Not long after returning home from Australia, it was time once again to get back on the travelling trail, as I cannot seem to sit around for too long before I start to go stir crazy. To combat this problem, I had purchased tickets to a UFC event for my friends Mike and Jenny as a wedding present while I was away and unable to make an ass of myself at their festivities. Looking back, it seems that it was probably a win-win situation, their wedding was drama free and we all got to go to Montreal for a weekend to watch a bunch of grown-ass sweaty man roll around on top of each other in a huge cage. I had actually purchased six tickets for the event, so poor Jenny had the pleasure of putting up with not only her new husband and me, but my friends Ryan, Dan, and Adam.
Friday afternoon, we all set off on the six hour drive down the 401 from Toronto to Montreal after work. Mike ended up driving his wife, Ryan and I, while Adam and Dan drove separately in another car. One thing that is almost always a guarantee when you drive to Montreal in the winter is that you are going to get shitted on by Mother Nature and this drive was no exception. I’m pretty sure shortly after leaving Mike was wishing he had not volunteered to drive as he had to deal with both rain and snow, not to mention the sights of dozens of cars in the ditch along the way just to rattle your nerves that little extra. We did manage to make it to Montreal in one piece though, just a little behind schedule and with a solid dose of Ryan’s stories of wading through the online world of dating! By the time we got checked in and met up with Adam and Dan it was after 11:00pm. Random moment of the weekend had to belong to Mike, when he discovered on an ice run from the room that his cousin was staying in a room directly across the hall from theirs and Mike had no idea he was even in town for the weekend. Speaking of ice runs, we had little time to waste due to our late arrival, so we promptly started up the hotel-room-drinking-party and followed it up with a trip to Burger King shortly after 2:00am. Wanting to keep the celebration of good drinks and awesome food going, we tried to get into a few bars, but everyone had locked their doors or was closed. This left us with only one option in the wee hours of the morning: casino. Jenny, Mike and Ryan decided to pass and retired to their room, while Adam, Dan, and I jumped in a cab and made our way over to the poker room at Casino Montreal. The three of us ended up hanging around for a few hours as we slowly went from drunk to sobering up with a hangover which is not the greatest feeling in the world while you’re still awake. Adam ended up being the big winner with a profit of a few hundred dollars, while I won like $90 and Dan lost a bit. It was kind of ironic actually, since Dan is a really good poker player, whereas as Mr. Adam and I are hardly legends on the felt. After Adam cashed in his new pension plan, the three of us headed to back to the hotel around 5:30am, dreaming of what awaited us the next day at the Bell Centre, UFC 124: GSP vs. Koscheck.
Adam, Dan, and I did not get out of bed until sometime around lunch the next day, although I do recall Ryan banging on our door at some ungodly hour like 10:00am and trying to get us to go out with them. When we did finally get up, the three of us went out for breakfast at one of the famous all-day breakfast places on Ste. Catherine Street. Let me just say that those Frenchies know how to do an all-day breakfast up in style! After our feeding frenzy we met up with Ryan and Mike who had been out on the town all morning with Jenny and had already had some beers. Ryan had also spent a couple hundred dollars on authentic GSP clothing and was currently wearing his GSP headband around the city like he was the second coming of the Karate Kid. While we were trying to find a watering hole that would accept grown men in headbands, we were accosted by two ladies on the street that jumped out in front of us and asked us if we knew how to drive. Not sure how to respond, I think all five of us just kind of stood there silent before they explained that they had jut smashed up their car trying to parallel park and would really appreciate it if one of us could do it for them. Well before you could say fender-bender, there was Adam in some stranger’s car on the busiest street in Montreal trying to parallel park the metal beast. Eventually he got the car parked, but not before all of us stood there laughing hysterically. I thought they might reward him with a BJ or at least an HJ, but in the end all he got was an old-fashioned thank you. Shortly thereafter, as we were making our way down the street, we walked past Canadian UFC fighter Sam Stout. None of us even noticed, except Ryan, who in a delayed reaction yelled out, “Hey Sam!” after he was already a hundred feet past us. This in turn led to Sam turning around with a confused look on his face and us all laughing because Ryan was so proud he had spotted him out! With a couple of awkward moments behind us, the five of us finally made our way to the restaurant/micro-brewery, Three