Evan Smotrycz grew up dreaming he’d play in the NBA one day. So when he wasn't working on jump shots, he practiced signing his autograph.

Over and over again.

“I just remember signing, like I’d have a little basketball,” Smotrycz said. “Fill it up and move on to the next. I still have them. They're in a Rubbermaid container in the basement.”

Smotrycz, now a freshman on the Michigan basketball team, got his first autograph request at a basketball camp during his junior year at Reading (Mass.) High.

He didn’t expect it. But he was prepared.

An autograph can become a special memory for a young fan or a profit-boost for a memorabilia collector. But it can be special for athletes, too. It’s the one thing everyone in the world has and one of the few things you can completely control.

An autograph borders on art form, with each taking on its own flair and personality. It can be intricate and elegant or one giant scribble.

An autograph can be an extension of yourself — and don’t think for a second that when an athlete is signing something that they haven’t worked on the insignia left behind.

They have. Sometimes obsessively.

“I don’t know if I want to admit it, but I still do it,” Michigan junior guard Stu Douglass said. “I find myself bored in class, like starting in middle school, bored in class, figuring out how to sign.

“I’d always see Tim Duncan’s signature and it looked pretty cool. You want to make it unique but that you could read it. A lot of guys, you couldn’t read it.”

Douglass is the self-appointed Michigan basketball autograph expert. When freshmen come in, he judges their signature. He makes suggestions, trying to add flair and make it look both legible and cool.

If an autograph isn’t up to his standards, he’ll rib his teammate about it.

“Mine’s horrible,” freshman forward Jon Horford said. “My teammates, they all practice theirs and I’m the only one who doesn’t really. I thought it was pretty good but they all laugh at it.

“Every time they see it, they're like ‘Terrible.’”

When other Michigan basketball players saw Horford’s scribble on a page recently, some shook their heads. Others laughed.

“We’ve just been telling him ‘You’ve got to change it, do something,’” redshirt freshman forward Jordan Morgan said. “He’s like ‘Yo, it’s my autograph, bro.’ We’re like, ‘Jon, you have to put your number.’

“He’s like ‘No, that’s my autograph, bro.’ Yeah, that’s bad.”

Players agree the key to a good autograph is legibility and comfort.

Legibility because they want fans to be able to read it and distinguish who it is, which is part of the reason their jersey number is a frequent addition. Comfort because an autograph is what fans will often latch on to.

“It’s important you find one that you’re comfortable with and then, obviously, you need to like it, too,” redshirt freshman forward Blake McLimans said.

Each Michigan basketball player has his own autograph style, and most admit to working on it or at least cleaning it up a bit since they were in high school.

AnnArbor.com asked each them to describe their autograph style in their own words.

“I make the E big, the ‘s-o’ small. Then the A is big and the ‘k-u-n-n-e’ small. I normally put 5 in there. I remember the first time I did it, I made it so obvious that’s my name. It looked like it was printed but it looked cursive, kinda. So it was really bad and I know signatures aren’t supposed to look like that. They are supposed to look unique. So I had to change it.”

“First time I ever worked on it, I was in high school and my coach played a trick on us and said we were going to be signing autographs for this little kid’s team. … Mine hasn’t changed. First off, I go J-Bart because Bartelstein’s too long. So I make a big J and then I connect the J, and then use the 20. I think it’s helpful to use the number.”

“It’s changed so many times over the years. It starts off with cursive and changes into something a little bit different. But it’s definitely changed. I just do two big Cs, just so you can see my initials. My first name you can read a little bit more than my last name. There was a point where it was two big Cs and then my last name after it and my number. So it’s kind of changed and it looks recognizable.”

“I figured out how to make the S and the D into one thing and combine them. I know that’s kind of unique. So I did that and then I saw Sean Dockery did that for Duke when I saw his signature, so I guess it’s not completely unique. I don’t know, I’ve always liked it. It was always different.”

“I just do a J and then the D and then a little scribble. Inside, I put my number. Basically a J and a D.”

“The D is a little bit different than most Ds, I got that from my father. I used to write my autograph all the time and I just didn’t like how my D looked. One day I saw his and was like, ‘Oh wow,’ so I took his D and it made the whole autograph kind of pop. Kind of the same thing with the E. I had a regular-looking E and I didn’t like that, either. I didn’t take his E, of course, because then my autograph would have been pretty much his autograph with a Roman numeral 2 at the end of it. So, over time, I just made up my own.”

“I make sure people can see the T like that. I still do the Tim. I don’t write the full name, Timothy. I don’t do that. I don’t like it. Then I’ll do the H, so everybody can see the T and then the H, which is very big ... because the person, whoever he shows, knows who he got the autograph from. And at the end it’s a Y and I make sure everybody can see it’s a Y.”

“I don’t know. I just try to make it look semi-fancy. I have terrible handwriting, too. I think if I slowed it down, I could make it better. But it’s just not that big of a deal to me. Your signature is your signature. That’s what mine is.”

“The capital letters I over-exaggerate and then scribble and put my middle initial (J). Then 'McLimans' and my number underneath it. If you exaggerate, it’s almost like initialing, I guess, and then scribbling. You can see the B and then I just kind of throw the J in there because ... I don’t know why, for flash, I guess. As long as people see the B, the M and then the little C, they would know who it is. I used to almost write out all the letters and it took too much time.”

“I just kind of sign my name a little bit, put little swoops at the end. I don’t know. Put my number. I had never done it, so I just wrote it cursive and then I got it a little better.”

“I got this D from my dad, this cursive D. Come up and then, boom, curves around a little bit and then scribble the rest. Got to make a big M so they know who it is and then the S. And you can’t forget the number. I always emphasize the first two letters so they know it’s D. M., so they can see it.”

“I change it almost every time. I just don’t care. I literally just change it almost every time. I used to have a set one but, honestly, a Z and an N are literally just the same thing, just turned on its side. I could never get it to look cool and it just pissed me off that everyone had a sweet autograph and I could just never figure out anything that looked cool. So I just started writing my name pretty much.”

“After my freshman year I actually changed my autograph. I changed it two or three times to get it down to what it is now. So the first name, I actually sign the name. The first part I kind of write out, scribble out my first name. For my last name I just make the P real big and just scribble the last name because that used to be the part that took so long. The first name I did real fast, but the last name would take me so long, I just kind of scribbled the last name and just put the number on there.”

“It used to be longer but when I actually had to sign stuff, I realized it took too long. So I had to shorten it. I make sure I get the E, the S, the T and the Z in there. The beginning, middle and end.”

“I want to get the 13 in there and the little swivel. My dad does that, so I wanted to keep that in there and Stu thought it looked cool. And, you know, ‘M Vog’ is all I need, all I need to write. So it’s all good. It works.”

Michael Rothstein covers Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein

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