Vince McMahon’s biography, written by Abraham Josephine Riesman, is one of the book releases I’ve been most excited about this year.
For the first time in history, at a time when everything was turning upside down for WWE’s great Manitou, we would finally get his full story in words.
At least that’s what I expected.
And unfortunately I was disappointed. Not because my expectations were too high. But only because the book is not very good in many ways.
First, you need to know some information about the author in order to better understand the sequel. Born in the mid-1980s, she says she was once a wrestling fan, albeit for only two very brief periods. Very young, around the age of 6, when his hero was Hulk Hogan. Then 1999, during the Attitude era, like a lot of teenagers. But by 2001 it was already over and she never pursued the product again after that.
So much so that throughout the book one gets the impression that the author despises professional wrestling. In the first half of the book, whenever the opportunity arises, she detours to tell the darker side of wrestling and its actors. She even ends one of the chapters by quoting a former journalist who said, “If wrestling is going to be great American history, you’ve got to shoot him in the head!” »
subjectivity and dark sides
When you write a bio, introduce characters. We then need to make a description of this new person in the story.
For Hulk Hogan, one of the things the author chose to say was that Hogan was the only white man to work in the Tampa port before becoming a professional wrestler. Immediately afterwards, in a multiline bracket, she describes the episode of racist remarks Hogan made decades later.
The same goes for the Ultimate Warrior.
She begins her description with the racist and homophobic comments Warrior made at the University of Connecticut in 2005, years after his career as a wrestler.
In either case, these comments, while true, have nothing to do with Vince McMahon.
And that’s another problem with the book.
We wonder on several occasions what the subject of the book is. A biography about McMahon? A book about WWE history? A book about the dark side of wrestling?
Because there’s a difference between Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka’s alleged murder of Nancy Argentino, the early 1990’s sex scandal and the steroid scandal, all stories Vince McMahon is intimately involved in or away, and evoke a dark side of a wrestler, which has nothing to do with him. As if she wanted to demonstrate that McMahon was dealing with the wrong people in his life.
Another example.
She describes WrestleMania V as a show of sexist wrestling rather than a culmination of one of the best story arcs in company history, featuring the rivalry between Hogan and “Macho Man” Randy Savage. Sexist because the world champion didn’t wrestle — she sang America the Beautiful — because there weren’t any women’s wrestling matches, because the whole thing took place in an amphitheater owned by Donald Trump, and because the only woman had a role on the show, Miss Elizabeth, had been placed in a scenario where she had to choose between two men and was sent to the shower by the referee after helping both of them.
Do you understand what i am trying to say?
Sometimes the contempt is more subtle. It’s a choice of words, an end of a paragraph that informs the madman of what the author is proposing to us. Many things remain unsaid.
Riesman doesn’t understand or know the world of wrestling and it shows throughout the read. She takes Hulk Hogan’s words from his two books too literally. Hogan has been known to invent a certain reality over the years.
It also leaves plenty of room for Lee Cole, Tom’s brother, a former arena builder who sued the WWF, accusing some of its employees of sexually assaulting them. The whole thing caused quite a stir in the early 1990s, and I blame the author for her lack of objectivity in the file. Everything Lee Cole says is mostly factually written, although she never once quotes the memoirs of Pat Patterson or Bertrand Hébert, who were just being interviewed for this biography.
However, when Mel Phillips and Terry Garvin, the other two employees singled out, never returned to the company, Patterson, in this case innocent, returned after an independent investigation, an investigation never mentioned in the book.
She doesn’t speak at all of the creative team that Pat Patterson and Vince McMahon have formed for years. From a script perspective, McMahon learned a lot from the Québécois, while the opposite is also true from a business perspective.
I have always believed that subjectivity has no place in a biography and I denounce that here.
McMahon’s childhood: very interesting
So I’m going to be objective here myself. Not everything is bad.
The first few chapters, dedicated to McMahon’s childhood and adolescence, are really interesting. The author really did her homework and interviewed several people who knew Vince when he was younger and knew his blended family. So there is a lot of new information that has never been released before.
All we know is that he didn’t know his father, Vincent James McMahon, until he was a teenager. Today, for example, it is known that for a long time he was known as Vinnie Lupton, his stepfather’s surname. Some people who knew him from a younger age only recently learned that Vinnie Lupton was WWE Vince McMahon.
