If you’ve been within spitting’s distance of professional wrestling since the 1970s, you’re familiar with the name Vincent K. McMahon. “Mr. McMahon’s” impact on wrestling – and truthfully on the broader media landscape – is undeniable.
Naturally, a career staked in the world of sports entertainment, with its trappings of meta-reality (the simulated matches take place under the auspices of what is traditionally referred to as “kayfabe”), is going to be one rife with myth-making, misheard anecdotes, and flat-out fabrications.
Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America by Abraham Josephine Riesman is, to date, the most comprehensive exposé of Vince McMahon’s career. Through extensive interviews, research, and old-fashioned door-to-door journalism, Riesman has cataloged the (sometimes literal) trials and tribulations of the man who grew up “Vinnie Lupton” before discovering that his dad, Vince Sr., was a key player in the emergent world of professional wrestling.
Presented in a way that makes the material accessible and ultimately as page-turning as a true crime novel, Ringmaster pulls no punches. While many of the more headline-grabbing stories from this book were discussed last summer when Vince’s hush-money payments led to him (albeit temporarily) leaving the company he built, there’s still a lot left to uncover.
You may remember Abraham Josephine Riesman from her previous book, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, which explored the myths behind the Marvel mastermind‘s carefully crafted public persona.
Her niche-media bonafides secured, she turned to a topic that had always interested her: Vince McMahon, the enigmatic man behind the modern media spectacle that is professional wrestling.
In her Polygon essay “Wrestling Turned Me Cis, Then It Turned Me Trans“, Riesman details how her own personal relationship with professional wrestling’s complicated masculinity allowed her to feel more confident in living as her true self:
To be a queer and trans wrestling fan is to invert and expand the industry that we all love to hate. Not everyone comes along on the ride. One of wrestling’s virtues is how much it can bring disparate people together — which means there are still plenty of bullies who watch wrestling. But I’ve chosen to opt out of that demographic. I’ve seceded. I’ve shown the world my secret face. And I haven’t looked back.
Abraham Josephine Riesman – Polygon
To her credit, Josie has used her newfound platform to bring forward more queer voices in media – starting with recommending voice actor Alyss Weissglass for Ringmaster’s audiobook.
Riesman has been especially delighted by the response she’s received from queer wrestling fans: “the most meaningful feedback I’ve gotten has been queer and trans people saying ‘thanks for bringing that perspective’ because although there are a ton of queer and trans wrestling fans, they are not usually the ones calling the shots.”
During her whirlwind book release tour, which included a WrestleMania-weekend event in Los Angeles with Open Mike Eagle, Luigi Primo, and many others, I had the opportunity to interview Josie about Vince McMahon, daddy issues, “neokayfabe” and more.
AIPT: Ringmaster has gotten a lot of really positive reviews from the non-wrestling world. How would you describe Vince McMahon to someone who knows nothing about wrestling?
Abraham Josephine Riesman: Vince McMahon is the Emperor of Professional Wrestling in the United States and Canada. For about 40 years, he’s been the single most important individual in the industry of American pro wrestling. He has shaped it and reshaped it and has crushed all of his rivals.
Perhaps most importantly for people who don’t care about wrestling: he’s become a major force in American cultural life and the Republican Party.
He and his wife Linda McMahon have donated hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates. Linda was in President Trump’s cabinet as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Vince and Trump have been close friends for over 40 years and Vince has been very influential on Trump’s style. Trump has been watching McMahon family wrestling since the 1950s and has been a participant in Vince’s programming at times. He is in the WWE Hall of Fame. He even had a moment where he knocked down Vince McMahon at a WrestleMania.
I could go on. He’s a terribly significant figure who has not been analyzed in a serious journalistic mode before. And I hope this is the beginning. I don’t want this to be the definitive final word on Vince McMahon. I really hope this encourages other people to start looking.
