by Josh Gross
Starting on December 5, 1982, Joe Blanchard’s Southwest Championship Wrestling became the first weekly wrestling program on cable, airing its regional stars to the country Sunday mornings on the USA Network. As a result of the new national exposure, SWCW staged a one-night tournament in Austin, Tex., to determine an “undisputed world heavyweight champion.” Lou Thesz even presented Adrian Adonis with the oldest existing pro rasslin’ championship belt, which is on display at the National Wrestling Hall of Fame Dan Gable Museum in Waterloo, Iowa.
USA canceled the program (in spite of the high ratings the show was garnering for the network) and turned the time slot over to the WWF when SWCW couldn’t pay the bills to keep up the time buy. The promotion soon disappeared.
McMahon Jr. was the one that made the move but some people, especially those immersed in the Japanese side of the business, like Dave Meltzer, who spoke a lot to Terry Funk, saw it coming.
“Terry Funk was the booker of All-Japan Pro Wrestling, so he was living in the Japanese world,” said Meltzer, who started printing the Wrestling Observer Newsletter in 1982. “He knew, because Japan was way ahead of the U.S. in every aspect of pro wrestling, that cable would be the equivalent of network. And he knew that Japan is all over the country because you’re on TV all over the country. And the small guys can’t compete with the big guys.”
This hit Meltzer while he watched wrestling from Georgia. All of a sudden, his interest in the California stuff waned because there was better professional wrestling below the Mason–Dixon Line.
McMahon figured it out and implemented a broader vision before anyone else. Whatever competition he had along the way went belly-up, and the wide territory system consolidated into super groups.
Both the business of American pro wrestling and its reach around the world greatly expanded under McMahon Jr., who became known as an innovator and more enterprising than his father. They lived apart for much of Junior’s childhood, reuniting when the son was twelve. Following college, to the displeasure of his dad, Vince quickly moved into the family business and concocted gimmicks like slicing Ali with a razor blade.
Junior had returned to New York by the night of June 25 so the voice of the WWWF could call the matches from Shea Stadium. Publicly McMahon was just the announcer, but behind the scenes he was starting to build the third-generation business. Sitting at the precipice of control of a solid pro wrestling kingdom, McMahon surveyed what was in front of him and asked how he could push the business. He wanted to be the world’s biggest promoter, not necessarily of just pro wrestling, though that was the priority.
“I believe that no matter how outlandish it is, knowing Vince to be the risk taker that he is, that he’s out there trying to push,” said Madigan, who left the WWE in 2010 and writes screenplays in Los Angeles. “He’s always tried to elevate wrestling outside of its parameters. This is another way of opening up the world. At the time it was still territorial. WWWF, which came from the Capitol Wrestling Corporation, was territorial and you’re still trying to carve out who you are.
“You could walk in a room and see the potential of something from Point A to Point B. Vince sees it from Point A to Point D. To Point E. Vince sees the potential going off until he can’t see it anymore. I’ve been in meetings when Vince will talk about something. He’ll look up and all of a sudden his eyes will look off. You can see where Vince sees this going. This is amazing foresight. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Without Vince’s foresight, wrestling would still be territorial. It would be in the dark ages, and no matter who you had wrestling for you—you could have the greatest guys in your promotion—but you are still watching the promotion. Vince knocked the walls down. He was like the Romans and spread the empire.
“Vince doesn’t push the envelope. Vince knocks over the post office. That’s what I love about him. He’s always said no matter what you do you learn from it. I think he learned from it. What to do. What not to do. And never put yourself in a position to look weak.
“Vince puts it on the line every time. Whether you agree or disagree you can’t fault the guy for trying to be the best. It’s his vision and if you don’t like it get the fuck out of the way. You’re either in or in the way. I think this just spurred him on to bigger things. For the first time, in a way, even though it’s Japan, it’s giving the WWWF a bigger spotlight.”
