Speaker 1: Robert Evans here and we'll get to the Vince McMahon
Speaker 1: episodes in a second. I wanted to let you all
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Speaker 1: What's vincent, my McMahons, And that's great, Yeah, courageous, courageous.
Speaker 1: This is Behind the Master. It's a podcast about the
Speaker 1: worst people in all of history, and today I've got
Speaker 1: two McMahons here to talk with me about. Vince McMahon,
Speaker 1: did you did that work?
Speaker 2: Let me tell you something, brother, that's the gotten I'm
Speaker 2: showing baby from the internet.
Speaker 3: Good news, Sean baby, we will be talking about Hulk
Speaker 3: Cogan today.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: Hm, let me tell you some dude.
Speaker 2: My name's Tom Rayman. Mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: And do you do you both have a lump of
Speaker 1: scar tissue in your asses from injecting steroids the size
Speaker 1: of a softball.
Speaker 2: I do, and several on my forehead from cutting it
Speaker 2: up with raisin lights.
Speaker 3: Oh you know a brother. Yeah, yeah, my forehead looks
Speaker 3: like a grotesque topocryphal map that looks like a look
Speaker 3: Abdul of the butcher.
Speaker 1: We call that the hulkster. When you can, when you
Speaker 1: can read, and braille on my forehead scars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you might not be, brother. No one knows about it.
Speaker 1: Uh, Terry Terry bolea Hulk's real name.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: When I was a little little kid, you know, before
Speaker 1: I made my friend and in the Attitude era, I
Speaker 1: was not a fan of wrestling because I don't think
Speaker 1: we got any of the channels that it was on.
Speaker 1: But I loved Hull Cogan because I would watch almost
Speaker 1: every single day when I was like sitting in the
Speaker 1: back room of the donut shop where my parents worked.
Speaker 1: The movie Suburban Commando, of course, hell yeah, absolutely a
Speaker 1: fucking legendary.
Speaker 3: I have long stretches of that movie memorized.
Speaker 1: Hule Cogan. So we are back for part three. We're
Speaker 1: talking about Vince Senior still because he is still the
Speaker 1: one running the wrestling business. When we left off, Vince
Speaker 1: Junior had just started using the name Vince McMahon as
Speaker 1: he got sent to a military school, possibly for being
Speaker 1: too racist to be in an integrated high school, but
Speaker 1: it's unclear.
Speaker 2: He's so more likely than him beating up a kuma
Speaker 2: te full of marines.
Speaker 3: Yes, that is probably true. You have to separate him
Speaker 3: from the general population. After that, he's far too damy
Speaker 3: interest So Vince was well regarded. Vince Senior was well regarded,
Speaker 3: as I said, in the national wrestling business. His company
Speaker 3: was an affiliate of the NWA, the big wrestling organizer
Speaker 3: union that ran most of the country, but he wasn't
Speaker 3: a member at first, and when he became one, he
Speaker 3: very quickly fell behind on his dues and threatened to resign.
Speaker 3: He seems to have understood the value of such an organization,
Speaker 3: but disliked the fact that being a member of it
Speaker 3: would mean he had to inevitably seed some of his
Speaker 3: control over how storylines of his wrestlers proceeded. Vince Senior
Speaker 3: was also different from most of the other promoters and
Speaker 3: owners across the country. While while his competitors generally booked
Speaker 3: technical wrestlers above all else, guys who were really good
Speaker 3: at kind of the choreography of ringwork, Vince Senior grew
Speaker 3: increasingly obsessed with bringing in giant, muscle bound monsters and
Speaker 3: was willing to sacrifice ring skill for having the absolute
Speaker 3: biggest dudes that he could hire. Now, this actually worked
Speaker 3: out really well for everyone for a while, because by
Speaker 3: this point the government had slapped the wrestling industry with
Speaker 3: some anti trust regulations, which meant that owners had to
Speaker 3: let their play their wrestlers travel around the country more
Speaker 3: or less at will. This was great for everybody because
Speaker 3: it means that audiences got a lot of choice and variety,
Speaker 3: and even the whims of a guy like Vince Senior
Speaker 3: couldn't exercise total control even in the region.
Speaker 2: That he owned.
Speaker 1: So Vince preferred to hire muscle bound, giant guys, and
Speaker 1: because they got to start with him, those giant muscle
Speaker 1: freaks would get to travel around the country and wrestle
Speaker 1: at other places. But also Vince would have to hire
Speaker 1: people who came in from other regions of the country,
Speaker 1: so he got a lot of technical wrestlers. It worked
Speaker 1: out really well for people who like to watch wrestling, right,
Speaker 1: You got a lot of variety in the kind of
Speaker 1: people who were, you know, taking part in wrestling matches.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty two, Vince Senior wanted to keep the
Speaker 1: National Championship belt on his champion, nature Boy Buddy Rogers.
Speaker 1: And I believe Rick Flair also gets called nature boy later, right,
Speaker 1: isn't that he sure does? Yeah, yeah, he's sure. There's
Speaker 1: a couple of nature boys in wrestling history, is what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. At this point, nature Boy Buddy Rogers, who's
Speaker 1: Vince Senior's wrestler. He wants to keep the belt on him,
Speaker 1: but the cartel, the NWA, has other plans. And there's
Speaker 1: this big dispute between the cartel, who's like, we want
Speaker 1: to give this to Luthez, you know, who's their big wrestler,
Speaker 1: and Vince Senior, who's like, no, I want to keep
Speaker 1: the belt on my guy. And this argument between the
Speaker 1: NWA and between Vince Senior's kind of wrestling syndicate actually
Speaker 1: puts the future of Kfabe at risk. For a while,
Speaker 1: there was a fear that Capital Wrestling, Vince Senior's company,
Speaker 1: might take the belt so that they could keep it
Speaker 1: on Buddy Rogers and leave the NWA, putting belief in
Speaker 1: the reality behind established KFA to risk. Right, If like
Speaker 1: he's able to just like leave the NWA and keep
Speaker 1: the belt, then it means that wrestling's not really a sport.
Speaker 1: So eventually they came to an agreement to kind of
Speaker 1: rescue Kfabe that Rogers would in fact lose to luth
Speaker 1: As after all. But the next year, Vince Senior and
Speaker 1: Toots Mom, who's his business partner at this point, decided
Speaker 1: to leave anyway and launch an independent wrestling federation of
Speaker 1: their own. They call it the WWWF or Worldwide Wrestling Federation.
Speaker 1: That eventually dropped one of the w's, giving us the
Speaker 1: WWF that most people listening grew up with. It's called
Speaker 1: the WWE now, but we're just going to call it
Speaker 1: the WWF for our purposes today. While all this was
Speaker 1: going on, Vince was acclimating to military school and the
Speaker 1: departure of his stepfather, Leo, who bounced and got divorced
Speaker 1: from Vincent Vince's mom around the same time. She got
Speaker 1: remarried to some other dude about a half year later,
Speaker 1: But this doesn't seem to have impacted Vince as much.
Speaker 2: He was old enough.
Speaker 1: Now he's spending all his time with his biological father,
Speaker 1: and to his credit, Vince Senior seems to have legitimately
Speaker 1: committed to being a part of Vincent's life, even though
Speaker 1: he never kind of got over his awkwardness with his son,
Speaker 1: who he doesn't really seem to have fully understood. It's
Speaker 1: worth noting that four years later, in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: Leo Lupton would marry Vince's cousin, the young kid he
Speaker 1: put leaves in in his early childhood. He was twenty
Speaker 1: eight years older than her. So that's oh, that's good.
Speaker 1: That's good.
Speaker 3: That's like the four d Chess of Troubling.
Speaker 1: But they marry in Florida, so at least this one's
Speaker 1: not on North Carolina, so hey, you know, that's good.
Speaker 2: He didn't even have to tell us that. I knew
Speaker 2: from the story where they got married.
Speaker 3: I assume most of these stories take place in Florida
Speaker 3: because it's pro wrestling.
Speaker 1: It is prominent in nearly every wrestler's life.
Speaker 2: Those dry Florida leaves. When you're stuffing leaves into your bride.
Speaker 2: You're twenty eight years younger cousin Brian and details the story.
Speaker 3: It's fine anyway, every one of those details is significant.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen sixty two, eleventh grade, Vince tried his
Speaker 1: first attempt at becoming a wrestling promoter. Now he's in
Speaker 1: military school. At this point, he's become pretty muscular. You know,
Speaker 1: he's working out with the weight set that uh doctor
Speaker 1: Graham gave him, and he's you know, he's done some football.
Speaker 1: He's an OK defensive tackle. But he doesn't really like
Speaker 1: actual competition sports. He doesn't seem to like super engage
Speaker 1: with him. Wrestling is what his bio dad did, and
Speaker 1: so wrestling is what Vincent Junior loved. He decided to
Speaker 1: create a youth copy of his dad's league at Fishbourne
Speaker 1: Military School. Now Vince McMahon's first shows were carried out
Speaker 1: in a high school gym after hours, and included the
Speaker 1: costumes and ring stunts that were already such a part
Speaker 1: of the past. Time Vince wrestled himself as ape Man McMahon.
Speaker 1: One friend at the time explained that's not a bad
Speaker 1: name to be honest, like solid wrestling name.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's you know you. You you graduate from that,
Speaker 3: you evolve, But it's not bad for a first first try.
Speaker 1: As a high school wrestling starting point, perfectly acceptable.
Speaker 2: You become.
Speaker 3: Some of the people listening think Gorilla Monsoon's a joke
Speaker 3: that you came up with.
Speaker 2: He is not. That's a real guy.
Speaker 1: That is an absolute real guy. One friend at the
Speaker 1: time explained he was just into dress up, putting on
Speaker 1: masks or something, and he would wrestle just to have fun.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people would participate, sometimes they just come watch Vince
Speaker 1: was Vince.
Speaker 2: He loves the first part LF.
Speaker 1: He's just choking, pop gouging his own eyes out, throat
Speaker 1: punching himself.
Speaker 3: This is what I did to those Marines.
Speaker 2: They coming. This is I have to say.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's actually really interesting about Vince McMahon.
Speaker 1: He is a cutthroat businessman. He is like, uh it
Speaker 1: does a lot of terrible things in the name of prophets.
Speaker 1: But he's also not one of those bloodless weirdos who
Speaker 1: just lives to soak money out of wrestling. Like he
Speaker 1: loves to wrestle like he becomes a very prominent in
Speaker 1: ring character because he just can't stop himself from being
Speaker 1: like physically an.
Speaker 2: Involved with it.
Speaker 1: A lot of people argue he ruined wrestling, and there's
Speaker 1: certainly a case to be made there, but you can't
Speaker 1: really argue he's not like enthralled by everything that is
Speaker 1: involved in in pro wrestling, Like this is an obsession
Speaker 1: for him and it kind of always has been. Kids
Speaker 1: who wrestled with him would later talk about his strut,
Speaker 1: like the strut with which he walked into the ring,
Speaker 1: which you can still see in like videos of him
Speaker 1: from the nineties and early two thousands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can.
Speaker 1: They describe him as walking like baby Hueye and it
Speaker 1: would still be part of his ring presence half a
Speaker 1: century later. That is a great way to describe the
Speaker 1: way he walks, like one of the kids from Ductails.
Speaker 3: It really sits well. Baby Hughey's a different character. Oh bough,
Speaker 3: we're not talking about Huey Dewey and Louis no. Oh okay,
Speaker 3: but maybe Baby Hughey is the great big one.
Speaker 1: I don't know who that is. See, this is this
Speaker 1: is me learning something. I'm going to google it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: google it. Google baby.
Speaker 2: I assume this was this was a duck. Oh oh,
Speaker 2: oh my god.
Speaker 1: Okay, no, I do know this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the gigantic weird baby duck. Yes, okay, that also works. Look,
Speaker 1: both of these work, is what I'm saying. Cartoon cartoon
Speaker 1: duck generally a good thing to compare to Vince McMahon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: has never been a more apt comparison.
Speaker 2: No. Interesting.
Speaker 1: So wrestling was not the only kind of performing that
Speaker 1: teen Vince was into, as Josie Reisman found when she
Speaker 1: interviewed his friend Dutch for her book Quote, we would
Speaker 1: go over to Fairfax Hall, the girls school across town,
Speaker 1: and he would put on a healing show over there.
Speaker 1: He had a fellow named Dutch Lindsay Charles Lindsay. Dutch
Speaker 1: was kind of short, stocky guy, and he'd grabbed Dutch
Speaker 1: by the head and he'd do this healing routine and
Speaker 1: Dutch would fall to the ground and Vince would heal him.
Speaker 1: What the book, I did not call medicine shows being
Speaker 1: part of his early life when I started doing this,
Speaker 1: but uh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, neither did I.
Speaker 2: But of course, yeah, absolutely, Scance. I love that it's
Speaker 2: a girls school. So there's this implied motivation that that
Speaker 2: he was doing it to get laid. He's like, you
Speaker 2: know what ladies love. Yeah, well that's interesting.
Speaker 1: That's interesting trying to see because and this is something
Speaker 1: that the when Josie talks to other kids at the
Speaker 1: military school, they'd bring up is that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: we're men in a military school, our access to women
Speaker 1: who are our age was very strictly curtailed at this point, right,
Speaker 1: So these performances at the women's school was kind of
Speaker 1: like one of our few chances to mingle with with other,
Speaker 1: you know, girls who were kind of in our same
Speaker 1: age group. But Vincent doesn't seem to have been into this.
Speaker 1: He is at this point in love with the woman
Speaker 1: who will become his wife, Linda McMahon.
Speaker 2: Uh. I can already see the scene where she's like
Speaker 2: watching from her dorm window of this this maniac and
Speaker 2: the parking lot, like healing his friend from a wheelchair
Speaker 2: and thinking, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna murder that man
Speaker 2: one day, and then.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna somehow become a member of Donald Trump's White House.
Speaker 2: My god.
Speaker 3: So they had very specific dreams.
Speaker 1: Yeah, friends, recall that he talked about Linda constantly, even
Speaker 1: though he generally didn't talk about girls, Wrestling was pretty
Speaker 1: much all Vince chatted about, like they thought. They noted
Speaker 1: that he talked about Linda and that it was kind
Speaker 1: of weird because he otherwise did not seem to notice
Speaker 1: that female people existed.
Speaker 3: Maybe she had a real crisp.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 3: She plants your head in a canvas like something you've
Speaker 3: never seen.
Speaker 1: Now, as we have come to expect, always keeps a
Speaker 1: razor blade in her palm, now, as we've come to
Speaker 1: expect from our boy adult. Vince would later claim to
Speaker 1: have been a bed dude at school, constantly in trouble,
Speaker 1: in committing crimes. I wasn't caught for some stuff that
Speaker 1: would have been immediate dismissal, like stealing the commandant's car.
Speaker 1: He also had a dog he was nuts about. I
Speaker 1: love animals, but one day I couldn't resist giving that
Speaker 1: dog a laxative. With the laxative and some hamburger, and
Speaker 1: the dog did his business all over the commandant's apartment,
Speaker 1: which thrilled me greatly.
Speaker 3: Now it thrilled me greatly. Yeah, when no, he absolutely did.
Speaker 3: When did he When did he give this interview? Oh?
Speaker 3: This was decades later. So it's in like the nineties, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: at the eighties ninety, I think, not like the eighteen.
Speaker 3: He chose to describe giving a dog a lax to
Speaker 3: ship all over a guy's apartment was it was quite thrilling.
Speaker 2: We got crazy friends on her head. We make a
Speaker 2: girl with a.
Speaker 3: Computer, our friend Bluto. You should have seen the one
Speaker 3: in That guy could rain a whole handle at once. Anyway,
Speaker 3: it killed me greatly.
Speaker 1: It is also interesting to me we're focusing on the
Speaker 1: even weirder things that he wants us to believe about him.
Speaker 1: But he really wants us to think he stole a
Speaker 1: lot of cars. And that's that's such a strange thing
Speaker 1: to what people. It's it's okay, man. He claims that
Speaker 1: he was the first student to be court martialed at
Speaker 1: Fishburne over depending on the interview, either in subordination or
Speaker 1: a threat he made that he might somehow sabotage sabotage
Speaker 1: finals week again sabotage, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Threat of a bomb threat is what he's claiming.
Speaker 1: I think it was more like a prank. Okay, but
Speaker 1: but yeah, this is like and he like. So he
Speaker 1: says that basically the administration thought I was gonna sabotage
Speaker 1: Finals week. So they court martialed me and they were
Speaker 1: gonna kick me out, But then all of the other
Speaker 1: students and teachers rose up and like threatened to leave
Speaker 1: the school if they didn't clear me of all charges.
Speaker 1: Like there was a rebellion. No, absolutely, none of they didn't.
Speaker 1: Fucking Dead Poet Society, for as you.
Speaker 2: Are accused of threatening to shut down the entire finals
Speaker 2: week with your pranks. What's this clapping? Everyone is in
Speaker 2: support of you, captain.
Speaker 3: My captain.
