John R. Deecken

For most of the 20th century, U.S. coins were designed inside a closed shop — by the Mint's own engravers or by a short list of invited sculptors. John R. Deecken was none of those things. He was a freelance illustrator from Connecticut. And in 1992 he put a figure on a U.S. silver dollar that the country could not stop arguing about.

The opening came from the Olympics. To mark the 1992 Games — winter in Albertville, summer in Barcelona — the Treasury Department did something unusual: it ran an open, nationwide design competition in 1991 and invited anyone in America to enter. About 1,107 designs came in. On October 1, 1991, Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady sat with a panel of Olympic athletes and picked the winners. Three coins, three outside artists. Deecken's drawing won the dollar.

Little about his life has been written up in the numismatic press, and there's no verified birth or death date on record. What's documented comes from his own artist profiles: a "lifelong self-taught" artist based in Connecticut — period reporting placed him in Fairfield, later profiles list neighboring Bridgeport — who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut in 1983. Beyond the Olympic dollar, he left almost no trail in coins. He is remembered for one design, and for the fight it started.

Deecken's obverse — the heads side — is pure motion. A pitcher is reared back at the top of his windup, an instant from firing the ball toward home plate, the five Olympic rings and "USA" behind him. It is one of the most dynamic single figures on any modern U.S. coin: an athlete frozen at the moment before release.

That energy is exactly what got it noticed. Collectors held the coin up against a 1991 Fleer baseball card — card No. 302, Nolan Ryan, caught mid-delivery — and the two looked nearly identical. The problem was the law. U.S. coins are not supposed to depict a living person, and in 1992 Ryan was very much alive, still pitching for the Texas Rangers. So the resemblance wasn't just a curiosity. It raised a real question: had the United States, in effect, put a specific active ballplayer on its money? The nickname "Nolan Ryan dollar" stuck, and the coin became an instant collectible.

Deecken's answer was that the pitcher was no one in particular. "It wasn't intended to be him," he told Coin World. He had built the figure, he said, from several deliveries at once: "I looked at a number of pitchers, including Ryan, Whitey Ford and other people and arrived at what you see on the coin." A composite — an artist's blend of windups into one ideal. He gave the same answer at the October 1991 unveiling, when reporters asked who the player was. The Mint and a spokesman for Fleer called the likeness a coincidence. The card, side by side, made that a hard sell.

A coin design contest produces a drawing, not a coin. The leap between the two is real work, and it wasn't Deecken's.

His flat artwork had to be turned into relief — the raised and recessed three-dimensional surface a die presses into metal. That modeling was done by Chester Y. Martin, a sculptor-engraver on the Mint's staff at Philadelphia from 1986 to 1992. Martin took Deecken's pitcher and gave it the depth and edges a die could actually strike. The reverse — the Union shield, olive branches, feathers, and the Olympic rings — came from a different and far more established hand: the sculptor Marcel Jovine, an Italian-born artist whose work appears on several U.S. commemoratives.

There's a quiet technical footnote, too. The uncirculated 1992-D dollar carries lettering around its edge — "XXV OLYMPIAD" repeated, applied by a special machine after the coin was struck. The Mint had not lettered a U.S. coin's edge this way since the 1933 Saint-Gaudens double eagle. (The proof, struck at San Francisco, has a plain reeded edge instead.) Deecken's pitcher got the headlines. The coin it rode on was quietly reviving a lost piece of minting craft.