8 Pieces Of Overwhelming Evidence That Vince McMahon Is Not A Visionary

7. He Wasn€™t The Only One Going National

National expansion in the eighties wasn't so much Vince McMahon and the WWF versus the territories (the accepted version of events in 2015), so much as it was the territories versus the future. Video tape trading and the advent of cable television were fast rendering the old territorial model obsolete. Fans were increasingly able to spot the narrative inconsistencies and repetition between territories, and the presence of the NWA€™s top stars on weekly television made their live appearances less special, less of a box office draw. Vince McMahon may have been one of the first to spot how these trends would end up, but he wasn€™t alone. Bill Watts had rebranded his Mid-South Wrestling the Universal Wrestling Federation in 1986 with the intention of expanding, and Verne Gagne with the AWA and Jim Crockett Jnr. with Jim Crockett Promotions also fully intended to go national. Watts ran out of money and sold the UWF to Crockett in 1987, and Gagne's AWA, far too inflexible, couldn€™t handle the competition€ but Crockett and McMahon would run together, each attempting to up the ante in turn. In fact, McMahon€™s initial attempts to achieve national television exposure on TBS for the WWF met with abject failure because the TV product he put on was so terrible: clip shows and highlights and listless squash matches, which the audience crapped on from a great height, being used to the far superior and more dramatic wrestling they€™d experienced in the timeslot before. He€™d be forced to sell that slot and find another way. Why did the WWF succeed and JCP fail? Well, Crockett€™s old school mentality meant that he still relied on handshakes to make deals, whereas McMahon would insist that arenas sign exclusivity contracts with the WWF, preventing other promotions from running shows there. Added to that, Crockett expanded west by running monthly shows in the same places, which began to be stale and attract less punters after a while. The biggest problem for both, however, was capital. Crockett€™s acquisition of the UWF was a massive gamble that didn€™t pay off: it meant taking on their massive debt as well, which further strained his finances. The WWF€™s massive gamble was Wrestlemania, and everyone knows how that risk paid off for Vince McMahon. Crockett simply ran out of money at the endgame, selling to Ted Turner in 1988, who renamed the promotion World Championship Wrestling, a name he€™d been toying with for years and at one point had been the name he'd had given to Georgia Championship Wrestling's Saturday show on his network. The myth still exists that McMahon dismantled the territories€ in fact, Crockett himself bought and absorbed many of the old NWA and outlaw regional wrestling promotions in the period between 1985 and 1987. The territories became outpaced by technology and popular culture, not by some sweeping Mongolian invasion from New York.