How Vince McMahon Almost Got Into Martial Arts

During the Something to Wrestle With Bruce Prichard that covered the 1994 Royal Rumble, Conrad and Bruce discussed a very interesting a business partnership that never became a reality.

The WWF sent out a casting call for martial artists in 1994 because they wanted to start their own weekly martial arts themed television show. Summit Media Group initially approached Vince McMahon because they wanted to create a weekly television show much akin to the WWF.

Titan Sports agreed to the idea so they went in with Summit 50% on the venture. Thus, the “World Martial Arts Federation” was born. It was scheduled to have an initial 26 episode run and cost around three to five million to produce. The show was planned to air on Saturday morning so kids could watch their favorite cartoons and pre-determined contact martial arts competitions at the same time.

Bruce says that he did the casting for the show and met with several big names in the martial arts community to appear on the show. However, the idea of a WMAF didn’t last because they couldn’t find any viable martial artists that would agree to lose in staged matches during the weekly thirty-minute battle arts show.

Bruce says that the martial artists couldn’t put their egos aside and agree to a fixed bout even with the possibility of merchandising and other sources of pay that they had never had access to before. Vince McMahon never put any real money in the product as it was more of an exploratory venture. Therefore, the show was scrapped and never came to fruition, Bruce says that it “died on the vine.”