Cory Wiatrek of worstofwrestling.cjb.net sent in the following notes from Sunday’s WrestleMania in Houston, TX:
Hope it isn’t too late for my live notes a day late and a dollar short. Well many dollars short. I spent a good amount of money at WrestleMania for a program and Axxess tickets. By the way, Fan Axxess is horribly a waste of time. They wouldn’t let us do half the things there because the lines were backed up to much. We got to walk around bored for three hours. Did get to meet Harley Race, Nick Bockwinkel, Tito Santana and Greg Valentine at the end though. Very cool. Not forty hard earned dollars cool.
My report is late because the parking at Reliant Stadium is horrible and they have no row markers. Out of 74,000 people we were the last to leave because we couldn’t find our car. It was insane. So I hit the bed when I got in at 1:00 am and went to work at 5:30 am this morning, so hence…. the late live notes.
These will be quick notes on things you may have not caught on the ppv airing. The Miz and Morrison lost to the Colons in the lumber jack match. Good match. It was fun to see the whole roster involved. Tony Chimmel introduced the match by the way.
During the Mania intro video, the pussycat doll girl was led to the ring to sing. After that they did crowd shots and the crews ran a bunch of ladders to the ring for the Money In The Bank match. Exciting notes so far… I know it.
Interesting enough, Kid Rock’s drummer wouldn’t stop testing his stupid drums during the money in the bank match. I wonder if you could hear that during the match on TV?
After JBL lost and the lights went down for the next promo video he actually stood in the titan tron are tunnel and took it all in one more time. It was kind of sad.
During the Cena/Edge/Big Show promo video Chavo wheeled Vickie half way down the aisle and stopped till the cameras came back.
We could see Steve Austin head back and ditch his tux for the four wheeler. Nothing to special about that note other than we saw it and the ppv watcher probably didn’t get to see it.
The HHH intro was lame. I guess they did something CG because he threw something through a big square and glass breaking noises came out, but it really didn’t happen. I’m sure it was cool on ppv, but live it was lame.
Speaking of lame, I think I heard some crickets during the main event chirping. I thought I was watching wrestling in Japan live for a few minutes. The crowd was dead during this match.
If you did happen to hear the crowd finally make some noise it was because WWE sent big cameras into the crowd to get fans excited like they were on TV, except they were not. They did this in like three sections. Behind the announcers up high, on the hard camera side and near the intro ramp. All areas you would not see during a high profile match like this. Also happens they have lots of extra mics in these areas. That was the only time the crowd cheered. So WWE pulled a fast one on the ppv audience. I actually really did hear planes going over the stadium in that match. They sounded like small engine planes too. It really was that quite…. and boring.
Overall the show was okay. I thought they spent more time outside the actual ring at this years Mania than ever before. It had the vibe of WrestleMania 18 in that the show stealer happened early, and then the main event was dead. I have to say Ricky Steamboat was awesome! Please come out of retirement and show these children in the WWE how to work! Little kids were having a blast watching him and they didn’t even know who he was. Just goes to show you that “wrestling” is still better than “entertainment”.
Match of the night was HBK/Taker and Y2J/Legends. That is all. It was fun, it was great, but it wasn’t as good as WrestleMania 17 live. Hope you enjoyed these little live notes. Take it easy.
– Cory Wiatrek