In light of Vince McMahon resigning from his positions at TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of WWE and UFC, Dan Le Batard owned up to something Monday.
“I’ve been wandering around here for a while, Stugotz, lamenting publicly in a way that probably has irritated our audience,” Le Batard said on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz. “This American movement toward if you have power and money, in sports or outside of sports, you can get away with absolutely anything and everything if you’re just willing to lean into being shameless. That shamelessness becomes a shield of immunity that will protect you from anything in the way of consequences.”
Before getting to McMahon, Dan Le Batard used UFC president Dana White as an example of the kind of person with immense money and power that they’re never held accountable.
“Not a lot of precedent for a person in that position of power in sports slapping his wife in public, in a video that gets out and there being no consequences because he’s got that much power,” he said before pivoting to McMahon. “And the other one who’s built just like him is Vince McMahon, who has had an assortment, a large resume filled with garbage that makes it known to all involved it is no secret he is a truly despicable human being.”
“But we have finally found, evidently, where it is that the powerful, rich, white man in America can actually lose something that he cares about,” he continued. “And the line — evidently — is in a lawsuit it being alleged that you shit on a woman during a threesome. That evidently is the final straw on Vince McMahon’s WWE career.”
Dan Le Batard talked about how complicated it was for McMahon to finally go away from WWE for good. It was very clear that Vince never wanted to leave that position of power, and he’s been reluctant and stubborn to the idea of handing the reins of the company to someone else. Add in the immeasurable wealth that McMahon wields, and so it seemed to Le Batard that Vince would never leave. That’s what made his resignation so surprising.
“I was surprised that he was gone only because I thought that he was gonna be gone five or six other times, and he just stays there,” Le Batard said. “And somehow because he built the whole thing, somehow because it’s scripted and it’s not really sports and he’s just running a business.
“But now when you’ve got something that’s publicly owned, there are stockholders and there are consequences, and I was relieved to finally see that there were consequences that this man is being punished for what has been a vile, vile run of terror through making that sport hugely popular – bigger than it has ever been. But also making him so powerful that it didn’t seem like anything was ever going to happen to him.”
