And I'm totally going. It's the RAW brand and is scheduled to be here on March 2. Why this is important is that this is a town of roughly 40,000 and the hockey arena is relatively small by WWE standards. The arena is listed as having a seating capacity of 4,750 for concerts and 2,350 for sports, which isn't very big. I'd say with the ring it would be somewhere in the middle at about 3,000 capacity. They've never come here before and I thought it was due to the size constraints. It just seems odd that I'll be going to see HHH and Chris Jericho at venue where the previous most popular stars have been Eddie Money circa 1998 and the Hansons from the Slapshot! movie.
Danville is a little out of the way. Why they would run a show there and not Assembly Hall in Champaign, only a bit to the west and able to draw from more of Illinois, is beyond me.
Originally posted by FightingIllini.comIllinois Women's Basketball vs Purdue - March 2, 2008 - Assembly Hall
So there it is. Though Bloomington-Normal would still make more sense, and the arena there (US Cell, not Redbird) has no events scheduled on their site. Odd.
Go to a place like Danville and you can count on a sell out, a hot crowd, and TONS of Merchandise sells. Same way they do Corinth Mississippi once a year.
Originally posted by StaggerLeeGo to a place like Danville and you can count on a sell out, a hot crowd, and TONS of Merchandise sells. Same way they do Corinth Mississippi once a year.
You'll also get Jack Doan's entire family there to root him on.
DANVILE??? Geez, I might have to go to that show. Any excuse to get to Schroeder's.
Some of the most fun shows I've attended were at the old Fargo Civic Center, a building that maybe held 5,000 for wrestling, and it was small for THAT. The place always felt packed, intimate, and in your face.
I love house shows! They run them at all sorts of little venues, & they're so much more intimate.
Oddly, neither WWE (wwe.com) nor ticketmaster lists the March 3-4 Raw or Smackdown tapings.
Granted, WWE screws up -- the Feb 26 Smackdown in Tucson has disappeared from their schedule, even though the tickets onsale was yesterday on ticketmaster. And not all venues sell through ticketmaster -- No Way Out on 2/17 is at Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, & they only sell tickets through the UNLV's own site. Still, interesting.
Originally posted by OliverI'm still waiting for the WWE to come back to Edmonton. We always have hot crowds for live TV shows.
Well, first, you're not waiting for them during the winter, are you?? Out of curiosity, how long would the drive be for a fleet of semi's between Edmonton & ... anywhere? (OK, that's Calgary. Nothing else even vaguely close, right?) Y'gotta admit, you're not exactly conveniently located.
(We have a bit of that same problem. Tucson is 2 hours from Phoenix. Next closest are : Vegas: 5+ hours; San Diego: 6 hours; Anaheim: 7 hours; LA: 8 hours. Tucson is pretty much the only viable companion for scheduling along with Phoenix. Scheduling's tough when the venues are so far apart.)
Originally posted by emmaOut of curiosity, how long would the drive be for a fleet of semi's between Edmonton & ... anywhere?
Calgary is about 2.5 hours from Edmonton, and Saskatoon is about 5 hours away. Last year, before Benoit wrecked the fun, there were house shows scheduled in Regina (2.5 hours from Saskatoon) and Saskatoon before the Raw and SD tapings in Calgary and Edmonton. I don't know about Calgary and Edmonton, but Saskatoon and Regina don't average one WWE show per year, and I have no idea when/if they're planning to come back.
It's worse in Winnipeg, which also generally gets hot crowds for events and TV. There's just nowhere nearby for other shows to be held. Brandon is a small town located around an hour or so to the west, Grand Forks is two and a half hours to the south, Regina four hours west, and both Calgary and Minneapolis are eight hours away.
The last time WWE had TV tapings in Winnipeg, they scheduled Raw and Smackdown here on back to back nights, and sold both out. That's one way to get around the travel problems, but it's also something they can't get away with doing all the time. And so we haven't had a sniff of TV since then, and only a couple of house shows to boot.
Welcome home, men of the 2nd Bn, 127th Inf, 32d "Red Arrow" Brigade, WI Army Nat'l Guard! Good luck to those down south.
Hell, Green Bay had to build a whole new facility to get the WWE back...for a TV taping.
After a Raw in '97 (where Sunny shot her Super Soaker ads in the concourse), the WWE figured out that the 5,000-seat Brown County Arena equaled sh*tty gates. So they didn't come back. (although the summer of '98 featured both WWE and WCW house shows.)
It took the construction of the Resch Center in 2003 to get WWE TV back to Titletown (the 3rd ever event held there, and the first televised one. I remember Tazz gettin' all excited over that, as the exterior arena shot panned over to our vets' memorial and that Lambeau Field thingy.)
The WWE recently came to my town (well, the town where half my family lives) for the first time since... well, my uncle couldn't remember exactly when it was they were last there, but Andre the Giant was the highlight of the show.
The arena likely held less than 5000 people but it was completely sold out and the crowd was completely hot. They even marked out for The Majors Brothers vs. Dave Taylor and Paul Burchill.
It looked like they were doing really good at the merchandise. I wanted to buy something but, well, I have some semblance of taste in regards to what I wear.
It was a good show, even with a Batista/Khali main event. Hornswoggle was there, which made up for the lack of Rey Mysterio and Ric Flair. (This was a week after Flair was reported to have quit.) My sister probably still hasn't stopped smiling after CM Punk saw her doing his crossed arms gesture, came over to talk to her and then gave her his t-shirt. Also, random househow information, whoever lends Chuck Palumbo a motorcycle gets 4 front row seats.