World Wrestling Federation

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World Wrestling Federation

While the World Wrestling Federation claims to have been the leader in "sports entertainment for over fifty years," the WWF really was formed in the early 1980s when Vince McMahon Jr. took over his ailing father's regional wrestling promotion and transformed it into an international marketing success story. McMahon Jr. is credited with taking professional wrestling out of the "smoke-filled arenas" and putting it on the map as family entertainment.

McMahon's father started the WWF (then called the WWWF) in 1963, breaking away from the National Wrestling Alliance over disagreements about the booking of the World Champion. McMahon Sr.'s home base was New York's Madison Square Garden, and he ran shows all along the East Coast. Playing to the heavy ethnic composition of his customers, he installed Italian strongman Bruno Sammartino as his World Champion, and the promotion was off and running. McMahon Sr. pioneered the big event card, holding two successful shows at Shea Stadium, both headlined by Sammartino. By the early 1980s, McMahon Jr., who had been working for his father as an announcer but was posed for something bigger for the business, had taken over the promotion. (McMahon told New York magazine that he "fell in love with it from the first contact.") Eventually buying out his father's stock in the parent company, Capital Sports, he changed the name to Titan Sports and proceeded to revolutionize wrestling.

McMahon broke all the rules: he "stole" other promoter's talent, bought out their television time, signed exclusive agreements with their arenas, and scheduled shows opposite theirs. Soon the traditional wrestling territories started drying up. McMahon's new company, headlined by Hulk Hogan as lead babyface and Roddy Piper as lead heel, used the emerging cable television industry to market his promotion across the country. Shows such as WWF Superstars and McMahon's faux talk show Tuesday Night Titans were the top rated shows on all cable. He also set up syndicated shows that became the highest rated in syndication. Attracting mainstream press, using celebrities like Liberace and Cindy Lauper, merchandising wrestlers as characters (the WWF would copyright and own each wrestler's gimmick), having wrestlers use entrance music, and, finally, making wrestling a true "show" thrust the WWF into the national consciousness.

After 1985's Wrestlemania I, a live event at Madison Square Garden covered by hundreds of media outlets but also shown across the country via closed-circuit TV, McMahon expanded his empire. He signed agreements for a cartoon show on CBS and inked a series of license agreements to create all sorts of products, from lunch boxes to trading cards, featuring the likenesses of his wrestlers. Rather than appealing to adults, McMahon aimed his product at the family market. The WWF scored a coup in landing a monthly spot on network TV with Saturday Night's Main Event premiering on NBC in 1985 in the 11:30 p.m. time slot. Forays into prime time began in 1988. Success followed success as the WWF dominated in the United States with events like 1987's Wrestlemania III drawing more than 90,000 to the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan, while wrestling became the cash cow of the early pay-per-view industry. The WWF even "exposed" the wrestling industry in a hearing in New Jersey to rid itself of being taxed as a sport. A WWF official testified that wrestling was indeed "fake," a headline which ended up in the New York Times. McMahon didn't even attempt to put up the façade any longer, telling New York magazine, "We're storytellers—this is a soap opera, performed by the greatest actors and athletes in the world. I'd like to say that it's the highest form of entertainment."

The WWF subsequently expanded to more than 1,000 events a year. The wrestlers were divided up into the three "teams," the big stars headlining in the major markets and new talent headlining in small towns. Already successful in Canada, in the late 1980s the WWF started running TV all over the world and promoting live events in England, Germany, and Italy as well as in the Middle East. In 1991, more than 60,000 fans jammed into Wembley Stadium in England for the "Summer Slam" show, while events in other countries sold out both tickets and merchandise.

While the success of the WWF was built on many factors, one of its main selling points was always the physique of its wrestlers. Champion Hulk Hogan bragged about having the "largest arms in the world," and performers like the Ultimate Warrior were touted not because of their ring talent, but because of their bodybuilder physiques. McMahon marketed bodybuilders by developing the World Bodybuilding Federation in 1991, a huge, and expensive, failure. More bad times followed for the WWF with the arrest of a WWF-affiliated doctor for trafficking in steroids. McMahon and the company itself were taken to court for distributing steroids in 1994 after a very public three-year investigation. About the same time the steroid scandal broke, former WWF wrestlers and announcers were coming forth with stories of sex scandals involving WWF officials. Jerry Springer, Geraldo, and other daytime talk shows covered the story, as did the New York Post. McMahon was on the ropes. The negative publicity from the scandals, coupled with the shrinking nature of the top wrestlers' physiques and the departure of top stars like Hulk Hogan caused a downturn in business. The WWF tried its old tricks of involving celebrities like Chuck Norris, Jenny McCarthy, Burt Reynolds, Pam Anderson, and even getting NFL Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor to wrestle in a Wrestlemania main event, but fan interest was waning.

After dominating wrestling for more than a decade, the WWF faced its first serious competition in 1995 when Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling challenged the WWF directly by scheduling a show called Monday Nitro opposite the WWF's long-standing Monday Night Raw. Losing talent, advertisers, and viewers, the WWF was clearly the number-two promotion. The turning point came when the WWF decided to abandon its family-friendly approach. It adopted a new hardcore edge and marketing campaign, "WWF attitude," while building the promotion around trash-talking Steve Austin rather than dependable champion Bret Hart. When Hart decided to leave the promotion in the fall of 1997, McMahon took a bold gamble. During a championship match, which McMahon and Hart had agreed would end in Hart NOT losing the WWF title, McMahon had the timekeeper ring the bell and declare Hart's opponent, Shawn Michaels, the winner and new champ. The controversy and interest in the finish, the emergence of Austin as the most popular wrestler in the country as well as a mainstream celebrity (showing up on awards shows, voicing MTV's Celebrity Death Match, being profiled in Rolling Stone and People), and lots of innovative promotion and matchmaking found the WWF back on top and once again "the leader in sports entertainment."

—Patrick Jones