8:46 PM EST

The family history runs deep. So deep, that for more than 70 years there has been a McMahon involved in professional wrestling. So deep, it is safe to say that professional wrestling would look completely different today without the McMahons.

Vincent Kennedy McMahon revolutionized the business, taking over the World Wrestling Federation from his father, Vincent J. McMahon, in 1982. At the time, the World Wrestling Federation was a regional territory based in the Northeast. But that simply would not do.

McMahon had a vision to bring all wrestling territories under one umbrella. His umbrella. He took over territories and started negotiating television and licensing deals, making WWF a national brand and eventually the most successful pro wrestling venture ever created.

He now oversees World Wrestling Entertainment, a publicly traded company that brought in a record $485.7 million in revenues last year. His wife, Linda, is the CEO, and his two children, Stephanie and Shane, have prominent roles in the company. His son-in-law, Triple H (Paul Levesque), is in a triple-threat match for the WWE championship at Wrestlemania 24 on Sunday.

The McMahons aren't going to loosen their hold on pro wrestling any time soon.

But for all the praise McMahon receives for being a visionary, there are those who see a man so obsessed with creating a national brand that he destroyed pro wrestling. He is polarizing, even for fans. You either love him, or you hate him.

"The funny thing with Vince is you'll have people who will just defend anything he does because he is a great promoter and he does some good things, and you'll have the people who think he's the devil," said Dave Meltzer, who has published the Wrestling Observer Newsletter since 1982. "He's a multifaceted person."


Origins of an empire

Roderick "Jess" McMahon got the family started in the business when he began promoting shows in 1935.

His son, Vince, took over the family business in the 1950s and started dominating in the Northeast, including New York City. He formed the company in 1963 and continued to have great success.

Though the current WWE boss wanted to be a wrestler, his father refused. So McMahon became a play-by-play man for WWF, a role he would continue after he bought the company from his father. During this time, pro wrestling was made up of different territories.

This would not last long. Soon, McMahon started poaching the different territories for talent and began promoting his outfit around the country. He bought time on local syndicated shows to introduce the fans to his product, then moved on to live shows.

The company also started a show on USA network, the first time pro wrestling had a national cable platform. From there, WWF started publishing a magazine and got its first licensing deal for action figures.

McMahon rarely does interviews and declined one for this story. Linda McMahon spoke on his behalf, saying Vince spoke to his father about his idea to bring pro wrestling to the masses.

"The vision clearly to begin with was national distribution and then expanding globally, so it was always a goal to build and grow into the company that it is today," said Linda McMahon, who has been married to Vince for 41 years.

McMahon, 62, held the first WrestleMania in 1985 at Madison Square Garden, a star-studded event that featured Liberace, Cyndi Lauper, Muhammad Ali and a host of others. This was the first pay-per-view event in pro wrestling, another vision of McMahon's. Though McMahon dumped all his assets into putting on the show, it was a great success and set the stage for bigger things to come.

Of course, it helped that McMahon had Hulk Hogan on his roster. He signed Hogan from the American Wrestling Association in 1983, but probably couldn't have envisioned the impact Hogan made on sports entertainment.

They brought pro wrestling into the mainstream. They got little kids interested. They also changed what people expected their wrestlers to look like, larger-than-life beefcakes with a charisma only few possess.


The only game in town

But while the money poured in for McMahon, the regional territories ended up going out of business. His company became the only game in town, angering longtime fans loyal to their regional groups.

"Vince is very shrewd," said "The Mouth of the South" Jimmy Hart, a longtime Memphis personality who now works for WWE. "Vince wasn't about to put anybody out of business. He realized the smaller territories, as things progressed, somebody had to do something. That's when he had the vision of going worldwide with this thing."

But many disagree. He has been called arrogant and greedy, only out for himself and the money that came with building a wrestling empire in which he was the king and nobody else existed. As it stands now, his is the only major pro wrestling company in the country.

"I think he's very, very self-centered and very paranoid," Meltzer said. "He thinks the whole world is out to get him. I don't think he really understands a lot of aspects of living in the real world. He literally lives in the world he created. It's a fiction world, but it's real to him."

