10 Most Ridiculous Lawsuits In Wrestling-4

4. The USA Tries To Break Up The NWA

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Vince McMahon’s prosecution in the nineties for allegedly distributing steroids to the WWF locker room wasn’t the only time that the US government litigated against the biggest name in the wrestling industry. However, four decades before that, the WWF was the WWWF, and owned by a different Vince McMahon – his father. In those days, it was the National Wrestling Alliance that ruled professional wrestling in the USA – and that was the problem.

In the 1950s, it was the USA vs. the NWA: the United States government filed an antitrust suit against the collection of wrestling promoters that had only recently clubbed together to control and shape pro wrestling in North America. That basically means that the government considered that the formation of the NWA had created an illegal monopoly, preventing competition in the wrestling business.

And of course, it had – they’d put together the NWA to achieve precisely that goal. The wrestling industry in those days was (and in many ways, still is) an industry of savvy carnies… they were so used to working people for a living that being duplicitous was simply doing business. Putting together the National Wrestling Alliance was simply better business for them, but ironically with more transparency and less skullduggery between the previously rival promotions.

The government didn’t quite see it that way of course, but the NWA quickly figured out how to work the law. The member promotions voluntarily cut a deal, entering into what’s called a consent decree with the government: they agreed to take certain actions to amend their business practices in order to comply with market competition regulations and so break up what government lawyers saw as their professional wrestling monopoly.

These restrictions chiefly amounted to being banned from preventing insolvent wrestling promoters from joining the NWA, dividing up the country into territories that only specific member promotions would be allowed to run shows in, and blackballing those who violated or ignored NWA rules. Of course, that removed most of the point of creating the NWA in the first place, so once the smoke had cleared some months later, they simply resumed business as usual, while assuring the US government that they were complying with the decree.

That’s right: the National Wrestling Alliance worked the United States Of America, continuing to operate a rigid and inflexible monopoly over the entire pro wrestling business for decades to come, until an unscrupulous east coast firebrand took the whole lot of them on and created his own monolithic institution to control professional wrestling, ruling the industry from the 1990s onwards.