Marshawn Lynch, you devil you.
Who knew the terse and tension-filled answers the mercurial Seattle Seahawks running back routinely shoots at reporters would be nectar to the ears of young coeds?
Two University of Illinois-Chicago students had been using Lynch's news conference quotes in conversations with each other, so they thought it might be funny and cool if they tried to use them as pickup lines around local campuses and caught it all on camera.
Challenge accepted.
Last Tuesday, UIC sophomore Henry Pye tried out lines such as "You know why I'm here,""I'm just here so I don't get fined,""yeah" and "maybe" on female students at DePaul University and the University of Chicago while junior Alex Van Anrooy video-recorded the whole exchange. You'd be surprised by how successful the 20-year-old dorm mates became at getting phone numbers with those cryptic come-ons.
"We didn't have anything like a 'hello' at our disposal," said Pye, an urban studies major and alum of GCE Chicago High School. "We had to ask things like, 'Thank you for asking about my stomach.' That line was the most successful. Approaching girls with 'You have two more minutes to look at me' was not successul. We have some pretty rude remarks we got back."
Despite the offbeat phrases, Pye smiled and used body language and tone to get his intentions across. "If I said it with the same tone Lynch said it with, the police would've been called," he said.
Van Anrooy, a communications major, had planned to take a turn but "Henry started to get into that groove ... so we kept we going because it worked so well."
Pye said he and Van Anrooy were careful to avoid using Lynch's lines in a way that might be perceived as sexist or racist, but one hiccup came when one of the women asked Pye's nationality.
"Shoutout to my real Africans," Pye said, parroting Lynch from a pre-Super Bowl news conference on Jan. 29. "Really?" she asks.
It was one of the lines Pye had printed out and studied for two days but had avoided until then. "We didn't want to utilize it as one of our go-to's, but it fit there."
Van Anrooy said the prank they conceived during the NFL playoffs has been well-received, even by its victims. "We let them all in on it afterward," said the Stevenson graduate from Long Grove. "They all took kind to it. They all laughed and smiled."
The Courtyard Trolls, as Van Anrooy and Pye call themselves, uploaded the video to YouTube around midnight early Friday morning and by Monday morning it had more than 412,000 views. "A couple hours after it exploded, we were talking to our parents. They were going crazy," said Van Anrooy, who plans to shoot more videos with his partner. "Henry was noticed in the cafeteria today."
Twitter @_phil_thompson
