Vince McMahon doesn’t like to think of himself as being in the wrestling business.
I don’t think it’s overly presumptuous of me to say that. True, I don’t know Vince McMahon.
I’ve never met him. I’ve never been involved in professional wrestling in any capacity
other than as a spectator. I’ve been a fan since I was seven years old, but that’s all I’ve been.
Even so, observing that Vince McMahon doesn’t like to think of himself as being
in the wrestling business doesn’t exactly require secret knowledge.
You don’t have to look very hard to find video clips of Vince McMahon describing himself as
pretty much anything other than a pro wrestling promoter. In Barry Blaustein’s widely seen 1999
documentary Beyond the Mat, there’s Vince smugly declaring, “We make movies.” In one of WWE’s
in-house documentaries about the history of their one-time competitor World Championship Wrestling,
you can see Vince recounting the phone call he got from Ted Turner, who had just purchased WCW
and was calling Vince to announce that he was now “in the wrasslin’ business,”
to which Vince replied, “Glad to know it, Ted — I’m in the entertainment business.”
By the way, if you need a single moment in history that illustrates what a self-deluded ascended
carny Vince McMahon is, let me repeat what I just said: Vince McMahon, the wrestling promoter,
claimed he was not actually in the wrestling business but was in fact
in the entertainment business, and he made this transparent,
outrageously self-serving claim to Ted Turner, the head of Turner Entertainment,
and years later bragged about it, on camera, because he thought it made him look good.
Anyway, here’s the point of all this. I was watching the recent series of
documentaries produced by A&E about WWE wrestlers and I realized that, in a way,
Vince McMahon’s claims about not being in the pro wrestling business are now
true. Because Vince’s company, WWE, isn’t really in the wrestling business anymore. It’s in the WWE
business. And these new A&E biographies demonstrate that pretty damn clearly.
I don’t know of any company that celebrates itself as shamelessly, as publicly, and as constantly, as
WWE does. A big part of this over the last twenty years or so has been the documentaries the company
produced about its history and its greatest stars, first for DVDs, then for its streaming service,
the WWE Network. As you might expect from a company that guards its legacy so jealously and
rewrites its own history so effortlessly, these in-house documentaries are mostly whitewashes.
And unfortunately, the new A&E documentaries aren’t much different. They aren’t being
produced directly by WWE, but they are being made with WWE’s involvement, which means
they’re telling the stories WWE wants told, the way it wants them told. That doesn’t mean
the A&E docs ignore the dark or controversial aspects of their subjects’ lives. But it does
mean they place the blame for that darkness and controversy somewhere other than the company.
The most egregious example of this, for me, comes during the Roddy Piper biography.
We’re shown a clip of Piper from an episode of HBO’s Real Sports in 2003 where he speaks
about the rash of premature deaths in pro wrestling. “They’re all dead,” Piper says,
“and nobody cares.” And he places blame for this on wrestling promoters — not specifically
Vince McMahon, but presumably Vince McMahon is one of the promoters he’s talking about,
and virtually all of the high profile wrestlers who died young in the 1990s and early 2000s
had spent significant portions of their careers working for McMahon.
The producers of the documentary could have left this bit out. That episode of Real Sports
was a hot topic of conversation at the time it originally aired, but it’s mostly forgotten now,
especially by the casual fans who are presumably the target audience for these
A&E biographies — die-hards like me already know most of this stuff. But the clip of
Piper from Real Sports is shown, and subsequently undermined by a clip from a present-day interview
with Piper’s son, who says his dad was just going through a really rough time back then
and surely didn’t mean to say that the shocking number of wrestlers dying young implied anything
sinister about the wrestling business or its most successful promoter, perish the thought — hey,
it’s just a tough business, that’s the way it is, it’s nobody’s fault.
Then, as if this segment weren’t already gross enough, we hear from Vince McMahon himself, who
lets us know how affronted he was to hear Roddy Piper say such terrible things about his company —
his billion-dollar company that still treats wrestlers not as employees but as independent
contractors, fails to provide for their health care and retirement, blocks them from unionizing,
and only started taking the problem of drug abuse among its wrestlers seriously when it began to
damage the image of the company. And when Vince thinks back to that time Roddy Piper talked openly
about the devastating effect that had on the lives of wrestlers, he’s just a little bummed about it.
The segment of the Roddy Piper A&E biography that deals with Piper’s Real Sports interview
is part of a pattern that is evident throughout this series of documentaries.
Well known incidents in the lives of the documentary subjects that show WWE in a
negative light are either framed in such a way that the company seems innocent of any wrongdoing,
or ignored completely. We can see an example of the latter in the A&E documentary about Booker T.
