Wrestling Babylon (eBook)

SAM MUCHNICK TO VINCE McMAHON____________________________________________________ How Wrestling Got a Hold on My Uncle and the Nation On the evening of Friday, November 22, 1963, Monsignor Louis Meyer of Epiphany of Our Lord Parish, director of the youth department for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, read a prayer in memory of President John F. Kennedy, who had died less than eight hours earlier in Dallas from an assassin's bullets. The 7,200 people filling two-thirds of the seats at Kiel Auditorium stood in respectful silence as the priest eulogized their martyred leader. When Monsignor Meyer was finished, everyone turned toward the American flag onstage while the U.S. Army Band Chorus recording of the national anthem blared tinnily over the public-address system. Then the crowd settled in for a night of professional wrestling, climaxed by National Wrestling Alliance heavyweight champion Lou Thesz's title defense against the evil German, Fritz Von Erich. Two days later, the commissioner of the National Football League, Pete Rozelle, would be excoriated for ordering NFL teams to play their full slate of games while the nation was still reeling from the death of the president. Yet in St. Louis there was no particular outcry when the NWA's show went forward. If anything, the promoter won sympathy for his predicament - after all, most of the wrestlers had already arrived in town before news of the assassination - and praise for his ingenuity in arranging a prayerful preamble to the ritual of mayhem performed by assorted eccentric, underdressed circus athletes. Why? I believe I know some of the answers to that question - in part because I myself, at age nine, was in attendance at Kiel Auditorium that night. Also because the St. Louis promoter was my late uncle, Sam Muchnick. A jagged line running from Sam Muchnick, the principal owner of the St. Louis Wrestling Club, to Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the flamboyant chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, tells a good slice of what might be called the backstory of twentieth century popular culture. McMahon turned wrestling into more than just a compelling metaphor for the mountebank inside all of us. For better or worse, the WWE is a powerful fact on the ground of our national life - providing the theme for a Times Square entertainment complex, churning out bestselling autobiographies, underpinning a huge public stock offering, helping elect a governor and manufacture one of the movie industry's hottest action stars, and cheerfully exporting teen-male misogyny from cable fringe to network prime time. American sports and society had an appointment with McMahon's XFL football on nbc on Saturday nights in 2001. That that experiment would go down as one of the most spectacular failures in television history shouldn't obscure the meaning of its having happened at all. The XFL was an all-too-glibly dismissed footprint of the mainstreaming of antisocial values. With or without the NFL, Vince McMahon became a showbiz baron, a Forbes 400 billionaire, and like his Connecticut forebear P.T. Barnum,an A-list exhibit to H.L.Mencken's contention that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the masses. In the World According to Vince - that meta-reality with unassailable traction - the xfl story contained no moral, unless it was that his brilliance in one field didn't necessarily translate into another.