We Promised You a Great Main Event: An Unauthorized WWE History

By Bill Hanstock

“A fascinating dive into the physical art of modern-day wrestling entertainment and the unbelievable characters who make it work in the ring and the back.” —Chris Kluwe

In We Promised You a Great Main Event, longtime sports journalist Bill Hanstock pulls back the curtain to give a smart fan’s account of WWE and Vince McMahon’s journey to the top. Untangling the truth behind the official WWE storyline, Hanstock does a deep dive into key moments of the company’s history, from the behind-the-scenes drama at the Montreal Screwjob, to the company’s handling of the Jimmy Snuka scandal, to the real story of the Monday Night Wars.

WWE is an extraordinary business success and an underappreciated pop cultural phenomenon. While WWE soared to prominence during the Hulk Hogan years, as the stakes grew more and more extreme, wrestlers faced steroid scandals and assault allegations. The whole story is here, good, bad, and ugly, from the heights of iconic cultural moments like Wrestlemania III to the arrival of global superstars like The Rock and John Cena.

We Promised You a Great Main Event is an exhaustive, fun account of the McMahon family and WWE’s unprecedented rise. Drawing on a decade of covering wrestling, Bill Hanstock synthesizes insights from historians, journalists, and industry insiders with his own deep research to produce the most up-to-date, entertaining history of WWE available. Full of amazing characters and astonishing stories from the ring to corporate boardrooms, it is a story as audacious as any WWE spectacle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062980854

Bill Hanstock

Bill Hanstock is an Emmy-winning producer, screenwriter, editor and journalist. He has covered and interviewed countless WWE and independent wrestling personalities and events for SB Nation, has contributed to Polygon, The Athletic, and Inked magazine, and has penned nearly a dozen stories for the official WWE comic book. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, son, and two cats.

Book preview

Introduction

You Know It’s All Fake, Right?

Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way right up front: yes, professional wrestling fans know it’s fake.

The truth is that for the vast majority of pro wrestling fans, we’ve lived most of our lives being told that our pastime isn’t actually real—the implication being, of course, that a perceived lack of authenticity means it isn’t worth our time, attention, and passion. It’s a very strange social and pop cultural stigma that is unique to wrestling, and it’s one that every single wrestling fan has encountered. Yes, it’s fake. And we really don’t care, because that isn’t the point.

For one thing, the athleticism and artistry of the performers and the consequences of the pro wrestling lifestyle couldn’t be more real, but for another, no one goes up to someone excited about the latest Star Wars movie and says, You know that Darth Vader isn’t real, right? Yep. All made up. You big dummy. Few (if any) people will cut someone off in the middle of gushing about a particular Meryl Streep performance to tell you that she didn’t really have to choose which of her children would be killed, or that she wasn’t really Julia Child.

It doesn’t matter that wrestling is fake. In fact, it is that very artifice that makes it so enthralling and watchable. Consider this: Legitimate sports are in fact so random that our narrative-driven brains aren’t able to perceive them as the objective and random collection of moments that they really are. Our brains and our broadcasters and analysts and columnists and other assorted talking heads try to awkwardly staple a narrative to a given game, sport, or athlete: the Yankees always win; LeBron fades in the fourth quarter; the refs were biased against us; Matt Ryan isn’t clutch. We look for a story in sports when there usually isn’t one. Wrestling gives us that story we crave.

Of course, wrestling also goes above and beyond by giving us backstage skits and exploding cars and witch doctors who make bodybuilders throw up. But face it: wouldn’t you be a lot more likely to tune in to a typical Thursday night NFL game if you knew Roger Goodell was going to show up beforehand and tell his archnemesis Aaron Rodgers that he’ll have to take on the Vikings using only seven players on offense all night? You’d watch the ever-living hell out of that. And even if it was fake, you’d probably enjoy it just the same.

