Wrestlemania III attendance

Last night was WrestleMania 32.  I didn't watch it, but twitter keeps you updated on what's going on.  I wanted to find what attendance number the WWE was going to say they had, and also wanted to know the actual attendance.  Last night's announced attendance was 101,763, and according to Brian Alvarez of the Wrestling Observer, Dave Meltzer got the real number from the stadium, and it was just under 94,000.  I thought about WrestleMania III.  The announced attendance was 93,173, but Meltzer said the real attendance was 78,000.  Either way last night's WrestleMania beat out the 78,000 number, and if we are to believe what Meltzer was told it was higher than the billed 93,173.  Because of that, this might be late, but I felt like looking at WrestleMania III and explaining why I believe Meltzer when it comes to the attendance at that event.  Perhaps it speaks to the magnitude of the event that there has been heavy debate over what the actual attendance figure is.  Now it's accepted that the WWE lies about their attendance figures, but it's so hard to believe that the attendance for WrestleMania III was as low as 78,000 (still a really high number). 

When I read, years ago, about how Meltzer learned of the real attendance being 78,000 I didn't believe it.  I had gone to Silverdome.com, and the site said that the arena seated 80,325 and had a capacity of about 90,000 for wrestling, and motocross (not sure if it was motocross).  That was years ago, but today I looked up the Pontiac Silverdome on google, and the stadium which is set to me demolished this spring, is listed as having a capacity of 80,311.  That capacity wouldn't include floor seats, and for those who believe in the 93,173 number, and for many who believe that it was at least in the 80,000s, that is the key.  The argument for there being 93,173 in attendance goes something like this.  There were 80,325 seats in the stands, and the stands were full.  Add in a bunch of people in floor seats, and 93,173 makes sense.  If you think about it that way the 78,000 number does not make sense, so how do you explain it.  Well for one even if the stands were full, there is no way there were enough people on the floor for them to have 93,173 people in attendance.  That would mean there would have to have been nearly 13,000 on the floor.  That would be enough to make a nice looking crowd at Madison Square Garden.  There weren't nearly that many people on the floor.  Then there is the stands.  Today the WWE uses a huge Titantron, which blocks a number of seats.  They didn't have anything like that back then, but there were still seats being blocked.  It isn't easy to catch, and I haven't read anything about it.  I was playing WWE 2k14, and noticed at the WrestleMania III arena there was some yellow contraption right over the ring entrance.  In the game there were people seated behind it, but I was wondering if I could spot the real one watching a video of WrestleMania III, and was anyone sitting behind it.  So I watched, and there it was above the entrance, and the old WWF logo

Behind it was empty seats, and at top there is a camera.  Sure there aren't thousands of empty seats behind, but I found something.  Looking at the event I noticed other spots in which the same type of yellow structure was used, and there were either a good number of empty seats behind it, or I couldn't tell.


Here's a shot of another area, where you can see the same type of structure, and see the empty blue behind it, which are empty seats

 


I saw another while watching Aretha Franklin sing America The Beautiful, and there was another that you could see when you saw the footage from the hard cam.  I'm sure those weren't the only ones.  For the 78,000 number to be accurate there wouldn't need to be a ton of those structures around.  The WWF
 had cameras all over the place that night in the Silverdome, and obviously some of them were being mounted on structures that were right in front of empty seats, besides why would you want to seat audience members behind something like that.  Whatever the case there certainly were not 80,000+ people in the stands.  I already believed the 78,000 attendance figure given by Meltzer, but I was wondering how there weren't about 80,000 in the stands.  Now there is less wondering for me to do about that.