Griffining began as a photograph of a football celebration and became something people could recreate almost anywhere. By late October 2012, contemporary reports show the pose had traveled well beyond Twitter and fan galleries: it appeared on shirts, in a nationally televised pregame feature, and even in photographs with Robert Griffin III himself. Those developments help explain why the original site is worth preserving as more than a collection of amusing pictures.
September 30: RG3 takes part in his own photo trend
After Washington’s win in Tampa Bay on September 30, Griffin posed with Olympic hurdler Kellie Wells while seated in the familiar arms-raised position. The Washington Post’s contemporaneous account first described the other person as a fan, then updated the story to identify Wells, a bronze medalist at the London Olympics. This was a new photograph of the pose, not the original touchdown image—and direct evidence that Griffin was willing to join the joke.
The distinction matters for the archive: an image documenting a cultural trend is not necessarily an image submitted to Griffining.com. The restoration maintains a separate record for contemporary press coverage rather than treating every public photo as a recovered site submission.
October 18–22: the pose reaches television production
A Washington Post report dated October 18 described Fox Sports filming an RG3-themed piece around Washington, including at the Lincoln Memorial. The crew and participants incorporated jersey-and-socks imagery and Washington landmarks into the production. On October 22, the newspaper followed up on the completed pregame piece, noting that some scenes from the earlier shoot did not make the final cut.
In an October 21 retrospective, the same paper explicitly described an actor performing the Griffining pose in the Fox feature. The televised example belongs in the wider history of the meme, though it should not be presented as an original submission to the fan gallery.
October 22: Adidas offers an official-looking piece of the meme
In a separate October 22 report, Sarah Kogod documented an Adidas Griffining T-shirt advertised for $22 plus shipping. The article also noted that independently made shirts and a version from the Washington team store had circulated earlier. The quoted price is a historical 2012 detail, not a current offer.
The order is significant. Fan-made versions came first; a commercial design appeared after the pose had already traveled widely. It is a small but revealing example of how an internet joke could become physical merchandise in a matter of weeks.
The image keeps returning
The October 21 report also observed that the arms-raised pose resurfaced when Griffin celebrated during Washington’s game against the New York Giants. The story mentioned a fan tattoo inspired by the pose as another indication of its reach. Those references show the gesture was still recognizable more than a month after the Saints game, but they do not establish that any particular tattoo or television still survived in the original Griffining.com archive.
What belongs in the restored archive
The aim of this site’s restoration is to document both sides of the story without mixing them up. The restored original-photo gallery contains surviving owner-supplied fan images with documented or clearly qualified credits. The historical site inventory records what is visible in the archived homepage. Articles like this one draw on independent 2012 reporting, linking to the original sources without copying their editorial photographs.
The surviving evidence tells a larger story: one spontaneous touchdown signal became a participatory internet pose, then an image reproduced through merchandise, television, press coverage and athletes’ own photographs. In the process, Griffining became a small but unusually well-documented artifact of 2012 online sports culture.