Vince McMahon's Assassination Conspiracy | Tales From Backstage
WWE lifers will tell you that neither World Championship Wrestling nor All Elite Wrestling - the two majors that managed to act as successful challenger brands to the recognised market leader - were ever better than Vince McMahon's promotion, even when business metrics might have temporarily suggested otherwise. McMahon never sold it, so his most zealous fans never bought it.
Across 1996, 1997 and into early 1998, an Eric Bischoff-led WCW Nitro crushed Monday Night Raw in the ratings for 83 consecutive weeks, and if you don't believe that, just ask 'Easy E' himself. In 2021, AEW was on fire creatively, and with every passing week appeared to be closing the gap on Raw in the ratings too. Chris Jericho was more than happy to stick his neck out and risk never getting re-signed by noting how he thought the company could be caught. The gap widened slightly when crowds returned to both companies post-pandemic, with WWE buildings filling back up due to a thirst for live entertainment rather than a particular spike in creative quality. But even moving into 2022, AEW continued to do such a fantastic job of curating to the tastes of disillusioned millennials that their place was assured as a permanent challenger brand either way. Unlike with the last of the territories or Bischoff's WCW in the decades prior, the former Chairman had lost that market forever, but was so deluded and out-of-touch that he'd also lost the desire to kill the Mr McMahon character too. By the 2020s, the opposite of his problem two decades earlier became true. Once a force for enormous change on television, McMahon was now an awkward caricature, barely audible in his b*llockings of the browbeaten Austin Theory and acting all the more erratically in the process. Once a man who was sick of his own persona's shadow, he now cast an enormous and ungainly one over a show that simply didn't need it, for fans that never wanted nor asked for. All until the consequences of his alleged actions caught up with him, anyway.
Vince McMahon resigned in disgrace from WWE on July 22nd 2022, then again in 2024 after temporarily forcing his way back as part of the company's sale merger with UFC to form the TKO group in mid-2023. He's since been embroiled in a host of legal battles including a federal sexual trafficking and abuse lawsuit as well as a WWE shareholder lawsuit regarding the merger. His last appearance on television as of writing was the June 27, 2022 edition of Monday Night Raw, with the July 22nd SmackDown kicking off with an enormously ill-advised Stephanie McMahon tribute promo to send him one last thank you down the lens.
In what he might once have referred to as a time honoured tradition, nobody else killed Mr McMahon but Mr McMahon himself. Promoters, despite some alleged zany plans, didn't kill Mr McMahon. Eric Bischoff in the 1990s nor Tony Khan in the 2020s didn't kill Mr McMahon. At long last, Mr McMahon killed Mr McMahon, but the most damning element of the character's disappearance from screens is that even, as of writing half a decade later, absolutely nobody has mourned the loss.