We want to suspend our disbelief. We love doing it. Just like when we take in any other form of a narrative, we pay attention to the stories that are being told. Maybe these two combatants in the ring aren’t really trying to defeat one another in unarmed combat for realsies, but if we’re lucky, the story that they tell inside that ring is going to transport and elevate our emotions as only the best combination of art and sport is capable of doing.

Pro wrestling’s fakeness isn’t a liability. It’s a storytelling device—one that wrestlers employ now with more self-awareness than ever. Fans have been in on the joke to varying degrees all along, but these days wrestlers are more than happy to make metacommentary on their own sport, from The Rock’s hyper self-aware heel to CM Punk’s pipe bomb promo.

The world of The Rock and CM Punk is a wildly different one from that of Bruno Sammartino. For the first time in the sport’s hundred-year-plus history, most of the people plying their trade as wrestlers are not members of a sworn brotherhood or society, invested in keeping kayfabe at all costs and keeping outsiders at arm’s length. The people performing as wrestlers now are—nearly exclusively—fans of wrestling in all its forms. These aren’t mostly former amateur wrestlers or former football players or street fighters or bodybuilders or models pressed into service because of their legitimacy and look and physique and told to protect the business and make sure the marks don’t peek behind the curtain; these are people who have grown up knowing about the artifice of wrestling and loving it with their entire hearts not just in spite of, but because of its postmodern, metatextual idiosyncrasies. These are fans of wrestling who loved the show so much that they became wrestlers, in an age when it’s never been easier to find credible wrestling schools. They’ve emerged and entered the business (or adapted their craft) in the age of social media and YouTube. They’ve practiced and distributed their promos and matches on the internet, posted on message boards, traded tapes, written letters to fan magazines, and promised themselves they’d have their very own WrestleMania moment. Not because they want to be rich, but because they want to be artists—and their medium is wrestling.

(It’s not all pathos and high art, of course. Due to the very nature and sheer ridiculousness of the reality of the reality of professional wrestling, there are going to be some kitschy or hokey aspects on some level. You cannot completely separate the hokeyness of wrestling from all of wrestling.)

So yes, fans aren’t idiots. We are even well aware of the long history of problematic, racist, and bigoted characters and story lines, and the shady business practices that have plagued the industry in general and World Wrestling Entertainment in particular.

Not that we get any credit for that. The condescension that pro wrestling fans experience doesn’t just extend to daily interactions with nonwrestling fans. I have had to wade through a good amount of biographies and memoirs and explainers and long-form articles that spend a lot of time trying to explain pro wrestling terms that most fans already know, while simultaneously having been through an editor who doesn’t know there was a person named Lou Thesz, or why that person existed, or why he might have a move named after him. Or how his name is spelled. We’ve had to deal with good but uninformed writers talking down to us, or (far more often) extremely knowledgeable fans and documentarians whose strong suit isn’t entertaining or, sadly, legible writing. Generally, these histories are either dry to a fault or talk down to the audience.

Even so, we’ll snatch up any piece of content that we can find if we think we’ll get some quality wrestling-based entertainment or information out of it—or just a shot of that pure, sweet, delectable pro wres nostalgia. In my decade of writing about wrestling on the internet, I’ve learned two fundamental truths about wrestling fans: we’ll click on and read absolutely anything we can about wrestling, and we’ll never, ever be able to get enough of it.

What I’m hoping to accomplish over the course of this book is a delicate balancing act. An informative history of the largest professional wrestling company in history (and by extension, a history of professional wrestling in the United States) that doesn’t insult the intelligence of hardcore fans, doesn’t alienate the uninitiated, and remains entertaining throughout. I’m excited to take on the challenge, and I’m excited that you’re coming along with me.

The story of WWE—formerly the World Wrestling Federation (WWF)—is a drama for the ages. Real-life backstabbing; all the drugs, booze, and sex you could possibly imagine; cutthroat business takeovers; and actual murder. What has happened over the course of Vince McMahon and his company’s ascendancy is every inch the soap opera for men that the on-camera pro wrestling product is constantly derided for aspiring to.

