Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (5 page)

ONE PERSON
who began to see Vinnie as a figure apart from his father was a Brooklyn-born graduate of Harvard Law School named Bob Arum. Arum had been a federal prosecutor and a friend of Robert Kennedy’s before he decided to leave the law and start promoting fights. He made his first match in 1966 between Muhammad Ali and a rough-and-tumble Canadian named George Chuvalo. By the time Vinnie walked into the promoter’s Park Avenue office in Manhattan in 1974, Ali was an international icon and Arum had promoted a dozen of his bouts.

The reasons for Vinnie’s visit made Arum chuckle. He’d been watching television at home one day when he heard Evel Knievel say in an interview that he dreamed of jumping over the Grand Canyon. Through some creative phone work, Vinnie managed to get Knievel on the phone and convinced him to meet in Las Vegas. Vinnie maxed out his credit card to make the flight, and in a brief session over drinks persuaded Knievel that they could make a killing if they broadcast the jump live by closed circuit. The McMahons had relationships with 130 theaters and arenas across the East Coast and knew promoters around the country who could fill hundreds more. Vinnie told Evel he could make millions.

When he returned to New York, Vinnie’s father thought the idea was crazy. But it was just crazy enough to intrigue Arum, who had good connections at ABC, the network that aired Evel’s other jumps on
Wide World of Sports
. Arum put together a deal in which the jump—whose location was changed to the Snake River Canyon in Idaho—would be seen live via closed circuit and rebroadcast for free on ABC a week later.

On the morning of September 8, every nut who wasn’t stalking Elvis or waiting for an alien abduction was in Twin Falls, Idaho. Frank Gifford and the Hells Angels were there, along with a gaggle of blondes giving away free blow jobs. The only one who wasn’t in a partying mood was Knievel, who’d convinced himself that he wouldn’t make it off the 108-foot ramp in the bottle-shaped craft known as the Sky-Cycle X-2. The moment the rocket’s thrusters started firing, a petrified Knievel threw the switch that deployed its chute. As a result, the sky-cycle barely cleared the ramp before falling 413 harmless feet to the canyon below.

Not only was the jump a bust, only a fraction of the theaters that showed it were full. “The problem,” says Arum, “is that we did too good a job of selling it. Parents were scared to let kids see their big hero die.” With sales only a fraction of what they had hoped, Knievel’s promised $6 million payday shrank to $250,000—roughly the amount that Vinnie and Linda lost when they couldn’t recoup the deposits they’d put down on the theaters.

Still, the experience convinced Arum that the McMahon kid had spark. That is why he called Vinnie again in early 1976, when Antonio Inoki, then the biggest wrestling star and promoter in Japan, offered $3 million if Ali would fly to Tokyo for a wrestling/boxing match with Inoki in which he’d lose. Arum, who was in the midst of arranging a third fight between Ali and Ken Norton, was intrigued by the idea. But he was out of his league when it came to wrestling. Vinnie’s solution was to stage matches between boxers and wrestlers at six stadiums around the United States as a prelude to the closed-circuit showing of the main event. Arum liked that fine. Now all that was left was convincing Ali to bite.

As Arum would recall the story, Vinnie flew with him in the spring of 1976 to Chicago to meet Ali in a gym on the South Side. Ali loved wrestling. In fact, he’d patterned his preening and posturing after Gorgeous George, who made frequent stops in Louisville when Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, was growing up. But he blanched at taking a dive. The champ, surrounded by his Muslim retinue, listened skeptically as McMahon laid out his plan. For the first several rounds, Ali would pound the lumbering, six-foot-one, 220-pound Inoki, looking every bit like the champion that he was. But in the fifth round, Inoki would come out with a razor in his mouth and secretly use it to cut open his forehead. When Ali saw that he was gushing blood, he’d beg the referee to stop the fight. At this point, Ali started smiling, seeing the possibilities. McMahon went on, suggesting that while Ali’s back was turned Inoki would give him a
enzuijiri
—his trademark kick to the back of the head. Japanese fans would be able to keep their champ, while Ali would return to America insisting that he’d been screwed.

“Okay, “said Ali.” I’ll do it.”

Unfortunately, Vinnie failed to mention his plan to the advance men who were waiting for Ali when his flight landed in Tokyo. When he asked them when rehearsals were going to start, he was met with blank stares. No one knew what he was talking about.

