Five Burning Questions Heading into WrestleMania 32
By: Jeff McDonough
On Saturday and Monday, upwards of 70,000 college basketball
fans will pack into NRG Stadium in Houston — formerly Reliant Stadium — for
the Final Four and NCAA Championship game. Sandwiched in between those days,
there will be another massive stadium event down the road in Arlington at AT&T Stadium as
World Wrestling Entertainment presents the Show of Shows, the Super Bowl of
Wrestling, WrestleMania. Now despite WWE’s often hyperbolic boasts, their
billing of ‘Mania as “the Greatest Spectacle in Live Entertainment” rings
somewhat true, as this will mark the 10th straight year they’ve
hosted their marquee event in a football stadium for 70,000+ screaming fans
each time. WrestleMania for the first 22
years had mostly been held in considerably smaller basketball arenas. So what
caused enough hype for WrestleMania ten years ago that would require the jump to
a much larger venue? Well, of course, the involvement of WWE Hall of Famer and
future US President Donald J. Trump!
So while that was the start of the football stadium as an
every year thing for ‘Mania, there had been some large events in the past.
Let’s examine this in reverse order: Before this ten year run, WWE did a sort of
a swan song run for basketball stadium ‘Manias in its diehard cities of New York, LA and Chicago. The
three years before that they tested out the larger crowd model by using three
baseball stadiums with crowds between 54,000 and 69,000. Every other ‘Mania before that, except for two, was held at
an arena with less than 21,000 attendees — including Trump
hosting back-to-back years in Atlantic City! The two outliers were the 62,127
at WrestleMania VIII in Indianapolis at the Hoosier Dome, and the Grand
Daddy of Them All, WrestleMania III in Detroit.