Speaker 2: Has a feed a dog laxative. I know this is
Speaker 2: you the dumbest ship.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he wants to believe it was Dead Poet Society
Speaker 3: but also Animal House.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and yeah it's it's it's very funny. He is
Speaker 1: such a liar. So Fishburne the school has like Josie
Speaker 1: Riseman again, the author of Ringmaster, Uh talked to a
Speaker 1: bunch of his former classmates at fishburn and none of
Speaker 1: them recall any of this happening. She also like reached
Speaker 1: out to Fishbourne and was like you, he says, you
Speaker 1: court martialed him. You guys keep records. Do you have
Speaker 1: any records that he was ever court martialed? Uh, they
Speaker 1: did not have any records, and Vince has never presented any. Instead,
Speaker 1: interviews with his peers portray him as a decent student
Speaker 1: who simply wasn't a great student because he wasn't that
Speaker 1: interested in school. Right. He was one of those kids
Speaker 1: who was like, he was smart, so he could do
Speaker 1: okay if he didn't work too hard at class, and
Speaker 1: so he devoted you know, he kind of scraped by
Speaker 1: and spent most of his time on wrestling. Right that,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that kind of dude is actually pretty familiar
Speaker 1: to our listeners, right, Like, that describes me without It
Speaker 1: wasn't wrestling for me, but that describes me in high
Speaker 1: school pretty well. Yeah, So once again Vince lied to
Speaker 1: make himself look like a badass. The reality is that
Speaker 1: he was a nerd. He was a wrestling nerd, and
Speaker 1: he was more jacked than we tend to associate with
Speaker 1: that term. But like most nerds, he kind of did
Speaker 1: what he had to at school, avoided trouble, and spent
Speaker 1: all of his free time on the stuff he was
Speaker 1: obsessed with. Right Like, for me, this was Warhammer, but
Speaker 1: it's the same pattern. Yeah, he graduated and he got
Speaker 1: into college at East Carolina University. Around the same time,
Speaker 1: his dad took on a new championship wrestler, a guy
Speaker 1: named Bruno. Semartino still regarded today as maybe the greatest
Speaker 1: pro wrestler of all time, although there's a couple of
Speaker 1: people who folks wind up throwing out in that category.
Speaker 1: Bruno conversation, he's in the conversation, right. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: a obviously, he's huge, and he was an extremely skilled
Speaker 1: technical wrestler. Bruno was also the kind of person who
Speaker 1: trained like a world class athlete, and as a result
Speaker 1: of how careful he was about his training, he was
Speaker 1: able to remain a high skill technical performer for more
Speaker 1: than thirty years, which is a lot of longevity, especially
Speaker 1: for this period of time in pro wrestling. With Bruno,
Speaker 1: Vince Senior pioneered a strategy totally new to the field.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote now from a book called
Speaker 1: Death of the Territories by Tim Hornbaker. The central idea
Speaker 1: was to build up a succession of threatening challengers for Sammartino,
Speaker 1: and Bruno would show his vulnerability in near defeats, only
Speaker 1: to rise up in the to conquer his opponents. His
Speaker 1: performance never failed to capture the imagination of audiences. Among
Speaker 1: his villainous rivals were a three hundred and fifty pound
Speaker 1: Guerrilla Monsoon, the six foot five Bill Miller, and the
Speaker 1: six foot three, two hundred and seventy five pound Bill Watts.
Speaker 1: As Semmartino worked through one feud, McMahon pushed several other
Speaker 1: prominent challengers at the same time to keep the cycle
Speaker 1: going all over the circuit. Now, while this is all
Speaker 1: going on in the wrestling world, you know, Linda graduates
Speaker 1: high school about a year after Vince, and the two
Speaker 1: of them get married when they're both in college in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six, which is, interestingly enough, the same year
Speaker 1: that Leo marries Vince's cousin. Linda joins him at ECU,
Speaker 1: and because she's an excellent student, she qualifies for an
Speaker 1: accelerated program in French, which is I wouldn't have called
Speaker 1: as Linda McMahon's focus in college, but there you go.
Speaker 1: They graduated in nineteen sixty nine, which is the same
Speaker 1: year that she got pregnant. Now, Vince tell another possible
Speaker 1: lie about his time in college. He claims that his
Speaker 1: grades there were so low because he was spending so
Speaker 1: much time fighting. I guess that he had to talk
Speaker 1: several professors into bumping his grades so he could get
Speaker 1: a two point zero zero one and graduate.
Speaker 3: I was just so tough, I kept punching my books.
Speaker 1: Now, I will say, of all of the things he's
Speaker 1: told us that might be lies, I think this one
Speaker 1: might be true because this relies on him being good
Speaker 1: at like manipulating people, and that is his actual skill. Yes,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I could see him manipulating his teachers to
Speaker 1: giving him a passing grade. I'm not gonna say that
Speaker 1: one's definitely fake. The year after he left college, Vince
Speaker 1: got a job working for his father at the then WWWF.
Speaker 1: He'd initially wanted to be a wrestler, but again, his
Speaker 1: dad sees what happens to wrestlers when they age, right, Like,
Speaker 1: he knows that this is a job that kills you,
Speaker 1: and he's like, the fuck no, you are not going
Speaker 1: to do this for a living. And yeah, at the
Speaker 1: start of the nineteen seventies, though, Vin Junior joins his
Speaker 1: dad's company anyway, and at this point kind of the
Speaker 1: WWF's territory had eleven states, basically the whole Northeast in
Speaker 1: pieces of the Virginias and Ohio, it's the largest wrestling
Speaker 1: federation at the time, but it's also very much.
Speaker 2: Integrated with the others. Right.
Speaker 1: The heads of the different syndicates would change sometimes, but
Speaker 1: the actual territory wouldn't because everything was kind of spoken for.
Speaker 1: So nobody can really expand without somebody else losing some ground.
Speaker 1: And for you know, all of the that he is
Speaker 1: a pretty cutthroat businessman, Vince Senior was one of these
Speaker 1: guys who's like, look, these other people are my peers,
Speaker 1: these other owners of syndicates, and we have a handshake deal, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to fuck too mouthy. You'll help, I'll
Speaker 1: fuck around a little bit sometimes to get an advantage,
Speaker 1: but I'm not going to fuck with the overall system
Speaker 1: too much, you know. Yeah, So at the very beginning
Speaker 1: of his career, Vince found a place for himself as
Speaker 1: a referee. Now, in this stage, wrestling refs were legitimate
Speaker 1: sports referees. They were licensed by the states, and they
Speaker 1: had to have specific trade in order to do the job.
Speaker 1: This is again wrestling is not an actual sport still
Speaker 1: at this point, but the referees do all of but
Speaker 1: they're lying about that, right, Like wrestler, like the company promoters,
Speaker 1: everybody pretends it is a real sport, and so the
Speaker 1: government's like, well, then you have to have actual reps, right, like,
Speaker 1: you know, like we'll go along with it, We'll go
Speaker 1: along with this, but you got to do the thing
Speaker 1: other sports do. We can't just like pretend that you're
Speaker 1: a real sport but be like for no reason, they're
Speaker 1: exempt from all the rules right now.
Speaker 3: Obviously, so all eventually becomes the whole thing behind sports entertainment, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, which we will. That will be a
Speaker 1: major focus of part four. So the main job of
Speaker 1: reps at this point is to act as storytellers, right
Speaker 1: they kind of Honestly, there's a lot of similarities between
Speaker 1: wrestling and dungeons and dragons. The reps in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways are kind of acting like dms, right, They're
Speaker 1: making it clear when someone's won or lost. Sometimes when
Speaker 1: you have to, like you know, somebody gets out of
Speaker 1: pocket and they're not willing to like actually take a
Speaker 1: fall when they're sppos to take a fall, you find
Speaker 1: ways to like deque them or call the match for
Speaker 1: the other guy in order to make sure things still
Speaker 1: in the way that they need to. The ref has
Speaker 1: actually a lot of power, and so do the announcers.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the two of them together are helping
Speaker 1: to sort of tell the story to the audience of
Speaker 1: what's happening in the ring, right, And it's also part
Speaker 1: of their job and part of the announcer's job what
Speaker 1: Vince Junior is doing to sell what's happening to the audience.
Speaker 1: So maybe sometimes you've got like a wrestler who's not
Speaker 1: as technically skilled, or just somebody's off and a hit
Speaker 1: doesn't really, you know, land the way that it should have.
Speaker 1: It's your job to kind of hype that hit up
Speaker 1: so that the audience, you know, gets carried along in
Speaker 1: the enthusiasm and doesn't notice.
