the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 214
the commentators kept hyping an explosion that never came. In uncom-
fortably extended shots of the cheerleaders, the women came across less as
enthusiastic supporters of the battling teams and more as unemployed
centerfolds auditioning for a pole-dance gig. On cue, NBC cameras panned
the crowd to create the impression that the XFL was a magnet for celebrities,
but the best they could do was find one of the network’s own, Saturday
Night Live and future Just Shoot Me star David Spade.
To the home audience, those things didn’t come across as sideshows
to the tepid football on the field. Rather, they actually seemed to be the
show. Plus, 19–0 blowouts aren’t exactly must-see TV, which is why NBC
switched to a more competitive secondary game broadcast, anchored by
blustery former pro wrestler Jerry Lawler, before the primary game was
even fi nished.
When those February 3, 2001, games were over, though, the television
ratings were encouraging—actually, more than encouraging. The
broadcast drew an overall 9.5 rating, with each rating point representing
roughly a million U.S. households. That was more than twice as many
viewers as NBC had guaranteed its advertisers, and it bested even Monday
Night Football and ESPN’s Sunday night NFL coverage among men between
the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. But a closer inspection of the
numbers was revealing. When the game began, the national rating was
11.7 as the curious tuned in to see what all the noise was about. “Within
an hour, the number had dropped to 10.1, the loss of a couple million
viewers,” wrote Forrest in Long Bomb. “By the end of the game, the rating
had fallen to 8.”
They came, they saw, they surfed away.
The next-day media reviews were a disaster. Newspapers around
the country crawled over one another to offer the most scorching critique
of the new league. The New York Times compared the XFL to “a blight
that has crept from the low-rent fringes of cable to network prime time”
that “suggests how the lowest televi sion culture is gaining mainstream
respectability.” McMahon had previously said that the X in XFL signifi ed