To everyone he’s known as Success Kid, an internet famous meme, but it’s easy to forget that the face behind that meme is Sammy Griner and he’s very much real. A lot has changed since Sammy’s rise to fame in 2007 after his mum posted a photo to Flickr of him eating sand on a beach.
The internet doing what it does best took the image and used it in a variety of hilarious ways, propelling Sammy to fame with one of the most popular memes being success kid. Used for a variety of different ‘successful’ situations Sammy has been used to celebrate triumphs as serious as beating alcohol and drug addictions to describing the euphoria felt when discovering it’s actually Friday instead of Thursday.
More recently however Sammy made a reappearance at the age of 8 as part of a campaign fuelled by Sammy’s fame to help raise money for his father, Justin, of Jacksonville in Florida. Justin had spent the past 6 years receiving hours of dialysis every day after his kidneys began to fail.
In total they managed to raise $100,000 and Justin underwent a successful operation last August after a donor was found. Now that really is a success. Here’s Sammy in 2016:
