Declaration of interest: Between May and November of 2010, D. Dowd Muska was an employee of Linda McMahon’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. He never had any contact with Vince McMahon — before, during, or since — and has not received a penny of income linked to the McMahons’ wealth in over a dozen years.
Vince McMahon is, well, kind of an asshole.
So was Steve Jobs. So is Elon Musk. So is Donald Trump.
Great things are rarely accomplished by nice guys, and like it or loathe it, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is a big deal. It employs 870 people at its headquarters in Connecticut, with additional workers in Los Angeles, London, Singapore, and Dubai. In 2022, the company’s net revenue was $1.3 billion. Its programs “can be seen in more than one billion homes and in 25 languages around the world.” Since February 2011, WWE has issued a quarterly dividend. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company and Endeavor Group Holdings Inc. have “agreed to form a new parent company that combines professional wrestling” with the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
At the age of six, Abraham Riesman’s mother “custom-stitched” him “a tearaway T-shirt” after he “first saw Hulk Hogan on TV.” These days, the “journalist and essayist” isn’t much of a fan of WWE. The author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America (Atria Books; 453 pages; $29.99), who “now identif[ies] as transgender,” considers the wrestling billionaire a “heel” who posses “an armor that virtue cannot destroy.”
Ringmaster is what you’d expect, given the source. But if you skip the lectures about “the open bigotry of the characters and story lines [McMahon] has crafted and pushed, and the impact they had on the countless young fans who grew up watching them,” you’ll be treated to a fascinating saga — albeit one that ends abruptly, and inexplicably.
Vince had it tough, growing up. His biological father abandoned him, his stepfather was an abusive monster, and something inappropriate — no one knows exactly what — happened with his mother. But at the age of 12, the troubled kid began to escape North Carolina. He finally met Vince Senior, and was introduced to a part of show business he instantly loved. Vinnie Lupton became Vince McMahon. By the early 1980s, he had taken control of his father’s World Wide Wrestling Federation, and was living in tony Greenwich.
A half-century ago, “wrestling was a parochial industry, divided into dozens of local fiefdoms across the country.” However much highbrows hated the “sport,” it had its fans. And it was about to get a lot more. Year after year, Vince expanded the entity that would, over the decades, morph into WWE. Along the way, he broke all the rules, and made plenty of enemies.
For the men who “wrestled,” hard livin’ was the norm. Roderick Toombs, known to millions of Xers and Millennials as “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, explained that it starts with booze, of course, and then:
You bring cocaine into the picture. Somebody gives [a wrestler] an eight-ball of coke. Well, he goes, I’m up. I’m eating. Okay, here’s my buddies. I’ll have some drinks. Holy hell, it’s four o’clock? “What time’s your plane?” “Seven!” “When do you need to get up?” “Five-thirty!” “Ah!” Does a line, gets on the plane. It’s time to fight: Psssh, no downers there. No, let’s go. But it’d be nice to have a little painkiller in ya as you go in. Or a lot. And whooom.
Vince McMahon wasn’t responsible for all the debauchery — a jury even acquitted him in a pathetically bungled federal prosecution for steroids in 1994 — but Riesman attempts to link the WWE’s mastermind to every manifestation of the industry’s ugliness, including the suspicious death of Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka’s girlfriend in 1983. Whatever.
Ringmaster methodically tracks the highs and lows of WWE, including the birth of WrestleMania, the fizzled scandal over accusations regarding abuse of “ring boys,” and the infamous “Attitude Era,” through the ‘80s and ‘90s. And then, it ends. Bizarrely, Riesman skips two entire decades, concluding with the recent revelations about WWE “payouts to women who had alleged sexual misconduct.” (An alpha male who cheats — who could have imagined such a thing?) How an editor permitted such a glaring gap is a head-scratcher, although these days, transgenderism has its privileges.
Despite its “woke” silliness, Ringmaster would have been worth a read, had it completed its chronicle. The impact of WWE’s IPO, the roles of the McMahon children, Mrs. McMahon’s two campaigns for the U.S. Senate, and other 21st century topics offered rich fodder. Then again, Riesman did write his book “entirely … during the COVID-19 pandemic,” when the Republican Party was “working overtime to attack the idea that public health should even be a function of government.” Perhaps it all got to be too much for the onetime Hulkamaniac to handle.
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