BOOOOOOOOOOO, GA'BAGE!!!!

ACTUAL TRANSCRIPT

11:12 PM, EDT, Men's Gymnastics High Bar Finals:

AL: "What does he do that gets you excited, Tim?"

TIM: "Just about everything, Al!"

And yet, that wasn't the most disturbing thing to come out of the event finals last night. That wasn't even the most disturbing thing to come out of the men's HIGH BAR final.

I want to know just what exactly Paul Hamm did to piss off the universe. First he executes the world's most hilarious vault in the all-around, then has to dig himself out of a twelth-place hole; and then after he does that, he's all of a sudden subject to an incredibly convenient South Korean objection, at which point that most august body, the U.S. Olympic Committee, left him hanging on his high bar. Paul was then forced to sit and watch Katie Couric attempt to form words and sentences in his general direction.

And THEN, on Monday, Alexei Nemov of Russia did all kinds of freaky-ass twisty shit in the high bar final (“OOOOHHHH!” went the crowd in increasing decibels after every release, until I actually started feeling a little uncomfortable and got the impression I should really be giving Alexei and the crowd some alone time) and the judges, who had been staring intently up their own butts, gave Nemov a ridiculously low score, whereupon the crowd delivered the absolute best booing performance in the history of ga'bage calls. It went on for ten minutes. It was the Citizen Kane of sustained booing. I am going to carry a tape of it wherever I go from now on, because it will enable me to win whatever argument in which I happen to find myself:

POLICE OFFICER: Weren't you going a little fast back there?

SEVENTEEN THOUSAND GREEK GYMNASTICS FANS: BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...

The judges immediately puckered and formed a Huddle of Asshats, the upshot of which was slightly higher score due to a revision from the Malaysian judge.

Okay. First of all: MALAYSIA?! Where the hell does Malyasia get off having any say on anything? Why wasn't this guy out stitching turtlenecks for the Gap?

In the meantime, the gymnast forced to follow all this was... Paul Hamm, who at this point is probably loathe to cross the street in Athens lest some dink from any old piece-of-shit country starts shrieking at him that he’s done it all wrong, and he doesn’t deserve to make it to the other side, and shouldn’t he personally now carry the entire South Korean contingent across the street too?

Paul got up to execute whole chalk-0n-the-hands routine and was shoved by sheer force of noise back over to the sidelines twice while this was going on, and I will tell you, I have been in some very high-stress situations, at least two of which involved a propane torch, but if I’m Paul here I’m bursting into tears and throwing myself a total Kerrigan-fit right there on the pommel horse.

Paul turned in a very admirable performance, but the judges, sponsored by France, gave him a score that was much higher than the Russian’s, and Paul reacted with this sort of sick smile and suddenly I was looking an Olympic athlete who, Bengals-like, just had to be hoping that he was not going to win. Higher, faster, stronger, baby!! Way to go, Maylasia. Tell Angora I said hi at the Lame Nations Barbeque.