Donald Trump plans to make WWE royalty Linda McMahon his education secretary. One former fighter is now a Tennessee mayor. Josh Glancy on how wrestling got US politics in a chokehold.
It’s a warm, beery August afternoon in Cleveland, Ohio, and a vast man called Matthew Justice is being beaten bloody on the street. His antagonist, Chuck Stone, slams Justice through a plywood table, scattering splinters. Then he hits him with a chair.
Watching on are hundreds of men. Big men, fat men, bearded men, tattooed men, men on mobility scooters, men with their sons and wives. These men are yelling, yowling, baying at the not-quite-real violence. Most have never heard of Stone or Justice, but they are certainly enjoying the show, whose constant fluctuations of fate and fortune are like a brutal dramatisation of real life.
This is street wrestling. The fighting is staged but it’s only when you see it up close, in glaring daylight, that you appreciate the level of neck-breaking risk these athletes take, and the amount of pain they endure in order to please their fans. “We want tables,” the crowd demands. They get tables, through which both men are thrown. Eventually Justice is served and Stone takes the victory.
That’s not the end, though, for the fighter known as the “One Man Militia”. Justice gets up, gives a rousing speech, chugs a can of Bud Light, and goes backstage to have his bleeding back washed down and stitched up.
At this point the crowd at the “Slammed on Sixth” tailgate downs its last suds and starts to filter towards the Huntington Bank Stadium, home to the Cleveland Browns American football team, which juts gorgeously into Lake Erie and is hosting tonight’s main event: the 37th annual WWE SummerSlam.
It’s been 22 years since I last gave wrestling a second thought. As a young boy I had all the figurines, Bret “The Hitman” Hart, Shawn Michaels, Hulk Hogan. And as a young teenager my friends and I would order the big events on pay per view and spend many happy hours practising baroque moves upon one another (although the fun was rather curtailed when one of our classmates knocked half his teeth out attempting a “swanton bomb” from the top of a staircase).
That was that, though. I grew up and became obsessed with football instead. I did not expect to find myself, decades later, sitting alongside 60,000 highly animated Americans and watching SummerSlam in person.
It turns out that wrestling didn’t go away, and it isn’t just for children. In fact it remains staggeringly popular and is having a resurgence. Last year World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the world’s dominant wrestling organisation, merged with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) to form a franken-fight club called TKO, worth an estimated US$23 billion ($40.7 billion). Shortly after that, WWE signed a ten-year, US$5 billion ($8.5 billon) deal to sell its global television rights to Netflix. It will be Netflix’s first mainstream live series, starting on January 6 (January 7, 2pm NZ time), meaning many of you are about to have your screens deluged with adverts for pretend bodybuilder violence.
Since WWE’s founder, impresario and animating spirit Vince McMahon was ousted from the company earlier this year, following just the latest allegations of lurid sexual misconduct, its popularity has surged once more. McMahon, 79, who denies the allegations, has been replaced by his son-in-law Paul Levesque, who used to be the wrestler Triple H and now runs the show. Levesque was in London a few months ago, meeting its mayor, Sadiq Khan, who is keen to woo WWE into hosting WrestleMania in the capital, an event that would thrill Britain’s considerable wrestling fanbase.
McMahon’s wife, Linda, meanwhile, has been nominated to be Donald Trump’s secretary for education, having already served in his previous government as head of the Small Business Administration. And Dana White, the rambunctious chief executive of the UFC, was also a fixture on Trump’s election campaign. Wrestling is back in the White House then, and that’s no coincidence. Trump has long been a fan of wrestling and is an old friend of the McMahons — he first met Vince in 1980s New York. Trump has made several WWE cameos over the years, most notably at WrestleMania’s Battle of the Billionaires in 2007, when the future president demonstrated his aptitude at throwing a clothesline.
In fact, long before he asked Hulk Hogan to appear at this year’s Republican national convention, it’s been argued that Trump draws extensively from wrestling, whose influences can be seen in his use of showmanship, high camp, shit-talking and, most important, the weaving of reality and fiction together into such a dizzying blur that people can no longer discern the difference. In wrestling they call this presentation of a staged performance that pretends to be genuine “kayfabe”. In Washington they call it politics.
