Exposing The Biggest Lie WWE 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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Outside of the purview of the NWA and the WWF, Hulk Hogan famously headlined a huge show in the early 1980s that drew a massive crowd of 19,000: AWA Super Sunday (the demand for the show was so high that Verne Gagne arranged a closed-circuit viewing nearby, attended by 5,000 people, in another example of another promoter arriving first at an idea credited to WWE). Even when he was on top in the WWF in the mid-1980s, Hogan was challenged by NWA powerhouses Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes, whose combined drawing power had doubled annual attendances from 800,000 to 2,000,000 at their peak in Jim Crockett Promotions. In several major metropolitan cities, the WWF Vs. JCP feud was even. Dusty, whose creative genius was Vince’s biggest foe in the 1980s, was also the first major star of the cable wrestling boom; his feud with Ole Anderson drew the TBS SuperStation’s highest ratings on its biggest early attraction: Georgia Championship Wrestling. WWE was far from the first wrestling promotion to introduce wrestling stars to a new national cable audience - nor was Vince McMahon the first man to adopt a glitzy promotional strategy.
World Class Championship Wrestling, the originator of the pro wrestling show as a rock concert experience, a precursor to WWE’s approach, drew around 20,000 to its huge Reunion Arena shows. On June 27, 1983, WCCW drew 21,000 to Dallas, Texas. WCCW was not a “tiny thing happening in a bar”; with its new rock music entrance themes and muscled heartthrob main event crew, it was the proto-WWF in many ways. To underscore the extent to which the territory system was thriving during this era - the year before Vince apparently took wrestling out of tiny bars - Jim Crockett, Jr. and Jack Tunney co-promoted a show one month later that drew a venue record of 20,703 to the Exhibition Stadium in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The July 10, 1983 Night of the Champions show was headlined by Harley Race Vs. Ric Flair. There are scores of examples that prove how popular wrestling was in the U.S. before Vince McMahon won the war.
The Junkyard Dog’s Dog Collar win over Michael Hayes drew around 30,000 fans to the New Orleans Superdome on August 2, 1980. Wrestling was a mainstream endeavour before cable TV and before Gorgeous George was one of the first stars of television full stop. Jim Londos, who might have set a still-standing worldwide record attendance in Athens, Greece in 1933, was also a bonafide national star stateside. It’s not simply the case that pro wrestling thrived at a level well beyond bars and bingo halls prior to Vince McMahon’s 1980s national expansion. The lie is not only flagrant; it is heavily ironic.
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WWE will tell you that wrestling was a niche thing happening in bars before it exploded onto MTV, NBC and pay-per-view under Vince’s grand vision. If anything, pro wrestling overall declined in popularity in the United States after Vince signed Hulk Hogan, bought out his rival’s regional syndicated TV slots, and raided his competition for their top talent. WWE will not use the word “monopoly” when glorifying the promotion’s rise to national prominence because they see it as a dreamer’s rags-to-riches story - another irony, since the WWF’s moneyed New York territory was the ideal base from which to launch. But that’s what it was: WWE monopolised wrestling in the U.S., and in doing so, fewer people watched the rest. The stars all went with Vince in the end, even Dusty Rhodes.
By the time Ric Flair made the jump in 1991, the territory system was long dead. (In another measure of the Memphis territory’s popularity, Lawler was the last big name hold-out.) With no stars left anywhere else, of course the WWF was able to weave its way into the fabric of Ronald Reagan’s glossy 1980s Americana. And the WWF was very big, not just the biggest wrestling outfit. Its wild cast of characters was known to the American public, allowing Hogan, Roddy Piper and Andre the Giant to briefly flirt with Hollywood. The WWF was big, but so were many other companies until Vince scooped their stars. Every other promoter suffered, and badly, dragging down the national attendance average.
Drawing on his exhaustively researched database of historical information, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter calculated on X that, in the 1950s, the total attendance for pro wrestling in the United States was 25 million. In the 1970s, the number reached 10 million. In 1983, at the advent of the cable boom, the number climbed to approximately 13 million. By the late 1980s - by which time WrestleMania 3 had taken place - the number had actually more than halved. About 5 million people attended pro wrestling events in the U.S. in the late 1980s. During the halcyon days in which Hogan body-slammed Andre and the Mega Powers exploded, significantly fewer people attended live wrestling shows than before Vince McMahon went national. Vince McMahon did not save wrestling; if anything, he nearly destroyed it. Why does WWE tell this blatant lie, then, now, forever?
