Motley Fool Money - Vince McMahon’s Advantage

Episode Date: March 19, 2023

If you hate Vince McMahon, then maybe you’ll buy a tee-shirt for his rival. And that’s a great outcome for the WWE. Abraham Josephine Riesman is the author of “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.” Ricky Mulvey caught up with Riesman to discuss:  - Vince McMahon’s early life as a “pretty nice kid”, and the parts of his story he doesn’t want wrestling fans to know. - WWE’s potential deal with the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. - The Montreal Screwjob, and the groundwork for the modern WWE. - A story about Saddam Hussein’s side job as a wrestling promoter, Andre the Giant, and a golden gun.  Company discussed: WWE Host: Ricky Mulvey Guest: Abraham Josephine Riesman Engineer: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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He was also very ruthless. You're right. There was nothing about him that felt nostalgic about the way things used to be in wrestling or the way things were in wrestling. He wanted to remake the world in his image, and he dreamed big. You know, say what you will about him. He was the one who said, I can conquer. And he did.

I'm Ricky Mulvey, and that's Abraham Josephine Reesman. She's the author of Ringmaster, Vince McMahon in the Unmaking of America. I caught up with Reesman to talk about one key quality that made McMahon an effective CEO, the parts of his story that he doesn't want wrestling fans to know, and she tells one of the best anecdotes that we've ever had on the show. I don't want to spoil it, but it involves Saddam Hussein, Andre the Giant, and a solid gold gun. Vince McMahon seems to be better than pretty much anyone else

that just getting people fired up. How's he so good at that? He pokes people's buttons in their brains. how is he so good at that? One thing is he learned a lot from his father. His father was a wrestling promoter, and they had a very complicated relationship because for the first 12 years of Vince's life,

his biological father was completely absent. He didn't know his father. He didn't even know how to pronounce his birth last name and went by the last name of his stepfather. But when he reunited with his father at age 12, around 1957, he then launched into the world of wrestling and really became, as they would say, a mark. You know, he became very, although he wasn't, unlike, that term is often used to describe people who are fooled by wrestling,

but he got a front row seat to how wrestling actually operates because his father was this promoter. So he got to see how the sausage is made. And that was increasingly true over the course of his time knowing his dad. And his dad was a part of this kind of. oligarchy of wizards who knew how to push people's buttons. He was part of the National Wrestling Alliance, which was essentially this semi-legal cartel that was formed by a tiny group of owners of wrestling promotions who then directed how the whole marketplace went.

So they were rivals, but they were also in collusion. And there was kind of this dark art of how to produce wrestling that was passed down behind the scenes by initiates. And Vince Sr., Vince's dad, had been an initiate because his dad had invested in pro wrestling in the 1930s and gotten the family, which had previously been involved in other sports, involved in it.

And, you know, there are a lot of factors that contribute to Vince's ability to fire people up. But I think a lot of it, you can't discount the fact that he learned at the feet of somebody who, had been brought into this strange world of wrestling and taught these fancy but also crude ways of getting an audience to their feet. He was also a bit more ruthless and savvy than any of the other people in the syndicate that controlled wrestling at the time. Yeah, well, he took a big risk,

which was he said, this world as it exists is not one that I can profit maximally. from so let's just bring about the end of the world now the the fact is the wrestling cartel was probably going to have to break up in some way because of the advent of cable television of national television for wrestling um which had happened in the late 70s with the launch of tbs ted turner's company um which you know had wrestling on it and so the the the wrestling economy was going to change no matter what but vince was the one who was unafraid to burn down the existing structures. Now, that's always a very risky move.

And one thing I try to convey in the book is that it was not guaranteed to work. There were a lot of things that were, and not only was it not guaranteed to work, a lot of its success had to do with things that were completely out of Vince's control and had nothing to do with his skill or savvy. You know, I always think of the fact that, you know, Steve Landisberg was supposed to host Saturday Night Live the night before WrestleMania won, which was the most expensive endeavor Vince had ever invested in. And abruptly, there was an

opening and that led to Hulk Hogan and Mr. T who were going to be in the main event of WrestleMania hosting Saturday Night Live. That was just a, you know, some, I can't remember, I think it was a family emergency happened with the original host. And Vince really got lucky. He was also very ruthless. You're right. There was nothing about him that felt nostalgic about the way things used to be in wrestling or the way things were in wrestling. He wanted to remake the world in his image, and he dreamed big, you know.