Speaker 3: One of the funniest things clips you can watch on
Speaker 3: YouTube are blown spots like that where somebody misses like
Speaker 3: a drop kick or a hole doesn't go right, or
Speaker 3: they screw up a special move and listening to the
Speaker 3: announcers trying to sell what happened as if they didn't
Speaker 3: just fuck up. Yeah, it's an incredible genre of YouTube video.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, yeah, and it is interesting, Like the
Speaker 1: more I get into it, the more I understand why,
Speaker 1: Like all of the kids that I played Dungeons and
Speaker 1: Dragons with when I was twelve were into pro wrestling.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, I get I actually and this makes
Speaker 1: complete sense. These are extremely similar in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It's just a lot of it is.
Speaker 1: Make believe in choreography and kind of the high fantasy,
Speaker 1: a weird kind of fantasy storytelling.
Speaker 2: I love the theatrics of when the referee like tells,
Speaker 2: like in a tag team match, he'll like tell the
Speaker 2: good guy tag team member like, hey, just turn and
Speaker 2: start yelling at him for no reason, and then the
Speaker 2: bad guy tag team guys will like beat out of
Speaker 2: the other guy, and then he turns around and he
Speaker 2: has to act like what happened to you? I just
Speaker 2: love that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So object permanence?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, you know who else has no object permanence?
Speaker 3: I love where this is going. Yeah, the sponsors.
Speaker 1: Look, we have one simple rule for the sponsors of
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, and it's that none of them can
Speaker 1: be above the age where they understand object permanence. Every
Speaker 1: one of our sponsors. The one guarantee I'll make is
Speaker 1: that if you put your hands over their eyes, they
Speaker 1: will freak out because they don't know that you haven't
Speaker 1: just disappeared from existence.
Speaker 3: Support these babies and goldfish.
Speaker 2: I guess yes, goldfish as well.
Speaker 1: We do take a lot of money from the goldfish
Speaker 1: industrial car from.
Speaker 2: Big gold Big goldfish.
Speaker 1: They can't get quite large if you keep feed them, Tom,
Speaker 1: It's all about the size of the bowl. Same is
Speaker 1: true of wrestlers.
Speaker 2: Actually, all right, ah, we're back, yeah, brother. So in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Seventy two, Vince Junior starts working as a referee. Now
Speaker 1: there's nothing that Vince McMahon hates more than being called
Speaker 1: Vince junior. And it is true, he's not a junior, right,
Speaker 1: he and his dad have different names, Like, they're not
Speaker 1: actually Vince Senior and Vince Junior. But because they are
Speaker 1: both a Vince McMahon, everyone they worked with at the time,
Speaker 1: and this I get this from Tim Hornbaker's book, everyone
Speaker 1: they worked with at the time in the wrestling world
Speaker 1: just called them Vince Senior and Vince Junior because, like
Speaker 1: I found out writing this podcast, that's just the easiest
Speaker 1: way to talk about the both of them. Because anyway,
Speaker 1: NS Slayer was not sticking as an Yeah Marin Slayer, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that doesn't work as well. Anyway, Vince McMahon hates it
Speaker 1: when you call him Vince Junior. So the job Vince
Speaker 1: Junior took previous had previously been done like this, This
Speaker 1: announce or referee, you know, announcer job that he gets, sorry,
Speaker 1: this announcer job that he gets had previously been done
Speaker 1: by a renowned sports broadcaster named Ray Morgan. He was
Speaker 1: a very good announcer, but he was also a union man,
Speaker 1: and both Vince McMahon's hated unions, so one to have that,
Speaker 1: you can't have that. So there's a couple versions of
Speaker 1: the story. One of them is that one day Vince's
Speaker 1: backstage with his dad in Hamburg, Pennsylvania one night and
Speaker 1: he sees his dad having this really mean, nasty argument
Speaker 1: with Ray Morgan over the fact that Ray wants a raise.
Speaker 1: Ray is like, I'm not going out and announcing tonight
Speaker 1: unless I get a raise, and Vince Senior's like, fuck you,
Speaker 1: then you're fired. Vince Junior then later claims, quote, I'm
Speaker 1: sitting in this cloakroom and I'm saying to myself, Wow,
Speaker 1: that was awesome. I was just proud to be there
Speaker 1: and listen to all that, and proud of my dad
Speaker 1: proud of the fact that he told this guy to
Speaker 1: take uh and so you know, his dad gives him
Speaker 1: the job to because he'd fired this guy for you know,
Speaker 1: trying to trying to get a raise. Now that's the
Speaker 1: Vince McMahon version of the story. Josie Riiseman's research includes
Speaker 1: uncovering arbitration documents from a separate legal case at around
Speaker 1: the same time before you, I just want to say
Speaker 1: real quick that my prediction is that those things happen.
Speaker 1: It is just not on the same night. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: actually Tom. You you have gotten it completely right. That
Speaker 1: is literally what I'm about to say. So he was
Speaker 1: not masturbating in the closet. Finds somebody well that I didn't.
Speaker 1: I never said that. I never said that, Sean. So
Speaker 1: basically what happens, based on these arbitration documents is that
Speaker 1: Morgan had previously negotiated a pay raise and Vince Senior
Speaker 1: had agreed to give him a pay raise, and after
Speaker 1: they have the face to face meeting where he agrees
Speaker 1: to a new contract in a pay raise, he fired
Speaker 1: Morgan like when they're no longer in a room together.
Speaker 1: So he doesn't have like the guts to get up
Speaker 1: in front of him and tell him he's fired. He
Speaker 1: pretends to agree to a raise to avoid a conflict,
Speaker 1: and then fires him later, and then he hires his
Speaker 1: son for the same rate that Morgan had just signed at. Now, basically,
Speaker 1: he's doing this to be like, hey, anybody who tries
Speaker 1: to like argue for a better stake, like, fuck you.
Speaker 1: It's not about the money to me, it's about winning. Right.
Speaker 1: If you get a raise, that means you beat me
Speaker 1: and I won't be beat son gets your job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my fucking kid gets your job. Now again, this is
Speaker 1: a little confusing. This story is a little confusing if
Speaker 1: you kind of buy all these recollections of Vince Senior
Speaker 1: that you get from other wrestlers that talk about how
Speaker 1: honest he was, and it is true, you can find
Speaker 1: a lot of positive accounts of Vince Senior as a
Speaker 1: boss from wrestlers from this era, and in fact, some
Speaker 1: of these accounts sort of verge on adoration, but that
Speaker 1: affection to.
Speaker 2: The degree that it was going to remember not everyone's
Speaker 2: an asshole all the time, exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: And it's also there's a lot of dudes that love
Speaker 3: Vince McMahon. Yeah, yeah, because he's nice to them in person.
Speaker 3: And that's what That's what Jesse the Body Ventura said that, like,
Speaker 3: you would always feel good after a talk with Vince,
Speaker 3: but you wouldn't get a dime, you know, And it's
Speaker 3: what's I think. It does seem to me that the
Speaker 3: affection a lot of his wrestlers had for him was honest,
Speaker 3: but it was not reciprocated by Vince Senior. Any warmth
Speaker 3: he showed his employees was k fabe right. And here's
Speaker 3: the book Ring Master describing a conversation between ex wrestler
Speaker 3: JJ Dillon and Vince Junior. Vince the Younger told Dylan
Speaker 3: about a conversation he'd had with Vince Senior. The father's wisdom,
Speaker 3: as imparted to the son, was wrestlers are like seagulls.
Speaker 3: All they do is shit, eat and squawk all day.
Speaker 3: Dylan was taken aback and never forgot it, even went
Speaker 3: so far as to name his memoir wrestlers are like seagulls.
Speaker 3: From McMahon to McMahon. That gave an insight there and
Speaker 3: how his father truly felt deep inside, Dylan says, though
Speaker 3: he never spoke openly that way, And yeah, I think
Speaker 3: that's interesting, accurate. Probably seems like Dylan's got his number. Now.
Speaker 1: The fact that Vince Senior gives Vince Junior this job
Speaker 1: is probably the most obvious example of nepotism that he shows.
Speaker 2: His son.
Speaker 1: Junior was expected to run himself ragged, though, driving across
Speaker 1: the country to call shows from Maine to Georgia. He
Speaker 1: kind of breaks into the business really because his dad
Speaker 1: gives him this impossible task of like bringing up numbers
Speaker 1: in Maine, and he's good at it. He's able to
Speaker 1: actually promote, he gets more people coming in, so he's
Speaker 1: he's not paid an enormous amount of money, Like I think,
Speaker 1: it's a reasonably comfortable living once he really gets in there.
Speaker 1: But his dad also he's not grooming his air, right
Speaker 1: he does. Vince is not going to inherit the business,
Speaker 1: and his dad is like open with him that, like,
Speaker 1: no nobody, I am not giving the business to you.
