October 29 was the birthday of a now obscure sports promoter named Jess McMahon (Roderick James McMahon Sr, 1882-1954). In the final analysis I revile the influence his family has had on this country, but damn do its origins streamline mellifluously into the stories we love to tell here.
McMahon’s parents were immigrants from Galway who immigrated to New York ca. the late 1870s or early 1880s, settling in Harlem, at a time when the neighborhood first started booming, and whites were flocking there as well as blacks. The McMahons ran a hotel, and I wish I could uncover more about it. Was it a respectable hostelry with clean linens and a wash basin in every room? Or was it more of a sporting joint with a saloon attached, and all sorts of colorful transients running around? The answer would make a difference in terms of naming the true founder of the dynasty. If it was the latter, then we could name the first Roderick McMahon (1846-1922) as the father of the McMahon craziness. If his establishment resembled Harry Hill’s, for example, it already takes us partway to the WWE. If someone asked me what the Bowery B’hoys were like, I’d show them a wrestling audience. Over the better part of two centuries almost nothing has changed.
As it stands, we name Jess as the patriarch, as is traditional. Jess was a sportsman in keeping with the tenor of his times, and he seemed to have his finger in all pies, savory and unsavory. He graduated from Manhattan College, then a newly established Catholic institution with an interest in educating working class men. He earned a “commercial diploma”, essentially a grounding in the basics of business and marketing. McMahon was still a teenager when he opened and managed several Athletic Clubs with his brother Eddie. This was right around the time when the physical culture craze was born; such clubs were major centers of social activity. This is where McMahon would have booked his first boxing matches starting in 1905. In 1915 he and his brother promoted a renowned bout between Jess Willard and Jack Johnson in Havanna, Cuba. Just as many of the boxers they managed and presented were black, the McMahons also owned and managed several black baseball teams in the segregated “Negro leagues”, including the New York Lincoln Giants and the Lincoln Stars. They also had a black basketball team, The Commonwealth Big 5. In 1925 McMahon was hired to book boxing matches for Madison Square Garden, where he hired fighters like Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey through 1928. This was probably his high point.
Meanwhile, a revolution had taken place in the field of professional wrestling. Prior to the 1920s, the sport was presented in the old school legit fashion — like they did it in Greece, like they did at your high school, like they do it at the Olympics. It’s an unpredictable sport. There are times when events move quickly, but other times when the pace is glacial, and it’s just two guys standing there grunting and hugging. Some matches could take an hour. So the popularity began to fall off. Then a triumvirate of promoters nicknamed the Gold Dust Trio (Strangler Lewis, Toots Mondt, and Billy Sandow) introduced what they termed “Slam-Bang Western Style Wrestling” which mixed elements of Greco-Roman, freestyle, boxing (meaning you could now strike your opponent), lumber camp fighting, sideshows, and theatrical melodrama (heroes, villains, speeches, soliloquies, emotions). And in the spirit of the theatre, the bouts would have storylines and predetermined outcomes. It would still be a “spectacle” and a “show”, but in the true sense of the word, it would no longer be a “sport”. It was now much more of an “athletic exhibition” or a “demonstration”. It was the birth of professional wrestling as we now know it.
McMahon had occasionally dabbled in presenting wrestling since the teens, but it was in 1932 that he began to apply himself more vigorously to the project in places like Freeport, Long Island (near his Rockaway home) and Coney Island. In 1953 the McMahons formed the Capitol Wrestling Corporation. Jess died a few months later, and there remains some confusion as to whether the old man himself founded it, or whether it was his son.
The torch was passed to Vince McMahon Sr (1914-1984) at the most opportune time concievable. He inherited the family business just as television was taking root. Television has been so central to the pro wrestling experience for over 70 years that it is nigh impossible to imagine how it ever existed without it. In the 1950s and ’60s the form began to develop its first colorful stars: Gorgeous George, Tor Johnson, Antonino Rocca, Buddy Rogers, Killer Kowalski, Bruno Sammartino, Gorilla Monsoon, Haystacks Calhoun. In those days the various wrestling leagues had their own regional territories (not unlike the vaudeville and burlesque circuits of an earlier time). The Capitol Wrestling Corpration had the choicest market in the country, comprising New York, New Jersey, and the Baltimore area. In 1963 they rebranded as the World Wide Wrestling Federation, which became pared down down to the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in 1979.
The 70s was when your correspondent discovered this hallucinatory, peculiar human ritual. I was a working class kid, and that had been the chosen demographic for the sport almost since the beginning. I mean, while boxing has always been looked down upon by some, compared to wrestling, professional pugilism is a veritable edifice of respectability. There has always been a widespread middle class snobbery about the fraudulence of wrestling, a feeling that its fans were all dupes, so dumb and uneducated that they “believed wrestling was real”. That may be true of some of the fans, but far from all of them. But I have also come to realize that wrestling’s culture of “kayfabe” — the unspoken bargain its participants and audience engage in, in which a blind eye is turned to pretense, in favor of perpetuating an artificial reality, is ultimately downright dangerous. It’s not good for large numbers of people to conspire together in maintaining the appearance of something that is at bottom a lie.
