So, last night the WWE Monday Night Raw Supershow rolled into Columbia, SC. My wife and I shelled out the money to take 3 of our boys, the oldest didn’t seem to interested and figured he’d be working anyways. Whether you like wrestling or not, it was a great experience that my kids loved and we had a “mostly” great time. There were some issues though.
First off, we purchased tickets for 5 seats, all together, because as a family, we like to sit together. Maybe we’re quirky like that, but so be it. We found our seats, Section 118, Row 17, Seats 18 – 22. Count that out, 5 seats, right? 5. Not 4, not 6, but 5. 18, 19. 20, 21, 22. F-I-V-E. At $16 per butt perch, we intended to use them all.
Well, we get to the row and they have roped off the last 3 seats in the row, for about 5 rows to make room for a tripod that the WWE was using to hold a camera. Not thinking much of it, as our seats were butted right up next to the barrier, we just sat down. About a half hour into the show, another couple shows up to sit next to us and says we have one of their seats. I had to look at the tickets twice to see what had happened. Apparently, each row has 25 seats, and they had roped off seat 22, 23, 24 and 25. Meaning, of course, that my seat 22 wasn’t available.
We had this happen to a family behind us (who I’ll get to in more detail shortly), and they wound up sitting one of the kids on their laps, because the “EVENT STAFF”, you could tell this by the yellow parka she wore with huge letters saying as much, said “What you want me to do ’bout it? It’s blocked off. Not my job to worry about your seat.”. Nice, real classy there Colonial Life Arena. I mean, I understand that you don’t draft from the best schools when hiring “EVENT STAFF”, but you could at least teach them to take care of the customer, maybe use that radio they carry around to find a solution or call a manager over so the customer doesn’t have to trudge all the way back out to the ticket office to stand in line for 30 minutes. Or maybe I’m just freakin’ insane. Who knows?
So, I wound up putting my youngest son on my lap to watch the show. After about 30 minutes, we noticed the 4 seats directly in front of us were staying empty and migrated two of the boys down there so everyone could be comfortable. As a side note, the tripod stood empty the entire show. Not once did they mount a camera to it or come back to it for anything. I considered stealing it as we left, just to be a dick, but then realized, I had nowhere to keep a 7 foot tripod.
Anyhow, we’re watching the show. If you’ve never been to a WWE wrestling show, I’ll set the scene for you. Columbia, South Carolina is one of the saddest, most boring, psuedo-cities in the world. We have next to nothing going on. In fact, if you remove the University of South Carolina from Columbia, there’s really much of nothing here. A museum, a few McDonald’s and some crack heads. Oh, and churches…LOTS of churches. Might as well be holy and high, right? So, the Colonial Life Arena holds about 18,000 – 19,000 people. And since there’s jack shit to do in Columbia otherwise, when the WWE comes to town, people show up in force. It’s THE hot ticket.
Also, it was raining and cold in Columbia last night. We had to wait in the rain for 30 minutes for them to wheel the aging, elderly, just-happy-to-have-a-part-time-job-that-isn’t-Wal-Mart ticket takers into place. What happened when they opened the doors was pitiful. Thousands of people crammed into an area that was built to hold, at best, 100 people. The scanners they used for ticket processing were about as big as 1980′s cell phones, and about as reliable. After 20 minutes of getting to know my fellow Columbians in intimate ways, we got through the ticket gates. I next stood in a roughly formed crowd to buy $80 worth of T-shirts, hats, masks and such for my boys. This was a treat. I think I got groped by at least 5 different grown men. My therapist says it will be o.k.
Sorry for the tangent there.
We’re sitting in our seats and there’s two Dads and 3 of their kids behind us. The show begins. It’s loud, and we expect that. Hell, we were loud too. But the kid who was sitting directly behind me was like nails on a chalkboard, through a megaphone, through an amplifier turned up to “11″. He was so damned loud and piercing. You could tell he wasn’t on his medication last night. And he NEVER. SHUT. UP. ALL. NIGHT. LONG. Oh, and he had that sort of cute from a distance southern twang in his voice. For example, this is what I heard for about 20 minutes solid at one point:
“See Eyim Pohnk, yew desrrrv tah ween! See Eyim Pohnk, don’t lettim git yew dow-yun!” Translation: CM Punk, you deserve to win. CM Punk, don’t let him get you down. All three of my boys were ready to go whip his ass just to shut him up. I was ready to let them, but I was sober, and I couldn’t allow them to kill a small child who was so obviously having the time of his life. Although, there were times I was ready to kneecap the little bastard.
All in all it was a great time, I took half a bottle of Excedrin when I got home to cure the headache that lil’ Tater caused me from screaming at me for 3 hours straight, and my boys had a blast. Soon, I’ll write something about pro-wrestling that hopefully will change your opinion of it, if you dislike it.
