Paul Granese is an avid Philadelphia Flyers fan. He is also a local artist whose 4-for-4 sports fandom and interest in vintage aesthetics combined to create a distinct style in works that have struck a chord with the city and the teams it has always been ultra-passionate about.
They caught the attention of the Flyers, too.
In the middle of the summer, Granese got a call from the team. They wanted to collaborate on a T-shirt design that referenced vintage postcards, and mainly, Bruce Springsteen’s “Greetings from Asbury Park” album cover, but featuring the team name and its current core of players within the letters.
For Granese, the project was right in his wheelhouse as an artist, and as a Flyers fan, it was a dream come true, especially as a chance to leave his own mark on what’s looking more and more like a real turning point in the team’s rebuild.
“It’s a dream job,” Granese said over the phone earlier this week. “I’m a 4-for-4 guy, but the Flyers have always been my favorite team, and be honest, this point in the Flyers’ history, this point in the rebuild, it was the perfect time for me to do a design like this, to include [Trevor Zegras] in that design, I mean, they made some big additions this offseason, so it was super exciting.”
The final product, featuring Zegras, Sean Couturier, Matvei Michkov, Tyson Foerster, and so on, will debut at Wednesday night’s Flyers home game against the Buffalo Sabres at Xfinity Mobile Arena. The shirt will be a part of the team’s “Artist Collective” series, which bundles tickets with an originally designed shirt from local artists throughout the season that fans can check out HERE.
The Flyers’ initiative to work and collaborate with local artists kicked off with their home opener back in October, when Dhwani Saraiya designed the shirt that was handed to every fan on the way into the arena.
The “Artist Collective” series shirts are tied to their specific ticket packages, but carry out the same idea for several games throughout the season.
And, obviously, the process for each design goes much further back.
When Granese got the call in the summer, he asked the Flyers for a list of players to include. From there, he gathered reference photos of the players in action, researched vintage postcard designs, and even took in nods from a Flyers Starter shirt he collected from the ’97 run to the Stanley Cup Final as all the pieces to fit together.
He sketched out, by hand, each of the nine Flyers within the letters of the stylized team name. And from the beginning up until the design’s final approval, Granese hand-drew everything except the Flyers logo itself underneath, all with pen and ink.
Granese said the process with the Flyers was his first time working with a professional sports team. “It’s been amazing,” he said, but he also joked that the wait from having to keep the job under wraps from his friends and family until it was finally OK to reveal it was “brutal.”
On Wednesday night, though, he’ll be at the game, and will finally get to see fans wearing his Flyers design.
“It’s going to be surreal,” Granese said. “Honestly, it was just really cool to design something hopefully people can wear for many years to come.”
Paul Granese, Philadelphia Flyers/for PhillyVoice
Paul Granese’s sketch of his eventual Flyers “Artist Collective” series design.
SIGN UP HERE to receive the PhillyVoice Sports newsletter
Follow Nick on Twitter: @itssnick
Follow Nick on Bluesky: @itssnick
Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice Sports