Splat Mulligan, jumping with the GlossyNews team, on his first and last X-Games trials. Relatives and family can visit his DNA during a memorial Tuesday. Microscopes provided.
ESPN announced today the immediate suspension of Bungee Diving from the X Games after the grizzly deaths of 42 athletes in a row.
Bungee diving as a sport lasted only 4 months, which is short even by X Game standards. It was created last fall by extreme skydiver Jack "9-lives" Stewart, 23, when his parachute failed to open on a jump made over Colorado's Royal Gorge bridge. Amazingly, Stewart was able to grab hold of a bungee cord that was attached to the bridge and hang on for dear life as he bounced out of death's doorway. He immediately became an icon in the extreme sports subculture.
Watching the story in a bar in Aspen, two skateboarders, Timmy "Head Bash" Gates and John "The Dude" Conners were so impressed that they decided promote the new activity as an X-Game sport. Despite having neither parachuted nor bungee jumped before, the pair calculated that the only necessary skills were good eyes, quick reflexes and balls that you'd need to move in a wheelbarrow. Thus was born the new sport of Bungee Diving.
Within weeks Gates and Conners met with ESPN executives and had a agreement in place, and athlete recuiting was brisk considering the danger of the sport. The risky nature also attracted numerous dead-athlete groupies, and easy sex boosted the sport even more.
When asked why he switched from speed skating to bungee diving, the late Johnny "Little D" Schwartz replied, "The babes, dude, the babes! They totally love a guy that's facing Mr. Death! They wanna mother ya and hump ya all at the same time, which is TOTALLY kinky."
Preliminaries in late 2002 proved the sport more difficult than anyone imagined. The first 27 attempts resulted in 27 deaths, including Gates and Conners, who had jumped simultaneously to "...show these whimp-asses how to do it, man." Ironically, horrified witnesses said the last words they could hear from the pair were "MOMMMMMYYYY!!!!! MOMMMMMMYYYY!!!!" moments before they turned from solid to liquid matter.
"Stretch it, bitch! Get some bounce in that butt!" The All-Glossy women's Bungee Humping team in training for this fall's games.
ESPN cancelled the sport after that event. The network determined that to be a sport someone had to survive to accept a medal. Additionally, the only people left entering tryouts were really drunk rednecks saying things like, "SHEEEIIIT! I kin do that!"
The network says it plans to hold onto it's core bungee-diving audience by introducing another new extreme sport this fall, Bungee-Humping.
"It was a great ride," said Scoop McIntry, an early diver who never actually got around to entering an event. "The girls, the parties, the drugs. The adrenaline rush of watching somebody falling at terminal velocity...man, what a rush. The sound of them hitting the ground was kinda creepy, though - sorta like when you hit a toad with a baseball bat, only thicker."