Or, rather, we can’t see it. Because it’s not there. That’s the . . . that’s the problem.
Booker T is an intriguing choice for a documentary subject for a couple of reasons. For one thing,
his career hasn’t been celebrated nearly as much as those of the other wrestlers featured
in this A&E series, all of whom have received DVD sets and documentaries produced by WWE.
For another, Booker doesn’t have nearly as many personal tragedies or skeletons in his closet.
Yes, he served some time in prison as a young man, and that’s an important part of the documentary,
but that all happened before he got into pro wrestling. As far as his wrestling career goes,
Booker’s reputation is nearly spotless. So far as I’ve ever heard, he didn’t have a reputation
of being difficult to work with, he never hurt anybody, he never abused his wife or his kids,
he never had a drug problem. He seems like a nice, talented guy who worked hard, had a great career,
and is more or less universally liked and respected by his peers. His name did come up
in relation to a steroid scandal that led to the suspension or departure of several WWE wrestlers
in 2007, but Booker denied having anything to do with it and nothing serious ever came of it
— Booker left WWE, worked for TNA Wrestling for a few years, then returned to WWE. That’s about it.
The 2007 steroid scandal isn’t mentioned at all in the Booker T documentary,
and that definitely qualifies as an omission that serves WWE’s preferred narrative. But
that’s not the omission I want to talk about. I want to talk about the fact that Booker T’s A&E
biography says absolutely nothing about Booker T’s match with Triple H at Wrestlemania 19.
So, during the build-up to Wrestlemania 19 in 2003, Booker T — a babyface at
the time — won a battle royal to earn a World Title shot at Wrestlemania. The World Champion
was Triple H. A few weeks before Wrestlemania,
on an episode of Monday Night Raw, Triple H cut a promo where he said to Booker,
“Somebody like you doesn’t get to be a World Champion. That’s reserved for people like me.”
Triple H goes on to demean Booker T by saying that his role on the show was to be an entertainer,
to make “people like me laugh.” He invites Booker to “do a little dance for me,” refers to his
“nappy hair,” and declares that at Wrestlemania Booker will do what people like him always do:
lose. The promo is condescending, it’s insulting, and its racist overtones are unmistakable.
It also has an uncomfortable ring of truth to it — when Triple H says that people like Booker
T don’t become champions, he’s stating a fact — in 2003 there had been only three Black men
to ever hold World Championships in major North American wrestling companies, and one of them
was Booker himself, who was a five-time World Champion in WCW, which by then had
been out of business for two years. The other two Black World Champions were Ron Simmons,
who won the WCW World Title in 1992, and The Rock, who won his first WWF Championship in 1998. And
since pro wrestling is a work — not a legitimate competitive sport — the lack of Black World
Champions isn’t because there weren’t any Black wrestlers who were good enough to win the title.
There had been numerous Black wrestlers who displayed outstanding talent and found
great popularity with the fans. But other than Simmons and The Rock and Booker, none of them
got anywhere near the World Championship, because the promoters and match-makers they worked for,
who almost without exception were white, didn’t see them as championship material.
In other words, the racist attitudes expressed by Triple H during a heel promo as part of a
storyline on a show were actually pervasive in the wrestling industry. Triple H was saying
what a lot of wrestlers and fans alike knew to be true:
that people like Booker T — Black people — had been mostly excluded from the World Title picture
in major wrestling companies for decades. And he was saying it in the voice of a successful,
arrogant, racist white man — exactly the sort of person who had done the excluding.
And here’s the thing: up until Wrestlemania, I was fine with all of that. Triple H was the heel.
His promo was definitely racist, but he didn’t use any slurs,
and he didn’t do anything that seemed designed to get fans on his side. He comes across as smug
and contemptible, and when he finishes talking and leaves the ring, all anyone in that arena
or watching at home wants to see is Booker T beat his ass and win that World Championship.
But that’s not what happened. Triple H won their match at Wrestlemania. He beat Booker T
and retained his World Championship. And it was a relatively clean victory — Ric Flair, who was
at ringside as Triple H’s manager, interfered to injure Booker’s knee, which played an important
part in the match. But overall, the match wasn’t laid out to make Booker T seem like a serious
threat, and when Triple H won it wasn’t a case of the dastardly heel cheating his way to victory and
escaping with his championship — it was a case of Triple H winning because he was the better man.
WWE chose to present a storyline where its white, racist World Champion defended
the title against a Black challenger at the biggest show of the year, and won.
And the A&E documentary doesn’t mention it once.
