The Stories Behind WWE's Vince McMahon

Abraham Josephine Riesman is the author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.

Motley Fool producer Ricky Mulvey caught up with Riesman to discuss: 

• Vince McMahon's early life as a "pretty nice kid," and the parts of his story he doesn't want wrestling fans to know.
• WWE's potential deal with the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund.
• The Montreal Screwjob, and the groundwork for the modern WWE.
• A story about Saddam Hussein's side job as a wrestling promoter, Andre the Giant, and a golden gun. 

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on March 19, 2023.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: He was also very ruthless. You're right. There was nothing about him that felt nostalgic about the way things used to be in wrestling or the way things were in wrestling. He wanted to remake the world in his image, and he dreamed big. He say what you will about him. He was the one who said, I can conquer, and he did.

Ricky Mulvey: I'm Ricky Mulvey and that's Abraham Josephine Riesman. She is the author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon in the unmaking of America. I caught up with Riesman to talk about one key quality that made McMahon an effective CEO, the parts of his story that he doesn't want wrestling fans to know, and she tells one of the best anecdotes that we've ever had on the show. I don't want to spoil it, but it involves Saddam Hussein, Andre the Giant, and a solid gold gun. That's big man seems to be better than pretty much anyone else that just getting people fired up. Has he so good at that?

Abraham Josephine Riesman: He pokes people's buttons and their brains. How is he so good at that? One thing is he learned a lot from his father. His father was a wrestling promoter and they had a very complicated relationship because for the first 12 years of Vince's life, his biological father was completely absent. You didn't know his father. He didn't even know how to pronounce his birth last name and went by the last name of his stepfather. But when he reunited with his father at age 12, around 1957, he then launched into the world of wrestling and really became, as they would say, a mark.

He became very, although it wasn't, unlike, that term is often used to describe people who are fooled by wrestling. But he got a front-row seat to how wrestling actually operates because his father was this promoter, so he got to see how the sausage is made, and that was increasingly true over the course of his time, knowing his dad. His dad was a part of this oligarchy of wizards who knew how to push peoples' buttons. He was part of the National Wrestling Alliance, which was essentially this semi-legal cartel that was formed by a tiny group of owners of wrestling promotions who then directed how the whole marketplace went, so they were rivals, but they were also in collusion.

There was this dark art of how to produce wrestling that was passed down behind the scenes by initiates. Vince Senior, Vince's dad had been an initiative because his dad had invested in pro wrestling in the 1930s and gotten the family, which had previously been involved in other sports, involved in it. There are a lot of factors that contribute to Vince's ability to fire people up. But I think a lot of it, you can't discount the fact that he learned at the feet of somebody who had been brought into this strange world of wrestling and taught these fancy but also crude ways of getting an audience to their feet.

Ricky Mulvey: It was also a bit more ruthless in savvy than any of the other people in the syndicate that controlled wrestling at the time.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: Yeah. He took a big risk, which was, he said this world as it exists, is not one that I can profit maximally from. Let's just bring about the end of the world. Now, the fact is the wrestling cartel was probably going to have to break up in some way because of the advent of cable television, of national television for wrestling, which had happened in the late '70s with the launch of TBS, Ted Turner's company, which had wrestling on it, and so the wrestling economy was going to change no matter what.

But Vince was the one who was unafraid to burn down the existing structures. That's always a very risky move. One thing I tried to convey in the book is that it was not guaranteed to work. There were a lot of things that were, and not only was it not guaranteed to work, a lot of its success had to do with things that were completely out of Vince's control and had nothing to do with his skill or savvy. I always think of the fact that Steve Lindesberg was supposed to host Saturday Night Live the night before WrestleMania 1, which was the most expensive endeavor Vince said ever invested in.

Abruptly, there was an opening and that led to Hulk Hogan and Mr. T, who we're going to be in the main event of WrestleMania hosting Saturday Night Live. That was just, I can't remember. I think it was a family emergency happened with the original host. Vince really got lucky. He was also very ruthless. You're right. There was nothing about him that felt nostalgic about the way things used to be in wrestling or the way things were in wrestling. He wanted to remake the world in his image, and he dreamed big. He say what you will about him. He was the one who said, I can conquer, and he did.

