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
Speaker 1: know that for the fourth year in a row, we
Speaker 1: are doing our fundraiser for the Portland Diaper Bank. Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards supporters have been helping to fund the Portland
Speaker 1: Diaper Bank since twenty twenty and bought millions of diapers
Speaker 1: for people who really need them. So if you go
Speaker 1: to GoFundMe and type in bTB fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank,
Speaker 1: or just type in bTB fundraiser Diaper Bank, go fund
Speaker 1: me into Google anything like that, you will find it.
Speaker 1: So please go fund me bTB Fundraiser for Portland Diaper Bank.
Speaker 1: Help us raise the money that these people need to
Speaker 1: get diapers to folks who need them desperately. Hey everyone,
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. I'm the host of a podcast called
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, and like most of you, I was
Speaker 1: raised during the nineteen nineties and early two thousands on
Speaker 1: a steady diet of World War II movies and History
Speaker 1: Channel documentaries about Hitler. I decided as an adult to
Speaker 1: kind of make that into a career and just read
Speaker 1: weird books about the Nazis and other dictators and talk
Speaker 1: about them on podcasts, And for the last five years
Speaker 1: or so, that's gone pretty well. You know, every week
Speaker 1: I find a new terrible person, I read about him,
Speaker 1: I write a script, and the show comes out that
Speaker 1: you're all duly familiar with. Well, a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 1: I decided, after a few years of every now and
Speaker 1: then getting suggestions from people, to do a bastard who
Speaker 1: was kind of from the it's not really a sport,
Speaker 1: but we'll call it from the sports world. A guy
Speaker 1: you've probably heard of called Vince McMahon. He is the
Speaker 1: owner of more or less of the what was once
Speaker 1: the WWF is now the WWE, and I kind of
Speaker 1: expected it to be like every other episode of Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards. You know, I spend three or four days,
Speaker 1: I read a book, maybe two, do some research, put
Speaker 1: together a script. Well, to my surprise, a couple of
Speaker 1: things happened. One of the things that happened is that
Speaker 1: when I posted that I was doing this guy, response
Speaker 1: unlike anything I've ever gotten, thousands and thousands of likes
Speaker 1: on Twitter and wrestling Twitter lit up over it. There
Speaker 1: were news articles about the fact that I was going
Speaker 1: to cover this guy, which has literally never happened before.
Speaker 1: Authors of books about Vince McMahon, including the book author
Speaker 1: of the book Ring Master, which we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about a little bit by Abraham Josephine Reisman here after
Speaker 1: referred to as Josie Riiseman reached out. People kind of
Speaker 1: lost their mind about it, and I found myself putting
Speaker 1: together a script that is currently set to be about
Speaker 1: as long as the script on Henry Kissinger. And that
Speaker 1: may seem insane for a guy whose primary claim to
Speaker 1: fame is running a wrestling company, but I assure you
Speaker 1: it's not. He deserves everything we're writing about him. And
Speaker 1: to kind of help me wrestle this monster.
Speaker 2: Can I just say I told you so? First of all?
Speaker 2: You did? You did?
Speaker 1: You tried to warn me, Sophie, and for like several years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we're doing this, and the old only people I
Speaker 1: thought could possibly help me wrestle this thing into a
Speaker 1: manageable form are two of the people I respect most
Speaker 1: when it comes to talking about.
Speaker 2: Shit like this.
Speaker 1: Sean Riley aka Sean Baby, who you will all well
Speaker 1: remember from the the legendary episodes that we did on
Speaker 1: Famous Karate Monster. Fucking yeah yeah, Sean. Hey, how are
Speaker 1: you doing.
Speaker 2: Oh it's good to be back. I've missed you.
Speaker 1: I have. I have missed you too, Sean. And this
Speaker 1: is this is going to be a special one. And
Speaker 1: I also want to introduce Tom Ryman to the program.
Speaker 1: Tom's been on a number of episodes. Tom, you're also
Speaker 1: a big wrestling fan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, very excited to be talking about Vince sick Mann.
Speaker 3: I thought I knew everything there was to know about
Speaker 3: vincemick mahn. But the fact that you have such a
Speaker 3: volume prepared for us is making me think, like.
Speaker 2: Did I not know how much of a ghoul he was?
Speaker 2: I thought I did? Well, figure technically a business goblin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a business gossling. Yeah, he's a business monster.
Speaker 1: There's a lot going for a business gool One of
Speaker 1: the problems with covering Vince McMahon. Weirdly enough, the thing
Speaker 1: that this episode is most similar to is writing about
Speaker 1: European royalty in the eighteen hundreds and nineteen hundreds, Because
Speaker 1: all of those like kings like Napoleon the Third or
Speaker 1: Leopold or Victoria, there was like somebody writing about every
Speaker 1: single second of their life and every decision that they made. Right,
Speaker 1: So there's just this there's so much shit to go through.
Speaker 1: There's so much detail on everything they ever did, and
Speaker 1: weirdly enough, it's exactly the same with wrestling, Like wrestling.
Speaker 1: Covering wrestling is a lot like covering English or European royalty.
Speaker 3: Oh that's the king Leopold had like a Dave Meltzer
Speaker 3: and a wrestling observer and stuff just track in his
Speaker 3: every movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's part of what's going on here. And
Speaker 1: the other part of what's going on is that, like,
Speaker 1: as I started learning about Vince, there are all these
Speaker 1: other wrestlers, Like wrestling probably has the highest density of
Speaker 1: like monsters of of any like entertainment industry sport out there,
Speaker 1: at least interesting monsters, right, Like, there's just so many
Speaker 1: fascinating weirdos.
