so how bad do yall think the dirt revealed is going to get. cause what we already know is scandalous enough.

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/vince-mcmahon-retirement-wwe-1235323378/

Vince McMahon is retiring from WWE.

“As I approach 77 years old, I feel it’s time for me to retire as Chairman and CEO of WWE,” McMahon said in a statement released by the sports entertainment company. “Throughout the years, it’s been a privilege to help WWE bring you joy, inspire you, thrill you, surprise you, and always entertain you. I would like to thank my family for mightily contributing to our success, and I would also like to thank all of our past and present Superstars and employees for their dedication and passion for our brand. Most importantly, I would like to thank our fans for allowing us into your homes every week and being your choice of entertainment. I hold the deepest appreciation and admiration for our generations of fans all over the world who have liked, currently like, and sometimes even love our form of Sports Entertainment.”

McMahon’s retirement comes after it was announced in June that he would be stepping back from his roles as chairman and CEO of WWE amid an ongoing investigation into allegations that he paid out millions of dollars to multiple women to keep quiet about alleged affairs. The Wall Street Journal reported that McMahon ultimately paid a total of $12 million as part of the agreements.

McMahon went on to say in his statement that his daughter Stephanie McMahon and WWE president Nick Khan would serve as co-CEOs upon his departure, with Stephanie also serving as chairwoman.

“Our global audience can take comfort in knowing WWE will continue to entertain you with the same fervor, dedication, and passion as always,” McMahon continued. “I am extremely confident in the continued success of WWE, and I leave our company in the capable hands of an extraordinary group of Superstars, employees, and executives – in particular, both Chairwoman and Co-CEO Stephanie McMahon and Co-CEO Nick Khan. As the majority shareholder, I will continue to support WWE in any way I can. My personal thanks to our community and business partners, shareholders, and Board of Directors for their guidance and support through the years. Then. Now. Forever. Together.”

The announcement will no doubt send shockwaves through the world of professional wrestling and media at large. McMahon is a third generation promoter, having taken over WWE (then WWF) from his father, Vince McMahon Sr, in the 1980s. He took professional wrestling to new heights, breaking from the traditional territory model of years past and taking his company national and eventually global. He also became known for his appearances onscreen as the villainous Mr. McMahon character, who famously feuded with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin during WWE’s so-called Attitude Era.

<--- Big Baller World Order

I also wonder how his stock shares work, in terms of how much power he can wield over things.

My guess is, if we that company puppet Bruce Pritchard getting the axe, that’s a good sign that he’s actually out of power, or that it’s significantly diminished.

Even then, with Stephanie in charge, I doubt we see much in the way of a shift in culture or or creative.

By many accounts, she’s very much her father’s daughter.

Nick Kahn will continue to keep the money machine flowing, either way.

will continue to watch

________________________________________
"Take the surprise out your voice Shaq."-The REAL CP3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2H5K-BUMS0

A lot of fans who have stopped watching altogether, or only watch on the rare occasion something notable happens, care.

Saying “those who watch will still watch” is a nothing statement.

If he’s still running creative, a lot of us who like the actual performers but gave up due to years of dogshit creative, still won’t watch.

If he’s out of creative and not wielding personnel power, that gives at least some hope that we could get a better creative product, and will give the new product a chance.

I just wasn't into the Real Guy era that followed the Attitude Era, I grew up playing the WWF SNES game and thinking it was amazing that Doink the Clown a very real thing. Much further along, I knew Raven's Flock was convoluted but also liked that you could watch some insane athletes do some unbelievable stuff together in front of a crowd, then go backstage and plot about how and why they'd buy into or out of one dumb gimmick after another over some ice packs and 30 packs.


In any case, I'm excited for Vince stepping away from the WWE product (and all of the video, audio and other intellectual property it holds) in the hopes that the further he gets, the more willing/able these guys are to tell their stories unfiltered before their time is up. I wouldn't be surprised if Stephanie maintains the vice grip, but the nostalgic in me remembers that she also wrestled with a lot of these so-called old-timers, married one of them and in any case like most children of tyrants should've recognized that for all the ways WWE has embraced new media they do such an offensive job of enjoying how the opera of the shoot is equally or more interesting than the kayfabe.


A great example is The Ringer's 25 Catchphrases That Explain the Attitude Era series that's going on right now. I really enjoy it because, again, it's about many of the most important Sundays and Mondays of my teenage years. There's lots of live and taped audio, and we get to hear a lot from HHH, Shawn Michaels, Paul Heyman, and others...but it's weird and notable that an episode about Austin 3:16 has no Stone Cold, Die Rocky Die has no Rock, Suck It has no X-Pac (or even Road Dogg), Bret Screwed Bret has no Bret Hart...all of which comes off even more curated when you remember The Ringer was making a Vince documentary with HBO that sounded like it was in final edits when the latest exploitation allegations came out.


I still really like to revisit that era, maybe to an unhealthy degree, and I'd love for the WWE archives to throw the doors open to a podcast or documentary series like this. I'll bet anybody in this thread read Mick Foley's Have a Nice Day or obsessively locked in on Beyond the Mat or Wrestling With Shadows. It makes sense that those three things dropping within 12 or 18 months of each other made Vince draw the curtain as tight as he could considering where wrestling stood culturally back then...but no wrestling fan is getting bullied because "it's fake" anymore, and it seems like enough natural athletes (rather than drunken renegades) see it as a career that Vince is/was the primary fence standing between the old carney show and something more modern and open.


