The Unbearable XFL: Vince McMahon Screws Up

Vince McMahon is sometimes described as a "promotional genius"?rather often, as a matter of fact, due to his wild success in blowing up the WWF into a transnational television and merchandising mega-force. But how much "genius" did it really take? When you're marketing almost exclusively to adolescent males, fabulous babes with big knockers are always a good idea. I could have told you that. Muscle-bound lugs cussing and kicking the crap out of each other usually works, too.

When he announced a year ago that he was starting the XFL, McMahon pledged to stick with the formula: "smashmouth" football and cheerleaders just this side of porn-star slutty. I wanted to see this, live. For real. Plunking down 20 bucks?McMahon also promised cheap tickets, and on that he delivered?I entered the dank, medieval and rather depressing Los Angeles Coliseum on Saturday, Feb. 10, just one of nearly 36,000 people (albeit, it seemed, the only one without a Raiders cap) enduring an unusually inclement Southern California evening.

The L.A. debut of the XFL was promoted, heavily, as the "return of professional football to Los Angeles." Not counting the zany, indoor Arena Football League, there hadn't been a pro game in L.A. since 1994. More important, this game?pitting the hometown Xtreme against the visiting Chicago Enforcers?would be the second prime-time telecast on NBC. The premiere week's broadcast had drawn a startling 10.3 overnight rating. Anticipation ran high.

I didn't need to assemble a focus group to see that the XFL was drawing McMahon's type of fan. A few minutes after the opening kickoff the chant began. It became the most spirited chant of the night. In fact, it was the only chant of the night. "Show your TITS! Show your TITS!"

The chant, initially, was directed at the L.A. Xtreme cheerleading squad. However, the cheerleaders' advertised smut-appeal never materialized. XFL cheerleaders turned out to be no sexier and only a little bit raunchier than NFL cheerleaders. They showed an inch or so more cleavage and occasionally mixed a squat-thrust into their semi-coherent choreography, but that was all. They certainly were not about to, you know, show their tits.

The crowd got tired of them. Quickly, the chant was redirected toward a few female team employees who hustled along the sidelines in black t-shirts, credentials flopping around their necks. I don't know what their jobs were, but they could obviously be accomplished without revealing cleavage, much less showing the whole shebang. Undeterred, hundreds of young men then chanted at any female fan drunk enough to stand up and face the cheap seats.

Sometime during the second quarter, people started to throw stuff. First it was paper airplanes and peanut shells, then beer cups and toilet paper. A bottle or two may have flown. Whatever they threw, there was a lot of stuff thrown.

Those things, and worse, happen at NFL games, but at this XFL game it was because the fans were bored. The reality of "reality" is that it is not very exciting, compared to the televised version of "reality." This is what will likely be McMahon's downfall: being at an XFL game is dull. So dull. Just, really, stupefyingly, oppressively dull.

What a letdown. I wanted to like the XFL. I wanted badly to become a passionate fan of the XFL, if only because the crusty old wags of the sports media hate it with a passion that borders on delusional. Dave Kindred of The Sporting News called the XFL "the trashiest creation in legitimate sports history." Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times described it as "a farcical disgrace to civilized culture." In The New York Times, Caryn James deemed McMahon's creation "a blight that has crept from the low-rent fringes of cable." Leonard Shapiro in The Washington Post described it as "the dark side of gratuitous violence, tawdry titillation and lousy football." (Does gratuitous violence have a bright side?)

New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick, who hates pretty much everything anyway, came especially unglued. In the span of a week, he devoted no fewer than three full columns (and part of a fourth a few days later) to his hysterical overreaction against the XFL, McMahon and NBC. His columns ran under the headlines, "X-Tremely Distasteful," "Network Without Shame" and "A Bad Dream Beyond Belief." For the latter column, Mushnick did some enterprise reporting. He phoned a retirement home in Savannah, GA. There, he spoke with Chet Simmons, long-ago president of NBC Sports and commissioner of the short-lived USFL. Maybe next, Mushnick will ring up Bob Hope to solicit his review of Jackass. Predictably, the elderly Simmons denounced the XFL as "shameful" and "depressing." He expressed despair over the fact that NBC's cameras showed "young men in the stands with a beer in each hand."

If such endorsements from the likes of our finest sporting scribes are not enough to drive one into the arms of Vince McMahon, I don't know what is.

So what went wrong?

McMahon spent the pre-debut year "positioning" (as they say in the promotional-genius business) the XFL as a fan's league. Players would collect mid-five-figure salaries that the average guy could relate to. On tv, players would wear mics so we'd hear them discussing strategy, grunting and hollering, "Yeah, baby! That's what I'm talking about!" Cameramen would stand right on the field and enter the locker rooms before the game and at halftime. Nothing would be hidden. There would be no mystique. The XFL would be real, "in your face."

When McMahon created the XFL in February of last year, the original cast members of Survivor hadn't yet touched down on their South China Seas island. But by the time the league premiered on Feb. 3 this year, XFL Football was labeled a "reality" show, not unlike Survivor itself. That was new territory for McMahon, whose wrestling programs, with their "works" and "angles" and "predetermined outcomes," are unintentional parodies of reality television. He knows nothing about how to turn real life into "reality."

The XFL's on-field "product" is not enough to hold the live crowd's interest. For $45,000 contracts (the XFL's across-the-board standard) you get $45,000 football players. In L.A. they tried an angle with Scott Milanovich, the backup Xtreme quarterback, hiring a helicopter to wait at the stadium and whisk him to the hospital the moment his overdue, pregnant wife went into labor. It never happened. When sideline reporter Fred Roggin asked Milanovich, during the game, if he had anything to say to his wife, the grim-faced quarterback replied, "I think she knows she's in my thoughts, but right now my mind is focused on football." Thank you, Mr. Romance.

At the stadium, you can hear the players' microphones, just like on tv. Great. Through the stadium p.a. I heard a series of clicks that sounded more like a kid fooling around with a tape recorder than the crunching of helmet and bone. I also heard the quarterbacks barking out signals, which taught me that "Red 25 screen! Red 25 screen! Hut! Hut!" is not very interesting to hear more than, say, once.

That leaves, in McMahon's formulation, the cheerleaders. I mean, I'm no Phil Mushnick but I do have enough decency to find the idea of women baring their torsos for the gratification of a crowd the likes of which I saw at the L.A. Coliseum more than a little disturbing. I don't believe the cheerleaders will be exposing themselves anytime soon. The moment a cheerleader goes HBO-style, McMahon's league loses something that he never needs to worry about in the WWF: credibility. Sports needs it to survive. Reality tv does not.

McMahon was unprepared for the gimmick-reliant, phony reality compatible with television; something like improvisational psychodrama with AFTRA-card-less actors starring as their "real" selves and the mundane, day-to-day drivel edited out. There is a reason why Temptation Island has no studio audience.

A decade ago, Spy published a piece titled "Inside Everything" that documented the newly evident desire of Americans to acquire technical expertise on a wide range of subjects that could not possibly concern them. The author argued that the more of this "insider" knowledge we obtain, the less we understand. In 2001, that trend has reached its logical conclusion. We now crave insider knowledge about people and things that do not concern us even when we are certain that the knowledge is false and manipulated. We want to get as close as possible to reality without having the slightest idea of what's really going on.

Sports events, on the other hand, must be real, live and spontaneous to come across well on television. And the more real they are, the worse they hold up as "reality" programming. McMahon does not appear to have figured this out. He has spent too much time in a universe where reality and tv are the same damn thing. He wants to take us all there, but perhaps it is a hopeful sign that we're not ready to go. Not all the way, just yet.