The ultimate face-off! A young boy engaged in an epic stare-down with an ESPN cameraman at a College World Series baseball game on Saturday, June 25 — and, naturally, it went viral.
In the hilarious minute-and-a-half clip, the redheaded young fan gazes into the camera lens with a stern look on his face and somehow manages not to blink. At one point, he even wiggles his eyebrows and does a little shimmy, all without cracking a smile.
At the end of the viral clip, which was filmed at the TCU Frogs and Coastal Carolina Chanticleers game at Omaha’s TD Ameritrade Park, the boy looks up at his mother, who seemingly didn’t take notice of her son’s antics at first, and laughs.
As soon as the video started to make the rounds online, social media users began comparing it to a similar viral clip of a female student named Sarah at a University of Arizona game in September 2010. One user even created a hilarious mashup, which was uploaded to its own Reddit thread.
In the throwback scene, Sarah, who quickly became known as “stop girl,” has a look of distress on her face. An ESPN cameraman zeroed in on her — and she caught him almost immediately. “Stop!” she yelled before breaking into laughter.
The “stop girl” video has since become a cult classic on Reddit, and Sarah even did a followup interview with ESPN in March 2013.
“I look at it every once in a while,” she recounted of the clip at the time. “I’m just, like, surprised at how popular it’s been, and it’s only getting more popular, it seems. I remember going home that night and my friends being like, ‘We saw you on TV.’ Maybe six months later, a friend texted me and was like, ‘Hey, you’re on this website.’ Now, it’s all over Reddit, and it’s getting really popular.”
Watch “stare kid” and “stop girl” face off in the video above!
