CHARLOTTE — When Luke Kuechly, who is the Luke Kuechly of linebackers, walked into see the rough draft of his Hall of Fame bust in a Provo, Utah art studio recently, he was amazed at the level of detail and how accurate a representation it was.

When Ben Hammond, who might be the Luke Kuechly of sculptors, looked at it, he saw something completely different.

"So I show up, and he's probably 75 percent done, and when he pulls the bag off of it because it's water-based clay and it can't dry out, I'm like, 'Wow, that's really cool,'" Kuechly said. "He's like, 'No, it's awful.'"

Hammond holds himself to the same standard for a Hall of Fame bust that Kuechly did as a Hall of Fame player, and there's the additional pressure that comes with creating a historical artifact, the kind of thing that will last 40,000 years. That demands intention, and attention to detail.

But when he saw this year's assignments and found out he was doing his second Panthers linebacker (Hammond also did Sam Mills' bust in 2022), there was a sense of extreme anticipation as well.

"I was really excited when I got assigned to Luke," Hammond said. "Because he was a head that I wanted to sculpt, just artistically."

Hammond, who has been creating Hall of Fame busts since 2007 (Kuechly was his 54th), can go into the same kind of detail talking about creating this particular work of art that Kuechly can when describing how he knew Tony Romo was about to throw a pass straight to him. And when you start him talking about the process of creating the image of Kuechly, he goes all the way from human anatomy to Hollywood history when describing why he was so eager for this assignment.

"As you're creating sculpture, just from the artistic end of it, strong bone structure looks really good three-dimensionally," Hammond began. "Think of traditionally masculine actors like Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck. I mean, everything's kind of changed a little bit with what we think looks good nowadays because of airbrushing and everything. But, back in the day, you wanted a real, strong, masculine leading man. And he'd have an interesting nose, where Luke has that really cool nose that's been broken at least a time or two. And he has really strong cheekbones and a really defined mouth barrel. So he's got these really chiseled features.

"So it makes it in a lot of ways, not necessarily easier to sculpt, but more fun because it's like not your typical big offensive lineman head that they have to eat like 20,000 calories a day, and they're all a little more filled out.

"Handsome isn't the right word, even though Luke's a very handsome guy, but it's more like that classical masculine look that you see in old movies from the 1950s and 1960s, like a Charlton Heston or Clint Eastwood. That's a more interesting face."

It's fair to admit that Kuechly is a handsome man. Empirically speaking, that's a true statement. And Hammond laughed that he prepared his wife, Kerri, in advance.

"I warned her, I'm like, he's pretty handsome, just so you know when he comes over," Hammond said. "She's been teasing me, 'What did you think I was going to do, not be able to talk?' I'm just saying, he's a good-looking guy."

But over the course of two days in late May, Hammond and Kuechly worked together to capture that, and refine each detail.

Well, Hammond did the work. Luke just had to sit still for a pair of afternoon-long sessions and consider the part of his haircut he can't normally see.

"I'm just sitting there for six hours, looking at the back of my own head," Kuechly said. "You can kind of see a reflection every once in a while, but for six hours, he's working on it, and you don't see it, and then he turns it around, and it's 'Whoa!'"

But even at that point, there was more work to be done. One of the last details Hammond adds to each model is the eyes, because once they're looking at you, it's hard to really concentrate on a chin or a nose.

"He said that's when it comes to life," Kuechly said. "And then he has a harder time because when you look at somebody, you want to look in their eyes. So when he puts the eyes in, and you think the eyes are done, he's like, they're not even close, and he continues to work.

"And then you go home, and you come back the next day, and it's changed even more, and you sit there for another five or six hours, and he continues to work, and it just evolves in front of you in real time. It's unbelievable."

Hammond and Kuechly had a lot of time to talk, and they found some common ground in their love of the outdoors, exchanging their best smoked-meat recipes in advance of their Memorial Day cookouts. But the sculptor was also impressed by Kuechly's attention to detail of someone else's craft, which is a lot of the reason Hammond's creating this particular statue anyway.