From the very beginning of the company, long before it was WWE, the McMahon family has been behind the scenes, steering the ship, and for forty years, since the company set its sights on national, and then global, expansion, they’ve had to deal with purists crying loudly that they’re murdering the very sport in which they ply their trade.

NFL fans hate Roger Goodell. NBA fans hated David Stern. Soccer fans hate everything about FIFA. NHL fans hate the rules that have made the league soft. But no sport has ever despised a despot more than the wrestling industry loathes the McMahon family.

Part I

The McMahon Family and The Early Years

1

Genetic Jackhammers and Actual Sledgehammers

An Introduction to the McMahon Family

Jim Browning, a rough-and-tumble brawler with a face like Jack Dempsey on a bad day and a thick midsection that, even in clothes, would warn bystanders not to start trouble, sends a roar up through the Coney Island crowd on a summer day in 1933.

Decades later, Hulk Hogan whipped the crowd into a frenzy when, at a given point in a match, he would channel the positive vibes of his Hulkamaniacs into a short period of imperviousness and Hulk up, vibrating his eye-popping 24-inch pythons* and marching in a spasmodic circle before pointing an accusatory finger at his challenger—almost invariably a barrel-chested monster from whatever country the United States happened to be feuding with or distrustful of at the time.

One year before the new millennium, a smug billionaire stands in a wrestling ring with his family and his chosen corporate wrestling champion: a well-over-6-foot-tall specimen known only as The Rock, a third-generation pompous ass with a penchant for silk Versace shirts and cocking an eyebrow beneath his rapidly dwindling hairline. This group’s moment of serenity would come to a screeching halt when the sound of breaking glass fills the arena, and a crazed redneck in a camouflage jacket drives a Coors beer truck to the ringside area. This lunatic hillbilly stomps out of the truck in jean shorts and proceeds to blast everyone standing in the ring—and most fans at ringside—with a torrent of beer sprayed directly out of a fire hose. Apparently, that’s a function of beer trucks, although it’s likely seldom used.

But all these scenes, from ankle-booted hourlong exchanges of amateur wrestling holds, to beer hoses, to flips and cakes, have been presided over (in one form or another) by one family: the McMahons.

The McMahon family are the central figures behind the scenes (and usually smack-dab in the middle of the scenes), a group that is about as self-made as a batch of American moguls can get—at least in the carny-ass industry that is pro wrestling.

The current and reigning patriarch, Vince McMahon, is hailed as perhaps the most brilliant wrestling mind of all time, and as the main source of problems that fans, peers, and onlookers have with WWE in particular, and, fair or not, with wrestling at large. As the driving force of the WWE machine, the architect of its monopolization of the industry, and the sole person who determines what makes it onto every television show, pay-per-view, house show, website article, coffee table book, press release, or program, he reaps the lion’s share of the credit for anything that gains acclaim, and is the person to blame if things are received poorly. In more recent years, WWE’s successes are largely considered by fans to happen in spite of Vince rather than because of him, almost as if the company has produced something worthwhile by sheer accident.

The McMahons’ power in the New York sports universe started a long time ago. Jess McMahon, born Roderick James McMahon in 1882, was the youngest child of Roderick and Elizabeth McMahon, hoteliers who had recently emigrated from County Galway in Ireland to Manhattan, New York. Jess’s main contribution to the family dynasty was building a good reputation in the boxing world in the Northeast, and by extension, making his last name notable in New York combat circles. Wrestling promotion wouldn’t pick up until his middle child, Vincent James McMahon, took over the family business.

Vincent (eventually referred to as Vince Sr. by the entire world following his death) shared his father’s love of promoting and talent for innovation. McMahon partnered with Toots Mondt to turn the Capitol Wrestling Corporation into a true powerhouse in the Northeast. The CWC was later renamed the World Wide Wrestling Federation—possibly to take advantage of infighting in the National Wrestling Alliance at the time or to set up an unaffiliated company in the event the Department of Justice decided to pursue a rumored antitrust suit against the NWA. Strangely, a large point of contention in the NWA squabble was whether television would be a negative to the business, as the relatively new medium threatened to air in certain territories within the markets of a rival. But McMahon understood the power of television as a marketing tool.

