Love him or hate him. Vince dominated Pro Wrestling. The days of owner/promoters with multiple wrestling territories ended after Vince lured away and signed the best talent.
Vince also had a long run as the muscle-bound Mr McMahon wrestling character.
I’m not surprised a sex scandel took Vince down. He’s had a long reputation as a ego driven and volatile employer. He gets what he wants.
The thing that brought Vince down was not so much the sex but rather the payoffs. Pro wrestling fans probably couldn’t give a damn about Vince having sex with his employees; quite a few of them would probably be prone to giving him a high-five.
Shareholders for WWE, on the other hand, are not going to be nearly as forgiving if it turns out that this hush money came from WWE corporate funds. I am taking Vince’s retirement announcement as a proxy admission that this was the case. I’m sure that an investigation will continue, so we’ll see how this all shakes out.
12 million is a lot of pay off. I hope it didn’t come from the company. Vince is reportedly quite wealthy and may have used his personal funds.
It will be interesting to see how Stephanie leads WWE.
Whether it was corporate funds or not as soon as the information became known they had to act to protect the corporation. Even with Vince gone they will be held liable for any of his misdeeds while he was still in their employ. They might have to hire extra some extra lawyers to deal with all the lawsuits that will now be filed.
Looking back at his long, checkered career, the thing that really stands out is the few setbacks he’s faced, the rare instances where he and his brand suffered real damage, were from the most unlikely causes imaginable.
Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: Vincent Kennedy McMahon is as close to an invincible, unassailable, bulletproof, Teflon, solid platinum, rampaging all-consuming god of a man as any of us will ever see in our lifetimes. He gobbles up one independent promotion after another. Everyone hates this; no one can stop him. He goes toe to toe with the mighty NWA and thrives. He bleeds the highly popular AWA dry. He puts all his eggs in the basket of a two-dimensional grimacing musclehead and shafts dozens of workers with horrible gimmicks. Musclehead becomes an icon; shafted workers fade into nothing. He goes to trial for steroid abuse. Prosecution is a bunch of moronic flailing clowns straight out of Night Court who think having Kevin Wacholz proclaim that he hates McMahon’s guts is a brilliant strategy. McMahon gets off without a scratch. A diva resigns in fury and sues him for sexual harrassment. Said diva comes crawling back, all but slobbers over McMahon’s boots, and cheerfully portrays his mistress. At a time when WCW is white-hot and threatening to reduce the WWE into irrelevance, he deals megastar Bret Hart the most infamous screwjob ever, then goes on a bout of absolutely despicable victim blaming. Fans fall right into line, McMahon blindly stumbles into a villain role which turns him into a billionaire, WCW makes jaw-dropping blunder after jaw-dropping blunder and crumbles into ashes, McMahon snaps it up for pocket change. Then, out of pure spite, he butchers the WCW/ECW Invasion, blowing unimaginable mountains of cash…and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Arenas get sold out, merchandise flies off of shelves, PPVs set new records. No comeuppance. No consequences. No justice.
Of course…these also happened:
He completely, abjectly, utterly FREAKING LOSES and is forced to rename the company.
and 2. framing an innocent man for it. 
(also ) Again, this was completely his idea, something that he was convinced would be a good fit for his top star and make money. This crossed the line for a great many fans…it absolutely would have for me…and permanently killed the Attitude Era, the one time when wrestling actually had mainstream coolness.
What’s that, there’s a horrifying disease in China that’s spreading like wildfire? Ahh, Donald Trump said it’s nothing to be worried about, full speed ahead!And now the final straw, dishing out a modest eight figures in hush money to a bunch of mistresses, which really shows you just how far he’s fallen. I keep going back to how a useless snotnose punk got Bob Knight bounced from Indiana. Time was that if anyone tried to blow the whistle on him, he would’ve squashed them like a bug. Fans would be unanimously complicit in throwing them under the bus, and their reputations would get trampled, shredded, and mangled to the point where they’d never be able to show their faces again. Now the gig is up and he has no choice but to take his medicine.
I keep thinking back to another quote from a wrestler I’ve long forgotten: “No man is invincible.” A lesson the great Vinny Mac learned just a bit too late.
I don’t follow modern wrestling closely. I get the impression viewer numbers are down? Youtube has interviews with people that worked as talent agents and producers. They created the storylines.
Wrestling has always had periods of big popularity and down years. Somehow its always survived and comes back.
Yeah, after 77 years and a billion dollars he sure learned a lesson he’ll never forget!
I wasn’t gloating. (Geez, why does everyone keep assuming that? 
). I don’t doubt for a second that he’s going to be highly comfortable for whatever remains of his life. But let’s get real, it’s gotta sting a bit that he didn’t get to leave on his own terms. My point was that nobody bats a thousand; even the greatest of the great can be laid low once in a blue moon.
I’m actually kinda interested in what he does now, if anything. Maybe if Dwayne Johnson’s XFL succeeds he goes for a stake in it, but that’s pretty unlikely.
He’s still the largest shareholder and his kid is still running the company. I really doubt he’s stepping down in anything more than a symbolic sense.
Moderating
“Limp-wristed” is absolutely NOT acceptable as a pejorative in this forum, let alone one you “*cannot stress …enough.”
This will be a warning.
Whoa. Sorry. No offense intended. It just strikes me as astonishing that Vinny Mac, riding the biggest boom period for wrestling ever, was forced to change his league and website by an environmental organization. That’s like Barry Horowitz getting a clean pin over The Ultimate Warrior. Even now I have no idea how we’re going to explain that one to our grandchildren.
He was in the midst of defending himself against federal charges when that started up and as a result they did a poor job of defending themselves from the infringement claims. At some point giving in made the most sense. If he kept fighting and lost eventually they’d have to change the name anyway and the cost to do that would keep increasing over time as the brand expanded.
My favorite part of Vince’s attempt to start the XFL is both times he managed to try to launch it during an economic downturn.
The first when the late 90s Internet/Tech boom crashed.
And the second when the whole Covid crisis started.
The steroid trial ended in 1994. The original settlement with the World Wildlife Fund was also in 1994, but the litigation didn’t begin until the late 1990s when WWE/F began breaching the settlement (which limited how and when they could use the initials). They wound up having to change the name at exactly the moment - 2002 - when the brand recognition was peaking. Other than being able to use the amusing “get the F out” slogan during the rebranding, they handled that as horribly as they possibly could have. (And WWE has always been a terrible name.)
Yes, I think the original settlement with WWF was what Vince referred to when he said that he (and the company) were distracted by the steroid trial. I think that makes sense because the WWF claims seemed absurd to me, I doubt they could find a single person on earth who was confused by the use of the same initials for those disparate purposes.
LOL Vince was a walking Ad for Steroids. There’s no other way a middle aged man got that big. Yeah he worked out, but his muscles were massive.
I remember seeing even bigger when he wrestled.
It wasn’t really an question of Vince’s personal steroid use. The issue was about his involvement in distributing steroids. The government’s case was always weak and also depended on professional wrestlers testifying against him. That was unlikely to happen in the circumstances best favoring the government, in these circumstances the government called 10 wrestlers McMahon had made rich and famous and one who had a known grudge with him. That one was the only wrestler that testified that McMahon had supplied him with steroids, and his credibility was taken apart on the stand.