Ambition could be heard in McMahon’s voice when he called Ali’s skirmish with Gorilla Monsoon in Philadelphia. The seeds had been planted for expansion. After “Toots” Mondt and Jess McMahon formed the Capitol Wrestling Corporation, which begat the WWWF, the WWF, and eventually the WWE, pro wrestling was fit for Saturday morning cartoons. Merchandising became a big deal. The more McMahon pushed, the larger his wrestling empire’s sphere of influence grew.
Less than a decade after creating the WWF, Vince K. McMahon described the style of his professional wrestling league as “sports entertainment.” Though the term dates back to February 1935, when Toronto Star sports editor Lou Marsh described professional wrestling as “sportive entertainment,” in 1989 McMahon used the phrase before the New Jersey Senate as he spoke about reclassifying professional wrestling to “sports entertainment”—and thus not fall subject to regulation or taxation like a competitive sport. The death rattle over pro wrestling’s sporting legitimacy, as it was widely regarded two generations ago, finally stopped. Business, though, was just picking up.
Wrestling is a funny thing in that it works off the Zeitgeist of the time—sometimes as embarrassing entertainment unafraid to latch on to whatever holds attention. At the highest level, once you know where you can take an angle or a story, you stay there. Then you’re forced to push or swerve and find new ways to hold the crowd. One of the wrestlers Madigan worked with at the WWE was Kenzo Suzuki, a wrestler from New Japan Pro Wrestling. Suzuki had some good size to him, and Madigan didn’t want to touch the old characters. They had done the samurai. The ninja. The cliché.
Then Madigan pitched McMahon on “Hirohito,” the great-grandson of the Emperor Hirohito, coming back to avenge his family honor and cultural heritage.
“God knows why,” Madigan laughed. “I said, ‘Imagine this. You’re watching the screen. All of a sudden you see an atomic explosion. Out of the mushroom cloud two Asian eyes peer out.’
“Vince went crazy. He loved it. He loved it. He goes, ‘That’s great.’”
McMahon purchased archival footage of a devastated Hiroshima after the U.S. dropped an atomic weapon on Japan, and WWE showed two eyes peering out from behind a mushroom cloud during a presentation in the arena. Someone went so far as to toss a bucket of “blood” onto the screen and it ran down over the eyes as the angle played out.
“Hirohito is coming,” the screen read.
This was shown on television live just once, on Raw, WWE’s flagship Monday night program that debuted on the USA Network in 1993. Wrestlers backstage wondered what the hell it meant. McMahon was very happy.
“I’m walking around on cloud nine,” Madigan said. “Two days later we’re back at the home office and Vince comes in. ‘We don’t talk about Hirohito,’ he said. ‘We don’t mention Hirohito. It never happened.’”
The Japanese Imperial Family was very upset with the promo and its implications, and according to Madigan they threatened to kick out WWE from Japan.
“I didn’t know there was a Japanese royal family,” he replied to McMahon.
“Well neither did I. Apparently they watch wrestling.”
Madigan once pitched a Nazi gimmick to McMahon. Baron Von Bobbin, the goose-stepping Nazi found frozen in the Swiss Alps. McMahon apparently stood up, didn’t say a word, and walked out of their meeting. That one didn’t fly, but others did and Madigan was responsible for sparking complaints from high ground. The Canadian government was upset over a character named Eugene because it portrayed a mentally challenged person. He also felt heat over the character “Mordecai,” a religious zealot who was banned by the Church of England.
“If you can’t get in trouble with the Church of England and the Japanese royal family you’re not doing your job,” Madigan quipped.
McMahon retrofitted the WWF into a unique brand that reached out to family audiences while attracting fans who had never before paid attention to pro wrestling. By directing his story lines towards highly publicized supercards, McMahon capitalized on a fledgling revenue stream by promoting these events live on pay-per-view television, a concept initiated by then-rival Jim Crockett Promotions. In 1987, the WWF reportedly drew 93,173 fans to the Pontiac Silverdome (the “biggest crowd in sports entertainment history”) for WrestleMania III, which featured the main event of Hulk Hogan versus Andre the Giant.
