Rant #1,644: Engulf and Devour

Once again, I am going to talk about sports here, so if you aren't into this, now is the time to leave and come back tomorrow for talk about some other topic.

But today it is sports, because this past weekend, my household was engulfed in sports ... or at least my son and I were engulfed in sports.

My wife was engulfed in "The Walking Dead."

That is another story for another time.

My son and I are not engulfed in zombiedum ( I would say zombie-dumb, but I do not want to incur the wrath of those who swear by "The Walking Dead," including my wife, who claims that I interrupt her while watching the show when I fall asleep and snore, as she can't hear the dialogue through my noise).

Yes, engulfed is the word of the day.

My son and I were engulfed in sports this weekend.

On Friday, as you all know, we went to the Knicks game, and although our seats were lousy--we could only see a part of the scoreboard as we were positioned behind one of the baskets all the way up in the back rows--we, at least, got to see the Knicks actually win a game, beating the equally lowly and much worse Brooklyn Nets.

It seems that you must now pay over $100 a seat to have the privilege of seeing the entire scoreboard, as those seats are further down and you can see everything.

Where we were, you were lucky to see part of the scoreboard, which meant that I had to crane my neck back a row to keep up with the score, as a row back, they did have a monitor which duplicated what was on the scoreboard. So, the entire night, that is what I did, and my neck, back and right arm hurt after that, and still do.

And sitting in the hinterlands also prevents us from fully hearing all of the announcements. It is a vacuum where our seats were, and really, you are at the game but aren't at the game when you have seats like this.

And most of the fans there, as we saw, were more interested than eating and talking about personal affairs than watching the game, so such a seating situation almost fosters this non-caring-about-the-game attitude.

There is next season, and as much as some players are now playing for next season, we as fans are too. Maybe next year, we will actually sit in seats where you can see everything, not just part of everything.

Saturday, my son went back to his bowling league, which he enjoys. His team is in second place, and they are within earshot of first.

My son basically held his own on the lanes that day--he pretty much hit his average--and the team won its two games and everything else that day, so they are still strong with about two months in the season to go.

Maybe we will have a first place team in our future. We will see.

Then on Sunday night, while my wife was pining for all those zombies, my son was hopped up for pro wrestling, as the WWE had its annual Wrestlemania extravaganza, this year held in the AT&T Center in Dallas, Texas--and each and every one of the more than 100,000 seats there were filled with fans.

The WWE shows its mega bash on its own WWE Network, and yesterday, with an influx of people around the world watching this show, the network was, well, engulfed, and many people had trouble signing onto the show, including us.

We continually got errors, but finally, we got onto the show.

At one point, it was going in and out, we tried to reset it, and lost the show again.

We managed to pick it up, and the rest of the evening was fine, but it was very frustrating otherwise.

You cannot understand how many people are into this thing, and Wrestlemania brings out even the most casual fans.

There were more than 100,000 in the seats in Dallas, and there were many, many times that amount watching from the comfort of their homes. I am willing to bet that not only an attendance record was set in Dallas for this event, but probably a Internet home viewing record, too.

As for the action, honestly, the first half of the show was absolutely terrible, with the matches not up to par with previous Wrestlemanias, but it did pick up.

The Shane McMahon-Undertaker bash was one of the best steel cage matches I have ever seen, highlighted by McMahon jumping off the top of the 25 feet off the ground steel cage onto the press table where the Undertaking was laying after getting beat up by McMahon.

He missed the Undertaker, but he put the press table in ruins, and so was McMahon, who ended up losing the match and nearly losing some other things, as he was carted away by the EMTs.

I won't go into the back story of the match--it is actually too complicated if you aren't really into this--but I will say that the match was quite good.

The other later matches weren't as good as this one, but they were good, so all in all, I would give the entire show a B-, not good for a Wrestlemania, but good considering the first couple of matches were Ds, as far as I am concerned.

So all in all, a great sports weekend ended when I went to sleep, and reality set in this morning that myself, my wife and my son have to go to work today.

Woe is us. Something else to get engulfed in.

But wait, there is hope for us.

Baseball's 2016 season began this weekend, and the Yankees begin their season this afternoon, so all hope is not lost.

Yes, there is really something else to get engulfed by ... .