Vince McMahon's Assassination Conspiracy | Tales From Backstage
The shot NEARLY heard around the world that would have changed wrestling history forever...
It was the late great football manager Bill Shankly all the way back in 1981 that summed up why in many if not all countries, 'The Beautiful Game' means so much to so many. After 50 years in the sport as a player and a manager, he summed it up succinctly and humorously enough that any layperson could understand - and laugh at - the game being so beloved. In discussion about its' significance on Granada TV's Live at Two show, he said; "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that."
Simultaneously crystallising the idea of the religious-level faith millions of people have in a simple game whilst also summing up the deep love between fan and team, Shankly cut to the quick with the witticism. It really is everything to people. What scans as ridiculous to some and can be reduced by the usual clichéd dig about 22 folk kicking a pigskin about is in fact a fundamental life tenet to others. Such is the power of a love, a hobby, and increasingly, a business.
Wrestling works in much the same way.
Ask any fan how, why and especially when they got into watching regularly, and there's a good chance it stems from a point in their youth. Like cigarettes, wrestling targets the impressionable in order to foster the addiction from early doors. Some would argue that's not the only health-related comparison between the two habits. But whether it's because of being more susceptible to the magic or simply wowed by the incredible pictures painted by the industry at its best, wrestling is often most captivating at first sight. Plenty of fans that develop the deep love in early years spend the rest of their lives chasing a dragon - your writer and his colleagues included - that finds away to replicate a feeling at its most purest. This is wrestling's greatest power, and where there's power over people that great, there's money to be made. A lot. Even more than some folk think.
Vince McMahon realised this when he bought the company from his father Vince Sr. He revealed that he intended to break the long-held promises between his Father and the other promoters about not moving in on their patch. He was going to do exactly that, and he'd take Hulk Hogan back from Verne Gagne's AWA to do so. But before he could even promote his new red-and-yellow money spinner all the way to the top of his cards, there were whispers about people trying nobble 'The Hulkster'. Certainly per the man asked to do it anyway - Iron Sheik went on record on more than one occasion to say that Hogan's former AWA boss Verne Gagne got in touch with him before their all-important January 1984 match at Madison Square Garden and offered $100,000 to break Hogan's leg as a shoot rather than put him over. Hulk Hogan re-told the story in one of his fanciful autobiographies. Allegations and accusations of course, and not really any that can be sourced beyond the late Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri and Terry Bollea themselves. They weren't the most reliable of viz-oices in the wrestling space when sharing old war stories, but the bizarre and rarely-discussed case of Vince McMahon being caught and compromised to a permanent end by another promoter adds some credence to just how dead-set the territory gaffers were in stopping his pro wrestling path of rage.
Many accused Vince McMahon of trying to kill wrestling along the way. But what about the barely-touched-upon conspiracy where wrestling allegedly tried to kill him?
CONT'D....
Not long before the aforementioned anointing of Hulk Hogan, Vince McMahon was already making moves. He acquired Southwest Championship Wrestling’s USA Network slot in order to retool it as WWF All American Wrestling, which in turn allowed the the World Wrestling Federation to look and feel a little bit more like the national (and eventually global) market leader McMahon wanted it to be. He thought big, but he thought different too, which perhaps explains why the likes of Tuesday Night Titans arrived in 1984 as a spin on late night television that just happened to feature the wrestlers he was rapidly acquiring to pad out his mid and undercards. Those wrestlers were territory main eventers that stood no chance of taking the top strap from 'The Hulkster', but stood the chance of making a darn sight more if they got the opportunity to work him around the horn. The promise was opportunity rather than the spot or outright cash, but with this sort of position came increased exposure, especially with increasing coverage. The package was understandably too appealing for many wrestlers to knock back, and within a period of a year or so, a substantial number of localised favourites were familiar to millions across the nation.
If this didn't anger the other promoters already, the tone and style of his product certainly did. Vince sat front and centre of Tuesday Night Titans, as it became something of a historic turning point for the company philosophically. Long before kayfabe was blown to smithereens or Triple H moved to outright saying the loud part even louder in the 2020s, TNT at very least was a show about wrestling and wrestlers, not a wrestling show featuring wrestlers. The distinction seems small, but it was hugely important. It was profiles and interviews and skits and bits, allowing people to form bonds with "Superstars" even if they'd never seen them grab a hold or throw a punch. In league with All American, the output created a snowball effect for the WWF, and McMahon assumed he could continue to scoop up more national cable slots. When Ted Turner refused to sell him Georgia Championship Wrestling's slot, McMahon instead negotiating with Jack and Gerald Brisco and Jim Barnett to buy their stakes in GCW in order to turn over control of the the WTBS show to him. The final World Championship Wrestling broadcast under Georgia's management aired on July 7th, 1984, marking the end of an era in wrestling history, and on the 14th, McMahon thought he'd launched the beginning of a new one. He wasn't entirely wrong, but a day remembered as "Black Saturday" tells the real story of how well it went when the biggest brand of southern states wrestling was replaced with old, taped World Wrestling Federation matches.
