A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

CineVegas Day 3 - Bring Me the Head of Bryan Adams

I've never watched an Arena Football League game. True, I don't watch much pro football in general, but arena ball always struck me as, well, pretty freaking goofy. 50-yard fields? End zone nets? Grand Rapids has a team? Pull the other one.

Still, when Gore told us he had tickets to Arena Bowl XIX (between the Georgia Force and the Colorado Crush) at the Thomas & Mack Center on Sunday, I was more than happy to go. Few sports are so boring (e.g. golf and NASCAR) that being there live isn't an entertaining experience, and arena football is no exception.

Though maybe for the wrong reasons.

One thing I noticed right away as you came up on the stadium was the small crowd, especially by regular football standards. Arena ball has a ways to go before it enjoys the attendance numbers of even some Texas 4A high schools. Parking was easily had, and the cheerleaders were hanging out right there, where every corpulent fan who flew in from Marietta could just reach out and touch them. Wicked.

I don't know what the capacity of the T&M Center is, but the place wasn't near full. Our seats also left a little something to be desired. We were on the second level, and from our vantage we couldn't even see one of the end zones. We (and about a hundred other like minded goobers) decided to move to a better position(the score at this point: COL 27, GEO 20):

Believe me, these were better than our original seats. They were on the 50 25-yard line and right next to the woefully deserted press section (and several surprisingly attractive news interns). Nevertheless, better seats were still to be had, and after spending a quarter or so (score: COL 58, GEO 55) scoping out the lower sections, we spied a few likely areas and made our move.

And lucky us, we got there just in time for Bryan Adams' smoking 3-song set:

That's him, just to the lower right of the red light. It was kind of eerie how he and every member of his band all wore identical jeans and black t-shirts. They looked like part of the touring cast for "Stomp," which is almost scarier than the idea of a Bryan Adams concert in the first place.

You know, there isn't much to say about Adams at this point. The guy's been Canadian's most embarrassing export since Doug Henning (or Gino Vanelli) for so long, I almost don't have the heart to give him any more grief. Except to say this: Bryan Adams is a one of the most shameful trend exploiters the music business has ever seen. His songs are now and have always been the worst sort of middle-of-the-road hackneyed crap, engineered to shift the largest number of units possible to the kind of folks who buy their music at Wal-Mart, and he latches on to whatever audio fad (Celtic melodies, Spanish guitars) is hot at the time to facilitate this. Adams is governed solely by the cold machinations of the market, not any love for music or "creating." Worse, this has always been the case. Adams was never a wide-eyed youth who ended up getting chewed up and spat out by the music industry; he's been a soulless, cynically calculating profit maching since Day 1. And to top it off, the guy released an album called "Waking Up the Neighbors," then bought and shut down a neighborhood bar that made too much noise near his house. If I could've lobbed a brick at the sonofabitch and gotten away with it, I would have.

But where were we?

Anyway, our new seats were a mere four rows back from the action. And I have to admit, it was pretty entertaining.

The cheerleaders came out and threw little miniature footballs into the crowd at one point in the 4th quarter (score: COL 104, GEO 89). I caught three and got my hand on two more. I kept one for She Who Shall Not Be Named, and gave one each to Mark and Gore (I checked for any kids who might not have one, the better to impress the ladies, but they all seemed to be taken care of).

Eventually, the game ended. Colorado ended up winning 624 to 576. Here's Crush owner John Elway (and AFL Chairman...wozname, he's the big goon on the left) waiting to take the field in triumph:

And here's the ensuing triumph we spoke of:

Not much to report after that, we headed back to the Palms for a few more drinks, and I went to the airport later on to catch my flight (described in detail below). Arrivederci, Vegas. My liver thanks you. My wallet and sense of moral decency, on the other hand...