Rant #2,349: Hit Me With Your Best Shot

As I said on Friday, this past weekend was the biggest weekend of the year for professional wrestling, as the WWE had its Wrestlemania event on Sunday, which was proceeded by its NXT Takeover event on Friday and its Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Saturday.

You would think that today I would be talking about some of the matches that took place at either Wrestlemania or NXT, but no, I am not going to do that. You can look up the results if you are interested.

What I am going to talk about is a bizarre occurrence that happened at the WWE Hall of Fame event, something that happened that proved once again that there is nothing like live TV to get the blood flowing.

And what made it even more interesting is that in a "sport" where much of the results are pre-planned, this was a situation that happened at Brooklyn's Barclays Center in just the opposite way; nobody knew it was going to happen, except, perhaps, the perpetrator.

One act after another was being inducted into the Hall of Fame, an accolade that has yet to have an actual brick and mortar home, but an honor nonetheless.

One of the acts that was being inducted this year was the Hart Foundation, a duo of Canadian wrestlers that dominated the sport in the 1990s.

Bret "The Hitman" Hart, came up to the podium--which was constructed to look like a wrestling ring--with his real-life niece, current WWE wrestler Natalya Hart, representing her late father, Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart, who died about a year ago.

They were making their induction speech, when from the right side of the podium--the left side to the millions of viewers who were watching this worldwide--somebody somehow jumped security and ran onto the podium and attacked Hart.

The screen went dark for a moment, but my son and I were watching, we saw this guy jump onto the stage, and I told my son that something "real" had occurred.

The screen returned, and a whole group of wrestlers were in the corner of the pseudo-ring, had surrounded the person, and reports are that one wrestler--Dash Wilder--actually socked him into submission.

Anyway, he was led away and the induction ceremony continued, unimpeded by this individual's stupidity. At the top of the screen, you could see someone being led away by New York City police to the cheers of the crowd.

After some tense moments, the show went on, and the induction ceremony continued.

The guy who jumped security guards and got to the ring was an amateur MMA fighter from Nebraska who was taken to the 78th Precinct in Brooklyn--right around the corner from the Barclays Center--and charged with two counts of assault and trespassing.

Anyway, although the WWE telecast blocked out a few seconds of the incident, attendees with their cell phones captured the whole thing, and it is available all over the Internet to view.

Anyway, I just found it interesting that in a "sport" where just about everything is planned, here was an incident where something completely unplanned happened.

Happily, Hart and his niece--who was herself knocked to the ground in the incident--came up relatively unscathed.

It was just one of those things that happen, and I thought it was just so interesting that people were able to capture the entire incident on phone video.

I won't say that it was the highlight of the night, but in show business tradition--I mean, this isn't called "sports entertainment" for nothing--the show went on.

Let's hope that this guy gets the book thrown at him, and that something like this never happens again.