Speaker 4: Like a casual wrestling story is like, oh, yeah, my
Speaker 4: friend was cranky. Story tour guy's eyeball out backstage.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's because they're carnies. It's it's a carnival thing.
Speaker 3: And so there's this it's way more hardcore than I
Speaker 3: think the more casual person realizes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So every probably every episode, all of the first couple
Speaker 1: so far, we're going to be going on log aggressions
Speaker 1: where we just talk about other crazy ass stories from wrestling,
Speaker 1: because like I felt like I was doing a disservice
Speaker 1: if I didn't, I wanted.
Speaker 2: To get and the Giant poop stories.
Speaker 1: We are talking a lot about Andre. Yes, I love Andre.
Speaker 1: The Giants not a master to a hero. By the way,
Speaker 1: just so we're clear.
Speaker 3: For sure, I wouldn't let an indecipherable Ultimate Warrior monologues.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh god, I have been watching quite a bit
Speaker 1: of wrestling. I wanted to start by asking, what is
Speaker 1: y'all's background, uh with with pro wrestling?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 4: Okay, uh, longtime fan since I was a kid, I
Speaker 4: grew up. I actually trained in pro wrestling for about
Speaker 4: half a year and did WOW three three live shows
Speaker 4: as a character named Captain Party. I was a superpowered
Speaker 4: frat boy. I did here in Portland at the Ash
Speaker 4: Street Saloon.
Speaker 2: Oh shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and let's see, I wrote three video games about wrestling,
Speaker 4: three w WE video games.
Speaker 2: Gosh, I feel like that's enough. That's yeah, No, that's
Speaker 2: that's so much expertise. Yeah, I can live up to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Tom, now you're on and now you're.
Speaker 3: I mean, fucking I'll try so. I also grew up
Speaker 3: watching wrestling, loved it since I was a kid. I
Speaker 3: was always more at a w W F or w
Speaker 3: W E than WCW. I was a backyard wrestler for
Speaker 3: several years. Hell yeah, and I definitely filmed one of
Speaker 3: my friends throwing another one of my friends off the
Speaker 3: roof of their house, and then that friend doing a
Speaker 3: flying elbow drop off of the house onto that friend.
Speaker 3: I never went off the house, but I had some
Speaker 3: some some fun bumps in a backyard done to me
Speaker 3: as well. I'm my friend back home books a local promotion.
Speaker 3: It's actually how I met my wife. I met my wife.
Speaker 2: At a wrestling show. Yeah, and your wife for so long?
Speaker 3: Okay, so so so my my buddy Jerry Stephanie's books.
Speaker 3: Independent wrestling promotion called Vanguard Championship Wrestling BCW in Virginia
Speaker 3: and many years ago they put on a show where
Speaker 3: they brought in Rick Flair. He was like a big
Speaker 3: mail bringing him for the show as a baby. By
Speaker 3: the way, I know, I remember that episode.
Speaker 2: That's nuts. And so she was.
Speaker 3: Marina was there set up because one of the wrestlers
Speaker 3: his mom ran this like new age sort of healing
Speaker 3: a store studio, and she had a massage parlor in there.
Speaker 3: Marina's a massage therapist. So Marina had a massage chair
Speaker 3: set up at this wrestling show, and that's how I
Speaker 3: met her. I met my wife at a Rick Flair appearance. Now,
Speaker 3: my friend put on that.
Speaker 1: Is that is a happier Rick Flair story than we've
Speaker 1: gotten late. Yeah, I mean Rick Flair Press recently.
Speaker 3: Flair spent the whole day drinking and then tried to
Speaker 3: stiff somebody else with the bill. That's that's what I
Speaker 3: heard from that specific appearance.
Speaker 2: But I have so I will.
Speaker 1: I will come in and say I have far less
Speaker 1: experience than all of you, and I think my experience
Speaker 1: kind of lines up broadly with like most kids in
Speaker 1: the nineties were like. I was never like a huge
Speaker 1: wrestling guy. I played a bunch of different wrestling video
Speaker 1: games in the late nineties early two thousands, when like
Speaker 1: frendshould come over for birthdays, Robert.
Speaker 2: I also own AWF Superstars Stand Up Arcade Unit.
Speaker 4: I should have included that that is AWERS.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I definitely played a bunch of that. I was
Speaker 1: I kind of I had about a maybe two years
Speaker 1: where I watched wrestling semi regularly. This was kind of
Speaker 1: I think it's you'd call it the Attitude era, right
Speaker 1: when Stone Cold Steve Austin was just one of the
Speaker 1: big names and the yeah and I was brought in again.
Speaker 1: It was one of those things. It wasn't I didn't
Speaker 1: it wasn't kind of like it did. Like I made
Speaker 1: friends with a kid and he was like one of
Speaker 1: the few kids weird enough to want to hang out
Speaker 1: with me after school when I moved to this new town,
Speaker 1: and he loved wrestling and old Star Trek, right, and
Speaker 1: so he introduced me to both of those things. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the love of Star Trek stuck around longer, but I
Speaker 1: watched wrestling like off and on for a couple of years,
Speaker 1: and you know, for years afterwards, i'd play games when
Speaker 1: you know, we were having a birthday party or something
Speaker 1: with my friends. From what I have kind of read,
Speaker 1: you know, I didn't know this at the time. Obviously
Speaker 1: wrestling was just wrestling, but ninety seven and ninety eight,
Speaker 1: which was sort of more or less I think when
Speaker 1: I was watching wrestling was kind of smack dab in
Speaker 1: the middle of depending on how you count it, the
Speaker 1: third or fourth big American surge of interest in wrestling,
Speaker 1: and the second of those to happen under the watchful
Speaker 1: eye of Vince. Vince McMahon, I don't remember a whole
Speaker 1: lot about that time except for that my favorite wrestler
Speaker 1: was the Undertaker. I'm not sure what like where that
Speaker 1: puts me, although people say he was a great kind
Speaker 1: of like a technical, you know, wrestler, good at back
Speaker 1: and people up, good at the good at the you know,
Speaker 1: kind of pinch hitter for storylines and stuff.