Speaker 1: He's not, in fact going to give the business to anybody. So,
Speaker 1: in order to prove himself, Vince Junior decided that, like,
Speaker 1: while he's sort of building his career as a wrestling promoter,
Speaker 1: he's going to try and get independently wealthy by engaging
Speaker 1: in a series of business schemes with his wife Linda.
Speaker 1: Uh So, the first thing they do is they buy
Speaker 1: an old cement plant and a horse farm to try
Speaker 1: to make money both of the stilling.
Speaker 2: Horse guy.
Speaker 3: You know you've heard that phrase. They go together like
Speaker 3: cement in horses. Right, you got horse in my cement.
Speaker 3: You got cement in my horses? Ohing, dip your horse
Speaker 3: and cementas delicious.
Speaker 1: Everyone loves a good cement horse. So Vince is heavily
Speaker 1: reliant on Linda as his money manager while they attempt to,
Speaker 1: you know, remain solvent. But even this early in their relationship,
Speaker 1: he cheated with enough regularity that his friends warned him
Speaker 1: about it. The genital just was, Vince, this woman is
Speaker 1: way too good for you. Why are you being an
Speaker 1: asshole like this? And you have to assume the kind
Speaker 1: of people that Vince McMahon has at friends at this point.
Speaker 1: For them to be like, you're not treating your wife right,
Speaker 1: You've got to be really cheating, outrageous. You gotta be cheating,
Speaker 1: like Olympic grade cheating. So, because Vince, you gotta be
Speaker 1: fucking women in the next room. Yeah, it's gotta be bad.
Speaker 1: It's gotta be like guys in North Carolina in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies go, I don't think this guy respects women
Speaker 1: like that. So Vince Junior is not set to inherit
Speaker 1: the WWF outright, And so again he's going to Ultimately
Speaker 1: he's going to pay his father for the business. He's
Speaker 1: often tried to describe this, the fact that his dad
Speaker 1: made him pay for the WWF. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: a a kind of like ode to self reliance, right,
Speaker 1: But the truth is that he did still get a
Speaker 1: lot of help from his father. In nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: Vince Senior got his son an unpaid gig with a
Speaker 1: boxing promoter top rank that was meant to teach him
Speaker 1: the ropes of the industry. Less than a week into
Speaker 1: this job, Vince went to his boss and said, quote,
Speaker 1: I've got this great idea. I know a guy who's
Speaker 1: been jumping over trucks with a motorcycle evil caneval and
Speaker 1: now he wants to with a space rocket jump over
Speaker 1: the Snake River Canyon.
Speaker 2: Now did really well, thank.
Speaker 1: You if you're a young aue.
Speaker 3: He didn't quite make it. He didn't quite.
Speaker 2: Make it right.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess most of our gen z ers don't
Speaker 1: remember Evil Knievel. If you've ever watched the Simpsons episode
Speaker 1: where Homer all down that canyon twice, the stunt man
Speaker 1: in the beginning of the episode is based on Evil Caniebl.
Speaker 1: Evil was a famous stunt man who jumped things and
Speaker 1: occasionally got badly hurt.
Speaker 3: Right real quick, I want to point out, Robert that
Speaker 3: you're touchstone for people who are too young to remember
Speaker 3: Evil Caniebl is a thirty three year old Simpsons The
Speaker 3: good Simpsons episodes are eternal, Tom, they never died, they
Speaker 3: never die.
Speaker 1: Still a touchstone to kids. I have to believe that, Tom,
Speaker 1: I have nothing else. Sure, it's it's I showed Garrison
Speaker 1: Starship Troopers the other week. All of all of the
Speaker 1: the icons of my childhood are have died and faded.
Speaker 1: It's it's tragic. I never thought it would happen to me.
Speaker 1: I thought, uh no, I thought those movies would be forever.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: Evil Canel, famous stunt man, jumped things, occasionally hurt himself
Speaker 1: at the day. I remember it was a little kid
Speaker 1: knowing about Evil Knievel and like my cousins and I
Speaker 1: like he was this kind of like superhero figure to us.
Speaker 1: But the reality is he was a giant piece of shit.
Speaker 2: He was going to make that at jumping motorcycles as well, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: he was not good at any other Like more modern
Speaker 2: motorcycle jumpers talk about him, they don't talk about like
Speaker 2: his technique. He just got off Harley and just held
Speaker 2: the throttle down, did not pitch that motorcycle.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: He was generally thought he would die, like he just
Speaker 2: had balls to he didn't care if he lived. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's like whatever if I die, fuck it cool.
Speaker 3: He's just Johnny Knoxville, like, yeah, forty years earlier, without
Speaker 3: a sense of humor or charm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or skill or any of the things.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's Yeah.
Speaker 1: Honestly, I think like fifty percent of his appeal was
Speaker 1: the fact that Evil canebl is a pretty cool name
Speaker 1: for a stunt man.
Speaker 4: You might see a man die, Yeah, there's that was
Speaker 4: the big appeal to all of his stunts is that, like,
Speaker 4: there's pretty good chance he doesn't live through this, so obviously.
Speaker 3: It won't be a gentle death. I know.
Speaker 1: No, you will watch a man come apart on landing
Speaker 1: crash dummy. So you know, he was a giant bigot.
Speaker 1: He was very sexist. He was There are allegations at
Speaker 1: least that he was abusive to his children, but Vince
Speaker 1: didn't care about that, although he may not have known
Speaker 1: any of that at the time, but I don't think
Speaker 1: he would have cared either way because he wanted to
Speaker 1: people to get to get people to pay for like
Speaker 1: pay There used to be a thing called pay per
Speaker 1: view kids, uh, where you would pay to watch things
Speaker 1: like a la carte that weren't cable TV. I know
Speaker 1: that's basically how all television works now for most people,
Speaker 1: but at the time this was special things, right, So
Speaker 1: his goal is, like, I want to get people to
Speaker 1: pay for pay per view so they can like see
Speaker 1: if this guy is going to die life on camera,
Speaker 1: Vince works out a potentially sweet deal with Evil and
Speaker 1: Evil and ABC were He's like, hey, we'll do this
Speaker 1: on pay per view while it's live, but then after
Speaker 1: it airs, ABC will get the exclusive right to rebroadcast
Speaker 1: it and so we'll get even more money from this thing.
Speaker 1: But when he sits down at it with Evil, canievl
Speaker 1: in a meeting with his boss, who is a Jewish
Speaker 1: lawyer from New York. His boss at this promotion company.
Speaker 1: The first thing Evil can Eevil says is there are
Speaker 1: three kinds of people. I can't stand New Yorkers, lawyers
Speaker 1: and Jews.
Speaker 3: Oh so so the meeting. The meeting went well, then.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the meeting went great, so gradu, Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: believe in the Holocaust.
Speaker 2: How are you doing?
Speaker 3: They all haven't even sat down yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's showing off his SS tattoo.
Speaker 3: So it's just brought. It brought a briefcase of Nazi
Speaker 3: parafamiliar with him bring meetings.
Speaker 1: So it gradually became clear that Evil was not a
Speaker 1: good person to be in business with. Now his boss,
Speaker 1: whose name is a room Vince, you know the decent
Speaker 1: thing to do when you realize that, like you've got that,
Speaker 1: there's two decent things to do, I would say, when
Speaker 1: you realize that, like you've brought this guy in for
Speaker 1: a meeting with your boss and he's being really racist
Speaker 1: to your boss, the most decent thing to do would
Speaker 1: be just like, fuck you, get out of here, We're
Speaker 1: not doing this deal. The second most decent thing would
Speaker 1: be like, hey, boss, really sorry, I didn't know he
Speaker 1: was fucking bigot. I will take point on this, so
Speaker 1: you don't have to interact with him, and I'll get
Speaker 1: you know, get this thing done and we can move
Speaker 1: on with our lives.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Vince does neither of those things. Instead, he abandons his
Speaker 1: boss and his unpaid job at the agency and leaves
Speaker 1: them to clean up the mess after they've signed a
Speaker 1: deal with Evil. The canyon jump is a disaster, and
Speaker 1: a room had to spin this again. His boss, who
Speaker 1: is a Jewish lawyer, had to spend the summer promoting
Speaker 1: it with Evil, and Evil, who, on one memorable occasion,
Speaker 1: while they are together at a hotel, gets angry and
Speaker 1: a bunch of off duty soldiers and their families swimming
Speaker 1: at the hotel pool and pulls a gun and threatens
Speaker 1: them out of the hotel pool so they'll be quiet.
Speaker 3: American hero, great guy.
Speaker 2: So the jump is a flop. Yeah, there's ay.
Speaker 3: I was wondering. I was like, man, I didn't know
Speaker 3: Vince was involved with the Snake River Canyon Jump, and
Speaker 3: it's like he.
