10 Times Wrestling History Repeated Itself
4. McMahon, Part One: Thats Karma For You
In the early 1980s, shortly after purchasing the World Wrestling Federation from his dad, Vince McMahon Jnr. began to reshape his vision for the company: he'd been considering serious expansion, expansion that would require him to fly in the face of the respect-driven yet politically toxic territorial system that the National Wrestling Alliance had going on in North America.
He knew what he'd have to do without fear or favour, he would need to screw his rivals into the ground. He stepped on handshake agreements his father had made, spitting on the etiquette and old school rules concerning territory boundaries. He began to place WWF programming on syndicated television across the entire of the USA, and toured the same places with impunity, hiring his opponents' best wrestlers out from under them to work for the WWF.
Some say he stole the idea for Wrestlemania from the NWA's own Starrcade event, which debuted over a year before and was similarly a big success for the organisation. He almost ran his own company into the ground in doing it, but when the dust had settled, the WWF was the country's first national wrestling promotion, and Vince McMahon certainly ran plenty of others out of business but succeeded in his aim, becoming the chairman of America's first national wrestling promotion.
In 1995, all the chickens came home to roost. Eric Bischoff had just become the new boss at the last big NWA promotion World Championship Wrestling, and the ambitious young hotshot knew that he'd need to take down the big dog in the yard if he wanted WCW and Eric Bischoff to make names for themselves. He'd been poor and he hadnt liked it: like McMahon before him, Bischoff ripped up the rulebook, took risks, signed his rivals talent away from him, and ruthlessly went head to head with them in the television market, setting up Monday Nitro as a live television spectacular against the WWF's dull, listless part-taped Monday Night RAW.
That was the beginning of the Monday Night War. Bischoff wasn't above being underhanded where necessary and often where not necessary. He used the same tactics as McMahon had a decade earlier, but with the advantage of billionaire Ted Turners deep pockets, trying his hardest to build up his company at the expense of McMahons own, just as McMahon himself had done to the NWA territories a dozen years earlier.