A Texas police officer has become an internet darling after a viral showed him playing hopscotch with a little girl.
It took less than 30 seconds of videotape to turn a Texas cop into an internet sensation, all because he played hopscotch with a little girl in his neighborhood.
“I never, ever, thought that it would get so much attention,” Lyle Gensler of Grand Prairie told InsideEdition.com Thursday.
He was on his way to the station when he saw the child, whom he calls “Claire Bear,” happily hopping by herself on the sidewalk in front of her home.
Gensler always waves to the girl and her mother, Dawn Clay, he said, because that is just his nature. “I love kids,” he said.
On Wednesday, he pulled over his cruiser and got out to give the child a lesson in how to play the chalk-marked game.
We can do what we want on our breaks, correct? Child's game, phooey! #hopscotch pic.twitter.com/MbLRVgnkko
— Lyle Gensler (@califcop) April 19, 2017
Claire, who is about 5 or 6, Gensler said, wasn’t using a "lagger." So he scooped up a rock and showed her how to toss it into the numbered boxes.
He asked her mother to videotape it on his cell phone.
“I didn’t think anyone would believe me when I went back to the station and told them I played hopscotch with a little girl,” he said.
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Later, he uploaded the 24-second video to his Twitter account. It quickly caught the attention of the internet.
“It just blows me away,” he said.
He says the main thing on his mind while playing with the child was not falling “on my a**.”
Cops are “pretty top-heavy because of all the gear we carry," he said. "So when I leaned down to pick up the rock, I almost fell over."
Along with the video, Gensler posted this message: “We can do what we want on our breaks, correct? Child’s game, phooey!”
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