For many fans it was the moment Andre got slammed, and WWF played it up that way even though in the old territory structure Hogan had done so many times. YouTube compilation videos of Hogan repeatedly lifting and dropping the Giant onto wrestling canvases across America are highly amusing.
Pro wrestling touches people in funny ways. The emotion of sport wrapped in a hippodrome. The formula obviously works and from time to time can serve as base social commentary. Muhammad Ali, a poet and philosopher, didn’t need a low-brow way to express such things; however, he loved wrestling and grabbed a chance to play in that world when he could.
“He’s got the same blood,” said Ali’s doctor, Ferdie Pacheco. “They had the blood of a con artist. Wrestling is con. It’s just a con. And if they went and wrestled and did crazy things it’s because they were doing stunts. So Ali liked that. He liked the idea of jumping off the top rope and landing on a guy.”
Because people don’t take it seriously, sports entertainment can touch issues—more to the point: play off current events and stereotypes—that more serious spaces might shy away from for fear of paying a public relations price. In the wrestling business there’s no such thing.
McMahon relied on the “sports entertainment” tag to help navigate his company through a steroid scandal, and is doing the same as wrestlers file lawsuits against WWE regarding concussion-related problems such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, known as CTE, a degenerative brain disease found in people with a history of repeated head trauma.
Hardly anyone made much noise about concussions as the calender turned to 1970, when, for instance, Chuck Wepner went down to George Foreman and Sonny Liston ten months apart. His main talent was taking as much punishment as an opponent could give.
At Madison Square Garden, a snappy left jab, stinging left hooks, and solid rights helped Foreman, in his fourth pro fight, stagger Wepner in the second round. Cut over his left eye heading to the third, Wepner needed to be saved after Foreman split the gash wide open with a series of punches. Big George wouldn’t lose until his forty-first bout half a decade later against Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire.
Liston’s final fight took place six months before he died at the age of 40 from “natural causes.” Many people believe he was murdered. One theory is that Liston was supposed to take a dive against Wepner, and killing him was payback for his failure to do so. (Others suggested he died from injecting heroin.) Among Wepner’s people in Jersey City, N.J., at the Armory on June 29, 1970, the fight was stopped after the ninth round due to severe cuts over both of Wepner’s eyes. He required seventy-two stitches and also suffered a broken nose and a cracked left cheekbone.
Wepner got a taste of the big time when he fought Ali in 1975. He inspired Sylvester Stallone to create Rocky Balboa after knocking down Ali with a clubbing shot under the heart in Round 9—one of four times in The Greatest’s career that he went down, although the other three came off clean punches, while Wepner clearly stepped on Ali’s foot when he connected.
“It wasn’t a great punch,” admitted Wepner. “But when he went down and the referee started counting, I went back to my corner. I walked back and I remember saying to my manager Al Braverman, ‘Start the car. We’re going to the bank. We’re millionaires.’ And he said ‘Chuck, you better turn around. He looks pissed off.’ And he was.”
The tall, bruising liquor salesman made it to Round 15 before Ali stopped him. Wepner wasn’t long for boxing at that point anyhow, and he already considered himself “best friends” with the WWWF people when Vince McMahon Sr. called with an offer in the spring of 1976. “I was asked if I would do this ‘mixed martial arts’ thing with someone,” Wepner recalled, “I said, ‘Who was the someone?’ He said, ‘Andre the Giant.’ I said, ‘Why not? What the fuck. I fought a bear twice.’”
Andre the Giant stood and weighed, according to the most impressive estimates, seven foot five and 525 pounds at the time Wepner faced him. The bear, closer to eight feet tall, had another 725 pounds on the famous Frenchman.
“I got the shit beat out of me and I got mauled twice, but it was for charity,” Wepner said. “They told me I wasn’t supposed to hit the bear in the nose. It was a trained bear. But nobody told me that. So I’m moving around popping this bear in the nose, and he flipped out. And threw me off the mat and jumped on me. Thank God I was able to get my hands out to wave so the trainer could whistle him off. He blows a whistle and the bear stops.”
A year and a half later, to Wepner’s detriment, the mauling boxer was again matched with the bear.
