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HIS NAME IS VINCE MCMAHON, and he is worried. You are not watching his TV programs, TNN's Raw or UPN's Smackdown. You are not buying his pay-per-views. You are not coming to the arenas where his "superstars" bounce around the ring in front of half-filled crowds. You're not buying any of it, and that's the problem. Vince is the Chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment and he has lost more than just profits. In fact, he is just plain lost. Although professional wrestling-fake professional wrestling-has existed in this country since around the turn of the century, when grapplers like Frank Gotch and George Hackenschmidt fooled a lot more people than The Undertaker into thinking the art of the squared circle was sport, the future of big-time money-drawing wrestling is in jeopardy, thanks to a rapidly decreasing audience and a lack of big stars. The huge names, the transcendent stars like Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair who brought mainstream fans to professional wrestling in the 1980s are either dead or, in the case of Hogan and Flair, ancient shells of their former selves. The renaissance of so-called "sports-entertainment," as McMahon termed it, also ran its course, peaking three or four years ago with the creation of new heroes, bad guys with hearts of gold like Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock. The then-WWF was bigger than it has ever been, popping all-time high Nielsen ratings along with unprecedented pay-per-view buyrates. The Monday Night Wars, in which WWE did head-to-head battle with AOL-Time-Warner-owned World Championship Wrestling (WCW), were finally over, largely because of financial problems and poor management. The result was that McMahon bought his long-time competitor for chump change in February of 2001. At the beginning of that year, McMahon was on top of the world. In April, the seventeenth version of his signature event, WrestleMania, would shatter all-time box-office and pay-per-view records with a main event of The Rock defending the WWE Heavyweight Title against Stone Cold Steve Austin. At the Houston Astrodome, Vince watched an announced crowd of 67,925 people witness what critics of the business deemed the greatest PPV in wrestling history. As Steve Austin and The Rock came out for the final match, Vince McMahon saw the biggest two stars of the modern era take his stage. In the storyline (each of the WWE's major shows is scripted by a three person team of writers with Vince having final say), he blasted The Rock with a steel chair en route to an Austin victory. Vince had even wrestled his son and co-heir into the family business (along with his daughter Stephanie), Shane McMahon on the undercard. Now he posed with Austin in the ring, soaking up cheers and boos from the mixed crowd. Despite the failure of the XFL, his ill-fated football league, McMahon, it seemed, still knew how to promote wrestling, the business he had started in as an announcer and succeeded his father in as owner. The summer of 2001 held potentially a lucrative "feud" between McMahon's WWE and the stars of WCW, whose contracts McMahon had bought in anticipation of such a scenario. But he fucked it all up. First, Austin's win of the WWE title set up an ill-fated run with Vince McMahon as a "heel," a bad guy in wrestling terminology, which angered longtime fans to whom the famed Austin-McMahon rivalry of 1998 and 1999 was sacred. Because McMahon refused to pay off the contracts of the aging stars of WCW like Goldberg, Hulk Hogan, Sting, and Kevin Nash, who would have popped short-term business, the WWF "version" of WCW as a separate entity was watered down, and the planned creation of a new WCW that would run its own pay-per-views and arena shows was shelved. When McMahon saw the red, red writing on the wall, he panicked. Instead of beginning to rebuild like the Florida Marlins after they won the World Series, he finally paid through his nose to bring in Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall, and Kevin Nash as the nWo, a rebel heel group that had sparked business for WCW-in 1996. Vince, unable to write himself out of any storyline, introduced the nWo as a thorn in "commissioner" Ric Flair's side, and expected this feud to draw money. It didn't. Why did the audience go away? McMahon had spent years training his audience to hate the stars of his competition, and after headlining a weak eighteenth WrestleMania in Toronto with The Rock versus Hulk Hogan, the novelty wore off fast on young fans, who had become accustomed to more exciting in-ring action and less cartoonish characters. McMahon had panicked again watching half-filled stadiums give Hogan standing ovations and put the title on him. Attendance and television ratings kept dropping. Meanwhile, WWE wore out its welcome on another front. Because of a lawsuit filed in England by the World Wildlife Fund, the WWF was no longer allowed to use the initials "WW"' to promote its worldwide product. Just as business was taking a turn for the worse, the company faced a critical rebranding. While this might have been an opportunity to paint the company with a new brush, McMahon chose the attention-grabbing campaign of "Get the F Out." Tremendous. But surely McMahon could return to fantastic storylines penned by the subsequently reshuffled group of former television writers and territory bookers from the mid 1990s? Actually, the stars