But that’s seriously the only good point of the book. I learned absolutely nothing after that.
Too many literally
The second part of the book is not told in this way. We’re no longer looking for the dark side of new characters like Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, and Steve Austin.
Rather, Riesman does full transcripts of promos or even reports of what McMahon, Jim Ross, or Jerry Lawler might have to say about the comments. We see it in the first part of the book, but it’s even more present in the second.
For example, we have the entire transcript of the interview between Vince and Melanie Pillman on Raw the day after Brian Pillman died. We have all of Bret’s promo from 1996, when he signed his contract with the WWF and that we turned that signing into a script. We have the full promo of the warrior the day before he died on Raw. We actually have several verbatim promos from Warrior. And also the transcription of what we hear on Raw when Mike Tyson and Steve Austin argue.
The whole thing takes up space and tells us absolutely nothing new about Vince.
No details on important issues
Also, this second part is even more disappointing than the first, if that’s even possible. Not only are there the many transcriptions, but the story ends in 1999.
Yes. You read that right. 1999
When the reader finishes the chapter about the year 1999, he finds that the book contains only 20 pages. I was shocked!
In this last chapter, the author talks about all the connections between Vince, Linda McMahon and Donald Trump. Riesman also talks about herself, her sexuality (she identifies as transgender and is becoming a woman), her relationship with wrestling, how she was bullied by admirers of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin before becoming one herself in 1999 Became a follower, all things a biographer should never do, which is become a character in his own book.
She concludes by saying that WWE made a huge impression on how society wants boys to grow up. She adds that all those who were children in the 1980s and 1990s and are now in established positions are all in some way Vince McMahon’s children.
It’s awkward to read.
Conversely, there are no details on the formation of SmackDown, the purchase of WCW, its incorporation into a public company, the name change, and the continuation of the World Wildlife Fund.
Also no details on the rich TV offerings of 2018, the XFL and the storylines of the last 20 years.
Not enough space to finish the story
I read an interview Riesman gave and she explained that the story ended in 1999 because it had a word limit.
Seriously?
That’s probably the worst excuse ever given. The book is being sold as a biography by Vince McMahon. Not his biography until 1999, 24 years ago.
For writing some biographies, the number of words is in proportion to the number of pages. The goal is reasonable printing costs. The role of the author is therefore to tell the story in the number of words provided or reduce the bold.
Cut in the fat
And in this chapter the fat is not missing!
The book contains 91 pages with footnotes and indexes at the very end. I repeat, 91 pages! It makes no sense.
A whole chapter was written on the Higher Power storyline when Vince was revealed to be behind the Undertaker’s evil plans. One of the worst revelations in WWE history, but a scenario that the author claims shaped her, which likely explains her presence.
This chapter includes the beginnings of Shane and Stephanie without going into detail and the death of Owen. It all ends with the full wording of the famous promo: “It was me Austin. It was me all along!” by McMahon.
She spends a lot of time explaining the history of General Adnan and Saddam Hussein to get to the Gulf War story, which the WWF exploited when it could have gotten to the facts much quicker.
She spends nearly an entire chapter transcribing McMahon’s mic segments in Memphis when he first started being a heel before playing Mr. McMahon on Raw. All this to tell us how Jerry Lawler was charged and acquitted of assaulting two teenage girls.
We have five pages on Vince and Bret’s relationship after the screwing job in Montreal and Owen’s death. But Bret is such a presence in the story that at one point we find ourselves wondering if we’re reading Bret Hart’s biography.
There are 10 lines on a “bronco buster,” a maneuver Shane does in one of her fights with Vince, with a very colorful description of Shane’s privates landing near his father’s mouth.
Why, why, why, why, why and why?
If we take away the unnecessary transcriptions, the diatribes that go nowhere and don’t serve the story of Vince McMahon, and the 100+ pages of notes at the end, there would have been room until at least 2022 to complete the story.
Any wrestling writer with less credit would have done a better job: Greg Oliver, Brian Solomon, Tim Hornbaker, Dave Meltzer, or Bertrand Hébert.
And don’t get me wrong.
Vince McMahon’s life and career aren’t perfect. Far from there. But there are plenty of bad things you can talk about without giving an entire industry the black eye. And while she didn’t have access to a single member of the McMahon family biography wasn’t allowed, there’s enough public information out there to not have to do filler like her. .
Conclusion: One of the worst biographies I’ve ever read.