“It was a mess,” says Arum. “Ali thought he was being set up. Everyone was threatening to break everyone else’s legs. Vinnie wouldn’t come to Japan. I had to stay right beside Ali the whole time.”

Eventually, a plan was worked out to assuage the champ. The two would fight for real, in what is known as a shoot match. But to favor Ali, certain conditions had to be met, among them that Inoki would have to keep both hands and a foot on the ground the whole time. Inoki was furious at being literally backed into a corner, but he agreed and the day of the match came prepared to make Ali pay. The Japanese legend may have spent the match like a spider on his back, but he kicked Ali so furiously that clots welled in Ali’s legs. “By the eighth round Ali’s legs were bleeding,” Arum remembers. “Ali kept running after him, yelling,’ Get up, you little yellow mother-fucker, get up!’ ”

Ticket sales were only slightly better than for the Snake River fiasco. Once again, Vinnie’s big payday failed to materialize.

In 1976 when Linda gave birth to their daughter Stephanie, and again in 1977, Vinnie had trouble paying his taxes, leading the Internal Revenue Service to eventually place a $43,000 lien on their home. Yet he knew that because his father was sixty-two, the subject of selling the WWF would have to come up sooner or later. He just needed to be in the right position when that happened. He found his way station in the spring of 1979 when he tried booking a show in a seven-thousand-seat arena in a coastal New England town called South Yarmouth.

Its owner, Ed Fruean, was a thickly built New Englander with a degree in electrical engineering and no appetite for show business. He’d built the Cape Cod Coliseum years before, leased it, and watched the prior tenant go bankrupt. Having had to take the coliseum over again to keep it afloat, Fruean was caught in a bind. Rock acts were the only thing that made him money, but a needling group of motel owners were trying to ban those concerts because of the “element” they brought into the quiet town. Fruean wanted out. Would Vinnie be interested? In April 1979, the pair struck a deal that involved no money down. Instead, Vinnie would pay a monthly mortgage held by Fruean, using the cash flow produced by the coliseum to come up with the payment.

Over that summer, the McMahons moved into a two-story shingled home down the block from Fruean and brought a minor-league hockey franchise into the Cape Cod Coliseum. Shane and two-year-old Stephanie’s young lives were colored by visits from members of the McMahon wrestling troupe. It was perfectly natural, for instance, for Andre the Giant to stop by if he was in the area. One day, he visited while Stephanie was playing on a trampoline in their yard. The three-year-old no doubt assumed that everyone had Giants visit them on balmy summer days, and Andre held out his hand as she climbed into it so he could lift her to his face and she could kiss his cheek.

Having never before had this kind of responsibility, Vinnie and Linda worked all hours to make the coliseum a success. They landed an NHL exhibition game, for instance, by promising the Boston Bruins a $50,000 ticket guarantee; they made the gamble work by selling VIP tickets that came with extras like the meatballs Linda made in their kitchen. At the same time, they also learned to play what would later become a familiar brand of hardball. When a town selectman tried to limit the hours that they could sell liquor at the coliseum, Vinnie showed up at the next meeting with a cast of 170 supporters and a battery of lawyers. “We’ve had nearly constant harassment by a certain segment of the community,” he said, staring down the selectman. “We’ve developed thick skins, but enough is enough.” The board backed off.

Through the next couple of years, Vinnie ran the coliseum while taking time out every three weeks to tend to his announcing duties on his father’s program, All-Star Wrestling. He shuttled from Cape Cod to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where the show was filmed at a small theater on the town fairgrounds. Their parents’ schedule was taxing on the kids. As Stephanie would later remember, “My parents weren’t around until later at night, so for the most part, Shane raised me. He not only toughened me up, but he kept me thoroughly entertained—most of the time doing impressions of our dad.”

Older wrestlers like Bruno Sammartino still looked down on the boss’s son, who drove a fancy car, dressed in flashy suits, and never seemed to get called to account for his numerous failures. But Vinnie was far closer to being able to take over the WWF than Sammartino or any of the other wrestlers who dismissed him realized. In Cape Cod, he was studying every act that came in, from the rock band Heart to the Harlem Globetrotters. He watched how they set their lighting rigs, wired their sound, placed their T-shirt stands. And, by Fruean’s account, he’d learned how to break even. “I don’t think he made any money, but he didn’t stick anybody with any bills,” says Fruean. “I held the mortgage, and there were never any questions.”

