One Baller's Biggest Fan
By BEN COHEN

Ari Marcopoulos is a renowned New York photographer. He worked for Andy Warhol, profiled Jean-Michel Basquiat and chronicled the Beastie Boys and skateboarders under the Brooklyn Bridge. He was featured in last year's Whitney Museum Biennial. In April he released a 1,200-page book.

His most recent project, though, is a 20-page fan zine that features none of his own photographs. It is a tribute to Dallas Mavericks center Tyson Chandler, an NBA player who has never been an All-Star or even lived in New York. The zine is called "Tyson Chandler."

A zine is a self-published print publication circulated to a small audience. If it looks like it was stapled together by hand, that's because it probably was. A fan zine, like "Tyson Chandler," usually focuses on one topic, though punk-rock bands and political movements (not pro athletes) are more often its subjects.

Zines were popular when Marcopoulos moved to New York in 1980. They faded in the shadow of the Internet and have resurfaced again as an analog alternative. Still, they're more of an indie delight than a mainstream pleasure.

"I had no clue what it was," Chandler said. He described a zine as "the mixtape of magazines."

One night last June, Marcopoulos and Camilla Venturini, his 23-year-old Italian art director, walked into a Park Slope sports bar for Game 6 of the NBA Finals and watched Dallas clinch its series against the Miami Heat. It wasn't long before the artists were inspired by Chandler.

"Everybody was talking about Dirk Nowitzki, but here was this guy who was a worker-bee player," Marcopoulos said.

Venturini was captivated for another reason. "First of all, he's handsome," she said. "But what I really like about him is that he's always really calm and rational. I follow him on his Facebook page and he looks modest and devoted to his family."

That same night, they sifted through hundreds of photographs on Google Images and settled on 29 black-and-white images, including a shot of Chandler shaking hands with President Barack Obama, a portrait of Chandler's family posing outdoors in formal wear and an illustration of Chandler wearing a New York Knicks jersey opposite a page with two words: "WE WISH." For the cover, they used Chandler's personal logo, an interlocking T and Y. Venturini finished the layout in two days.

The artists Xeroxed 150 copies, priced the zine at $10 to cover production costs and provided issues to six independent bookstores in New York, Los Angeles and Germany.

They have since sold out—partly because of one bulk order.

The 7-foot-1 Chandler was in Chelsea visiting art galleries Tuesday when he was briefed about the fan zine. Since he was in the area, he walked into Printed Matter, the only Manhattan bookstore with "Tyson Chandler" still in stock. "There was a dope vibe in there," he said.

Then the zine's namesake proceeded to purchase the remaining copies of "Tyson Chandler." He even autographed one and left it for Marcopoulos. "It's one of the big accomplishments of my career," Chandler said. He posed for photos while reading the zine and called Marcopoulos, who was in Italy on a video shoot with Venturini.

"Hey, this is Tyson Chandler," he said.

"I'm, like, no way," Marcopoulos recalled.

Chandler asked Marcopoulos for more copies of the zine to distribute among family and friends. He invited the photographer to Texas once the NBA season begins. He also told Marcopoulos that he wants to follow him around the next time he comes to New York.

When they hung up, Marcopoulos phoned Venturini. She started screaming.

"NBA players don't know what zines are," he said. "Everything that's made for the NBA is more luxurious. This is very grassroots. For him to appreciate it like that is really amazing."

The unlikely success of "Tyson Chandler" is not the strangest thing about the zine. Marcopoulos has made about 50 others zines, he said, but only one fan zine. (The subject was a model.) Neither Marcopoulos nor Venturini was born in the U.S., and they had no connection to the city of Dallas. Even the subject is odd. Chandler is well-known but hardly one of the NBA's greats.

The play of Tyson Chandler (pictured) in the NBA Finals caught the attention of Ari Marcopoulos, a New York photographer.

"I hope he doesn't think I'm a stalker," Venturini wrote in an email before Chandler learned of the zine.

The zine resembles a scrapbook that conveys the arc of Chandler's career from high school through last year's NBA finals. Its photos were sourced from the Internet; some are grainier than others. Only eight are action shots. "The idea was to make it really simple and have the layout reflect something that everybody could do," Marcopoulos said. "There's a lot of zines out there, but we really wanted to go for an old-school fan zine, all about our love for a player."

This was love at first sight. Venturini was raised as a swimmer in a small town in Northern Italy, and her time in New York working with Marcopoulos coincided with the NBA playoffs. He brought her to Machavelle, a bar across Flatbush Avenue from the future home of the Brooklyn Nets, and as soon as they adopted the Mavericks as their rooting interest, they also found their muse in Chandler.

In New York, though, Marcopoulos is more of a celebrity than Chandler. It was because of the author that the zine sold out at Manhattan bookstores like McNally Jackson, Dashwood Books and Printed Matter.

When Marcopoulos moved from the Netherlands to the U.S., he lived in his father's friend's office in Midtown and left the makeshift apartment before employees arrived in the morning. Within five months, he was working as Warhol's black-and-white printer and partying with the pop artist and his contemporaries. "I don't think he was a basketball guy," Marcopoulos said of Warhol, "but if he could sit next to a famous person at a game, he would."

Marcopoulos was fascinated first by hip-hop up-and-comers—he hung around LL Cool J and was credited on A Tribe Called Quest's first album—then by the rise of skateboarding in the city. In the insular world of photography, he's now known as someone who depicts people in an ordinary way, making his shots all the more extraordinary.

All along, Marcopoulos indulged his basketball obsession. He played pickup hoops in the Netherlands and fell for the sport by reading paperback NBA pamphlets and listening to games on Armed Forces Radio. The photographer purchased his first pair of Chuck Taylors in Celtics green because he saw Nate Archibald wearing them.

He recently spent 12 years in California, where he frequented Golden State Warriors games, but since settling last year in Brooklyn, Marcopoulos has wrestled with a question not uncommon in his new borough. "Should I be a Nets fan?" he asked one night this month.

He was sitting in Machavelle wearing a pink-and-green plaid shirt, corduroy pants and black Nike sneakers from the brand's Rajon Rondo collection. The bartender had greeted him by name. He and Venturini were contemplating a second sports zine, this one dedicated to the Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli, and Venturini wrote earlier from Milan that she wasn't opposed to a project focusing on another NBA player this season—as long as there is one. (The NBA season is threatened by a lockout.)

While nursing a Stella Artois draft, Marcopoulos reached into a pocket and pulled out a Contax camera. He carries a camera wherever he goes and still shoots with film. Before Chandler contacted him, Marcopoulos admitted he had thought about approaching him about a shoot of his own, but he promised that his photographs would be different from the fan zine's game shots and glamour poses.

"I would have to convince him, let me chill for a while with you and take a picture outside the surface," he said.

Chandler's response this week: "I would be honored for him to photograph me."