The WWF: A Brief History

In mid-1976, The WWF (World Wrestling Federation) was born from its predecessor The WWWF (World Wide Wrestling Federation). It was run by Vince McMahon Sr, who had a belief that wrestlers should be wrestlers, and stay out of films. He would go on to fire a future star by the name of Hulk Hogan for going against his wishes.

In 1983, McMahon Sr. would sell the promotion to his son Vince McMahon Jr. With wrestling starting to appear on television on a regular basis, Vince went after other territories stars, the first being Hulk Hogan, and would use him as his main star for his shows.

In 1985, he needed to make the WWF do something special, so he hired on Mr. T to main event for Wrestlemania , a new concept called the pay-per-view. This move would land Vince a deal with NBC to promote a new show on Saturday nights when Saturday Night Live was not taping. It would be called Saturday Night’s Main Event.

Every year the Wrestlemania pay per views would attract more and more of an attendance, and Vince was slowly putting smaller federations out of business. Eventually there was only WWF, and Jim Crocket’s promotion left to fight it out. Vince started adding more pay-per-views as the years progressed.

As Ted Turner took over Jim Crocket’s promotion, Vince could not capitalize on making the WWF the number one promotion due to facts of both a sex scandal involving minors and a steroid trial that almost sent Vince to jail for quite a while.

In 1996, things went from bad to worse in the ratings as three of the WWF’s biggest stars (Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, and Hulk Hogan), all departed for the rival WCW. For 84 straight weeks, the WWF lost to WCW in the ratings, and in 2002, they lost a battle to use the letters WWF due to a violation in a copyright agreement with the World Wildlife Fund, and was forced to change to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), and shortly afterwards purchased rival company WCW.