Read Sex, Lies, and Headlocks for Free Online Page B

failed to materialize.
    In 1976 when Linda gave birth to their daughter Stephanie, and again in 1977, Vinnie had trouble paying his taxes, leading the Internal Revenue Service to eventually place a $43,000 lien on their home. Yet he knew that because his father was sixty-two, the subject of selling the WWF would have to come up sooner or later. He just needed to be in the right position when that happened. He found his way station in the spring of 1979 when he tried booking a show in a seven-thousand-seat arena in a coastal New England town called South Yarmouth.
    Its owner, Ed Fruean, was a thickly built New Englander with a degree in electrical engineering and no appetite for show business. He’d built the Cape Cod Coliseum years before, leased it, and watched the prior tenant go bankrupt. Having had to take the coliseum over again to keep it afloat, Fruean was caught in a bind. Rock acts were the only thing that made him money, but a needling group of motel owners were trying to ban those concerts because of the “element” they brought into the quiet town. Fruean wanted out. Would Vinnie be interested? In April 1979, the pair struck a deal that involved no money down. Instead, Vinnie would pay a monthly mortgage held by Fruean, using the cash flow produced by the coliseum to come up with the payment.
    Over that summer, the McMahons moved into a two-story shingled home down the block from Fruean and brought a minor-league hockey franchise into the Cape Cod Coliseum. Shane and two-year-old Stephanie’s young lives were colored by visits from members of the McMahon wrestling troupe. It was perfectly natural, for instance, for Andre the Giant to stop by if he was in the area. One day, he visited while Stephanie was playing on a trampoline in their yard. The three-year-old no doubt assumed that everyone had Giants visit them on balmy summer days, and Andre held out his hand as she climbed into it so he could lift her to his face and she could kiss his cheek.
    Having never before had this kind of responsibility, Vinnie and Linda worked all hours to make the coliseum a success. They landed an NHL exhibition game, for instance, by promising the Boston Bruins a $50,000 ticket guarantee; they made the gamble work by selling VIP tickets that came with extras like the meatballs Linda made in their kitchen. At the same time, they also learned to play what would later become a familiar brand of hardball. When a town selectman tried to limit the hours that they could sell liquor at the coliseum, Vinnie showed up at the next meeting with a cast of 170 supporters and a battery of lawyers. “We’ve had nearly constant harassment by a certain segment of the community,” he said, staring down the selectman. “We’ve developed thick skins, but enough is enough.” The board backed off.
    Through the next couple of years, Vinnie ran the coliseum while taking time out every three weeks to tend to his announcing duties on his father’s program, All-Star Wrestling. He shuttled from Cape Cod to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where the show was filmed at a small theater on the town fairgrounds. Their parents’ schedule was taxing on the kids. As Stephanie would later remember, “My parents weren’t around until later at night, so for the most part, Shane raised me. He not only toughened me up, but he kept me thoroughly entertained—most of the time doing impressions of our dad.”
    Older wrestlers like Bruno Sammartino still looked down on the boss’s son, who drove a fancy car, dressed in flashy suits, and never seemed to get called to account for his numerous failures. But Vinnie was far closer to being able to take over the WWF than Sammartino or any of the other wrestlers who dismissed him realized. In Cape Cod, he was studying every act that came in, from the rock band Heart to the Harlem Globetrotters. He watched how they set their lighting rigs, wired their sound, placed their T-shirt stands. And, by Fruean’s account, he’d learned