10 Most Fascinating Stories In WrestleMania History

WWE is drafting a new, major chapter in the history of WrestleMania. It's all a bit disheartening.

Once the site of triumph, the show, increasingly, is defined now by pure greed. That may read like an absurd take, on the surface - WWE is a rampant capitalist empire with a monopoly unprecedented in all of entertainment - but Christ, they're so brazen with it now. The old way is incompatible with this Network era. WrestleMania can no longer exist as the four-hour show of old, and even that format stretched the patience and enthusiasm of the live crowd. There are too many performers on the roster to appease, and too many of them are packed into an event ugly in its excess - and undisciplined in its middle-age spread.

The ideal compromise - and this is workable, too, since WrestleMania is already a festival WWE resents for its outsider curation - is to extend the show over two nights. But no: greed and excess is considered well before the consumer experience.

There's an irony, too, in the sentiment. Those wrestlers work all year for the prestige of 'Mania, and yet, the rising shadow of Saudi Arabia safeguards the company's future more effectively than the old centrepiece. Vince McMahon didn't decide on the WWE Championship match until February (!) because, sadly, he did not have to. And yet, for now, we anticipate WrestleMania, essentially in spite of itself.

Its glorious past is too evocative of brilliance to forecast disappointment.

Vince McMahon mortgaged the entire future of the WWF on the first WrestleMania event.

Shockingly, given his carny mendacity, this is only a slight embellishment. The WWF wouldn't have closed instantly, had the gamble failed. But it is deeply unlikely that the company, as we know it, would thrive in this unthinkable alternate timeline. Dave Meltzer speculated on his superb WrestleMania retrospective with the Lapsed Fan that, to proceed with expansion, McMahon would have had to source outside investment. These great "What if?" scenarios are too fraught with possibility to parse, but everything we know of McMahon's singular iron will renders that fatalistically untenable. Meanwhile, there remained an appetite for pro wrestling, the rich regional traditions of which hadn't yet been lost to time and WWE's subsequent, total monopoly.

In the real timeline, the bet paid off. Vince McMahon sought to coalesce and broaden the splintered identity of pro wrestling to the middle American household, and he did so by inviting major celebrities to sports entertainment's debutante ball. An unprecedented nationwide closed-circuit extravaganza, promoted effectively with both laser-focused broad strokes and not inconsiderable serendipity, WrestleMania I altered the history of the industry forevermore.

This is what Vince McMahon talks about when Vince McMahon talks about his grapefruit-sized balls.