Cooper Flagg’s journey from a small-town kid to a rising basketball superstar is now etched into the landscape in the heart of rural Maine.
At Thunder Road Farm in Corinna, Maine, just a few miles from Flagg’s hometown of Newport, a corn maze tribute has taken shape to honor the Dallas Mavericks’ newest draft pick. It’s a carefully designed homage, built with the help of Flagg’s family and friends.
“Cooper inspires the crowd at Duke or anywhere when he gets an open dunk and brings the crowd to life,” Thunder Road Farm co-owner Charlie Peavey said, standing outside the maze. “That’s what he’s kind of known for, so that’s what we wanted to do the design of.”
The 5-acre maze is made up of nearly 800 rows of corn, according to Peavey. He says the design took months of collaboration with Cooper’s mother, Kelley and the rest of the Flagg family.
“Oh, they’re thrilled,” Peavey said. “She’s [Kelley] been so much help to design what parts she wanted on it, and it’s been great to work with them.”
Inscribed into the maze is also Cooper’s nickname, ‘The Maine Event.’ The design was brought to life with the help of image mapping software from MAiZE, a Utah-based company.
“We draw the design out and transpose it over this grid and that grid lines up perfectly with the grid in the field that’s created when the farmer plants the field,” Brett Herbst, owner of The MAiZE, said.
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An overhead view of the corn maze honoring Cooper Flagg.
From there, Herbst said he and his team used the grid as a base to paint and mow each line of the image.
“We like to cut it when the corn is still short, so you can see the grid on the ground clearly,” Herbst added.
The Peaveys said there is still work to ensure the paths stay tip-top.
“Knowing the Flagg’s personally, we are probably putting our most effort into this maze that we ever had,” Peavey said.
The Peaveys said the hours of manual labor in the heat will be worth it when they see families filing into the maze.
“All these people, all these little kids who idolize Cooper… they’re going to be able to come out here and walk through him and play — going to be great to see,” Kellen Peavey said.
Farm staff say the maze will open Sept. 13 through Oct. 26.