"He's very present, not one of those people who has to post every second of their lives on Instagram," Hammond said. "It was cool because every once in a while he'd come up to the front and look at it, and he's like 'Oh jeez, what'd you do?' I could tell he's curious because he'd notice when I switched tools, and would ask why I was using that tool now. He seems like a very curious person.

"It's like he's watching film on a monitor and breaking it down. I guess he was really good at that as a player. So it was fun because he's very interested in the process."

As Hammond explained each detail of a face Kuechly's been looking at in the mirror for 35 years, and the process of turning a clay model into a rubber mold that was shipped to a foundry this week for the final steps of casting it in bronze (the finished bust will be ready days ahead of the Aug. 8 induction), they continued to refine it.

And even though this is one head (two eyes, a nose, and a mouth), there are still plenty of decisions to be made. When Julius Peppers was sitting with sculptor Blair Buswell for his bust two years ago, there were lengthy discussions about hairstyle. Peppers ultimately went with a close-cropped haircut from his younger days after they both went back and forth about the possibility of braids.

Hammond said the Kuechly fans will see in Canton in August is closer to the younger side (though there's not much variation, since he'll be the second-youngest player ever inducted), and there were dozens of small tweaks as they went along.

"I've got his playing days neck back on him," Hammond said. "Luke said when he was talking to his mom and dad, 'This Luke looks like he could beat me up.' That's the big tough guy, he's throwing some weight around. The face doesn't change as much. We did a little bit longer hair, like his dominant years and up to the Super Bowl season, not crazy curly, but longer hair, so that was fun to do. And he didn't want it like combed perfectly, he wanted it to have a little more pizzazz to it."

Hammond said seeing NFL Films treatments of Kuechly's playing days, famous for their intensity, led to "an epiphany" that caused him to add some other adjustments to his early mold.

"I tell the players this all the time," Hammond explained. "Just think about how many times you grit your teeth in a collision, and especially if you're anywhere in the trenches, all your facial muscles are much bigger because you're working those muscles.

"And after you're done playing, when you don't have collisions, all of those muscles kind of calm down. There's not as much blood flowing, and they're not as big. So the face does lean out. So it's not that his face was ever heavy, but it has a stronger jaw muscle and stronger neck."

Throughout the Hall of Fame process, Kuechly has tried to make every step around everyone but himself. And he can go into great length about Hammond's talents, but with every sliver of clay that's added or taken away, it's an image of himself and a lasting monument that's being created, along with a singular garment in the gold jacket that he tried on for size and final tailoring in April.

As he goes through this process, like the day he walked into the Merlin Olsen Luncheon in San Francisco, Kuechly is realizing a little at a time that it's becoming real, and that his place in football history is being cemented with every one of these milestones.

"Those things hold a weight," Kuechly said of the jacket and the bust. "And they're the same in a lot of ways. The biggest difference was when we put the jacket on, it was the jacket. When Ben was finished, it was clay. There's a whole process to go through to get to the bust. So I've seen the jacket. I haven't seen a finished bust.

"In my mind, the thing I'm looking forward to most is that bust because I haven't seen it yet. When we were at the Merlin Olsen Luncheon, and you see 100 dudes in there with the jackets on, you're like 'Whoa, that's cool.' And then when we went up to Canton, and they take you in that bust room, and they're all in there, you're like, 'OK, wow.'

"I think each step of the way becomes, I don't know if more real is the right word, but you can kind of put yourself in that spot. It's fascinating."

And it's that way for the 49-year-old Hammond, too, and not just because Kuechly reminds him of the guys who played Moses, Atticus Finch, and Dirty Harry. Having done this for nearly 20 years, he has an appreciation for the greats of the game, and he understands that Kuechly's status puts him among the greats of all time.

"He's a unique guy; he's an old soul," Hammond said of his latest model. "He really should be considered one of the best. The people who have played the game and other Hall of Famers I've talked to, they're like, 'Luke was a nightmare.' That's what's fun through all these years of sculpting these guys. They know who belongs in the Hall of Fame. And even though Luke had a shorter career, it was those eight years he played, he was a menace."

A menace with a chiseled jaw and leading-man looks, which are in the process of being preserved and displayed for all to see.