He say what you will about him. He was the one who said, I can conquer. And he did. You also went to North Carolina to his hometown to get the real perspective. In town, plural. He moved around. But yeah, I went to the hollers in the back. the back roads to find his origins in North Carolina.

What did you learn about his early life, his high school persona that may veer away from the official narrative? Yeah, I mean, I was very surprised to learn that Vince was actually kind of a nice kid. That was the big surprise, because Vince's account of his childhood, which he's only given a couple of times, and not in more than 20 years. You know, there was this brief period around the turn of the millennium

where he saw it as advantageous to talk about himself. But although that stuff had been taken as gospel, I found out that it was far from certain. The big distinction being that he used to talk about himself in these interviews as just a little rapscallion, you know, a fire plug who was constantly getting into fights and was a problem student when he went to military school for two years and almost got expelled and they had a court-martial for him,

all this stuff, was getting into fights with Marines when he was living in Havelock, North Carolina, that sort of thing. I'm pretty sure all of that was made up. I found people who went to school with him. I found people who grew up with him. And there was a universal consensus that as of when he was in North Carolina, at least, pretty nice kid. Not that remarkable. Not super dumb. Not super smart. kind of middle of the road and people liked him. The one thing that really set him apart, and this was very interesting to find out, although I didn't find out in North Carolina,

this was just through looking at yearbooks, and then cold calling people. What was interesting was I learned that he started doing pro wrestling shows when he was in high school, which Vince had never talked about. Vince has never once talked about his first pro wrestling shows, which were produced at the military school he attended,

in Virginia for two years. And, you know, I got multiple people on the record, including his high school roommate, saying, yeah, he was ape man McMahon, McMahon, you know, APE. And he had costumes for everybody, and we'd put on these little shows. Vince has never talked about this, because Vince wants you to think that his youth

was him being a rough and tumble near do well. And that just doesn't seem to be what the research backs up. Vince McMahon is an alleged sexual predator. He's allegedly helped cover up a murder. There's plenty of things to talk about in terms of controversy. But I think one thing you highlight in the book that made him successful was that hate was not a barrier for him to work with anybody. That's right. I mean, hate is an emotion that we tend to associate with failure, right?

you know, if you are hated in the public eye, then how successful can you be? Well, we've entered a world where that hate is no barrier to success and hate is no barrier to relationships. Vince was a living example of this before it started to really pervade the political sphere, but Vince figured out how to profit off of people who dislike him, whether that's the audience or wrestlers or other people involved in the wrestling industry that has worked with. He has managed to make himself in both of those vectors the winner no matter what. If you love him or you hate him, he's the one who makes the money off of wrestling. There's a rival wrestling promotion to AEW that has done very well at being very cool and hip, but it is not the business juggernaut that WW is.

W.W.E. remains the hegemon for wrestling in the United States and Canada, and Vince is the hegemon within WWE. So he gets to kind of set the agenda to a certain extent. And that means if you want to make money in wrestling, whether you are an active wrestler or you are a retired one, especially if you're a retired one, because there ain't no pension plan or union for wrestling, You have to work with Vince. No matter how much he screwed you, you have to come crawling back to Vince if you want to draw a further paycheck

for merchandising or for appearances. And then when it comes to the audience, similarly, because he's the person who profits from this company, when he was a character, he would make himself into this villain, this person who was really loathed and whose name was Vince McMahon,

Vincent Kennedy McMahon. And so people would say, oh, screw that guy. But then they would say, they would put that hatred into action by, you know, buying the t-shirt of his rival, Stone Cold Steve Austin, who, of course, you know, all those t-shirts were lining the pockets of Vince McMahon. So it's really a clever gambit. If you can pull that off, you can make the world work for you. I mean, this was part of the Trump success, right?

