Wrestlemania XXIV

I’m about to go to bed. Have a wee little bit of a buzz left from the Amber Bock beer. We went to a sports bar near here called the WingHouse to watch WrestleMania XXIV with Katie. I’ve never watched an event at a sports bar before, so it was a new experience for me. I kinda liked it. I mean, come on, it was a lot of fun to watch wrestling with a whole crowd of people who were going “Ohhh!” every time someone got smacked.
If you’ve never heard of the WingHouse, it’s a take-off on Hooters (close enough that Hooters filed a lawsuit). Young girls in tight outfits. Chicken wings. You get the idea. I suspect the girls at WingHouse are a little more scantily clad. It’s a hell of a place to go with your girlfriend, because it’s damned hard not to look.
But that’s me being the writer watching the people in the fishbowl. One of the things I enjoyed was watching people watching the girls. It’s always funny to watch the interactions between people in public places. Buy the dynamic in a place like that, with girls walking around in tight shorts with their asses hanging out, and husbands and boyfriends trying to appear unaffected, was just hilarious.
Anyway, the point of being there was WrestleMania XXIV. We watched all of the almost five hours of it. I won’t bore you with a recap. I’m sure you can find that all across the Internet. And I’m certainly not one to wax rhapsodic about wrestling. But I have to admit to being affected by at least one match (much to my surprise). Somehow it seemed fitting to me that the first time I watched a pay-per-view wrestling event at a sports bar was the night that wrestler Ric Flair was retired. I mean, I used to watch this guy on television when I was a kid. I saw him all the time wrestling at the Kings Mountain Community Center. Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, Ricky Steamboat, Blackjack Mulligan, Ivan Koloff . Many I could name that most of the crowd at Wrestlemania would never have heard of (like The Mighty Igor). So, yeah. I admit that I got a little misty when I realized that Ric Flair was really going to retire from wrestling. Well, until the next pitcher of beer arrived. Then I had moved on.
But I had a really good time watching all of the other matches, and enjoying the ambiance of being in a crowd of people who were getting into the same thing. Plus, as ever, I was in excellent company.