Vince McMahon Wanted Iconic WWE Logo To Feature Balls
An incredible story has suggested Vince McMahon’s original idea for the scratch logo from WWE’s Attitude Era was to feature his own famed grapefruits.
In 1997, WWE was entering the age of Attitude as they skewed their programming and stories to a more mature audience creating some of the most fondly remembered and controversial moments in wrestling history.
With a new image came a new logo with WWE premiering what is known as the scratch logo in late 1997. Featuring the WWF lettering in a similar configuration as previous logos, the motif was finished off with a red swirl underneath but it could have been oh so different.
Speaking on Wrestling Observer Live, Mike Sempervive recalled the story he had been told about Vince McMahon’s reaction to a very bad rating led him to create a new logo featuring what every good logo that will be seen around the world needs – a pair of balls:
“Brian Solomon that wrote that sheet book who I work with on The Wrestling News, used to work for WWF Magazine and they were going through the whole change I guess, this is a story he had heard about the old block logo that WWF had.”
“Remember the legendary story about them getting such a low rating on Raw that Vince freaked out, this was a rating that they did when they were in Europe and it was a taped show that bottomed out terribly. They had a low rating, WCW had a good one and he lost it. This is what opened the door for Vince Russo to come in around that time.”
“[Vince McMahon] is upset and he’s looking at the block logo and he smashes it in front of everyone and he scribbled on a whiteboard what basically became the scratch logo that you see, the WWF logo that you saw before it became just the WW [for WWE].”
“Underneath it [McMahon] actually on the whiteboard – because he’s Vince – drew a big set of balls and when they actually came to look for ideas about the logo they did have to break it to him no Vince you can’t put the balls under the logo but what we can do is actually create a swirl. So the swirl that was underneath that logo on the original scratch logo was actually Vince’s balls.”
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