In Mr McMahon, a recent documentary about her husband, Linda is asked what she sees as the key to WWE’s success. “What you must do is evoke emotion,” she says. “Whether it’s anger, happiness, even sometimes disgust if the bad guy went a little too far. It’s always about emotion.” She might as well have been talking about her new boss.
All of which brings me to SummerSlam at Cleveland. Because if you thought wrestling was only mindless stimulation for hicks and bored teenagers, you missed a trick. Hidden inside the vapid melodrama of WWE was a manual for how entertainment could conquer politics, and how performance could conquer reality.
WWE deals in base gratification, but it is also instinctively postmodern and post-truth. It basically invented scripted reality, foreshadowing so much that has come to pass in modern entertainment. And while it would be wrong to say Vince McMahon’s wrestling invented Donald Trump, there is a strong kinship between the two; both emanate from the same cauldron of American hyperbole.
Before McMahon took over what was then the WWF in 1982, wrestling in America was a regional affair. The shows had roots in 19th-century travelling carnivals and wrestling was run almost like the mafia, with bosses carving up the country into territories that they defended fiercely. One of these bosses was McMahon’s father, Vincent J McMahon, a domineering figure who ran wrestling in New York and New Jersey.
McMahon was not initially raised by his own father and grew up with his mother and stepfather in a trailer park in North Carolina. It was a brutal, abusive home and McMahon has heavily inferred that his mother, Victoria, sexually abused him. Of his stepfather, Leo Lupton, he once said: “It’s unfortunate that he died before I could kill him.”
McMahon went to see his real father aged 12 and soon became besotted with the world of wrestling, acting as a commentator for early WWF fights in which Hulk Hogan, Sgt Slaughter and the Iron Sheik enacted bloodthirsty and lucrative pantomimes. But he also saw underexploited potential.
When his father became ill in 1982, McMahon bought WWF from him for US$1m. He proceeded to muscle in on the regional cartels and turn the WWF into a national institution. Then he started annual, pay per view, Super Bowl-style events such as WrestleMania.
At WrestleMania III McMahon sparked a frenzy by bringing back André the Giant to face Hulk Hogan, and the global potential of the WWF became apparent. “WrestleMania III enshrined the event as an institution that could not be missed,” says Keith Greenberg, author of Bigger! Better! Badder!: WrestleMania III and the Year It All Changed. “Anyone who dared to call the spectacle ‘fake’ had fallen behind.”
The voracious, crude and irrepressible McMahon drove the WWF, which later changed its name to WWE after a trademark lawsuit filed by the World Wildlife Fund, on to ever more spectacular, grotesque heights. At the turn of the century Gallup estimated that 50 million Americans were wrestling fans and McMahon’s WWF swallowed up much of the British wrestling scene too. “McMahon Jr is the modern-day Hitler of professional wrestling, and if you told him that to his face he’d take you out and buy you the biggest steak you could eat,” is how one wrestler, Buddy Rogers, described him. “He thrives on the people around him hating his guts. He loves it.”
McMahon’s modern day Ringling circus was wildly entertaining and unforgivably reckless. It brought the world Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart, and then took things up a notch with the late-1990s “Attitude era” of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. McMahon regularly jumped in the ring himself with an alter-ego character, “Mr McMahon”, who was even more indecent than the man himself. His children, Stephanie and Shane, became recurring characters and Linda also made appearances, often slapping her “wayward” daughter and once being “tombstoned” by the 6ft 9in wrestler Kane, played by Glenn Jacobs, who is now the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee.
But scandal and tragedy followed this carnival with grim inevitability. In 1993 McMahon was indicted and charged with supplying steroids to his wrestlers, and later acquitted. At a pay per view event in 1999 in Missouri, Owen Hart, Bret’s brother, died after the equipment lowering him from the ceiling for a spectacular entrance malfunctioned. McMahon didn’t cancel the show, though. In 2007 news broke that the wrestler Chris Benoit had died. WWE issued a series of glowing tributes before it emerged that Benoit had killed his wife and son before committing suicide, leading to speculation that he had brain damage caused by his wrestling career.
