Vince McMahon is a great American survivor

You might think that as Vince McMahon, veteran boss of World Wrestling Entertainment, returned to public life after a brief period in exile following allegations of sexual misconduct and hush-money agreements, he would want to present a sober and serious image. Not a bit of it. The seventy-seven-year-old emerged to announce the sale of WWE to Endeavor Group Holdings with blackened hair and a pencil mustache — resembling Dick Dastardly on a shit ton of steroids.

McMahon is a showman. I’m sure there is some extent to which he wanted his mustache to become the story. Get ‘em talking about the image and they might not focus on those dark mutterings about sexual harassment and assault. But you can’t understand Vincent Kennedy McMahon without understanding that he isn’t just a cynic. He is an obsessive. He is a man who squats dozens of plates in his seventies and who used to pull out a razor in business meetings to carve the faintest hint of stubble off his face. He is one of the most strangely, furiously driven people of our age. If he has a mustache, then he must have decided that — goddammit — a mustache was Right for Vincent Kennedy McMahon.

At risk of trivializing his scandals, one sad thing about them was how unexceptional they were. Vince has never seemed like a man of appetites. Ex-employees would speak in hushed tones about how the billionaire would eat plain turkey sandwiches and steak burritos with a squirt of ketchup. If he groped clerks and abused his power over his female performers it isn’t just deplorable — it’s squalidly common male behavior.

McMahon stepped down from his role as chairman of WWE in 2022 after the allegations broke, abruptly announcing that it was “time to retire.” Only an idiot would have believed that he was going to buy a condo and take up golf. The man is so wedded to work that as they lower his coffin into his grave they will hear his ghost barking commands. Faster, pal! Goddammit!

McMahon’s daughter Stephanie and his business mastermind Nick Khan took over the corporate side of WWE while his son-in-law Paul “Triple H” Levesque took on the creative duties. Somehow, WWE thrived. All the eccentricities that were cooking inside Vince throughout his adult life have boiled over in recent years in manic episodes of control freakery and imaginative derangement. Now, the product was more logical and more consistent — and stars like Sami Zayn and Rhea Ripley began to shine.

But one man was not impressed. WWE had been Vince’s baby for four decades — stretching back to when he had bought it from his dad — and he would be damned if he would let it go without a fight. He was still the majority shareholder, after all. As the WWE board contemplated potential buyers of the company, he made it known that he would block any sale if he could not return to the fold. What choice did the executives have? 

McMahon came back — but he was clear that he was only returning to facilitate a sale. If you believed that, you would believe a pyromaniac who said he wanted matches to light a candle. Soon, McMahon was backstage at WWE’s flagship Monday night program Raw. Fans were looking for his fingerprints on the product. 

At last weekend’s annual Wrestlemania extravaganza, it was announced that WWE had been sold to Endeavor for a whopping $9.3 billion. Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel has announced that it will be merged with another huge Endeavor product, the UFC. And guess who is set to be executive chairman, and was sitting alongside Emanuel for a CNBC interview as he announced the deal, looking a bit like Clark Gable if he had been left out in the sun? Vince McMahon. 

At this week’s Raw, Vince was backstage again. Rewrites were reportedly demanded twenty minutes before the show went on air.

“I have made mistakes obviously personally and professionally throughout my fifty-year career,” said McMahon. “I have owned up to every single one of them and then moved on.” This is curious given that he has never publicly admitted what they were. 

But you can’t judge Vince only in moral terms. He isn’t just a man. He’s a force of nature. He has gone from a trailer park in North Carolina to the most intimidating heights of wealth and fame. He has taken his company from being a niche New York pro wrestling promotion to an international entertainment phenomenon worth billions of dollars. 

In doing so, he has risked bankruptcy, jail and brain damage and death from all the blows and falls he has endured in the ring while performing as his evil “Mr. McMahon” alter ego. He has also been quite prepared to drive people out of business, double-cross his top performers and demand that the action continue after one of his beloved stars had died in the ring. You don’t have to like that sort of ice-cold dedication — but there is at least a sense in which you have to respect it. Civilizations have thrived, in large part, because of nigh-on sociopathic will.

As Donald Trump was being arrested, his longtime friend Vince McMahon was basking in the glow of a multi-billion dollar deal that has still left him with enormous power over the future of “his” company. WWE has survived — quite apart from all the things that I have mentioned — billionaire-backed rivals, government investigations and the familicide of one of its top stars. Vince has become one of America’s greatest success stories and greatest survivors. Whether he deserves it is another question, but success and morality are at most distant cousins.

Just imagine if he had gone into politics.