Exclusive: New biography plumbs the unlikely world of WWE’s Vince McMahon

One of the most visible corporate leaders of a Fairfield County company is Vince McMahon, executive chairman of Stamford-based WWE (NYSE:WWE). A second-generation professional wrestling promoter, McMahon grew a noisy little regional promotion into an international multimedia empire that has entertained two generations of squared-circle fans.

As a business leader, McMahon has generated a surplus number of scandals and setbacks, including a 1993 federal indictment that alleged he supplied illegal anabolic steroids to his professional wrestlers ”“ he was acquitted in a jury trial. In January, McMahon aggressively forced his way back into the WWE leadership that he resigned last summer amid press reports that he paid millions of dollars in hush money to former female employees millions of dollars who accused him of sexual harassment. One of the reasons that WWE cited for his return was to orchestrate “a review of its strategic alternatives with the goal being to maximize value for all WWE shareholders” ”“ which was widely seen as a fancy way of saying McMahon was eager to sell the company where he was the majority shareholder.

McMahon”™s rise to fame and power is the subject of Abraham Riesman”™s new book “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.” Ahead of the book”™s March 28 release by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Riesman spoke with the Business Journals about Stamford”™s most conspicuous C-suite occupant.

What inspired you to create a book on Vince McMahon?

Why not? He is a fascinating and underappreciated ”“ or at least under researched ”“ American character who’s had a tremendous amount of influence. It came up just in a conversation with my spouse, S.I. Rosenbaum, who’s also a journalist and a longtime editor ”“ we were talking in February of 2020 shortly after I had my first draft accepted of “True Believer,” my previous book [a biography on comic book artist Stan Lee], and therefore I was contractually allowed to pitch another book. I was brainstorming with her and one of us said, “What about Vince McMahon as a biography subject?” I don’t remember which one of us, but we were saying that’s a really compelling idea that hasn’t really been studied in the proper way yet.

Did McMahon or anybody from the WWE cooperate on the creation of the book?

No. I reached out to their publicist the day before the book was announced, just to give them a courtesy heads-up in the hopes that they might want to give me at least a little access to some things or somebody. The publicist was very polite with me and said, “Thanks for the heads-up, and I will see what I can do about access, but don’t get your hopes up.”

So, I’ve tried, but it was an independent work and I think they don’t like being involved these days in anything they can’t control and have final say over.

Over the years, McMahon”™s on-camera persona during the WWF and WWE broadcasts evolved from the somewhat mild-mannered announcer in the 1970s and 1980s into the more sinister “Mr. McMahon” persona. Which of the two was closer to the real Vince McMahon?

The announcer was very much just a character who was more of a cipher than anything else. The Vince McMahon announcer was pretty distant from what Vince actually is. The main defining trait for him was that he was the voice of righteousness ”“ he was the one who would get disgusted with the heels when he was doing little interviews with them, or when he was noting they were cheating in the ring. That’s not really how Vince thinks ”“ Vince is not somebody who is deeply moralistic.

I think that would be obvious to anybody who has watched the programming that this is not somebody who sets out to be didactic and teach people to be better. This is somebody who knows how to push buttons and get your attention. That’s his goal, to entertain or at least to grab eyeballs. And in that regard, he’s much closer to Mr. McMahon in that Mr. McMahon is somebody who will do anything ”“ the character will stop at nothing to get what’s good for business. I think that’s how Vince approaches things, in contrast to the announcer character who’s very righteous.

The Mr. McMahon character overlaps greatly with Vince McMahon, although I would argue it overlaps even more with Vince Sr. ”“ it”™s his father who I think really was the inspiration for Mr. McMahon, whether Vince is even conscious of that or not.

In the mid-1980s, WWF became a pop cultural phenomenon ”“ it was almost like a musclebound vaudeville show whose larger-than-life zany characters were embraced by a wide public. Was McMahon surprised about how quickly and how wide WWF popularity took off during that era?

That’s a great question. I don’t know how surprised he was, but I can’t imagine he could have seen precisely how quickly he would come to dominate the ecosystem. I don’t think even he predicted it would be so just fast.

If you think about it, he begins buying the company in four installments in 1982. Less than three years later, he’s doing the first WrestleMania. And it’s this massive success. By three years after that, there really aren’t any competitors left. I think the speed was surprising for him.

There were a lot of contingent, very arbitrary things that happened that benefited Vince. One of the major factors in WrestleMania getting over the top in its ticket sales was that the night before WrestleMania, Hulk Hogan and Mr. T hosted “Saturday Night Live.” That was just because there was a last-minute cancellation from the host [comic Steve Landesberg] and Dick Ebersole, who knew Vince called him up and said, “Let’s have some of your talent on here.” If the original host didn’t have to cancel, things would have gone very differently. That’s just one example.

