7 Things You Should Know About WWE Royal Rumble 1997

7. Largest Attendance In Royal Rumble History

The attendance of the show was supposed to be 70,000 fans. The idea was that they could sell out the Alamodome in Shawn Michaels' hometown, but that didn't happen. They had to give a lot of tickets away. According to this Jim Cornette shoot interview, the actual number was 47,514 paid and 12,511 comps for a 60,525 people. The gate was $480,013. He also noted that they had to pay $125,000 for a flat rent of the building. http://youtu.be/mIKBDHNYeII They didn't hit the number they were going for, but it was still impressive to get over 60,000 people in that stadium even though 1/5 of them got in for free. This was at a time when the business really wasn't booming, but there were signs that things were going well. They give the free tickets out to make it look more full. Wrestling companies always do that when they're struggling. It's interesting that WWE hasn't tried to do another Royal Rumble in a dome just because they could probably come close to selling out simply because of how big the match has become. Perhaps the thinking is that they don't want to spend that much money to rent a dome and then worry about what to do if it fails to sell out just like what happened in 1997.