By the following March, (incidentally not long before the inaugural WrestleMania), a makeshift pairing of Gorilla Monsoon and Eddie Miller hung out on the Crockett-era wrestling space-station set with a WWF block logo slapped in the window, but the substantial damage had been done. Monsoon and Miller weren't Gordon Solie, Hogan wasn't Flair, and none of this was what the viewers of Georgia Championship Wrestling had wanted, or would ever want. Ted Turner's quick fix was to provide Mid-South Wrestling with a Sunday show while placing the Ole Anderson-helmed NWA affiliate Championship Wrestling from Georgia on Saturday mornings. It was a sh*t sandwich but at least the bread was nice. It bothered McMahon that his product was perceived as inferior to two he felt couldn't touch his, and losing money to them wasn't something he liked either. His goal was to take the entirity of North America, not remind a lot of people in the South why they might not actually agree with his strategy. He sold the Saturday night time slot to JCP owner Jim Crockett for a million dollars, ultimately kicking off the chain of events that resulted in Ted Turner's acquisition of World Championship Wrestling in 1988. Infamously, if wrestling apocrypha is to be believed, Turner rang McMahon to let him know he was in the "rasslin' business", and though McMahon re-tells the story like he had a witty retort, smiled and got on with his day, the more likely version involves some fuming, followed by a renewed desire to one day monopolise the whole scene in his own image.
Jim Ross was a key figure for many of the outfits on the opposite side of Vince Jr during this time, and learning a lot of lessons that would ultimately benefit the WWF massively when he worked there, particularly as Executive Vice President of Talent Relations behind the scenes in the 1990s. An under-credited architect of the Attitude Era thanks to the signings he made and the philosophical shifts those signings represented, Ross was a crucial (and at one point unexpected) weapon in McMahon's war against Turner in particular, but he knew all-too-well of what some on the other side were prepared to do to "compete". He couldn't get away from that sort of thing at the time.
Not even during his bathroom breaks...
CONT'D...
'Good Ol JR' shared a shocking story about this very scenario on an edition of his "Grilling JR" podcast. Speaking about one of the times several unnamed promoters put their heads together about some ill-fated collectivism (assorted "SuperClash" cards between 1985 and 1990 were critical and commercial failures featuring all sorts of headaches as the various names and promotions, appropriately, could not co-exist). He needed a comfort break, but it was anything but that when he locked the toilet door. As he put it;
“I make my way to the men’s room. I go into the first available stall. Might have been the only stall in there. And I get down to do my business, and here comes a bunch of guys walking in off of that meeting [I'd been in]. Famous wrestling promoters. Hall-Of-Fame men. Some of the most famous men in pro wrestling history, are in my little bathroom. And I’m sitting there trying to be discreet. You ever try to be discreet when you really need to go? It’s hard, it’s very sad. It’s really sad. Anyway, they start talking about Vince. So one voice, very distinctive voice, says, ‘I could have the motherf*cker killed for $700. Why don’t we just do that?’ Then like I was surrounded by a bunch of little David Copperfields, my feet started elevating off the floor of the bathroom. Because I didn’t want anybody to see there’s anybody in there. They hadn’t noticed, they hadn’t said anything. And so that was kind of where that ended. They washed their hands, and I can’t wait to lower my feet back to the floor because my abdomen was hurting, ’cause I was in bad shape. And they leave.”
When a shocked and shaken Ross was permitted escape from the prison of his own design, he reported what he'd heard back to his boss Bill Watts, who, by virtue of his place in the story, can't have been the one to drop the fatal pitch. The typically brusk 'Cowboy' was unmoved...
“I said, ‘Cowboy, well that was interesting.’ He says, ‘What?’ And so I told him. He says, ‘Aw, sh*t. They’re just flapping their gums, kid. They ain’t gonna do sh*t. They couldn’t agree who’s gonna put the $700 in, if that was what they’re gonna do...We’re going home because they’re done. They’re gonna repeat the same stories this afternoon they did this morning, except they’re gonna be longer and slower. And we’re out of here...So that’s what we did. So the thought of killing Vince McMahon. The thought was not really expounded upon, like ‘Yeah, how do we go about doing that? Where would it be,’ whatever. It was basically a matter of fact, ‘Hey, I got a guy who’ll kill him for $700.’"
