Sunday 3 April, 2005

Grandaddy of them all

On Sunday we had no reason to get up early, except for some weird reason I ordered the breakfast for nine. So we got up at nine, at a lazy breakfast and went back to bed. We woke up sometime in the afternoon and after picking up protein shakes from a local smoothie bar, we headed to Staples Centre.

Queues were once again huge, but we seemed to get off easy every single time on this trip. We found one of the backdoor queues that were actually quite short, and got in with only 20 minutes or so queuing - which was good as they said in the paper that the ultraviolet index was ten, meaning that fair skin would burn in ten minutes without protection. After Toronto trip when we burned really badly we had prepared for sun, but still I wouldn't want to push it.

Our seats read "limited view", but as you can see from the photo they weren't bad at all, we had unlimited view to the ring. What we didn't see was the main screen, but pretty much everything else was visible - it was actually really cool to see a lot of the preparations going on outside the camera view. For example how they disassembled the ring before the sumo match: Akebono had already appeared and started to walk towards the ring when the sumo circle wasn't ready yet - but by the time he was there it was up and looking good. Or how they were assembling the stage Motörhead was playing on next to the Hall of Fame inductees without the viewers sitting at home noticing a thing. And I think that the ladder match actually looked better from a distance than it did on the telly.

Anyway, Wrestlemania was a great show. It seemed more distant after two evenings of sitting withing touching distance of the wrestlers, and by this time we were dead tired - but still, it was a great experience. We had no assholes around us and did several chants just amongst our section, and the athmosphere was good. We rented two pairs of binoculars in addition to the one pair we had, and used them a bit - most of the time it was just easier to follow the matches without them.

Good stuff, and definetly won't be the last big WWE event we'll be attending.

Posted by kolibri at 3 April 23:28, 2005
Comments
# 1 - Chu (on April 11, 2005 10:02 AM):

The weird thing about the TV broadcast is you can't hear the crowd for all that it was. For example, from the moment he stepped out of his lowrider, there were huge, stadium-wide Eddie chants going on - yet you can't really hear them at all on the PPV broadcast.

Based on this, you can imagine just how loud the audience was during Hulkamania ;D. I've never heard anything like that in my life.


# 2 - kolibri [TypeKey Profile Page] (on April 11, 2005 11:07 AM):

Most amazingly Hulkamania did run over us. I even chanted for Hogan at some point :P


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