Of all the public indignities great athletes are subjected to, from the meme to the boo to the hurled bottle, undoubtedly the worst is the bad statue. A bronze figure in a stadium plaza is so much more permanent than an insult, and the irony is that a Dwyane Wade or a Michael Jordan has to accept the thing as a compliment. The statue’s intent is to immortalize. Instead, it kills its subject dead.Only one truly great bronze rendering of a renowned athlete has been produced in recent decades, and viewers of the U.S. Open tennis tournament—happening now until September 7—can see it daily. Just outside the stadium that bears his name, an abstract Arthur Ashe surges from the earth like a lightning bolt striking upward instead of down. The sculpture, unveiled by the artist Eric Fischl in 2000 and titled Soul in Flight, is worth pausing to look at, for its instructive power and its indictment of the ponderous slabs of metallurgical debris that litter other stadiums and arenas.Any discussion of why so much sports art is so clumsy begins with the fact that rendering the human form in motion using fixed material is not easy. The British art historian Kenneth Clark once wrote that the body, “that forked radish, that defenseless starfish,” is an awkward vehicle for the expression of energy. Yet somehow, in a medium of heavy copper, Fischl captures the lithe, swaying, physical vitality of Ashe, as well as the high-mindedness of the man who was so committed to social causes. The sculpture is “trying to find exactly that moment where there’s some kind of internal force meeting an external shape,” Fischl told me. Isn’t that what all monuments to greats should be?You don’t have to know calendar art from a colonnade to recognize how botched so many other athlete statues are. Wade’s, unveiled last year outside of the Kaseya Center, in Miami, provokes an involuntary “Gah!” as you throw an arm across your eyes. Wade, the former Miami Heat guard, had such sweet escapability that Shaquille O’Neal nicknamed him “Flash.” His bronze version turns him into a Lurch who shuffle-lumbers on his podium, zombie-legged, his teeth bared. The fabric of his jersey, which should suggest his movement and musculature, is instead accordion-crumpled like a piece of paper.[Read: If you must play one sport, make it tennis]The piece instantly became the subject of viral memes and inspired an uproarious exchange on TNT’s NBA Tip-Off during which Charles Barkley couldn’t contain his scorn. “It’s a great honor, but they gotta take that thing down,” he said. “That thing is awful.” In another segment, Shaquille O’Neal called it “the scariest thing this Halloween.” Barkley replied, “I tell you what, if you put that in front of your house, there ain’t no kids coming.” Oscar León, who collaborated on the statue with lead sculptor Omri Amrany of the Rotblatt Amrany Studio in Highwood, Illinois, blamed some of the reaction on a sealing glaze that creates “a little bit of, um, a misunderstanding to the eye.”Another child-afrighting piece sits outside of Nationals Park, in Washington, D.C., a version of Walter Johnson, the turn-of-the-20th-century pitcher for the old Washington Senators. This one, too, was created by Amrany, who said his intent was to capture the sequential speed and timing of Johnson’s pitching motion. Somehow, that worked out to embedding a mutant third hand in his shoulder. “Rather than zooming,” the Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik wrote in 2009, “his bronze appears to glop.” Amrany’s technique, Gopnik observed, “has the unfortunate effect of making his players seem covered in tumorous growths.”In response to an inquiry about the harsh response to some of his work, Amrany told me via email: “Art is always open to interpretation, and public art especially so. When you put a monument in a public space, everyone becomes a critic. What I can say is that every piece is created with rigor, research, and care. Sometimes what people react to is not actually the work itself but their own expectations of perfection—or nostalgia. As artists, we listen, but we also stand by the integrity of the process. Over time, I’ve found many of those same works that were controversial at unveiling become embraced by the community once people live with them.”Amrany’s first sports commission came in 1994, when he and his wife and co-creator, Julie Rotblatt Amrany, won the chance to execute a “Jumpman” rendition of Michael Jordan on deadline for the opening of the Chicago Bulls’s United Center. They managed to