But I will cut the tween-age Trav a little slack for becoming interested in it. Eh? Leaping off the ropes onto your opponent, pretending to gouge his eyes out, and slap his skull, and twist his limbs like licorice. For better or worse, it’s what boys do. I don’t endorse ACTUAL fighting, but PRETEND fighting is just acrobatic theatre, a very macho form of modern dance. So starting in the mid ’70s, my friends and I started following these guys, in much the same way as we followed the exploits of superheros in comic books. Chief Jay Strongbow, Andre the Giant, Bobby Heenan, Jake the Snake, Bret Hart, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, George “the Animal” Steele. Some that I recall from those days, like The Wild Samoans, were straight up carnival sideshow stuff, racist missing link and cannibal characters straight out of the the P.T. Barnum playbook.
And? this is where I first heard the name, and saw the face of Vince McMahon the younger (b. 1945). In those days I had no idea that McMahon had anything to do with the ownership of the company. He was just a ring announcer, host and emcee. As luck would have it, McMahon has a terrific voice, and a deadpan sensibility that fit the job perfectly. While his father preferred to remain behind the scenes, Vince Jr. became the face of the WWF.
Amazingly, at least as he tells it, McMahon spent the first 12 years of his life never knowing who his actual father was. He grew up with his mother and a series of abusive stepfathers in North Carolina, and was educated at a military school. At any rate, there is no way to convey to anyone who was never a 12 year old working class boy what it would be like to wake up one day and learn that your father OWNED the wrestling league. It would be exactly like finding the Golden Ticket to the Chocolate Factory. The mind boggles at what that must have felt like. It would be as if Santa’s sleigh pulled into your yard, and the Merry Old Elf said, “Ho, ho, ho, kid! We’re goin’ for a ride!” Quite naturally Vince Jr worked his ass off to position himself to be in line for the management of the WWWF. He went to business school. He became an on-air personality. He worked himself into the business decisions (it was he who argued to whittle the name from WWWF to WWF). And eventually he bought his dad out.
Like all true impresarios and entrepreneurs, McMahon could see into the future. He could envision new worlds to conquer that his father would never have dared to contemplate. Then, even more than now, the wrestling world was a sort of déclassé ghetto within American culture. The market was unsophisticated working people. Mainstream success was never even considered, let alone sought. Vince McMahon envisioned something much greater. He wanted to grow the sport’s popularity and visibility. Remarkably, he achieved that. In fact, I am just the right age to have experienced each new big leap in the growth of his enterprise. The timing was such that, at every stage when I would have ordinarily lost interest (all things remaining the same), he reinvented the product in such a way that it kept me at least marginally engaged.
By my late teens, for example, I had very much outgrown interest in wrestling, much as I had comic books. But then McMahon began doing all of this cross-promotion with MTV, a.k.a. “The Rock ‘n’ Wrestling Connection”, of which I was an enormous fan. Cyndi Lauper and Captain Lou Albano began collaborating. Albano was in Lauper’s music videos, and Lauper would show up on wrestling broadcasts. Guys like Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper began getting cast in movies. The personalities in the league itself were getting more entertaining and colorful. There were characters like Big Boss Man (a prison guard), Sgt. Slaughter, The Iron Shiek, The Honky Tonk Man, King Kong Bundy, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Ric Flair, The Ultimate Warrior, Nikolai Volkoff, Mr. T, et al emerged, anchored by the hilariously calm presence of the best straight man in the business, interviewer Mean Gene Okerlund.
(I should interject here that just prior to McMahon’s amping up of the show biz element in the wrestling ring, Andy Kaufman had graduated from fighting women as a prank, to getting into the ring with real grappling stars like Jerry Lawler. He also released his 1983 film My Breakfast with Blassie co-starring Classy Freddie Blassie. In the tradition of wrestling ballyhoo, Kaufman’s various contretemps and lawsuits and so forth were all gaffed. This was not true of other personalities like journalist John Stossel and comedian Richard Belzer, who actually sued the WWF for injuries suffered in their interactions with wrestling personalities. At any rate, Kaufman’s shenigans were putting wrestling on the talk shows, even before McMahon’s mainstreaming innocations).
From here the story, undoubtedly already too tawdry for some people, begins to get darker and darker, even as the organization grows and grows. It was already happening in the ’80s, when the WWF began to amp up the jingoism and xenophobia, with Muslim and Russian characters as the heavies, and monstrous “take no prisoners” hatemongers as the theoretical good guys, whipping the crowds into a frenzy. It had a lot in common with the trash tv of the time, stuff like the Morton Downey Jr. and Jerry Springer shows. Wrestling also had a lot of aesthetic overlap with hair metal, when ultra sexy, objectified women billed as “divas” in skimpy spandex outfits became part of the package.
At the same time McMahon was turning up the dial on the entertainment aspect of the sport, he was also poaching talent from the regional organizations, and ultimately absorbing them entirely, building for the very first time a nationwide federation (recall that originally his turf had only been the northeast). The McMahon organization had metastasized, gone from a “mom and pop” operation to a multi-millionaire dollar juggernaut.
