<Split> The decline of Vince McMahon

[JerryvonKramer]

That's the impression I"m getting- that as long as Vince isn't ruled mentally incompetent Donald Sterling-style, the WWE will continue to decline.

Yes, because the man who has made more from wrestling than the next TEN promoters combined doesn't know what he's doing and CM Punk and the smart fans do.

 

Not trying to pick a fight, but for as much criticism as Vince gets -- remember that he beat Sam Muchnick, Bill Watts, Fritz Von Erich, Eddie Graham, Verne Gagne, Jim Crockett, Paul Heyman, Ted Turner ... Vince won every single time.

 

And every step of the way there was Dave Meltzer and a 1000 smart fans talking about how wrong everything he was doing was. Every step of the way.

[BigBadMick]

It's a very different Vince out there now though, Parv.

 

If he was 1/2 as capable now as he was in 1998 I'd agree with you.....

[JerryvonKramer]

Can you break down what's changed in him? How and when did Vince fall off in your estimation?

 

I'm interested. If this thread isn't the place for it, I'd encourage someone to start one.

 

This is a fascinating topic to me.

 

My analysis has been for a long time that the thing Vince gets than no one else -- as in other promoters, fans, etc. -- does is that the public at large don't really like wrestling that much and his whole career has been a testament to that. I think that Vince's instincts are always FIRST towards getting product over as you'd get any other product over. Then he thinks in wrestling terms second. And his wrestling instincts, I think, are still very much influenced by his dad -- as in babyfaces, babyfaces, babyfaces. Heels have always been second-class citizens in WWF.

[BigBadMick]

Ok, but Parv I think there are about 50 people on this board more qualified to speak on the decline of Vince than me.

 

You've said before that you stopped watching in about 2005, can I ask why, and whether you feel there was a decline in WWE at that time?

[JerryvonKramer]

Well the thing is, Mick, I'm not representative of Vince's target audience.

 

I think a lot of the time Vince just point-blank writes off the hardcore fan. He cares more about the casual dollar. That's always been where he's focused his attention. To an extent, he probably thinks "well there's a certain portion of guys who are gonna turn up no matter what, it's the other 80% I need to worry about".

 

I absolutely hate what Vince has ended up turning wrestling into. But I still see phenomenal gates on the PPV events, legions of message boards talking about nothing but WWE, and people fucking telling me that HBK is the greatest of all time, which suggests that Vince is doing something right.

 

He's making something that I don't want to buy, but there are people buying it.

 

Just like Simon Cowell makes music I'd never ever ever buy in a million years, but the charts are full of his acts.

[BigBadMick]

'Just like Simon Cowell makes music I'd never ever ever buy in a million years, but the charts are full of his acts.'

 

Yeah, but that doesn't make it right

 

I see where you're coming from, Parv. But I would be curious to know if casual fans, paying the casual dollar, feel WWE is as good was it was even 5 years ago. And I'm not sure how you would even try to find out.

[BigBadMick]

And to pick up on another point, I don't think WWE has a current 'living legend' that they would try to call the greatest ever, like HBK.

[JerryvonKramer]

I see where you're coming from, Parv. But I would be curious to know if casual fans, paying the casual dollar, feel WWE is as good was it was even 5 years ago. And I'm not sure how you would even try to find out.

The casual fan doesn't care. Just lives in the perpetual present. Do you think in 1985 that the average Hogan fan even knew who Bob Backlund was? The point is that the past just doesn't matter.

 

And to pick up on another point, I don't think WWE has a current 'living legend' that they would try to call the greatest ever, like HBK.

John Cena probably.

 

Undertaker has just gone out.

[BigBadMick]

I don't think the Hogan/Backlund analogy applies here. Maybe I'm speaking for myself here, but when the product is hot, you don't tend to look to the past. If you'd been a casual fan from, say, 2008 to now, I think you'd be inclined to look at 2008-10 as 'the good old days' and not be as keen on the present. You'd still pay money and support it, but be aware that it's in a bit of a slump.

