Vince McMahon isn’t gone forever: Former WWE head man is just biding his time

Vince McMahon has stepped down from his roles at WWE, but since he still controls the company, you have to wonder: is he just laying low?

It’s hard to imagine, as long as McMahon still owns a supermajority of the voting shares in WWE, that he is just going to spend more time with the grandkids, maybe volunteer a couple nights a week at a local nonprofit theater, take up a new hobby, maybe painting.

His daughter, Stephanie McMahon-Levesque, was installed as the company’s co-CEO, alongside Nick Khan, the logical choice to run things as the former WWE president and chief financial officer.

Stephanie’s husband, Paul Levesque, known to wrestling fans as Triple H, is back as executive vice president of talent relations.

Long-time McMahon toady Bruce Pritchard is still involved on the creative team, his main qualification for that role being his intimate knowledge of what Vince McMahon wants out of WWE in terms of its weekly TV content.

Another McMahon hanger-on, Kevin Dunn, is still in charge of production.

The people in the key jobs, aside from Khan, are McMahon loyalists. Basically, everything they know about wrestling, they learned from Vince.

The only thing different in the here and now is that Vince McMahon isn’t physically sitting in the Gorilla position on Mondays, Fridays and once a month on Saturdays or Sundays.

He’s not just flipping on the TV and waiting to see what they’re doing different from when he was in charge.

And when the TV deals with Fox and NBCUniversal come up for renegotiation next year, while Khan is a big player on the business side, you know McMahon, who is the guy who changed the wrestling business with his vision for how TV needed to be the primary source of revenues, will be at least involved, if not in the lead.

McMahon is saying all the right things, but come on, there’s no way this is anything but turning the heat down.

Assuming there are no other NDAs, McMahon’s gamble is that time, which as the saying goes heals all wounds, will rehabilitate his reputation enough to allow him to quietly do what he wants to do behind the scenes, and then eventually again in front of the cameras.

But this is assuming that there are no other NDAs. If there are other NDAs, then the sense in the McMahon inner circle must be that revelations to that effect are about to become public, and his retirement announcement is just gettin’ while the gettin’ is good.

That’s entirely possible.

I think it’s more possible that McMahon, a master at game theory, is playing the table again, waiting for us to forget that he’s even gone, ready to pounce when the moment calls for it, which is this time next year, when it’s time to sign the next round of multibillion-dollar TV deals.