In the United States, many grade school boys dream of hitting a walk-off home run in the World Series or catching the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. Some kids fantasize about buzzer-beating threes, Stanley Cup heroics, or even an occasional world cup winner.
But never gymnastics. More seven year old boys dream of being LeBron James's agent than of sticking their landings in the Olympics for a gold medal.
The resounding stick of American Paul Hamm's feet at the end of his high bar routine at this summer's Athens Olympics began a new chapter in American gymnastics, and could very well have sparked a change in attitude towards men's gymnastics in this country.
While America often has been enchanted by female gymnasts, from Mary Lou Retton in 1984 to Keri Strug in 1996, gymnastics is one of the few sports in which the men have fallen by the wayside.
This hasn't happened without good reason. The United States has long been the black sheep in a men's gymnastics community dominated for decades by Eastern European and Asian countries.
The last American team medal came 20 years ago at the boycotted 1984 Summer Games.
On August 18th, Hamm, the defending 2003 world champion, won the most coveted individual medal in the sport, the all-around gold.
This came just two nights after leading an American team, that included his twin brother Morgan, to the silver medal. The team finished behind the Japanese and just in front of the Romanians.
American boys may not be skipping Little League in favor of the pommel horse quite yet, but for at least one night, Paul Hamm captured the country's imagination.
After vaulting in his fourth of six events, Hamm's medal hopes seemed dismal. The normally solid athlete landed his vault out-of-control, stumbling on his landing and taking several large steps before crashing into the judge's table.
He received a 9.137, spiraling down the standings and into twelfth place.
"I thought, 'That's it. I'm done,'" Hamm told the Associated Press.
Other medal contenders began to falter, however, and Hamm proceeded to perform the two best routines of the Games.
He received a 9.837 for his parallel bars performance, the highest score of the competition given to any gymnast in any event to that point.
That score would not be beaten, but it would be matched by Hamm on his sixth, and final event, the high bar.
That routine featured three consecutive release moves during which Hamm released the bar on the upswing, somersaulted over the top and grabbed the bar on the way back down.
Hamm won the all-around competition by .012 points, the closest margin of victory in men's Olympic gymnastics history.
Later, a scoring scandal broke out with the discovery that South Korean bronze medalist Yang Tae Young's parallel bars routine was misjudged and deserved an extra tenth of a point, which would have placed him first.
The International Gymnastics Federation ruled that the results from Athens could not be changed, perhaps for good reason, as a later scoring error was discovered that would have docked Young an extra two tenths of a point.
The aggregate corrections would have landed him out of medal contention all together.
The controversy is still burning, a situation that is becoming unsettlingly familiar after each Olympic Games, but Hamm's awe-inspiring performance will be remembered long after the scandal dies down.
Even after the Wheaties boxes go back to featuring Super Bowl heroes and NBA stars, Hamm's impact may have helped usher in a new era in American gymnastics: one in which the men are a much bigger part of the action.