 

Again, I'm not going off any concrete evidence here, just a feeling I have. I don't think casual fans only live in a perpetual present.

[JerryvonKramer]

But the casual fan is transitory and slopes off. He's a fairweather fan. He's a kid of 8 who is into something now and moves onto something else in a year.

 

To an extent the WWE just needs a constant churn of such fans.

 

What was the gate at the last Wrestlemania?

[BigBadMick]

We probably need a definition of a casual fan here.

 

To me, it's someone that watches Raw weekly, and Smackdown sometimes, and in the pre-Network era would have ordered 'Mania, SummerSlam and Rumble. Doesn't really bother with the internet much. Has a memory

 

Perhaps we're on different trains of thought here?

[MoS]

Hasn't the business been in slow decline over the years, barring Wrestlemania? Which, by now, is a draw in itself anyway?

 

You can certainly argue that Vince has lost his touch. Everything fromr atings to house show attendance to TV revenue are not where they should be. Not the sign of a promoter with his finger on the mainstream pulse.

[kjh]

Not trying to pick a fight, but for as much criticism as Vince gets -- remember that he beat Sam Muchnick, Bill Watts, Fritz Von Erich, Eddie Graham, Verne Gagne, Jim Crockett, Paul Heyman, Ted Turner ... Vince won every single time.

And every step of the way there was Dave Meltzer and a 1000 smart fans talking about how wrong everything he was doing was. Every step of the way.

 

 

I think you're wrong grouping Meltzer with those hardcore fans of the time who irrationally hated everything WWE did with a passion, even though it was effective. He would always give Vince props for his business success and saw that Vince would win the war quicker than most business insiders did at the time.

 

Even today, I'm sure he'd agree that McMahon has better promotional instincts than almost anyone in the profession today.

[broccoman]

Can you break down what's changed in him? How and when did Vince fall off in your estimation?

 

I'm interested. If this thread isn't the place for it, I'd encourage someone to start one.

 

This is a fascinating topic to me.

 

My analysis has been for a long time that the thing Vince gets than no one else -- as in other promoters, fans, etc. -- does is that the public at large don't really like wrestling that much and his whole career has been a testament to that. I think that Vince's instincts are always FIRST towards getting product over as you'd get any other product over. Then he thinks in wrestling terms second. And his wrestling instincts, I think, are still very much influenced by his dad -- as in babyfaces, babyfaces, babyfaces. Heels have always been second-class citizens in WWF.

 

I agree with those points, but it is different now. The differences now are

 

1) He has a lack of competition, which hurts the wrestling. There are people who watch for the wrestling, and they are the folks who sustain the product in the not-so-hot times. Even when they hate the product, they watch. I'm seeing a change- people aren't hating as much as they are just indifferent. That's bad. Vince might be the sort that does better when he's having to compete hard, and not so much when he can coast.

 

In my case, this has been the first time in years when I've been able to watch a wrestling show on Monday nights, and have chosen to skip it for random stuff.

 

 

2) Vince is too far detached from what works to be effective with his old formula. He's gotten too old to be running things anymore. He's no longer Vince, he's now Verne.

[Shining Wiz]

If they watch Raw weekly, I'd say they're more than casual. I'm a huge wrestling nerd, and I haven't watched Raw weekely in close to a decade.

[JerryvonKramer]

Would recommend splitting this off as its own topic

V. Interesting. More later.

[Shining Wiz]

Not disagreeing with the notion that Vince is by far the most succesful promoter ever and therefore obviously knows what he's doing better than most.

 

But I will say any company that stands on "We're the most succesful at this business, we know better than anyone so don't question us" is pretty much doomed to failure. And I'm afraid that's where they may be. I don't remember a time where the shows seemed so aimless and scatterbrained. Which is a shame, because I don't think I remember a time when the roster was so talented. When people talk about the roster not having depth, I assume they mean in star power rather than in talent. But the lack of star power is the fault of WWE.

