"Lords Of The Ring"

This is a really kick ass article. Gives you a whole new respect for Vince!

The child bolted upright in his bed, awakened by screams, his mother's screams, crackling through the thin walls of the house trailer and shattering the blackness of the North Carolina night. Creeping out of bed, the boy peered into the next room, where his 200-pound stepfather bent over his mother's crouched form, bloodying her face with his fist. "Hey, what are you guys doing?" Cried the startled child, and the man spun and grabbed the six year old's hair, bringing a closed fist hard across his face until the cheeks were bloody and the whimpered and fled. Later, in his bed, the boy would weep.

His stepfather was an electrician, and he used whatever tools were on hand to beat his was child: wires, screwdrivers, a pipe wrench. The lessons seemed simple -- Violence solves problems -- And the boy learned it well as eh grew, fighting, drinking, and disrupting school so often he was finally expelled. Later, as young man, when he had tamed his rebelliousness and begun to work for the old time wrestling promoter who was his real father, he discovered he could draw on his violent past. In time, he would create a world of fury and mayhem so big and so bad that it made his childhood home look like Disneyland. But this time, there would be a difference: This time, the bad guys would work for him.

"Did you see it, wasn't that cool?" Vince McMahon gasps, out of breath and dripping with beer and perspiration. He has just lurched off the set of a live audience taping of "SMACKDOWN!" In New Haven, Conn., where he was "bashed" with a metal chair and ended the match spread-eagled on the canvas. "SMACKDOWN!" Is just one of the hugely successful shows produced by McMahon's World Wrestling Federation, which in the past seventeen years has taken professional wrestling from a marginal, back-alley sport to nothing short of a new American art form: "sports entertainment," he calls is, a bizarre melange of rock music, pyrotechnics, soap opera, and athleticism staged before frenzied crowds. McMahon's Monday night two-hour "RAW IS WAR," filled with lewdness, simulated sex, prostitutes, and profanities is the No. 1-rated show on cable TV, outpacing even "MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL" among male teens and edging out its slightly less raunchy rival, World Championship Wrestling's "MONDAY NITRO." The two competing tours produce fifteen hours of weekly TV, attracting a whopping thirty-five million viewers.

Captain of industry. But McMahon has wrought far more than just a popular TV show. With a bevy of spin-offs -- Two magazines, videos, a Web site, T-shirts, action figures, and even cologne -- WWF and its competitor, WCW, have managed to infiltrate the fantasies of an entire generation of young boys. In certain parts of the country it's hard to find a male teen who can't identify Stone Cold Steve Austin (the beer swilling, shiny-domed WWF superstar) or Goldberg (the grimacing, shiny-domed WCW superstar). Overseas, professional wrestler are often the face of American culture: WWF programming is currently beamed to 120 countries and translated into 11 languages.

Yet the extent to which wrestling's violence and vulgarity affect society -- And especially young people -- Is far from clear. Certainly, nobody claims that pile driving one's enemies or ranting obscenities is a testament to cultural progress. McMahon says he is just reflecting the world around him. But a host of social critics. -- Educators, pediatricians, and parents -- argue that McMahon is doing far worse, by pitching to a vulnerable young audience the vilest messages of our times: Racial stereotypes are OK. Ogling women and making crude remarks are the marks of a man. It's cool to tell people to "Kiss my ass" or "Suck it." And if you disagree with someone, "bash" them.

Current events only confuse the picture. In the aftermath of the tragic shootings in Littleton, Colo., many Americans are debating whether the United States has a special culture of violence in which the link between social ills and televised brutality like wrestling seems all too obvious. Yet there is suprisingly little scientific research to connect the two. In Littleton, both killer Matthew Kechter, who was killed, was such received -- a special tribute to the victims, which aired on "RAW" two weeks ago