Speaker 2: Zombie, yeah, zombie and Vince McMahon.
Speaker 1: I think for most of us who are kind of
Speaker 1: on the periphery of wrestling, who just sort of know it,
Speaker 1: you know, as a in broad terms, is one of
Speaker 1: those figures in American pop culture who's just kind of
Speaker 1: always been there. Like I couldn't tell you when I
Speaker 1: first heard his name, right, He's like Michael Jackson or
Speaker 1: Arnold Schwarzenegger in that he's just someone who's always been
Speaker 1: kind of part of the foundation of pop culture for
Speaker 1: basically my whole life. And in the decades since I,
Speaker 1: you know, was kind of into wrestling, he's become a
Speaker 1: major Republican donor, one of the few close friends of
Speaker 1: former President Trump. People will say that he was one
Speaker 1: of the only people Trump would take his phone calls
Speaker 1: and push other people out of the room when he
Speaker 1: called while he was president. His wife is also a
Speaker 1: massive influence, Linda, huge influence on the direction of wrestling,
Speaker 1: and also moderately influential person in American politics. She was
Speaker 1: kind of the only member of Trump's cabinet who didn't
Speaker 1: have a huge scandal during his president See, like she
Speaker 1: was just kind of in there for a while and
Speaker 1: then bounced, but there was no like she didn't do
Speaker 1: a mooch right, Like, there was no big blow up,
Speaker 1: which I'm not saying is like praise for her. She
Speaker 1: is a terrible person, but like she's savvier than a
Speaker 1: lot of the other people he brought in.
Speaker 3: Do you remember when the mooch went on like a
Speaker 3: following spree and followed like everyone at cracked. Yeah, that
Speaker 3: was a fun day. That was a weird d what
Speaker 3: a wild presidency. We just all blew right past it.
Speaker 1: But Vince is not just and kind of the reason
Speaker 1: why we're doing so much focus on Vince is not
Speaker 1: just like a guy who is influential in wrestling. He
Speaker 1: helped create the foundations in a lot of ways of
Speaker 1: not just modern right wing media, but like modern American culture.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a strong argument that we may not
Speaker 1: get Donald Trump as president without Vince McMahon, and specifically
Speaker 1: without Trump's time in wrestling, where a lot of people
Speaker 1: will argue he learned quite a bit.
Speaker 2: The best book about the life.
Speaker 1: Of Vince McMahon is the recently published Tome Ring Master
Speaker 1: by Abraham Josephine Riceman, again hereafter referred to as Josie Risman.
Speaker 1: Early on in the book, she makes the point that
Speaker 1: wrestling is more or less inextricable from human civilization. I
Speaker 1: didn't know this when I started researching, but the Biblical
Speaker 1: Jacob got the name Israel after a wrestling match, and
Speaker 1: the word Israel means wrestling with God, at least in
Speaker 1: one translation, So that we that's kind of sweet, Yeah,
Speaker 1: romming a macho man elbow on God. Hell, Yes, that's
Speaker 1: exactly how I d God. Palestine does translate the laydrop.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So virtually every culture has some form of wrestling, and generally,
Speaker 1: you know, up until the modern era, these were like
Speaker 1: actual competitions right in which you know, athletes were, you know,
Speaker 1: the the end was in doubt. Obviously, like all sports people,
Speaker 1: you know, falling on matches for betting purposes has happened
Speaker 1: for forever. But generally speaking, it was supposed to be
Speaker 1: an actual competition. And while you know that was always
Speaker 1: a part of wrestling, it also relied heavily on spectacle, right,
Speaker 1: This has always been a part of it. Now, if
Speaker 1: we're tracing back the origins of modern pro wrestling, the
Speaker 1: most direct place to do so is the French Revolution
Speaker 1: of eighteen thirty, better known as the July Revolution. This
Speaker 1: is the revolution that led to the overthrow of the
Speaker 1: Bourbon monarchy and its replacement by the House of Orleon.
Speaker 1: But that's you know, boring history, nerd shit, So I'm
Speaker 1: just going to quote from wrestling reporter Kyle Dunning.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: It is said that during this time wrestlers were first
Speaker 1: given nicknames. Also, the tradition of an open challenge being
Speaker 1: issued to the general public was born. There was commonly
Speaker 1: a reward of five hundred francs to anyone who could
Speaker 1: knock a wrestler down to the ground. This is where
Speaker 1: Circus has got the idea from. I wish we still
Speaker 1: had that.
Speaker 4: This happened organically on me Once. I was at a
Speaker 4: Mexican video game convention and there was a wrestling ring
Speaker 4: in this booth that I was near, just a weird
Speaker 4: little wrestling ring, don't know why it was there, and
Speaker 4: someone asked me to get up and say something, and
Speaker 4: within two minutes, I just sort of organically offered to
Speaker 4: body slam the biggest person they could find. And then
Speaker 4: I just did that for like ten minutes, and then
Speaker 4: one kid got in and it was like, okay, cool,
Speaker 4: put your phone down, I'll body slam you.
Speaker 2: And then he.
Speaker 4: Attacked me and I was like, Oh, this must be
Speaker 4: how shoot fighting got it start.
Speaker 2: How did that go? Uh?