For one thing, wrestling could be adequately produced for television on a (relatively) tiny budget. Pro wrestling had been airing on the DuMont Network in some form since 1940, and in the late forties the small screen helped turn personalities like Gorgeous George into national phenomena. Television would entice fans to come out to Madison Square Garden and other venues for the big cards and the showcase matches. McMahon was hardly the first to put wrestling on TV, but he was one of the first to lean into it as an integral part of the business. Television needed programming, and McMahon was eager to oblige.

Within a year of assuming control of the company, McMahon’s CWC arranged a deal to air a weekly show on the DuMont Network. Since sporting and concert venues were in no way set up to allow for television taping at the time, McMahon arranged for a ring and studio to be constructed in a barn in Washington, D.C. The CWC would air every Wednesday on DuMont until 1956 and would move to New York’s WABD and air on Saturday evenings every week until the 1970s.

Unlike his father, Vincent settled on professional wrestling promotion as his primary venture, and he worked hard to utilize television and continue his father’s tenure in New York and Madison Square Garden. As the popularity of the now-named World Wide Wrestling Federation grew, McMahon developed a stranglehold on wrestling in the Northeast, and McMahon’s jurisdiction was soon just referred to as New York among people in the business. (That Vince Sr. was purportedly one of the very first promoters to begin splitting a percentage of the gate with the in-ring performers didn’t hurt New York’s reputation as a great place for wrestlers to work.) As the WWWF separated from the National Wrestling Alliance, there was a shift in aesthetics and ethos. By 1971, pro wrestling in the United States could be distilled into Southern wrestling (or Southern rasslin’, if you want to be more accurate and/or rile up and/or inspire fans) and New York.

Which brings us to Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the Vince McMahon you’re likely familiar with. Vince is a singularly fascinating individual, perhaps one of the most perplexing humans who has ever graced the face of the Earth. Stories about his proclivities and peculiarities—both apocryphal and verified—could fill their own book: he hates sneezing and considers it a sign of weakness. He was in his forties or later when he first learned what a burrito was, and that Asian porn existed. He’s been known to deliberately step on a person’s feet or make a personal verbal attack on them in order to try and get them to stick up for themselves. He believes you can eat an entire box of Oreo cookies in one sitting with no ill effect; it’s having a few every day that will make you fat. He finds farts the most hilarious thing in the world, unless it’s a day when he’s tickled by poop. He yelled at a prospective screenwriter for using the phrase to tell you the truth—the implication being in Vince’s mind that the individual must have been lying to him during the rest of the conversation.

He once tried to pitch his daughter two separate story lines involving incest: one that implied she was in a romantic relationship with her brother, and one where she was sleeping with him. She declined both. Howard Cosell, perhaps the most famous sportscaster of all time, told a story in his autobiography of McMahon calling him in 1984 to offer him a job as the WWF’s lead announcer. Cosell laughed, incredulous, and told Vince that he didn’t want to finish up his illustrious career calling phony wrestling matches. He said Vince must be crazy and turned him down cold. McMahon, in an instant, turned furious, yelling, Fuck you, Howard! You’re making the biggest mistake of your life. Howard recalled, After I hung up, I thought McMahon was a real kook. I still do. But he’s an incredibly successful one. A more succinct appraisal of McMahon would be difficult to find.