 

And that lack of star power looks to be the result of the scatterbrained, aimless nature of the shows. Just look at all the guys who have their legs cut out from them this year alone - Cesaro, Wyatt, Ambrose, Bryan..... I was a long holdout in the "yeah, they may not do it the way I'd like to see it, but they must have a long term plan to get where they want to go". I'm out of that now. Cesaro has had the potential to break out since he showed up.....and they just keep shoving him back down. He's a guy who doesn't need to be a traditional heel or a face....just let him be him and go. He's an interesting character that people are drawn to....if you give them something. But they have no clue what to do with him, and that shows.

 

Wyatt.....hottest new act in forever. But they have no idea what to do with him, so they made him magic. Wonderful.

 

Ambrose was another guy who has a personality and they could have strapped a rocket to and see where it goes.......but no. Same thing Bryan. They may have had him be the focal point of 'Mania, but they didn't have plans for him afterwards.

 

And looking at Vince's tenure in full - he's had two white hot periods in 30 years, each existing for about a 3 year period (85-88 and 97-2000), each based around a transcendant star (Hogan and Austin). His entire empire is based off of this. It's been 15 years since the last truly hot cycle for them. They've had blips here and there, but that's it. Their profile today exists based off what they built then.

 

As for Vince's genius - 6 years out of 30 or 31 as the owner of the company. 24 or 25 not as hot/outright cold years.

 

I obviously have no inside knowledge regarding the company, how it's run, or who does what. But from all the first hand reports of how things run out there, you have a 70 year old trying to tell stories that interest him, aimed primarily at an age group 50 to 60 years younger than him, based on a formula that hasn't really changed at its base in 30 years but seems to think the next hot streak is inevitable.

 

The network numbers should be a wake up. 4 millionish people watch Raw for free. 1 million people pay for Wrestlemania. 700,000 people are willing to shell out monthly for as much as they can get. Worldwide. That is a massive disconnect in people who will look at your product, and people who will pay for it. And why won't they pay for it? It's not because they're dumb or don't understand that $9.99 is cheap.....it's because they're not interested. Possibly because what titilates a 70 year old millionaire doesn't work for the masses.

[PhilTLL]

It may have only been 6-8 hot years, but it's almost impossible to overstate what Vince did during those years. He rewrote the rules of the entire American wrestling industry, consolidated the vast majority of it, and developed an international marketing machine. That's not just WWE mythology.

 

One thing that I wonder about is whether Vince would have survived the mid-90s without WCW's utter incompetence. They had him on the ropes from '95-97, and while Vince was definitely at his cagiest and most desperately creative, WCW shot their own feet over and over.

 

Anyway, that's not the topic, I suppose. Just for me, I stopped watching on a semi-regular basis in 2009-10 or so. Not really sure why, just lost the spark. One issue I have with Vince is that he's apparently acquiesced to this sort of standardization of the product into a predictable but boring thing that is more concerned with stability than taking creative risks for possible growth. Whenever I do try to watch, I can't shake the feeling that most of the characters, work, stories, even the dialogue and announcing are interchangeable and pretty much the same as last year and the one before.

[Dooley]

The idea that Vince can't fall off as a senior citizen from where he was as a young man seems silly to me.

[Loss]

I would have loved to be a fly in the room when Vince found out he was going on Medicare.

[JerryvonKramer]

I'm sorry Shining Wiz, but I find that post exceptionally wrong-headed. Almost absurdly so.

 

And I think it's a fantastic example of how all the little basic wrestling promotion 101 stuff that Vince has always done really well at (local marketing, booking venues, decent live gates, etc.) are just taken for granted. And it takes a really incompetent company like a JCP or WCW to remind you of all the little things WWF/E did right and have done right during Vince's entire time in charge.

