Even so, professional  wrestling performed an espe­cially prominent role in television's early history as a mass medium. During the age of live programming, wrestling's choreographed violence and grand pantomime made it an entertainment form that was particularly well-suited to the limitations of primitive television sets. Although the faux sport was most closely associated with the ABC and Dumont networks, between 1948 and 1955 (during what is now known as the "golden era" of the sport), wrestling programs appeared at one time or another on the prime-time schedules of all four major national broadcast networks. Chicago was home to the two longest-running wrestling shows of this period. On almost every Wednesday night for six years, ABC telecast matches from the Windy City's Rainbow Arena with Wayne Griffin performing as announcer. On Saturday nights during roughly the same time span, Marigold Gardens was the setting for Dumont's "Wrestling from Chicago" with Jack Brickhouse providing the commentary. But the most noteworthy of the early announcers, Dennis James, appeared on another Dumont production that originated from various arenas in and around New York City. Remembered for the catch­ phrase "Okay, Mother," James's enthusiasm for the sport was both legendary and infectious.

     During   this   golden   era   of   kayfabe   wrestling, matches pitted fan favorites like Verne Gagne, Lou Thesz, and Bruno "The Italian Superman" Sammartino against larger-than-life villains like "Classy" Freddie Blassie, Killer Kowalski, and "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers. But by far the most significant wrestling star of this period was George Wagner-millions  knew (and hated) him as Gorgeous George. After ten years of wrestling in obscurity, Wagner became something of an alchemist when he discovered how to turn homophobia into gold. In a day when most wrestlers and their  male  fans sported  crew  cuts and  flattops, Gorgeous George's long, curly, platinum blond locks made him stand out. His many theatrical innovations included deploying a supporting cast/entourage and playing provocative theme music: male valets named Geoffrey and Thomas Ross would spray Wagner's corner of the ring with perfume before George, with "Pomp and Circumstance" blaring on the loudspeakers, made a grand entrance that might last longer than his actual match. Wagner's showmanship would have a lasting impact on the sport, inspiring generations of imitators like Adrian Street, "Superstar" Billy Graham, Ric Flair, "Adorable" Adrian Adonis, Goldust, and Randy "Macho Man" Savage (whose theme song was also "Pomp and Circumstance''). The importance of Gorgeous George Wagner, then, is that he was the first of TV's sports performers to establish that personality, character, and color are as interesting to audiences and as crucial to television stardom as run-of-the-mill competitive superiority.

     The golden era of pro wrestling would end in 1955, when wrestling vanished from all of the networks' prime-time schedules. Surviving in the ghetto time­ slots of local late-night and weekend schedules, wrestling programming during the next 25 years was largely produced and distributed by regional promoters who developed a cast of heroes and villains that replicated and exploited prevailing cultural conflicts and ethnic rivalries. In Lubbock, Texas, for example, "Rapid" Ricky Romero was a popular "good guy" who appealed to the area's large Mexican-American population, while the Funks (a ranching family made up of father Dory and sons Dory Jr. and Terry) catered to An­glo fans. Where Gorgeous George exploited homophobia, many of the wrestling villains of the 1960s and 1970s capitalized on the xenophobia of cold war America. Lord Alfred Hayes, "Russian Bear" Ivan Koloff, Baron Mikel Scicluna, Baron von Raschke, The Sheik, Professor Toru Tanaka, Mr. Fuji: all were portrayed as foreign-born villains.

     Another notable trend of this period was the emergence of masked wrestlers who seemed to be refugees from pages of comic books. In the United States, masked wrestlers like the Destroyer, the Bolos, Dr. X, Mr. Wrestling, and Mr. Wrestling II achieved moderate success as villains. But south of the U.S. border, colorful masked men dominated the character cosmos of what is called Lucha Libre (literally, free-form fighting). From the legendary El Santo and Blue Demon through the flamboyant Mil Mascaras to such contemporary young superstars as Rey Mysterio Jr. and Ju­ventud Gurrera, the masked luchador is the defining figure in Mexican professional wrestling.

