9 Lessons Vince McMahon Should Have Learned From Ted Turner

3. Dance With The Girl That Brought You To The Party

Since the above is indisputably the case, Vince needs to remember that he's a wrestling promoter, not a legendary entrepreneur or a business prodigy. It doesn't matter how global WWE€™s business is: running the biggest pro wrestling farm and promotion is what he does for a living. Ted Turner recognised that, when finding cheap and accommodating original TV programming for his fledgeling TV station - back when it wasn€™t making much money - pro wrestling was his bread and butter. That€™s why, at the height of his massive success in the eighties, he purchased Jim Crockett Promotions. He transformed JCP into WCW because the wrestling programming on Turner television had been named World Championship Wrestling since 1972. Right there, you can see the sole reason for the purchase of the company, not to get back at Vince, or to prove he can beat him, or any of the nonsense that McMahon probably still believe. He did it in order to own the company that produced the television product that he broadcast, and rebrand it to fit the TV he€™d been running for sixteen years. He learned something from Black Saturday, that it made no sense to rely on outside businesses to create the product that he needed to broadcast. That€™s why he chose Eric Bischoff, an announcer with the heart of a used car salesman, to revamp that product to compete with the WWF. Even as successful as he€™d been in other areas, and even as rich as he was, Turner understood that wrestling was important to his success and stuck with it. Sports entertainment is a marvellous brand, as is WrestleMania and the WWE itself. To this day, if there€™s a pro wrestling story in the mainstream media, it€™ll get related to WWE in some way. WWE is the industry. Eighteen-year-veteran AJ Styles has accomplished phenomenal amounts in his time as a pro wrestler, but his recent addition to the WWE roster will forever be what he€™s most famous for, even if it lasts for a year and goes nowhere. That€™s the power of Vince McMahon€™s legacy in the business. It€™s something to be proud of, not ashamed of.