Longtime wrestling scribe Keith Elliot Greenberg has penned an excellent new book, “Bigger, Better, Badder: Wrestlemania III and The Year It All Changed.” Regarded as one of the most influential and important events in professional wrestling history, Wrestlemania III had a massive impact on the sports entertainment landscape.
Greenberg talked with Web Is Jericho via Youngstown Studio about several topics in the book including an underrated match, the reaction from the remaining wrestling territories to Wrestlemania III’s success, the importance of the managers on the card as well as the long-debated attendance figure.
“I think they’re doing it now laughing,” Greenberg said of WWE and what fans perceive now as misleading crowd numbers. “There’s a whole section in the book about the mythology of the 93,173 people in attendance. There was a rumor I head that (former WWE executive) Basil Devito wrote the number in advance on a cocktail napkin. When I asked him about it — he was an executive in the company, very close to Vince. He kind of smiled about it and said, ‘People didn’t have cell phones back then, and they didn’t have laptops back then, I had to write the number on something. I don’t know. Was it a cocktail napkin? I know I wrote it somewhere.’”
Greenberg continued: “He swears there were 93,173 people in the building. Because, and again, this is all said with a smile. He said, ‘I counted every parking lot attendant. I counted every security guard. I counted every hot dog vendor. Tom Buchanon, the (Wrestlemania III) photographer remembers a directive coming either Linda McMahon or Basil that the fans who were tailgating and didn’t have tickets be let into the stadium. Vince had given the order, ‘I don’t want to see one empty seat.’ He wasn’t saying that lightly, and the people who worked there knew he would take it out on them if he did.”
Greenberg’s full interview can be viewed below, and his new book can be purchased here.