Speaker 2: Wasn't He invented it and then he abandoned it.
Speaker 3: He just fucking left.
Speaker 2: He was out. In your future episode, there's still plenty
Speaker 2: for the don't worry, we'll make it work.
Speaker 3: I do like it's a snake River is not even
Speaker 3: it's not even like an entertaining catastrophe. No, No, he
Speaker 3: just doesn't make it in his parachute open off the side. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a climactics, a very lame jump.
Speaker 1: If you just type bass jumping fails into YouTube, you
Speaker 1: will find more impressive failure fails of reckless human beings.
Speaker 2: If you cat's trying to circle around a full back,
Speaker 2: you'll get.
Speaker 3: More more thrilling videos than jumping snake River can.
Speaker 1: So it goes really badly. And I will say, even
Speaker 1: though Vince abandons the entire effort, he and his wife
Speaker 1: are heavily invested in this stunt for some fucking reason,
Speaker 1: and they do lose a quarter of a million dollars.
Speaker 2: So God, but she loves him. She is very loyal.
Speaker 2: You gotta give her that.
Speaker 1: In normal people world, being responsible for the Snake River
Speaker 1: Canyon jump and then losing a quarter of a million
Speaker 1: dollars on it would be the end of your big
Speaker 1: industry dreams.
Speaker 3: But Vince, that would be like opening al Capone's vault.
Speaker 3: There was nothing inside.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but unfortunate.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine if that guy was still in media?
Speaker 1: But Vince Junior is Vince Senior son. So a room
Speaker 1: wound up reaching out again to Vince Junior when he
Speaker 1: had another idea for a stunt promotion. Now, this one
Speaker 1: involved a guy you might know called Muhammad Ali, him Ali.
Speaker 1: We are talking the mid seventies here. Ali is a
Speaker 1: big name at this point in time. He is he is,
Speaker 1: he is fucking a big, big, big dude, and he
Speaker 1: has been approached by the Japanese to fight a famous
Speaker 1: Japanese wrestler in like a big show match. Now, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of money in getting Muhammad Ali to fight
Speaker 1: the most famous wrestler in Japan, Right, you can make
Speaker 1: You're gonna make a shitload on that if you can,
Speaker 1: if you can pull it out. But Ali wasn't Mahmad
Speaker 1: Ali is Muhammad Ali, right, He's he's kind of hesitant.
Speaker 1: He doesn't really get why anyone would want to see this.
Speaker 1: So Vince Junior made a plan that he thought he
Speaker 1: could sell to Ali. And I'm gonna quote again from
Speaker 1: Josie Reisman here.
Speaker 3: Dying to hear what this is.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, tom So I got a hold of Vince
Speaker 1: Junior and I said, how do I do this? A
Speaker 1: room says, and Vince, of course had brilliance when it
Speaker 1: came to wrestling and gave me the sin. He recounts
Speaker 1: Vince's plan, which involved a well worn wrestling practice known
Speaker 1: as blading, in which your wrestler will covertly cut their
Speaker 1: own skin to make it look as though they've endured
Speaker 1: enormous damage. The scenario was, and I'll never forget it,
Speaker 1: that Ali, after two or three rounds was going to
Speaker 1: be ostensibly pounding the hell out of Anoch for fake
Speaker 1: but make it look real. And Anoki was the kind
Speaker 1: of wrestler that had a razor like you shave with
Speaker 1: in his mouth, and he would take the razor out
Speaker 1: and slit his own eyebrows. And as Ali was punishing him,
Speaker 1: the blood would be falling down and a Lee would
Speaker 1: turn to the referee, please stop the fight. The referee wouldn't,
Speaker 1: and Ali turns around and says, you got to stop
Speaker 1: the fight, Andnoki would jump on his back pin him
Speaker 1: one two, three count. Anok would win the fight. Everyone
Speaker 1: would be happy, and a Lee would win with a
Speaker 1: big paycheck. Okay, okay, is yeah, that sort of works.
Speaker 2: That has like a wrestling logic to it that like yeah,
Speaker 2: he lost, but like it's not a clean pin, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the thing that theoretically could work, although I
Speaker 1: might add that having somebody take a punch from Muhammad
Speaker 1: Ali with a razor blade in their mouth seems reckless.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that fake punching is not it's like a
Speaker 2: specific thing you train. Yeah, that like when you watch
Speaker 2: The Rock and Steve Austin throw fake punches, You're like, God,
Speaker 2: that looks really close to real. Yeah, they're quite good
Speaker 2: at it. It took probably forty years of wrestling before
Speaker 2: anyone like landed on that. Like if you watch Hulkogan
Speaker 2: punch somebody who'll like put his hand over their forehead,
Speaker 2: dogs and then his own hand, You're like, well, I
Speaker 2: know how you did that trick. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a counterpoint, have you seen an Oki? I feel
Speaker 3: like that dude's face could take a up.
Speaker 2: Camera.
Speaker 1: Well you got to get you do have to give him.
Speaker 1: He is he is one of like three people who
Speaker 1: have lived on this earth who looks like he could
Speaker 1: take a punch from Muhammad Ali.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for dude looks like a very serious statue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very very large man. So actual wrestling people. So again,
Speaker 1: this is like, this is a problem for Ali because
Speaker 1: Mom and Ali, I don't know if you know this
Speaker 1: about him not a loser, right not part of his brand.
Speaker 3: Doesn't really have anything to prove by doing this weird
Speaker 3: exhibition work, so.
Speaker 1: They may they do make a tentative agree agreement and
Speaker 1: they haven't like, Ali hasn't agreed to the plan, but
Speaker 1: he's like, well, we'll figure out something. So they start
Speaker 1: promoting the match as they're still kind of working behind
Speaker 1: the scenes to figure out exactly how this is going
Speaker 1: to play out. The actual wrestling people, both you know,
Speaker 1: on the US side working with Ali and the people
Speaker 1: who are in Japan working with Aenoki, both agree that
Speaker 1: Ali shouldn't beat like he can't win, right because this
Speaker 1: is in Japan and an Oki is a Japanese babyface,
Speaker 1: and you're not going to bring in a foreigner and
Speaker 1: have him win on an OKI's own turf, right kind
Speaker 1: of Famously, the only wrestler who regularly got to do
Speaker 1: that is Andre the Giant, but we're we haven't gotten
Speaker 1: to him yet.
Speaker 3: So hugely hugely famous he is. He is massive, it's
Speaker 3: just he's got to win, right, But Ali isn't really
Speaker 3: willing to budge on losing right, he doesn't like because
Speaker 3: he's Muhammad Ali. Vince Junior is ordered to Tokyo to
Speaker 3: like figure this out, to like because they again it
Speaker 3: kind of gets close to the wire and they still
Speaker 3: haven't figured out how they're going to do this. So
Speaker 3: Vince Junior, according to one version of the story, flies
Speaker 3: down to Tokyo to figure this out. And here's what
Speaker 3: Josie says, and I'm going to quote her here because
Speaker 3: this is fucking unbelievable. In Vince's telling, he went to
Speaker 3: Ali's room and discussed the matter with him. Ali refused
Speaker 3: to play ball, so Vince lunged forward and grabbed Ali
Speaker 3: in a wrestling hole.
Speaker 2: My surprise.
Speaker 1: They took him to the floor, just to demonstrate that
Speaker 1: in Noki abs there is that is physically impossible.
Speaker 2: You don't, absolutely not.
Speaker 3: If you lunged at Muhammad Ali in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 3: you died in the nineteen.
Speaker 1: Seventies, h tom My only disagreement is you would die
Speaker 1: in like the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 2: He would punch you so hard you would go back
Speaker 2: in time.
Speaker 3: He did not. Oh my god, Okay, yeah, we've gone
Speaker 3: from stuff and leaves into my cousin's vagina to I
Speaker 3: took down Mohammed Ali in a hotel room.
Speaker 2: That left my life absolutely not. There are other.
Speaker 1: People who were there who recall Vince being in a
Speaker 1: room with Ali, but that he never touched him. You know,
Speaker 1: I feel like I don't remember that. I do feel
Speaker 1: like they'd remember that across.
Speaker 2: The room from Muhammad Ali, like him getting taken to
Speaker 2: the ground by some fucking guy's kid.
Speaker 1: Just I want you, I want you listeners. Go to YouTube,
Speaker 1: look up any interview with Vince McMahon and try to
Speaker 1: imagine that dude taking down Muhammad Ali in his prime.
Speaker 1: It's simply inconceivable. It's the greatest strike of all time
Speaker 1: versus a leaf molester close, I mean, absolutely not. What
Speaker 1: an insane thing to lie.