Wrestling has been haunted by a number of other premature deaths, including Davey Boy Smith, “the British Bulldog”, who died of a heart attack at 39, and Eddie “Latino Heat” Guerrero, who died of heart failure in 2005, aged just 38.
McMahon also wriggled free of numerous allegations of sexual harassment and rape over the years, clinching the multibillion-dollar merger of WWE and UFC even after revelations of hush money payments to various female employees. Eventually a 2024 lawsuit from Janel Grant, a former WWE employee, alleging that McMahon had coerced her into a sexual relationship and subjected her to “extreme cruelty and degradation”, led to his resignation from TKO. Linda McMahon stood by her husband publicly through all this, but a recent report in The Washington Post confirmed the pair are now separated. McMahon is also the subject of a continuing Justice Department investigation into sexual assault and sex trafficking allegations, though since Trump’s election win wrestling media is abuzz with speculation that the new president might pardon his old pal.
After the Grant allegations, Vince was finally out for the count as head of WWE, but his mantle was picked up by Levesque, who is married to McMahon’s daughter, Stephanie. Since the old silverback was forced off stage, ratings have picked up and the show has some of its old buzz back. The Rock is also back, as a board member of TKO with occasional fighting cameos. Wrestling is calmer now, though, more family friendly and less porn-like. Gone are the days when McMahon made his on-screen girlfriend, Trish Stratus, get on her knees and bark like a dog for his forgiveness. “There’s been a lot of progress in women’s wrestling,” says Liv Morgan, the current women’s world champion. “People slept on us but now they’re awake.”
The storytelling is fresher now too. Shawn Michaels, once the luscious-locked “Heartbreak Kid”, now a balding, 59-year-old senior vice-president of talent development at WWE, thinks Levesque is key to the transformation. “Those kinds of changes are always positive,” he says of McMahon’s departure. “I’m a huge fan of Triple H, he’s my best friend. But I think he’s the best man for the job. We’re exploring more truthful, explicit, real aspects of these characters. Having one of your own in the driving seat resonates with our fanbase, they see it as real and genuine. That’s why we’re in this boom period.”
Wrestling has tens of millions of committed fans worldwide and puts on two or more live shows a week. It is a cash machine but it also has a direct line to the kind of young men that mainstream media often struggle to reach: Joe Rogan fans, YouTube fanatics, gym rats. It was partly to attract this audience that Netflix recently put on a Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson boxing fight in Dallas, Texas.
Paul v Tyson wasn’t sport as such, but rather the performance of it. And it worked. The fight peaked at 65 million concurrent streams and brought in seven times its projected audience in Britain, helping vindicate Netflix’s decision to spend big money on wrestling. “It opens up and unlocks an audience we don’t always connect with as consistently,” says Brandon Riegg, vice-president of unscripted series at Netflix and the man behind Drive to Survive, its acclaimed Formula 1 documentary. “That brand reaches an audience that is incredibly loyal, not all of whom might find something that currently resonates with them on our platform.”
Was Riegg worried about going into business with McMahon, who had all manner of allegations on his CV and was still on board when the deal was done? “There was the character of Vince and then there was the actual owner,” he says. “The lines were always fuzzy. When the very serious allegations came up, we had zero awareness of that prior. But at that point the deal had been done. We trusted in our partners they were going to handle it in the appropriate way.”
Perception is reality, as McMahon likes to say. So the only way to really understand wrestling was to perceive it for myself, to meet the fans and smell the baby oil.
SummerSlam is the second biggest event in the annual wrestling calendar, the US Open to WrestleMania’s Wimbledon. It attracts fans from all over the country and the globe, which is why even Holiday Inn rooms in Cleveland are more than US$1,000 a night when I visit.
