10 Times Wrestling Was More Hardcore Than "Real" Sports

By Laura Crawford /

5. Shattering Attendance Records

Sports: The Japanese passion for the real sport of baseball can€™t hold a candle to their fanatical devotion to pro wrestling. Although invented in the states, baseball is a cornerstone of sporting life in Japan. It€™s so popular that Japan€™s National Tourism Organization claims €œmany fans are surprised to hear that Americans also consider it their €˜national sport.€™€ Nippon Professional Baseball is the country€™s equivalent of Major League Baseball and their 2014 season average attendance at games was 26,457. The Tokyo Dome€™s 2015 baseball season average attendance was 42,470. Japan€™s most highly attended pro wrestling show, PRIDE Shockwave at Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, more than doubled baseball€™s figures in 2002 with an astonishing 91,107 fans. New Japan Pro Wrestling is the country€™s current leading promotion and even their 1998 Antonio Inoki Retirement show drew 70,000 wrestle-heads to the Tokyo Dome. Wrestling:Football players may think of themselves as stadium gods but like Scott Steiner cutting a promo, the numbers just don€™t add up. Consider that fourteen WrestleManias had more spectators than the first Super Bowl in Dallas, which only had 60,000 people in attendance. For twenty-three years WrestleMania III held the North American live indoor sporting event record with 93,173 fans filling the Detroit Silverdome, a fact Vince will let few people forget. Though WCW is just a memory these days, Billionaire Ted still holds one prize over McMahon€™s head, the largest Pay Per View event in wrestling history. €œCollision in Korea€ was perhaps the ballsiest move in international sports-put on a joint collaboration between WCW and New Japan Pro Wrestling in the isolated, antagonistic, Communist nation of North Korea. Their gumption paid off-340,000 people filled May Day Stadium in Pyongyang over the course of two days and Scott Steiner managed to not get himself arrested for mouthing off to Kim Jong Il.