Speaker 3: About, boldness of telling that lie.
Speaker 2: So he did that, like if he's to be believed,
Speaker 2: he did that to prove to Muhammad Ali like you
Speaker 2: can't deal with.
Speaker 3: A wrestler, no, no, just to show him like how
Speaker 3: it would work, right.
Speaker 2: As if he had this conversation two hundred times a
Speaker 2: day since he started being a boxer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's incredibly silly. So at any rate, Vince
Speaker 1: does allegedly cook up a plan. So his partner on
Speaker 1: this fight is a promoter named Mike Labell, who I
Speaker 1: believe is the brother of Judo Jean LaBelle, who has
Speaker 1: come up in both of the Bastards episodes. So you've
Speaker 1: done with me now, shots, I love Jean's fucking hero.
Speaker 1: So Jean was going to be the referee of the
Speaker 1: match and Vincent's Vince McMahon's plan is that he was
Speaker 1: going to sneak Judo jan a razor blade, which Jean
Speaker 1: was supposed to use to cut Muhammad Ali's forehead and
Speaker 1: force it into the match. They were going to do
Speaker 1: this without warning.
Speaker 2: Alife on the man in the middle of the match.
Speaker 3: They were going to surprise blade Muhammad Ali, now one
Speaker 3: of the greatest athletes of all time.
Speaker 1: I will get I will say one thing. On the
Speaker 1: shirt list of people who might not die after blading
Speaker 1: Muhammad Ali, Jean label is on that list.
Speaker 3: Sure, I still don't favor him, It's sure, but I'm
Speaker 3: I'm reacting to like the insanity is do it? Dacity?
Speaker 1: Like this isna say Mahamad Ali with a razor blade
Speaker 1: without telling him?
Speaker 3: What if he because he's not gonna understand, it's it's
Speaker 3: what's happening. So what if you fucking miss and cut
Speaker 3: his eye out? Like yes, Like, there's so many things
Speaker 3: that can go wrong with this.
Speaker 1: Not only is this unethical, this is illegal, Like this
Speaker 1: isn't illegal by the rules of wrestling. This is a
Speaker 1: crime in Japan in the United States. That's that's actual assault. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is just a straight up.
Speaker 2: A very legendarily hard maniac. You give him the knife.
Speaker 2: I think he can take Muhammad Ali in his crime
Speaker 2: three four times maybe, yeah, three maybe four?
Speaker 1: So you know who would never agree to slash Muhammad
Speaker 1: Ali in the face with a razor blade. The sponsors
Speaker 1: of this podcast.
Speaker 3: The Fine Toddler Baby Goldfish.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Toddler's and Goldfish never gets caught up in schemes
Speaker 1: like this.
Speaker 2: We're back.
Speaker 3: So again.
Speaker 1: The plan is Judo Jean's kind of blade Muhammad Ali
Speaker 1: and then use that as an excuse to stop the fight,
Speaker 1: right And basically the idea is he'll make it look
Speaker 1: as if all these bleeding because.
Speaker 2: It could have got a hit by the other guy.
Speaker 2: No one will sell together that the referee just lunged
Speaker 2: at Muhammad Ali with a knife and suddenly he's spurting
Speaker 2: blood and Mohamed at least very very mad at him,
Speaker 2: and they'll say that that injury must have been from
Speaker 2: the unrelated thing happened earlier in the fight. I think
Speaker 2: it's a believable story. Grace is whoever came up with
Speaker 2: this plan is probably a genius, And.
Speaker 1: So there's there is I will say a pretty good
Speaker 1: chance that what I've told you is true that Vince
Speaker 1: McMahon goes to Tokyo and comes up with this insane plan.
Speaker 3: Mike level, No, there's no doubt in my mind that
Speaker 3: this plan was true.
Speaker 2: Possibility dred percent.
Speaker 1: Mike Leabell claims that Vince never even went to Japan. Again,
Speaker 1: everyone involved in this are like liars, so.
Speaker 3: Hard to say what went down.
Speaker 2: You have to consider none of it happens at all, true,
Speaker 2: might not exist. I never met him, what.
Speaker 1: Liars, So whatever the truth, Vince is definitely not there.
Speaker 1: The day of the fight, which is again a debacle,
Speaker 1: they have kind of a brief, unsatisfying skirmish, and then
Speaker 1: Ainoki kicks Ali with cleats and cuts his leg, which
Speaker 1: gives Jean Lebelle an excuse to call the fight.
Speaker 2: Here everyone a.
Speaker 1: Quick correction, I summarize this wrong in my notes. The
Speaker 1: Ali Andoki fight ended in a draw, not a ref stoppage. Also,
Speaker 1: Allie nearly lost his leg from the infection caused by
Speaker 1: the injury he got there, which is wild.
Speaker 2: Sorry about that. So fo a disaster wanders after him
Speaker 2: while he like throws Antonio and Oki kept throwing himself
Speaker 2: on the mat and throwing like lake kicks from like
Speaker 2: a butt scoot position. So it just it felt like
Speaker 2: an eight year old who heard the rules of the
Speaker 2: match and he's like, aha, technically, I know how I
Speaker 2: can defeat you, and there's nothing you can do. It's
Speaker 2: so unn and stupid and pathetic and boring, and everybody lost.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we all lost all real alien versus predator situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So at this point, Vincent's career as a promoter is
Speaker 1: not looking promising, right, And in fact, two months the do.
Speaker 3: Sound like ideas that came from the guy who invented XFL.
Speaker 3: They certainly do. They certainly do the.
Speaker 2: Organization.
Speaker 1: Yeah, two months before the alianok fight, he and Linda
Speaker 1: go bankrupt to a million. There are a million dollars
Speaker 1: in debt. And then right after the well deserved, well deserved,
Speaker 1: right after the fight. They have a kid. Now, for
Speaker 1: most people this would be an impossible to recover from situation, right,
Speaker 1: But Vince Junior is Vince Senior's son. Using the connections
Speaker 1: that he had made through being the kid of a
Speaker 1: rich and successful guy, he and Linda, dealing with bankruptcy,
Speaker 1: are able to put together enough investment money to buy
Speaker 1: the Cape Cod Coliseum, which yeah, yeah, yeah there because
Speaker 1: again they're rich people, right, it's fine. So their plan
Speaker 1: is to turn this into a modestly successful venue for
Speaker 1: concerts and the like and kind of get their bones
Speaker 1: about how to do this business through it. By this point,
Speaker 1: by the time they're up and running with the Cape
Speaker 1: Cod Colisseum, they've got two kids, Shane and Stephanie. Both
Speaker 1: of them will go on to work in the WWF,
Speaker 1: but since Vince started having them work clean up at
Speaker 1: the coliseum as a parent. He described himself as a disciplinarian,
Speaker 1: telling Playboy, I'm real big on respect. I was on
Speaker 1: the road a lot, and I'm sure that when I
Speaker 1: was at home the kids wanted me back on the road.
Speaker 1: I do not doubt that.
Speaker 2: Vents. Yeah, yeah, that's Scance magazine.
Speaker 3: What a weird fucking story.
Speaker 2: To share.
Speaker 3: He brags about the strangest things in that interview. It's
Speaker 3: a remarkable document. I was real monster, daved been terror
Speaker 3: of the sound of my voice. Anyway, that's my love,
Speaker 3: my kids.
Speaker 1: So Cape Cod is not a big party town, and
Speaker 1: the previous owner of the coliseum had banned rock shows
Speaker 1: after a disastrous Ted Nugent concert.
Speaker 3: If it was going to be anyone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm surprised it was the new.
Speaker 1: Town. Yeah yeah, now yeah, I will say Ted NuGen,
Speaker 1: if he were to tell me that he stole a
Speaker 1: bunch of cars, I would say, that does sound like you,
Speaker 1: Ted NuGen, thank you. One of these days. Well that
Speaker 1: got that one loaded up in the hopper. So the
Speaker 1: town did not love the McMahon's plans there, and the
Speaker 1: local government decided to go after them by modifying their
Speaker 1: license in order to restrict the alcohol that they could
Speaker 1: sell at the coliseum. The McMahons were sure that this
Speaker 1: would sink the business, and they decided the best response
Speaker 1: was to fight the local government head on. The way
Speaker 1: that they do this is like they show up at
Speaker 1: a hearing with all of the selectmen, which is the
Speaker 1: town legislators, and they bring a bunch of supporters. Right,
Speaker 1: they get a bunch of like local fans, people who
Speaker 1: want to like go to shows and be able to
Speaker 1: drink and think that their plans for the coliseum are good.
