Happy Monday everyone.
I wanted to do something different this morning. I had an idea for a new weekend wrap-up and I feel as though this was a good weekend for it. The title is from The 40 Year Old Virgin when Cal is talking to Andy about his weekend in Tijuana.
NHL Skills Competition
This was brutal to watch; at least the beginning. The “break-a-way challenge” is the NHL’s version of the slam dunk contest. First, they put some local goalie between the pipes to give the players a better chance to score. Then the players get a minute to take as many trick shots as they can.
Their was literally nothing spectacular about the entire event until Alex Ovechkin, in his showman style, deciding to dress up like a Canadian’s fan and take his final shot. It saved the event for me. That being said I was over the skills challenge at this point and ready for some fights.
Affliction: Day of Reckoning
It was an entertaining night of fights for Affliction. The unfortunate thing is that at some point they are going to have to start making money with this thing.
According to MMAmania they spent 
about $3.3 million just on fighter salaries alone for Saturday nights card. These numbers are only like the base pay for your normal job. They do not include bonuses. For example, Fedor only made $300,000 base but will take home over $1 million.
The gate, for a show that drew a crowd of over 13,000 people, will be a bit under $2 million. So as you accounting majors can see, it’s going to hit the fan soon. Unless they are selling some serious t-shirts this isn’t going to stay afloat forever.
Mavericks @ Celtics
On the heels of Mark Cuban inviting the Texas high school girls basketball team to be his special guests at an upcoming Mavs game, the Mavericks players decided to do one better. Honorably they let the C’s blow them out in an apparent effort to show the girls that they can learn from their defeat.
At least that is what it looked like they were doing; the Celtics had a 74-47 lead at the half.
NHL All Star Game
The skills competition just wasn’t enough meaningless hockey for me this weekend.
But hey, this is some fan friendly hockey; a 12-11 win for the East. The only problem for the American fan is that it had to go to something called a “shootout” to decide a winner. Seems cheap to me.
Pictured above is the lead singer of Simple Plan. Yeah, I can’t blame you if you don’t remember them but apparently they are Canadian. Apparently they had an album that came out last year and it went platinum in Canada but did not even make it to gold in the US.
If I can say one thing about Canadians… they definitely stick together.
WEC 38
Urijah Faber got back into the win column. Albeit, it was in a joke of a fight against Jens Pulver who he had already beaten just months ago. A win is a win and now the WEC can do a Mike Brown-Urijah Faber rematch.
No football for the first time in 20 some odd weeks. So it was a weekend full of hockey and fights. All-in-all not too shabby.
However do not forget, we are coming up on one of the biggest sports weekends of the entire year; Super Bowl Sunday and Super Fight Saturday.
