During a recent edition of his “What Happened When” podcast, Tony Schiavone discussed how regional wrestling promoters viewed Vince McMahon and WWE’s national expansion in the 1980s, highlighting the impact of Saturday Night’s Main Event’s debut on NBC.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On Vince McMahon and WWE going mainstream with a more entertainment product: “I don’t think it was a deal of ‘his wrestling against our wrestling, and we’re real wrestling, and he’s not.’ The fact that they had Barry Windham on their team so to speak, and Ricky Steamboat on their team, and Mike Rotunda, to me showed me that they had great wrestlers. And Macho Man, Randy Savage.
“I think what the concern was, and rightfully so — you talked about all the territories. This was the end of the territories. And that’s why in ’83 when I first started, I feel fortunate that I was there when the territories were still running. But I felt they all felt, promoters inside wrestling, that Vince was out to put them out of business. Which he was, and which he did. So they were all right. There’s always been a… everybody is so nervous and so insecure. There’s a big insecurity in wrestling, with wrestlers and with promoters back then. That back then, wrestlers didn’t trust promoters because of payoffs. And then promoters didn’t trust each other because they all felt they were trying to cut in on their business. And Vince cut in on the business big time, didn’t he?”
On WWE’s superior television production: “It goes back to the point where Vince had the best-looking television show. And he went to all these markets that had local wrestling, and he said, ‘This is our product, this is how it looks. And this is their product, and this is how it looks.’ And if you’re a station manager, or the program director, you’re the one that decides, aside from network programming, what goes on your television station, you look at Vince and go, ‘Shoot, we can sell local time with this. This looks better.’ And thus, there they all went.
“So I think the feeling on the inside was, ‘Man, he’s out to put us out of business. Now he’s on a national level,’ right? And I remember — I don’t know when it happened. Probably happened before that, before this. But when I was in Jim Crockett Promotions, I shared an office with Sandy Scott. And Gene Anderson was across the hall from us, and in the corner was Jimmy Crockett, and across from him was Dusty Rhodes in an office, and David [Crockett] had an office. So we’re all kind of back there. When I think about it, wasn’t that cool to have an office back there? So anyway I was with Sandy, and we would do all these local promotions like in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia — the core part of Jim Crockett Promotions. And then Sandy told me, he said, ‘We’re going to start running on a national level.’ He said, ‘We’re going to compete against them. So some of the promos that you’re going to start doing now are for different cities that you’ve never done before.’ And I went, ‘Wow.’ So there was a war going on back in the ’80s, long before the Monday Night Wars in the ’90s. And it was Jim Crockett Promotions and Vince McMahon. I know before he passed away, you talked to Jimmy [Crockett], and they were not equipped to fight the war with Vince McMahon, although they tried and lost.”