hammer it out despite being given just 72 hours to make a sketch and only eight months to produce the work. (The Ashe took Fischl about two years.) Small wonder that although the statue is expressive of Jordan’s signature, physically sprawling move, one leg is as stiff as a pharaoh’s, his feet are weirdly flat, his jersey is pooched as if a possum were wriggling inside it. The Chicago Tribune art critic Alan Artner was forbearing; he said that the inscription on the base calling Jordan “the best there ever was” referred “more accurately to the subject than to the sculpture.”Since then, the Amrany firm has turned sports-statue-izing into an industry, executing more than 250 pieces with a large staff of assistant artists and regular commissions from NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL teams, as well as various civic organizations. “That piece was groundbreaking for us and, honestly, for public art in sports. It opened the door to an entire genre,” Julie Rotblatt Amrany observed to me via email. The firm works fast (12 to 14 months), is accommodating to clients who want direct input, and can deliver orthodox iconography on demand. It recently produced a replica of the WNBA’s Sue Bird mid-layup for the Seattle Storm’s Climate Pledge Arena. This was a landmark event: Bird was the first-ever player from the league to receive such a tribute from a team. When I look at the statue, I find myself wishing for more of a sense of her lift and net-snapping rhythm. Instead, it appears slightly spraddle-legged. And does that free hand look right? Why does it seem so rheumatoid? Still, Julie Rotblatt Amrany got the flying ponytail right and delivered a decorous portrayal that was well received.“When the figure is a beloved athlete, there’s the responsibility of honoring both the reality of their physique and the impression of who they are to the public,” she noted. “People bring their emotions, their memories, and sometimes their critiques to the work—so we have to be incredibly precise and deeply sensitive.”[Read: The worst statue in the history of sports]The New England Patriots chose a different firm to deify the seven-time Super Bowl–winning quarterback Tom Brady, going to a local Massachusetts sculptor-foundryman named Jeff Buccacio. “It was nights and weekends busting my ass with Tom Brady on my shoulder saying, You’ve seen what I can do with three minutes,” he told me of the 11 months he took to make the sculpture. The 17-foot-tall Brady statue erected outside Gillette Stadium earlier this month is not undignified; it’s a good likeness of Brady’s features, and it’s certainly colossal. That’s apparently what Patriots management, led by owner Robert Kraft, wanted. Kraft asked for a “larger than life” piece that was not attached to any one gesture or moment in Brady’s career but that would “forever remind us of what Tom Brady did and how he made us all feel.” Buccacio told me, “They had some strong ideas about what it should represent.”The statue, unfortunately, is inert. It presents Brady as tall and linear as a column, and about as expressive. Because it’s so fixed and still, it has no sense of Brady’s acuity, his almost transistor-like connection to his receivers. He looks like a lost man hailing a cab.Buccacio told me he’d braced for a mixed reaction, given Brady’s huge popularity. Indeed, in a poll of 1,334 residents by Boston.com, 521 pronounced it “awful,” and 476 felt that it was just “okay.” Buccacio said, “I take all this stuff very personally. That’s the only way I can do the work sincerely—I pour my heart into it. So I’m not going to say it doesn’t affect me. It does affect me. That’s why I take it serious. You put yourself out there and hope for the best.”These works are what happens when excess sentiment meets shallow conception and hasty commissioning. They’re not studies. They’re logos, or photo knockoffs. They also raise the question: Why should modern sports artists be so inferior to the Stone Age vagrants who showed more of a sense of line in depicting animal musculature on the bumpy walls of a dim French cave? As the New Yorker cultural critic Anthony Lane once noticed, those Paleolithic artisans were so adept at using ochre on limestone to create stunning illusions of athletic motion that, 30,000 years later, the beasts “haven’t stopped running. The hunt is still on.”Fischl’s Ashe has a similar vigor. Fifty years from his greatest season, in 1975, Ashe is still serving. Most striking about the quality of the artistry is the statue’s epic sense of