the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 208
the evolution of American football—and pitched with unabashed appeal
to what American Demographics magazine labeled “Guy Culture”—was
just weeks away from the coroner’s door, a victim of overreaching ambition,
poor execution, and televi sion ratings that essentially fl atlined after
the first half of the very first league game. To anyone not distracted by the
cheerleaders and manufactured excitement, the Million Dollar Game was
dead on arrival, with perhaps its most appropriate epitaph spoken weeks
later by media buyer Bob Igiel to a reporter for Mediaweek magazine:
“The XFL was an embarrassment for sports and for NBC. It was a complete
waste of time.”
On a brighter note, only a special kind of business can lose more
than $70 million in just fifteen months. Surely that’s some kind of record.
The Promise of Neanderthal Football
Vince McMahon, who first conjured the XFL illusion by announcing
plans for the league in February 2000, came to that fateful crossroads
in his life as both a man of admirable achievement and one searching for
mainstream respectability. On the one hand, he was without question a
staggeringly successful self-made sports entertainment entrepreneur. On
the other, McMahon’s fortune was derived from a decidedly lowbrow pursuit:
professional wrestling. He was most viciously characterized by author
Brett Forrest, who in his 2002 XFL autopsy report, Long Bomb: How
the XFL Became TV’s Biggest Fiasco, referred to the wrestling impresario
as a “bumpkin billionaire” who’d made his fortune in a trade that “in
many minds clung precariously to a rung one up from porn and cockfi ghting.”
The XFL, Forrest wrote, “wasn’t just McMahon’s attempt at expanding
his wealth, influence, and empire, although it certainly was that.
This was an exertion of another of his visions, that of sport’s next step. If
all went according to plan, no amount of criticism or envy could deny the
achievement. The XFL was McMahon’s shot at legitimacy.”
But let’s give credit where it’s due. McMahon had built his World