a second tony has hit the tiger

I spoke on the phone with Heath, a manager at the Krispy Kreme location who about knew the incident I was describing. He was, however, slightly surprised that I knew of the video. “Actually, that video was supposed to have been removed from the web,” he told me, “so I’m surprised it’s still out there circulating.”

Aaron, who executed the flip heard around the world, is a professional tumbler, and his dance group was once on America’s Got Talent. He described the iconic incident:

Oh my God, let me tell you about that night. So I have a free coupon to get like a dozen doughnuts, so I go, “All right, say no more.” I go make moves — we’re all in line, we’re just talking. I was like, “Yo, I’m about to make a video, I’m about to do a flip.” So I give them my coupon, I’m like, “Stand in line, get the dozen doughnuts, I’m gonna go over here and make this video,” and all that. So it was me and my two friends. I tell them to set up at the table. I was like, “Oh, I gotta get my intro real quick.” I did my little intro — “Back at it again at Krispy Kreme” — and I was like, “Y’all ready?” Then we flipped the camera around. I back up. I told myself, I’m not gonna hit anything. So I do my flip, but the second flip that I did — the back handspring, the back one with hands going into the spin — I stretched it out too long. So when I went into the air and started spinning, my left leg hit the sign off the wall clean, and it dropped behind the counter. And it was like [glass shattering sound effect]. It was packed. There was a good hundred, a hundred and some change, people inside. Everybody was talking. As soon as that thing dropped, everybody didn’t talk for a good 30 seconds. It was nothing but silence. As soon as I landed — I didn’t fall after that, you saw me, I landed on my feet. I looked up and I saw that it fell, I didn’t look at nobody, I just kept walking, and I walked out the door. Everybody was like, “What the heck? Oh shoot, he just kicked down the sign!” Everybody started going crazy.

I was floored to find out the restaurant was so crowded when it happened. Imagine being there that day, witnessing history…

Aaron did delete the video from his own account to avoid negative attention, but it had already gone too viral to die down. Happily he didn’t get into any trouble. Someone did call the sheriff (insane thing to do, be so serious), but they told Aaron, “You don’t have to pay for anything like that, just don’t do anything like that again.”

In the words of Funké in his coverage of the Vine, “and he hasn’t done it since.” But he did keep doing flips: