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"To the victor belongs the spoils" - New York Senator William L. Marcy on President Andrew Jackson’s Election victory, 1828.
World Wrestling Entertainment is the victor. Since the fateful day Vince McMahon began expanding nationally, buying the rights to some territories and running others out of business, the audience’s understanding of what professional wrestling is, was and should be has been formed through the prism of the company now known as WWE.
By the early 2000s, all major competition on a national scale had been laid at WWE’s feet as the dust from the legendary Monday Night Wars settled. Since that time, despite the best efforts of start-ups great and small, the alpha and omega for what defines professional wrestling to the average viewer has been WWE programming.
WWE earned that right, no matter how anyone may feel about the product, by being the victor of the wars ignited in the mid-1980s and in 2018, its flag is planted deeply into the psyche of every modern pro wrestling fan as the company closes in on the biggest television deals in the history of this unique, colorful genre.
While the WWE stock is soaring, and all speculation abounds as of what these new deals with FOX and NBC Universal secures the long-term survival of WWE as the media landscape continues to churn and reshape, there is no argument that WWE is a beast. To keep the beast alive and happy, however, it must be fed.
In a time that will never return, pro wresters would venture from territory to territory in pursuit of the next big run for their career, rebooting their viability and their personalities anew every time they debuted or returned to an area. That kept the wresting world vibrant, it allowed turn-over, and it allowed for creative sparks. Professional wrestling was able to continuously replant their crops again and again, enticing the audience to part with their money, to cheer their heroes, boo their villains and remain enticed in the weekly developments of what transpired inside the squared circle.
Obviously, today is a different matter. The world has changed, and WWE holds a great responsibility in not only being one of the root causes of those changes but in being the custodian of what is to come next.
The territories are alive only in history books and vintage video. The Monday Night Wars are now memories as nostalgic as the ones your grandparents would recount about what “their” wrestling was versus what “your” wrestling is. WWE has mined loads of talent from the independent and international scenes, but nothing will ever be enough.
The beast must be fed.
WWE has been acutely aware of this, founding the earliest version of what is now known as their developmental system in the mid-1990s with training camps designed to scout and refine future potential WWE players. Over the year, whether it be Ohio Valley Wrestling, Memphis or other developmental territories, WWE has attempted to decipher and refine how it could groom the next generation.
In 2013, WWE founded the WWE Performance Center, creating a physical home that the company owned, controlled and operated in Orlando, Florida. The Center changed the very fabric of WWE, creating not just a central home for talent, but a nucleus for where all things related to the company could flow – training, practices, seminars, medical treatment, physical rehabilitation. Whether it was someone who was starting from their first day training, like Alexa Bliss or a well-traveled star who WWE wanted to refine and put their own spin on, like Sami Zayn, all roads to modern Wrestlemania glory (with very few exceptions) begin at the Performance Center.
When one looks at the roster that has walked through the facility over the past five years and lists the talent currently training there while plying their trade for the WWE NXT brand, it’s a virtual who’s who of top flight independent and international names designed to one day create those same creative sparks for the company, to provide the same fresh faces (and even returns) that will entice the audience and keep them invested, only instead of a local territory, it’s on a global scale.
The beast continues to grow. Even if one doesn’t include the massive TV deals that are in their final stages, WWE has more talent under contract than ever before and continues to lock in even more performers. In recent years, WWE has signed a crop of European talents under contract, seeking to launch a regular UK-centric brand. They have had their eyes on expansion in Latin America, the Middle East and beyond.
WWE has the same needs as the territory promoters of the past, just on a much grander scale.
The Empire needs more Stormtroopers. If Vince McMahon is the Emperor, certainly his son-in-law, Paul Levesque is Darth Vader. Holding the post of WWE’s Executive Vice President of Talent, Live Events and Creative, the same year the Performance Center was founded, it’s Levesque’s responsibility to find, recruit, nurture and prepare the next generation of WWE stars.
The Performance Center allowed for a physical location to bring talent, a place to funnel them into the waiting arms of WWE Coaches and hopefully churn out the next John Cena or Steve Austin or Hulk Hogan. It also allowed something tangible that WWE could present to potential recruits who didn’t have a lifelong affinity or background in professional wrestling. After all, not every potential talent is going to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every Wrestlemania main event.
While WWE has scoured over every potential promotion and country in seeking out talents to populate their company, Levesque still wanted to cast the net wider, not just wanting to seek out the former Ring of Honor champions but to find the factors that might be otherwise unknown to the company, because not only were they not in professional wrestling, they might not even know how to contact WWE.
“I think the biggest and more diverse pipeline of talent you have coming in at all times, the better your options,” explained Levesque during a telephone conversation from his office in Stamford, CT. “In terms of finding stars and finding the right people…. if you’re inside the bubble, so to speak, you know of the Performance Center and you know where it is, but even if you’re inside that bubble, how do you get there? You can’t just pick up the phone and call the Performance Center and say, ‘Hey I’d like to try out.” How do you get there? How do you get that asked? How do you get that opportunity if you’re not already in the business? If you’re starting from ground zero, if you’re a high-level athlete in something else and you’ve always wanted to be in the WWE or even if you always wanted to be in WWE and you weren’t an athlete anywhere else, how do you find that pathway here?"
Levesque hopes the launch of an official website (www.WWEPerformanceCenter.com) will become a starting point for athletes and performers seeking striving to find a World Wrestling Entertainment career, just as the actual Performance Center evolved into the destination for developmental talents. Levesque isn't looking for just the next John Cena, who grew up a lifelong WWE fan but the next Braun Strowman, who had made his mark in strongman competitions and was seeking to find the next stage of his career. Strowman had WWE Hall of Famer Mark Henry help him make in-roads towards getting WWE management’s attention, but others who are out there, with similar potential and untapped raw ability, might not have those knowledge or connections.
With the new website, Levesque hopes to erase those obstacles and make what had been an unknown process for some, a simpler path.
"Over the years as I’ve traveled everywhere, it’s a question I’ve heard over and over," said Leveque. “‘I didn’t know how to get there. I didn’t know how to go about becoming a WWE star. I didn’t know where to even look.” I wanted to change that and create that pathway where if you were coming out of college and you were an athlete and you think this was the right thing for you and you have a big personality and you want to give it a shot, this is how you go about doing it. This site will increase that flow.”
While the website has now become the primary window into applying for a tryout with WWE at the Performance Center, it’s also become a digital celebration of talents who have been cultivated, prepared and groomed for Raw and Smackdown. From the Authors of Pain to Zelina Vega, the WWE Performance Center website points to their tenure in the facility and the NXT brand not just as proof of their system’s success, but as enticement to the what the next generation can aspire to become.
“[The Performance Center website] will allow people to see what being a WWE star is truly like – not just what you see about on TV and what you read about, but to see it and hear from others who have done it.”
Just as all paths to main roster stardom now thread through the Performance Center, Levesque wants the website to be the initial educational tool so that potential talents, uninitiated in what the WWE tryout process and journey could truly be, will have better insight to prepare and refine themselves. With detailed information and video highlights of past tryouts, the idea is to allow potential talents to have the best possible understanding of what WWE is seeking before those talents ever get approved and walk through the tryout doors, so that everyone involved, including WWE, can yield the most out of the process.
“There’s a lot of information that will be on this site, “Levesque noted. “What the tryouts are like, what the process is like. What you go about as a WWE Superstar in training on a daily basis. All of that. It’s all about increasing the pipeline globally that comes into the WWE.”
While WWE already brings in potential talents from outside the realm of professional wrestling, the hope is that the website will greatly increase those numbers. The is for the Performance Center website to be the entrance ramp for anyone potential talents to have an easy access vehicle to contact WWE. He’s looking for former NFL players, for collegiate athletes, for international talents. Levesque is trying to catch everything he can with the largest digital net possible, especially for international recruits.”
“In most countries where there is not a robust independent scene, and that is very few and far in between, the majority of the people that we have had coming in are people that have had no experience walking into the door of WWE. At that point, we are looking for the best athlete, the most charismatic, the right human being, all those things walking in the door. We have a handle, for the most part, going to those other markets – UK or Australia or whatever, we have a pretty good handle on who’s there and their skill level and what they’re doing, if they are on the indie scene. It’s the rest. It’s all the others, right? Everyone finds a pathway and a different way to come to the WWE. It’s all those others. It’s the Braun Strowmans that are competing in Strongman but are fascinated with the WWE. They were massive fans and it was always something they wanted to do. Now there’s a pathway for them to come do it, as opposed to us stumbling upon them and saying, ‘Hey, you should give this a try’ and them being like, ‘Hell year, I will’ and few years later being a featured attraction on Monday Night Raw. It’s a process, but we find the athletes from everywhere. Internationally, that’s especially accurate, because there’s no place else for them to learn.”
Tasked with feeding the beast (and having the right mixture of talents to keep Vince McMahon happy), Levesque has been the driving force behind the creation and streamlining of the WWE developmental system in its current form. When pressed as to whether he’s satisfied or even happy with where the system stands as the company launches the Performance Center website, Levesque noted, “So there’s a difference between being happy and being satisfied. I am satisfied with where we’ve gotten it to in the period of time that we’ve had it. We’ve had other sports teams at the highest levels come to see the Performance Center because they are opening a facility in the U.S. and they have researched the best in the world and they want to see ours and evaluate it because they’ve come up with it as one of the best. That’s a big compliment to us. Am I happy with it? Am I happy that its turned out about 80% of the main roster from the Performance Center? 40% international diversity? Absolutely, I’m happy. Am I satisfied? Not even close.”
After all the beast is always hungry and the Performance Center website will change how WWE feeds it, just as the physical PC did in 2013.
“We got a lot of work to do.” Levesque pointed out. “This recruit website is part of that process of opening up the floodgates of what we can bring in as talents and increase the opportunity but the global nature of what we do, the ability to trail talents in market. If you look at the international markets – let’s say we find 50 athletes in the Middle East out of the entire Middle East. Do I bring them all to the United States or do I train them there? You begin to work backwards into that process. I don’t think about this as where we are going to end tomorrow, but where we are going to end up ten years from now.”
WWE are the victors and with that victory comes the task of keeping professional wrestling alive, because if they fail, what was the worth of the victory?
A decade from now, what defines pro wrestling will have changed yet again, as wrestling should never remain stagnant if it wants to thrive. Whatever talents stand atop World Wrestling Entertainment might very well be traced back to the day they discovered the Performance Center website, the latest weapon in WWE's arsenal at not just maintaining their victory, but keeping the beast at bay as well.
PWInsider.com Elite subscribers can now listen to the entire conversation with Paul Levesque. You can as well by subscribing to www.PWInsiderElite.com.
Mike Johnson can be reached at MikeJohnsonPWInsider@gmail.com.
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