Speaker 4: He tried to take me down and then we wrestled
Speaker 4: for a bit and I kind of gave him like
Speaker 4: half a body slam, which he did not want, so
Speaker 4: he didn't take it very well, and I realized, we
Speaker 4: got to stop doing this.
Speaker 2: This is escalating too quickly. Yeah, this could go really badly.
Speaker 1: I always there were back in the day kind of
Speaker 1: One of the seminal moments in early internet culture was
Speaker 1: the uh there was this director of horrible video game
Speaker 1: movies named Uva Bowl you. I think everyone is here
Speaker 1: is familiar with this story. Who got made fun of
Speaker 1: by comedy writers on the internet a lot, and so
Speaker 1: challenged them to a fight, like a televised fight. And
Speaker 1: he had been he had some sort of semi pro experience, right,
Speaker 1: he's like an amateur box Yeah, but he's legitimately like
Speaker 1: a more built dude than the average internet comedy writer
Speaker 1: in the late nineties early two thousands. For sure, he
Speaker 1: did not. If I'm not mistaken, Sean, you put your
Speaker 1: hat into the ring and he did not want anything
Speaker 1: to do with that.
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 4: It's gonna take like three or four minutes to tell
Speaker 4: this full story. I want to be said, you know,
Speaker 4: but like I used to host a show called Attack
Speaker 4: the Show back in the.
Speaker 2: Day on G four. Yeah, yeah, and yeah recently came
Speaker 2: back but uh and then left again.
Speaker 4: But uh we wanted to come on and fight Kevin Pereira,
Speaker 4: and Kevin pere Is like, dude, that's crazy.
Speaker 2: But wait, wait, wait, I bet Sean Dabey'd fight you.
Speaker 2: And so they called me.
Speaker 4: I'm like fuck yes today, tomorrow, I don't care when,
Speaker 4: and uh and.
Speaker 2: Then zero, I don't need to prepare.
Speaker 3: I've been preparing for this fight my whole life, my
Speaker 3: whole life.
Speaker 2: When I got the call, I did jump some rope.
Speaker 2: I'm like, all right, all right, let's let's get drank
Speaker 2: some raw eggs.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I had a few eggs, and so us people like
Speaker 4: called me to get my stats, and I was like,
Speaker 4: I gave him my stats. I was, uh, six y three.
Speaker 4: I'm like two hundred ten pounds. This is not good
Speaker 4: news for UE Bowl. They're like, do you know how
Speaker 4: to fight? I'm like, yeah, I kind of know how
Speaker 4: to fight, like you know what, you know what, maybe
Speaker 4: we're not going to do this. And I found out
Speaker 4: later that he basically I don't think he was like scared,
Speaker 4: but he was like he's kind of a bully.
Speaker 2: He just wants to beat up on little nerds.
Speaker 4: He'd wear like film Rocky for So he's like, no,
Speaker 4: I don't I want to like just beat up your
Speaker 4: smallest toast. I don't want to like stand toe to
Speaker 4: toe with a real man.
Speaker 1: I want to beat up Richard Kanka. Yeah, he beat
Speaker 1: the share that guy. And it's included as DVD extras
Speaker 1: on one of his movies. So I've watched all the
Speaker 1: fights and it's you know we we have since learned
Speaker 1: afterwards that low Tax had it coming.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, he was uh uh you know that's will
Speaker 4: be here. So anyway, he did offer me a spot
Speaker 4: in that They're like, well, we'll fly to Canada and
Speaker 4: we'll do it there, and like suspiciously, they never followed
Speaker 4: up on that. But but anyway, that's the story of
Speaker 4: but we ball and then people say like, oh, he
Speaker 4: ducked me, and I guess he technically did, but uh
Speaker 4: I did go to the premiere postal and I was like,
Speaker 4: I think it's only fair that I give him the
Speaker 4: chance to kick my ass. So I went up because
Speaker 4: I had already like made fun of him in the magazines. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I went up and he's like, yeah, I know
Speaker 4: who you are. And I'm like okay, so like so, like,
Speaker 4: are you like pissed and he's like no. And then
Speaker 4: he just very uh carefully explained all of my jokes
Speaker 4: back to me and how they weren't like real, and I'm.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, they're they're fucking jokes.
Speaker 4: Like he did, I don't think he understood even a
Speaker 4: beginning of what I was trying to do there was
Speaker 4: making fun of you.
Speaker 2: The movies are bad. What the heck are we doing here?
Speaker 3: I think the way they framed it on the DVD
Speaker 3: extras that I saw was that, oh, he's he's fighting critics.
Speaker 3: So maybe he thought it was like all film criticism
Speaker 3: and not just like jokes. I yes, I mean I
Speaker 3: was criticizing his films. He was just like, you know,
Speaker 3: like like in Blood Rain there's a love scene. I
Speaker 3: was like, this is obviously directed by a man who's
Speaker 3: never fucked. And he's like, you know, I had this
Speaker 3: ex before, Like he's like clinically explaining. Does seem like
Speaker 3: the type of dude that would need to clarify?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: Wait, wait, wait, wait wait, I.
Speaker 4: Have had six right, it doesn't translate into my work,
Speaker 4: but I have touched a Wilma.
Speaker 1: I have.
Speaker 2: I have seen the boobies.
Speaker 1: I do like to think about him like getting in
Speaker 1: a cage with Ebert and then Ebert like pulling out
Speaker 1: like the baracco weapons from Mortal Kombat, just.
Speaker 2: Kind of just sucking swords erupting from his risky Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's how I imagine him fighting. Never jump in got
Speaker 2: too much anti air face, So send you Beyond the
Speaker 2: Valley of the Dolls.
Speaker 1: This, uh, this kind of evolution in wrestling where it
Speaker 1: starts to become something that like, yeah, people like you're
Speaker 1: doing it out in public. People are like drinking heavily.