Ricky Mulvey: You also went to North Carolina, to his hometown to get the real.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: The towns plural. He moved around but yeah, I went to the hollers in the back roads to find his origins in North Carolina.

Ricky Mulvey: What did you learn about his early life, his high school persona that may veer away from the official narrative.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: Yeah. I mean, I was very surprised to learn that Vince was actually a nice kid. That was the big surprise because Vince's accounts of his childhood, which he's only given a couple of times and not in more than 20 years, there was this brief period around the turn of the millennium where you saw it as advantageous to talk about himself. But although that stuff had been taken as gospel, I found out that it was far from certain. The big distinction being that he used to talk about himself in these interviews as just a little rapscallion, a fire plug who's constantly getting into fights and was a problem student when he went to military school for two years and almost got expelled and they had a court marshal for him all this stuff.

Was getting into fights with marines when he was living in Havelock, North Carolina, that thing. I'm pretty sure all of that was made up. I found people who went to school with him. I found people who grew up with him. There was a universal consensus that as of when he was in North Carolina, at least pretty nice kid. Not that remarkable, not super dumb, not super smart. Middle of the road, and people liked him. The one thing that really set them apart. This was very interesting to find out, although I didn't find out in North Carolina, this was just through looking at yearbooks, was cold calling people.

What was interesting was, I learned that he started doing pro wrestling show's when he was in high school, which Vince had never talked about, and says never once talked about his first pro wrestling show's which were produced at the military school he attended in Virginia for two years. I got multiple people on the record including his high school roommate saying, yeah, he was Ape Man McMahon, APE, and he had costumes for everybody and we'd put on these little shows. Vince has never talked about this because Vince wants you to think that his youth was him being a rough and tumble near do well, and that just doesn't seem to be what the research backs up.

Ricky Mulvey: Vince McMahon has is an alleged sexual predator. He's allegedly helped to cover up a murder. There's plenty of things to talk about in terms of controversy. But I think one thing you highlight in the book that made him successful was that hate was not a barrier for him to work with anybody.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: That's right. I mean, he isn't emotion that we tend to associate with failure. If you are hated in the public eye, then how successful can you be? We've entered a world where that hate is no barrier to success and hate is no barrier to relationships. Vince was living example of this before it started to really pervaded the political sphere. But Vince figured out how to profit off of people who dislike him, whether that's the audience or wrestlers or other people involved in the rest of the industry that he's worked with. He has managed to make himself in both of those vectors the winner and no matter what, if you love him or hate him, he's the one who makes the money off of wrestling.

There's a rival wrestling promotion, AEW, that has done very well at being very cool and hip. But it is not the business juggernaut that WWE is. WWE remains the hegemon for wrestling in the United States and Canada, and Vince is the hegemon within WWE, so he gets to set the agenda to a certain extent. That means if you want to make money in wrestling, whether you are an active wrestler or you are retired one, especially if you're retired one because there ain't no pension plan or union for wrestling. You have to work with Vince. No matter how much he screwed you, you have to come crawling back to Vince if you want to draw a further paycheck for merchandising or for appearances.

Then when it comes to the audience, similarly, because he's the person who profits from this company. When he was a character, he would make himself into this villain, this person who was really low and whose name was Vince McMahon, Vincent Kennedy McMahon. People would say, screw that guy, but then they would say, they would put that hatred into action by buying the T-shirt of his rivals, Stone Cold Steve Austin, who of course, all of those T-shirts we're lining the pockets of Vince McMahon. It's really a clever gambit. If you can pull that off, you can make the world work for you. I mean, this was part of the Trump success. Was this idea of if you love him or you hate him, you're paying attention to him and that is what he needs.

