It was Saturday morning and my wife had surprised me with tickets to what was going to be the biggest thing since ... well,the flood. She told me that she got them on Stubhub last week, and she might have overpaid for the seats, but I would be in the section with Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Will Smith, and John Cusack. Who said those Bon Jovi tickets wouldn't pay off?
I called the fellas, and told them my good fortune. They were told that the family would not be able to join me because it is baseball Saturday and my boys have games. Their loss was your gain. We decide we had to tailgate for such an event. As I rushed out the door with a globe on my head, my wife yelled, "Honey, you forgot the 'save the earth' shirts." I smiled and said, "we are going to paint our chests with the letters E_A_R_T_H!"
As we headed off to this big event, I started to think that if this event was really going to be as big as they said it would be, it should have a title sponsor. Something like "The End of the World is brought to you by the good people of Halliburton ... if the world comes to an end we were part of it."
As we got to our seats I thought to myself who is this guy who's promoting this event and wondered how he expected to pull this off. Why is it not being staged in Vegas? At the time it didn't matter because the tickets were paid for and beer was consumed. As Michael Buffer started his schtick ... let's get ready to rumble ... I remembered what I told my boys before leaving: If this turns out better than the hype, I will get tickets to the next time the world ends. I was sure it would go the way of the Olympics and World Cup, eEvery four years with a different country hosting it.
An event like this rarely meets our expectations, and this one ended before it started. Earth scored a technical knockout. I longed for the days of the great fights like Holmes vs. Cooney or Tyson vs. Spinks.
As we left the stadium I had that same feeling in my gut as I did as a kid when I heard that Evil Knievel was going to jump the Snake River on his motorcycle only to turn on the TV and find out that he had a space shuttle. It turned out that he had enough fuel to shoot up 100 feet before it came crashing back down on the same side of the river he took off from. I had just been duped again. Must have been a Don King production.
"Wise Guy"