Indeed, since 1997 he has played a character in WWE, the despised Mr. McMahon, the owner who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. In his character profile on the WWE home page, he says: "You've got to grab your competition by the throat and squeeze the life out of them."

That is essentially what he did to regional wrestling. And eventually, it is what happened to other wrestling outfits that tried to compete with him, including World Championship Wrestling.

WWE and WCW were involved in a major ratings battle from 1995-2001. The "Monday Night Wars" drew millions of fans to cable television. WCW, owned by Ted Turner, actually won the ratings battle from 1996-98, but the company fell on hard times following the AOL- Time Warner merger.

McMahon ended up buying WCW and merging it into WWE. Brilliant maneuvering to some.

"The WWE is an example of a really savvy show-business operation," said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse. "I don't know anybody more brilliant at merging the management of a large corporate entity and being a character in his own self-created drama than McMahon."


Controversy and failure

McMahon has been embroiled in his share of controversy and failed business ventures. In 1991, Dr. George Zahorian was convicted of illegally selling steroids. At his trial, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, Rick Martel and "Superstar" Billy Graham all admitted they purchased steroids and controlled drugs from him.

Two years later, McMahon went on trial, accused of distributing steroids and telling his wrestlers they needed to use them. Though he admitted to using steroids himself, McMahon was acquitted. During the trial, Hogan also admitted to using steroids, though he said he never got them from McMahon.

In 2001, McMahon tried creating a football league to compete with the NFL. But the XFL shut down after one year. McMahon also tried to start up a bodybuilding organization, but that failed, too.

"He knows wrestling so well and gets wrestling fans, he understands the spectacle, but those things don't really translate to other things," Meltzer said. "He brought his wrestling mentality to these other sports, and they failed. Wrestling is pure hype, pure sizzle, and in the real world, the sizzle is not as big a part."

There is no doubt McMahon is a workaholic showman, a promoter who will do what it takes to get the job done. For this year's WrestleMania, he got boxer Floyd Mayweather to take on 7-foot Big Show in one of the featured matches.

From one showman to another, Mayweather has been impressed with the WWE chairman.

"He's smart, he's intelligent, he's brilliant," Mayweather said. "The only thing I'm doing is sitting back and watching McMahon and learning from him."

But there is no disputing the fact that McMahon changed pro wrestling. Whether he made it better is up for debate, but he figured out a way to make money off it. Lots of money. Last year, WWE made $90 million more in revenue than 2002.

To some, that came at the expense of what pro wrestling once was. Many old-timers cannot take the scantily clad women, the profanity or the vulgarity that often marks pro wrestling today. Bruno Sammartino, who wrestled from 1959-87 and is known as one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, says there is nobody lower than McMahon because of what he has done to the business.

The two have been in a feud since the mid-1980s, and Sammartino is one of his biggest critics. He refuses to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, saying, "I can't stomach what they do. What would it say about me to accept an induction by this very organization that I feel is so despicable? Absolutely not.

"Wrestling was a sport of good athleticism during my era and way before. But now, there is no limit to how low he can go. Everything he can get away with, he'll stoop to anything if it creates some interest."

The criticism is nothing the McMahons haven't heard.

"I think the majority of the fans on a global basis love the variety aspect that's available in our program today," Linda McMahon said. "There are probably some old football fans who say, 'I liked it back in the old days.' You can't focus on some fans who might say I liked it the way it was.

"I think you'll see the growth of WWE rests on the fact that we don't stay the same."

So the McMahons keep going. Linda McMahon says they are not close to retiring. Even when it comes time for Vince and Linda to hand over the reins, their kids are ready to keep the McMahon name in pro wrestling.

Stephanie McMahon is executive vice president of talent relations, live events and creative writing, and Shane McMahon is executive vice president of global media. The two have been involved in the company since they were teens, working in the warehouse, managing inventory, working marketing and going on the road.

"Shane and Stephanie are embedded here," Linda McMahon said. "In 20, 30 years from now, if they're not going to want to run the company, maybe their children will."

There is no doubting that. Because as long as pro wrestling exists, there is a good chance a McMahon will be in control, helping direct the course of business to cheers and jeers.