10 Smartest Decisions In Wrestling History
9. Vince McMahon Buys Up The Competition...
The old way of pro wrestling - and indeed, the current make-up of legitimate sport - is deeply weird, when viewed through metrics outside of the United States. A nation built on capitalist blood, the territorial system was oddly removed from the individualistic American Dream.
The NWA was rife with cutthroat politicking, but the system existed as a weird, quasi-socialist profit-sharing enterprise in which talents were cycled out and shared to sustain itself and its regional components. It was mutually beneficial. Promoters under this model did not over-expose talent. Paul Boesch’s Houston Wrestling was perhaps the best example of this; the new acts parachuted into the promotion injected it with a winning vitality, and the talent themselves benefitted from exposure to new audiences. This system allowed them to season and diversify their acts.
By buying out the TV time slots of his regional competition with his New York money, only Vince benefitted.
He couldn't buy the competition outright - competing promoters were so resistant that apocrypha has it they plotted to kill him - and so he undercut their crucial revenue stream by purchasing TV from under them. This transgressive, ruthless move, an omnicide, essentially, allowed Vince first refusal on talent.
There was no money to be made elsewhere, and one by one, every last hold-out trudged through the doors of Titan Towers - whether they wanted to or not, to quote that dimwitted young lad from SummerSlam '92.