“This bear remembered me when I fought him in Asbury Park and was hitting him in the nose,” he said. “And I told my manager when we were sitting in the ring that this bear remembers me and he don’t like me. And Al’s like, ‘He’s fought a hundred guys since you. He’s not gonna remember you.’ Bears get your scent. They’re like elephants, another animal with a strong memory. He remembered me and I remembered him.”
When the bear charged, Wepner sidestepped and tried to jump out of the ring, but he got tangled in the ropes and the bear slung the 225-pounder by the leg.
“I went out into the crowd on the table, knocked over all the dishes,” Wepner said. “There was 160 people in the place. My friend picked me up and said, ‘Come on Chuck, get up, go get ’em.’ This bear’s standing. You can imagine, it’s eight feet tall and 1,250 pounds. He’s roaring. And then they said, ‘Go get ’em.’ And I said, ‘Go get my ass.’ And the referee’s counting, he’s up to four. And I said, ‘five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, good-bye.’ So it won by default. We raised almost $28,000 that night for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Tickets were $350 apiece, plus the drinks, and they had a thing before that. Anyways, we did a good job.”
Wepner had a month’s notice for Andre the Giant. Since he was in shape anyway and in the gym all the time it was an easy yes.
“Of course it was show business so nobody was going to get seriously hurt,” he said. “Unless there was a mistake. They wanted Andre in the fourth round to body slam me to win the fight. I said are you out of your mind? He’s 525 pounds. We weighed in with Brent Musburger from CBS. They had to bring in a meat scale to weigh in. I was 228; he as 525. We took some pictures. He had a hand two and a half times the size of mine. He was just a huge man.”
The atmosphere at Shea Stadium was tremendous as both men made their way to a ring situated in the center of the baseball diamond. Most estimates pegged attendance for the second WWWF promoted “Showdown at Shea” at over 32,000. Wepner said it seemed like half that to him. It was still a big crowd and fans were getting two attractions for the price of one, featuring Andre the Giant, the most popular wrestler in the world, and Muhammad Ali, the greatest fighter in the world.
A precursor to Wrestlemania, the “Showdown at Shea” took place in 1972, 1976, and 1980. Bruno Sammartino headlined all three events, though he probably should not have in ’76. Two and a half months earlier at Madison Square Garden, Stan Hansen slipped while executing a basic body slam and dropped Sammartino on his head, resulting in a broken neck. Nothing like that had happened before to Sammartino and the big wrestling hero wasn’t in condition to do anything athletic as the bicentennial approached.
Doctors told Vince McMahon Sr. not to, but Shea Stadium was booked, and so were major arenas in
the WWWF’s territory throughout the Northeast. McMahon rang Sammartino, his long-reigning heavyweight champion, and told him that because of all the money locked up in this thing, if the promotion failed it meant they could be out of business. So Sammartino had to show up, especially since most of the people who turned up at Shea were there to see him.
Sammartino reluctantly agreed to take 3 precent of all the closed-circuit money but never saw a penny. McMahon eventually told him that Bob Arum, the boxing guy in the equation, messed up the deal. Regardless, the promoters got what they wanted. Sammartino sold some tickets and Wepner and the Giant romped on closed circuit.
It started out with putting on a show, then Wepner began belting Andre. He sidestepped the mammoth wrestler once, and hit him with a couple of rabbit punches. The Giant grew mad and threw a backhand that struck Wepner across the chest and the side of his face.
“Christ, it was like getting hit with a bat,” Wepner said. “He was such a strong man. And then we picked it up a little bit. We gave them their money’s worth. When he threw me outta the ring, I landed almost directly on the pitcher’s mound in Shea Stadium because it was right there in the middle of the field.”
When Andre the Giant faced Jersey’s own Chuck Wepner, the crowd across the river at the Liberty Theater started buzzing. “Even though the Bayonne Bleeder was one of our own, my recollection was that the crowd was very heavily Andre,” recalled Jeff Wagenheim. “And when the moment came when he picked up Wepner and threw him out of the ring, the whole theater went crazy.”