Speaker 1: You've got random folks locally kind of like showing up
Speaker 1: to fight, try to knock these wrestlers down. It becomes
Speaker 1: this circus act. This is what marks kind of the
Speaker 1: first really clear permanent separation from the various forms of
Speaker 1: competitive wrestling that had obviously been around for forever to
Speaker 1: modern wrestling as entertainment. Because obviously, when you've got like
Speaker 1: random local drunks like queuing up to be suplexed, the
Speaker 1: point is very clearly not measuring grappling skill in a
Speaker 1: traditional way.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: By eighteen forty eight, Circus troops had adopted a new
Speaker 1: style of wrestling known as first hand wrestling all better
Speaker 1: known as Greco Roman wrestling, which is not the way
Speaker 1: that the ancient Greeks or Romans wrestled, right, It's just
Speaker 1: called that it pants on for one, Yeah, they had
Speaker 1: pants on for one, a lot less abusive in a
Speaker 1: number of ways. It banned a number of holds below
Speaker 1: the waist. It also banned a number of holds that
Speaker 1: had kept killing people, so they were trying to like
Speaker 1: reduce the body count. Circus troops in Europe quickly adopted
Speaker 1: this new style, but not eliminate the body. Can know
Speaker 1: they never get rid of the body count. Let's be
Speaker 1: very clear about this. I've been again, I've benus watching
Speaker 1: old wrestling, like from the eighties and early nineties with
Speaker 1: like my young friend Garrison, and one of the things
Speaker 1: we'll do in every match is like google the names
Speaker 1: and see kind of who made it the longest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of forty nine year olds, you know, tapping
Speaker 1: out of life in this sport.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, Oh yeah, that's all a joke. It was just
Speaker 2: a sad reality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, football is not wildly different. So one of the
Speaker 1: things that's kind of going on here is they transition
Speaker 1: to Greco Roman wrestling, is that a lot of things
Speaker 1: like leg hooks are restricted, which were some of the
Speaker 1: most effective holds, and so because they can't do a
Speaker 1: lot of the holes they used to be doing, wrestlers
Speaker 1: adopted the tactic of throwing each other around the room
Speaker 1: or around the the you know, the whatever the square,
Speaker 1: which is obviously like another link you know, in the
Speaker 1: chain to modern pro wrestling. The nicknames fan challenges and
Speaker 1: increasingly elaborate throws that evolved over this period of time
Speaker 1: made wrestling more fun to watch than it had been before.
Speaker 1: By the end of the eighteen hundreds, the new sport
Speaker 1: had first real champion, a guy named Paul Ponds. He
Speaker 1: was a Frenchman. His stage name was Colossus, and he became,
Speaker 1: by some counts, the world Champion of Greco Roman wrestling.
Speaker 1: That's what Wikipedia calls him. At least the reality is
Speaker 1: he won a match sponsored by a magazine and then
Speaker 1: like another match sponsored in Russia, neither of which were
Speaker 1: really world championships. But he just started calling himself the
Speaker 1: world champion because like, who's gonna argue with you?
Speaker 2: Right, right, this is before the internet. You can just
Speaker 2: say things.
Speaker 1: This is before the internet and your giant you know, right,
Speaker 1: So this may sport.
Speaker 2: I'm in favor of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fine. This made him famous, and he opened
Speaker 1: a gym for wrestlers and for strongmen, right, And this
Speaker 1: is again all kind of very highly tied to the circus. Still,
Speaker 1: the reality of the situation is that a couple of
Speaker 1: different countries had wrestling tournaments and winning basically any one
Speaker 1: of them would qualify you to call yourself world champion
Speaker 1: if you wanted, because like there was no body that
Speaker 1: was sort of determining who was what was the real
Speaker 1: world championship in the early nineteen hundreds. This is kind
Speaker 1: of the first time that we start to have what
Speaker 1: you could call a credible world championship. And the guy
Speaker 1: who wins it for the first time is a dude
Speaker 1: named George Hackenschmidt, who is legitimately one of the hardest
Speaker 1: motherfuckers to ever walk the face of the earth, basically
Speaker 1: unbeatable from nineteen oh one to nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 3: How lucky is that name? Then, hacken Schmidt. Hackenschmidt it is.
Speaker 1: And like, I'm gonna have Sophie show you a picture
Speaker 1: of this dude in the second here.
Speaker 3: Pons I'm interesting, expecting a real granite faced son of
Speaker 3: a bitch.
Speaker 1: He is actually kind of in a pre steroid era.
Speaker 1: He looks like he's on steroids. He's no, no, no,
Speaker 1: he is. He is smooth as a fucking waxed dolphin.
Speaker 2: Oh no.
Speaker 1: He's also he's interesting because he's kind of an old guy.
Speaker 1: When he becomes he's thirty four, which is like today
Speaker 1: even that's kind of like pushing it you know, by
Speaker 1: the standard of athletes in the late eighteen hundred, that's
Speaker 1: like hundred and three.
Speaker 2: Yeah, back then he might as well have been ninety seven. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Hackenschmidt is a one of the first really shredded guys,
Speaker 1: as I said, in the modern sense, to ever be photographed.
Speaker 1: And again it kind of says a lot that he
Speaker 1: still looks jacked by today's standards, even though there's there's
Speaker 1: no steroids in this period. There's not even like a
Speaker 1: great understanding of muscle building.
Speaker 2: Why do you think they took his picture?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: It's also he is credited as the inventor of the
Speaker 1: bench press and the hack Squad, at least according to
Speaker 1: a website called Barbend that repeatedly tried to sell me creatine.