Outside the stadium I meet TJ, 49, who is a football coach from Cleveland and has been watching wrestling since his grandma got him into it aged five. He has brought his eight-year-old son, Thomas, along for his first event. “We’re going to find out today if he’s a fan or not,” he says, patting Thomas on the head.
What does TJ love about wrestling? “It’s the storylines, man. It’s a male soap opera for us. Women have General Hospital, we have WWE. I come home from a long day, have a glass of wine and watch Monday Night Raw. It’s how I relax.” He’s pumped for WWE to come to Netflix. “It’s going to be showing breast and everything,” he says.
Like many of the female fans I met at SummerSlam, Cristina Lowenfeld got into wrestling through her husband, Joe, who is wearing a wrestling balaclava that Cristina made for him. “It’s about the excitement for me,” explains Cristina, who is an event planner. “It’s high energy, high emotion. The guys get to drool over the girls in the bikini outfits, and the girls drool over the big muscular guys.”
Joe, who edits YouTube videos, has been watching wrestling since he was four years old. “It’s the one thing that’s been around, week in week out, since I was a kid,” he says. “It’s reliable.” The couple got married at the Cleveland Browns stadium and each wore wrestling belts for the occasion. Do they ever wrestle each other, I wonder. “He does put me in a headlock sometimes,” Cristina says with a grin. “He puts me in a sharpshooter, it hurts! Oh man, it hurts. I can’t do that stuff. I can do the people’s elbow [a famous elbow drop] — I’ve done that to him once or twice.”
Around the stadium men walk around very earnestly carrying wrestling belts over their right arms — these are a snip at US$600. But this isn’t simply an incel convention; there are dads with their young daughters, entire families who have driven in from Detroit and Chicago, and a group of girls on a hen do. All life is here.
The headline fight is between the world champ Cody Rhodes, the “American Nightmare”, and Solo Sikoa, a member of the “Bloodline”, a sprawling dynasty of Pacific Islands wrestlers. But all the chatter is about Roman Reigns. The hope is that wrestling’s biggest star, who is reported to be on US$5 million a year and hasn’t been seen since WrestleMania in April, will return to reclaim his leadership of the Bloodline from Sikoa.
I realise how infantile this all sounds when written down. But when you’re in the stadium and the stage lights are on and seven vast men are lamping each other with abandon, and 60,000 people are frantically awaiting the first bars of Roman’s entry song, you can’t help but feel a jolt of something.
The press box at SummerSlam is unlike that of any sporting event I’ve been to, full of yelling and foot-stamping. During one fight the wrestler Rhea Ripley appears to have dislocated her shoulder. She grimaces in agony but fights on. Has she actually injured herself? I’m thrillingly unsure.
“She’s got to Mel Gibson that shit,” one of the commentators next to me says, referring to the movie Lethal Weapon, when Gibson relocates his shoulder by smashing it into a cubicle door. And lo, she Mel Gibsons that shit, slamming her shoulder into the corner of the ring, suggesting — one hopes — it was a fake dislocation all along. “Mind-blowing,” the commentator says.
Many countries from Mexico to Japan have their own form of wrestling, but what I’m witnessing is a peculiarly American fantasy of badass men and fierce, busty chicks who know how to throw down. A world unconstrained by truth or the bonds of civility, where fans can temporarily escape from being demeaned by their boss or confused by their healthcare insurance and imagine that it’s them fighting and flirting under the bright lights.
So as the evening builds towards its finale, one question remains: will Roman Reigns come out? It’s not a guarantee. Sometimes WWE zags when everyone wants them to zig. Mostly it zigs, though. “We want Roman!” the crowd demands. Eventually the first bars of his opening song, Head of the Table, drop, the crowd roars and writhes in ecstasy. Reigns strides into the ring, beats up Solo Sikoa, a member of his own Bloodline, and hands the match to Cody Rhodes, his bitter rival. It’s all over. “That was some good shit,” the woman next to me mutters happily. Her friend agrees. “So much better than real life.”
WWE is showing live on Netflix from today 2pm.
Written by: Josh Glancy
© The Times of London