I suppose one might try to justify it by saying that the story has too much inside
baseball that wouldn’t be of interest to casual fans. But the documentary portrays
a good deal of Booker T’s wrestling career, including his early years wrestling in Texas,
his years as a member of the tag team Harlem Heat with his brother Stevie Ray, and his breakthrough
as a singles star in WCW that eventually led to him winning that company’s World Title in 2000.
Wrestlemania 19 was the only time Booker T ever wrestled for a World Title at Wrestlemania.
Any retrospective on his wrestling career would be incomplete without at least acknowledging it.
Booker’s Blackness and the racism he faced as a result of it, are mentioned elsewhere in
the documentary. We’re told of how fans would shout racial slurs at Booker and his brother
in the early days of their careers. The rarity of Black World Champions is even acknowledged in the
context of Booker winning his first WCW World Title, as is how important it was to Booker
for someone who looked like him to carry the top title, to represent and inspire young Black fans.
There are other significant events in Booker’s career that are absent from the documentary, and
based on things he’s said about it elsewhere, Booker himself doesn’t
seem to be carrying any resentment over how Wrestlemania 19 played out, but even so,
for a documentary that both chronicles his in-ring career and acknowledges the obstacle
that racism presented to Booker and Black wrestlers in general, to completely ignore
Wrestlemania 19 feels like a cynical and calculated decision on the part of WWE.
There are similar omissions in other biographies in the series. In the Shawn Michaels episode,
there’s a lot of talk about Shawn’s struggles with drug addiction in the 1990s and early 2000s,
but no one brings up the fact that Shawn was allowed to continue to work on live TV,
potentially endangering himself and those he was in the ring with, despite the fact that his
drug problem, which continued to spiral out of control, was an open secret within the company.
Vince McMahon could have pulled Shawn off the road and sent him to rehab, but he didn’t,
because — and I’m just guessing here, based on the available evidence — as long as Shawn
was able to talk and wrestle and make money, Vince didn’t give a shit about his drug problem.
Steve Austin’s biography makes no mention whatsoever of his history of spousal abuse.
Randy Savage’s biography does mention how paranoid and controlling he was with
at least two of the women in his life — his wife and manager Elizabeth, and later his
girlfriend and manager Stephanie Bellars, who worked under the name Gorgeous George — but
details like Savage locking Elizabeth in a dressing room during shows so that no
one else could talk to her are presented with a kind of bemused shaked of the head,
as though there was nothing anyone in the company could have done about it at the time.
Mick Foley’s episode spends some time discussing his legendary Hell in a Cell
match against the Undertaker in 1998, where he took two bone-shattering bumps from the
top of the cage, one of which left him with one of his teeth sticking out of his nose,
but it makes sure to include how Vince McMahon approached Mick after the match and told him,
“Thank you for what you did for this company tonight, but i don’t ever
want you to do anything like that again.” That Vince. What a guy.
I’d say, “I wonder what would have happened had something gone wrong and one of those
bumps killed Foley that night,” but I don’t need to wonder. I know what would have happened: Vince
would have gone right on with the show. Because that’s exactly what did happen a year later,
when Owen Hart died in a botched stunt during a live pay-per-view. That incident,
one of the most infamous tragedies in the history of professional wrestling, is discussed during the
biography devoted to Bret Hart, Owen’s brother, but the company’s responsibility for Owen’s death,
and McMahon’s callous decision to continue the show, are not addressed.
I think you get the point.
There’s a brief, revealing moment in the A&E Biography of the Ultimate Warrior that I think
tells us everything we need to know about this series of documentaries. The Warrior episode
carries out the most blatant sanitizing of its subject of the series — the Ultimate Warrior was
not a good person, he was a bigoted, egotistical hypocrite, but the A&E doc lightly touches on
this and then waves it off by telling us that Warrior was “a complicated person” — how many
garbage humans have sought an acquittal in the court of public opinion through that defense?
But the moment I’m referring to isn’t one of those. It happens during a clip of an
outtake from a backstage promo Warrior was recording in the early 1990s.
Warrior had been rude to a young fan at an airport, and when Vince McMahon heard about it,
he ordered Warrior to record an apology video to the kid. In the A&E documentary
we see Warrior struggling to record a “heartfelt” apology for something he doesn’t seem to even
remember doing. With Warrior growing increasingly frustrated after several blown takes,
McMahon says to him, “It’s a work! That’s all it is. A work. We’re working here.”
The apology didn’t mean anything to Vince McMahon, and he didn’t care if it meant anything
to Warrior. He didn’t care if it was heartfelt, or true. He just needed to get it on tape. Because it
made his company, and by extension him, look good. That’s the only thing that mattered.
To Vince McMahon and WWE, that’s the only thing that’s ever mattered.