Speaker 3: I feel like somebody figured out the bench press before that.
Speaker 3: It's not exactly weird.
Speaker 1: I found another website that says he definitely didn't create
Speaker 1: the bench press, although I will say that website also
Speaker 1: tried to sell me creatine.
Speaker 2: So how much so how much creating you get?
Speaker 1: Clearly not enough according to these two websites, did you
Speaker 1: did you buy enough creatine to invent the bench bench? Us? Uh?
Speaker 2: Not not yet.
Speaker 1: But I'm hoping I bought enough creatine to determine which
Speaker 1: website is more credible. Like whatever, whichever creatine pushes my
Speaker 1: bench up more and like a three week period, that's
Speaker 1: the website I'll choose to believe.
Speaker 2: This is how we will measure, Sophie.
Speaker 1: I want you to show them like hacken Schmidt looks
Speaker 1: like a crude discount discount action figure from a grocery
Speaker 1: store toy isle. Hell yeah, he looks awesome. Yeah, totally natty.
Speaker 1: You have to assume because it's nineteen oh eight. Nick, Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: no neck his necklace. He cannot put his arms down
Speaker 1: at his side, put his arms down to his socks.
Speaker 1: He looks like a man. Yeah, like, look at those thighs.
Speaker 1: This motherfucker never skipped a leg day. We can say
Speaker 1: that with a degree of certainty. It's interesting. Look over
Speaker 1: black socks. Yeah, incredible. Yeah, he's got the socks pulled up.
Speaker 1: It looks like it doesn't look amazing. Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 2: This dude.
Speaker 3: It's like reminding me of like the difference between like
Speaker 3: when like Christopher Reeve or like Michael Keaton played superheroes
Speaker 3: and then like what people who play superheroes look like nowadays, Like,
Speaker 3: this guy's definitely jacked, but like he's not Hugh Jackman
Speaker 3: and the Wolverine Jack. No, no, no, no no, Like
Speaker 3: it's huge X Men Jack.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Although he is a wide shouldered man, he's so wide,
Speaker 1: he is a fascinating looking fellow. So again, basically, none
Speaker 1: of the creatine websites disagree that he invented the hack squat,
Speaker 1: so I guess we have to give him that. A
Speaker 1: different website that tried to sell me work out Powders
Speaker 1: did argue that he didn't invent the bench press, and
Speaker 1: that article was written by a guy named Roger rock Lockridge,
Speaker 1: So I do think we have to trust it because
Speaker 1: that's quite a name, sweet name.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Hack and Schmidt racked up he invented something, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. The rock is in quotes absolutely, I hope
Speaker 1: you do. Could hear them? So Hack and Schmidt rack
Speaker 1: up more than three thousand victories during his career. A
Speaker 1: lot of them were during He has a there's a
Speaker 1: forty day wrestling tournament that he wins in nineteen hundred. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this guy, you have to assume pretty good endurrets.
Speaker 1: But he doesn't really earn a pace of a place
Speaker 1: of promise in the history books until nineteen oh five
Speaker 1: when he travels to the United States. Now, in the
Speaker 1: US and the UK, obviously, like in Europe, as we've
Speaker 1: been talking about, Greco Roman wrestling is the big thing
Speaker 1: in the US and the UK. It's still a thing,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of less favored than something called catches
Speaker 1: catch can wrestling, which is a combination of several smaller
Speaker 1: variants of wrestling rules that allows leg hooks but also
Speaker 1: emphasizes submissions and matt wrestling. This goes viral in the
Speaker 1: US because it made it particularly easy to allow challenges
Speaker 1: for members of the public at big outdoor events. Americans
Speaker 1: are drunk and love to fight, so you can't not
Speaker 1: have that. But also you don't want either to kill
Speaker 1: these guys or for them to seriously hurt your wrestlers,
Speaker 1: and so submission hold or something that wrestlers can train
Speaker 1: on and can kind of guarantee that they can win
Speaker 1: without like murdering a suburban dad by shattering his spine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm just trying to picture the first poor son
Speaker 3: of a bitch that got put into like a figure four.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have no context for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what is this a spell? No, it's like a
Speaker 1: medieval peasant eating cheetos. It just blows your mind. You
Speaker 1: would just you would just have a stroke and die, like.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't be able to wrap your mind around whatever
Speaker 3: devilry was being done to absolute.
Speaker 2: No, No, this was still a point.
Speaker 4: Times I've gone back to my date after losing to
Speaker 4: a figure four leg lock.
Speaker 2: Like, sorry, honey, I just I thought I had him
Speaker 2: that time.
Speaker 4: That would have been my whole life back then, just
Speaker 4: going out on dates like oh, sorry, I'm gonna go
Speaker 4: to my ass kicked honey, Like, stop it, come back
Speaker 4: to our date.
Speaker 2: You promised me you wouldn't do this anymore, my whole life.
Speaker 2: The evil you know, he's just gonna wrap your legs
Speaker 2: up again. I turn them over if I can slip them,
Speaker 2: so we're on our bellies. You never listened to me.
Speaker 2: You think my ideas are stupid.
Speaker 1: I'm imagining like early oss men, watching like a wrestling
Speaker 1: match and going, we have to we have to figure
Speaker 1: this out.
Speaker 2: We have to put money into this. This is how
Speaker 2: we beat the crowds. We gotta crack this nut.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they've got like a stone cold stunner locked up
Speaker 1: underneath the pentagon, like we can't let this out, and
Speaker 1: it's like the plague in the stand. This gets out,
Speaker 1: anything could happen.
