You might not know Dieunerst Collin personally, but you still know Dieunerst Collin. In a Vine video shot back in 2013, he stands wearing a yellow shirt, holding a Popeye’s fast-food drink cup, side-eyeing the camera. That Vine earned over 19 million views, but even after Vine’s parent company, Twitter, discontinued the service in 2016, Collin’s face lived on.
His image is still regularly pasted into plenty of reaction memes, whenever anyone wants a wary, alarmed face to go with a caption. And now Collin has a new, more impressive title for his resume: State football champ.
Collin is a member of the East Orange High School team, which won the New Jersey state title in triple overtime on Sunday. Its meme-famous player didn’t go unnoticed.
“Dieunerst from the legendary meme is a state champion!” tweeted the official SportsCenter account.
Collin was just nine when the video of him was taken, and he didn’t ask for the viral fame.
“When it first happened, I kind of felt sad about it,” Collin told Sports Illustrated. “It was somebody randomly recording me, and I’ve never been viral before.”
The video shows someone mistaking Collin for another child who was then famous on Vine, TerRio. Collin’s confused and wary reaction struck a chord with many meme-makers, who snatched the image and captioned it with such phrases as, “When I see my teacher at a store.”
His viral fame led to bullying, Collin told Sports Illustrated, saying, “I did get to a place where it was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to go out any more.'” But eventually things became easier.
“People in my class found it very funny, so then I just continued being myself,” he said. “I got over it once everybody who would randomly come up to me and call me Terio actually met me and learned my actual name and got to know me.”
And now he has a new claim to fame. On Sunday, Collin shared an Instagram photo of himself with the team’s new trophy, writing, “IMAGINE NOT BEING A STATE CHAMP:I CANT RELATE‼️”