BY 1983
, when Vincent was sixty-seven, he began to talk about finally cashing out. He had moved to Fort Lauderdale several years earlier and enjoyed a peaceful life there. He and Juanita hosted well-attended parties and had full calendars, and though he only had to travel a few times a month for business—to the Garden once a month for a show and to Allentown every three weeks to supervise the taping of
All-Star Wrestling
—it was still growing tiresome. He called his son and asked Vinnie whether he wanted to make an offer.

In Cape Cod, Vinnie had assembled a kitchen cabinet, waiting for a moment like this to arrive. It included Linda, his closest confidant and adviser; a former New York Rangers right wing named Jim Troy, whom Vinnie had hired as the general manager of his minor-league team, the Cape Cod Buccaneers; and Joe Perkins, his father’s syndication salesman. In the spring of 1983, Vinnie flew into Manhattan from the Cape with Troy in tow, carrying two huge briefcases full of contracts.

It was a cool and sunny New York morning, and as they walked into a suite at the Warwick Hotel they found Vincent and three other men. Vinnie’s father was the public face of the WWF, but he didn’t actually own it all alone. He gave pieces to three other men whose help he needed. They were Phil Zacko, his longtime treasurer and friend, and two of his star wrestlers: Gino Marella, a four-hundred-pound high school teacher who turned himself into Gorilla Monsoon, and Arnold Skaaland, known since his heyday in the 1950s as the Golden Boy.

After all the men got comfortable, Vinnie laid the contracts on the coffee table. As he started explaining the terms, he knew the offer was held together with rubber bands. His financing was a mix of loans he’d received from friendly New England banks (using his equity in the coliseum as collateral) and the cash flow he expected to produce with the WWF. Marella and Skaaland, he said, would get one and a half times the average wrestler’s pay for every show he staged. (In other words, they’d receive $750 if the average wrestler was making $500.) Since the WWF was putting on three hundred shows a year, it was a considerable promise. Zacko would get regular monthly payments over two years, as would his father. There have been differing accounts of how much he offered his dad that afternoon—from $350,000 to as much as a $1 million. But Vincent thought it was a high-enough figure that he skeptically asked that a provision be inserted allowing him to nullify the sale if Vinnie missed a single one of the monthly payments. Vinnie agreed.

After all the documents were signed, Vinnie and Troy went down to the Warwick’s bar and each ordered a Dewar’s, neat. By nightfall, Troy recalled, “we were two of the drunkest men in New York.”

NO ONE
in the World Wrestling Federation’s troupe of sixty wrestlers realized what Vinnie was up to when he suddenly decided to change champions in December 1983. Promoters have to be part casting agent, part scriptwriter, and part enforcer, deciding not merely who wins each match, but the manner of the win and the way it lays the foundation for the next match. The story arc is the bloodstream of the promotion, a current that leaves some talents mired at the bottom of the card and others carried to the top. Mixing and matching wrestlers is an art form in itself, since it has to factor in elements like personal chemistry, style, and fan appeal. Now that he’d taken over the company from his ailing father, he was ready to place his own stamp on it—and the first order of business was getting rid of its champion, Bob Backlund.

Vinnie had to admit that Backlund had served his purpose. Until his dad brought the native Minnesotan to New York years earlier, its wrestling scene was synonymous with ethnic champions such as Pedro Morales, Sammartino, and Killer Kowalski—men who shared the grainy UHF (ultrahigh frequency) universe with ice hockey, Roller Derby, and Charles Bronson movies. They were the pulp heroes of the immigrant labor class, actors without airs, and most couldn’t have cared less if the world accorded them the respectability of porn stars. Backlund was a different wrestler in a different age, a collegiate medalist with a clean image built around a sensible six-foot-one, 191-pound frame.

However, Vinnie was tired of Backlund and ready to ride another shift in public sensibilities. He’d hired Hulk Hogan because he was everything Backlund wasn’t. So as Vinnie waited to start filming the WWF’s studio television show in Allentown, he motioned his champ to the ring. “Things are going to be changing, Bob,” he started. “We need wrestlers who are bigger than life.” Backlund winced, knowing what was coming next. “We have a guy coming in who’s going to take us to the next level.”