Most industries lie to you, but professional wrestling is unique in that it knows you know it’s lying… and still tries to trick you anyways, leading to a dynamic where fans try to guess what will happen, only to be surprised anyways. That is the fancy explanation, at least; mostly it’s fun because people get hit with chairs. But this is crucial to understanding the return of the Xtreme Football League, aka the XFL, which was announced on Thursday after weeks of speculation.
If you don’t remember the XFL, consider yourself lucky. Back in 2001, the World Wrestling Federation (now known as the WWE) and NBC teamed up to produce a single season of this alternative league billed as a return to the violence and speed of vintage football, before the rules and the liberals took out all the fun. Players would hit harder; cheerleaders would shake faster. The Rock showed up, in character. Jerseys bore the nicknames of the players, like “Dirty Durden” and “He Hate Me.” Everything was bigger, dumber, and completely unwatchable. It lasted one year, and lost an estimated $70 million.
A few years ago, if you were to estimate the number of people seriously hankering for XFL redux, I’d generously put it somewhere between nine and nineteen people in the world. Still, time has been strangely kind to the XFL, which was the subject of a fascinating ESPN documentary that played it up as a ridiculous spectacle, whose merits did not depend on the negative value of the on-field product, but the fact that it was all so much, and unlikely to be replicated again. In 2001, the WWE was doing some of its best ever business, spearheaded by stars like the Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin, the defining wrestlers of their era. That it would jeopardize this success by diverting attention to off-brand football was financially irresponsible, but aesthetically marvelous… at least in hindsight.
The new XFL, which will supposedly launch in 2020 (just in time for Trump to join as commissioner!), will bear little resemblance to the old XFL. The cities haven’t been decided. The viewing options haven’t been announced. There will be no sexy cheerleaders; there will be no players with criminal records; there will absolutely be no politics, which McMahon was insistent about during a conference call with reporters. Like the genius wrestling promoter he is, a man who has staked his way to a billion-dollar fortune by lying happily and with aplomb, McMahon danced around the attendant questions about stripping the politics out of the human experience. Would Colin Kaepernick be welcome? Sure, if he could abide by the rules. Would kneeling for the anthem be explicitly banned? Yes, he finally admitted. “People don’t want social and political issues coming into play when they are trying to be entertained,” McMahon said. “We want someone who wants to take a knee to do their version of that on their personal time.”
And had he talked to Donald Trump, the president who oafishly blasts the NFL as a league of ingrates, about this? You know, considering that his wife Linda works in the administration, and that Trump himself participated in several WWE storylines over the years? No, he insisted.
Do I think McMahon is telling the truth about this? No, of course not, and it’s very easy to imagine the tangled web of conspiracies behind the XFL’s revival. Trump hates the NFL, because the black players are rude to him, so he offers insane tax breaks to get McMahon’s business off the ground; Trump passes notes like “maybe cheerleaders though???” to Linda who passes them to Vince; somehow, the National Endowment for the Arts ends up funding this, because Bad, Not Even Horny Anymore Football is the only acceptable art form under this administration. All of this seems possible in the current society, in which the dumbest thing possible is always on the table.
That said, I’m more interested in the egotistical motivations behind McMahon, who is 72 years old, investing $100 million of his own money into this venture that could very, very easily be a bust. McMahon, by trusted accounts, is not even really a big football fan. But even if the XFL’s reputation has been massaged over time, the fact remains that it was still an initial failure — and when image is everything, when the business you work in relies on the lies you can tell you make yourself seem bigger than you are, the chance to rehabilitate one of the black marks of his entrepreneurial portfolio must seem very, very appealing. (McMahon also once launched a dismally unpopular bodybuilding federation, back in the ‘90s, but even he wouldn’t be brash enough to make a second go of that.) If it succeeds, he will look like a genius. If it fails, who cares? He’s still rich, anyways. In a world where the most shameless people alive are always getting ahead, there’s no reason not to try. Those of us at home may protest, and make fun, and reference alternative values like “humility” and “not being an idiot,” but we’ll still be watching.
