Vince McMahon

Of course, the very first name that must be mentioned in any book about WWE is that of Vincent Kennedy McMahon. He also happens to be the person most difficult to encapsulate in just a few pages.

Vince McMahon Jr. is the chairman, CEO, and majority shareholder of today's World Wrestling Entertainment. His grandfather, Jess McMahon, promoted boxing and very occasionally pro wrestling at Madison Square Garden in New York City. His father, Vincent James McMahon, was cofounder alongside Toots Mondt of what was then known as the World Wide Wrestling Federation, in 1963.

McMahon Jr. didn't meet his biological father until he was 12 years old. The elder McMahon had left the family and Vince Jr. was raised by his mother and a series of stepfathers. Upon meeting McMahon Sr., Vince began attending events at the Garden and became interested in following his father into the business. He wanted to be a wrestler but the elder McMahon, who was wary of him even being involved in a behind-the-scenes capacity in wrestling, strongly discouraged him from doing so. (Vince Sr. was appalled when his son bleached his hair blond to look like his idol, Dr. Jerry Graham.) It wasn't until long after his father passed away that McMahon Jr., in his early 50s at the time, began to promote himself as a wrestler, ultimately making himself, for a few days, the World Wrestling Federation champion.

As a promoter, McMahon Jr. changed the business forever. Up until the early 1980s, wrestling was largely a territorial business. The United States was divided into a number of different regional territories, including New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Memphis, the Carolinas, etc. Many territories had their own local stars and local television contracts, and unless wrestling fans regularly traveled to other parts of the country, studied wrestling magazines, or had friends to correspond with, they generally knew little about what happened outside of their home territory. Wrestlers could work programs and then pack up and move on to a new territory if they began to get stale.

By the mid-1970s the writing was on the wall with the advent of nationwide cable television. There had been nationally broadcast pro wrestling here and there dating back to the late 1940s and early 1950s — for instance, pro wrestling on the DuMont Network, which helped make the original Gorgeous George a star — but with cable beginning to take hold it became increasingly clear that the territorial model would ultimately die, and whoever could go national with strong television first would become the king of pro wrestling.

Many tried, many failed, but Vince McMahon Jr. succeeded. He paid stations around the country to replace their local territorial wrestling shows with tapes of his World Wrestling Federation events. He purchased the Georgia Championship Wrestling time slot on Superstation TBS. He spent big money to raid the best talent from the biggest regional territories, his crown jewel being "The Incredible" Hulk Hogan. He got into bed with MTV to launch the "Rock 'n' Wrestling Connection"; he got into bed with NBC to promote Saturday Night's Main Event in a time slot which pre-empted Saturday Night Live. And he rode that momentum to create WrestleMania, his annual megashow which had its ups and downs over the years but today remains by far the most lucrative annual wrestling event there has ever been.

In the mid-1990s, McMahon faced a number of sex- and drug-related scandals that nearly put him in prison. While he escaped a sentence he did not do so unscathed and had to change the way he promoted his business. He fell behind and for a period of time got his ass kicked by World Championship Wrestling. Run by Eric Bischoff and backed by Ted Turner's pocketbook, WCW Monday Nitro featured all of the stars of the 1980s who McMahon thought were too old to draw ratings. Bischoff reintroduced them to a generation of kids and teenagers looking for childhood nostalgia, whose parents had disposable income to spend on tickets, merchandise, and pay-per-view events. McMahon Jr. struggled until hitting upon a series of extremely lucky scenarios: a real-life pro wrestling screwjob that turned him into the hottest bad guy in pro...