     Back in the United States, the fragmentation of wrestling in the 1960s and 1970s is perhaps best illustrated by the contested object that motivated the main line of action in the always-developing masculine melodrama: the championship belt. The smallest wrestling circuits attached grandiose titles to belts that made the huge buckles of rodeo hardware look puny. Even so, the three most prestigious "World" heavyweight titles during this era were sanctioned by what were then the three largest wrestling associations: the American Wrestling Association (AWA), the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), and the World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF). First awarded to Frank Gotch in 1904, the NWA's World Wrestling Championship was the oldest belt recognized in the United States.

     In keeping with a familiar business trend in the entertainment industry, it would not be one of the three established powers that propelled professional wrestling into a hyper-golden age of global proportions. Instead, the seeds of wrestling's postmodern future would take root in a small East Coast operation known as the Capitol Wrestling Federation. In 1982, Vincent Kenneth McMahon Jr. and his wife, Linda, acquired the marginal enterprise from a partnership headed by Vincent Kenneth McMahon Sr. for $1 million divided into four quarterly payments. Like his main rival, Ted Turner, McMahon understood the economic opportunities afforded by the satellite/cable revolution. Renaming his company the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), McMahon signed a deal with the USA Network that enabled him to cultivate a national cable audience.

     McMahon was not concerned with maintaining the so-called "credibility" of the sport form. Dropping any pretense that pro wrestling was an authentic sport, McMahon violated kayfabe when he freely admitted that matches were rigged. In fact, discarding the burden of credibility enabled McMahon to connect wrestling to another super histrionic spectacle: rock music. With the aid of pop stars (most notably, Cyndi Lauper), McMahon forged a rock-wrestling connection that successfully pitched his pyrotechnic productions to the MTV generation. McMahon's targeting of the youth market was also apparent in the WWF's new line of wrestling superstars. Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and Randy "Macho Man" Savage would become internationally known names in the rapidly expanding culture of global telecommunications technology.

     McMahon's greatest achievements have been in pay-per-view television. The 1985 debut of McMa­ hon's Wrestlemania was a headline-grabbing experiment. The first Wrestlemania was staged in New York's Madison Square Garden. With Muhammad Ali serving as guest referee, Liberace keeping time, and baseball's Billy Martin performing as ring announcer, Wrestlemania I's marquee event was a grudge tag­ team match that partnered Hulk Hogan and the A Team's Mr. T against Rowdy Roddy Piper and Paul "Mr. Wonderful" Orndorff. The outcome of the match is, of course, not as important as the fact that the experiment almost made money.

     Two years later, Wrestlemania III erased any lingering doubts about the profitability of pay-per-view wrestling. A record 93,173 spectators jammed the Pontiac Silverdome to make Wrestlemania's third installment rank then as the "largest indoor sports event or entertainment event of all time" (the previous indoor attendance record was for a 1981 Rolling Stones concert  in  New  Orleans  at  the  Superdome). Producing $1.7 million in ticket sales and $30 million more in pay-per-view and merchandising receipts, Wrestlema­ nia III established McMahon as the architect of a new media synergy that went beyond the way professional wrestling had traditionally used televised matches to hype live events. Whether distributed on a major broadcast network (NBC's Saturday Night's Main Event}, a minor broadcast network (UPN's Smackdown!), or a basic cable network (USA's Raw), McMa­ hon's "free"  wrestling  shows-though  highly  rated and profitable-would come to represent relatively modest revenue streams compared with their promotional value for building anticipation and expectations for the orgy of excess and profit taking that is Wrestle­ mania.

