I have done a number of memorial pieces for athletes who have passed away. This project was one of the first ones I did though, and it was pretty close to home. A young man who was entering his junior year in high school was helping on his grandfather's farm, was killed when a grain auger they were moving touched an overhead electric wire. His cousin, was injured badly. This was close to home because this was a kid who I had coached in grade school and Junior high basketball and football. He was close friends with my son, 
Player #11 is kneeling to honor #40 who had passed away right before the season.
I wanted this to be a special figurine to give to his parents. Typically I use heads from existing players for the customs I do so the resemblances are close at best. This time I wanted to have someone actually sculpt the head to get an exact likeness. I had some connections through the fine scale model building I had been doing for the past number of years prior to this project. I selected a pose I thought would be great to use. I chose a side line pose of Brett Favre, as it was helmetless and would show off his sculted head.
I was lucky to make contact with a sculture who had actually sculpted a number of the figurines for McFarlane Toys, Adam Beane, who lived in Massachusetts. He graciously took on the project at no cost to me, after I explained the project and that I was donating to the parents. So I sent him a figure to use for scale to sculpt the figure as it needed to match the body. Typically, sculptors like Adam work in 12" (1/6th scale) but this actually needed to be in 1/12th scale (6"). Meanwhile I worked on the rest of the figure to match his high school team uniform.
Using photos of the boy I provided him, Adam was able to work his magic and sculpt a perfect likeness of the subject.
Adam then created a mold and cast the head from the original sculpt. He also sent me the mold when he was done. You can see in the photo below the size of the piece. You can understand how difficult this would be to sculpt from scratch. A testiment to the amazing skills of a master sculptor like Adam Beane.
Meanwhile. I finished up the rest of the figure. I did this project 13 years ago, and at that time I was not taking many progress photos so this is just the finished piece without the head.
Adam also wanted to paint the head so I told him to go for it. He then mailed the final head to me and I added it to the figure along with the arms. Final photos are shown below. I also added a crowd background from one of the games after he passed away.
If you look closely at the crowd in the background, you will see signs for #40 and #69 who was the cousin who was also injured in the accident, but he recovered and was able to play that year.
Memorial pieces are some of my favorite to do, they mean so very much to the parents and family of the person deceased and it gives me a lot of satisfaction to do pieces like this. I often will donate them to the family like in this particular case.
Thanks for looking at my story about this particular piece.