Ricky Mulvey: I want to take a detour. That is to an anecdote that I cannot get out of my head, which is Saddam Hussein's involvement in pro wrestling. Saddam Hussein, big pro wrestling guy who would've thought.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: Yeah. Saddam Hussein Al Tikriti of Baghdad. He apparently according to his high school classmate or his youthful school classmate and eventual pro wrestling champion, Adnan Al-Kaissie, Saddam was a mark. Saddam loved wrestling, but totally believed in it. Did not know that wrestling was a staged endeavor. Adnan for a little bit of background was a fellow Big Daddy who had grown up knowing Saddam, then Saddam went to another school and they lost touch and then Adnan went to the US on an athletic scholarship, real athletics sports, and then eventually fell into pro wrestling. Loved pro wrestling, loved that he could manipulate an audience. That's the common refrain that you hear from people as like oh my God, I could get this audience to do anything. What a power to have, its intoxicating.

He got really into it and then went back to Baghdad and was summoned to a meeting with Saddam who at that point was the hidden hand directing politics in the country but was extensively like the deputy to the person in charge. They had this meeting and apparently, Saddam had found out about wrestling and was watching it and really liked it but had no idea that it was staged and said, you need to set up some matches here in Iraq so we can entertain the people. Saddam ended up being a wrestling promoter for a little bit. Adnan was huge. I've interviewed Iraqis who tell me with great confidence, they don't have to think about it. They're like, in the early '70s, there was literally no one more famous in Iraq than Adnan Al-Kaissie. Adnan Al-Kaissie was an enormous pop culture presence and an athletic hero to millions.

Saddam all this while just thought the matches were real and there's this amazing story, a truly amazing story that who knows if any of it's embellished? I don't know but Adnan told it in great detail and I relay it to you. Now, Adnan had been tasked with getting a big wrestling show together so Adnan asked Andre the Giant who was not at that time going as Andre the Giant yet, he was just Andre Roussimoff but he was a big up-and-coming sensation out of France. Adnan got Andre to do a match with him but right before the match which was in this enormous stadium with thousands and thousands of people watching for the birthday of the army and carrying Kalashnikovs, there was this match and the trouble was right before the match, Saddam says to Adnan, be courageous. You've got this, this guy. You'll forgive my language, but this other guy is and if he tries to do anything to you, he'll get this and he pulls up his coat to show that he has a solid gold pistol on his side.

He's like I'll put bullets in that guy's head and he will go home to France in a pine box. The trouble was this was going to be a two out of three falls match, meaning you had to win twice in order to win the whole show. The trouble was Andre was going to win the second time and then Adnan would have a comeback and would win in the end. But the trouble was, Adnan is thinking, if I lose even one of those falls to Saddam who does not understand wrestling, it could be really bad. Somebody could kill Andre the Giant right here. He had to like whisper to Andre while they were wrestling across the language barrier between Arabic, English and French, he was like just you got to take the fall, don't win anything and it worked. But anyway, I can keep going about Saddam and wrestling. I find it completely fascinating and I'm very glad you asked because no one else is focused in on it the way I was hoping people would.

Ricky Mulvey: I did as well and reading that story and I know you spoke with Adnan and I couldn't help but think that Saddam's threat was also directed at Adnan. He didn't show Andre the Giant the gun. He showed Adnan the gun.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: That's actually a very good point. I hadn't thought about it that way but you're probably right. I mean, it's Saddam. Saddam was not known for being super loyal to anybody no matter how friendly they were, whether they'd gone to school together. I would not be surprised if that was like, don't lose or you're both getting it because it's a bad show for the country. If all that's true then I guess for the future of wrestling and the way things turned out, especially with Andre, I'm glad they were able to communicate in the ring.

Ricky Mulvey: A common theme among wrestlers is protect the business. That includes not breaking kayfabe. The idea that what's going on in the ring is real. When you're interviewing folks around the WWE, how did you encounter that mantra? Did you have difficulty separating fact from fiction?

