Bruce Prichard Discusses WWE Running WrestleMania In A “Sh*thole”
WrestleMania 39 is in the books after WWE brought their biggest show of the year to the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, CA but not every venue for The Show of Shows has been quite as popular.
WrestleMania 24 is best remembered as the final WWE match of Ric Flair’s career where Shawn Michaels told him he was sorry and that he loved him before planting a kick squarely on The Nature Boy’s chin and ending his in-ring career – for a year and a half at least.
Also on the show was Floyd Mayweather defeating The Big Show while The Undertaker kept The Streak alive by defeating Edge for the World Heavyweight Championship in the main event.
While WrestleMania 24 might have plenty for fans to look back fondly at, one thing that won’t be looked back fondly on by the people who were there is the venue for the event.
Speaking on his Something To Wrestle podcast, Bruce Prichard had one word to describe the Florida Citrus Bowl where WrestleMania 24 was held:
“Sh*thole … Well, you get a hole and then you sh*t in it and therefore acts like a sh*t hole, and that’s kind of what that stadium was like. It was a hole that was dilapidated. It had no dressing rooms, it had no backstage area of any kind whatsoever. We had to repair it. We had to build an entire backstage city with showers and bathrooms and buses and tents and portable rooms and bathrooms and showers and things of that nature. Build walkways, so you’re not just walking through the mud and the dirt.”
Prichard explained that despite the obvious drawbacks to running WrestleMania in the stadium, the deal they were offered made it worth it:
“It was a hell of a deal and I think it was the first one in Florida… That was a big deal and it was a historic stadium if you will. But I think we spent almost a half-a-million dollars on palm trees around the top of it when all was said and done. Aesthetically, we put a lot of time, effort, and expense into making it look presentable on-camera and if you go back and you look at the WrestleManias that have been held in that stadium compared to anything else held there, I think you would say, that’s that?
“But what people don’t see is the backstage and there were no offices. Like I said, we had to build walkways so that you’re not just walking through the grass and the dirt and the mud and all the crap. We had to build actual just walkways to dressing rooms and to bathrooms and everything else. It was not ideal and I don’t think that, yeah, it wasn’t someplace I really would go, gosh! We gotta go back there and the fact that it was open air.
“I know it’s Florida, but it’s April and it’s humid and it rains so that’s another thing, you didn’t have air conditioning anywhere except in the rooms and the buses and all the stuff that we built. It wasn’t any air conditioning, anywhere. So it was a challenge, to say the least.”