WWE's Biggest Nightmare Is Coming True
It was back during McMahon's first boom period that whispers of a union were shared with him by top star Hulk Hogan. As he put during an interview with Steve Austin (h/t to 411Mania.com for the transcription);
"It was WrestleMania 2. Two weeks before it, all the publicity had gone out. The advantage was ours. I stood, I waited, so there weren’t agents around. I stood up in the dressing room and I gave a speech to the boys and this was at the time we were still battling Charlotte [North Carolina – Jim Crockett Promotions], and I said, ‘if we go together and simply tell the media we are not wrestling unless union negotiators by federal law come in and give us the opportunity to unionise.’ Then, if we engage the Charlotte guys to do the same thing, we can have a union in wrestling.’ The next night, I got a phone call from Vince who basically threatened to fire me if I ever brought it up again and read me the riot act. And I then did WrestleMania 2 and immediately left and did Predator and was a member of the Screen Actors Guild now, my union that I get retirement from now, healthcare from, all of that from. I’m a member of the Screen Actors Guild. I get healthcare, I get retirement, I get everything from them. I’ll pay my union dues.”
How had McMahon found out? How else? Somebody wasn't as collectivist as Ventura, and that somebody had the most the lose. Ventura continued;
“When I sued Vince, we had to depose him. And so, when we got in there...my attorney was great. He said, ‘Mr. McMahon,’ he said, ‘has there ever been a union in wrestling?’ Vince [replies], ‘no.’ [The lawyer asks] ‘Anyone ever try to form one?’ Vince sat a minute, he says, ‘well, yeah, as a matter of fact, Jesse Ventura spouted his mouth off about it once years ago.’ And my attorney goes, ‘well, how do you know that? Did you hear him? No? Well, how did you know he spouted his mouth off?’ He didn’t even hesitate. ‘Hulk Hogan told me’…It was like someone punched me in the face. I sat there in the chair and I couldn’t even think that it was Hogan. Then I found out in the trial why. Well, in the trial, we got the [financial] records of WrestleMania 3, the big one, him and Andre [The Giant], well, Hogan made more money than all of us combined, including Andre. If you took the payoffs of Andre and the whole rest of the card, Hogan made more than we did. So, naturally, he didn’t want a union. That could even out the money a little bit more and I saw that he made more than Andre and all of us combined, then, the picture was crystal clear to me, that he sold us out because he was getting taken care of and he didn’t want nobody else horning in on the good deal he had.”
McMahon and Hogan's trust was surely strengthened as result of this, as was, presumably, their understanding of one another's attitudes towards single-minded capitalistic endeavour. These qualities came to define driving force of the company's second boom a decade later, too.
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