You Can Quit WWE—But It's Not Easy
It’s hard to support WWE—as a company, a concept or a crew. It’s a terrible place built on the most heinous of crimes, a company that has been tied to everything from child sexual abuse to literal murder. The gleaming Titan Towers, nestled in a Connecticut wasteland filled with investment bankers and tax lawyers was like a haunted house in a movie, 94,000 square feet built on top of the bones of multiple generations of victims.
You’ve likely heard and read plenty about the latest victim and the awful allegations surrounding her tenure as both a WWE employee and Vince McMahon’s mistress. Much of the behavior described is beyond the pale, some of it documented by text exchanges. As a law school graduate, I think it’s worth noting that plaintiff’s lawsuits like this are designed to make a media splash and that McMahon and WWE may very well have evidence refuting some of these claims. Regardless, they paint a picture of a company out of control, powerless to prevent or even put a governor on the reckless, cruel impulses of its largest shareholder.
The thing is, this has been true for more than 30 years. We’ve just chosen to ignore it, to stuff it in that ever darkening place in our soul where we put inconvenient, troubling information. Like the fact that the device you are reading this on was very likely created in whole or part by the labor of children in some foreign land far away. It’s best not to think about how WWE came to be WWE when it comes time to sing along to Cody’s music or laugh at the Rock’s dad jokes.
But these are not good people and giving them your hard-earned money every month to watch their latest soulless “Premium Live Event” makes you complicit, whether you like it or not.
I’ve never loved WWE. As a kid, we called it “Yankee wrestling”, a sideshow where nobody ever bled, they often forgot to remove the steroid needles before coming out for interviews, and the wrestling was performed without the men in the ring seemingly making any contact with each other at all. Later I learned that this corporate cartoon sludge actually killed real wrestling all throughout the country, with McMahon and henchman like Ed Cohen savagely destroying what had, even a year before Hulkamania, been a thriving enterprise. McMahon was a brutal, thuggish stereotype, covering up murder, hiding child sexual abuse, allegedly pressuring his performers to use ever-growing amounts of anabolic steroids, even providing drugs to them, in order to create real-life comic book style heroes.
The cost of all this was very high.
Women in WWE were not safe, whether it was Rita Chatterton in the back of a limousine, Ashley Massaro in Kuwait or Trish Stratus in the ring barking like a dog on live television. Reading the lawsuit filed this week makes it more clear than ever that the on-screen “Mr. McMahon” character was actually a toned down version of the real thing. From using loved ones to satisfy business partners to an obsession with feces and men’s bodies, all of his hidden inner desires were featured on television weekly for years, making us all witness to his real life depravity, if only the fictional version.
It’s gross. It just is.
There are likely some of you so upset by all of this that you just wish you could remove the WWE version of pro wrestling from your life, moving on without a weekly shot of trash talk and pratfalls. I’m here to tell you it’s possible.
“Tonight's storyline was to have been the alleged demise of my character, Mr. McMahon. However, in reality, WWE Superstar Chris Benoit, his wife Nancy, and their son Daniel, are dead. Their bodies were discovered this afternoon in their new, suburban Atlanta home. The authorities are undergoing an investigation. We here in the WWE can only offer our condolences to the extended family of Chris Benoit, and the only other thing we can do at this moment is, tonight, pay tribute to Chris Benoit.”
-Vince McMahon, WWE Monday Night RAW (June 25, 2007)
For years, this was the end of my relationship with professional wrestling. I just couldn’t do it anymore. Like so many, my fandom was built on the workrate gods, Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero. I was amazed by their performances, rooted for their kayfabe success, invested way too much energy and emotion into these men I barely knew, convinced that their wrestling prowess was a proxy for righteousness.
In 2004 the two men closed WrestleMania XX holding their championship belts in the air, kings, if only for a moment of all of wrestling. All was right in the world.
Then Guerrero died, his heart giving out in a Marriott in Minneapolis. He collapsed, toothbrush in hand, preparing for yet another airplane ride in a life full of them. He was 38. At the time wrestlers were dropping seemingly by the score.
No one took it worse than Benoit, who began a downward spiral that culminated in a murder-suicide. He tied up his wife with coaxial cables and duct tape, stuffed a sock in her mouth and strangled her to death. His son, at least, he sedated first, then choked out, some say using his professional wrestling finisher. Benoit spent his last moments on Earth Googling the story of Elijah and praying he could resurrect the son he had murdered the day before. Then he hung himself from the gym equipment with which he’d built his outlandishly muscular figure.
The next day, even as news trickled in that Benoit was the perpetrator and not the victim of a truly despicable crime, WWE paid tribute to their fallen warrior. For me, it was all too much. I swore off WWE entirely for several years, walking away from the sole remaining company promoting the thing I’d loved since I was five years old.
I won’t lie to you though—it’s not easy. Wrestling burrows itself into your bones and, frankly, there isn’t anything else out there that works as a one-for-one replacement. I came back slowly, the Royal Rumble serving as the gateway, its combination of pomp and surprises almost impossible to resist. In 2011 I was hired by Bleacher Report as one of their first “professional” writers. They wanted to see what I could do, but I was contractually prohibited at the time from writing about MMA for anyone but SBNation. I did my tryout on pro wrestling instead—it felt like putting back on a favorite pair of jeans.
It just fits me.
Right now it’s easy to feel betrayed by WWE. It’s a company with tons of slogans and nods towards doing the right thing. It presents itself as a family, even its grumpiest Superstars referring to the billion dollar behemoth as their “home.”
The truth is, it’s a business that was built by a ruthless sociopath, stocked top-to-bottom with many of his hand-picked lieutenants and cronies. WWE’s rot can’t be removed by chopping off the head. The company is infected by decades of his leadership, its culture and ethos perhaps irrevocably broken and twisted.
A boycott may feel right. It might even be the correct thing to do. But it doesn’t hurt Vince. He’s walking away with billions, as is his family. His closest allies are all millionaires many times over. Unfortunately, they can’t be harmed by the power of the market. They’ve already pulled up stakes. They got away with it.
But the current employees of the company and the wrestlers who just want to perform and shine, the ones who walked away from McMahon and his sycophants as they denigrated fellow employees and shared sexually explicit photos and videos—they didn’t ask for this. It was thrust on them. For most of the last 20 years, there hasn’t even been another option for wrestlers who want to do this for a living. Walking away from WWE hurts them, full stop.
Maybe that’s a cost that must be paid. Maybe WWE needs to die for wrestling to survive. Or, maybe, the world is what it is and the best we can hope for is three hours of entertainment on a Saturday night as the flames surround us.
Me? I won’t cry if it all burns to the Earth. But I’ll be watching the Royal Rumble too. We are who we are.
Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.
I haven’t watched a second of WWE programming since the Saudi deal. Even then, I held it at arm’s length, mostly because I grew up in the Territorial Era watching Crockett, Dallas, Memphis, and Puerto Rico, but also because there was something I intuitively found icky about that company and Vince in particular.
I was able to enjoy wrestling without WWE, even before AEW. New Japan was kicking ass, and ROH and the indies were great. Now there’s AEW. Maybe people should spend less time moaning about how imperfect AEW is and more time being thankful that it exists and that it is not [gestures towards Titan Tower] THAT.
I hear the point about boycotts hurting the employees, but I’ve boycotted WWE off and on since the early 2000s, as it doesn’t feel right to me to support them. I grew up in their territory in the 80s, too, but gravitated more towards the NWA and any other territories, but Vince has always been repugnant and I’ve hated sending any of my money his way. That company needs to remove all of the people complicit in this mess, and then I’d consider supporting them again.