Was this idea of if you love him or you hate him, you're paying attention to him. and that is what he needs. I want to take a detour. And that is to an anecdote that I cannot get out of my head, which is Saddam Hussein's involvement in pro wrestling. Saddam Hussein, big pro wrestling guy. Who would have thought? Yep. Saddam Hussein Alti Kriy of Baghdad.

He apparently, according to his high school classmates, his youthful school classmate and eventual pro wrestling champion, Adnan Al-Kasi, you know, Saddam was a mark. Saddam loved wrestling, but totally believed in it, did not know that wrestling was a staged endeavor. You know, Adnan, for a little bit of background, was a fellow Baghdaddy who had grown up knowing Saddam, then Saddam went to another school and they lost touch, and then Adnan went to the U.S. on an athletic scholarship, real athletics, sports, and then eventually fell into pro wrestling, loved pro wrestling, loved that he could manipulate an audience. You know, that's the common refrain

that you hear from people is like, oh my God, I could get this audience to do anything. What a power to have. It's intoxicating. He got really into it. And then went back to Baghdad and was summoned to a meeting with Saddam, who at that point was a sort of hidden hand directing politics in the country, but was ostensibly like the deputy to the person in charge. And they had this meeting, and apparently Saddam had found out about wrestling and was watching it and really liked it, but had no idea that it was staged and said, you know, you need to set up some matches here in Iraq so we can entertain the people. And yeah, so Saddam ended up being kind of a wrestling promoter for a little bit.

Adnan was huge. You know, I've interviewed Iraqis who tell me, with great confidence, they don't have to think about it. They're like, oh yeah, in the early 70s, there was literally no one more famous in Iraq than Adnan al-KCase. Adnan-L-K-K-C-C-C-s was an enormous pop culture presence and an athletic hero to millions. And Saddam all this while just thought the matches were real. And there's this amazing story, a truly amazing story that, who knows if any of it's embellished, I don't know. But Adnan told it in great detail, and I relay it to you, Now, Adnan had been tasked with getting a big wrestling show together, so Adnan asked Andre the

giant, who was not at that time going as Andre the giant yet. He was just Andre Roussemoff, but he was a big up-and-coming sensation out of France. And Adnan got Andre to do a match with him, but right before the match, which was in this enormous stadium with thousands and thousands of people watching for the birthday of the army and carrying Kalashnikovs, there was this match. the trouble was right before the match, Saddam says to Adnan, you know, be courageous, you've got this, this guy, you'll forgive my language, but this other guy is a, and if he tries to do anything to you, he'll get this. And he pulls up his coat to show that he has a solid gold pistol on his side. And he's like, I'll put bullets in that guy's head, and he will go home to France in a pine

box. And the trouble was, this was going to be a two out of three falls match, meaning you had to win twice in order to win the whole show. And so the trouble was Andre was going to win the second time. And then Adnan would have a comeback and would win in the end. But the trouble was, he was like, Adnan's thinking, if I lose even one of those falls to Saddam, who does not understand wrestling, it could be really bad. Somebody could kill Andre the Giant right here.

And so he had to like whisper to Andre, while they were wrestling, you know, across the language barrier between Arabic, English, and French. She was like, just you got to take the fall. Don't win anything. And it worked. But anyway, I can keep going about Saddam and wrestling. I found it completely fascinating. And I'm very glad you asked because no one else has focused in on it the way I was hoping people would.

I did as well. And I reading that story, and I know you spoke with Adnan, and I couldn't help but think that Saddam's threat was also directed at Adnan. You know, he didn't show Andre the giant the gun. He showed Adnan the gun. That's actually a very good point. I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're probably right. I mean, it's Saddam. Saddam was not known for being super loyal to anybody, no matter how friendly they were,

whether they'd gone to school together. So I would not be surprised if that was like, don't lose or you're both getting it because it's a bad show for the country. So if all that's true, then I guess for the future of wrestling and the way things turned out, especially with Andre, I'm glad they were able to communicate in the ring. A common theme among wrestlers is protect the business. That includes not breaking K Fabe, the idea that what's going on in the ring is real. When you're interviewing folks around the WWE, how did you encounter that mantra?

