Wrestling Analytic 3: The pros and Cons of Vince Mcmahon (feel free to add)?

[The Dragon]

I've been a wrestling fan for 45 years. In the interest of full disclosure (not that my feelings about Vince McMahon are a secret) I see Vince McMahon as the devil who killed the wrestling business to replace it with his Hollywood parody he calls "sports entertainment". He turned a, uh, "respectable" pseudo-sport into a cheesy cartoon show full of superheroes and supervillains fueled by grade "Z" Hollywood shlocky melodrama. Those who only know the WWE have no idea what it was like to have a real wrestling business.

A few Pros and Cons of Vince McMahon:

PROS:

1. He's not afraid to fail...spectacularly. Vince really does have balls the size of grapefruits, and an ego to match. He will risk everything to push something he believes in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

2. He is a marketing genius. That's the only time you will ever see me refer to Vince McMahon as a "genius". Vince is the greatest marketer in pro wrestling history, no question. He is the "P.T. Barnum" of the wrestling business. Couple that with the first thing I wrote and Vince did indeed make the WWE a world-wide brand and household name.

3. Despite his wealth, power, and accolades Vince does know when to listen to his subordinates. An example: Aligning the WWF with Cyndi Lauper was Captain Lou Albano's idea. Vince saw that marketing to the MTV crowd could be a big success so he took Albano's suggestion and made it happen. Vince has since aligned the WWF/E with various other entertainment genres, attempting to broaden the WWF/E's appeal, mostly successfully.

CONS:

1. He is an idea thief. Vince hasn't created, invented, or innovated anything in the wrestling business. He's just taken ideas from other promoters/wrestlers (without giving credit), put a slick coat of Hollywood glitz on them, put them on national TV, and taken credit for "inventing" them. Examples: Vince didn't invent the wrestling PPV, Jim Crockett did. Vince didn't invent multi-angle multi-camera TV wrestling shows, Fritz Von Erich did. Vince didn't invent syndicated pre-packaged wrestling shows shipped to various markets (including to other countries), Fritz Von Erich did. Vince didn't invent Hell In A Cell, Ole Anderson did. Vince didn't invent the Royal Rumble, Pat Patterson did. Vince didn't invent Triple Threat matches, Paul Heyman did. Vince didn't create the Attitude Era, Paul Heyman did. Vince didn't invent the Ladder Match, a wrestler in Stampede did. Etc etc etc.

2. Vince has no morals, ethics, or scruples. He wasn't willing to "win" by producing better TV and live shows, he pulled every trick in the book to kill the territories and put every wrestling company in North America out of business, not caring in the least about the thousands of people he put out of work, just to make sure he had no competition. I'm not talking about offering more money to the performers, that's fair. I'm talking about buying up local promotions' TV time and replacing their shows with his syndicated WWE compilation shows. I'm talking about running shows opposite smaller promotions on the same night in the same city and locking out every other wrestling promoter from various arenas around the country by getting the managers of those arenas to sign exclusive contracts with the WWF/E prohibiting them from holding wrestling shows that are not the WWF/E. I'm talking about locking in WWE performers to exclusive contracts that took away their rights to work when where and how often they wanted. You and I can have as many different jobs working for as many different employers as we want; WWE performers have that right taken away as a condition of WWE employment.

3. Vince has dumbed-down and shoved to the back the actual wrestling match, and with it actual wrestling skills and the art of pro wrestling, replacing it with cheesy grade "Z" shlocky melodrama written by failed Hollywood screenwriters, cartoon characters, catchphrases, merchandise-driven "promos", and punching & kicking. Storytelling (in the ring) has all but disappeared from the WWE. Instead, we have muscled-up actors reciting pre-written dialogue following directions in skits and in the ring. Very few in the WWE still have the ability to improvise on the fly should it be necessary; most of them just blindly follow "the script" no matter the circumstances or the audience reactions.