Vince is ruthless both personally and professionally. If he feels a perceived slight, he has a long history of enacting his revenge fantasies on the air within his programs and inside the ring. When Rosie O’Donnell ran afoul of his good friend Donald Trump, he booked a match on Raw between a Rosie impersonator and a Trump impersonator (neither of which looked much like their real-life counterparts, apart from the Trump wig), with Trump going over. He booked a similar match between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He cast geriatric actors to portray Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, and Billionaire Ted when his two former top stars decided to sign with Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW). He’s hired former longtime opposition stars and paid them big money just to make them look foolish and diminish their value elsewhere. The many regional bookers, promoters, and adversaries who went up against McMahon hated his guts long before he eventually drove them all out of business. He has at one time or another employed just about every dirty trick in the wrestling and the promoter business in order to gain an upper hand, although that’s pretty much what you’d expect from any billionaire. Vincent Kennedy McMahon has kept an iron grip on his empire against all odds, but he wasn’t necessarily the born-into-this golden child you might expect given his promoter-family lineage.

Vince Jr. was the younger of two boys born to Vince Sr. and his first wife, Victoria. Vince Jr. was born in 1945 in North Carolina, but Vince Sr. divorced Victoria in 1946 and departed with his eldest son, Roderick McMahon III. As a result, Vince Jr. didn’t meet his father until adolescence, instead growing up with several fathers and being raised under the name Vinnie Lupton. Vince Jr. said in a 2001 Playboy interview that the stepfather from who he took this surname, Leo Lupton, abused his mother, and subsequently beat Vinnie when he once tried to intervene on his mother’s behalf. Of Leo, Vince later said, It is unfortunate that he died before I could kill him. I would have enjoyed that. He also said in that same interview that he was sexually assaulted or molested as a child by someone very close to him. You said the sexual abuse in your childhood ‘wasn’t from the male,’ said interviewer Kevin Cook. It’s well known that you’re estranged from your mother. Have we found the reason? After a pause, McMahon nodded and offered, Without saying that, I’d say that’s pretty close.

Vince told Forbes that he grew up dirt poor and lived in a trailer park before finally meeting his biological father at the age of twelve. By all accounts, Vince was instantly hooked on the wrestling business, even wanting to become a pro wrestler himself before Vince Sr. forbade it.* After meeting his father, Vince would regularly make trips to MSG to watch the shows by his father’s side behind the scenes. Vince graduated from military school in Virginia, then got his bachelor’s degree at East Carolina University in 1968.* He quickly came aboard his father’s business, eager to learn, and debuted in the World Wide Wrestling Federation as a ring announcer in 1969. It was off to the races at that point, as he became a play-by-play man in 1971 and continued to work hand in hand with his father. They clashed at times, as Vince Sr. was a traditionalist. Among other disagreements, Vince Sr. believed the role of a booker and promoter was to be behind the scenes and unseen at all costs—something Vince Jr. would eschew for the bulk of his time in the wrestling business.

Linda Marie Edwards met Vince Jr. when she was thirteen years old and Vince was sixteen, as their mothers worked in the same building. Victoria McMahon became good friends with the Edwards family, and Vince and Linda dated throughout high school. The Edwardses’ stable home life was a balm to Vince, and he spent most of his free time there until heading off to college. He proposed to Linda after she graduated from high school, and they married in August 1966, when Linda was seventeen years old. Linda attended East Carolina University alongside her husband, and finished college with a French degree and her teaching certification in just three years, so that she could walk in the same graduation ceremony as Vince. After Vince joined his father’s company, Linda worked as a receptionist and paralegal in Maryland, translating documents for a law firm and studying IP law, which would definitely come in extremely handy for the couple’s future in professional wrestling.

In 1970, Linda gave birth to their son, Shane McMahon, and Stephanie McMahon was born in 1976. In 1980, Linda and Vince founded Titan Sports, which would eventually orchestrate the buyout of Vince Sr.’s wrestling company. Linda would make her way onto WWE television—most notably as a wheelchair-bound zombie drugged by her real-life husband and evil business partner, and recipient of some of the most gingerly applied wrestling holds in history. Outside of pro wrestling, Linda took part in various entrepreneurial and philanthropic efforts, and along with the success of WWE, the McMahons were real movers and shakers in Connecticut, their adopted home state ever since putting down the proverbial Titan Sports stakes (which eventually found its permanent home in Stamford*).

