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

6. Wrestlemania Wasn't Exactly A Stand-Out Creative Moment

Professional wrestling in the US and Canada had produced supershows for years, attracting tens of thousands of fans at massive stadia across the country €“ in fact, Vince Snr. and his WWWF had run a fair few of them in the seventies. Although financially Vince McMahon bet the future of his company on the first Wrestlemania event on March 31st 1985, Jim Crockett Jnr. and his booker Dusty Rhodes had created Starrcade for the NWA in 1983, debuting it in Thanksgiving of that year to around 16,000 fans at capacity in the Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina, and broadcast on closed circuit television to locations at every one of the promotions major touring stops. Starrcade was created to be the Superbowl for professional wrestling in the US, and was nicknamed 'the Granddaddy of them all!" Sound familiar? It should, because those two descriptions have since been used as a part of McMahon€™s branding for Wrestlemania, which debuted sixteen months after Starrcade and used the same model (a supercard featuring top stars at a large arena venue, with fans not in attendance getting to see the card via closed circuit television). The only thing McMahon did differently was to promote and push Wrestlemania as a multi-media spectacular involving celebrity after celebrity, courting mainstream publicity and acceptance. You€™ll note that€™s nothing to do with pro wrestling. In the end, it wasn€™t Vince McMahon or Wrestlemania€™s innovation and creative flair that nudged it out into first place: it was the fact that non-wrestling celebrities were in the main event and the fact that he€™d hired Hulk Hogan and his pre-existing million-dollar gimmick the month after Starrcade aired.