reach. One arm dangles backward, loose, yet loaded with tension, gripping the broken-off handle of a racket. The other flares upward, suggesting imminent propulsion. The torso is torqued, drawn like a bow, as if the next moment it will escape the imprisoning bronze and arc skywards.Part of its effect comes from the fact that Fischl refused to depict Ashe literally and insisted on doing an abstract nude. “A lot of contemporary art that uses the image of the body as sculpture turns it into mannequins or dolls, as a way of talking about human behavior,” Fischl told me. “There’s something about the actual body that has become so difficult for us.” He continued, “We’re in a place culturally where we rely too heavily on the literal and the literal image of something, as though that fully captures the emotional, physical, and psychological.”[Read: The process of sculpture]Fischl referenced the great Greek athletic nudes, such as Myron’s discus thrower, to achieve not just the portrayal of continuous energetic motion but also the suggestion that great human athleticism is about a stopping point, calculated containment. The body reaches maximum tension at an intelligently organized peak before it releases all of its harmonious energy toward a fixed purpose. Look at the classical contrapposto stance of the discus thrower and compare it to the Ashe statue’s. Both show the shift of weight from one foot to the other and the emphasis on the arching and diagonal twist of the torso, which creates a sense of motion and emotion. The Greeks invested muscles with meaning, a line of inquiry that Michelangelo would eventually explore to wring tears out of us using marble.Fischl’s Ashe is going for a similarly evocative, emotional timelessness. His decision not to show Ashe’s actual features, and to render him nude, was initially controversial. But, Fischl decided, “a portrait would be limiting in an odd way.” He continued, “When you start to drape clothes on it that are time-specific, to me, it gets weird. You end up with, Oh, that’s the shorty-shorts era of, you know, 1958. Or a wood racket. Everything becomes time-specific, when what you’re actually going for is something that is transcending time.” The admiration of Ashe’s widow, Jeanne, eased the reception of the sculpture, as did the efforts of John McEnroe, an avid and intelligent art collector and a friend of Fischl’s, who insisted on filming television stand-ups in front of it.As Clark, the art historian, wrote, the difference between naked and nude is that one is “huddled and defenseless” while the other is “balanced, prosperous and confident.” But you’d better be an artist—the real, honest-to-God thing—to take on a nude. In Ashe’s case, Fischl strove for a physical eloquence that would override controversy, and he got there. There is nothing crude about the sculpture. And although it is abstract, there is nothing cool about it, either, because every intelligible detail is invested with feeling. For instance, that broken-off racket handle: It suggests something lost too soon. It also resembles a baton, “something you pass on,” Fischl said. “It’s about bringing others along with you, those who will carry on and surpass what you were as an athlete, as a Black athlete, and what you were as a humanitarian.”Great art and great athletics share basic similarities: They’re both about form and execution, and creating an impression of ease. But for both, looking beautiful requires incredibly hard, tedious, purposeful work toward a breakthrough. “Both require resistance to make it more effective,” Fischl said. “Resistance is the thing that sharpens your focus, right?”That’s what so irritates about all those gloppy, bronze sports statues. They lack any real sense of struggle and breakthrough, which is a disservice to the deep, yearslong efforts of the athletes, their streaking movements across courts and fields that approached artistry.Does bad stadium art matter, or is this a trivial complaint? To answer that question, think of it from an archeological point of view. As Edith Hamilton wrote in her 1930 book, The Greek Way: “If we had no other knowledge of what the Greeks were like, if nothing were left of Greek art and literature, the fact that they were in love with play and played magnificently would be proof enough of how they lived and how they looked at life.” Someday, people with shovels and brushes are going to dig those statues up, and they’re going to make judgments about us. Surely, we’d rather they didn’t see us as a society of hacks.