WWE’s Vince McMahon has warped the history of wrestling forever

With WrestleMania 39 set to kick off on April 1, and Polygon contributor Abraham Josephine Riesman’s new book Vince McMahon and Unmaking of America: Ringmaster set to enter the ring on March 28, we’re spending the week grappling with pro wrestling — and everything it’s shaped. Riesman kicks off the short series with a look at McMahon’s unshakeable presence in the arena.

Pro wrestling is a sport that relives the past with enthusiasm and ease.

The ring is where it happens: A villain suddenly performs a noble act and becomes a good man. (Until the next moral turn). It happens behind the scenes: “Documentaries” produced by World Wrestling Entertainment will wax poetic about a wrestler’s triumphs and never mention his domestic violence charges. The equivalent to ESPN Classic is not available for wrestling. Most matches that were held prior the 1980s might be considered lost, at least in terms of average viewers. With only a vague sense of past events, the industry is in an endless present.

It is by design.

Vincent Kennedy McMahon is the WWE’s executive chairman and has been the most influential man in professional wrestling for over 40 years. He also happens to be one of the greatest manipulators of reality ever seen in popular entertainment history. You have the usual manipulation of the viewers that is standard in pro wrestling. It is still a legitimate sport, just like the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team. But there’s another layer.

Ever since 1983, when McMahon took control of the World Wrestling Federation from his father, he’s manifested Orwell’s dictum about those controlling the present controlling the past. His tape archive of almost all companies that he defeated in his reign is his, and no one else can see it without his authorization.

That makes sense — McMahon has never been nostalgic about the way wrestling was before he conquered it. He sought to eliminate or purchase all his rivals from the beginning of his time at the helm in WWE, then known as World Wrestling Federation or WWF, the 1980s. Ted Turner became his main rival within 10 years. He was the only one who could beat him within 20 years. McMahon changed the face of wrestling. According to the legend, McMahon reshaped wrestling in his image.

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

WWE often highlights McMahon’s deft kicking-down of the old system. Pro-wrestling was for a century a criminally run world full of thieves and brutes. While promoters of wrestling claimed it to be an honest-to God sport, legislators and regulators considered it silly and unworthy. It was rare to find informed legislation protecting or stopping fraud among wrestlers. Because of this, the wrestling industry developed its own code, which wasn’t based solely on law or ethics.

To put it bluntly, in a wrestling promotion, the promoter was able to do whatever the hell he wanted, so long as it didn’t piss off the promoter of a different region. Each of the few dozen wrestling “territories” was run as its own little totalitarian fiefdom. If a man had clawed his way to the ownership of a promotion, more often than not, he hadn’t gotten there by playing nice.

There was no opposition to the promoters. Wrestlers have never had a union. Because they are independent contractors and not employees, they have never been covered by employer-provided insurance. They were — and are — grossly underpaid compared to athletes in legitimate sports. McMahon’s destruction of the National Wrestling Alliance promoted wrestling as a democracy. However, it was an oligarchy that promoters controlled and wrestlers were not allowed to speak. These wrestlers don’t have job security. It is not possible to get a pension. It is not possible to have a pension plan. Escape plan.

If they had the ability to survive in the tough-and-tumble world of old-school wrestling, then abusive bosses would thrive. To find an example, look no further than Vince McMahon’s own father, Vincent James McMahon (known posthumously as Vince Sr.), whose territory stretched throughout most of the American northeast, including New York, Boston, and D.C. He is remembered for his comforting smile and charisma. His reputation as an old-school wrestler’s promoter is one of his greatest strengths. But that’s a low bar.

Vince McMahon’s dad was a perfect example of the normalized sadism in pro wrestling.

He didn’t hold his workers in high esteem. “Wrestlers are like seagulls,” the father once told his son. “All they do is eat, shit, and squawk all day.” He was kinder than some, but even those who praised him noted his avarice. As wrestler/politician Jesse “The Body” Ventura once said, “You could be angry at [Vince Sr.] for a payoff; you’d walk in, you’d voice your complaint, you’d walk out, you’d feel great — and yet, you got no more money.” When the Justice Department made a brief crackdown on the NWA for its intimidation of non-NWA promoters, Vince Sr. bullied one of his wrestlers into changing his story in a deposition. “You know where your bread is buttered,” he’d said. “Self-preservation? Fuck it.”

Image: Simon & Schuster

But McMahon didn’t know Vince Sr. until he was 12 years old. The father had abandoned his wife and two sons down in North Carolina (he’d only met the woman because of his deployment during World War II). McMahon wasn’t even a McMahon for those early years — he bore the surname of his stepfather, going by Vinnie Lupton. McMahon says that McMahon was physically and sexually abused in his family home. One might expect such trauma to make a child unruly and violent — and, indeed, that is how McMahon has described his young self.

But contrary to McMahon’s own narrative about his youth, the peers of his that I found in North Carolina as I reported on my new book, Vince McMahon Ringmaster, and the Unmaking of AmericaMy family all said Vinnie Lupton was quiet, unassuming and a nice kid who might have dreamed of getting in fights but never got there. Vinnie was finally able to meet his father, a legendary wrestle promoter.

