Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (37 page)

By late 2001, McCluggage’s reign as a player at Viacom would be over. Once CBS boss Les Moonves got tired of waiting for UPN to turn around, he assumed control of the struggling network, cutting the legs out from under McCluggage, who resigned shortly thereafter, and laying the groundwork for Dean Valentine to be fired.

By then, Wall Street had become skeptical about whether Viacom would ever earn back its investment in the WWF, and whether Vince would regain the momentum he had in the late nineties.

In April 2001, the WWF reported that its wrestling-related revenues had grown by 20 percent, less than half of what it grew the preceding year. While the growth was respectable, the company’s ballooning expenses troubled analysts. Thanks to a new layer of upper management that the McMahons added in the belief that they could model themselves after Disney, operating income grew in fiscal 2001 by a measly 5.5 percent. When the cost of shutting down the XFL was factored in, the couple had barely eked out $16 million of profit on $456 million in revenues. The news got worse when the slumping economy finally hit the media sector in the summer of 2001. That July, the WWF announced that its television advertising plummeted by 17 percent, and its stock hit an all time low of $10.31—60 percent off the price it closed at when it went public in October 1999.

It didn’t help that Vince was ceding many day-to-day chores to his kids. Shane had evolved into one of the show’s largest daredevils, taking such risks as a fifty-foot fall from a scaffolding rig. Stephanie, meanwhile, embraced the post-Sable archetype of the heel slut, encouraging the chants of “bitch” that accompany her ring entrances. As one of the show’s key writers, she even placed herself in situations to provoke them. On the same day that the
New York Times
carried a story about teen magazine editors declining ads for breast enlargement surgery, the twenty-four-year-old paraded her newly (re-) enlarged breasts on Raw. When asked why she did it, she replied that she had seen a sign in the audience that read, “Steph’s puppies sag.”

But audiences tired of the self-involved stories that centered on the family, sending Raw’s ratings to their lowest points in years. The McMahons reacted by cleaning house, firing thirty-nine employees, or nearly a tenth of their workforce. Vince also made a much-discussed appearance at a meeting of his department heads, many of whom were wondering if he still had the energy to produce ten hours of weekly television. He acknowledged that he’d allowed himself to get out of touch but assured the gathering that he was going to be hands-on once more. “It’s time to have fun again,” he said. “If Wall Street doesn’t like it, fuck ‘em.”

Linda carried a less combative message to a conference of analysts in November 2001. Conceding that the XFL had taken its toll, she said matter-of-factly: “Sometimes you’re sharper creatively than at others. It happened before and it will happen again.”

The rest of the year found McMahon searching for a way to revive his TV persona. He spent one show humiliating his latest Sable knockoff, Trish Stratus, by having her get on her hands and knees and bark like a dog before ordering her to strip down to her bra and panties. On another, he whisked a breast-enhanced blonde named Torrie Wilson to a laundry room and moaned in delight as she unbuttoned his shirt, pulled his pants past his ankles, and disappeared beneath the eye of the camera. (When she told him to close his eyes for a “big surprise,” he did as he was told, only to open them and see his wife standing before him.) In a show that aired at Christmastime, he made a series of wrestlers kiss his bare ass. Recognizing the need for a new foil, Vince next brought Ric Flair aboard, creating a role for the white-haired legend as the WWF’s “co-owner.” Their scripted struggles led to McMahon’s most violent ring work since the Austin era, including a graphic end to the January 2002
Royal Rumble
in which Flair sank his teeth into Vince’s bloodied forehead after belting him with a lead pipe. Finally, McMahon did something few would have thought possible in burying the hatchet with Hogan, who hadn’t worked for him since 1993. Revisiting a contentious piece of his past, he used Hogan to reprise the nWo with Scott Hall and Kevin Nash.