McMahon re-told a version of the story, albeit without the specifics, when he was on the Pat McAfee show in 2022. Via tales shared with him by Ross during their time working together, he contextualised the anecdote by noting how aware he was of his pariah status at the time. How could he not be? McMahon's vision for WWE was complete global domination, and being on top meant being across everything else in wrestling if only to try and crush it. He might not have been in or even near the rooms where his downfall was being plotted or discussed, but he was mindful of their presence before he attempted to run them out of business. It's genuinely astonishing he didn't realise the value of pushing himself as the company's top heel sooner - to know, categorically, that you're hated and not monetise it on your sporting soap opera seems wasteful.
He certainly made up for lost time when he got around to it, though this may explain another odd quirk about the life of Vince McMahon and the Mr McMahon character. Or should that be, the death of him?
CONT'D...
Remember when Vince McMahon was desperate to kill Mr McMahon?
Per multiple Bruce Prichard podcast anecdotes, the former boss could often be heard saying words to the effect of "I can't be on television if I'm dead" in creative discussions, so desperate as he was at the time to remove himself from television. The same man that tried to worm his way back into the organisation after resigning in disgrace in 2022 was once so sick of his elevated persona that repeatedly tried to get rid of it once and for all.
As far back as 1999 - barely a year into playing a role that was so effective that it helped WWE comfortably overturn WCW in half the time Nitro was in front of Raw - McMahon was looking for an exit strategy the gimmick. Having fought arch nemesis Stone Cold Steve Austin in the Royal Rumble match and steel cage main event of St Valentine's Day Massacre a month later, he tried and failed to stop 'The Rattlesnake' regaining the the WWE Championship at WrestleMania XV. It was during the build to the 'Show Of Shows' that he'd fallen afoul of an Undertaker character that wanted to take the entire company from him, distracting him somewhat from the initial task at hand. When Austin saved McMahon's daughter Stephanie from a deranged forced marriage to 'The Deadman', it seemed to bring their rivalry to an end...until Vince confirmed himself as the "Higher Power" ordering Undertaker to do all the mad stuff in the first place. It didn't all hold together, bro, but the story had just about found one more peak, and McMahon decided to use it to create the finality he felt it needed. At Fully Loaded '99, Austin and The Undertaker's First Blood WWE Championship match would also be for the career of the CEO. Austin won, and as of the July 26th 1999 edition of Monday Night Raw, Mr McMahon was booted off of television forever.
To illustrate how well that went, on the September 16th edition of SmackDown, he became WWE Champion.
This bananas plot point was to get him back on screens when it became apparent just how beneficial he was. Now fully working as a babyface, McMahon returned in order to try and elevate Triple H at the umpteenth time of asking, presenting 'The Game' as a bully who was willing to decimate an old man in order to seize the title and control of the entire company. It half-worked when the two traded the title, but a combination of Hunter running into Mick Foley and running off with Stephanie McMahon proved to be the real magic formula. Stephanie's December 1999 heel turn at Vince's expense once again sent him packing from television, this time until WrestleMania 2000 season, when he came back to align with The Rock...only to swerve turn on him on 'The Grandest Stage'. The Attitude Era went through end-of-the-world storylines like laxatives through a Stampede Wrestling star, and by that summer, McMahon removed himself yet again, this time to be a "genetic jackhammer" while Commissioner Mick Foley ruled the roost. His next return at the end of the year kicked off the most evil era for the character, partially in service of the incredible McMahon Vs McMahon match at WrestleMania X-Seven, but also because his impending purchase of WCW and creation of the XFL seemed to result in the most pronounced overlapping of the persona and the person. If the best characters are real people turned up to 11, McMahon's backstage megalomania must have been beyond reproach.
