Botched Spot

Hey everybody!

So, sorry again for the unusually absent strips!  Schoolwork, power outages, and day trips to Savannah have been getting the best of me as of late, but hopefully that’s all behind me now.  And I feel ESPECIALLY bad now because I just saw there was a jump in pageviews the two days I missed my updates.  But I do want to say thanks to all of you loyal readers for coming back over and over again and thanks for the support!  I do appreciate it, because it’s always a great motivator for me.  Also thanks for spreading the word, or however I got so many new views, because that is always great to see!

BUT despite being busy with schoolwork, one nice distraction was that I went to the ECW/ Smackdown taping this last Tuesday here in Atlanta!  For the low price of forty dollars (plus a ten dollar handling fee, twenty dollars for parking, four dollar coke, and a twenty five dollar Edge shirt) I was able to get into the Philips Arena and see all the wrestling I could stand!

Okay, so longtime readers (or people who have been reading for the past two months) may recall back in June I went to a RAW house show in Redding, California.  So now you may be wondering what the difference is between watching wrestling at a show in Northern California and in Georgia is.  Jesus, do people love the Hardys down South!  I mean people liked Jeff a lot in CA, but during the whole show there were “We want Hardy” chants during slow matches or commercial breaks.  Not Triple H, not Hornswaggle.  Also a fair bit of “WOOOOOing”.

Another difference was in the CA shows I’ve been to (including a few RAW shows in Sacramento) if fans weren’t into a match they just would just sit in silence.  At the show last Tuesday, poor Braden Walker (aka Wildcat Chris Harris from TNA) and James Curtis desperately tried to put on an entertaining match while the crowd LOUDLY chanted “THIS IS BORING *CLAPCLAPCLAP*”.

UPDATE:  And… yikes… I just found out that they both were JUST released yesterday and today!  Is this blood on MY hands, being one of the crowd that treated them so poorly?  Hell no, I kept my mouth shut!  Sorry Bradon!

But overall ECW was a fun show to watch, even considering the fact that I haven’t watched it in a while.  The best match of ECW was when the team of Chavo Guerrero and Bam Neely fought Evan Bourne (who got a REALLY good pop) and Atlas Ortiz (aka Atlas DaBone- no relation to Rad Bad of course!  HAha, oh I hope I don’t get sued…).  Also fun was the LIVE edition of The Dirt Sheet where John Morrison and The Miz got into it with Mark Henry, Tony Atlas and Matt Hardy.

Smackdown was a good show too.  I’ll try to keep this spoiler-free since it hasn’t aired yet, but I will say there was an AWESOME match between Jeff Hardy and Shelton Benjamin that is definitely worth checking out.  Other than that there were a few alright matches, a handful of black roses and one Broken Glass Arm Wrestling match, which made up for an okay show.

While the best part of the night was Jeff vs. Shelton, there were a few good dark matches too, including Kenny Dykstra vs. R. Truth (aka Ron Killings from TNA who got  a good pop from the crowd), Triple H vs. Vladimir Kozlov, and right after that Triple H vs. Edge.

So the whole event was pretty fun overall, and well worth the money paid to see it.  Whether cheering, booing, or chanting “boring”, the crowd seemed passionate about everything that happened, and that always helps the experience.  It will be interesting to see how the shows play out on air though with the announcer shake up of Tazz replacing Mick Foley and Matt Striker replacing Tazz on ECW.

But anyway, thanks for reading and welcome to any new readers!

-James Hornsby

I will say this about Tony Atlas.  The purpose of a manager is to make his wrestler look good, right?  Atlas makes Mark Henry look good on the mic.