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There are two primary reasons. One is cynical; the other is actually understandable. Firstly, WWE does this because it allows itself to feel like the biggest promotion ever in the mind of the public - which it is. There is no debating that. WWE is not the oldest promotion: that is CMLL. WWE may not have set the record for the largest paid attendance; 1933 might exceed 1987. In terms of televised audience, a 1977 tag match pitting Giant Baba and Jumbo Tsuruta against Kim Duk and Kintaro Oki, held in South Korea, drew an 88.0 audience share. 31.7 million viewers watched in a nation with a then-population of 36.4 million. WWE has come nowhere near close to that incredible figure, not even for Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper or Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant’s biggest TV matches. On the subject of Hogan, WWE has never contracted the biggest mainstream name to have emerged from pro wrestling; that would be El Santo.
But on balance, factoring every metric over the long-term - certainly in terms of revenue - WWE is the dance, the grandest stage, the recognised global leader in sports entertainment. This messaging fuels everything.
This rhetoric is partly why, in recent years, several AEW wrestlers have traded critical acclaim and even comparable or higher annual salaries to make the jump to WWE. As Mariah May, Mariah Mead was the antagonist of what many critics and fans consider one of the very wrestling storylines of the 21st century: her obsession with and betrayal of Toni Storm, an incredible saga that culminated in the ultraviolent ‘Hollywood Ending’ of AEW Revolution 2025. As Blake Monroe, Mead has fared…less well in WWE. But she went there anyway, because WWE is WWE. Triple H does not care that he makes a fool of himself with this message to those with even shallow knowledge of wrestling history, because the messaging works. The second, understandable reason is that wrestling is considered a laughing stock by those who do not get it.
It doesn’t matter how many accurate analogies that you, as a wrestling fan, might use to defend your hobby of choice. You can point out that the plot of almost every Hollywood blockbuster is farcical and could not possibly be “real”. You can mention that entire genres of fiction are not real, like science fiction and fantasy. You can even say that actual athletes in football are playing a role, in a way, in that they’ll kiss the club badge and feign passion, but walk to Real Madrid barefoot if they could sign there. It doesn’t matter. There’s something about pro wrestling specifically that carries a stigma that the vast majority of people on this planet cannot look beyond.
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The idea of a fight, and how much a wrestling match does not resemble a fight, is too much for them to reconcile. It’s not even that these people think you have bad taste. They think you are stupid. They think you are stupid for believing it’s real. You don’t think it’s real, but they think you do. That’s the difference between you watching wrestling and them going to the cinema. It is a belief echoed in the television and advertisement industries, without which wrestling in the U.S. might actually find itself in bingo halls.
WWE presents itself as an elevated version of pro wrestling - “a movie about a sport”, to use another Triple H buzz phrase - and has done for years in an attempt to rid itself of this stigma. That’s why Vince McMahon spent his career as a promoter trying to replace the term “pro wrestling” with “sports entertainment”. WWE intentionally rubbishes pro wrestling as something it transcended decades ago because ad executives don’t want to waste their time hawking their wares to the people they presume to be unintelligent for “believing”. Because fans are thought to be uneducated, that must also mean they are too stupid to hold a well-paying job, which in turn must mean that they can’t afford products and services advertised on TV. It’s not as if these powerbrokers can be blamed, either. Many wrestling promoters thought the exact thing about its customers, who were never called that. They were marks to be conned.
Shame drove much of Vince McMahon’s rebrand campaign. He wanted to be known as a legitimate businessman. It does not take a psychiatry degree to arrive at the idea that his one-sided feud with WCW founder Ted Turner was fuelled by jealousy. But while Vince once booked Hell In A Cell 2019, he was not stupid. He told a lie about wrestling because the truth is that the very definition carries a cheap and nasty stigma. Vince perpetuated it more than most. The man who sought to move away from pro wrestling actually defined it, warts and all, and the scandal-magnet almost became everything he mocked.
In perhaps the greatest irony of all, by 1994, business was so bad that Vince had to resort to promoting shows in buildings literally one step up from the bingo hall that ECW had repurposed. In December of that year, WWE taped four episodes of Monday Night Raw from Liberty Central High School in Liberty, New York. Around 1,400 fans attended those shows, barely 100 more than the ECW Arena’s best nights.
WWE did not rescue wrestling from bars and bingo halls; at one dire stage, it was actually a tiny thing happening in high school gyms.