For 40 years Vince McMahon served as CEO and Executive Chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE. In that time, he helped to launch internationally famous superstars like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Hulk Hogan, and John Cena. McMahon also made a lot of enemies – and one very notable friend in former President Donald Trump. Providence-based writer Abraham Josephine Riesman is the author of a new biography, “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.” Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with Riesman about the book, which takes a look at McMahon’s life, as well as his impact on American culture and politics.
TRANSCRIPT:
Luis Hernandez: Why did you want to write about Vince McMahon? I mean, he’s a fascinating character. But, I mean, we can list a lot of interesting people. Why him?
Abraham Josephine Riesman: It just seems like there were a million tendrils that reach out from Vince McMahon’s life into the fabric of American life. And I pitched this book in the early days of the pandemic, and a lot of what I was trying to figure out was, why am I so angry? And why did the world get so messed up, especially this country? … And I figured, let’s look at how this country got into a rough spot by looking at the life of one man who is both emblematic of and also instrumental in a lot of the changes that have led to chaos in American politics and American culture.
Hernandez: When I started reading the book, I thought, yeah, I grew up watching it too. And I think I’ve seen every story or every interview about Vince McMahon. What am I going to learn that I didn’t know? But you did point out things I did not know. But did anything surprise you?
Riesman: The big surprise for me, in this life of shocking stories just beneath the surface, everything from allegations that Vince helped cover up a murder to allegations that Vince raped the first female referee, all of that. What was most surprising was not all of that, because I kind of expected that. What was surprising was learning about Vince’s early life in which, contrary to his narrative about that early life, he was by all accounts that I could get from childhood friends and acquaintances, a pretty nice kid. Vince has often told the story of himself as something of a juvenile delinquent. As a rough and tumble kid who was constantly getting into fights with Marines or running from the cops or at military school, getting court martialed, that sort of thing. I couldn’t find any evidence of any of that. What I found was up until his entry into the world of wrestling his real induction into his estranged biological father’s empire of wrestling. He was kind of a nice, non entity. A lot of people just said, Yeah, I knew him. But he didn’t make a big impression. And certainly, even the people who knew him well said he wasn’t getting into fights. He was a showman.
Hernandez: Did you get a sense that things happened in his childhood that shaped him to become this very hard nosed guy that seemed almost uncaring towards his workers and towards women especially? Or was he just always lost in some character?
Riesman: The big trauma of Vince’s young life, and I say that not lightly because there was a lot of trauma it seems in his young life, was the absence of his biological father until he was 12. Vince did not know the man now known as Vince senior, Vincent James McMahon, until Vince was 12. And in those first 12 years, he was abused and living in poverty. And his father, his biological father was living with riches in the northeast, Vince was growing up in North Carolina where his mother was from. And Vince senior even adopted another family that he wasn’t biologically related to, to take care of them as a paterfamilias. And I think the trauma of not knowing his father, then meeting his father and seeing that his father had sort of bestowed his love elsewhere, and that he couldn’t quite access it was something that really shaped him, I think. Then seeing the way his father conducted business, which was often with a very iron fist, even if it was with a velvet glove over it. I think that had a huge impact on Vince.
Hernandez: I think about some of the stories you play out that I know. I remember the stories, the controversy with Jimmy Superfly Snuka. And the death of his girlfriend,
Riesman: Nancy Argentina, right.
Hernandez: And then there was the referee, the first female referee.
Riesman: Rita Chatterton. Yes.
Hernandez: And that whole case as something that just kept playing out that kept coming back, and I was curious, what you think of this – in every situation, he always pushed back against prosecutors, against the media, against anybody who was against him, telling them you’re all making this up, you’re trying to destroy me, that was his M.O. And I said, wow, I’ve heard that before, in politicians. He was already doing this for many years.
Riesman: Yeah. Vince was a pioneer in the world of political reality warping, or just reality warping in general. I think the way he’s managed to wriggle out of a lot of these difficult situations is, for one thing, people don’t take wrestling seriously as a product. So therefore, they don’t take it seriously as an object of study or journalistic inquiry. So stuff just doesn’t get reported. But also Vince has over time, especially starting in the mid to late 90s, created this persona for himself that openly says, “Hey, I’m a bad guy and a liar.” This is what the persona that is known as “Mr. McMahon” was all about, his villainous character that he played, that was kind of an exaggeration himself. And so when he’s then accused of being a bad person or a liar, it kind of rolls off of him because the human brain doesn’t quite know what to do.
Hernandez: Vince McMahon is friends with Donald Trump. But how close are they? Because you reference that Vince is the only guy that Donald will take a call from.
