10 Smartest Decisions In Wrestling History
Ruthless Aggression.
Vince McMahon looked at Steve Austin and saw a good, technical hand.
Vince McMahon looked at The Rock and saw a glad-handing, all-smiles babyface. Vince McMahon knocked back what eventually evolved into Bret Hart Vs. Owen Hart at WrestleMania X because "brothers don't fight". Vince McMahon thought the Royal Rumble was a "stupid" idea. Vince McMahon originally wanted to call WrestleMania 'The Colossal Tussle'. Vince McMahon thought, at various points, that it was a good idea to promote fatalistic garbage men, magicians, race car drivers, evil dentists, minotaur descendants, plumbers, demented monks, incestuous siblings, repo men who were the criminals, too, evil hockey players...
Vince McMahon isn't creative: he is a calculating monster of a businessman.
Even now, when he's so clueless as to how to tell a story that he has left creative in the hands of an old enemy, he remains a ruthless genius. Opposing AEW's weekly TV show with a live, revamped NXT is a tremendous idea: he is creating a civil splinter war within the forces rebelling against the main roster product. The reported attempt to purchase FITE TV is another masterstroke, in that Vince might yet cut off vital supplies to the competition.
They are all pages from his adaptation of the Art of War...
10. Vince McMahon Defies His Father
Vince McMahon became Vince McMahon by defying his father.
Vince Sr. didn't even want his son to enter the pro wrestling racket as he knew it. He wanted his son to enter a more legitimate white collar industry before recognising that it was futile, and bleeding him in by hiring him as a ring announcer.
Vince Sr. certainly did not want his son to reimagine it in such a way that it was unrecognisable, forever changed. While acknowledging Vince's carny instincts and fondness to put his rags-to-riches iconoclast gimmick over, there is a rare truth to his candid 1991 Sports Illustrated profile, in which he revealed how his father would not have allowed him to purchase the majority of the WWWF, had he known of his plan to disrupt everything to his own, calculating benefit.
Vince Jr. didn't merely expand the WWF; he changed its DNA by tearing up the local sports page from his father's old playbook and delving into superhero comics for inspiration. The WWWF was moneyed in finances but gritty and working class in presentation and top stars; the WWF, in contrast, was far larger than mundane, real life, powered by the superhero writ large that was Hulk Hogan.
With Hogan as the vehicle to ramrod into the household, Vince removed his competition from theirs...