the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 210
hon’s wrestling extravaganzas in head- to- head broadcasts. From that Mc-
Mahon concluded that the red-meat crowd was ready for a new brand of
football.
For decades, the NFL had been one of the most reliable magnets
for the nation’s young male viewers. Those viewers are prized because
their buying habits are not yet established, and the shows they watch are
the place the advertisers of beer, hemi pickup trucks, Doritos, and similar
products want to be. McMahon knew the denizens of Guy Culture not
already tuned to his wrestling shows were prowling their TV dial for offerings
such as The Man Show on Comedy Central, which in 1999 began
offering unapologetically sexist slow-mo video of girls jumping on trampolines,
a regular crew of big-breasted women known as the “Juggies,”
and recurring skits such as “Household Hints of Adult Film Stars.”
In those reliable appetites McMahon sensed an opportunity to
make even more money. The NFL enjoyed the biggest slice of the American
sports money pie, with annual revenues in 2002 estimated at $4.8
billion—more than twice what it had been five years before, with projected
increases of $1 billion a year during the three years that followed.
But the NFL was losing part of its young male audience to new players in
the entertainment world, including video games, the Internet, and extreme
sports competitions such as the X Games. In 1999, Monday Night
Football was drawing about 20 million viewers per game. It’s an impressive
number, but the average Monday Night Football viewer also was fortyfour
years old with an income of more than $50,000—terrific for some
advertisers, but not quite right for the ones trying to reach those coveted
young males. “In sports, old and rich is not necessarily a good thing,”
noted U.S. News & World Report in an optimistic XFL preview article in
September 2000.
McMahon imagined a football league that would appeal more directly
to those beer-drinking, hemi-driving Doritos munchers. And during
his February 2000 news conference announcing plans to create the
XFL, McMahon went straight at what he perceived as the NFL’s soft