Did you have difficulty separating fact from fiction? I had a lot of difficulty separating fat from fiction. That was the big challenge because in wrestling, you often just repeat your lies so often that you forget their lies and it just becomes part of your nature and part of your own memory. Especially if you, I sound like I'm making a joke here, but I'm not, but especially if you've taken a lot of head injuries as a lot of these wrestlers have, your memories get hazy and you just remember the story. You don't necessarily remember that you told people, but you don't necessarily remember

what really happened. So wrestlers were not usually, I'm talking a lot about Adnan here, but they were not usually my only sources for things. The only wrestler I sort of lent a little more trust to in. his account was Brett Hart, the famous wrestler, who was very generous with his time, but most importantly, had kept audio diaries of his entire career and consulted those contemporaneous ones where he would nightly, wherever he was, say, here's what happened today to me, and then eventually wrote his memoir, which is very detailed.

And that one in his accounts got a little more attention just because I had a little bit more trust that that stuff had been contemporaneously recorded and then consulted. But for the most part, I was going lots more on documentation, on hard numbers that I could locate, talking to people who were involved in wrestling, but were not wrestlers, who were not necessarily schooled in the mentality of you never break character, you never, you know, make things rough for wrestling. But that said, those are my successes, but there were plenty of. people who did not want to talk. Plenty of people who didn't want to talk. Because you say that that's the mantra and it is, protect the business. Three words, protect the business, referring to the

wrestling industry. You don't do anything that would upset the apple cart for the whole industry. But Vince kind of made himself into the whole industry. So protect the business ultimately means protect Vince. Unless you are very brave, you are not going to speak out about Vince and there were a lot of people who just rejected me out of hand or people who only spoke to me on. background. He holds a lot of power there still. I want to talk about the WW today, but I got to talk about your conversations with Brett Hart.

He was famously a part of one of the greatest controversies in WW history, the Montreal Screwjob, which is where you'll tell it better. The script was flipped. Yeah, the script was flipped. Brett Hart was one of the biggest wrestlers in WWF in the 90s, and in November of 1997, very long. long the story short. I mean, this is like a whole chapter of the book, and I promise it's thrilling,

but I'm giving you the very abbreviated version. Vince, in an act of vengeance, or at least assertion of his power, flipped the script on what the ending of the big WWF championship match between Brett Hart, who was the champion, and Sean Michaels, who was challenging him, I lost the grammar of that sentence. But that was the match that was going to be the main that night. And the original plan, as Brett understood it, was that there was going to be some kind of disqualification or thing that would make the match ambiguous at the end because he was about to leave the company and go to the rival Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling, WCW. And Vince didn't take too kindly to that. And eventually worked out this plan where

He didn't tell Brett, but he told Sean, the referee, and possibly a tiny number of other people, that what was really going to happen was Sean was going to win under pretty obviously, you know, unconsure circumstances. And then Brett would no longer be the champion, and he could, you know, shuffle off to WCW. And so when that happened, this, and it's called the Monkosh. Montreal screw job because it was in Montreal and a screw job, believe it or not, is sort of a technical term in wrestling, which refers to an instance in which a promoter does exactly that, flips the script and as the term so eloquently puts it, screws a wrestler. So Brett got screwed

and I always sort of semi-joke that that opened up the portal into hell for the universe. But the introduction of that moment into the canon of wrestling really altered the course of wrestling history. And I would argue perhaps grandiosly all of history right now. Because 1997 was the moment, the Montreal Screwjob, I should say, was the moment that really codified what I refer to in the book as Neo-KFabe. Because K-Fabe was the system for about the first century of wrestling that said, hey, audience, everything you're seeing in the ring is real. Those people are really like that, and this is a real sporting competition.

And even if you knew that was a lie, you respected the lie, you enjoyed it, et cetera. Now what you have is this very strange hybrid, where after Vince, through a deregulation effort, killed K-Fabe and revealed to the world somewhat inadvertently, but definitely through his actions, that wrestling was fake, after that, he had to come with something else, and he, he, ended up adopting a lot of techniques that had started with other people, and in 1987, really codifies Neo-K-Faib, which is the mix of truth, fiction, and everything in between, all delivered with the exact same level of commitment and earnestness at top volume. When you execute Neo-K-Fab, you are telling the audience, not, hey, everything's real.