Speaker 1: And they have like one hundred and fifty of these
Speaker 1: people swarm the meeting so that it's crowded out with
Speaker 1: the people who support them, and basically they kind of
Speaker 1: bully their way into convincing, you know, the selectmen to
Speaker 1: give them the votes that they need in order to
Speaker 1: reduce the restrictions on their operations and allow them to
Speaker 1: sell all the hard liquor they want right occupy the
Speaker 1: Board of Selectors. Yeah, this is the first time that
Speaker 1: the McMahons ever used the political system for their own profit,
Speaker 1: but it would not be the last. So as the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties dawned, the WWF was a more successful business
Speaker 1: than Vince Senior had ever dreamed. There was no more
Speaker 1: penny pinching for him.
Speaker 3: At least.
Speaker 1: He was wealthy and beloved, but he was also old
Speaker 1: and mostly spending his time chilling out in Florida. He
Speaker 1: also saw trouble on the horizon for his b business.
Speaker 1: By this point, Ted Turner had launched TBS, which I'm
Speaker 1: going to guess ninety percent of our listeners don't remember,
Speaker 1: but was the first super channel, right. It was a
Speaker 1: big deal at the time, and Ted hosted wrestling from
Speaker 1: another company that was not affiliated with Vince McMahon. Sam
Speaker 1: Muchnik had retired from the NWA at this point, and
Speaker 1: it was teetering. Vince Senior knew that he didn't have
Speaker 1: the health or the energy to navigate yet another era
Speaker 1: of the business, but he also didn't particularly want his
Speaker 1: son to follow him. He didn't want any of his
Speaker 1: kids to follow him, and most of them seemed fine
Speaker 1: with this because they were rich, but Vince Junior was
Speaker 1: still obsessed with wrestling and wanted more than anything to
Speaker 1: own his dad's business. Still, Vince Senior refused to give
Speaker 1: it to him, so eventually they worked out a purchase
Speaker 1: deal on extremely strict terms. Vince would need to pay
Speaker 1: one million dollars to his dad and several shareholders in
Speaker 1: just a year's time. If he missed a single payment,
Speaker 1: they got back control of the WAF and got to
Speaker 1: keep all of the money that he'd paid them. Now
Speaker 1: it is somewhat unclear how he managed to make these payments.
Speaker 1: He told one reporter that he did it by quote,
Speaker 1: using mirrors and getting the help of a guru. I
Speaker 1: don't know what the fuck that means.
Speaker 2: Nobody seems to what you use a mirror, you turn
Speaker 2: ten bucks into twenty bucks.
Speaker 3: No one seems to know what.
Speaker 2: Right there.
Speaker 3: I don't have trouble believing that he was involved with
Speaker 3: some weird cult leader who helped him out on the radio.
Speaker 3: That would not be beyond Vince McMahon. Whatever, however he
Speaker 3: did it. He buys the WWF in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 3: and he pays it off before the end of nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty three. At this point, most people would have described
Speaker 3: his position in the industry as solid but challenging. Right
Speaker 3: Ted Turner's rising up, we're kind of entering a new era.
Speaker 3: Vince has a plan, though, and he's got a plan
Speaker 3: not just to kind of keep the business going as
Speaker 3: his father had, but to destroy all of the other
Speaker 3: region syndicates and make himself the undisputed king of wrestling nationwide.
Speaker 3: He later said, I knew my dad wouldn't really have
Speaker 3: sold me the business had he known what I was
Speaker 3: going to do.
Speaker 2: I believe that party. I do believe that part of
Speaker 2: the way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, this could I have to say here
Speaker 1: when it comes to like how he destroyed the regionals,
Speaker 1: this is probably going to be one of This is
Speaker 1: definitely one of the longest scripts we've ever done. It might,
Speaker 1: by the end, wind up competing with the fucking kiss
Speaker 1: Kissinger episodes for length. At a certain point, I have
Speaker 1: had to decide there are chunks of the Vince McMahon
Speaker 1: story that we are going to have to blow through
Speaker 1: in order to avoid like driving people insane with a
Speaker 1: series that's just far too long. What you need to
Speaker 1: know is this, after Vince took over from his dad,
Speaker 1: he shredded the gentleman's agreement that the promoters had previously,
Speaker 1: and he set to work destroying the NWA and as
Speaker 1: many of the other regionals as he could by spreading
Speaker 1: WWF evins across the country, and most of the regional
Speaker 1: hours die one by one during this period. He doesn't
Speaker 1: totally wipe them out, but he he spreads the WWF
Speaker 1: to be nationwide and most of them die kind of
Speaker 1: as a result of this, or get acquired. If you
Speaker 1: want more detail about how this process went, the most
Speaker 1: accessible and detailed account is in Ringmaster Josie Riisman's book,
Speaker 1: If you were a huge wrestling nerd and you went
Speaker 1: forensic detail about how this went, the book Death of
Speaker 1: the Territories is the best resource by a mile. Now,
Speaker 1: A big part of the weakness of these kind of
Speaker 1: regional syndicates is that they didn't understand TV the way
Speaker 1: that Vince McMahon did. For them, wrestling TV was big business,
Speaker 1: but it was kind of a normal TV business. Because
Speaker 1: did Vince understand TV? Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's good at this.
Speaker 1: He's been a disaster before. But he figures something important out,
Speaker 1: which is that most people in the biz are using
Speaker 1: TV the way that normal people use TV to make money, right,
Speaker 1: where you put on a thing and it attracts advertisers
Speaker 1: and you make money.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Vince was willing to give his shows to broadcasters for
Speaker 1: free because he realized that whatever money he could get
Speaker 1: from ads, especially in these local TV networks, is pennies
Speaker 1: next to the value of promoting live shows and filling
Speaker 1: stadiums with fans. Vince was the guy who realized televised
Speaker 1: wrestling doesn't exist because TV's a good business. Televised wrestling
Speaker 1: puts butts in seats and sells merchandise and that's how
Speaker 1: you make the big fucking bucks. And he's very successful
Speaker 1: at this. Now, Vincent Senor is not proud of what
Speaker 1: his son's doing here because he's kind of doing this
Speaker 1: as he's using TV. He'll basically like give you know,
Speaker 1: broadcast rights to a bunch of local TV stations that
Speaker 1: he's not currently the WWF isn't currently in this town,
Speaker 1: or the state, or this part of the country, and
Speaker 1: that he'll use that to build up interests so that
Speaker 1: he can then bring the WWF to this new state,
Speaker 1: start hosting show and slowly choke out another regional competitor, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's the actual tact.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And assuming a lot of the other
Speaker 3: promotions aren't rich enough to do the same thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. He's got the size, he's got the money
Speaker 1: to use as a base to kind of conquer from.
Speaker 1: And Vincent Senior is kind of horrified by what his
Speaker 1: son's doing here. For all that he could be ruthless,
Speaker 1: he was also kind of a team player with the
Speaker 1: guys he saw as his equals, and some of these
Speaker 1: guys are also his friends, right, These are his like
Speaker 1: buddies that he's been in business around for years. So
Speaker 1: some of these guys call Vince Senior in a panic
Speaker 1: once it becomes clear that his son is on the
Speaker 1: cusp of destroying them. He complained to his son, He
Speaker 1: apologized to them, but it didn't matter. He wasn't in
Speaker 1: charge anymore and there was nothing he could do. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: Robert here. This wound up running long, like two hours long,
Speaker 1: and so we just needed to roll some of this
Speaker 1: episode into part four, which we're going to do so
Speaker 1: that this is not insane and d wieldy for our
Speaker 1: editing team and for us. Since we don't have a
Speaker 1: normal outro for this one, I'm just gonna let you
Speaker 1: guys know that you can find you know what I'll do.
Speaker 1: I'll fake their voices while I do their pluggables.
Speaker 2: I'm shown Baby.
Speaker 3: You can find me at one.
Speaker 1: Now, Okay, that's actually kind of disrespectful since this is
Speaker 1: their plugs. You can find Sean Baby at one nine
Speaker 1: hundred hot Dog, the last comedy website tragically pretty close
Speaker 1: to true, and you can back them on Patreon as well.
Speaker 1: That is again one nine hundred hot Dog, And of
Speaker 1: course Tom Ryman you can find on Gamefully Unemployed, which
Speaker 1: does podcasts and all sorts of great content there, everything
Speaker 1: from like movie reviews to you know, watch throughs of
Speaker 1: shows like X Files and yeah, a lot of great
Speaker 1: content gamefully unemployed on Patreon. You can find them there.
Speaker 1: I apologize for not doing a fake Tom voice, but
Speaker 1: let's all be honest, it would have been almost identical
Speaker 1: to my fake.
Speaker 2: Sean Baby voice. Behind the Bastards is a production of
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit
Speaker 2: our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 2: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.