Posted January 30, 201312 yr comment_5531930 I've always heard that during it's heyday the Saturday Morning Wrestling show in Memphis would draw millions of viewers and something like a 60+% share of the viewing audience. Yet as far as I know, the Mid-South Coliseum, which sat 10,000 people, was never a constant sell out arena. I've seen people criticize WWE for not converting more of it's millions of TV viewers into PPV buyers, but even that seems like a far better conversion rate than what Memphis was doing. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? I realize economics surely plays a part in this but tickets were always really cheap in Memphis.
January 30, 201312 yr comment_5531950 Memphis was not a massive city at that point IIRC. More importantly they ran weekly. Anytime you run a building that size weekly it's gonna be hard to pull a sell out week-to-week
January 31, 201312 yr comment_5531951 Memphis Metro: 1970: 834,103 1980: 913,472 1990: 981,747 Memphis City: 1970: 623,988 1980: 646,174 1990: 610,337 The Saturday show didn't draw millions of viewers in Memphis. It also didn't draw 60% of the total population. It's simply alleged to have draw 60% of the folks watching TV at the time. Saturday morning isn't Prime Time in terms of people watching TV. 60% is an impressive number, but it shouldn't be overblown into folks thinking that 300K people were turning in to watch it. There weren't. John
January 31, 201312 yr comment_5531953 I don't know why I'm surprised that Memphis metro was that big back then but I am
January 31, 201312 yr comment_5531957 I think in one of our discussions on Expansion or other things that I probably rolled it out. Anyway, this is April 1980, which is slightly more than the number above for 1980: 18,905,705 NY 11,497,548 LA 8,114,844 Chicago 5,790,555 DC/Baltimore/NVA 5,649,031 Philly 5,367,900 SF/Oak/San Jose 5,293,161 Detroit 5,121,673 Boston 3,118,480 Houston 3,046,136 Dallas / Fort Worth 2,938,277 Cleveland 2,643,766 Miami / Ft Laud 2,571,223 Pitt 2,414,061 St Lou 2,408,749 Seattle 2,233,229 Atlanta 2,198,190 Minny/St Paul 1,861,846 SD 1,741,899 Denver 1,726,430 Cincy 1,613,600 Tampa / St Pete 1,600,093 PHX 1,583,518 Portland 1,570,152 Milw 1,449,380 KC 1,305,911 Indy 1,304,212 New Orleans 1,242,826 Buffalo 1,214,291 Columbus 1,200,998 Norfolk / VA Beach / Newport News 1,099,814 Sacramento 1,088,881 San Antonio 1,080,710 Hartford 1,076,557 Providence 1,030,630 Rochester 971,447 Charlotte 953,520 Louisville 950,763 Greensboro / Winston-Salem 942,083 Dayton 938,777 Memphis 910,222 Salt Lake City 860,969 OKC 850,505 Nashville 840,824 Grand Rapids 824,729 Albany 815,333 Birmingham 804,774 Orlando 762,565 Honolulu 761,311 Richmond 744,428 Greenville / Spartanburg / Anderson 722,865 Syracuse 722,252 Jacksonville 664,788 Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill 659,387 Scranton / Wilkes-Barre 657,173 Tulsa 644,922 Youngstown 616,864 Toldeo 605,419 Omaha 585,051 Austin 577,737 Fresno 576,758 West Palm Beach / Boca Raton 569,777 Springfield, MA 556,242 Harrisburg 551,052 Allentown 546,488 Knoxville 531,443 Tuscon 528,000 Las Vegas My guess is when we look at the Metros/Cities in that way, Memphis fits in at about the right spot. The ones smaller than it... they're pretty much ones that you'd think were smaller. There might be some above Memphis that was slightly surprising, like Rochester or Columbus... but it's not like I thought there was a massive difference in them anyway. Memphis and Nashville grew at a quicker pace in the 80s than Louisville, so they would both jump it in the 1990 Census.
January 31, 201312 yr comment_5531959 Also get a sense that they had a nice little base for a territory: 953,520 Louisville 938,777 Memphis 850,505 Nashville That's not really epic in the sense of what Pre-Expansion WWWF/WWF had, or Pre-Expansion Mid-Atlantic. But Memphis, Lousiville and Nashville were decent sized. John
January 31, 201312 yr comment_5531989 Also get a sense that they had a nice little base for a territory: 953,520 Louisville 938,777 Memphis 850,505 Nashville That's not really epic in the sense of what Pre-Expansion WWWF/WWF had, or Pre-Expansion Mid-Atlantic. But Memphis, Lousiville and Nashville were decent sized. John They also ran my hometown, Jonesboro, Ark, which had a population of 30-40k in the 80's and over 50k in the 90's.
January 31, 201312 yr comment_5532031 In comparison to the WWF running MSG once a month too Memphis running MSC 4 times a month, Memphis probably drew the same if not better over the course of the month. Whether thats relevant that's for people to decide, but for example in August 1982 over the course of the month Memphis drew over 35,000. The question is, whether Memphis were to run once a month, would they sell out? Against running 4 times a month drawing say an average of 20,000 and not selling out once?
February 2, 201312 yr Author comment_5532536 Nothing to add to this except thanks for pretty much answering my questions. Guess I shouldn't have taken things said by wrestlers about "millions of people" watching the TV show at face value.
February 2, 201312 yr comment_5532650 I guess there's a possibility that it could have gotten close to a million people once you factor in Louisville, Nashville, Evansville, etc, but a million people in Memphis proper seems pretty close to impossible.
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