Henrying

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About

Henrying is a photoshop meme based on an image of French professional football player Thierry Henry celebrating after scoring a goal by leaning against the goal post with one arm resting on his hip.

Origin

On September 8th, 2013, during the Major League Soccer (MLS) season match between New York Bulls and Houston Dynamo, New York Bulls' captain Thierry Henry scored a goal at 47 minutes into the first half of the game, breaking his recent streak of no goals in six consecutive games. Upon scoring, Henry immediately got up on his feet and leaned against the goal post to celebrate his goal. Then on September 14th, Henry once again staged the same ceremony after scoring the first goal during a season match against Toronto FC.

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On September 19th, The YouTube sportscast channel KICKTV^[1] tweeted an illustration breaking down the elements of Henry's unenthusiastic goal ceremony, dubbing the pose "Henrying" in similar fashion to the previous photo fads based on athletes.

Head down. Hand on hip. This is #Henrying (GIF: http://t.co/EalfoziagA) 101: pic.twitter.com/axY3JullDt
— KICKTV (@KICKTV) September 19, 2013

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Although KICKTV's tweet seemed to be aimed at jump starting a photo fad, soccer fans on Twitter soon began sharing photoshopped images of the New York Bulls forward inserted into famous photographs in modern sports history, including pictures of American boxing legend Muhammed Ali's 1965 fight against Sonny Liston, retired Argentinian football star Diego Maradona's 1986 "Hand of God" incident and British marathoner Mo Farah at the 2012 Summer London Olympics (shown below). In less than 24 hours of KICKTV's post, at least 30 unique photoshopped instances surfaced under the tag #Henrying^[2] on Twitter.

By September 20th, Henrying had been picked up by several sports news sites and soccer fan blogs, including Bleacher Report^[4], Sports Illustrated^[3], Yahoo Sports^[5] and NBC Sports^[6], as well as the official Major League Soccer website.^[8] In addition, the New York Bulls fan blog Empire of Soccer^[7] reported that Thierry Henry reacted in bemusement after he was shown some of the photoshopped images.