Speaker 4: I've always thought you could measure how good a lover
Speaker 4: a man is by how well he takes a stunner,
Speaker 4: like how giving he is is a lover by how
Speaker 4: much he gets obliterated by the stone cold stunner, which
Speaker 4: means that the Rock does like a full backflip. I'm
Speaker 4: saying on record, I think the Rock is a fairy
Speaker 4: giving level. It's yeah, I mean, honestly, Sean, it's the
Speaker 4: Rock or Vince. Yeah, So that does like how weird
Speaker 4: Like Quiver, he used to do it better. He used
Speaker 4: to do it better before he blew his knees up.
Speaker 1: So hacken Schmidt's style and size made him pretty unstopped
Speaker 1: pppable in the US for a time.
Speaker 2: He very quickly.
Speaker 1: Defeated the American Champion of the Day guy named Tom
Speaker 1: Jenkins and what was not a particularly hard match. Hackenschmidt
Speaker 1: was so dominant that a wrestling promoter named Charles Cochran
Speaker 1: took him aside and was like, hey man, you make
Speaker 1: a lot more money if you like fuck around with
Speaker 1: your opponents a little like tauntum toy with them. Give
Speaker 1: people a show instead of just like beating the absolute
Speaker 1: piss out of them. In an article for E Wrestling News,
Speaker 1: Kyle dunning Wright's in other words, he wanted to fake
Speaker 1: the contests to make them more competitive, because the marks
Speaker 1: would keep coming back if they thought he was beatable.
Speaker 1: With this business philosophy, catch wrestling soon transitioned to become
Speaker 1: professional wrestling, and many other countries adopted the same, knowing
Speaker 1: there was more money to be made predetermining bouts for
Speaker 1: entertainment value. It all relied on keeping to k fabe
Speaker 1: that wrestling remained a sport in the eyes of the public.
Speaker 1: Now again, it's not as this is kind of like
Speaker 1: flattening it a little bit. Obviously, other people, other promoters
Speaker 1: had been doing wrestling matches where the ending was sort
Speaker 1: of settled ahead of time, but that was not always
Speaker 1: the case. And it was also a thing where like
Speaker 1: a lot of time in this day, even if you
Speaker 1: were supposed to be setting up who's going to win
Speaker 1: ahead of time, it would still like either egos would
Speaker 1: get her in the way or something, and like people
Speaker 1: would actually just wind up fighting right like this was
Speaker 1: a lot more common back then. I should also note
Speaker 1: that the idea in this period that a major sporting
Speaker 1: event might be determined by something other than legitimate contest
Speaker 1: was not unique to wrestling. In early nineteen nineteen, the
Speaker 1: Chicago White Sox conspired to lose that year's Fall Classic
Speaker 1: to the Cincinnati Reds. Members of the White Sox approached
Speaker 1: a group of gamblers and presented them with an opportunity
Speaker 1: to make a shitload of money. This did not go well.
Speaker 1: There's a huge grand jury investigation, there's a trial, and
Speaker 1: major league sports gambling is banned until we realized that
Speaker 1: it was stopping a lot of terrible people from making money.
Speaker 1: This took about one hundred years, so the fallout from
Speaker 1: this is significant. Anyway, Hack and Schmidt basically unstoppable in
Speaker 1: the US until he winds up wrestling a guy named
Speaker 1: Frank Gotch. Gotch is an American who just was famous
Speaker 1: for having pretty incredible endurance. It's unclear to me if
Speaker 1: their big match is fixed in one way, but from
Speaker 1: what I've read, neither man is able to force the
Speaker 1: other into a clear submission for more than two hours,
Speaker 1: and that's that is a huge. So for some perspective
Speaker 1: in modern wrestling, one of the most famous matches of
Speaker 1: all time is an hour long match between Shawn Michaels
Speaker 1: and Brett Hart. These are two of like the best
Speaker 1: technical wrestlers of their day. They're obviously this is not
Speaker 1: they're not competing in the traditional sense, but if you
Speaker 1: watch what they're doing, it's amazing that they kept up
Speaker 1: that level of.
Speaker 2: Energy for now.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible match. Yeah, they are doing they are going.
Speaker 1: It is insane.
Speaker 2: Shit.
Speaker 4: It was one of the may matches that went ninety minutes. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the year two thousand. That was because soccer Roba versus
Speaker 4: Hoyst Grace. Yeah, so, oh, I love soccer.
Speaker 2: It's the best. Yeah, the freaking Gracie Hunter.
Speaker 1: I think the point I'm making is that Hackenschmidt and
Speaker 1: Gotch must have been something to see. Two hours is
Speaker 1: still a significant fucking mesch.
Speaker 3: If Gotcha's finishing move wasn't called the Gotcha, I don't
Speaker 3: know what he's doing in the carnie business.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like I don't know what we're doing
Speaker 1: as a culture if that wasn't the case. But I
Speaker 1: haven't found evidence of it. Tom So I apologize on
Speaker 1: behalf of America. No, yeah, so wrestling's chairman right along,
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds. But then you get that whole World
Speaker 1: War thing. It disrupts the industry. Obviously, the kind of
Speaker 1: wrestling you know, age men eventually do come back afterwards,
Speaker 1: but the age that follows World War One is a
Speaker 1: little more jaded. And one of the things this means
Speaker 1: is that a larger and larger number of wrestling fans
Speaker 1: start to doubt whether or not wrestling is real. The
Speaker 1: sport languished and a shady as a kind of shady
Speaker 1: side show entertainment for drunks and people from New Jersey
Speaker 1: until the nineteen twenties. In the early twenties, a wrestler
Speaker 1: named Ed Lewis is hooked up by his trainer who'd
Speaker 1: also trained Frank Gotch with a fella named Toots Mond.
