Exposing The Biggest WWE Lie Ever Told
The idea of a fight, and how much a wrestling match does not resemble a fight, is too much for them to reconcile. It’s not even that these people think you have bad taste. They think you are stupid. They think you are stupid for believing it’s real. You don’t think it’s real, but they think you do. That’s the difference between you watching wrestling and them going to the cinema. It is a belief echoed in the television and advertisement industries, without which wrestling in the U.S. might actually find itself in bingo halls.
WWE presents itself as an elevated version of pro wrestling - “a movie about a sport”, to use another Triple H buzz phrase - and has done for years in an attempt to rid itself of this stigma. That’s why Vince McMahon spent his career as a promoter trying to replace the term “pro wrestling” with “sports entertainment”. WWE intentionally rubbishes pro wrestling as something it transcended decades ago because ad executives don’t want to waste their time hawking their wares to the people they presume to be unintelligent for “believing”. Because fans are thought to be uneducated, that must also mean they are too stupid to hold a well-paying job, which in turn must mean that they can’t afford products and services advertised on TV. It’s not as if these powerbrokers can be blamed, either. Many wrestling promoters thought the exact thing about its customers, who were never called that. They were marks to be conned.
Shame drove much of Vince McMahon’s rebrand campaign. He wanted to be known as a legitimate businessman. It does not take a psychiatry degree to arrive at the idea that his one-sided feud with WCW founder Ted Turner was fuelled by jealousy. But while Vince once booked Hell In A Cell 2019, he was not stupid. He told a lie about wrestling because the truth is that the very definition carries a cheap and nasty stigma. Vince perpetuated it more than most. The man who sought to move away from pro wrestling actually defined it, warts and all, and the scandal-magnet almost became everything he mocked.
In perhaps the greatest irony of all, by 1994, business was so bad that Vince had to resort to promoting shows in buildings literally one step up from the bingo hall that ECW had repurposed. In December of that year, WWE taped four episodes of Monday Night Raw from Liberty Central High School in Liberty, New York. Around 1,400 fans attended those shows, barely 100 more than the ECW Arena’s best nights.
WWE did not rescue wrestling from bars and bingo halls; at one dire stage, it was actually a tiny thing happening in high school gyms.