McMahon, and the regional wrestling powerhouse that he ran out of D.C. McMahon grew up poor in mid-century North Carolina, estranged from his father, Vincent J. McMahon and Trump are good friends, and although each took over a successful family business, the details differ. (In 2016, as Trump blustered toward the Presidency, the Times Magazine ran an essay exploring this idea, titled “ Is Everything Wrestling?”) It is not hard to see parallels between wrestling kayfabe and the wider cultural substitution of performance for substance which climaxed with the election of Donald Trump. She sees in McMahon’s story a larger tale of the duplicitous turn that the United States has taken over that same forty years. Riesman’s subtitle throws down a grand gauntlet. As Abraham Riesman writes in a compelling new biography, “ Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America,” “If wrestling is an art, one man is both its Michelangelo and its Medici.” McMahon built this empire through, at once, vision and despotism. programming Fox and NBCUniversal are reportedly paying a combined 2.35 billion dollars, over five years, to air one weekly show apiece. In the past four decades, his company (until 2002 the World Wrestling Federation, or W.W.F.) has made household names of performers such as Macho Man Randy Savage, the Undertaker, and Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, while helping to warp their pseudo-sport medium into an international entertainment juggernaut. The man most credited with hastening this unlikely evolution is Vince McMahon, the longtime kingpin of World Wrestling Entertainment, or W.W.E.
VINCE MCMAHON R TRUTH PROFESSIONAL
It is not necessarily a natural progression from these faked contests to the idiosyncratic variety-show-soap-opera hybrid that is much of American professional wrestling today. This understanding, in a bit of bastardized carnie-speak, was called “kayfabe.” But, for all who were involved in producing the spectacle, a key omertà held tight: they were to maintain to outsiders, in word and deed, that all of wrestling’s goings on were in earnest. Athletes could be built up as heroes and villains whom onlookers would pay to see triumph or fail conclusions could be contrived in controversial ways that might encourage the crowd to buy tickets for a rematch. Just as crucially, it allowed for manipulated narratives that ginned up and steered public interest. Coördinated “professional wrestling,” as it came to be known, made possible more commercially attractive shows held at a more palatable pace, with more crowd-pleasing action. Promoters hit upon a solution: if they fixed the bouts, with participants agreeing to the outcome beforehand, they could better insure a compelling product. Bouts could stretch to galling lengths, with little discernible action, before winding their way to unsatisfying, humdrum endings.
In the nineteenth century, as wrestling matches became a staple of the American carnival circuit, legitimate competition was not always the easiest sell.
0 kommentar(er)
