In an interview with Wrestledelphia, former WWE Magazine writer and editor Brian Solomon spoke about the time he’s spent with the McMahon Family. Here are highlights:
On working under Shane McMahon: “He was a very interesting boss. First of all, in all honesty, he is the nicest of the entire McMahon clan. Unfortunately, in that family, I think that’s kind of like a badge of dishonor. He really was a nice guy. Yeah, he’s a celebrity and celebrities are an unusual bunch. It’s a challenge working for people who are famous. My sister has worked for a lot of magazines run by celebrities. She currently works for Martha Stewart’s magazine, she worked for Rosie O’Donnell, Puff Daddy. We share these war stories of these weird, unrealistic expectations they might have and how they can sometimes be detached from the average person’s everyday life. He could be a fun guy and enjoyed working with us a lot of the time.
But there were times when he could be unreasonable and demanding. He worked us pretty damn hard. You always got the sense that he was getting pressure himself from above and that he was transferring that pressure to us. There were times when we would go nuts mocking up literally 30 or 40 different covers just to get one he would like. There would be times when there was just no pleasing him. For years Barry was our buffer, but unfortunately, he had to deal with it. He and Shane locked horns a lot. They were very different people. Barry was an old newspaper guy. He was sports editor of the New York Daily News. He wanted to be shown the confidence that he could do his job and not be micromanaged by somebody who, quite frankly, did not understand the publishing industry as well as he did. Shane was supposed to be in this position to learn from Barry, and instead it turned out to be this toxic relationship. One time we had a cover where Vince and Hulk Hogan were staring each other down from WrestleMania XIX. Shane was asking us if we could turn their heads around so you could see the other side of their face. And we would have to tell him, Shane, it’s a 2-dimensional image. (laughs) We can’t really turn it around—there is no other side of the face. So those were the kind of requests we would sometimes be pulling our hair out about.”
On interviewing Vince in his limo: “Well, Vince ate a lot of protein bars. He was very candid. We ran out of interview stuff after a while and it was just us talking. I was amazed at how nostalgic he was because you always heard how he’s a very forward-thinking person and doesn’t want to look back and doesn’t really care about the history of the business. But here he was telling me stories about his father, dying his hair to look like Dr. Jerry Graham when he was a teenager and how his dad was pissed off at him. He told me when he was 15 years old and in Comiskey Park for the NWA title match between Pat O’Connor and Buddy Rogers—I never even heard that before. Then he was talking to me about his family and how much he loves Shane and Stephanie and how much trouble Shane gave him and Linda when he was a kid. They sent him off to boarding school and he was like, ‘we smothered them in love, Brian. We smothered him in love,’ and made this motion like he was hugging himself. In that moment, he was really down to earth and that was a great day. There were other times when I saw him act like the character on TV.”
On if the stigma of wrestling fans will ever go away: “I think it’s not as bad as it used to be. There was a time when no publisher would touch a wrestling book because the idea was wrestling fans don’t read. The thing that changed that was Foley’s book, ‘Have A Nice Day.’ And that opened the floodgate to every wrestler under the sun writing a book and all the historical books. None of us would be doing this if it wasn’t for Foley. You have kind of a different fan base now. I mean, there are many fans who perfectly fit the stereotype of wrestling fans, I’m not going to lie. But the fans now are a little bit more kind of with it. There’s a younger fan base, very millennial, snarky, and if you listen to the chants on RAW, a lot of times they’re very clever. It’s very different from old school wrestling fans who were a little more blue-collar, a little less educated, and maybe fit more into the stereotype. Again, that’s still not completely true, because you still have fans like my uncle Pete. I don’t think the stigma will ever completely go away because there are still areas of popular culture where professional wrestling is untouchable. That’s why to this day it’s still so hard for them to sell advertising. RAW could be doing a 20 share every week and a car company will not advertise on that show because they don’t want to be associated with that kind of material. That’s just a fact.”