In 2009, Linda became a member of the Connecticut State Board of Education, appointed by then-governor Jodi Rell, and stepped down from that post the following year to begin the first of two attempted U.S. Senate campaigns. Running as a Republican, she was handed defeats in the 2010 and 2012 senatorial elections, reportedly spending tens of millions of dollars of her own money on the campaigns. After seeing her general-election political hopes dashed in two straight elections, McMahon became heavily involved as a donor and fundraiser for the GOP. Not surprisingly, the McMahons have donated several million dollars to Donald Trump and his various personal and political exploits, including a $6 million donation to a Trump campaign super PAC in 2016. Equally not surprisingly, Linda was one of the first people earmarked for a spot in Trump’s cabinet following his election. On February 14, 2017, Linda became the head of the Small Business Administration, and despite the subsequent mind-boggling picture of her and Vince in the Oval Office with their pro wrestling children and their children, she would eventually become one of the least controversial and least scandal-plagued members of the entire Trump administration.*

So now we really must talk about the McMahon-Trump relationship. Linda and Vince have a long-standing personal friendship with Donald Trump, dating back to the 1980s. The earliest notable on-screen collaboration between the Trumps and the McMahons came in 1988, when WrestleMania IV was referred to on-screen as being held at the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.* Trump also appeared on-camera at ringside during the event, schmoozed backstage with wrestlers, and did it again the following year, when WrestleMania V was held at the same venue and Trump was interviewed at ringside by announcer Sean Mooney midway through the event. These were the formative events in the McMahon-Trump alliance, and the family have been friends with Donald ever since.

Much has been written about the relationship between the McMahons and Donald Trump over the years, but the underlying sentiment and belief is that the two showmen tend to have a lot in common in terms of showmanship under the guise of business—or vice versa. A sizable chunk of the American populace views the two men as billionaire hucksters of a sort, and huckster one-percenters tend to stick together. Personally, I believe the relationship is a bit more nuanced than that.

Donald Trump and Vince McMahon see something in the other man that they desperately wish they could obtain for themselves. Vince McMahon has accomplished everything there is to be accomplished in a specific niche, but all his other ventures have met with limited success or pointed failure over the years, especially when he’s tried to court a more mainstream audience. He’s always desired validation from the mainstream press and has either subtly or overtly wanted to be seen as something other than a carny wrestling promoter. He’s hailed as a genius, visionary, and the largest mogul his field could ever imagine, but he desires nothing more than to be thought of as a self-made billionaire and genius, period, without the wrestling label appended to any of his superlatives. In Donald Trump, McMahon sees someone with his same mindset and mentality (to varying degrees) and his same love of bombast and showmanship, but someone who has always managed to convince the world at large of his business acumen, celebrity, and personality—someone who is Vince McMahon viewed from a different angle, but a Vince McMahon who has managed to attain the ultimate validation of mainstream acceptance: the office of the presidency of the United States.

Similarly, when Trump looks at McMahon, he sees what he’s always imagined in himself: someone who has scrapped and clawed for every inch of his personal success and wealth; someone who has conquered his corner of industry and is hailed as an innovative genius, visionary, and ruthless businessman; and someone who is a big, strong, macho guy—a swaggering manifestation of excess and masculinity that Trump has always been single-mindedly focused on in endless interviews and speeches and braggadocio. Trump was handed immense wealth by his father and got a family doctor to write a note to avoid joining the military. He reportedly gorges on fast food and watches television most of the day, seething at people who call him out for what he perceives as petty slights. Vince McMahon, meanwhile, grew up in a trailer park, bought out his own father’s business, and has spent the past few decades working out hours a day, growing his business, and barely having time for sleep—not that he’d claim to need sleep, anyway. Vince has a full head of hair and bulging muscles and minuscule body fat. He fancies himself as being in control at all times, to the point where he has nearly mastered his own body’s compulsion to occasionally sneeze. That sure ain’t Trump. The two men recognize their ruthless showmanship nature in the other, but their yearning for what the other has is what drives them. If they weren’t friends, they’d be bitter enemies. If one of them didn’t exist, the other would create a hypothetical image of him in their mind to motivate them and propel them forward.