AIPT: It’s more than Trump, too – I was surprised to see [former Pennsylvania Senator] Rick Santorum has a part in the Ringmaster story.
AJR: Right, young Rick Santorum worked with the McMahons to regulate wrestling in Pennsylvania when he was just a lawyer at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. It was like, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
AIPT: The first section of Ringmaster centers around Vince’s relationship with his biological father, Vince Sr., who he didn’t really know until he was a teenager. How do you think Vince’s desire to be accepted by his biological father impacted his professional trajectory?
After Vince Sr. took Vince (then known as Vinnie Lupton) in, he paid for his son to go to a military boarding school in Waynesboro, VA. That’s where Vince (Junior) put on his first wrestling shows.
He loved wrestling – he was even on the collegiate wrestling team at East Carolina University. But what all of his comrades said was he liked wrestling, but he liked his dad’s kind of wrestling.
So he replicated Vince Sr.’s kind of wrestling at this high school, which is pretty remarkable because Vince has never mentioned it. He wants you to think he was a tough guy, or a delinquent, in high school as opposed to a showman, which is how everyone describes him.
This is all speculation, and I’m being a biographer here, but I think that once he had access to Vince Sr. and found out his father was a wrestling promoter, he decided, “Well, if I can’t get close to my father through family, maybe I can get close to him through his work.”
Vince never describes Vince Sr. in warm tones. He’ll say, you know, “my father is a wonderful man.” “I loved my father”, et cetera. He often talks about him in very almost erotic ways. He says “I was very attracted to my father.” “I fell in love with my father,” et cetera. But the stories he tells about his actual interactions with his father are all, “here’s the time my dad was disappointed in me.”
By Vince’s own admission, his father never said anything complimentary to him to his face and never said “I love you” until (according to Vince) they had their final meeting while his father was dying of cancer in the hospital.
AIPT: In both Ringmaster and your previous book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, you play a lot with the contradictions and falsifications inherent in mythmaking. For Ringmaster, you coined the term “neokayfabe” – what exactly does that mean to you?
AJR: Kayfabe started from the presumption that “everything you’ll see tonight is real.” The winners won because they deserve it. They won because they were good at their craft. They followed the rules – or if they broke the rules, the referee really genuinely couldn’t see it.
You’re supposed to continue to believe or at very least suspend your disbelief. That was old kayfabe. A big, flat, solid, foundational lie.
Now, neokayfabe starts from the presumption that you are telling the audience, “hey, this is all fake.” Even if you’re not directly telling them, it’s part of the literature or the news reporting around your show – “Don’t worry, it’s all fake. Everybody is doing a show.”
But this one thing that’s happening, this might be real. You know, these two guys behind the scenes, they really hate each other. So they might actually hurt each other. That’s neokayfabe. You end up having this weird scenario where wrestling is telling you “this is all fake except for the parts that are true and we’re not gonna tell you which is which.”
It’s a bunch of slippery beach balls that you’re trying to walk across – you can’t get your balance. A true neokayfabe moment is where you’re like “Is this really happening? Is he allowed to say that?” When the mind is confused like that, it becomes fixated.
You’re very susceptible because you’re paying close attention. And when you think you have the answer, you can say “Okay, I figured it out.” But that answer can be just as manufactured as the initial lie.
You know, that’s the other genius of neokayfabe. You take lies and you bury them beneath other lies. So you dig up one lie and you clear away one lie I should say and say, “Wow, I found buried treasure. This must be the truth!”
But it’s just a lie that somebody took the time to bury.
AIPT: It’s easy to compare Ringmaster to a works of non-fiction, like Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, that offer detailed backstories behind dictators and political figures. Do you think there’s any crossover there?
AJR: It’s the same story. Wrestling just happens to be Vince McMahon’s medium.
If he met his father after 12 years and Vince Sr. was a petty dictator of some small nation – then Vince McMahon would have become the dictator of that small nation.
And they would have gone nuclear.
Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America is available now from Simon & Schuster.
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