The Mirror of America

WWE as Chocolate Garlic

Dear Republic,

Physicality Week continues with this whirlwind tour of WWE history, from the doubly-pseudonymous Klaus Zynski.

-ROL

THE MIRROR OF AMERICA

According to legend, while traveling to America to take his new theories of psychoanalysis on tour, Sigmund Freud found himself nervous about navigating the transition from European audiences to American ones. The way he saw it, the logic which governed people in Europe was of a totally distinct species than that native to America.

He’s supposed to have expressed the distinction like this: many Europeans like chocolate, many like garlic, therefore a significant number of them like both garlic and chocolate. The European mind accepts this, and moves on. The American hears about the separate popularity of garlic and chocolate and then tries to pitch you on chocolate-dipped garlic.

Freud needn’t have worried. If anything, his exposure to the American market would win him new levels of renown. However, he hit on something elemental about the American character. America’s genius is combination and conglomeration. It is the ability to marshal resources in service of something that appears frivolous at best and then generates attention, adoration, and money without end. Our position as the spoiled baby brother of the colonial powers of Europe gives us the unique privilege of a culture which always asks “why not?” rather than “why?” This American mania for amalgamation, for testing the accepted bounds of good taste, good culture, and good ideas generally, has powered the national ascent towards a zenith of cultural dominance over the globe.

In the realm of chocolate dipped garlic, of amalgamation, there can be no greater American success than professional wrestling. Pro wrestling is everything. It’s a morality play, it’s calisthenics, aerobics, powerlifting, bodybuilding, gymnastics, it’s a pulp revenge potboiler, it’s stand up comedy, it’s horror, fantasy, and sci-fi, it’s trashy reality TV and state of the art production wizardry, it’s the circus, it’s drag, it’s the Super Bowl, it’s slapstick comedy, it’s a musical. It is the chocolate-dipped garlic spawned from the overstimulated American id, governed by nothing but imagination, production budgets, the egos of men in spandex, and, of course, the Federal Communications Commission. We’ve planted that chocolate-dipped clove of garlic and grown it by the hectare, and the world can’t get enough of it.

In 2026, pro-wrestling has conquered much of the world under the corporate aegis of World Wrestling Entertainment, now further invigorated by the resources of their new and ambitious TKO Group parent company. WWE is a global phenomenon. In many ways the modern history of pro-wrestling mirrors the civic history of America itself, as corporate consolidation, national and then global telecommunications, and the death of regional character, culture, and community drive us all into the pacifying embrace of America, Inc.

The Assassination of the NWA by the Coward Vince McMahon

WWE operated as a monopoly in the US from the death of the Turner-backed World Championship Wrestling in 2001 until All Elite Wrestling emerged as a nationally touring competitor in 2019. It’s hard to overstate what a total reversal this is from the business as it existed before the 1980s wrestling boom brought the then-WWF into the living rooms of America. We must remember how recent an invention much of the television broadcast infrastructure we take for granted actually is. It wasn’t until the 1980s that television gained the bandwidth to become the nationally cohesive product we know now. Before digital broadcasting, before satellites, before cable, television was a regionalized product. So was pro-wrestling.

Starting from the 1950s, television found a dependable way to promote the nascent network system and attract viewership via live events. World title wrestling matches live from New York’s Madison Square Garden proved to be a consistent ratings draw. The primacy of MSG would shape the geography of American wrestling for years to come. While regional promotions and promoters would assemble prosperous fiefdoms or “territories” in all parts of the country, the American wrestling business found a center of gravity in Vince McMahon Sr. and his World-Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF), which promoted shows at the Garden as well as in upstate New York, Long Island, New Jersey, Philadelphia, other parts of Pennsylvania, and New England. The Garden and its revenues made Vince Sr. wealthier than much of his competition and allowed him the pick of the day’s highest-drawing stars, but exporting the WWWF brand outside of his territory would have been unthinkable.

In these days, promoters conducted business under the informal cartel of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), less a traditional sports licensing authority and more akin to a fusion between a mafia council of bosses and the editorial board of Marvel comics. The NWA was the shared universe which knit the disparate territories together, endorsing world champions co-signed by all NWA members and allowing promoters to trade talent, settle disputes, and freeze out prospective competition. Still, territories could crown and promote their own champions, and generally mold a product suited to whatever region they happened to do business in. While the WWWF was the richest and most powerful territory, thriving promotions under the NWA banner could be found in virtually every state of the union, plus Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Japan. The important thing to remember is that these territories were, in a sense, small businesses. A more rigid commitment to protecting the inner working of the business led to a more insular culture. Cash was king and a handshake meant more than any contract.

It was this American fetish for plain dealing, the look-me-in-the-eye-and-spit-on-my-lawn no lawyers required conception of the market that left the territories fatally exposed to a new sort of capitalist coming into vogue as the 1980s dawned. As any wrestling fan could have told you long before he became an alleged sex criminal, Vincent Kennedy McMahon Junior is a massive freak whose business sense expands and contracts at random, but compared to the old school carnies of the territories era, he may as well have been Gordon Gecko. While learning the business under his father and working production on Madison Square Garden shows, Vince Jr. became acquainted with Dick Ebersol, the TV production guru most famous for masterminding Saturday Night Live for NBC. Ebersol wanted a prime time program to preempt SNL, and thought a live wrestling show could be just the thing. Ebersol and McMahon saw eye to eye about the potential for a truly made for TV product. For Vince Sr’s generation of promoters and performers, wrestling was a live gate revenue business. The only reason to tolerate the headaches associated with television was to drive ticket sales at live events. Vince Jr. was media savvy and ambitious enough to see the potential in recalibrating the business model. After buying his father out, he did exactly that.

