Tom Hammond's Grotesque, Ill-Formed Clone to Join Tom Hammond in NBC Booth

Hot on the heels of today's announcement that Pat Haden will be leaving NBC to take the position of athletic director at the University of Southern California, rumors have been rampant about who will join his inimitable broadcast partner Tom Hammond in the booth for Notre Dame football games this fall. In an eerie pre-dawn press conference at a hastily-constructed dais in front of Notre Dame's Radiation Laboratory, NBC and a team of unintroduced heavily-armed men in lab coats put an end to the speculation by officially announcing that Tom Hammond will be joined in the booth by a gnarled, misshapen clone of Tom Hammond that has been living in the subterranean tunnels below Notre Dame's campus since a team of unscrupulous scientists created him from a scraping of skin cells from the broadcaster's cheek five years ago.

Know ye know what gods feel like!

2-Hammond-beta, as the repulsive affront to God and nature is known, brings decades of genetically-inherited experience to the booth, although he has not seen any broadcasting action, nor the unrelenting burn of natural sunlight on his limpid skin, since being wrenched from the carbide incubator that served as his unholy womb during the cloning process.

"Unfortunately, there hasn't been a place for Nega-Hammond in the NBC Sports family until now," commented NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol from the safety of a reinforced bullet-proof lucite box several dozen yards away from the chained-down clone. "And although we are sad to lose the talents of a fine broadcaster like [Haden], we are happy that it provided an opening for us to return our beloved semi-reptilian hellspawn back to the fold."

According to one university source who was very, very adamant about not providing his name, Nega-Hammond was initially created to solve a pernicious rodent infestation in the subterranean tunnels, a task which he proved to be exceptionally adept at. Too adept, in fact, as the indigenous brown rat population in Northwest Indiana took a precipitous drop in the first 18 months of the clone's horrid existence, and leading biologists in the region say that an intact specimen of rattus norvegicus has not been seen in the region since the winter of 2007. It was at that point that Nega-Hammond's handlers lost contact with him, prompting many close to the project to openly wonder what the gnarled underbeing has been doing, and particularly what he had been subsisting on for food, since then. "The answer to that question," one highly-placed source in the administration was quoted as saying, "is beyond the reach of where nightmares tread," and then crossed himself vigorously.


The only known image of Nega-Hammond in existence. The camera was eaten shortly afterwards.

Despite going off the grid since that cold winter of 2007, Nega-Hammond was spotted by some ice skaters at the on-campus rink at the Joyce Athletic center, who complained of an eerie, croaky voice doing play-by-play of their figure skating routines coming from one of the vents in the floor. The problem was resolved without incident after maintenance crews pumped the vents with pesticide spray overnight.

Not surprisingly, the revelation of covert organ- and monster-harvesting cloneries on campus has sparked controversy on the campus of the Catholic university, as the Church strongly opposes the practice of human cloning.

"Tom Hammond is an affront to God and abomination upon this world. Our faith is crystal clear about that, and we are shocked and repulsed by his presence," commented the director of campus affairs, Rev. Ted Moynihan, CSC. When asked if meeting with Hammond's clone had made him rethink his position on the subject, Moynihan replied, "Tom Hammond's what?"