Dave Meltzer on the WrestleMania III 93,000 attendance number, which is always brought up every single year...
Wallask: Finally, last question here. They often mention the attendance of WrestleMania III was 93,173 and they’ve really hammered that number for years. However you reported in the Observer many years back, that the real attendance was closer to 78,000 or so. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Meltzer: Sure. I remember — it’s funny, because at that time in ’87, I was getting all the gates of all the WWF shows from WWE. And they would say like, “Blah, blah, blah, blah” and they gave me the gate of $1,599,000. And I said, “What was the real attendance?” And I just remember it’s funny because they just said there were 2,300 freebies. But I was never actually told 93,173, and it was sort of like, well, what was the real number. And just kind of the subject was changed. So, I just figured 93,173 was probably the real number. Nobody else had ever questioned it. It wasn’t like anybody came up with a, you know — like now, now every year at WrestleMania they announce a number and six weeks later I get the real number, and it’s 8,000, 10,000, 12,000 different. They make up the number to have the record for the building, even though usually they don’t have the record for the building because they got the big stage. For a football game, you actually can get more people for a football game than you can for a WrestleMania, than if you have a Final Four or something like that at some of these indoor stadiums, where you don’t have the big screens or anything. You draw out far, far more people.
So, the point is, yeah, at that time I didn’t know and it really wasn’t until, God, I don’t know seven or eight years later that I remember this. There had been, and I don’t know if it was E! or somebody who did a True Hollywood Story on Hulk Hogan. And Hogan was out there talking about 93,000, and I got a phone call while I’m watching the show from Zane Bresloff, who promoted that show. And he just goes — and he and Hogan are tight, they were good friends — and he just goes, “God, Hogan probably really believes that number.” And I go, “Isn’t that the real number?” And he goes, “No, of course not!” Because when I was getting numbers from WWE, the numbers, even for the indoor WrestleManias, the numbers that they have on their computers and the numbers that they announce are always different.
But in ‘87, as I told you, they kind of like, in the conversation, I think one of the things is that they didn’t want me to know that number, so they didn’t tell me that number. So, that was my first time, seven or eight years later, because Hogan was already on WCW by then, so it’s probably ‘95, I’m thinking — maybe ‘94, ‘95, ‘96. And he just goes, “No, no the real number is 78,000.” And I go, “Really?” And he goes, “Yeah, we made up 93,000,” because, whatever it was, the Rolling Stones had drawn like 87,000 or something like that. Maybe the Rolling Stones was after it, but they knew it was coming.
But there was the pope and the Rolling Stones and them, so they’ve created a number that neither of those groups could have and nobody could have because you couldn’t get that many people in the building. So it was a number that was created before the show ever started and it was a number — I mean, they did sell out. The sellout was real. And the truth of the matter is, that if the building was big enough to where they could put 93,000 in, they really would have. But you could say that about a lot of WrestleManias. Of all the WrestleManias, the one that would have put the most people in the building was the one at the Astrodome with Rock and Austin, because that one, they sold out every ticket as soon as they put tickets on sale. Whereas this WrestleMania, you know, they might have sold 20,000 tickets the first week at the Pontiac Silverdome, the WrestleMania with Rock and Austin, they sold like, I don’t know what it was, like maybe 50,000 tickets the first day. You can’t even compare the two. That one would have sold the most.
But the Astrodome was smaller than the Silverdome, so they didn’t get as many people in. But anyway, since then I’ve talked to many people there, and I’ve talked to Vince about it once. And he said, “The numbers that we give you are the real numbers, and the numbers that we say on television are for entertainment purposes only.” And that was the answer. So, it’s for entertainment purposes only, that number, so they could claim the record. You know for a long time they would claim the largest indoor, whatever, the largest indoor sport crowd in the history of the world or something. So, they claimed that for a while and everything. But that was the story behind that. I mean the fact is, like I said, they probably could have got, I don’t know how many people, maybe a 100,000 there. They probably could have gotten 120,000 there maybe for the Austin match. But who knows? No one really knows because they filled up the stadium, that’s all you can say. And how many extra they would have gotten, no one really knows.