With NBC’s promotional and production resources behind him, the rebranded WWF began offering handsome guaranteed contracts to the top stars of the territories, growing into a national brand and launching a commercial revolution. All the while, the territories died quietly in the background. Many of them were acquired by Jim Crockett promotions, who managed to build out a temporary bulwark against the WWF. JCP would later be acquired by Ted Turner and rebranded as WCW, which would later be acquired by WWF in 2001 after a half decade of bitter television ratings competition between the two brands.

There’s something so essentially American and so profoundly depressing about the ultimate fate of the territories. These folk institutions which once shaped lives in communities so often ignored by corporate media now find their history owned by the sort of depersonalized globe-dominating corporate entity which has replaced any semblance of local flavor or distinct identity in these communities. Ways of life reduced to copyrighted lettermark logos and tape libraries assessed dollar valuations. When Ric Flair opened the last WCW Monday Nitro waxing poetic about the Jim Crockett Promotions days, he wasn’t eulogizing WCW the company, but the tradition it embodied. The Nature Boy was a star everywhere he performed, from Madison Square Garden to North Korea, but that reputation was built on the road, in little towns and provincial cities throughout the parts of America forgotten by our modern New York/Chicago/Los Angeles/San Francisco/DC Axis of Media. How many modern entertainers of note, in any genre or art form, can afford to treat a place like Greensboro, North Carolina with the same importance as any of the cities I just named?

Now, we have to be careful not to romanticize the injustices of vintage capitalism while comparing it to modern capitalism. The territories era allowed promoters to hoard power, depress wrestler pay, quash opportunities for racial minorities and women, and blackball those unwilling to tow the company line. But it made wrestling a sustainable and eclectic regional business. The WWF’s corporatization should be understood as a shift in priority from sustainability towards exponential growth, a shift we’ve seen hit much of the non-sports-entertainment economy over the past few decades. That shift can take you odd places. Money, after all, never sleeps.

SaudiMania

In 2027, WWE will present WrestleMania 43 in Saudi Arabia as part of the Riyadh Season series of live events. This will be the first of the company’s marquee annual supercards held outside of the United States and will mark a new high water mark in the profitable partnership between WWE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It will, perhaps, be a sign of the times. In an era where so many Americans of note seem to be stripping the copper wiring out of the nation’s walls and selling it for personal gain, why should this be any different? It’s fitting, really, because WrestleMania has never really been about the wrestling. It’s about celebrity, cross-promotion, branding. What has the recent global charm offensive from the oil-rich states of the Arabian Peninsula been if not a masterclass in brand development? What is this if not the ultimate victory of the free market? American capital freed from anything even resembling the American public and empowered to seek the highest possible price for its services, none of that pesky sentimentality to get in the way. It’s easy to be a free market absolutist until the market starts picking someone else over you.

The “someones else” being picked don’t go out of their way to be sympathetic. Saudi crowds have been notably hostile to women performers. Children of the wrestling boom of the 90s, an era when women wrestlers were an afterthought milked for Jerry Springeresque catfights and lurid titillation may be surprised by how central women have become to any modern wrestling brand. A concerted effort by WWE to scout and develop talent over the past decade has been rewarded with a golden generation of performers renowned more for their in-ring product than their Playboy photoshoots. Their success paved the way for women like Australian-born Rhea Ripley, whose status as a genuine top five star in the business would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. Are WWE going to exclude some of their biggest stars to appease their gracious hosts or make them bear the jeers of a misogynistic crowd?

Even beyond the specifics of 2027’s imminent SaudiMania, Mania crowds have been something of a punchline for a while now. In an odd kind of ouroboros effect, wrestling has once again become a live gate revenue business. The exorbitant fees WWE and AEW can charge for their biggest shows exclude large portions of their fanbases outright, privileging a kind of stateless nouveau-riche class of live events hyperconsumer. This sort of person can be consistently observed in the wild by any concertgoer or sports fan of more modest means. Ever gone to a concert and observed the people with the most expensive ticket filming the show more than enjoying the music? Ever seen a guy with courtside seats at an NBA game spend most of the action on Instagram? The majority of a modern WrestleMania crowd is those people. I feel sympathy for the lifelong fans maxxing the credit cards for a once in a lifetime trip, and scorn and disgust at the greed of the live events business writ large. Whether it takes place in New York, San Francisco, Miami, or anywhere else, WrestleMania remains a reflection of the state of America, and its modern appearance betrays a disease of the spirit.

"Klaus Zynski" is an unexpectedly successful branding exercise carried out by the already-pseudonymous J.W. Yablonsky. He essays regularly on his Substack, Genius of Loathe, and has published short fiction in Apocalypse Confidential, Muleskinner Journal, and Orpheus. He is an editor and contributor for the literary magazine Kindness Report. J.W. lives in Washington, D.C. with his fiancée and a large, needy cat.