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Authors: Shaun Assael
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nearby to inform their employees. Rogowski’s secretary was crying when she called him in Wisconsin. “Vince bought the company,” she sobbed. “He bought it.”
Rogowski rushed back the next morning, just in time to see Vince walk into the TBS studio with the four-hundred-pound Gorilla Monsoon at his side.
“Get the fuck out of here, Vince,” Rogowski told him.
McMahon was the picture of reconciliation as he held out his hand. “Come work with me, Ole,” he said, using Rogowski’s stage name. “I’ll make you more money than you’ll ever think possible.” Later, Rogowski would wish that for once in his life he’d just shut up.
Instead he replied, “Fuck you … and your wife.”
1. Rogowski had competition as a tough man from his wrestling “brother,” Gene Anderson, the only real Anderson of the group. Once in a match with Wahoo McDaniel, Gene got all of his front teeth knocked back. As Rogowski remembers it, “his mouth was swollen and bleeding all over the place. He asked me how it looked. It was gross. But he refused to stop. He kept on wrestling. He didn’t want to stop anywhere that night, so we went back to the motel and went to bed. The next morning I went to his room to get his ass up and go to the dentist. His mouth was all covered with blood from sleeping that way. He had them all pulled and never said a word.”
FOUR
SINCE HIS EARLY DAYS imitating Howard Cosell under his father’s watchful eyes in Washington, Vinnie had developed an easy manner on television. On one level, his job was simply to feed his wrestlers straight lines and let them react, thereby setting up the plot and foreshadowing the action. But that’s like saying all Johnny Carson had to do was talk. Vinnie had to sell their answers, and he did it better than anyone. The man who’d wanted to be a wrestler since he was twelve had an obvious affection for his muscle-bound performers, and it came through on the screen. He dug trenches in the studio so his six-foot-three frame wouldn’t tower over his shorter entertainers, and he always played the straight man so as never to steal their laughs. Imitating his father’s decorum, he dressed in suits with vests and 1920s-style collars, always keeping an ironed hankie in the breast pocket. With his deep voice, cleft chin, and wide, stocky frame, he almost looked like a comic book character himself—the twenties banker or the vaudeville emcee.
And there was a lot of this Vinnie on television. Every three weeks, the company filmed a day’s worth of wrestling matches at an old agricultural hall at the fairgrounds in Allentown, Pennsylvania, creating three hour-long installments of Championship Wrestling , the flagship show that he sold in syndication. Then the troupe would pack up and drive to a small arena thirty miles away in Hamburg, where more matches were shot, creating a second syndicated show called All-Star Wrestling . For a third show for markets with an insatiable appetite, he’d take scraps from the Allentown and Hamburg sessions, reedit them with new voice-overs, and sell them as Superstars of Wrestling .
His fourth hour of weekly television was All-American Wrestling on USA, and because Nielsen had just begun monitoring cable viewership it became Kay Koplovitz’s first measurable ratings hit, easily outdoing Robert Klein and Don Adams. Knowing a good thing when she saw it, Koplovitz asked Vince if he wanted to fill an hour-long hole in her Tuesday lineup as well. He had no idea what to do with it until he was out to dinner one evening with a director named Nelson Sweglar, who suggested, “Why don’t you do a talk show?”
Tuesday Night Titans (or TNT) Vince’s fifth program, was a radical departure for the WWF and wrestling in general. From a shoestring set with a boxy black-and-white skyline behind the talk show desk, he interviewed a parade of wrestlers as if they all lived in some parallel universe where everyone walked around in colored trunks, Arab
Rogowski rushed back the next morning, just in time to see Vince walk into the TBS studio with the four-hundred-pound Gorilla Monsoon at his side.
“Get the fuck out of here, Vince,” Rogowski told him.
McMahon was the picture of reconciliation as he held out his hand. “Come work with me, Ole,” he said, using Rogowski’s stage name. “I’ll make you more money than you’ll ever think possible.” Later, Rogowski would wish that for once in his life he’d just shut up.
Instead he replied, “Fuck you … and your wife.”
1. Rogowski had competition as a tough man from his wrestling “brother,” Gene Anderson, the only real Anderson of the group. Once in a match with Wahoo McDaniel, Gene got all of his front teeth knocked back. As Rogowski remembers it, “his mouth was swollen and bleeding all over the place. He asked me how it looked. It was gross. But he refused to stop. He kept on wrestling. He didn’t want to stop anywhere that night, so we went back to the motel and went to bed. The next morning I went to his room to get his ass up and go to the dentist. His mouth was all covered with blood from sleeping that way. He had them all pulled and never said a word.”
FOUR
SINCE HIS EARLY DAYS imitating Howard Cosell under his father’s watchful eyes in Washington, Vinnie had developed an easy manner on television. On one level, his job was simply to feed his wrestlers straight lines and let them react, thereby setting up the plot and foreshadowing the action. But that’s like saying all Johnny Carson had to do was talk. Vinnie had to sell their answers, and he did it better than anyone. The man who’d wanted to be a wrestler since he was twelve had an obvious affection for his muscle-bound performers, and it came through on the screen. He dug trenches in the studio so his six-foot-three frame wouldn’t tower over his shorter entertainers, and he always played the straight man so as never to steal their laughs. Imitating his father’s decorum, he dressed in suits with vests and 1920s-style collars, always keeping an ironed hankie in the breast pocket. With his deep voice, cleft chin, and wide, stocky frame, he almost looked like a comic book character himself—the twenties banker or the vaudeville emcee.
And there was a lot of this Vinnie on television. Every three weeks, the company filmed a day’s worth of wrestling matches at an old agricultural hall at the fairgrounds in Allentown, Pennsylvania, creating three hour-long installments of Championship Wrestling , the flagship show that he sold in syndication. Then the troupe would pack up and drive to a small arena thirty miles away in Hamburg, where more matches were shot, creating a second syndicated show called All-Star Wrestling . For a third show for markets with an insatiable appetite, he’d take scraps from the Allentown and Hamburg sessions, reedit them with new voice-overs, and sell them as Superstars of Wrestling .
His fourth hour of weekly television was All-American Wrestling on USA, and because Nielsen had just begun monitoring cable viewership it became Kay Koplovitz’s first measurable ratings hit, easily outdoing Robert Klein and Don Adams. Knowing a good thing when she saw it, Koplovitz asked Vince if he wanted to fill an hour-long hole in her Tuesday lineup as well. He had no idea what to do with it until he was out to dinner one evening with a director named Nelson Sweglar, who suggested, “Why don’t you do a talk show?”
Tuesday Night Titans (or TNT) Vince’s fifth program, was a radical departure for the WWF and wrestling in general. From a shoestring set with a boxy black-and-white skyline behind the talk show desk, he interviewed a parade of wrestlers as if they all lived in some parallel universe where everyone walked around in colored trunks, Arab
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