Anthony Adams Rubbing Hands

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About

Anthony Adams Rubbing Hands refers to a photograph of former professional football player Anthony "Spice" Adams dressed in a yellow jacket, peeking from behind a tree, rubbing his hands and licking his lips. Online, the photograph has gained popularity as a reaction image.

Origin

On December 27th, 2017, former professional American football player Anthony "Spice" Adams posted a humorous story titled "The Love Story of Leon Lemons" together with a series of photographs of himself and his family to Twitter and Facebook.^[1]^[2] The posts gained over 30 retweets and 260 shares in two years, respectively.

Spread

On Twitter, the image has been used as a reaction image at least since January 2018, sometimes used in Horny on Main posts. For example, on January 16th, 2018, Twitter user @Czohmfeka used the image as a reaction.^[3] In September and October 2018, the image saw an increase in use on the platform.^[4]^[5]

On April 16th, 2019, unknown Reddit user posted the first meme based on the image, gaining nine upvotes.^[6] The format did not see any notable examples until on July 5th, 2019, when Redditor dcxr posted a meme which gained over 73,000 upvotes in twelve days (shown below).^[7]

In the following days, the format saw extensive use on the platform, with notable posts appearing in /r/dankmemes,^[8] /r/attackontitan ^[9] and other subreddits.

Tree Identification And Location Discovery

On November 29th, 2023, Rainbolt posted a video to Instagram (and also to TikTok) walking viewers through his process to discover the exact location where the meme image of Anthony Adams rubbing his hands behind the tree was taken. The post received almost 1.2 million likes over the course of a day and a half (seen below).^[10] The video established that the location of the meme was the Daniel Wright Woods Forest Preserve in Illinois, USA.