The man responsible for the wrestling boom is every bit as much a paradox as his product. On-stage, he is the mean, scowling schemer, "Mr. McMahon," who will lie, cheat, and crack skulls to get the power and money he craves. Offstage, he seems almost guileless. "My job it to entertain the masses at whatever level they want," he says, sipping his 10th cup of coffee of the day in the slick glass-and-marble headquarters of Titan Sports Inc., WWF's parent company. IN person, McMahon is an affectionate, affable man with a shiny prawn pompadour and a disarming candor. One minute he volunteers intimate details about this marriage (he cheated repeatedly -- "It's not something I'm proud of"). The next, he squeezes the arm of his publicist saying, "I could be better at patting others on the back, right, pal?" This is Vince, the softy who wept the first time he held his son Vince, who sends his wrestlers out to meet dying kids for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Pumped Up Then there is the ready-to-rumble Vince, the aggressive competitor whom a former WWF wrestler once called "an evil guy" who treats wrestlers like "circus animals." This Vince follows a simple code: You hit him, he hits back. In mid-90s, after Ted Turner lured away some of McMahon's stars for his competing WCW tour on the cable channels TBS and TNT, McMahon ratcheted up the level of violence and sexuality in Raw to new levels -- even while admitting that 15 percent of the audience, or more than 1 million viewers, is 11 years old or younger. By February of this year, the show's mayhem had risen to such levels that an Indiana University -- Inside Edition study of 50 episodes reported 1,658 instances of grabbing or pointing to one's crotch, 157 instances of an obscene finger gesture, 128 episodes of simulated sexual activity, and 21 references to urination.

"These shows are extremely inappropriate models for children," says Howard Spivak, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' task force on violence. Kids don't always differentiate fantasy from reality, says Spivak and other critics, who point to 30 years of scientific research linking TV violence with increased fear and aggression in children. Although few researchers have zeroed in on televised wrestling, a 1994 Israeli study of third- through sixth-graders showed that after the WWF started airing in Israel in the early 1990s, violent behavior -- in the form of mock wrestling matches that often escalated to fighting and injuries -- increased "to a degree never known before." When WWF airtime was cut back, the violence among school children diminished "sharply."

At the New Haven Coliseum he other night, 10-year-old Jim Sabo, a WWF fan since he was 2, sat down with his mother watching "SMACKDOWN!" He was holding a sign he had made himself that read, "Suck IT." What he likes best about wrestling, Jim says, is "How they all get hurt." His mother, Laurie, says she's not too concerned about the violence. "He understands it's just an act," she says. "But I'm not happy with the nudity and swearing."

Even some of the WWF's own stars think the show goes too far. "I get a little turned off with some of the sexual overtones," says Stone Cold Steve Austin, who in real life is Steve Williams, the father of two young girls. "I don't dig any of that racism."

Code of honor. But McMahon accepts no blame. For someone who tries to adhere to a moral code in his private life, he seems strangely disconnected from the moral implications of his public persona. McMahon says he values honesty, respect for others, compassion, and equal treatment for all. He gave up his martial infidelities, he says, when he realized he was "hurting a lot of people." He is proud that he hires only 'quality human beings."

But when it comes to wrestling, he refuses to play ethics cop. He is first and foremost an entertainer, he says, and it's the job of parents -- not himself -- to monitor what kids watch on TV. "RAW is TV-14," he says, referring to the content rating. "If parents are concerned about content, they should insist their kids watch the Saturday and Sunday morning, which is more youth friendly." As for obscene finger gestures, they are "done all over the world." And the frequent WWF appearances of an African-American pimp and his "ho's?" "We're not concerned about being politically incorrect."

Past episodes of "RAW" have featured mock crucifixions, S&M scenes, wrestlers "mooning" the audience and each other, and a woman sucking suggestively on an Italian sausage. Is there a line beyond which McMahon won't go? "You don't see guns, murder, knives," he says. "We resolve our differences physically, in a wrestling ring. How bad is it compared to a Schwarzeneggar or Stallone movie?"

He has a point. Wrestling, with its cartoonish characters and faked body slams and pile drivers, seems less real than Mel Gibson mowing down blood-spurting villains with a pump shotgun. Mick Foley, who plays the deranged WWF character Mankind, says that even children's fairy tales have more blood and gore than the WWF. For instance, in Snow White, the evil stepmother requests that Snow White's heart be brought to her in a box (the messenger brings a boar's heart instead.) "If we were to air a story line like that," Foley says, "we'd have a media uproar requesting that we be thrown off the air."

McMahon has not asked for anyone's heart in a box -- yes -- but in an odd way, his success rests on wrestling's ability to tap those troves of human archetypes. Mythologist Joseph Campbell once wrote that humans inevitably re-created ancient myths in each new generation. For all its crudeness, professional wrestling plays to just such familiar fables. IN "RAW" the "sport" occupies just 36 minutes of a two-hour show. The rest is an elaborate, soap-opera-syle story line detailing a host of feuds, rivalries, grudges, and byzantine subplots.

