Below is the beginning of my biography of Vince McMahon, "Ringmaster":

OVERTURE: "SHOOT"

We begin at the end of the world.

It’s April 14, 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has killed roughly thirty thousand Americans. The unpredictable US president has done nothing of substance to contain the virus and is, per usual, issuing bizarre and contradictory statements via Twitter. The ruling Republican Party is working overtime to attack the idea that public health should even be a function of government. People are cowering in their homes, terrified and angry, eager for distraction, guidance, or both. Only essential businesses are open. All sports seasons have been canceled. All filming of movies and shows has been called off. All of which means the nation is facing an unprecedented, world-historical threat: there’s nothing good on TV.

“People have been starved for content,” says Florida’s arch-Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, at a news conference that day. “I mean, if you think about it, we’ve never had a period like this in modern American history, where you’ve had such little new content, particularly in the sporting realm. I mean, people are watching—y’know, we’re watching, like, reruns from the early 2000s.”

But there is nothing to fear. The governor has a solution: wrestling will save us.

Five days prior, without announcing anything to the public, DeSantis had amended his state’s COVID work restrictions, authorizing in-person work for “employees at a professional sports and media production with a national audience,” if such a company meets certain criteria. As it turns out, there’s only one athletic entity that fits, according to DeSantis’s office: World Wrestling Entertainment, the multibillion-dollar firm that has dominated pro wrestling for decades.

If you only had a passing familiarity with WWE, you might be baffled. How on earth could this spectacle—not quite sports, not quite theater, and not quite palatable for the highbrow snobs of the world—be in the same category as hospitals and groceries? But if you talked to an astute political analyst or any wrestling fan, they’d tell you that it all made perfect sense. This was just Vince McMahon, WWE’s then-CEO, in action.

It helps, for example, to know that Vince’s wife, Linda McMahon, was an influential Republican donor and former cabinet member whose super PAC, America First Action, had just announced it would spend $18.5 million on Republican ads in Florida.

It also didn’t hurt that Vince’s longtime friend Donald Trump was the first—and very possibly not the last—member of the WWE Hall of Fame to occupy the Oval Office.

Whatever the reasoning, the message was simple. No matter how bad things got, no matter how many people perished, no matter how great the threat to the American experiment, the nation could rest assured of one thing: we would be entertained.

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