McMahon eventually worked as a translator for local venues before becoming a broadcast announcer on TV for wrestling matches. He was actually hired to be the announcer after Ray Morgan, his father, who was a well-known broadcaster, requested a raise. Vince Sr. then fired him. He hired his son to replace him — at the new pay rate. It was clear that Vince Sr. is not someone to screw with. McMahon has often described the firing with joy and awe at his father’s cruelty: “I was just proud to be there and listen to all that, and proud of my dad, proud of the fact he told this guy to take off,” is how he once put it.

Vince Sr. did not show a lot of kindness to his son. According to McMahon, the older man only told him he loved him once, on his deathbed — and, like many Vince McMahon stories, there is plenty of reason to doubt the veracity of that anecdote. McMahon’s affection for his father was passionate, but always unrequited. It is my belief that this strained relationship, and the younger McMahon’s effort to emulate his father, led him to become the much-feared king of kings that he is today.

When McMahon took over the WWF (his father didn’t give it to him; he made the young man buy it in a precarious and punishing payment schedule) in 1983, he proceeded to destroy the system that his father had been such an integral part of. He broke all the territorial rules, invading other promoters’ regions with live shows and surreptitiously purchased television slots. The NWA was on the offensive. Vince Sr. tried unsuccessfully to stop his son.

Today, the WWF of the ’80s is remembered as a kind of golden age, when the content was wholesome and the wrestlers were superheroes. But, at the time, longtime fans saw McMahon’s national march as a terrible disruption of the ecosystem. McMahon’s brand of wrestling was more outrageous and less credible than any that came before it. This angered those who were serious about the art. As one emblematic reader of The Wrestling Observer Newsletter put it in a 1984 letter to the editor, McMahon posed “a real threat to the stability of pro wrestling, which obviously was doing quite well until he decided to overrun the sport like Hannibal.”

Or, to put it another way: “McMahon Jr. is the modern-day Hitler of professional wrestling, and if you told him that to his face, he’d take you out and buy you the biggest steak you could eat,” said one of Vince Sr.’s favorite wrestlers, Buddy Rogers. “He thrives on the people around him hating his guts. He loves it.”

McMahon finally succeeded in dismantling the systems that had controlled wrestling for many decades. But there was one crucial aspect of the old system that he didn’t get rid of: the abuses. In fact, he is most passionate about the abuses.

Eugene Gologursky/WireImage via Getty Images

McMahon made wrestling so special that very few wrestlers would dare to speak against him. McMahon’s sexual misconduct allegations against him this summer led to his resignation as CEO and Chairman. However, few wrestlers or other industry members would have believed that McMahon had done anything wrong. Even people from rival company All Elite Wrestling (far cooler than WWE, but also vastly smaller) didn’t make hay of those allegations, likely fearing that they might tick off McMahon and lose any future shot of working for him. In wrestling, there isn’t a serious whistleblower group.

The text Ringmaster was finalized in September of last year, while the wrestling magnate was out of the driver’s seat and out of the spotlight. It had to refer to the fact that he was the sole hand in leading the company’s future. It was just a matter of luck. Even when he was “gone,” I knew he’d come back. He was the largest shareholder in the publicly traded WWE and controlled 80% shareholder votes. He was the greatest wrestler ever.

McMahon returned to the company. McMahon took over the company a few months back, putting himself in charge of executive chair and forcing Stephanie, his daughter, to resign. Either way, she’s gone and the future of the firm is deeply uncertain. McMahon has, despite refusing all interviews, encouraged the company to sell or go private, even though it denied them every request. Nobody, not even veteran wrestling reporters with trusted sources within WWE, seems to have a clear story on what’s going to happen. Vince’s mind is a black box these days.

Not only was McMahon never truly gone, his father’s ethos never was, either.

Today’s wrestling has a shiny sheen. WWE shows don’t look like sweaty barroom brawls between bloated non-athletes; they are high-impact, high-octane spectacles accompanied by slick camerawork, enormous LED screens, and advanced live CGI for the viewers at home. But there’s still no union. There’s still no health insurance. There’s still no retirement plan. The pay is still garbage (the average working wrestler makes about $50,000 a year, if they’re lucky). The supreme rulers of the companies are still their promoters. It’s just that there’s only one hegemonic promoter now: the man who annihilated all the others and took the power for himself.

Although wrestling is still an unsavory, underground industry. Vince McMahon has mastered the art of manipulating public perceptions so that WWE is often seen as another entertainment company. In a sense, this is true. All cultures are greedy, but WWE does all of it openly, at the highest levels possible. WWE is today a vicious beast disguised as a gentleman, standing on its hind legs with a champagne glass in hand.

Although wrestling is beautiful, its business model is horrendous. It must be able to learn from its history if it wants to survive as an art form.

My conviction is that professional wrestling will continue to thrive even after our current civilizational decline. It’s magnificently low-tech: All you really need is a mattress, an audience, and two people willing to risk it all for entertainment. The practice of wrestling will continue to thrive, thank God, regardless of the collapse in capitalism. Wrestling is going to survive the end of the world. In fact, Vince survived it.

Vince McMahon and Unmaking of America: Ringmaster

Price at publishing time.

The definitive biography of Vince McMahon, former WWE chairman and CEO, charts his rise from rural poverty to the throne of one of the world’s most influential media empires — and features never-before-seen research and exclusive interviews with more than 150 people who witnessed, aided, and suffered from his ascent.