The character he plays in the wrestling ring began to overtake the sobersided businessman again. A familiar pop-eyed look of defiance came across Vince McMahon's face. He started to pick a fight.

There should have been a shutoff switch somewhere, some little public-relations trick he'd learned long ago to help him act nice, to play to this press-conference crowd in this interview tent behind Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas last Saturday night. Then again, maybe this was the public-relations trick: Tell the press-conference crowd to kiss his 55-year-old butt in the middle of Times Square at midnight.

"Where are the questions?" he asked. "There have to be some more questions."

"This is it?" he boomed. "Somebody's got a question out there, doesn't he? Come on. Bring it. Bring it....

"You're not going to write about it without asking anything, are you?"

He sneered the way the Vince McMahon character would sneer on RAW Is WAR on a Monday night or Smackdown! on a Thursday night, sneered the way a heel—the old term for a wrestling villain—would sneer in any World Wrestling Federation production. What could these media people do to him? He had built one empire without them, and now he would build another.

Numbers against words, baby. Financial bottom line against the clever typewritten line. You didn't like what you saw? You didn't like this XFL kind of football, unveiled before a sold-out stadium and a whopping national television audience, with the newly formed Las Vegas Outlaws whipping the newly formed New York/New Jersey Hitmen 19-0? What, in particular, offended you? The cheerleaders' cleavage was too deep? The announcers' words were too coarse? The football was too...what? Numbers against words. "I've been married to him for 34 years," Linda McMahon said quietly in the back of the tent. "Vince never walks away from confrontation."

Come on. Bring it. Numbers against words. The Saturday night TV rating would be 10.3, with a 17 share—more than double the league's expectations and those of its partner, NBC. The crowds? In Vegas, 30,389. In Orlando the same night, 36,000, selling out all the available seats.

What were we supposed to do with this plastic pink flamingo that suddenly had landed on the greenest of our athletic lawns? That was the question. How were we supposed to react to this chili dog, unveiled when the waiter removed the silver cover at our reserved, linen-covered table? What were we supposed to think? Roll over, P.T. Barnum, and tell Jerry Springer the news.

There never had been a night quite like this in American sport. With the new league's marquee game played on the edge of a get-rich-quick city in a get-rich-quick era, this was the marriage of a traditional American game with good old American cheese. Should we lock the children in the storm cellar? Or should we buy season tickets for family and friends—and pick up a six-pack on the way? Hell and a handbasket and football suddenly were in the same sentence.