Myth maker. Playing out the tales is an oddball cast drawn in part form McMahon's own imagination and embellished by his team of writers and stars. McMahon has never read Homer or Carl Jung, but if wrestling did not pay homage to primordial story lines, it seems unlikely that it would have caught on. The Undertaker, the ultimate archetype of darkness, dresses in black, appears in a cloud of smoke, and continually hauls off victims for Satanic rituals. The 7-foot Kane -- a mute, scarred misfit in a scar red mask 00 is right out of the book of Genesis. Another favorite plot, that of a beautiful woman (currently, McMahon's 22-year-old daughter, Stephanie) abducted by a man, sounds a lot like "Iliad" or even the Hindu epic "Ramayana." Then there is the staged rebellion of McMahon's son, Shane, against his father. Oedipus Rex, anyone?

Jungian psychologist Polly Young-Eisendrath says these images are instantly recognizable "because everybody has had the same emotional experience." A fan, Patrick Armstrong, 23, puts it this way: "Every member of the population is represented in the WWF."

And at the center of it all is McMahon, who helped build a mutimillion-dollar megabusiness from the small-time shows of the early 1980s. On show night, he darts around nonstop, now poring over the script backstage, now huddling with Steve Austin, now stopping to chat with a reporter about his need to "tweak" the show's story line right up until curtain time. Around him roam the lunatic products of his imagination. A beefy, bare-chested wrestler named Triple H watches while a hairdresser arranges his blond tresses in a ponytail. The Big Show, a 500-pound refrigerator of a man, sprays his vast torso and shoulders with oil. Another star, Al Snow, wanders around carrying a mannequin's severed head. "In psycholanalytic terms," he says solemnly, "I'm projecting a nonverbal cry for help." They all seem to like Vince. He is nice to everybody, they say. "This is a mom-and-pop business," says Nicole Bass, a 6-foot, 2-inch bodybuilder who recently joined the show. "It's really a big family back here."

It's certainly a happier family than the one Vince Kennedy McMahon left back in Havelock, N.C. His mother married five times, and her boy Vince suffered not only from dyslexia but from attention deficit disorder as well. He was so disruptive in school that the authorities gave him a choice: a state reform school or a military academy. Before long, he had earned the dubious honor of being the first cadet in the history of Fishburne Military School in Wanynesboro, Va., to be court-martialed. In fact, the only way McMahon got through what is now called East Carolina University was by attending class for five years, taking summer school every year, and petitioning his professors to raise his grades. "Even today I can't spell," he says.

After stints selling paper cups and adding machines, he went to work in 1971 for his father, who promoted wrestling matches throughout the Northeast. With stars like Gorgeous George, wrestling had been a huge hit in the early days of television, featured on all the networks. But by the late 1960s, it had dropped in appeal. McMahon began buying out the regional promoters who controlled the sport and consolidating the smaller tours into a national company. In the early 1980s, he acknowledged that the outcomes of the matches were predetermined, freeing wrestling from state regulations. Ten years later, when a federal investigation of steroid use in the WWF threatened to scuttle the company, Vince beat the charges -- while admitting he took steroids himself, when they were still legal.

Stiff competition. It was during the steroid investigation -- and a concurrent scandal involving sexual harassment against a WWF executive (not McMahon) -- that Ted Turner made his move. Turner signed several WWF stars, including superstar Hulk Hogan, and positioned his "MONDAY NITRO" directly opposite "RAW." The WCW shows topped WWF viewership for more than a year and a half. Irate, McMahon charged Turner with theft of ideas, and his lawsuit -- and Turner's counter suit -- are still pending.

In the end, though, the competition apparently helped them both. Far from mercifully receding, professional wrestling is threatening to expand. Life is good now for McMahon. The guy who grew up in a trailer and put cardboard in his shoes to cover the holes now controls a company with revenues of %500 million a year. His wife, Linda, is president and CEO of the Stamford, Conn., corporation; their children, Stephanie and Shane, both work for the company; and the whole family appears in the shows. His kids are so devoted that Shane McMahon even asked his father to be his best man at his wedding a few years ago.

Linda likes to tell the story of when Shane was 4 years old and was terrified one night that Dracula was hiding in the closet. No amount of reassurance by his mother could change his mind. Finally, Vince strode into the room, heading right into the closet. After a great deal of crashing and banging, he emerged and closed the door. "You don't have to worry anymore," he assured his son. "Dracula is dead."

As a father, McMahon understood the importance of quieting a child's fears about violence and terror. But a wrestling promoter's job, he tells interviewers, is not that of a parent. So don't expect McMahon to slay one of parents' current nightmares, the sordid spectacle of professional wrestling. That's one monster he prefers not to see.

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