Brandi Chastain plaque features a face of someone who is not Brandi Chastain

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May 23, 2018 4:12 AM

Another masterpiece has been added to a rapidly expanding subgenre of art: sculptures of famous athletes that look nothing like those famous athletes.

Brandi Chastain, the soccer star whose jersey-shedding goal celebration in the 1999 World Cup is one of sport’s most iconic moments, is the latest, er, victim of sculptural farcicalism.

She was inducted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame in San Francisco on Monday night, and her plaque has been universally judged to be among the worst of this budding movement.

A sculpture of the soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo at the Madeira International Airport in Portugal unveiled last year was widely derided as really bad. And just as with the sculpture of Ronaldo, there was a nearly immediate pledge to redo the Chastain work. This time Chastain has been asked to send a photo for the hall of fame to use for the do-over.

Before The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the plaque would be adjusted, the sculptural accuracy police were all over the Chastain representation, which proudly embraces whatever the opposite of realism is. Even Ann Killion, the Chronicle columnist who wrote the words that accompany the image on the plaque, joined in the chorus of criticism.

“Brandi Chastain is one of the most beautiful athletes I’ve ever covered,” Killion wrote on Twitter. “How this became her plaque is a freaking embarrasment for BASHOF. Makes Cristiano’s look perfect.”

In the spirit of inclusiveness, art critics and Twitter users cited other touchstones of downright terrible likenesses, like the weird courtroom sketch of Tom Brady.

“Brandi Chastain’s HOF plaque looks like an elderly man,” Andrew Doughty of Hero Sports wrote on Twitter.

At her induction ceremony, Chastain spoke carefully. “It’s not the most flattering,” she said, according to The San Jose Mercury News. “But it’s nice.”

Anthony Savicke, a vice president of the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame, told The Mercury News that the images on the plaques were merely “representations.” Of whom it was unclear.

When Emanuel Santos, the sculptor responsible for the Ronaldo travesty, took another shot at the bust earlier this year, he did better, by all accounts.

He told the BBC of his original work: “It is impossible to please the Greeks and Trojans. Neither did Jesus please everyone.”

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