A veteran on stage. A painter on the floor. A number that means something.
That all came together on the NFL Draft stage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 25 as performance artist Cody Sabol speed-painted a portrait of Pat Tillman while Marine Corps veteran and Tillman Scholar Margo Darragh announced the 226th overall selection.
Why? That was the pick Tillman was drafted with by the Arizona Cardinals in 1998. He set the franchise tackle record as a rookie, then walked away from a $3.6 million contract offer to enlist in the U.S. Army in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan in April 2004 by friendly fire and every year at the NFL Draft, at pick No. 226, his memory is honored.
“It's really a cool thing when you get to combine something that I love with something that I'm passionate about," Sabol said. "And also honoring somebody like Pat is truly a great honor, and it's not something that I take lightly, so I'm really excited to get to perform this.”
And the pick had a wonderful connection as the Cincinnati Bengals selected Naval Academy nose tackle Landon Robinson.
Sabol became interested in speed painting while attending Kentucky Christian University, where he split time as a quarterback and defensive end.
Sabol said practice is key to creating the most realistic painting in the least amount of time possible. Practice times for Sabol ran between five and 10 minutes before he and Darragh took to the draft stage.
“I've been working on a bunch of different angles and systems that I kind of put in place to make sure that each performance is a success,” he explained.
Sabol said some of the best paintings he does are an equal balance of challenging and reacting at the same time.
“You don't want to overthink things, because then you can sort of make mistakes there, and then you also don't want to just react to everything at the same time, because it gets maybe a little bit sloppy, so there's this perfect balance that I try to achieve with every painting,” he explained. “I think we definitely got it with this one.”
Darragh, a Marine Corps veteran and Yale Law graduate, found out she passed the Pennsylvania Bar Exam on April 23.
“It does feel kind of like, you know, a milestone on a long journey. I was grateful to receive the Tillman Scholarship right when I got out of the Marines and was starting in law school,” she said.
The Pat Tillman Foundation supports service members, veterans, and military spouses with educational and leadership opportunities
Following her graduation from the Naval Academy, Darragh served as a combat engineer in the Corps and deployed to Asia. She then taught leadership tactics and decision-making to junior officers at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia.
“It was while I was in that job that I started closely following the opioid crisis, and I was really inspired by the attorneys that were doing really good work, advocating for families who have been impacted by OxyContin, advocating for communities, who had been harmed by the drug, and it really inspired me to take a different path in service that was obviously different than what I was doing in the Marines,” she said.
Darrah said scholarship was a ”life raft” as she pursued her law degree.
“It meant that I was taking out loans at law school, so I would be able to pursue the public interest opportunities and the law that means the most sooner than if I didn't have that scholarship at all,” she said.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.
