Jul 29, 2019
  • David M. HaleESPN Staff Writer
Florida State professor Bruce Thyer was in the Virgin Islands this spring, looking to do a little scuba diving. At the dive center, a TV flickered with highlights of Clemson's national championship behind the reservation desk. The friendly woman taking his information smiled.
"I'm a Clemson fan," she said.
Intrigued, Thyer asked whether she'd seen the Florida State game. She had.
"Remember the guy reading the book in the stands?" he asked.
Of course she did, she said. The only memorable part of Clemson's 59-10 blowout was the shirtless man caught on camera, sitting high in an otherwise empty section of seats, reading a mystery novel while the Seminoles' defense unraveled below. No image better represented the brutal performance or the doomed FSU season than that.
"Well," Thyer said, "that was me."
Suddenly a screech erupted from the back room.
"It's FSU Book Guy!"
It was the scuba center's manager. She was a Clemson fan, too, and she wasn't going to miss her chance to meet an internet celebrity. She rushed from her office, hugged Thyer and had her employee snap a photo.
"They actually gave me a discount for my excursion," Thyer said.
Those are the perks of being a part of the growing menagerie of suddenly famous college football fans, plucked from obscurity by television producers, then launched into the world in meme form through myriad social media platforms. It's the modern twist on Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" theory, only these 15 minutes are portioned out in three-second GIFs over years and years.
Thyer, who is 65, is a renowned professor of social work, has a doctorate from Michigan and has written numerous books. But ask any college football fan from Tallahassee to Tucson and he's not Dr. Thyer, respected educator. He's FSU Book Guy.
At a recent family reunion in Chicago, Thyer's cousins had T-shirts printed up with his meme emblazoned on the front, and they all posed for photos wearing them. All except Thyer. He was in the middle of the scene, seated, shirtless and reading a book.

You become a meme ... and can't hide

John Hurley is a Florida State fan, too. He works for the state, and he's lived most of his life in Tallahassee. He's got the gentle good humor and quiet dignity befitting a true Southern gentleman. And, of course, he's got a great mustache. That's what really captured America's hearts during the Seminoles' season opener in 2016.
Dalvin Cook fumbled what should've been an easy touchdown late in the first half, and as the broadcast went to commercial break, the camera trained on the mustachioed Hurley, staring into the middle distance, perfectly conveying a visceral melancholy that captured both the immediacy of the Seminoles' struggles and an existential malaise born from a cold, uncaring universe. He was instantly famous.
Blurring the lines between fan and celebrity is not new. Long before social media, cameras spied Spike Lee or Jack Nicholson courtside at NBA games. Fans like Green Man, Fan Man and Morgana the Kissing Bandit forced their way into popular culture by interrupting sporting events. Unsuspecting fans like Jeffrey Maier or Steve Bartman found themselves at the center of a media circus when fate suddenly thrust them into the action.
What's different now is technology. High-definition television makes it easy to spot the background characters -- Marlins Man has turned it into a career -- and cellphones allow anyone to snap a screenshot and post it to social media, where the image is shared with millions of people around the world instantaneously.
"At this point, it's become a pastime," said Brad Kim, editor of Know Your Meme, the world's foremost library for meme culture. "It's a side activity for sports viewers. We're spectating the spectators."
This notion is not lost on the folks charged with putting together the TV coverage of a game. Finding fans who can convey the emotion in the stadium to a wider audience is actually a critical part of the producer's job.
"We have an eye on people through the game," said ESPN producer Derek Mobley. "I might not take the shot in the second quarter, but we know when we have a fan that's really reacting, when a big moment happens, we see if we can get back to him and it'll be a great picture."
That's what happened to Kaileigh Thomas, better known to the college football world as "LSU Stare Girl." A cameraman had watched her section of Tiger Stadium for most of a game against Alabama last fall, but by the fourth quarter, with her team getting steamrollered, she was in no mood for the attention.
"I was just so upset and so mad, and the camera would just not go away," Thomas said. "I had no idea it was live. I thought he was just being annoying."
Thomas -- in reality, a bubbly sophomore with a sharp sense of humor -- stared daggers at the camera, a look, she said, her mother knows well. The camera stared back, slowly zooming in. It was a standoff that, amid a blowout football game, captured the country's attention.
Thomas' death stare was soon shared not just as a commentary on LSU's struggles against the Crimson Tide but as a joke about everything from college tuition to politics to a wayward storyline on someone's favorite TV show. Her look captured how we've all felt at some point.
This is, perhaps, the real value of modern college football memes. They become shorthand for an emotion that can be hard to put into words but is so perfectly conveyed by one LSU sophomore's cold, menacing stare or one Florida State fan frustrated by a fumble.
"What's great is what people are doing is slowly building a code of visual, living emojicons that serve various purposes," Kim said. "They're not limited to the direct context they came from. It's really what the face is saying that has a lasting value."

'You have to give the people what they want'

Jake Robinson's belly is a wonderful conversation starter. His friends have proved this repeatedly.
If the name doesn't ring a bell, simply google "NC State" and "GIF" and he'll be there, at the top of the screen, hanging from a pole and waving his shirt, his stomach resplendent under the Carter-Finley Stadium lights, celebrating the Wolfpack's upset of Florida State in 2012.
That was seven years ago. Both coaches from that game are gone. The ADs of both teams have changed. The losing QB became a first-round NFL draft pick, played and has retired. The winning QB is on his fourth NFL team. Robinson's celebration remains.
"As long as GIFs are around, I'll have my fame to some degree," said Robinson, who now works in hospitality in Asheville, North Carolina. "It's fun to see people's reactions -- 'Oh, you're that guy!'"
These days, he usually keeps his shirt on for photo requests, but at parties, the crowd gets excited, and he has a few drinks and then ...
"There was a whole summer where I ripped shirts Ric Flair style," Robinson said. "You have to give the people what they want."
You don't end up hanging from a pole, waving your shirt in front of TV cameras without being the outgoing type, but what has caught Robinson by surprise is that, seven years later, we're still celebrating with him.
Robinson's lasting legacy as "Shirtless NC State Fan" is an interesting case study on the life cycle of fan memes. Some flash across the screen, spend a few minutes worming their way through Twitter's expanses, then disappear as quickly as they arrived, forgotten forever, while others, like Robinson's belly, become part of college football history.
The internet can be a fickle beast, and the line between what sticks (Grumpy Cat, Crying Michael Jordan) and what doesn't (we miss you, Harambe) often makes little sense, though Joe Veix, a writer and artist based in Oakland, California, has tried to figure out the answers. He researched the typical life span of memes (spoiler alert: about four months) and said the key to a lasting impact is likely the emotional connection a meme creates with viewers.
"If it draws on a broad emotion that can be applied to many different situations, then it will likely last longer and be shared more frequently," Veix said.
Robinson has seen it firsthand.
He'll be scrolling through Twitter or browsing Reddit, and every month or two, there it is. His belly. The pole. The shirt spinning wildly. If there's something to be celebrated online, Robinson's GIF is likely celebrating, too.