Luck wasn’t on McMahon”™s side when he tried to launch the World Bodybuilding Federation and twice tried to start the XFL Why did those interests fail, whereas WWF / WWE succeeded?

A big reason is because WWF / WWE has succeeded so much. Everyone assumes that when Vince does one of these other projects is just going to replicate that formula. And that formula is something that America feels very ambiguously about ”“ it’s enormously watched, but the people who are tastemakers generally looked down on wrestling or, at best, write about it with some degree of shame that they liked it. It’s unusual for wrestling to get treated as a serious subject and as a serious product.

When you have something like the World Bodybuilding Federation or the XFL, which were billed as legitimate sporting competitions, then you’re always going to have that cloud over there with people going “Yeah, but I mean, it’s probably fake, like the wrestling that he does, right?”
That was a huge problem with the WBF ”“ there was this suspicion that Gary Strydom, then the most highly paid of the new bodybuilders for this federation, was guaranteed to win the first competition ”“ and, sure enough, he did.

With the first go-round of XFL, you had all this stuff around it that even if it wasn’t fake, it was very trashy ”“ the cheerleader cams and the change in the rules to make it more brutal. So, in both cases, you had suspicion but also kind of poor execution.

The second go-round of the XFL very possibly could have been Vince’s first big success outside of wrestling. But his good friend in the White House decided to bungle Covid, and all of a sudden there’s no sporting events ”“ right when the first season is starting. So that then went kaput.

Speaking of that good friend in the White House, Donald Trump isn’t known for having a great many personal friends. But Vince McMahon is one of them. What is the kinship between these two?

It’s a boring answer, but they have a lot in common. These are men who come from difficult fathers who were very powerful and rich, who consider themselves men of the people despite the fact they enjoy great wealth and in their young days had a great deal of privilege ”“ it is a little more complicated for Vince because he also lived in poverty and kind of a bifurcated existence. But be that as it may, he and Trump both have this sort of chip on their shoulders and belief that they can bounce back from anything. A self-confidence that is so powerful, that it can overcome gravity. Basically, they both bounce back from every defeat, and they both have a complete disdain for respectable for mainstream respectability.

Trump doesn’t have close companions that he confides in. Sam Nunberg from the first Trump campaign told me that there were only two people that Trump took private phone calls with: Mark Burnett of “The Apprentice” and Vince. It’s a pretty startling claim.

For both of them, respectability is not a factor. Shame is not a factor. Guilt is not a factor. Regret is not a factor. They’re both people who are very driven toward playing out their personal grudges, predilections and peccadilloes ”“ and in a public forum. Vince was doing it before Trump was, and then Trump very much followed in his political career.

And they also are both political mercenaries who have found themselves in the Republican Party. Both of them have supported Democrats in the past and have the sort of weird, ambiguous haphazard politics. But they’ve both found themselves in the deep in the red camp now. And Linda McMahon, as well.

There have been a lot of people online who”™ve made comments that today’s marriage between Vince and Linda McMahon is just in name only. Are those claims genuine or an example of online mischief making?

I hesitate because I didn’t say anything about that in the book ”“ it’s all hearsay as far as I know. But you certainly hear people tell you that it is not a close or intimate marriage, at least as of now. Vince, by his own admission, in somewhat infamous interview with Playboy was not always faithful.

It’s hard for me to say ”“ I feel a little reluctant to comment on the nature of a marriage. But you certainly hear from people who know them that these days they’re not as close as they used to be.

Earlier this year, McMahon made a very dramatic comeback, muscling his way back to the leadership of WWE. And he stated that in a somewhat opaque way that he was looking for a potential sale for the company. What do you see as the company’s future? Do you think anybody’s going to want to buy the company, considering some of the baggage that comes with it ”“ particularly McMahon himself?

I could see somebody buying it. It’s still an enormously lucrative business ”“ it has brand recognition up the wazoo.

I have no clue what Vince is thinking right now, and I’m not alone in that. Once he stepped back, people stopped having a glimpse of what’s going on in his head. There’s no clarity about what his plans are ”“ veteran wrestling reporters who have been doing this for 30 or 40 years can’t get solid answers about what his plans are or even what he’s doing right now. There are all these conflicting narratives about whether or not Vince has gone back to controlling the creative aspects in the show or whether he’s just in it for financial and political control.

I don’t have that answer and I really think no one at the company knows what he’s planning to do.