the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

DON’T MESS WITH SUCCESS 209
Wrestling Entertainment Inc. from a foundation laid by his father, an old-
time wrestling promoter. While not always successful during his early
promotional efforts, the younger McMahon had staged several high-
profile public spectacles, including Evel Knievel’s comically aborted
“jump” across Idaho’s Snake River canyon in 1974. Beginning in the early
1980s, McMahon began packaging and marketing his pro wrestling shows
as cheap programming for the then-decentralized cable TV industry and
as pay-per-view televi sion events, and he remade that old- fashioned form
of sports entertainment into a modern and lucrative televi sion spectacle.
He even unselfishly played himself as a cartoonish villain (“Mr. McMahon”)
in many of his own scripted pro wrestling melodramas.
Goofy as they sometimes were, those seminude soap operas on steroids
kept TV viewers tuning in with a potent mix of sexual tease, choreographed
action- figure violence, and invented grudges. Researchers at
Indiana University quantified the formula by studying fifty episodes of
McMahon’s wrestling shows from 1998, a year when the ratings for those
shows increased by 50 percent from the year before. According to Sex,
Lies, and Headlocks: The Real Story of Vince McMahon and the World
Wrestling Federation, a 2002 book by Shaun Assael and Mike Mooneyham,
the researchers counted 1,658 instances of crotch grabbing, 157 obscene
gestures, and 128 instances of simulated sexual activity. McMahon clearly
understood what America wanted—or at least what appealed to a certain
rowdy seam of the national population—and he knew how to package it,
televise it, and milk it for cash. According to McMahon’s wrestling organization,
his operation in its prime was generating about $100 million in
quarterly revenues, with a weekly viewership around the world estimated
at 500 million.
As McMahon surveyed the American landscape from his peculiar
rung on the ladder during the winter of 2000, he sensed a softening in the
public’s ardor for NFL-style football. Between 1999 and 2000, the NFL
saw its televi sion ratings slip as part of an overall sports ratings malaise,
and even venerable Monday Night Football was losing viewers to McMa-