The length of the road they’d all traveled was demonstrated on a February 2002 night in Chicago. Hogan challenged The Rock to meet him in the main event of the forthcoming
Wrestlemania
, and after the typical stare-downs and boasts, things took a dark turn. Nash and Hall ambushed The Rock, leaving him prone on the mat, whereupon Hogan grabbed a hammer and brought it down “hard” over the movie star’s head. As the scene unfolded, paramedics rushed The Rock into an ambulance, only to be ambushed again, this time when the old (and old-looking) Outsiders blocked its departure with their limousine. As the segment built to its climax, Hogan commandeered the cab of a 16-wheeler and used it to ram the side of the ambulance. To approximately five million people watching in the ten o’clock hour, announcers Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler left the impression that The Rock lay inside, dying. “Some things happen in real life and some things happen in wrestling, but this isn’t good…. Tragedy has struck a WWF superstar,” Ross exclaimed in a voice much like the one he used three years earlier as he watched Owen Hart fall to his death in Kansas City.

Anyone who has watched Vincent Kennedy McMahon battle for ratings over the past twenty years instantly recognized the formula: the blending of unsettling fiction and frequently tragic fact. It may not be everyone’s idea of entertainment, but it has made McMahon the consummate survivor on TV, where he continues to wrestle with his demons every week, live and in front of all America.

AFTERWORD

SHORTLY AFTER WE FINISHED
this book in early 2002, Vince and Linda McMahon moved into a $14 million vacation home in Boca Raton’s exclusive Excelsior resort, with polished granite floors and wraparound terraces overlooking the Atlantic. Despite losing $35 million on the XFL, they were unabashedly optimistic about their future. They even built a monument to their TV thrill machine—a roller-coaster ride beside a WWF theme store in Niagara Falls that they called The Pile Driver. On its first day of operation, state officials shut the ride down, citing safety issues. As we write this in September 2003, the renamed WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) seems every bit as grounded by capricious management and creative gridlock. The $19 million loss it posted at the end of its 2003 fiscal year was the worst in its history.

In the summer of 2003, the McMahons made a move that many considered a prelude to taking the company private again. They decided to spend $20 million to buy back all the WWE’s shares that had been bought by Viacom. If they use the $270 million they have on hand to buy the rest of the outstanding shares, that would end the incessant intrusions of analysts. But not the shift that led many of those analysts to warn that the wrestling industry is in for a prolonged downturn. A nation living under color-coded terrorist threats just doesn’t consider its brand of violence fashionable or fun anymore.

McMahon, at fifty-eight, isn’t conceding a thing. He bloodied himself to boost pay-per-view buys in a match with Hogan during Wrestlemania XIX. In interviews, he’s been defiant and nearly violent, like when he seemed to lose control in an appearance on HBO and lunged at Bob Costas. (The two staged a subsequent interview that was so sickeningly sweet, it could have been seen on
The View.)
And he supervises every word that goes out over the air. Still, the man who could always fall back on wrestling when debacles like the XFL derailed his other ambitions is unquestionably having a hard time staying relevant in 2004.

As former scriptwriter Vince Russo said when he was briefly rehired as a consultant, “I was absolutely shocked and taken back, because this was not the same guy that I worked so closely with for three years. The fire wasn’t there. The hunger wasn’t there … I just felt like I was dealing with a totally different individual.”

A favorite pastime for “smart” fans is debating when McMahon seemed to lose his creative compass.

Was it on October 21, 2002, when
Raw
featured Triple H simulating sex with a corpse in a casket? (After slipping a bra and panties off the “corpse” and taking off his tights, he crawled into the casket, gyrated his hips, and threw a glob of goo intended to look like brain matter over the side, crowing that he’d “screwed her brains out.”)

Was it when Vince duped the gay rights advocates at GLAAD into helping him promote the in-ring “wedding” of two supposedly gay wrestlers—an endorsement that helped get them on the
Today
show—only to pull out at the last minute and declare the whole thing a hoax?

Was it when the World Wrestling Federation lost the use of its trademark in a case brought by the World Wildlife Fund, prompting the
Wall Street Journal
to cluck that it “got beat by a panda”?

Or was it when the Rock decided to become a film star, taking away the WWE’s most bankable act when it needed him most?

We’d argue the key moment was in September of 2002, when McMahon walked into his now-defunct Times Square restaurant for an annual meeting of shareholders. Two years earlier, when he’d announced the start of the XFL there, the room was packed with reporters. Now, there were maybe three dozen investors mixed in with WWE executives arrayed before him. The mood was glum, and as McMahon started to speak, he seemed to give in to the pessimism. Then he caught himself and shook it off. Demanding that the house lights be turned up, he barked, “Hey, this isn’t a wake.”