just weren't around: in short time the African American/Samoan superstar The Rock was the star of The Scorpion King, a Hollywood property, and not expected back until next WrestleMania; Stone Cold Steve Austin, the biggest merchandise seller and biggest ratings draw the company had, burned out on the creative direction of his character. The day after WrestleMania, the real-life Steve Williams no-showed a Monday Night RAW show. One month later, he left for good, and was charged with spousal abuse of his new wife, Debra McMichael, who played the television babe "Debra." His return is not anticipated until McMahon gets particularly desperate, as the stock of the company, which made a disastrous move to trade on the stock market in 1999, is at an all-time low. Is it any wonder that Vince McMahon is pissed off? If this is beginning to sound like a soap opera, just another wrestling storyline, that's nothing new. When young Vince McMahon took over the then World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF), it was simply a territory in the northeast that ran Saturday morning television designed to draw large crowds to local arenas. After succeeding his father, Vince McMahon Sr., the 30-year-old Vincent Kennedy McMahon changed everything, redefining the way professional wrestling was seen in this country. Before Vince-although the company line is that professional wrestling existed in smoky salons and bars-professional wrestling was extremely successful in what was known as the territory system. Promoters featured hot acts in each of the different regions of the US and Canada. This worked, but no one was making millions at it, and Vince McMahon saw a way he could. McMahon saw big dollars in the formation of a national promotion and began buying out the territories one by one, and running in that region. If the promoter wouldn't sell, McMahon would simply sign all the promotion's wrestlers away for more money. After three national promotions established themselves during the 1980s, McMahon signed away Verne Gagne's biggest star, a juiced-up, blond-haired white guy named Terry Bollea, stage name Hulk Hogan, and put the title on him. He built up monsters like Andre the Giant and King Kong Bundy to lose to Hogan. While the formula wasn't innovative, it had legs, and Vince began selling out arenas all across the country. Then something happened. I got three words for you: Pay. Per. View. The growing importance of television ratings in attracting advertisers and keeping WWE RAW IS WAR and WWE Smackdown on the air is crucial, but more than anything else, the increasing importance of pay-per-view revenues has shaped how professional wrestling is now being promoted. During the hot period of 1998-2001, when wrestling was at its all-time peak, McMahon increased the number of big shows each year from 6 to 12, to increase his pay-per-view revenues. Before this, more time was allotted to build up match-ups that the fans wanted to see. Now the company has to sell a card of matches to an audience that's just seen an event last month promoted as the biggest of the year. This worked during the hot period, because fans were willing to buy anything with Stone Cold Steve Austin or The Rock's name on it. While the downturn of the economy has certainly had an effect on fans buying pricey tickets for arena shows, that doesn't tell the whole story. If bad economic times were all that was at work, then television ratings would theoretically go up, because the audience already has cable. Instead, Nielsen ratings plummeted from doing high sixes and sevens to now in the high threes. The real factor driving the audience away has been the creative direction of the product and the inability for Vince McMahon to create new stars. The political machinations within the company that have allowed the product to become stale are as a result of McMahon's stubbornness to a vision of wrestling that no longer entertains and the unwillingness of stale wrestlers main-eventing pay-per-views doing tiny buyrates like the Undertaker, Hulk Hogan, and Triple H. Triple H himself, currently the WWE RAW champion, has become notorious for his power-hungry relationship with head writer and Vince's daughter Stephanie McMahon as well as his unwillingness to do "jobs" (losing, in wrestling terminology) for younger, hotter acts like Brock Lesnar, Rob Van Dam, and former Olympic champion Kurt Angle. This happens because McMahon is unable to offer his long-time headliners any financial reason to lose their spot at the top of the card and eat declining paychecks. It is ironic that McMahon, among the vilest employers in terms of benefits to his employees, is now at the mercy of his own pay structure. This is one more way in which McMahon has lost his grip without competition to drive him. The tragedy is because he has no competition, he has the most athletically talented roster of professional wrestlers that the industry has ever seen. A return to a more legit, athletically-based style would fit the wrestlers he has with legit amateur credentials like NCAA champion Brock Lesnar and the aforementioned Kurt Angle. But, as the revolting image of Triple H penetrating a dead corpse in a necrophilia angle on this past Monday's RAW shows, this is one storyline Vince doesn't know how to get out of. If you think Alex Carnevale B'05 knows a lot about wrestling, get him talking about sandwiches. |
copyright © 2002, The College
Hill Independent
last updated 10 11 02
