Nick Young a.k.a. the man behind the 'Confused Nick Young' meme has revealed the story behind the viral photo.
Nick Young - full name Nicholas Aaron Young and nicknamed 'Swaggy P' - may be a NBA player but, funnily enough, he's best known for becoming a meme which may've gone viral yonks ago, but remains well known to this day.
The 38-year-old's since spoken out how the meme came to be - the picture actually a still from a video which many are only seeing now for the first time.
The 'Confused Nick Young' meme first came about in October, 2014. Yep, that long ago.
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And while it looks like it could've just been a slightly blurry photograph, like the ones our friends try and catch of us to embarrass us in a post on our birthday, the image is actually a still from a longer video.
But how did it come about? Well, Young's revealed all.
In an interview with BuzzFeed Video in 2022, Nick notes he 'would say this all started in the nineties' when Cassy Athena started taking photographs of him - Athena going on to become one of the pioneering photographers to shoot pictures of NBA players hooping.
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Young explains: "We would just see her around the gym, she was taking pictures for us and you know back then, before Instagram and all that, when you get pictures, you's like, 'Oh man, these are cool. Can you take more pictures of us?'
"And one day she just asked me, 'Can I follow you around? You know, I wanna do something new. Instead of taking pictures, I wanna do, like, a video like a day in the life.'"
Young agreed and Athena then followed the NBA player around LA and they ended up going to his mom and dad's house.
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"You know, mom's gonna be mom," Young continues. "She said something."
The video shows Young's mom saying: "If that boy ever take it serious, he'd be great... But he was a clown then."
To which Young doesn't reply, but simply makes the face we all now know and love as the 'Confused Nick Young' meme. You can watch the clip here:
Young reflects: "I didn't expect her to say that, you know. Moms don't normally call their son's clowns, you know? There's better words than that, you know?
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"[...] So it kind of just caught me off guard. Hey, why you gonna do that to me on camera? But it was funny."
And people are in stitches after only just seeing the video and context behind the meme for the first time.
One YouTuber said: "The fact it happened with his mother makes it even more golden."
"Great Meme story! Such an authentic reaction to his mom clowning him," another added.
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And a third commented: "What a great success story and fun story about the meme. That dude has great smile and good attitude. He's got a great mom to, you can tell the way she jokes about him in that moment."
Topics: Celebrity, Social Media, Viral, YouTube
Poppy Bilderbeck