Goodbye, WWE Network

With the conclusion of the 2021 Royal Rumble on January 31, I said farewell to my WWE Network subscription after nearly seven years. I mean, I won’t get all high and mighty here – my subscription ended on February 5, but I was done watching after the pay-per-view. And I guess I really have no moral high ground here since I still watched the PPV, but…let me just start from the beginning.

On January 6, seditionists rallied in Washington D.C. at the “March to Save America” by way of rebelling against America and refusing to accept the results of a free and fair election. Smartphone app tracking showed about 40 percent of the devices at the rally wound up in and around the United States Capitol during the subsequent Trumpian domestic terrorist attack.

On January 9, a CNBC article about the dark money groups behind the seditionist rally pointed out that it was largely organized by Women for America First. While that group’s donors are unknown, America First Policies did disclose in 2019 that it gave $25,000 to Women for America First. America First Policies is chaired by Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration under President Donald Trump.

Linda McMahon is, of course, the wife of WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon, and former CEO of the professional wrestling company herself.

And that was it! I couldn’t justify paying for the WWE product anymore. I’m not saying I’m better than anybody, or that I should be applauded for my “moral” decision. I’m just saying for this idiot wrestling fan, I had to come back down to Earth. The whole “separate the art from the artist” discussion is a larger one that can be had outside of this crummy little blog post. For me, there is no way to separate the McMahons from the TV shows enough to fork over my money.

I have no idea what mental gymnastics I pulled to ignore the fact Linda McMahon literally worked in the Trump Administration, especially since I have spent years being vocally anti-Trump. Shit, the main image for this blog is the entire family with Trump, and I’ve known about that for years. But there are performers I really enjoy watching in WWE, so I just did my best to ignore the scumbaggery from the McMahons. I had quietly grumbled about a lot of really scummy behavior for years for the sake of entertainment, but I finally couldn’t stomach it anymore. Some examples:

– You may have seen in the news last year that America First Action, the Super PAC affiliated with America First Policies, announced $18.5 million in ad buys after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared WWE an essential business so they could continue TV tapings in Orlando.

– John Oliver had the essential take-down of WWE a few years back when he covered how WWE has used and abused its employees for years, overworking them and running their bodies into the ground, driving many to an early grave. WWE has gotten out of paying their health insurance by classifying their employees as “independent contractors” – despite the fact WWE “Superstars” are exclusive to the brand. Oliver even shows one of the most bizarre and offensive WWE moments of all time – Vince McMahon saying the N-word in what Vince thought was a great comedy bit.

– Related to the Oliver segment, CM Punk’s appearance on the Art of Wrestling podcast became embroiled in legal controversy when he detailed WWE’s abusive tactics. He described how health concerns are minimized, with wrestlers pressured into performing hurt (WWE’s doctor sued Punk over the podcast and lost). The story culminated with Punk’s departure from WWE, receiving his termination papers via FedEx on his wedding day.

– WWE’s business dealings in Saudi Arabia have an entire Wikipedia page on the associated controversies. They ran a damn show in Saudi Arabia in 2018 a month after Jamal Kashoggi was brutally murdered by government agents and the government attempted to cover it up. WWE ignored calls to cancel the show, though John Cena and Daniel Bryan used their clout and backed out. Personal note: I stopped following the main, weekly WWE programming after this but kept my Network subscription and would still tune into the PPVs. I never watched the Saudi stuff, but I remember rumblings that a money dispute in 2019 led to the government detaining the performers while Vince McMahon hightailed it out of the country and left them behind.

– On March 28, 2015, Stephanie McMahon, Vince’s daughter and WWE’s Chief Brand Officer, tweeted a quote from a speaker at WWE’s Business Partner Summit, saying, “Philanthropy is the future of marketing, it’s the way brands r going 2 win.” She tweeted this out mere hours before WWE inducted Connor Michalek, an 8-year-old fan who died of cancer and whom WWE named the Connor’s Cure charity after, into their Hall of Fame with the Warrior Award honoring strength and perseverance. Really shows you how altruistic that was.

– Then there’s Ultimate Warrior, for whom the Warrior Award was named. While the character of Ultimate Warrior is objectively hilarious and metal as fuck, the man who portrayed Warrior was, as Barry Petchesky of Deadspin said in an article following the Ultimate One’s passing in 2014, an “insane dick.” Warrior – birth name Jim Hellwig but later legally changed to Warrior to reflect that fact he truly is the Ultimate Warrior – was like Rush Limbaugh on cocaine and steroids. Just an angry, racist, homophobic, hateful, spiteful lunatic. WWE welcomed Warrior back with open arms in 2014, inducted him into the Hall of Fame, and when he died suddenly days later they honored him with epic fanfare and created an award in his name. I still laugh when I see Ultimate Warrior because the character is absolutely ridiculous and inexorably linked to my childhood, but WWE honoring his legacy every year and portraying his fictional heroic character as if that was his persona in real life is awkward at best.

– Hulk Hogan…yikes. WWE dumped his ass in 2015 when it came out that he had liberally used the N-word and admitted that he was “a racist, to a point” in his leaked sex tape. He was welcomed back before the Extreme Rules PPV in 2018 and addressed the entire locker room. People can absolutely apologize and grow, but I tend to side with Titus O’Neil that if an apology includes bits about how you don’t remember saying things and didn’t know you were being recorded, it’s hard to take the apology seriously. Instead of hearing what Black performers had to say about his return and acknowledging his apology was lacking and he should do better, Hogan said that wrestlers who didn’t accept his apology don’t understand the brotherhood of the business. It’s impossible to discuss wrestling and its popularity without talking about Hulk Hogan, but bringing the Hulkster back into the fold and having him on TV again after all of that is not cool.

– In October 2020, WWE informed its employees that they could no longer run their own Youtube, Cameo or Twitch channels, taking away outside income. WWE said it would instead run the performers’ platforms and give them a cut of the profits.This again called into question the “independent contractor” classification, and when Zelina Vega openly showed support for unionization, she was fired.

And that’s all within the last decade! There are plenty of stories of WWE being trash long before that. Off the top of my head there’s the objectification and humiliation of women (calling Mickie James “Piggy James” on TV because McMahon thought she gained weight stands out), Triple H going full racist in a 2003 storyline with Booker T and then winning the payoff match, Owen Hart dying at Over the Edge and McMahon having the wrestlers continue the PPV, and Eddie Guerrero’s sudden and tragic death being used as a storyline, complete with Randy Orton saying Eddie was in hell as a cheap tactic to get boos.

Most recently, I saw that WWE is freezing promotions and raises for employees. This is a company run by a billionaire. The McMahons’ PAC had nearly $20 million to spend on ad buys to bribe DeSantis into declaring WWE an essential business so their employees could be forced to work during the pandemic, but there’s no money for the people who actually have worked during the pandemic?

So yeah, after all that bad shit I still watched the Royal Rumble since I figured at that point what did three and half more hours of my life to see my old boy Edge – who I once tearfully begged my aunt to buy me an action figure of in Toys R Us – wrestle once more on my dime really matter. I still have to reckon with the fact that my lifelong support of the McMahons’ product in some small way allowed them to financially support Trump, which I ignored for years, and then helped them fund a seditionist rally and domestic terrorist assault. Fucking disgusting.

Then there’s Peacock. WWE Network will soon no longer be a standalone app as it will become part of NBC Universal’s Peacock streaming service. I have no idea what is even on Peacock since I already have too many subscriptions, but I now I have to question if I could ever justify paying for their service.

If you can separate the McMahons from the product and support the performers, good on you I guess. I just can’t do it anymore.