Posted by Rohan on 15:18:18 12/08/02:

From stormwrestling.com -

"While I type this I am sitting on my flight home from Australia. I figured this would be an appropriate time to give you my thoughts of my trip Down Under. Apart from the flight I had a great time. Travel is always the worst part of this job and this past week was no exception. We headed to Australia right after TV Monday. We had a charter flight from Baltimore to LA, spent most of Tuesday in LA then flew from there to Melbourne. The charter flight was 5 ½ hours and the Melbourne flight an additional 16. Needless to say I was tired and wore out upon my arrival in Australia.

We did have a couple days off before we had to work, but not a lot of that was free time. In addition to the show they ran ”Fan Frenzy”, which was similar to the WrestleMania “Fan Access”, so we had several appearances to do. These were really well organized and all of the boys were amazed at how polite the Australian fans were. All of the Aussie fans were great. You couldn’t leave the hotel without getting bombarded by large groups of fans, which is usually a night mare, but with the politeness these fan displayed it was next to impossible to turn any of them down and they were so nice you didn’t want to. I don’t remember the last time I signed so many autographs.

I was lucky enough to do on extra excursion, this trip as well. They had several outings, which were filmed for Confidential and will also be used for extras on the Global Warning DVD. Christian, Kurt Angle, and I did one of these and the highlight of which was a trip to the Zoo. Okay, granted a trip to the Zoo isn’t usually a big highlight but we were taken on a special tour and they took us right inside the animal enclosures. We got to feed and pet the animal. We got to feed Giraffes, Kangaroos, Tree Kangaroos, and Koalas. Fortunately I took my digital camera with me so I got some great shots. The Tree Kangaroos and the Koalas were our favourites as we got to handle both of them. The Koalas were unbelievably cute and soft. Kurt wanted to adopt one; he just couldn’t get enough of them. I preferred Timmy the Tree Kangaroo because we got closest to him; he was by far the most hands on of all the animals.

If all of the extras weren’t enough the actual event was awesome. Were wrestled in Colonial Stadium, which is huge. We set a new venue attendance record of 56,734. (The second largest crowd I’ve worked, behind WrestleMania in Toronto) What made it even better was it had an extremely low ceiling for such a large venue. I originally thought it was an outdoors show but the stadium just had a retractable roof. (Similar to Sky Dome just flat instead of domed.) This lower ceiling seemed to keep the noise in better and made the crowd seem much louder. The crowd was both huge and hot, which made working so much fun.

We (Christian and I) worked Rey Mysterio and Billy Kidman, and for those of you who read my last commentary, we worked as heels and the crowd booed us. (We didn’t even do a promo we just worked as heels and they took us as such) Our match went quite well, not perfect, but good enough for everyone I’ve talk to, to say they enjoyed it. There were a lot of matches on the show so we didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to, but a solid performance non-the less. Rey was definitely the highlight hitting several spectacular, highflying moves. Kidman even managed to get in the Shooting Star Press, so as not be out done. I didn’t get the chance to hit my drop kick. We stopped Rey for the bulk of our offense and I just didn’t see the point in hitting my drop kick on someone 5’ 4”.

Drop kick aside, I hope everyone in the arena had a great time because I know all of us sure did. This was a great show and definitely an event worth picking up on DVD when it comes out. I’d like to thank all of the great Aussie fans for making it so much fun for us. Your enthusiasm and your manners made it a truly spectacular event. I hope when WWE makes it’s way back to Australia it will be a RAW trip, and I can once again go Down Under".

Till next week mate, Cheers,

Lance

• www.stormwrestling.com