Riesman: Sam Nunberg, who worked on the 2016 Trump campaign, and was a significant figure there, very influential. According to him, during the 2016 campaign, there were only two people on planet earth that Donald Trump would shoo everyone out of the room for a phone call with. As opposed to Donald’s usual approach, which is putting someone on speakerphone, be they a close friend or a golf pro or, you know, the prime minister or something, put them on speakerphone and kind of showboat in front of his entourage. But when it came to two people, Mark Burnett, the producer of The Apprentice, and Vince McMahon, the executive chairman now of WWE, Donald Trump would only take those calls in private. He really trusted those people and respected them enough to not put them out on blast. And I think that says a lot. You know, I don’t base their relationship just on that anecdote. Of course, Trump was the host of two WrestleManias. They’ve known each other since probably about 1981 when, according to Linda McMahon, the Trumps and the McMahons met at a Rolling Stones concert, a perfect little Boomer story. And Trump then was a participant in WrestleMania in 2007, in a storyline that took months to build up to with a lot of appearances from Trump.
Hernandez: How much do you think Trump learned about his campaigning style from the time he spent in wrestling?
Riesman: I think the amount of wrestling that Donald Trump has consumed should not be underestimated. We have people on the record going back to the 1950s, saying, Yeah, me and Donnie Trump used to watch wrestling together. I don’t know how often he watches Raw or Smackdown. But he has an enormous amount of respect for Vince. Basically, I think Trump learned one other big thing, which is he learned how to work a rowdy crowd. And I just don’t think he’d had that kind of experience before. But you watch him do it now. And you’re like, it’s instantly recognizable as his rally style.
Hernandez: You know, the underlying theme to the whole book, as you were talking about, is this undoing of America, which is in the title, but I’m just… I wanted to understand your motives in writing this book. And what is it you’re trying to tell us about Vince and wrestling and its impact on the American psyche?
Riesman: I’m trying to talk about a wrestling term called kayfabe. Very briefly explained, kayfabe is this tension between fiction and fact, between fantasy and reality in which wrestling has always dwelled since it emerged from the carnivals of the late 19th century. Now for a long time. kayfabe just meant, you commit really hard to the fictions of wrestling. If you’re a wrestler, you don’t let the public know that you are not actually doing physical, unplanned competition. And you don’t let the world know that you are not actually your character. And that was something beautiful. And there’s something almost like a fall from Eden that you have in the mid 90s. Where in the late 80s, Vince McMahon had sort of killed kayfabe by seeking deregulation and in legislation and lawsuits was saying, ‘Yeah, wrestling is actually fake.’ And eventually, the New York Times and the New York Post ran big stories on that. And that was it for kayfabe in its old form. But in the mid 90s, you get this new form of kayfabe, that in one form or another is still what attracts people. And it’s something that is very dangerous. It’s a very dangerous tool. And I, perhaps audaciously, decided to name it in my book as Neo kayfabe. And Neo kayfabe is when you start from the assumption, or rather you give the assumption to the audience that everything here is fake. It’s the opposite of what you used to say. You say, “Don’t worry, this is all fake, everything here is made up.” But then you imply that oh, there might actually be some reality that pokes out tonight. You don’t want to miss it, something real might happen. Or even if you’re only watching the artifice, wouldn’t it be interesting to decode exactly what’s going on beneath the surface? And what’s dangerous about that is once you’re aware that you’re doing that, as a content producer, you can just create more lies, bury them beneath the surface of other lies. And then when people dig under the lies, they find this other lie, but because it was beneath the surface, they think it’s treasure, they think it’s the truth. And you see that so often in politics now. You know, this is the essence of Q anon. It’s the essence of going down the rabbit hole with Russia gate conspiracy theories, you start to convince yourself in this blizzard of fact and fiction that has been presented to you, where you and the people talking all sort of on some level know it’s BS. Once you introduce the idea that like ah, but there’s a holy grail, there’s some truth that you can find if you really dig and you get rid of all the other lies, but then you provide no no actual treasure map for it. You end up with a lot of chaos. And that’s something you see in politics and culture more broadly right now. Vince McMahon was a real pioneer of that.
Hernandez: And I’m willing to bet that he’ll deny that.
Riesman: [laughter] Probably.
Hernandez: Josie, thank you so much. This latest piece again, “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America,” is a fascinating piece. I know there are a lot of wrestling fans in Rhode Island. This one they should check out. Josie, I really appreciate the time.
Riesman: Oh, thank you for having me. It was a real delight.
