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

wasn’t about to let his long-forgotten sons get too close to wrestling, or for that matter too close to him. At the very least, Vinnie was a handful, certainly more than a man in a second marriage and in his mid-forties needed. Still, Juanita softened him up enough that the boys started spending summers with them in Maryland.
    Vinnie went from being a military brat to a son of the circus, a wide-eyed kid in a world of new possibilities. His favorite wrestler became Dr. Jerry Graham, who at three hundred pounds resembled nothing so much as an inflated Jerry Lee Lewis with peroxided hair and a bloodred Cadillac convertible that matched the color of his threads. Graham lived life large, lighting his cigars with hundred-dollar bills—just the kind of outsized figure who could forever alter a young boy’s image of what constitutes normalcy. Vinnie was so impressed with Graham in the summer of 1958 that he asked his stepmother to bleach his hair in the kitchen of their summer home in Delaware. She obliged, though her husband was far from amused when he got home. He’d be damned, he said, if his son was following him into wrestling.
    At fourteen, Vinnie found himself enrolled in the Fishburne Military Academy, a haven for the sons of the wealthy in the rolling green hills of the Shenandoah Valley. Fishburne’s yearbook from 1963 contains a photo of a six-foot-two, 230-pound Vince in a football uniform, staring off the page toward a future that lay somewhere between the bleakness of what waited for him back in rural North Carolina and the world in Washington he now knew he wanted to enter. Not completely welcome in either, he decided to go to a college that was fifty-five miles away from a girl whom he’d started dating in Havelock.
    Linda Edwards, whose mother worked in the same Cherry Point base building as Vinnie’s mom, was thirteen when she started dating the sixteen-year-old tough. “I had no idea what a family was until I met Linda and saw how they lived,” he remarked in an interview with the magazine Cigar Aficionado . “It was an Ozzie and Harriet life. There wasn’t screaming and beating.” Vinnie quickly became a fixture in the Edwards home, and as soon as Linda graduated from high school (with honors), he asked her to marry him. Most of the guests at the small church ceremony were friends of her parents from the base.
    Two years after Vinnie entered East Carolina University, Linda joined him there and squeezed her college work into three years so the two could graduate together. On the eve of their graduation day, Linda discovered she was pregnant with their son Shane. It was 1969, and wrestling would have to wait for Vinnie while he lived in Washington, D.C., and worked as a traveling salesman. Six months later, a ring announcer who worked for his father set the next phase of his life in motion. Because Vincent’s wrestling shows were now airing across the East Coast, the unionized announcer wanted to be paid a national rate. Vincent grumbled about having to pay it (the employee was threatening to make trouble with the union), until he learned that union scale didn’t apply to family. So he fired the ring man, and when Vinnie asked, “Who are you going to replace him with?” his father answered, “You.”
    Overnight, Vinnie went from doing part-time work setting up rings to appearing on television in neon suits that swallowed his rail-thin frame. The wrestlers laughed at the kid who was trying so hard to sound like Howard Cosell. But once the matches began, even his father had to admit that the boy had a surprising flair for making the make-believe seem real.
    In 1971, the show was being seen in thirty cities in fourteen states and had outgrown its confines at the National Arena in Washington. Needing to find a larger space, the elder McMahon decided to tape his shows at a thousand-seat theater in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, and at a slightly larger pavilion nearby on a fairgrounds complex in Allentown,