The Challenge Theory I: Timmy Beggy's Disqualification From Inferno 3

One of my all time favorite "Real World Road Rules" challengers in the history of the show happened to be Timmy Beggy. Timmy was originally a fun spirited and comedic Pittsburgh native that first showed up on "Road Rules: USA Season 2" in the mid 1990's and got his first shot on the 5th season of the challenge in "Battle of the Seasons". He would appear in three total challenges until his final one where he was on the Good Guys team in the "Inferno 3" and in those three previous challenges he had never been eliminated.

In the 10th episode of the season, the Good Guys and the Bad A**es faced each other in a mission called "Dog Day Afternoon", which was based on the movie by the same name. In this mission, male and female pairs on one team would push a dog sled from one side of a field to the other carrying a male and female pair from the other team on the sled. The team with the best cumulative time would end up winning the mission.

Alton and Susie (Good guys) 

pulling two Bad A**es during 

"Dog Day Afternoon". 

Previously to the mission, the Bad A**es selected Ace from the Good Guys to go into the Inferno and Ace was the male player who won the Life Shield because him and Cara had the best time for the Good Guys, he would not be the one to go to the Inferno, so he had to pick either Timmy, John, or Davis to go in. Originally John and Ace were adamant to put Davis in based on his past performance, but Timmy elected to be put into the Inferno. The reason he gave was because he was older than everyone else and he slowed the team down in "Dog Day Afternoon". Despite the fact that Ace didn't want to put Timmy in, he reluctantly agreed to send his friend and the heart of the Good Guys team into the Inferno. In reality, Timmy claimed that he could barely stand during the missions and that he might have torn his hamstring.

Much like Ace, Kenny Stanucci the self proclaimed "ladies man" was voted in by the Good Guys because they usually went after the weakest player on the other team. And because Kenny didn't seem as tough as Derrick and Abram, they selected him. Kenny also won the Life Shield with his partner Evelyn and he selected Abram to battle Timmy in the Inferno. The Inferno was called "Smash House" where both players were placed in a small glass cube that had two bigger cubes on the outside of it, each cube bigger than the other. They were also given metal rings to break the glass and they were each suspended in the air at a distance of around 20 feet or so. Both players had to race to break ALL glass panes and the one who did this first won.

Now here is where the controversy begins, Timmy actually broke through all of the panes first and then broke through the bottom and won "Smash House". However, to the dismay of the Good Guys, Timmy was disqualified because the glass pane at the top was not broken, even when it hit the ground. Abram was awarded the victory and Timmy went home, but not before a retirement speech where he told everyone "to keep doing challenges" and he left.

Timmy after finding out that he was disqualified from "Smash 

House" (left) Timmy giving his farewell speech (right)

Even after watching this episode back in 2007 I still had many questions about what had taken place because it had only been the third time a player had been disqualified from an elimination (the first two being Beth and CT after being unable to pull a carabiner off a hook in "The Duel"). This was the first time I had ever seen a pane of glass drop to the ground from about 20 feet and not shatter into a million pieces. Now while I don't have the exact clip of what happened because the whole season was deleted off of Dailymotion, but I am pretty sure that if a pane of glass had dropped from that distance, it would have shattered. It was almost as if the glass was merely plastic or something because of how it fell and the velocity of the fall. 

This leads me to believe one of a few things. The first is that the whole elimination was staged and Timmy planned to get eliminated. For this to be true, Timmy would have had to go to the producers and tell them that he was going to give his all, but that they would have to award the win to his opponent, which was very likely due to the fact that Timmy's retirement speech was so well rehearsed. The second possibility is that Murray/Bunim Productions knew of his injury and staged his exit from the show without him knowing. Evidence of this could be Timmy's reaction to being disqualified as you can see from Timmy's open mouth face to the left. Third possibility is that Timmy had no idea that this was going to happen and MTV didn't rig the elimination to allow Abram to win. 

Now besides a bit of fan speculation, the fact that this whole thing was rigged was purely "circumstantial", but I am leaning more towards the second option of Timmy not knowing and MTV rigging it so that Timmy would lose. This is the only outcome that I can come to because I have a hard time believing that a pane of glass that big does not split into a million pieces upon impact with the ground at that distance unless it was the hardest glass in the world. It just seems highly coincidental to me that one pane of glass doesn't break for Timmy when he strangely enough is about to retire from the challenges. I wish I could find more evidence of this, but searching "Timmy Beggy elimination from Inferno 3 MTV Abram rigged Smash House" didn't net me many results besides a few pictures and a few articles talking about the elimination. Hopefully this theory can lead to more discussion on the topic because it is something that not a lot of fans talk about because it happened such a long time ago.