The remark was off-the-cuff. But it reminds us of another sobering reality that has to be weighing on him: Wrestlers have been dying left and right since this book was first published. The community has mourned the passing of Freddie Blassie, Lou Thesz, Ed “The Sheik” Farhat, and Tim “Mr. Wrestling” Woods—all of whom led full and relatively healthy lives. It has also buried stars who haven’t.

On May 18, 2002, Davey Boy Smith died of a heart attack after spending two decades in constant pain. The last, and most fateful accident, happened to him when he broke his back wrestling for WCW. It pushed him over the edge and into a methadone addiction. His wife, Diana Hart, threw him out and he became romantically involved with his sister-in-law, Andrea Hart. He was in bed with her when he died, though just a day earlier he’d talked with Diana about coming home to her and his kids, Georgia and Harry.

The WWE argues that there is no evidence that steroids killed Smith. But they couldn’t have helped his heart. Family members say he was taking heavy doses of steroids in a last-ditch bid to make a comeback with WWE. “Right up to the end, Davey was ‘roided out,” Bruce Hart says. Even Andrea concedes that “Davey was in pain because he’d put on fifteen or twenty pounds of muscle weight. Some days, he had a hard time walking.”

It’s not just has-beens who are succumbing to a decade of fully ratcheted violence. At Wrestlemania, in March of 2003, Kurt Angle and Steve Austin performed with degenerative neck conditions that were so serious, both had been advised by their doctors that they risked crippling themselves. They decided to go on, anyway. Angle has opted for surgery to extend his career, while the thirty-eight-year-old Austin, who spent the night before the match in the hospital, has decided to retire from in-ring competition. At the time of the match, Austin was on probation for an assault on his wife in June 2002. He’s since blamed the incident on the constant pain that he’s been forced to accept.

McMahon’s empire never seemed as fragile as it did on April 27, 2003, when he addressed his touring company prior to the Backlash pay-per-view at the Centrum in Worcester, Massachusetts. He told them that they needed to tone things down, work slower matches, and protect their bodies from the suicide stunts that drove the company to its heights in the late 1990s.

McMahon has been masterful at exploiting violence. But the speech he gave that day suggests that he sees another backlash coming—part of the inevitable cycle that causes fans to veer between excitement, boredom, blame, and rediscovery.

Right now, WWE is teetering in the space between boredom and blame. And the May 2003 death of one of the most beloved acts in the business, “Miss Elizabeth” Hulette, hasn’t helped matters. Hulette’s sweet looks were indelibly linked to the WWF’s eat-your-vitamins-and-say-your-prayers era. But cops who found her passed out in an Atlanta condo on May 1 saw a different woman. She still bore the bruises from a domestic abuse call that had brought them to the same residence weeks before.

Her live-in lover, Lawrence “Lex Luger” Pfohl was charged in that abuse, though the charges were later dropped. He was not charged in her death, which was ruled accidental after the medical examiner found that she choked on Vodka and pain pills. Pfohl, however, didn’t get away clean. Cops who searched the condo busted him for possessing massive amounts of steroids.

Pfohl’s arrest was prominently covered in major newspapers, as well as on a program called
Confidential
that McMahon launched in 2002. As a wrestling version of a newsmagazine, the show is a useful tool for the WWE to spin events before its critics can. In this case, the coverage painted Pfohl as a fuck-up who’s hurt everyone who’s ever befriended him. But the truth is that Pfohl’s relationship with Hulette is part of a calamitous continuum in wrestling. The business creates stars, watches them self-destruct, and then pedals their destruction as infotainment.

We’d like to believe that the tragedies of the last few years will push McMahon into a new direction. Maybe the speech he gave his wrestlers, encouraging them to take more care of themselves, is a start. Wrestling, at its best, is a vehicle for storytelling, and he’s the last man standing from a generation that understands this. The trouble is, he’s also the last man standing.

Increasingly, McMahon is reaching back into the past to rely on past glories. Even his choice of Madison Square Garden in 2004 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Wrestlemania, which began there, feels more derivative than bold. McMahon may be one of the four hundred richest people on
Forbes’
list of wealthy Americans, but as he runs out of glories to resurrect (and stars to help resurrect them), he seems more out-of-step than ever. No one is saying “no” to the king of the ring except the fans.