He had titillated one writer with this enlightened notion: when an XFL player made a bad play, the field announcers might stalk his cheerleader/girlfriend demanding to know whether she kept him up late the previous night doing the “nasty thing.” Even in a country awash with bad taste, this came across as particularly crass. McMahon was only joking to the reporter, he explained to me. “I winked at him,” Vince insisted. I warned McMahon that I could be obtuse, too, and that I needed a wink to identify the jokes.
During our hour-long conversation, McMahon was outrageous, with nary an eye twitch. He thought it would be neat, he said, to ridicule drunks in the stands by asking them complex, philosophical questions. Critics be damned, he said. “The negative stuff will just create more controversy.” At the end of what, I confess, was an entertaining monologue, I got up to leave. But before I did, I said, “I just want to make sure. I never saw you wink.” As I exited stage right, he hit me with a giant one.
So now I get it. The whole thing was one colossal joke. And taken as a satire on the American culture-a terrific two-hour made-for-TV movie-it might still pass for a brilliant riff. The problem is, Americans take their football damned seriously. And XFL football wasn’t ever serious. Oh, the players tried. But from the first wounded duck that impersonated a forward pass, no fans of the game were fooled. The XFL quarterbacks made Trent Dilfer look like Joe Montana. Everything about the game shrieked “MINOR LEAGUE!”
But then again, what’s a sophisticated football nation supposed to think when we hear Birmingham versus Memphis? Might as well have been Sioux Falls against Fargo. At least I know NFL Europe cities like Berlin, Barcelona and Amsterdam are big-time towns. You can created a rooting interest. “Go Barcelona!” I once had a swell seafood paella there.
Once the football stunk, the league was doomed. But the rest of the package was crude and silly, even by WWF standards. What made anyone think for a second that a guy who wears HE HATE ME on the back of his uniform could possibly have anything profound to say? Forget profound. Anything at all that the public wanted to hear? And I was never remotely interested in what coaches said in the locker room. I much prefer the Knute Rockne mythology than listening to, “Okay guys, go out there and get ’em,” which in the XFL passed for Aristotelian wisdom. And while I didn’t expect James King, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell to be doing splits along the sidelines, I wasn’t quite prepared for the steady parade of what appeared to be local lap-dancers posing as cheerleaders. Who needs another Bada-Bing when you already have “The Sopranos”?
The cleverest touch was the XFL’s one hint of subtlety and self-mockery-dubbing the championship game “The Big Game At The End.” But, of course, by the time the end approached, the league chickened out and gave the event some silly money name that made it sound like a Delaware Lotto contest. (The game turned out to be a 38-6 snooze and ranked 93rd among TV programs that week, or slightly lower than the ratings a good lotto drawing might have garnered.)
Much of the justification for the XFL was that the NFL was too staid, too soulless, too buttoned-down. And, of course, there is more than a grain of truth in this notion. The NFL is corporate and only going to get more so. But that confuses the veneer and the suites with what ensues on the field and in the stands. And there the NFL is everything the XFL aspired to be, violent at its core and lunatic in its devotions. Do we really need do-rags, trash talk, sack dances or comic-book team nicknames to comprehend that the Baltimore Ravens, led by Ray Lewis, are the real thing-a true menace and xtreme force on the football field?
Of course, it’s easy to kick ’em when they’re down. So I’ll say one nice thing in the wake of the league’s demise. Credit McMahon and his partner-in-crime, NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol; they’ve both been standup. Ebersol even said it was fun. And McMahon said the buck stopped there. (It was too late, apparently to stop the $35 million bucks that NBC and the WWF reportedly lost.) Still, one can’t help but wish that when these TV and marketing giants have their next genius notion, they demonstrate a little less hubris, show a modicum of restraint. The XFL was such a golden idea, McMahon told me on that preseason visit, “that I’m already in the third season in my head.”
We can at least count our blessings that he’s the only one who’ll ever have to endure it.
