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Pennsylvania. Because the shows taped only once every three weeks, Vinnie had ample time to try other things. At first, he tried his hand at booking oldies’ shows with acts like Jerry Lee Lewis and Dottie West. But then one day his father got a call from a private investigator, looking for the Vince McMahon who’d run up a trail of bad debts. As the story goes, Vincent listened carefully, then realized the investigator was talking about his son. That was when he decided it was better to keep the kid close rather than let him run down the family’s name.
    In 1973, when an opening for a promoter arose in Maine, Vincent installed his son in the territory, telling him that if he wasn’t able to make a living up there, he didn’t want to hear any more talk about wrestling again. (There is some dispute over how the opening arose. In his Playboy interview, Vince insisted that his father fired the longtime promoter there for stealing. Others remember that the promoter had simply died.) On weekends, Vinnie would leave the West Hartford, Connecticut, trailer park where he’d temporarily moved his family and drive a beat-up blue Buick to Maine to make fifty or a hundred bucks a show. As Joe Perkins, a close aide to the senior McMahon, once remarked, “Vincent made it quite clear to me that his son had to pay his own bills and I was not to look to Capitol Wrestling if he fell behind.”
    Old-time wrestlers like Walter “Killer” Kowalski raised their eyebrows when Vinnie begged them to try new things, like taking their brawls out of the ring and into the parking lots of the new theaters and union halls that he was expanding into. Vincent took note of his son’s growing aptitude, but he wasn’t quick to talk about it or even acknowledge his son to others. “I talked to Senior every day for years in the seventies and I couldn’t tell you a single thing Vinnie did for the company back then,” says James Barnett, who controlled Georgia. “He never talked about Vinnie, which makes me think he didn’t want anyone to know which ideas were his and which ones weren’t.”
    ONE PERSON who began to see Vinnie as a figure apart from his father was a Brooklyn-born graduate of Harvard Law School named Bob Arum. Arum had been a federal prosecutor and a friend of Robert Kennedy’s before he decided to leave the law and start promoting fights. He made his first match in 1966 between Muhammad Ali and a rough-and-tumble Canadian named George Chuvalo. By the time Vinnie walked into the promoter’s Park Avenue office in Manhattan in 1974, Ali was an international icon and Arum had promoted a dozen of his bouts.
    The reasons for Vinnie’s visit made Arum chuckle. He’d been watching television at home one day when he heard Evel Knievel say in an interview that he dreamed of jumping over the Grand Canyon. Through some creative phone work, Vinnie managed to get Knievel on the phone and convinced him to meet in Las Vegas. Vinnie maxed out his credit card to make the flight, and in a brief session over drinks persuaded Knievel that they could make a killing if they broadcast the jump live by closed circuit. The McMahons had relationships with 130 theaters and arenas across the East Coast and knew promoters around the country who could fill hundreds more. Vinnie told Evel he could make millions.
    When he returned to New York, Vinnie’s father thought the idea was crazy. But it was just crazy enough to intrigue Arum, who had good connections at ABC, the network that aired Evel’s other jumps on Wide World of Sports . Arum put together a deal in which the jump—whose location was changed to the Snake River Canyon in Idaho—would be seen live via closed circuit and rebroadcast for free on ABC a week later.
    On the morning of September 8, every nut who wasn’t stalking Elvis or waiting for an alien abduction was in Twin Falls, Idaho. Frank Gifford and the Hells Angels were there, along with a gaggle of blondes giving away free blow jobs. The