A biography of the W.W.E. boss Vince McMahon ties his post-truth pseudo-sport to “the unmaking of America.”
In the nineteenth century, as wrestling matches became a staple of the American carnival circuit, legitimate competition was not always the easiest sell. Bouts could stretch to galling lengths, with little discernible action, before winding their way to unsatisfying, humdrum endings. Promoters hit upon a solution: if they fixed the bouts, with participants agreeing to the outcome beforehand, they could better insure a compelling product.
He eventually nudged his way onto the lower rungs of his father’s company and was pressed into service, in 1971, as its primary onscreen announcer. Beginning in 1982, he scrounged together a million dollars—notably, less than the W.W.F. would gross each year just from a series of events that it regularly held at—to buy out his father and his partners. He set his sights high.
McMahon was not content to simply surpass his competitors. He sought to bury them, by signing exclusive deals with arenas and pressuring cable companies that worked with the N.W.A., among other tactics. Many of McMahon’s other promotional methods had been tried by these other outfits, at lesser scale. Before McMahon brought in Cyndi Lauper, the N.W.A.’s Memphis territory famously deployed the comedian Andy Kaufman; before the first WrestleMania, there was the N.W.A.’s Starrcade.
Such cloudiness had previously served McMahon well. In 1983, one of his most popular stars, Superfly Jimmy Snuka, was questioned by police regarding the blunt-force-trauma death of his girlfriend, Nancy Argentino. Snuka, perhaps playing into the inarticulate caricature he portrayed on TV, let his boss do the talking; Snuka was subsequently not charged, and a P.R. disaster was averted. In the early nineties, other legal troubles threatened to sink McMahon.
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