10 Wrestling Secrets Everyone Knows Except You
7. The Never-Ending WrestleMania III Attendance Row
The biggest, broadest and most ostentatious of WWE's massaged attendances, WrestleMania III played host the company's biggest attendance of the decade,
Their announced 93,173 was debunked by The Wrestling Observer's Dave Meltzer, who was given a total closer to 78,000 paid from promoter Zane Bresloff. In conversations around WrestleMania 32's 100,000+ number almost 30 years later, Vince McMahon was forced to admit that they count every single body in the building in order to get the figure as high as possible. Wrestlers, arena staff and punters alike contribute, basically.
Retroactively adding these to the Bresloff figure likely increases it beyond his paid total, but to the tune of 15,000? Unlikely, but even then WWE probably wouldn't have been happy about that anyway - amongst other giant lies they wanted to be true was the fact that they'd out-drawn The Pope, who pulled 88,000 people in September 1987.
This, hilariously, resulted in another group not being shy of upping the numbers - upon realising WWE had tried to make the 93,173 the figure, somebody on Team Pontifex upped his number 93,682.
Workers gonna work.