Well, Vince McMahon has officially announced that he’s sinking more than $100 million of his personal fortune into reviving the XFL in 2020, and wasn’t that just what all the football fans in the world were waiting to hear?
No? Well, too bad.
If there’s one thing that Vince enjoys, it’s proving the critics wrong: especially when it comes to promoting and innovating outside of pro wrestling. If he ever finds something outside of wrestling that he’s good at, I’m sure he’ll let us know about it.
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Of course, McMahon is easily one of the greatest promoters of wrestling in history, no one is denying that. However, the phrase “stay in your own lane” has never been more appropriate than with McMahon and his dreams of being an entertainment mogul like Ted Turner, and his flirtation with the world of bodybuilding is the best example to show you why.
Back in 1990, for reasons that escape anyone around at the time, McMahon decided that he wanted to branch out from the successful PPV business that the WWF was doing into something totally different. He still wanted to do PPV, but for whatever reason thought that the world was dying to see professional bodybuilding on TV. Now, there were many reasons why this was a dumb idea — chiefly because no one wanted to actually watch bodybuilding shows on TV — but Vince had a vision of taking the stodgy world of pro bodybuilding and infusing it with characters and skits, like one would infuse tea with fruit flavors. In this case it was tea that no one wanted to drink, infused with rotten fruits.
It was initially only created as a bodybuilding magazine, called “Bodybuilding Lifestyles” which Vince swore was not to compete with the existing “Weider Mags” on the newsstands at that point. He was, of course, lying and began making big-money offers to existing talent from the Weider organization, with promises of a new show about bodybuilding on the USA Network called “Body Stars” and huge PPV numbers.
Really though, the whole thing came across as Vince living out his personal fantasy of hanging out with oiled-up muscle men and it was more than a little bit creepy and off-putting. Even by McMahon standards.
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However, while Vince was more than capable of putting two-bit wrestling promoters out of business during the WWF’s expansion in the '80s, he was completely over his head with bodybuilding promoters. The Weiders had been running the business for decades, and essentially promised to blackball any of their talent that was dumb enough to jump to Vince’s upstart promotion. This essentially crushed the WBF from the start, although McMahon was still able to secure a few notable names in the industry to be his top stars, such as Gary Strydom.
That being said, the whole thing was a money-losing disaster from Day 1, leading up to the first ever WBF Bodystars PPV in 1991, which had advance buys trending so low that the majority of cable companies didn’t even bother to carry it. Despite some notably mixed reviews, McMahon went ahead with a second one in 1992, but by this point was essentially turning the product into pro wrestling.
In the biggest move in that direction, he had signed Lex Luger away from WCW and was using him in the WBF to avoid getting sued for violating the non-compete clause.
He was also actively trying to strike a deal with Lou Ferrigno to be the featured star of the promotion moving forward. However, the Ferrigno deal fell apart, and even worse, the WWF was suddenly under the microscope for steroid distribution among top names like Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage. While he very loudly proclaimed that the WWF had the best drug testing in the sports world to any sucker who would listen, he made no such claims about the WBF.
Before anyone could ask too many uncomfortable questions, Vince quietly pulled the plug on the WBF in 1993.
But wait, there’s more! In a last ditch attempt to monetize the poor bodybuilders he had left under contract, he tried the most common scam in the bodybuilding world to recoup some money: supplement sales. In this case, his failed bodybuilding stars became pitchmen for a snake-oil product called ICOPRO, which was a vaguely defined vitamin and protein supplement system that was supposed to make you look like Lex Luger if you took it. Clearly, it didn’t work, judging by how many times Rick Rude called the audience a bunch of fat, out-of-shape losers over the course of his WWF career.
In the end, McMahon learned nothing and of course ventured into the “legit” sports world again with the XFL, but given his own love of bodybuilding, maybe Triple H will take another shot at the WBF once the XFL dies a miserable death again. We can only hope.
