LaurenHicks

“Are you ready?” Triple H, or Paul Levesque, current Chief Content Officer of the WWE, asked the thunderous crowd as he took the helm of the company. As Levesque would implement his ideas, he would begin to change the wrestling world, effecting it and setting new precedents like the many who came before him.

World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) was founded in 1953 but gained popularity in the ‘80s after Vincent McMahon Jr. bought the company from his father and expanded it nationally. At the time, major stars in the company included Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant and the “Macho Man” Randy Savage.

Freshman Avani Amarawardana started to watch the sport with her dad. “He always puts it on when he is working,” Amarawardana said.

WWE had no real competition until World Championship Wrestling (WCW) was started in 1988. WWE has a weekly show called “Monday Night Raw” and Eric Bischoff, President of WCW, launched a new show on the same day titled “Monday Nitro.” Every week for nearly five years, the two would compete for viewers and ratings, sparking what was known as the Monday Night Wars.

WCW created a star group called the New World Order (NWO), which included all former WWE stars Scott Hall, Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan. WCW won in ratings for 83 weeks because of the NWO. 

However, WCW made a fatal mistake when they revealed that Mick Foley was going to win the WWE championship. The episode of Monday Night Raw had been pretaped that week and the outcomes had been revealed by sneaky reporters. The WCW commentators told their listeners that there was no need to switch to WWE that week because Mick Foley was going to be defeating the Rock. This comment made more than 600,000 viewers switch to watch Foley win.

McMahon won the war in 2001 when he purchased WCW and acquired many of their talent.

A new, edgier alternative to the WWE also emerged in the ‘90s, called Elite Championship Wrestling (ECW). Every week, they would pull crazy stunts, putting the wrestlers’ bodies on the line. An infamous spot occurred in 1995 when Mick Foley accidently set two other wrestlers on fire with a flame thrower. 

“My favorite wrestling moment is whenever someone gets hit with a chair,” Amarawardana said.

ECW quickly grew a cult following with a rowdy crowd attending each of their shows, not afraid to share their opinions on what was going on in the ring. Legendary wrestlers that emerged from ECW included Rob Van Dam, the Dudley Boys and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. McMahon and Bischoff both saw ECW as a threat. Bischoff, famously, once paid the ECW champion at the time, Mike Awesome, $1,000,000 to leave the company and join WCW instead.

In 2001, McMahon succeeded in purchasing the company, ending its decade-long run. 

“I have not seen any ECW matches yet, but I’m interested,” junior Amelia Spieker said. Spieker has been watching wrestling since she was 7, mostly from exposure at daycare.

Since the streaming age, more wrestling fans have been able to go back and watch old ECW pay-per-views, witnessing the brutality that was pretty much unheard of at the time.

From the fall of ECW to the late 2010s, WWE had nearly no competition when it came to “sports entertainment,” as McMahon would put it. During this time is when stars like John Cena began to emerge. The product began to take a turn to become more family-friendly, with Cena being the face of this new PG era. Cena received a lot of heat from the older members of the “WWE Universe” for this. 

In 2022, after five decades in the business, McMahon stepped down from his role as Chairman and CEO of the company. His daughter and son-in-law, Stephanie McMahon and Paul Levesque, better known as Triple H, each took on the roles of CEO and Chief Content Officer respectively. In 2023, the WWE was taken over by TKO Group Holdings, who also owned Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), forever changing the landscape of the company.

“I feel like it’s become more flashy,” Amarawardana said.

The production of WWE has always been very secretive. Nobody really knew how the matches were planned and how the storylines were made. In a new show called “WWE: Unreal,” clips from WWE Creative’s meetings were released for the first time, allowing viewers to get a glance at the behind the scenes.

Pro wrestling has been around for nearly 200 years and has seen many changes. As social media continues to grow, one can only imagine the effect that it will have on the industry. 

“I really think social media will affect it. It affects the marketing and how people see it,”  Amarawardana said.