Even when he wasn't needed - such as during the period the character hired Eric Bischoff and Stephanie McMahon as General Managers for Raw and SmackDown respectively - he hung around like a revolting stench, getting bigger and pinker while necking on with Sable, actually trying to win fights with the likes of The Undertaker and Kurt Angle, before ultimately settling into something of a part-time overlord role that was purpose-serving for big announcements and/or WrestleMania storylines. The most effective of the latter came in 2007 with the "Battle Of The Billionaires" against Donald Trump at WrestleMania 23. With Trump at the height of some renewed fame bossing The Apprentice TV show and two disgustingly rich idiots putting their hair on the line, the stage was impeccably set for a Bobby Lashley/Umaga clash, refereed by Stone Cold Steve Austin no less. The show drew 1,188,000 buys, topping the wildly successful WrestleMania 21 and falling just behind a Rock/John Cena-headlined WrestleMania XXVIII as the second highest drawing pay-per-view in company history. Whether this was a desire to see the Chairman bald or a combination of the overlapping pop culture/boom era figures in one place, McMahon saw the increased eyes as yet another opportunity to off himself. As it turned out, going bald begat McMahon's unsubtle slide into insanity, first reflected in an obsession with becoming ECW Champion and wearing a variety of different headgears, before slipping into a semi-comatose state, controlled mostly by his assistant-cum-carer Jonathan Coachman.
Per reports at the time, it was the closest the character had been to the real life version in some time. A few months earlier, the Wrestling Observer had reported how McMahon "went nuts" backstage at a taping following the New Years Revolution pay-per-view. According the source at the time, he "hated the ECW TV show and was screaming that there was no one in ECW who knew how to work", and added that then-ECW Champion Lashley wasn't being agented correctly while working with his Raw and SmackDown contemporaries. It's funny to thus assume that he believed himself to be the only possible solution to the Lashley problem when in fact the opposite was true. By the time McMahon was a confused mute on television following a decisive loss to the 'All Mighty', Lashley himself was starting to flag. He lost to John Cena at the Great American Bash in July, got injured, and subsequently left the company for a decade. Another failed project in a series of them in the 2000s, Lashley was the rule rather than the exception, but McMahon took this particular creative stumble a little more seriously. The problem wasn't his creative, he reasoned, but once again, his character. He set about assembling a new demise for the character that was to be the grandest yet and provide a narrative whodunnit to try and revive the company's fortunes over the summer. Following a "Mr McMahon Appreciation Night" edition of Raw on June 11th that featured all of his enemies doing anything but pay their respects, McMahon walked through a guard of honour made by his tragic midcarders, left the building, took what felt like a pointed breath of fresh air, and stepped into the back seat of his limousine. He took one last infuriated look back at the building, almost as if he'd snapped out of his frazzled state (or possibly implying that it had been a work all along), hesitated, then slammed the door shut. As he did so, the limo exploded, killing him instantly.
If only those territory promoters had thought of that one.
CONT'D...
Or not, obviously.
The stunt was, for wrestling, visually very impressive. Money had been spent on blowing a car up, that much was clear. It fooled the aforementioned future President Donald Trump, who responded to the news by calling, distressed, to check on the condition of his wealthy pal. He was of course fine, but this was about fiction, not facts. There could be no reasonable doubt that in the world of WWE, the McMahon character was actually done for this time. The company had to confirm as much to Wall Street when the stock price dropped. The mystery element was one of several narrative cliffhangers though, and there was suddenly the realistic possibility that Vince had accomplished most of his many missions with one singularly impressive moment. For 13 days, amidst some tributes paid in quite poor taste working on the assumption he was shoot dead, everything in the world of WWE was centred around what had happened, how it might have occurred, and ultimately who was responsible. High drama for a Sports Entertainment show that needed an injection of this sort of excitement.
Exactly two weeks later though, a very alive Vince McMahon opened a Raw that was promoted as the night his kayfabe funeral was to occur. No funny faces, no sardonic tributes, no fake services. Only the real and subsequently harrowing news that Chris, Nancy & Daniel Benoit were all dead. There were lots of remarks about tempting fate in an industry already plagued with an abhorrent death rate, and the reckoning would come for the market leader and industry as a whole on that front in the aftermath of Nancy and Daniel's horrific murders at Chris' hands, but as WWE tried and failed to roll with the punches, the one certainty was that the RIP Mr McMahon storyline could not continue.
