I went to AEW Fyter Fest

As the title of this post says, I got myself a couple of tickets to Wednesday's AEW show. This is actually the first live wrestling show I've attended since 2001, which was a taping of WWF Smackdown. I recently rewatched that show and, surprise, it was fucking dogshit! Watching it again with the added hindsight of knowing that WCW and ECW had both shut down a month before reminded me just how deep in the fucking trenches we were. 2001 was an awful year for many reasons, really.

Anyways, AEW did not put on a terrible show. In fact, they put on a great one! I got to see most of my favorites: Kenny Omega, Hangman Page, Speedball Mike Bailey, Kazuchika Okada, Toni Storm. I didn't get to see Swerve Strickland or Samoa Joe, but you don't always get everything you want in life. But I will say right now that it was pretty fucked up that I was forced to see both Sammy Guevara and Adam Cole within the same hour. There is no excuse for that bullshit.

Oh, and I was right next to Powerhouse Hobbs when he came out to answer Max Caster's Five Minute White Boy Challenge. You can see me snap this picture and then give a big thumbs up on TV.

It looks like I was super far away from the action. This is merely a trick played by a terrible iPhone camera. I got a great view of the action, and I can be seen on the hard cam quite a bit! In fact, THERE I AM, GARY!

The only things I couldn't see was any action by the near guard rail, by the commentary desk. So a lot of outside brawling that night was pretty obscured. Also, a lot of entrances were blocked because of the camera crew getting close up shots for TV.

The Mission Ballroom, as it turns out, is a sweet venue. Real good crowd too; didn't have to deal with obnoxious drunks saying fucked up shit about any of the minority wrestlers. Also: didn't see one fucking Jim Cornette sign, thank fuck. I figured I would be in good company when, during a pre-show video where Excalibur narrates disclaimers and codes of conduct, there was a huge roar of approval when he said that anyone who made bigoted comments would be ejected. Big pops when Komander and Hechicero spoke Spanish (Colorado has a huge Latino population). Toni Storm dancing with Mina Shirakawa got a reaction almost as loud as Omega having a face-off with Okada later in the night.

Of course, I brought my mother with me, because she has become a huge AEW fan over the last year, and she had a great time, too. The lighting wasn't too harsh on her eyesight (though the red lighting for the ROH taping sucked for the both of us), and the seating didn't hurt her back, though she was smart enough to bring her walking cane that she never uses to play the sympathy role and try to get us better seats.

Anyways, this show kicked fucking ass, and I'm just going to end this with a bunch of pictures I took: