Sex, Lies, and Headlocks by Shaun Assael Read Free Book Online

how to break even. “I don’t think he made any money, but he didn’t stick anybody with any bills,” says Fruean. “I held the mortgage, and there were never any questions.”
    BY 1983 , when Vincent was sixty-seven, he began to talk about finally cashing out. He had moved to Fort Lauderdale several years earlier and enjoyed a peaceful life there. He and Juanita hosted well-attended parties and had full calendars, and though he only had to travel a few times a month for business—to the Garden once a month for a show and to Allentown every three weeks to supervise the taping of All-Star Wrestling —it was still growing tiresome. He called his son and asked Vinnie whether he wanted to make an offer.
    In Cape Cod, Vinnie had assembled a kitchen cabinet, waiting for a moment like this to arrive. It included Linda, his closest confidant and adviser; a former New York Rangers right wing named Jim Troy, whom Vinnie had hired as the general manager of his minor-league team, the Cape Cod Buccaneers; and Joe Perkins, his father’s syndication salesman. In the spring of 1983, Vinnie flew into Manhattan from the Cape with Troy in tow, carrying two huge briefcases full of contracts.
    It was a cool and sunny New York morning, and as they walked into a suite at the Warwick Hotel they found Vincent and three other men. Vinnie’s father was the public face of the WWF, but he didn’t actually own it all alone. He gave pieces to three other men whose help he needed. They were Phil Zacko, his longtime treasurer and friend, and two of his star wrestlers: Gino Marella, a four-hundred-pound high school teacher who turned himself into Gorilla Monsoon, and Arnold Skaaland, known since his heyday in the 1950s as the Golden Boy.
    After all the men got comfortable, Vinnie laid the contracts on the coffee table. As he started explaining the terms, he knew the offer was held together with rubber bands. His financing was a mix of loans he’d received from friendly New England banks (using his equity in the coliseum as collateral) and the cash flow he expected to produce with the WWF. Marella and Skaaland, he said, would get one and a half times the average wrestler’s pay for every show he staged. (In other words, they’d receive $750 if the average wrestler was making $500.) Since the WWF was putting on three hundred shows a year, it was a considerable promise. Zacko would get regular monthly payments over two years, as would his father. There have been differing accounts of how much he offered his dad that afternoon—from $350,000 to as much as a $1 million. But Vincent thought it was a high-enough figure that he skeptically asked that a provision be inserted allowing him to nullify the sale if Vinnie missed a single one of the monthly payments. Vinnie agreed.
    After all the documents were signed, Vinnie and Troy went down to the Warwick’s bar and each ordered a Dewar’s, neat. By nightfall, Troy recalled, “we were two of the drunkest men in New York.”
    NO ONE in the World Wrestling Federation’s troupe of sixty wrestlers realized what Vinnie was up to when he suddenly decided to change champions in December 1983. Promoters have to be part casting agent, part scriptwriter, and part enforcer, deciding not merely who wins each match, but the manner of the win and the way it lays the foundation for the next match. The story arc is the bloodstream of the promotion, a current that leaves some talents mired at the bottom of the card and others carried to the top. Mixing and matching wrestlers is an art form in itself, since it has to factor in elements like personal chemistry, style, and fan appeal. Now that he’d taken over the company from his ailing father, he was ready to place his own stamp on it—and the first order of business was getting rid of its champion, Bob Backlund.
    Vinnie had to admit that Backlund had served his purpose. Until his dad brought the native Minnesotan to New York years earlier, its wrestling scene was