The Wrasslin' Essay: The McMahon Family Circus

With WrestleMania 32 a month away, WWE has their three top matches seemingly set in stone. Roman Reigns will challenge Triple H for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, Dean Ambrose will face Brock Lesnar in a Street Fight, and Shane McMahon will take on the Undertaker in Hell in a Cell for control of the WWE. While all six of those names have some juice behind them, the biggest WrestleMania of all time is not set up to be anything more than a commercial success. Although WWE will surely pack AT&T Stadium, setting attendance records and impressing people who are impressed by big numbers, this show could easily be the weakest WrestleMania of the gigantic stadium era (truly begun with WrestleMania XXIII). Undeniably, one of the principal causes for this is the rash of injuries that has decimated the WWE locker-room in recent months. However, the other element holding back this year’s big show is a little more surprising: the McMahon family.

Since Howard Finkel first declared “Welcome to WrestleMania!” over three decades ago, it was always the McMahon touch that made professional wrestling’s biggest spectacle special. Each year, McMahon built carefully to the blowoffs of his major angles, packed his cards with the best available talent, and provided a cavalcade of A and B-list celebrities to remind people that WrestleMania was a respectable entertainment spectacle, not a wrestling supercard. What made McMahon the victor in both wrestling wars he fought was the ability to balance these two seemingly opposed forces: the glitz and the grit.

McMahon was savvy when it came to production values, advertising deals, and family-friendly marketing, but he never lost sight of the fact that, at the end of the day, he was ultimately promoting a wrestling show filled with wrestlers who were going to wrestle each other (it is called WrestleMania, after all). Even when the Chairman was feuding with Steve Austin at the height of the Monday Night War, Stone Cold never wrestled Mr. McMahon directly at the biggest event of the year; rather, he always faced a surrogate. This ensured that Austin could claim a hard-fought victory in an athletic match rather than simply beating up a middle-aged man.

Credit: WWE

However, this consistent, sensible line of thinking has clearly eroded over the last two and a half years as the overarching Authority storyline has gradually made the McMahon name not just the be-all-end-all on the corporate side of the company, but in the ring as well. The top heel cannot exist without either being a McMahon (as Triple H indirectly is) or being endorsed by the McMahons (as Seth Rollins was). The top babyface must feud with the McMahons, constantly having the ball pulled away from them like Charlie Brown, so as to pour more and more heat onto the McMahon name. This year, however, the chickens are finally coming home to roost, and this strategy threatens to reduce the greatest spectacle in professional wrestling to a self-indulgent back-patting session for the family that owns an impossibly large market share of the business.

Perhaps the single greatest indicator of the McMahon hubris at work here is the “it actually seems like this is happening” matchup of Shane McMahon versus the Undertaker in Hell in a Cell. No amount of nostalgia, no ill-advised spine-tingling bump, no ToonTown factory of bells and whistles could possibly make Shane McMahon even the twentieth best choice to wrestle the Undertaker at this year’s WrestleMania. Given how close the Dead Man is to the end of his career, it’s an injustice to him and the fan base that he is not placed in the ring with the best available worker who can make him look as much like the Undertaker of old as possible. Imagine if in what could be his final performance, Robert DeNiro was cast in a Max Landis movie. Sure, their names are intriguing on the same poster, the audience certainly hasn’t seen it before, and it’s bound to make some money, but wouldn’t you sacrifice a little sex appeal to guarantee that one of the biggest stars of all time didn’t go out on a sour note?

The McMahon family drama about which this year’s WrestleMania card orbits isn’t just bad because it’s taking the show away from wrestlers, it’s also a bunch of low-brow, dated garbage. The last two episodes of Raw have seen members of wrestling’s first family putting each other in place with threats and reminders of physical violence like it’s the ’50s, teasing their sibling rivals over their inability to produce male heirs like characters on Wolf Hall, and targeting each other with leveraged back room business deals worthy of an ’80s soap opera. The result is a tawdry mess reminiscent of late ’90s cable—appropriately, the context in which these people actually felt like real celebrities for a brief time.

As we are an exit away from WrestleMania 32 , Vince McMahon, in and out of kayfabe, feels like King Lear on steroids (both metaphorically and literally). In his television storyline, he dotes on his sycophantic child while seeking the ruination of the once-favored heir. He refuses to listen to reason or introspect while his kingdom falls around him. Outside of storylines, he feels like a once-great king whose vanity and advancing age have finally brought him low at the feet of his own family.