Weekend So Far
I’ll spare you my bad travel issues.
Thursday
Stardom – I try to take in shows that I won’t get to see otherwise and when else am I going to get to see Japanese women’s wrestling? I didn’t exactly know much about most of the names but I caught on fast enough and the matches were fun. Toni Storm showed up in a great bonus moment near the end. Fun show, but it was really short at only about an hour and forty minutes.
WrestleCon Supershow – It was a very fun show with some great action, but unfortunately I had a bad case of vertigo kick in about ten minutes before the show started and it only started clearing up about halfway through the next to last match of the night. I could barely focus on the show, so this is going to need a heck of a rewatch.
Now that being said, the big ending was the Sandman making his full entrance, complete with Enter Sandman in the ECW Arena. I’m far from an ECW fan but the Sandman was the coolest thing ever when I was a kid. Seeing him getting to do that entrance in that building was one of the coolest moments I’ve ever seen at any show and it was absolutely special.
Related note: I went to Denny’s for supper after the show and a group of CMLL wrestlers were sat next to me. They were unmasked and wouldn’t say who they were, but Barbero Cavernario was there and confirmed it was in fact them (Mistico was at another show so I definitely didn’t meet him).
Friday
WrestleCon – As usual, this is an insane amount of people in one place but thankfully they were spread out over multiple rooms. The lines were long, but I did pick up a new book about the early 80s WWF and a gift for the wife. It was cool to see the bigger names, but I didn’t really talk to any wrestlers due to the amount of fans there. Granted it also doesn’t help when I’ve met most of them before anyway.
WWE World (Axxess) – Nope. I’ve been to more WWE events than I can count and I do not remember being more disappointed than this. It was badly lit, they only had some of the always cool pay per view banners hanging down, the lines were WAY too long to stand in and most of it was just for photo ops. I actually spent more time walking (20 minutes) from WrestleCon to this than I spent at the event (15 minutes). This was horrible and if Fanatics is running it again next year, it’s absolutely being dropped from the itinerary.
Progress – I got to this a bit late and knew almost no one on the card, but they pulled me in with everything they did. This was a very entertaining show with some good action and some absolutely hilarious matches (even Bussy won me over, which I didn’t think was possible). Fun stuff here and maybe the best mixture of quality and comedy I’ve seen at an indy show in a good while. Also met a reader (Muffin Top Merkley) which is always fun to see.
Joey Janela’s Spring Break 8 – I don’t follow GCW but I knew enough of the people on this show. It was the usual rowdy crowd (save for the main event oddly enough) and it worked well enough. The show was long (as it tends to be) but it went well, with the biggest problem being the seating. I got a sixth row seat with nothing specified on the ticket other than “sixth row”. I sat in a seat but was told I had my own seat with my literal name on it, as they were apparently set up alphbetically. This wound up being true, and I was stuck sitting between two good sized people, to the point where I couldn’t put my arms down for most of the show. So if a buddy of mine and I buy tickets separately and have different last names, we can’t sit together? That’s not a great plan.
Overall, good stuff so far, but we get to the big stuff tomorrow.
KB