Abraham Josephine Riesman: I had a lot of difficulty separating fact from fiction, that was the big challenge because in wrestling, you often just repeat your lies so often that you forget they're lies and it just becomes part of your nature and part of your own memory. I sound like I'm making a joke here but I'm not. But especially if you've taken a lot of head injuries as a lot of these wrestlers have, your memories get hazy and you just remember the story that you told people. But you don't necessarily remember what really happened. Wrestlers were not usually, I'm talking a lot about Adnan here, but they were not usually my only sources for things.

The only wrestler I lent a little more trust to in his account was Bret Hart, the famous wrestler who was very generous with his time, but most importantly, had kept audio diaries of his entire career and consulted those, like contemporaneous ones where he would nightly, wherever he was say here's what happened today to me. Then eventually wrote his memoir which is very detailed. That one in his accounts got a little more attention just because I had a little bit more trust that that stuff have been contemporaneously recorded and then consulted but for the most part, I was going lots more on documentation, on hard numbers that I could locate talking to people who were involved in wrestling but were not wrestlers.

Who were not necessarily schooled in the mentality of you never break character, you never make things rough for wrestling. But that said, those are my successes but there were plenty of people who did not want to talk. Plenty of people who didn't want to talk because you said that that's the mantra and it is, protect the business. Three words, protect the business, referring to the wrestling industry. You don't do anything that would upset the applecart for the whole industry. But Vince made himself into the whole industry, so protect the business ultimately means protect Vince. Unless you are very brave, you are not going to speak out about Vince and there were a lot of people who just rejected me out of hand or people who only spoke to me on background. He holds a lot of power there still.

Ricky Mulvey: Want to talk about the WWE today but I got to talk about your conversations with Bret Hart. He was famously a part of one of the greatest controversies in WWE history, the Montreal Screwjob which is where that, you'll tell us that.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: The script was flipped. Bret Hart was one of the biggest wrestlers in WWF in the '90s and in November of 1997, a very long story short. I mean, this is like a whole chapter of the book and I promise it's thrilling, but I'm giving you the very abbreviated version. Vince, in an act of vengeance or at least assertion of his power, flipped the script on what the ending of the big WWF championship match between Bret Hart, who was the champion, and Shawn Michaels who was challenging him. I lost the grammar that sentence, but that was the match that was going to be the main event that night. The original plan, as Bret understood it, was that there was going to be some disqualification or thing that would make the match ambiguous at the end because he was about to leave the company and go to the rival Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling, WCW.

Vince didn't take to kindly to that and eventually worked out this plan where he didn't tell Bret, but he told Shawn, the referee, and possibly a tiny number of other people that what was really going to happen was Shawn was going to win under pretty obviously on kosher circumstances. Then Bret would no longer be the champion and he could shuffle off to WCW. When that happened is, and it's called the Montreal Screwjob because it was in Montreal. A screwjob, believe it or not, is a technical term in Rest language refers to an instance in which a promoter does exactly that, flips the script and as the term so eloquently puts it screws a wrestler.

Bret got screwed and I always semi-joke that that opened up the portal into hell for the universe, but the introduction of that moment into the canon of wrestling really altered the course of wrestling history and I would argue, perhaps grandiosely all of history right now, because 1997 was the moment, the mitral screwdriver, I should say it was the moment that really codified what I referred to in the book as Neo Kayfabe. Because kayfabe was the system for about the first century of wrestling that said, hey, audience, everything you're seeing in the ring is real. Those people are really like that and this is a real sporting competition. Even if you knew that was a lie, you've respected the lie, you enjoyed it, etc. Now what you have is this very strange hybrid where after Vince through a deregulation effort, killed kayfabe and revealed to the world somewhat inadvertently, but definitely his actions that wrestling was fake.

After that, he had to come with something else and he ended up adopting a lot of techniques that had started with other people and in 1987 really codifies Neo Kayfabe, which is the mix of truth, fiction, and everything in-between, all delivered with the exact same level of commitment and earnestness at top volume. When you execute Neo Kayfabe, you are telling the audience not Hey, everything's real. You actually say, Hey, everything's fake but guess what something real might happen tonight. That was the essence what happened at the Montreal Screwjob.  That is the great temptation that introduced into wrestling because that night something real did happen, something totally bizarre, unprecedented for the most part, this main event screwjob for the biggest title in the whole game with the biggest wrestler in the game.