According to multiple sources who were with the company at the time in retrospective reflections (including but not limited to then-WWE creative team member Chris "Big Dick Johnson" DeJoseph), several segments were filmed for airing during the June 24th Raw, including funeral segments featuring the likes of "Johnson" and Michael Hayes crying uncontrollably by McMahon's coffin. All the other McMahons were due to be there, with Linda ultimately facing arrest on suspicion of being the one behind the murderer. Even Rod - McMahon's never-featured brother - was booked to appear. Unfamiliar territory then, but the payoff was at least to be on familiar ground. The grand reveal was supposed to feature Mr Kennedy being revealed to be McMahon's illegitimate son - a thought bubble that at very least lingered in the ether from the moment the Green Bay bigmouth took the Kennedy name on anyway. Everybody clocked the "coincidence" from the earliest days, and it felt like less of a one the more Kennedy got over. He won the Money In The Bank contract at WrestleMania 23 and used his mic time the next night to promise a cash-in at WrestleMania the following year, but disaster struck when an injury misdiagnosis moved the company to take the title shot away and give it to Edge before discovering a several month layoff was reduced to weeks. This did at least mean Kennedy was available and in the mix for the exploding limo follow-up, but when that got scrapped, so too did the illigitmate son payoff. That aforementioned 'Show Of Shows' main event he'd manifested was to also have control-of-the-company stakes attached, with Kennedy trying to use his ill-gotten-gains to take the lot from Triple H and/or Shane McMahon, but with the boss now very much once again not dead, WWE went comedic with it and turned the whodunit into a whodonehim and revealed that a prior dalliance had resulted in the birth of McMahon's new progeny - Hornswoggle.
The less said about that putrid saga the better, but as it bled into 2008, so too did McMahon's desire to have one last crack at doing himself in. At the not-so-thrilling conclusion of the calamitous McMahon's Million Dollar Mania, the smiling-and-waving Chairman, post-cash giveaway, was hit by a piece of the stage as it not-so-randomly collapsed on him. Was he once again being targeted? The revenge of Mr Kennedy once and for all? Anything? Literally absolutely anything? Who knows. Not only did WWE drop this last storyline attempt on his life, but also even the prospect of speculation when, in January 2009, he was back without a scratch.
Those 1980s promoters weren't just insane for hatching a conspiratorial scheme to have the man main done in. They were mad to think $700 would be enough. McMahon went into seven figures more than once trying and failing to get it done. But as the world would eventually come to learn, all that money couldn't get him into - and keep him out of - trouble forever.
CONT'D...
WWE lifers will tell you that neither World Championship Wrestling nor All Elite Wrestling - the two majors that managed to act as successful challenger brands to the recognised market leader - were ever better than Vince McMahon's promotion, even when business metrics might have temporarily suggested otherwise. McMahon never sold it, so his most zealous fans never bought it.
Across 1996, 1997 and into early 1998, an Eric Bischoff-led WCW Nitro crushed Monday Night Raw in the ratings for 83 consecutive weeks, and if you don't believe that, just ask 'Easy E' himself. In 2021, AEW was on fire creatively, and with every passing week appeared to be closing the gap on Raw in the ratings too. Chris Jericho was more than happy to stick his neck out and risk never getting re-signed by noting how he thought the company could be caught. The gap widened slightly when crowds returned to both companies post-pandemic, with WWE buildings filling back up due to a thirst for live entertainment rather than a particular spike in creative quality. But even moving into 2022, AEW continued to do such a fantastic job of curating to the tastes of disillusioned millennials that their place was assured as a permanent challenger brand either way. Unlike with the last of the territories or Bischoff's WCW in the decades prior, the former Chairman had lost that market forever, but was so deluded and out-of-touch that he'd also lost the desire to kill the Mr McMahon character too. By the 2020s, the opposite of his problem two decades earlier became true. Once a force for enormous change on television, McMahon was now an awkward caricature, barely audible in his b*llockings of the browbeaten Austin Theory and acting all the more erratically in the process. Once a man who was sick of his own persona's shadow, he now cast an enormous and ungainly one over a show that simply didn't need it, for fans that never wanted nor asked for. All until the consequences of his alleged actions caught up with him, anyway.
Vince McMahon resigned in disgrace from WWE on July 22nd 2022, then again in 2024 after temporarily forcing his way back as part of the company's sale merger with UFC to form the TKO group in mid-2023. He's since been embroiled in a host of legal battles including a federal sexual trafficking and abuse lawsuit as well as a WWE shareholder lawsuit regarding the merger. His last appearance on television as of writing was the June 27, 2022 edition of Monday Night Raw, with the July 22nd SmackDown kicking off with an enormously ill-advised Stephanie McMahon tribute promo to send him one last thank you down the lens.
In what he might once have referred to as a time honoured tradition, nobody else killed Mr McMahon but Mr McMahon himself. Promoters, despite some alleged zany plans, didn't kill Mr McMahon. Eric Bischoff in the 1990s nor Tony Khan in the 2020s didn't kill Mr McMahon. At long last, Mr McMahon killed Mr McMahon, but the most damning element of the character's disappearance from screens is that even, as of writing half a decade later, absolutely nobody has mourned the loss.