Vince McMahon screamed.

It was 2 February 2001 and the man who made professional wrestling a cultural colossus stood inside a football stadium near the Las Vegas strip telling me how he was about to change sports forever. He wore a black and red bandana on his head and proclaimed his new spring football league, the XFL, would take fans to places they had never been with cameras in the locker rooms, in meetings, on the tops of players’ helmets and where every collision promised to knock your television off its shelf. Then he breathed in deep, threw back his head and bellowed:

“LET US BE THE VOYEUR!”

Let us lift the curtain, let us peek in the window. McMahon was laying a bet on that Vegas afternoon that America yearned to look inside football, to feel the crunch of a tackle and to smell the dirty socks. He was gambling on a hunch that people would watch if he could make the US’s most-popular sport less a game and more a spectacle, with nightly dramas spilling from locker rooms to fresh-laid sod at the feet of leather-clad cheerleaders. He was trying to turn mainstream sports into a reality TV show at a time when reality TV was more a concept than the norm.

The football, he said would be real. The show he was building around the game would only make it better.

One night later, the XFL bombed in its opening act. The football, it turned out, was real but not good. The first game was far drearier than the team nicknames promised, an unmemorable 19-0 victory for the Las Vegas Outlaws over the New York/New Jersey Hitmen. The titillating hint of voyeurism was blunted by the fact little happens in football locker rooms. Players sat at their lockers. They listened to music. They studied game plans. The most exciting thing they did was pull jerseys over their shoulder pads.

My best football memory of the night came an hour before the game just outside the Las Vegas locker room where one of the players, running back Rod Smart, stood dressed in his uniform. McMahon had encouraged the players to wear nicknames on their jerseys – the fiercer the better – and above the No30 on Smart’s back was printed the words: “He Hate Me.”

“Why ‘He Hate Me?’” I asked.

“Because when I hit the other guy he hate me,” Smart said smiling.

All these years later, He Hate Me is about the only thing anyone recalls of McMahon’s failed three-month venture taken on with NBC. The league was gone by May.

The farce that was the XFL came flooding back Thursday as McMahon announced a new XFL that will begin play in 2020. This XFL, he said, won’t attempt to be the voyeur. In a world where all the blinds have been drawn he is betting $100m on the idea that people have too much of a window to the inside of pro football and are hungry to focus on the game instead of a show.

McMahon says his new league has nothing to do with politics but a red-white-and-blue logo along with his insistence that players will be expected to stand for the national anthem and social justice stands suggests otherwise. Public dissent won’t be tolerated. Neither will players with criminal records. Without saying as much, McMahon – a friend of president Donald Trump – is presenting a football league for Trump America sealed with a vow to Make Football Great Again.

Two decades after gambling big on the idea that fans were tired of a despotic NFL squelching its players’ individuality, McMahon is laying an even heavier wager that fans no longer want players with a voice. Now that the players, once muffled by football’s autocratic structure, have a platform to speak about uncomfortable topics that range from police brutality to the fact they are killing their brains in a daily battle for an brown, oblong ball he is telling them to shut up, lock on their chinstraps and blast their cerebellums into gooey messes without complaint.

As with Trump’s presidential campaign McMahon was big on hazy rhetoric and short on specifics. He talked vaguely about putting his new XFL in the hands of football experts, eliminating half-time and breaks in play to shorten games from three hours to two. He said repeatedly that the football would be high-quality without indicating how this league would be any different than the handful of second-tier spring leagues that have come along, including the first XFL, only to die deaths of indifference.

The sad part about McMahon’s first XFL is that actually he had the right idea. The NFL was too manipulative, filled with Stepford players, best watched but not heard. He gave stages men like Rod Smart and begged them to be free. He pushed the use of overhead shots, on-field cameras and long extra points – all things that have been adopted by today’s NFL and improved it. His mistake came in wrapping it with wrestling, trying to create tawdry subplots and encouraging a misogynistic culture where grown men and young boys held sheets with numbers, rating cheerleaders on their level of sex appeal. That wasn’t football and America flat-out rejected it.

“Whatever comes out of this thing from a reality standpoint isn’t going too far,” he said that day in 2001.

Now that reality doesn’t fit the squares of a Trump tweetstorm he is making a red-white-and-blue football league where the players he unshackled go back into their chains again, where the only sounds are the cracking of helmets and the grinding of knees.

And where Vince McMahon tries to blow out a fire he once hoped to light.