It was astounding and since then everyone has been tuning in to try and see something that real happen amid the fakeness. Again, and nothing on that scale really has happened with the possible exception of the death of Bret's brother, Owen Hart two years later in the ring. That's a whole separate thing. But the Montreal Screwjob I really think was the template for how we operate in politics and society now too. In that right now, we have this world where our politicians, our business leaders are entertainers, give us this endless stream of a mix of total BS and then unspeakable truths, things that are so crazy that you should never show crazily true and so obscenely true that you should never say them and then everything in-between. It can get very confusing for everybody involved.

Ricky Mulvey: I think it depends on the business leader to guy like for.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: Sure, not everybody.

Ricky Mulvey: I don't know if Warren Buffett's doing Neo Kayfabe out there. Before we get to our final questions too you spoke with Bret Hart for hours. He has every reason to hate Vince McMahon, hate the WWE and yet he goes back and works for him.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: Bret came back. After the Montreal Screwjob and the death of his brother in the ring due to a failed technical stunt. Despite all that, Bret came back. It took him years of acrimony but eventually, he wanted to finish his story in a way that he had a little more control of. He's found some degree of peace. He told me all of these awful things about Vince McMahon but he would always have a postscript of, but I still really admire him. I mean, with the Montreal Screwjob, even when I interviewed him about it, he said, I had to admit it was a brilliant maneuver, this thing that derailed his entire career.

Really in many ways is the thing is most remembered for despite the fact that it's something that was humiliating to him. He doffs his cap and says, Vince played it brilliantly and I loved watching it, not watching the Screwjob because he was there but watching everything came after the Screwjob. The introduction of the character of Mr. McMahon, of Vincent Kennedy McMahon's Alter Ego, Mr. McMahon. All of that came out of the Screwjob. Bret still has love for Vince.

Ricky Mulvey: I'm going to unfairly skip ahead and the WWE story. If you want more you can check out the book but right now, Saudi Arabia is public investment fund and the WWE are in talks to make it go private. We don't know where that stands as we're recording on March 14 but without asking for prediction, what are your thoughts as somebody who studied the history of the WWE is those two parties is dance partners.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: I think it would make a lot of sense. I have no idea if it's what Vince is going to do, but look, you have the other people who or the other entities that have been floated. A lot of them are entertainment or streamers or whatever companies that are more traditional as opposed to a sovereign wealth fund from a government. But although ironically you might think sovereign wealth fund would be more moral and concerned about ethics and optics than private entities. In the case of Saudi Arabia, I think although companies can get pretty shameless, the king of Saudi Arabia doesn't really care about the optics of being bad for worker rights, for example, because labor rights are non-existent practically in wrestling and they're practically non-existent for migrant workers in Saudi Arabia for example.

I think there would be much less pressure on Vince from Saudi Arabia to clean up his act. He's not as obscene and lewd and his product as he was at say the turn of the '90s into the new millennium but it still not respectable. But the trouble is, that doesn't really matter in Saudi Arabia, it's one of the only popular entertainment you can go to a stadium and cheer for. This is a relatively recent development that you can do that and wrestling in this deal that Vince already made with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to do wrestling shows there. He's had this deal and it's been very successful, it's been very lucrative for everybody involved. Saudi Arabia has already invested heavily in WWE, and I would not be shocked if they want to take that investment to the next level now that Vince is looking possibly to sell.

Ricky Mulvey: Our guest is Abraham Josephine Riesman. She is the author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the unmasking of America. I found it to be a page-turner and delighted in reading the book. Even as a non-wrestling fan, I think investors, people interested in the history of CEOs in American pop culture will find value in it. I appreciate the book and appreciate the conversation.

Abraham Josephine Riesman: Thank you. It was my pleasure, as well.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy yourself stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.