 

Here's the bottom line: Vince's worst years as a promoter, his very worst years, with the possible exception of WCW for about a year, still made more many than the best years of any other promotion. Period.

 

Certain things are easy to take for granted. I'm not putting work into this, someone else can if they want to, but go and look at MSG attendance figures, even during the darkest years. Look at Boston. Philly. Washington. And look at other towns on WWF's core regular loop even during the very very worst years. Tell me what you see.

 

I see people giving Memphis Wrestling all sorts of praise for getting 8,000 people to come back to the Mid-South Coliseum every month. No one ever credits Vince for selling out fucking MSG for 30 years. Just let alone ANYTHING else, look at the core old territory business and he's already better than 90% of promoters who ever lived. Now go and look at the gates in their key Canadian towns over that 30 year period.

 

I think his accomplishments are easy to take for granted after the fact. Okay, so not every year is a Hogan year or an Austin year. Those sorts of booms come round once a generation if you're lucky. But his average year is better than any average year in wrestling history. Choose a year any year as your example, go for 1995 and 2006 if you want. Vince's 2006 was better than the best year they ever had in any other promotion in the world, in wrestling history. Fact.

 

Now consider:

 

- Took over every single region in the USA

- Put almost every competitor out of business in the USA

- Took over Canada with relative ease

- Went over to the UK where wrestling was on its arse, dying on its arse, and got 80,000+ people into Wembley without free-to-air national TV. Do you know incredible that is?

- Broke other international markets, including India.

 

Now consider:

 

- Transformed the business model of pro wrestling utterly

- Added merchandise as a key revenue stream

- Added PPV as a key revenue stream and ... cemented PPV as a core business principle in pro wrestling

- Wrestlemania itself ("Oh but WM is its own thing" No it's Vince's thing. I mean Christ, it's HIS event and it makes shit loads of money)

- Supplemented with other revenue streams (see WWE.com, WWE Network, video games, etc. etc.)

- Plus god knows how many stars he's made over the years

- Plus god knows how many amazing angles and brilliant TV he's overseen

 

"Oh yeah, but 2005 wasn't as hot as when Austin was around"

 

Are you fucking kidding me?

 

You've lost all perspective. All of it. Compare WWF/E to Mid South, to Memphis, to JCP and it completely destroys any of them as a money-making machine. DESTROYS them.

 

Fuck compare it to EMLL, New Japan or All Japan. "Oh but that's not fair". Why not?

 

The bottom-line is who made the most money. Who was best at making money out of pro wrestling. #1 on the board practically every year since 1985 is Vince, with a possible blip in 1996.

 

"Oh but only 8 of those years were HOT"

 

Do not talk shit. I'll stop now, but this sort of thing baffles me.

[BillThompson]

I gotta say, as much as I love this place, posts like that one are too antagonistic and "I'm right, you're completely" wrong, and kind of put a damper on things. We're all part of a community here, let's keep things a bit more friendly, it really helps the discussions.

[JerryvonKramer]

Alright Shining Wiz, have a hug too buddy. I'm not having a go at you as a person, I just really disagree with your take on Vince.

 

Only don't actually hug me. But I'm sorry if that post hurt your feelings, came across as too antagonistic, or made it seem like there was an absolute truth.

 

Alright. Assume all my posts have that tagged on the end of them.

[WingedEagle]

In some discussions Vince probably does get a bad rap because he's compared to his best years rather than the competition in many cases. Competition he either eliminated or outlasted. Can't argue he's far and away the best ever in his line of work. But, doesn't mean you can't find flaws there and perhaps sometimes those are not placed in context. The network / TV rights era going forward may have a pretty big impact on his legacy and while its easy to draw conclusions at this point roughly 9 months in, we're a ways away from being able to say much conclusive about the transformation and its impact on the business.

[pol]

Vince's worst years being better than EMLL and NJPW's best sounds like utter nonsense to me. Why was Japan the place to be for workers in the early to mid 90s if that were the case?