I'm not getting into this argument too much but...
They gave out a lot of comps for Royal Rumble 97 BUT nobody can knock the crowd Shawn drew for that particular show. It was a downtime for the WWF and he drew a HUGE crowd.
Or, to quote Dave Meltzer:
"By the way, even with discounting tickets and all, and it wasn't the success at the gate they had hoped for, selling more than 48,000 tickets in San Antonio, Texas is nothing to sneeze at. Who else in history has ever come close to that? To use that as an example that Michaels isn't a good draw because they didn't sellout a 70,000 seat building is mind boggling."