Obviously for the people and athletes still watching and wrestling they've got to do what they do, but 1985-2002 professional wrestling was so ambitious, fluid and definitive that I'd love to see Vince's grip on those stories loosen to the point of irrelevance. And, again, I think the most recent wrestling match I've seen was the latter of the Michaels/Taker Wrestlemania matches. So I feel like a kind of quintessential example of somebody who doesn't care much how this effects current WWE, other than it'd be nice if the working conditions greatly improved (those dudes should be actual employees, for starters) but I really want the historical floodgates to open up without that egotistical shield in front of it.


That Mankind book dropped in the middle of his mainstream pop, and in a lot of ways I feel like the show has been running away from all those black eyes and broken bones ever since.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

________________________________________
"Take the surprise out your voice Shaq."-The REAL CP3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2H5K-BUMS0

Kind of a dumb thing to lie about, but do you

https://twitter.com/BrandoLightShed/status/1550575439273496582
https://twitter.com/WWE/status/1550483148701589509

<--- Big Baller World Order

Lol

I'd also imagine that the sponsors were putting pressure on him to step down.

Big question now is if Nick Khan puts the screws to Stephanie to sell the company to NBC Universal or failing that, Netflix or Disney.

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TBH the fact that you're even a mod here fits squarely within Jag's narrative of OK-sanctioned aggression, bullying, and toxicity. *shrug*

These WSJ articles are likely opening the floodgates. He’s been pretending that none of this is happening for:the past month, but it was soon coming to the point)t where the networks and sponsors won’t let him pretend anymore.

There’s also the possibility that Vince was paying off the women with WWE money, rather than his own, which would be a huge no-no. But that’s more of a Trump thing to do; Vince is usually smarter than that.

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The second the payoffs came out, he was done, even if there was nothing else to dig up.

He probably survives that a decade ago. Not today.

The big kicker here is, new contracts with Fox and Universal are coming due, the network is now tied to partnerships, they’re publicly traded, and he’s brought in too many outside corporate chiefs with too much internal power.

Nick Kahn has been steering them to be as profitable and lean as possible, potentially for a sale at some point.

He just doesn’t all the chips anymore, and he invited a much savvier corporate wolf into his cathouse. Vince would probably still being mid/high 6 figures to acts he barely uses just to hoard them away from other companies, were it not for Nick Kahn.

Even if it’s just the four known payouts, that was more than enough with this set of circumstances. His presence puts the company over a barrel in this next round of contract negotiations, and had to go.

My best guess is, Kahn helped orchestrate all of this. I’m guessing those bodies didn’t simply reach out. He went digging.

like if someone decided to dig into that Ashley Massaro situation for example

<--- Big Baller World Order

>like if someone decided to dig into that Ashley Massaro
>situation for example

Yes. Even a cursory review of some of the things related to her time in WWE seems pretty rotten…and not just from Vince. Sadly, a lot of it seems bad in a way that most people ‘kinda know’ pro wrestling to be bad behind the scenes: people trying to sleep with the women, expecting people to work hurt, horrible concussion management, etcetera.

"as the majority shareholder"

nobody can force him to do anything, theres no sale unless he wants to sell, and i think his controlling interest of "A" (voting) shares means he can select the board

hes not deciding pushes or contracts (but might be doing that too thru Stephanie and HHH), but the WWE is still very much HIS company

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

>"as the majority shareholder"
>
>nobody can force him to do anything, theres no sale unless he
>wants to sell, and i think his controlling interest of "A"
>(voting) shares means he can select the board
>
>hes not deciding pushes or contracts (but might be doing that
>too thru Stephanie and HHH), but the WWE is still very much
>HIS company
>

Yep. It is very early for the ding dong the Vince is dead talk. All that you laid out plus my general 'gut' tells me Vince won't be totally gone until he truly wants to be or he has to be because of death/failing health. And shit, at 77, we might be better off if most folks were tipping out of corporate/power positions. Hopefully some of Murrica's older political folks take a hint here, but actually get out and stay mostly out. Our last election had no biz being those two people running for POTUS with a straight face.

Some more stuff will come out on Vince. We know this..especially if he messes around and dies. Negativity will fly around cuz that's what it does and there's too much money in it apparently. On that, pods and blogs will put a lot 'work' in guessing what it'll all mean. And of course, making up narratives about 'what it all meant'. People who have ever watched wrestling will be painted a certain way. People who still watch it now will be accused lazily and randomly. And a bunch more words will get wasted on all of it. Dude did some bad shit. His number finally got called. Bruno, Andre, Hogan, Austin, Rock, Roman, and a bunch of other rasslers gave a slew of people some good times and Vince was at the helm of a shitload of it. Whatever that means...I don't know.

Meanwhile, I'm about to finish watching MITB 2011 (Punk/Cena in Chicago with Punk's contract expiring + 2 very weird in retrospect MITB matches). Then I'm gonna find a Rick Rude vs Steamboat match from WCW era cuz I assume it'll be good time and I've had a reminder set to do it for quite a while. I don't even remember what made me think 'oh yeah, I need to see that again'. But hey..my phone reminds me when I tell it to!

WWE bookmakers “discovered” the Vince spent $14.6 million of the company’s money and didn’t report it. He’s certainly not publicly coming back after that.

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