Vince is seemingly motivated by this raging desire to break into a more respected business. Every time a nonwrestling website or publication spills any amount of positive ink or devotes any amount of space to something WWE did, the weekly shows will dedicate a short bumper to showing the headlines on screen, while lead announcer Michael Cole explains why the noteworthy news item was important. In the 1980s and 1990s, McMahon tried to start a movie production company, a bodybuilding league, a supplement company, and get into the boxing game (among other ventures). In the 2000s, he tried to start a mainstream football company (twice) and actually did start a movie studio. It’s his continued insistence that his company is an entertainment company, not a wrestling company. It rankles him that he’ll never get the mainstream respect he craves due to the societal stigma associated with the fundamental nature of pro wrestling—and yet he is unable to break free from his status as a self-made billionaire who became rich and powerful by being better at promoting pro wrestling than anyone else in history.

2

A Brief History Of Kayfabe and the Territories

Wrestling is probably the most carny-ass business on Earth, especially given how the origins of the business lie in—you know—carnivals.

Between the 1830s and 1850s, pro wrestling evolved as a circus and carnival sideshow attraction, one that eventually developed a set of loose rules. From its inception, the fix was in: in order to put on a good show for spectators (this was the circus, after all), the performers needed to be certain that it would go as planned. And the carny promoters and showmen realized that a staged competition, under the guise of authentic sport, really made for the best possible adrenaline rush. You could make sure the hero prevailed after a prolonged struggle, or that the dastardly villain took advantage of a weakness or utilized unscrupulous tactics.

By the mid-nineteenth century, promoters of wrestling contests were savvy enough to realize that they could maximize their profits and the enjoyment of the paying audience by ensuring the proper person emerged victorious. Thus, the performers began to work the crowds—make them believe what they were seeing was real. (The opposite of a work, as every good fan knows, is a shoot—something that is actually, really real. No, really.) By the time the 1900s rolled around, traveling carnivals had created a brotherhood of kayfabe: the insistence on the artifice of legitimacy where pro wrestling was concerned.

It was in the twentieth century that wrestling became a global business, dominated by trusts and charismatic billionaires. And the exact strictures of kayfabe, major wrestling companies, and the narratives that those companies create were developed during the 1930s.

Georg Hackenschmidt and Frank Gotch were the first international ultrasuperstars in the world of professional wrestling, but their careers wound down around the time the sport suffered a drastic decrease in popularity: during World War I, when there was a dearth of strapping young lads to grip one another roughly about the waist, because they were all in foxholes in Europe trying not to die.

The business was dying, and something had to be done. Enter the team of Billy Sandow, Ed Strangler Lewis, and Joseph Raymond Toots Mondt, three meat tossers who had the wherewithal to do two important things: give the public a reason to line up to buy a ticket, and essentially form a cartel to ensure people watched their wrestling shows instead of anyone else’s.

Toots Mondt, like all the other biggest pro wrestlers and promoters of his generation, made it his business to befriend and eventually have in his pocket an assortment of newspapermen and other journalists. As such—like many other pro wrestling promoters and companies before and after him—much of what we understand as Mondt’s backstory is likely hooey, but the fact remains that he’s one of the most influential men in the evolution of what we recognize as professional wrestling today, and his importance may be largely due to his foresight of controlling his own narrative. It was an important lesson that the McMahon family paid close attention to, and a trick that has served well every wrestling promoter to venture into the business since.

A brief history of Toots Mondt, as presented by people friendly with Toots Mondt, is as follows: Mondt, inspired by wild brawls at the lumber camp where he worked, the best of the Greco-Roman and catch styles, and a liberal dose of various carny-assery, trained up a cadre of wrestlers, innovated some amazing-looking (but relatively safe) moves of his own devising, stuck the whole damn thing inside a boxing ring, and called it Slam Bang Western-Style Wrestling. We should still be calling it that, and the fact that we’re not is a crime.