In the ’90s, the WWF suffered many setbacks, including legal woes resulting from rampant use of steroids in the organization, and the emergence of Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) as competition, which eclipsed WWF in popularity for several years. Meanwhile, McMahon began to develop new stars like The Undertaker, Razor Ramon, and Tatanka. By the late ’90s, superstars like Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock had emerged, lifting the WWF out of the doldrums. This was known as the “Attitude Era”, and this is when the levels of sex and violence were amped up considerably more than had ever been done in the past. The ugliness in and out of the ring increased exponentially. Blood, anger, fire. Women were treated as slaves and humiliated. The language that was used began to push the envelope on profanity. McMahon himself became a character in storylines, as did his children Shane (b. 1970) and Stephanie McMahon (b. 1976) and his wife Linda (b. 1978). They would enact weird family melodramas live on stage, reminsicent of Greek tragedy and Eugene O’Neill. Ostensibly this new phase of wrestling was to appeal to young adults, and indeed it did. But children continued to watch as well.
in 1997, McMahon tried his ignoble experiment, the XFL, a football league that was invested with all the scripted melodrama of pro wrestling. I watched a few games because I loved the idea and wanted it to succeed (I don’t like sports), but the public hated it, and it lasted only one season. Basically, instead of being the best of both worlds, it was neither fish nor fowl, not as outrageous as pro wrestling, and apparently pretty bad football.
But the WWF was thriving again. In 1999 McMahon took the company public. In 2002, the World Wildlife Fund sued over the right to use the initials, and McMahon’s organization became World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), a better name for what they do anyhow. If only Fox News were forced to (accurately) rebrand as “Fox News Entertainment”, its viewers might have a clearer picture of what is being presented to them.
The years 2002-2008 have been dubbed the “Ruthless Aggression” era of the WWE, as actual wrestling technique returned to the fore. In 2007, two symbolic things happened to illustrate how things had gotten out of hand. WWE wrestler Chris Benoit killed his wife and seven year old son, and then himself. There seemed to have been little motivation, but more than ample evidence of brain damage cause by repeated blows to his skull, further sullying the reputation of the sport.
That same year, a tawdry reality TV star named Donald Trump began to appear as a character on WWE broadcasts, brawling with McMahon himself, and working the crowd into a frenzy. Little has been made of this, but I feel quite certain this is the birth of Trump as a political figure. It is where he developed his style, and it is where he acquired his ready made base. While figures from physical culture and the wrestling world like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse The Body Ventura had actually served as state governors in the past, both men had actually tacked in the direction of politics, and governed relatively sensibily. By contrast, as President, Trump went in the other direction. He debased political discourse by making it more like professional wrestling. His rallys are reminiscent of matches. The ugliness unleashed on January 6 looked like one of those wrestling free-for-alls, where the participants all grab blunt objects and merge into a sea of anarchy. Would Americans have given themselves permission to behave this way prior to savoring it as entertainment? I have my doubts. (Trump, by the way, put Linda McMahon in charge of the Small Business Administration, and she has since been prominent in his re-election campaigns.)
At this writing, the McMahons are effectively out of the wrestling business, due to a major festering problem within the organization which we haven’t even mentioned yet. There have been dozens of allegations against Vince McMahon and other members of his organization for sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, and sex trafficking stretching all the way back to the 1980s. Over the years, he managed to settle many of these cases out of court and keep them hushed up. But this year a bunch of these charges resurfaced and he was officially ousted from his organization, along with his kids.
Much of what was reported above is featured in the new netflix documentary series Mr. McMahon, just released on September 25.
Naturally, I binged the series in preparation for this post. I found it insightful in certain ways, especially in its exploration of McMahon’s psychology. Abused as a child, he seems to have perpetuated the cycle in his own relationships, and unleashed his demons through all sorts of dark re-enactments at his shows. Contrary to what McMahon himself claims, the line between himself and his “character” seems scarely to exist. And it seems to speak directly to the bestial in his audiences. It is a mighty and terrifying force, and I’m afraid what it has loosed in this country will get worse before it gets better.
Apparently this series was mostly complete when the final wave broke for the McMahon family. As a result of that, the reflection on the darker parts get dealt with here as a kind of afterthought. In a good documentary, this awareness would inform the entire viewing experience. Quite hilariously, (very much in Trumpian fashion) the McMahons and their supporters said they found the series too skewed against them, when the reality is, it doesn’t eviscerate and expose their corrupt venality nearly enough. In fact, huge portions are devoted to minutiae about particular feuds and bouts and storylines that no average, objective viewer will remotely give a crap about. At some point, some film-maker is going to need to take another stab at this, someone a little less worshipful of the product, who will incorporate elements that feed the REAL narrative about how what was once essentially a Saturday morning kids show eventually ate the beating heart out of America.
Anyway, you know McMahon’s kind. In the unlikely event that he goes to jail, he’ll only organize wrestling matches there.