Australian Pro Wrestling Directory
Wrestling with a global phenomenon (The Australian)
WWF boss Vince McMahon is both colourful entertainer and shrewd businessman,
writes Kerrie Murphy
April 18, 2002
UNLESS you know a wristlock from a wristwatch, the name Vince McMahon may be unfamiliar. But to 500 million viewers worldwide who watch World Wrestling Federation programming every week, he's Mr McMahon, the maniacal owner of the WWF who once invited a wrestler to kiss his arse, literally.
In real life, McMahon is the not-so-maniacal owner and president of the WWF, who bought a regional wrestling promotion from his father Vincent K. McMahon in 1982 and turned it into sports entertainment – a hybrid of drama, comedy and athleticism. World Wrestling Federation Entertainment is now a publicly listed company with an annual turnover of $US48 million ($91.6 million) and the number one merchandising licence in the US.
McMahon is now taking the WWF live events international and is hoping to attract between 50,000 and 55,000 people to Melbourne's Colonial Stadium on August 10 with an event that will feature The Rock, Hollywood Hulk Hogan and current WWF undisputed champion Triple H.
While the WWF toured Australia almost 20 years ago, the company has mainly focused on the North American market, with a couple of tours of Britain annually. But when buy rates for the WWF's monthly pay-per-view events in Australia, available on pay TV for between $22 and $28 each, regularly outsell other PPVs by three to one and its programs Raw and Smackdown (on Fox Sports and Fox 8 respectively) average audiences of 110,000 and 84,000, it's a market not to be ignored. Organisations such as the World Wrestling Allstars have been doing big business here and in Britain with live shows comprised mainly of former WWF stars.
"I think they're just trying to beat us to where we should have been all along. To be the first in and grab some of that, which is all right," McMahon said when he was in Sydney last week to announce an Australian tour.
He says "there's a little bit of the [Mr McMahon] character in me. I mean we're both aggressive, both outspoken, but the character is overbearing and unfair and I'd like to think I'm not that way as a human being," he pauses. "Although some people in the company might say there are not too many differences."
On top of that, "Mr McMahon" also started wrestling occasionally in the late 1990s. Last year, the 56-year-old broke his tailbone when thrown from the ring on to the announcer's table by an opponent.
This can make life difficult for the real McMahon: "On the pay-per-view on the Sunday night, maybe I was in the ring and took a bunch of chairshots or something and the next day, I have to be at the production meeting and guiding everyone through the creative of what's going to happen on Monday.
"There have been times I will absolutely draw a complete blank in the middle of sentence and it would sound like I was talking complete Greek and I wouldn't realise it. All you can do is laugh. Post-concussion syndrome they call it and that's one of the symptoms, but as long as it doesn't become to bad, it seems all right."
Other entertainment honchos may well be lining up to receive a few hits on the noggin, because McMahon can afford to laugh at concussions. The WWF's ratings in the US may be down from the 1999-2000 period, but the company's Raw, a two-hour program, is still consistently in the top ten regular cable programs and Smackdown, the company's free-to-air offering for UPN is the network's highest rating show. Both are watched by about 20 million households in the US.
The company has a restaurant and nightclub in New York's Times Square and publishes two magazines with a combined circulation of 7.5 million.
THEIR fans are some of the most devoted in the business, 68,237 of them packed into the Toronto Skydome in March for Wrestlemania X8, wrestling's Superbowl.
In March 2001 the company purchased its main rival, Time Warner's World Championship Wrestling and has since absorbed much of the talent from Extreme Championship Wrestling after its bankruptcy. But it was not an outcome McMahon anticipated.
"We are our own competition now. It's not anything we aspired to be. I think competition, generally speaking, is very good – if it's good competition. We always thought there'd be WCW and I hoped that ECW would continue and, quite frankly, I was supporting financially the ECW organisation to a certain extent," he says. "No one ever knew, and of course Paul Heyman [former ECW owner, on screen and off] would cut his anti-WWF promos so everyone knew the WWF wasn't supporting it."
Not everything McMahon touches turns to gold. Last year his off-season "extreme" competitor to the National Football League, XFL, shut down after only one season losing the WWF and NBC $US35 million a piece. But McMahon shrugs it off like a chairshot.
"There's really no lesson to learn in terms of the XFL, I'm very proud of having experimented with that," he says. "If you're an entrepreneur as I am, it's important to be able to, from time to time, take a swing at things. You have to understand the downside before you do and if you are willing to accept the downside . . . then you go ahead."
This international tour will bring the number of live events in 2002 to 350, with the tour already visiting Singapore, Japan and Malaysia. Language is no barrier, with fans at a Japanese event booing the Japanese translator because he wasn't part of the usual WWF experience.
"My personal view is that America's greatest entertainment export is the WWF. We are really, in a microcosm, what a lot of people think America is," says McMahon. "When you think of the brashness of our characters and the aggressive nature and the sexuality that's in our show, and of course the in-ring content is totally understandable in any language, any culture in the world."
So where to now for McMahon? Certainly stopping isn't an option. "I can't imagine me in a little cabin somewhere, in a rocking chair smoking a pipe, waiting to die. It's not what I want to do. I'm having more fun in the business now than I ever have," he says. "Although from a physical standpoint, I think my days in the ring are numbered."