A brief history of Toots Mondt by people not so friendly to him would highlight his financial irresponsibility. He nearly (or by some accounts, completely) ran the wrestling scene in the Northeast into the ground with his failure to live up to promises and his failure to pay his wrestlers what they were owed.

Mondt is credited with coming up with the idea that every match should have a recognizable finish that the crowd could follow—that is, a clearly defined conclusion. Building on that, he also came up with the fuck finish, an unsatisfying or controversial end that would guarantee a return match—one that would theoretically draw an even bigger crowd and a much larger gate. And of course, there was the double countout and the planned time limit draw—the latter another innovation of Mondt’s, because somehow no one had thought to put a hard time limit on what had previously been an interminable sport. Mondt and his partners never let one match be enough when there was any possibility people would pay to see a second. As another famous carny once said, always leave them wanting more.

Mondt, Sandow, and Lewis were given the name The Gold Dust Trio in a 1937 tell-all book by Marcus Griffin called Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce. That book was filled to the brim with details about exactly how and why the wrestling business was all a sham, even though—as was the journalistic convention at the time—it was also filled with its own outright fabrications, boosting numbers, exaggerating paydays, and the like.

That book’s existence just goes to show that as long as there has been professional wrestling, there have been critics, journalists, and nonfans continually blowing the lid off the fact that it was all rigged. Every five or ten years or so, a newspaper story, magazine article, or book would come along and shine a bright light on the scandal that negatively impacted business to varying degrees—until the public forgot about it and just wanted to have a good time going to see the matches. A few years later, it would start all over again.

Despite semiregular exposés, pro wrestling was able to keep up the ruse for decades due to the extremely close-knit fraternity developed by those inside the business. Kayfabe became the rule of the day: you don’t tell anyone about what really goes on here unless they’re one of us. Even into the 1990s, fans (and even people actively training to be pro wrestlers) weren’t smartened up until and unless it was deemed absolutely necessary.

Pro wrestling still requires some level of kayfabe, even today, for any of it to work at all. Take a nonfan to any independent wrestling show and by midway through, they’ll probably ask you if some move or some result was real. The illusion of the dance is intoxicating. Thanks, kayfabe!

The bottom fell out of pro wrestling in the 1930s, but after World War II, the influx of commerce (and the advent of television) led to business picking up once again. In 1948, the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) was formed by a half-dozen promoters, largely from the Midwest. They created a unified NWA World Heavyweight Champion, who would serve as a touring national champion, shared between territories, traveling the country and allowing not only for a quasi-universally recognized world champ for the sport, but for all NWA promoters to share in the profitability of promoting the real world’s champion.

It’s important to note that in those days—and all the way up until the late 1990s in some respects—wrestling was regional. This was partly due to logistics and infrastructure (like the local news, the local television station, the local newspaper, and the concept of a local versus a long-distance call). The country was carved up into territories, many affiliated with the NWA, and those unaffiliated were considered outlaw promotions. Some NWA promoters wouldn’t book you if you went and worked an outlaw show; but then again, if there was money in it, both sides were always plenty willing to do business. Some wrestlers were exclusive to certain promoters or territories, but many big-name main-event players and other upper-card guys (especially the heels) would join up with Georgia Championship Wrestling for a few months, finish up all their story lines, then move somewhere else in the country (or the continent, or the world) like Championship Wrestling in Florida, or Mid-South Wrestling in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, or Pacific Northwest Wrestling. All this helps explain why finally having one agreed-upon national champion was a big deal.

Orville Brown was the first man to hold the national NWA title, but in 1949 the man who would become synonymous with it—Lou Thesz, former protégé of Ed Lewis—kicked off a prosperous six-year reign. Thanks to the NWA, pro wrestling for the first time