You actually say, hey, everything's fake, but guess what? Something real might happen tonight. And that was the essence of what happened at the Montreal screw job. That is the great temptation that it introduced into wrestling. Because that night something real did happen. Something totally bizarre, unprecedented, for the most part, you know, this main event screw job for the biggest title in the whole game with the biggest wrestler in the game. It was astounding.

And since then, everyone has been tuning in to try and see something that real happened. amidst the fakeness again. And nothing on that scale really has happened, with the possible exception of the death of Brett's brother, Owenhart, two years later, in the ring. So that's a whole separate thing. But the Montreal Screwjob, I really think, was the template for how we operate in politics and society now, too.

You know, in that right now, we have this world where our politicians, our business leaders, our entertainers, give us this endless stream of a mix of total BS and then unspeakable truths, things that are so crazy that you should never, so crazily true, and so obscenely true that you should never say them, and then everything in between. It can get very confusing for everybody involved. I think it depends on the business leader, too.

Guy like Warren Buffett. Sure, not everybody. Yeah. I don't know if Warren Buffett's doing Neo-K Fab out there. Before we get to our final questions, too, you spoke. with Brett Hart for hours and he has every reason to hate Vince McMahon, hate the WWE, and yet he goes back and works for him. Yeah, yeah, Brett came back.

You know, after the Montreal screw job and the death of his brother in the ring due to a failed technical stunt, you know, despite all that, Brett came back. It took him years of acrimony, but eventually he wanted to finish his story in a way that he had a little more control of. And he sort of found some degree of peace. he told me all of these awful things about Vince McMahon, but he would always have a post script of, but I still really admire him. I mean, with the Montreal screw job even, when I interviewed him about it, he said, I had to admit it was a brilliant maneuver. This thing that kind of derailed his entire career, and really, in many ways, is the thing he's most remembered for, despite the fact that it's something that was humiliated.

to him. He doffs his cap and says Vince played it brilliantly and I loved watching it. Not watching the screw job because he was there, but watching everything came after the screw job. The introduction of the character of Mr. McMahon of Vincent Kennedy McMahon's alter ego, Mr. McMahon, you know, all of that came out of the screw job. And yeah, Brett still, Brett still has love for Vince. I'm going to unfairly skip ahead in the WWE story. If you want more, you can check out the book. But right now, Saudi Arabia's public investment fund and the WWE are in talks to make it go private. We don't know where that stands as we're recording on March 14th. But without asking for a prediction, what are your thoughts as someone who studied the history of the WWWE is those two parties as dance

partners? I think it would make a lot of sense. I have no idea if it's what Vince is going to do. But look, you have the other people who are the other entities that have been floated, and a lot of them are entertainment or, you know, streamers or whatever companies that are more traditional as opposed to a sovereign wealth fund from a government. But although, ironically, you might think a sovereign wealth fund would be more moral and concerned about ethical. and optics than private entities. In the case of Saudi Arabia, I think the, although companies can get pretty shameless, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia doesn't really care about the optics of being bad for worker rights, for example, because labor rights are non-existent practically in wrestling, and they're practically non-existent for migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, for example. I think there would be much less pressure on Vince from Saudi Arabia to clean up his act.

He's not as obscene and lewd in his product as he was at, say, the turn of the 90s into the new millennium, but it's still not respectable. But the trouble is that doesn't really matter in Saudi Arabia. It's one of the only popular entertainments you can go to a stadium and cheer for. This is a relatively recent development that you can do that. in this deal that Vince already made with King of Saudi Arabia to do wrestling shows there. He's had this deal and it's been very successful. It's been very lucrative for everybody involved. Saudi Arabia has already invested heavily in WWE,

and I would not be shocked if they want to take that investment to the next level now that Vince is looking possibly to sell. Our guest is Abraham Josephine Reesman. She's the author of Ringmaster, Vince McMahon, and The Unmaking of America. I found it to be a Page Turner. delighted in reading the book. And even as a non-wrestling fan, I think investors, people interested in the history of CEOs in American pop culture will find value in it. Appreciate the book and appreciate the conversation. Thank you. It was my pleasure as well. As always, people on the program may have

interests in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy yourself stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.