Showing great respect for beach volleyball

Forget college football, Major League Baseball and NASCAR.

My old grammar school friend Dwayne Dumas has become a beach volleyball fanatic.

During the Summer Olympics he went on and on about the women players who fly through the air and spike the ball.

Dwayne admits he had to sneak around and watch it behind his wife’s back, apparently because of the women’s skimpy uniforms.

He insists, however, that his interest stems only from a great personal respect for the athletes.

But all is not right in communist China, Dwayne adds.

He can’t understand why they spent billions of dollars on the Games, but forced the gymnasts to perform on faulty equipment.

“Me and my brother-in-law Bud could take a carpenter’s level and fix them uneven monkey bars,” he says. “It wouldn’t take no genius to even them up.

“It’s just like them Chinese to make some cheap knockoff Jungle Gym,” he adds. “My wife bought one of them Dooney and Birch designer purses down at the flea market and the handle fell off before we got home. Made in China.”

Dwayne is gravely concerned about the gymnastics event that he calls the “Landscape Timber.”

“Dwayne, are you talking about the balance beam?” I ask.

“Whatever,” he says. “All I know is it ain’t but 4 inches wide and them poor girls purty near fall off every time they turn a flip. Then they have to flap their arms around like they meant to do that.”

Dwayne knocked on a solid corner post in his workshop.

“Me and Bud could go down and pick up a 8-by-8 post at Marvin’s drive-through lumberyard. Now that’s what you call a balance beam.”

He said they could take his belt sander and put a smooth edge on it, too, to cut down on splinters.

Dwayne is suspicious because so many world records fell in August. He believes the Chinese cheated so the word “Beijing” will show up with every record possible.

“Michael Phelps, my butt,” he says. “Fly me to China, give me a good retractable tape measure and I’ll prove we’re three feet shy of an official Olympic-size swimming hole.”

When I mention the pool is measured in meters, Dwayne dismisses it as more Chinese trickery.

Then he says he’s convinced that the Chinese entered 5-year-olds in the gymnastics routines and starved them so they’d fly higher.

“I ain’t watching no more underfed gymnasts,” he says, looking around to make sure his wife isn’t within earshot. “It’s nothing but beach volleyball for old Dwayne from here on out.”

Scott Morris is managing editor.