America Is Basically WrestleMania VI Now

And while I did like The Ultimate Warrior (a lot), I am not sure it's exactly the proper direction for the world's richest country.

I was a huge, and I mean huge, wrestling fan as a kid. One day in probably 1992, I begged my dad to take me to Madison Square Garden that night for a crappy house show headlined by Nailz vs. The Undertaker. He obliged (thanks, dad!) and it was a pretty cool night. I also ordered about six pay-per-views as a kid, with the permission of my parents. I lost wrestling during college and afterwards, then had phases where I checked back in with it. I finally, over the holidays, got around to watching that Netflix show Mr. McMahon, filmed while he was still running things but debuting after all the Janel Grant lawsuit allegations, and just last night I watched the first RAW episode on Netflix. So I guess I am halfway back into the fan scene? Not sure.

Anyway, for a long time I thought the story of McMahon was cool from afar. He grew up literally dirt poor and didn’t know his dad until 12. Maybe you could argue he was kinda sorta “born on second base” because his dad did do wrestling promotion, and his dad let him be on-air talent at a young age, but in other ways you can look at McMahon and think, “Whoa, American dream right here.” He took over from his dad and did rapid territory purchasing, building a global brand, made the (at the time) correct decision to lean on Hulk Hogan for a number of years, built up stars around Hogan, almost lost it all to WCW, and then won those wars because of guys like Austin, Rock, and The Undertaker.

Now, you can also look at McMahon and think, “Wow, this is a sexual deviant trying to compensate for something,” which is readily apparent in some of the Trish storylines where Linda, Vince’s wife, was a vegetable and Trish was the mistress. What the fuck?

Now, there’s a portion in the Netflix series where they talk about how Shane McMahon (his son) wanted to buy UFC, and his dad (Vince) didn’t, and that created a fissure whereby Shane left the company for a while. (It feels very Succession-esque in that part.) Why did Vince not want to buy UFC, even though ironically they came under the same parent company 14 years later? Because Vince thought his business model was creating good and evil characters, maintaining the rights to those characters for life, and milking the merch out of them forever. And he’s right — that is his business model. Let’s think about the first part.

Vince was very good — along with guys like Pat Patterson and Bruce Pritchard and HHH and others — at creating essentially “good” and “evil” forces. Now, the forces could shift — a heel could turn Babyface and vice versa. That happened all the time. But it was mostly clear to see who was good and who was bad, who to cheer and who to boo. Some guys blurred those lines and made it semi-interesting here and there, but mostly it was a “I like him, I don’t like him” thing.

Now let’s bring in Trump.