10 Fascinating WWE WrestleMania 13 Facts
A one-match show, but boy, what a match it was.
In years past, WrestleMania was wont to kick off with glamorously-light music, accompanied by images of majesty, glory, and pomp, setting the stage for wrestling's biggest larger-than-life icons to mingle with the distinguished dignitaries of song, screen, and sport.
The opening video of WrestleMania 13 took a sharply-different tack than those anodyne days of the past. While the March 23, 1997 telecast did lead off with classed-up images of the WrestleManias of yore, those pictures abruptly shifted into the state of chaos depicted on latter-day WWE programming: gang warfare (The Nation of Domination whipping and stomping Ahmed Johnson), defiance of authority (Undertaker chokeslamming a referee), and a general decay in fortitude (Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart each taking part in activities unbecoming of their babyface personas).
The war against WCW begat scripted in-house warfare, where the quirky paper soldiers transformed into three-dimensional belligerents, grappling angels with dirty souls. The stark contrast of the 1997 WWE product to its previous incarnations was being explicitly spelled out for anyone in the audience that had not yet caught on to the programming shift. As if moral highlander Bret Hart's obscenity-laced tirade from the previous Raw wasn't enough of a clue.
WrestleMania 13 was the Attitude Era in its incubation stage, the harbinger of unrepentant lawlessness ahead. Here are ten facts and stories about the show you may not have known.
10. More Than 3000 Tickets Were Available Less Than Two Weeks Before The Show
Although creatively, the scripted disorder was doing wonders for the previously-stale television product, the overall turnaround was hardly swift. In the Wrestling Observer Newsletter cover-dated March 17, 1997 (likely released the previous Wednesday or Thursday), Dave Meltzer reported that 3000 to 4000 tickets were still available for the card in Chicago.
In the end, 18,197 fans filled the Rosemont Horizon, with 16,467 paid, doing a respectable gate of more than $830,000. There's no way to know for sure how much of those final 3000-4000 seats were give-aways in the final two weeks, but one has to reckon that quite a few were in order to fill the venue.
In any event, only having 14,000 seats spoken for, less than two weeks before the biggest show of the year, gives one an idea of just how different times were for WWE a generation ago.