Exposing The Biggest WWE Lie Ever Told
The biggest lie WWE ever told - and WHY they continue to tell it…
In August 2022, the Chief Content Officer for WWE, Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque, made a guest appearance on Logan Paul’s ‘Impaulsive’ podcast. On it, he repeated key WWE rhetoric that the promotion has regurgitated for decades. Actually, “rhetoric” is an inaccurate, generous term. The correct word is “propaganda”. Triple H said, prior to Vince McMahon expanding the WWF into a national entity, that wrestling was “this tiny, little thing happening in bars”. This was Levesque’s update on the old, oft-repeated “smoky bingo halls” line. Whatever the term, the broad idea here is to condemn every promotion that came before - and for that matter, every promotion that cosplays as competition today - as lesser-than. A smoky bingo hall or, laughably, a bar, is not glamorous. It’s definitionally not big. WWE is able to put this idea over - without actually substantiating it - with clever editing trickery.
In various retrospectives covering the history of WrestleMania, WWE is clever enough to show footage of wrestlers soaking in the daunting enormity of a gigantic, empty stadium, before a match cut to the same building, packed out, sexed-up by WWE’s extravagant production displays of pyrotechnics and dazzling light shows. It’s meant to be symbolic. Before WWE, this wrasslin’ stuff never made the big time; now, Vince McMahon’s powerhouse of sports entertainment has taken over the globe as a phenomenon. On ‘The True Story of WrestleMania’ - a DVD released in March 2011 - a wrestling legend parroted this narrative. Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler said that if purists were upset by the first WrestleMania event, it was good for the business overall. This is a lie.
Lawler, more than most, knows better - but he also knew who was paying him to say it. He was the top star of a territory, Memphis, that for much of the 1970s and 1980s drew the most paying fans in the United States on a weekly basis. The territory was once so hot that the local NBC affiliate at times did not air MLB World Series games live because wrestling was a bigger draw. Memphis did not promote shows in bars or bingo halls. Many events that Lawler headlined emanated from the Mid-South Coliseum, drawing in excess of 10,000 fans. That’s a big pub.
Well before the NWA was founded in 1948 as a coordinated attempt to get fans to buy into a con exposed by promoters confusing the market with multiple World champions, wrestling thrived in the early 20th century. In the 1930s, it was not uncommon for promoters on both coasts to draw in excess of 20,000 to baseball stadiums, per the brilliant research of Wrestlenomics.
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