     In the world of pro wrestling, McMahon now reigns supreme, having finally vanquished his only serious rival, Ted Turner. This accomplishment is even more impressive considering Turner's ten-year head start in the wrestling business. Though Turner is better known for his ownership of the Atlanta Braves, professional wrestling was actually his first venture into the world of sports programming. Soon after purchasing a money-losing UHF station in Atlanta in 1970, Turner enlisted the aid of a former girlfriend (who was married to one of Atlanta's top wrestling promoters) to help him steal a popular wrestling show from the local ABC affiliate. Outfitting Channel I 7's small studio with a full-sized ring, Turner scheduled wrestling three times a week-and the station's ratings started moving upward. That small independent station would eventually become WTBS. For the next three decades, wrestling would be a key programming ingredient of Turner's cable empire. However, in the 1980s, when McMahon was taking wrestling to new heights with Wrestlemania, Turner was preoccupied with other matters: establishing CNN, trying to buy CBS, launching the Goodwill Games, acquiring MGM's film archive, and fighting off creditors. In the mid- 1990s, though, Turner would go on the offensive. Changing the name of his wrestling property from the National Wrestling Alliance to World Class Wrestling (WCW), Turner re­ tooled its programming with higher production values and more convoluted, melodramatic storylines. Beginning in July 1996, for 83 straight weeks, Turner's WCW attracted larger television audiences than McMahon's WWF fare.

     McMahon   mounted   a   counteroffensive   with  a makeover of the WWF that included hiring writers from MTV and the Conan O'Brien Show to dream up sleazy plots and odious stunts. One Thanksgiving installment, for instance, featured two women grappling in gravy. Though such tasteless gimmickry resulted in Coca Cola pulling its ads from SmackDown!, McMa­ hon's strategy would bring viewers flooding back to the WWF. By 2000, WWF programming had doubled the ratings of WCW. And in March 2001, McMahon acquired the WCW from AOL Time Warner for $10 to $20 million. After the takeover,  the WCW's  top stars, Goldberg and Ric Flair, would go on to share the WWF spotlight with Stone Cold Steve Austin, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and Mick "Mankind" Foley.

     But there was something hollow about McMahon's ringing victory over his old enemy, for the WCW was not the only sport/entertainment enterprise to fold in the spring of 2001. On May 10 of that memorable year, a little over a month after the WWF-WCW merger, McMahon and his collaborators at NBC were forced to also pull the plug on the XFL, a new football league that failed to catch on with the public. Just before the launch of the XFL, McMahon had himself achieved billionaire status when a share of WWF stock was trading at $22; soon after the XFL failure, the price of WWF stock was cut in half-and  it would  dip as low as $7.43 in 2002.

     Despite the XFL debacle, the man who brought the world Wrestlemania still stands as an impresario whose showmanship rivals that of the legendary P.T. Barnum. In addition to being associated with a low­-brow cultural form, McMahon's legend is stigmatized by the widely held belief that his sizable personal fortune has been built on the blood, sweat, and tears (and chemical enhancement) of others. In fact, years before the demise of the XFL damaged McMahon's reputation, his public persona had been tainted by skullduggery. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a steroid scandal tarnished not only McMahon's name but also the wholesome good-guy credentials of Hulk Hogan. Later, McMahon settled for a reported $18 million in a wrongful death suit filed by the family of Owen Hart. Hart, a journeyman wrestler, was fatally injured on May 23, 1999, when he fell 78 feet during an aerial stunt at a WWF show in Kansas City. And, more recently, deaths of at least two children have been attributed to juvenile violence inspired by the WWF. In the most publicized of these cases, Lionel Tate was given life in prison by a Florida court after being found guilty of body-slamming and kicking six-year-old Tiffany Eunick to death. Tate was 14 years old at the time of his sentencing.

     McMahon's advice to parents concerned that his crude, misogynist, and violent programming is not suitable for children is to "Chill!" As he told Matt Meagher of Inside Edition, "We're not trying to corrupt the public We're trying to do one thing only: Entertain you! And based upon our TV ratings, that's what we're doing." On May 5, 2002, McMahon renamed his outfit World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (WWE). McMahon's wife, Linda, who was speaking as CEO of WWE, declared, "Our new name puts an emphasis on the 'E' for entertainment, what our company does best. WWE provides us with a global identity that is distinct and unencumbered, which is critical to our U.S. and international growth plans." Putting the emphasis on the "E" also speaks to the chief economic motive behind Vince McMahon's rejection of the pretense that pro wrestling is a sport-it provides him with a strategy for disowning the negative consequences of his business. His well-rehearsed and oft-spoken defense of his product basically boils down to a verbal shell game that equates and conflates "harmlessness" with "entertainment"-a semantic move that covers a multitude of sins and makes one nostalgic for the good old-fashioned dishonesty of kayfabe.