Last time out I talked about Daniel Bryan and how his SummerSlam main event spot was more coincidence due to a reality TV show than some form of “genius” plan from Vince McMahon to push the most popular guy on the roster. Many would disagree with that assessment and there is obviously plenty of evidence out there to back-up anyone who would claim that Vince is a promoting genius. Hell, I would agree with that he is.
Yet it can be an interesting exercise to look back at the “Superstars” that the WWF/E has produced over the years and see how it’s not always genius that paves the way for success. Sometimes it is indeed coincidence, good fortune and serendipity that wins the day. For every Hulk Hogan, who Vince targeted as his poster boy and the driving force behind national expansion there is a Diesel, perhaps the last man hand-picked and expected to carry the company on his shoulders on his own, whose reign was so dreadful and generally unappealing it nearly bankrupted the company in the process. Not every huge success stands up to close inspection in terms of Vince McMahon’s genius.
Take, for instance, Stone Cold Steve Austin. The man was arguably THE hottest WWE star of all time. At his peak he earned $12,000,000 in one year. And yet whilst we can laud Vince McMahon’s promotion of him and realising the potential of the character there are some points it’s wise not to forget. Jim Ross has admitted that Austin was brought in only as a “strong hand” who could work good exciting mid-card matches with a variety of opponents. One of the greatest talkers of all-time, Austin was saddled with a manager in the form of Ted DiBiase because the company had no faith in his promo’s. And his big breakout moment came at King of The Ring 1996, where he only got the opportunity to cut his legendary Austin 3:16 promo because Triple H was still being punished for his part in the infamous MSG Curtain Call incident. Just think about that for a moment; if the original plan for that show had gone ahead, the world’s biggest selling wrestling t-shirt of all time would probably never had existed because no matter how well Austin’s career had subsequently gone would he ever have been in the position to cut that promo at Jake Roberts’ expense ever again? You can, of course, run rings around yourself by dealing in “what if” scenarios, but what if Eric Bischoff hadn’t offered Razor & Diesel all that money to jump ship…the Curtain call doesn’t happen and Triple H becomes the 1996 King of The Ring. Whatever the genius of Vince in pushing/promoting Austin to the moon after that show, it’s clear that a great slice of luck or fate intervened leading up to it.
Austin’s main rival in the glory years The Rock also had a sticky start in the WWF. Regardless of any revisionist history, Rocky Maivia was a bust. This was no Kurt Angle style attempt to get a “babyface” character booed (Angle’s antics when he started in 1999 would have made him a superstar Babyface in the 1980’s but were intended to create a backlash in the 1990s). Maivia was expected to be a big smiling babyface star, by a booking squad hopelessly out of date admittedly, and it didn’t work. If Rock hadn’t been injured and had to take a leave of absence, would Vince have taken the advice of Mick Foley who admitted that he thought Rock should have been let go as he just didn’t have it? Would Rock have been able to make the transition to heel in another angle than his return panned out? We don’t know, but perhaps fate intervened again.
Where would Bret Hart be if Vince McMahon hadn’t, allegedly, woken up in a foul mood on that day in October 1992 and decided that he was taking the belt off Ric Flair and handing it to “The Hitman”? Bret himself has admitted that when he was called into Vince’s office that day he thought he was being fired and a number of backstage workers have intimated that if Vince had made his decision a few days earlier there would have been every chance that he would have been convinced to change his mind. Now you could argue this was Vince seeing potential in Bret and rolling the dice on the gamble but equally it could be seen as a decision made on the hoof as a result of a mood swing that happened to pay off (in steady, if unspectacular terms).
History is littered with these kind of things in the WWF. The “greatest intercontinental champion of all time” The Honky Tonk Man only won the belt because Butch Reed no-showed the night he was supposed to unseat Ricky Steamboat. As ridiculous as Honky’s gimmick was, he was super-over and headlined the non-Hogan house show circuit. Not bad for an unplanned reign. Batista’s babyface turn on Triple H (which, like “The Animal” or not, led to one of the most profitable WrestleMania main event matches of all time) was only set in motion when a “fake” turn on Hunter in a RAW angle in the Evolution times got over so huge that the WWE immediately saw the dollar signs and sidelined (or downgraded) the planned feud between HHH and Randy Orton. On a different level, CM Punk got more over with the audience with one self-penned “pipe-bomb” than he ever did with a couple of years of Vince McMahon’s “say what we tell you” promotional expertise behind him.
Vince is the greatest wrestling promoter of all time; the money he’s made and the amount of time he’s made it over tells us that. But even geniuses require a little luck and good fortune at times. Perhaps Vince’s greatest claim to “genius” is the way he’s capitalised on those little acts of fate that have landed in his lap.
– By Matthew Roberts