Brewers. We all ordered jumbo one-litre glasses of ale and proceeded to indulge. Apparently Mike and Ryan had already been to another location of the same restaurant that morning and had been drinking these jumbo beers, so I’m pretty sure by the time they got done they were feeling pretty good! We also discovered that sitting beside us in the restaurant was a group of people including Josh Koscheck’s (the American challenger in the main event that evening) wrestling coach from high school and some of his other teachers and people from his hometown. Ryan ended up talking their ears off as only he can, and we wished them luck in the main event that evening, although we all knew GSP was going to kick his ass, no luck needed! After dusting off our beers, we headed back to the hotel to wake Jenny up from her nap and start and our pre-drink. We headed down to the Bell Centre around 6:00pm and the six of us were all in our seats for the start of the preliminary card. Without doing a full recap of all the fights, I will say it was an excellent night for the Canadian fighters on the card and it was a pretty solid night of bouts. By the time the main event rolled around, we were all feeling pretty good after spending a few hundred dollars between us on $12 glasses of Molson Export. Some might even say Mike was feeling a little too good, as we had to wake him up for the last fight of the night and I’m pretty sure he has no recollection of it! Oh well, as long as he had fun (or thinks he did to the best of his memory), that’s all that matters! The main event of GSP vs. Koscheck provided the desired result for 99.9% of the people in the building, with Koscheck getting his ass beaten down for five straight rounds, much to the delight of all of us goofs wearing GSP headbands. Following the action-packed night of fights, Mike, Ryan, and Jenny had seen enough (especially Mike) and decided to head back to the hotel. The other two and I took this as our cue to continue drinking and our first stop was some Irish pub we stumbled upon. While we were drinking, one of the waitresses came over and asked us where we were from. We weren’t sure why she wanted to know and she would not tell us why she needed this information. After enough pestering, we told her we were from Bradford and she quickly disappeared. A couple of minutes later, another waitress surfaced, but this time it was a girl who had gone to high school with us and dated one of our old friends back in the day. She informs us that she had sent the other girl over to see if we were who she thought we were. In fact, we were just who she thought we were, some drunk idiots from her hometown! By this point, Adam was getting quite restless though and wanted to go to everyone’s favourite Montreal institution, Club Super Sexe aka one of Canada’s premier adult entertainment clubs. Since it was a fight weekend, the place was jammed with patrons and smoking hot strippers, and we quickly settled in at the first table we could find and ordered and $60 bucket of beer, which we were told came with a coupon for a free lap dance. What the waitress failed to mention was that the strippers were all bitches and none of them were having anything to do with “free lap dance” coupons. This in turn made Adam quite the angry fellow as he attempted to find a lady respectful enough to take his coupon and make him a happy man. He never did find that lady of his dreams, but what he did manage to do was snore at a ridiculously high volume level that night and attempt to keep me awake despite my alcohol induced stupor.
Sunday morning, Dan and I awoke to the sounds of Adam in the bathroom making the most violent puking noises I have EVER heard. After we were up and about and getting ready to head home Adam was just laying motionless on the bed. Before I went to meet up with the other three and catch a ride home, Adam did manage to have his second puking rally of the day, which not surprisingly was no less dramatic. After leaving Adam in the capable hands of Dan and wishing him good luck, I headed on my way back to Ontario with the seemingly more sober Mike, Jenny, and Ryan. Just to make our drive home fun, Mother Nature again decided a snow storm was in order. This was no deterrent to Jenny though who commanded her husband to take her to the bagel shop to pick up some “real” Montreal style bagels. To my knowledge, this was the first time I had ever had one of these contraptions and I must say they were pleasantly delicious (thanks Jenny!). The drive home was again slow, like the drive there, but not as slow as Dan’s as he had to apparently pull off the highway on at least one occasion to let Adam the puke machine go to work. In conclusion, Molson Export does not sit well in the stomach on long car rides and the French should be ashamed of it being their beer of choice.
All in all a great weekend, and after now attending three UFC events, I must say they are the greatest sporting events on the planet to attend (no bias, okay maybe a little).
Until next time, stay classy citizens and keep on keeping on.
~Brent~
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