TNA's first show attendance figures?

[Mr. JL]

Hey, I was just wondering if anyone knows any attendance figues from TNA's very first show or if any of you can point me in the right direction to finding such a figure.

[loopydate]

Prowrestlinghistory.com lists the first TNA show in Huntsville - 6/19/02 main evented by Ken Shamrock winning the vacant NWA Title in a match against Malice - as only drawing about 3,000 people. That sounds about right, because it was held at a pretty small venue. TNA didn't start running bigger shows until much later.

[The Mackem]

If I remember rightly the first couple of shows were in Huntsville, Alabama and then the Nashville Municipal Auditoriumbut they were actually *too* big for what they could afford so they started running the Fairgrounds in Nashville, Tennessee instead. They went from drawing 3000 in their first shows to considerably less when they moved to the fairgrounds. I think they had to reduce their high operationg costs plus one of their investors pulled out early on.

[Rammsteinmad]

3000 seems a pretty good crowd though. I mean okay it's not WWE but come on.

[The Mackem]

The Von Braun center can hold something like 6-7000 people. For the first week of the promotion when plenty of free tickets were handed out it wasn't really great for their first two weeks that they taped on that night. The business was based around weekly PPV figures which they grossly over estimated and are only imaginably very poor because for some reason they never published them. Plus they were being misled about their buyrates alledgedly by their PPV consultant who had connections with WWE - they believed he was sabotaging them.

Investors were either shady or had to pull out for one reason or another. IT got to the point where it was conceivable that the Jarretts would have had to declare themselves personally bankrupt if Panda Energy did not step in.