Speaker 1: Now Tootsmond comes from a names Toots Mob. These all
Speaker 1: sounds like old time, Sophie. Will you look up a
Speaker 1: picture of tootsman. They need to see him. But second,
Speaker 1: I need to describe this man to you. Tootsmond is
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen twenties considered one of the most
Speaker 1: out of control gamblers in the entire country in the twenties, like, hell,
Speaker 1: he is a mobbed up dude who other mobbed up
Speaker 1: dudes are like, This motherfucker gambles too much and number
Speaker 1: two Toots mon competition Smeland is a dude who other
Speaker 1: men in the twenties are like. This guy drinks quite
Speaker 1: a lot.
Speaker 5: Like it is.
Speaker 1: It's probable no one on earth could drink with this
Speaker 1: guy today.
Speaker 2: I'm really excited to Yeah, you gotta show. You got
Speaker 2: to show, Toots. I can't wait to see this. I
Speaker 2: can't wait to see this hero.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're ready ready, This guy who other mobsters were like,
Speaker 3: God damn, this man holy looks like a giant baby.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is an unfinished clone. Yeah he's dummy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They paint those nipples on him every morning so people
Speaker 1: don't get suspicious.
Speaker 2: He looks, he looks.
Speaker 4: Yeah to sixty yeah, six from He.
Speaker 2: Is a slab of meat.
Speaker 1: Look, this dude a profoundly unsettling man. And I'm only
Speaker 1: saying that because he's been dead for decades, because I
Speaker 1: would be frightened to make these comments if he were alive.
Speaker 3: You know, he looks like in the face, not so
Speaker 3: much as build but in the face he looks like
Speaker 3: Brian Urlocker. Oh yeah, like a cabbage patch kid.
Speaker 1: But yeah, looks like he does have yeah, resting cabbage
Speaker 1: patch energy.
Speaker 2: So Toots is in adition to me, let me call
Speaker 2: him because of his train conductor hat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Toots is also a wrestler, and so he acted
Speaker 1: Ed Lewis's sparring partner, trainer and security man. Together the
Speaker 1: two worked out a series of new holds and innovative
Speaker 1: wrestling tactics. They also would wrestle each other in the
Speaker 1: ring sometime during matches these were you know, obviously they
Speaker 1: had set these matches ahead of time. Both of these
Speaker 1: guys are pretty technically skilled. So Toots is the kind
Speaker 1: of guy that like Ed, can trust, and they can
Speaker 1: trust each other to do a lot of these kind
Speaker 1: of like throws and tosses and not murder each other
Speaker 1: and put together a few poreographed spectacle Right.
Speaker 3: If you can't trust Toots, you can't trust Toots. Who
Speaker 3: can't trust who wants to stay in this world? If
Speaker 3: you can't trust the hard drink and gambling, out of
Speaker 3: control mobster wrestler.
Speaker 1: So Toots and Lewis overtime develop a new style of wrestling,
Speaker 1: and it's a hybrid of Greco Roman catches, catch can
Speaker 1: and kind of circus shit which they call slam bang
Speaker 1: Western style wrestling. And this is kind of the most
Speaker 1: direct precursor to modern pro wrestling. In a different article
Speaker 1: for e Wrestling News, Kyle Don rights the newly formed
Speaker 1: Trio used their connections to persuade wrestlers from around the
Speaker 1: country to join their new promotions, so they no longer
Speaker 1: had to be controlled by others. Toots began forming what
Speaker 1: we would later know as sports entertainment, but the wrestlers
Speaker 1: had to be in on keeping it secret from the public.
Speaker 1: This new style of wrestling would incorporate elements from boxing,
Speaker 1: Greco Roman, freestyle, lumber camp fighting, and theater. As traditional
Speaker 1: wrestling could go on for several hours, they implemented time
Speaker 1: limits to ensure matches would not bore the audience. They
Speaker 1: also introduced the concept of tag team wrestling, which had
Speaker 1: seldom been used before. Within six months, they had taken
Speaker 1: over the wrestling scene and were taking bookings and major
Speaker 1: sports venues instead of back alley halls and other small places.
Speaker 4: Sounds like making love, lumber camp brawls. Excuse me, lumber
Speaker 4: Camp brawls.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a major book, specifically up in the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest, a major form of entertainment where like you
Speaker 1: just go out and watch lumber camp guys beat the
Speaker 1: piss out of each other there. They are very jacked
Speaker 1: and they have no money. They are all alcoholics. They
Speaker 1: will fight for hard liquor. Maybe they'll fight a bear,
Speaker 1: maybe a tree.
Speaker 2: I don't know. They don't care.
Speaker 1: They don't even know the deck out and you know,
Speaker 1: danger will fight for your amusement to the death. If
Speaker 1: you want, you know, you slip them a twenty Products
Speaker 1: and services that support this content. Huge fans of blood sports, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't give a shit. Ah, we're back. So you know,
Speaker 1: lumber camp fighting, all this kind of stuff fuses together
Speaker 1: to make a slam bang western style wrestling with which
Speaker 1: Toots and Ed create.
Speaker 3: Just I love that somebody saw lumber camp fighting and
Speaker 3: was like, this is close.
Speaker 2: America needs this. But it would not just it's just
Speaker 2: said shiny panties, a.
Speaker 1: Couple of cas and really throwing each other, weird, wild distances,
Speaker 1: surprising air. That's what we need here. And I got
Speaker 1: a fancy guy with a monocle.
Speaker 2: Yeah. More guys in suits.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's not nearly enough racist caricatures. No one's dressed
Speaker 1: as a shake. So for one thing, we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to fix that. We got to fix that quoit right now.
Speaker 1: It is worth noting that around the same time, the
Speaker 1: late nineteen twenties and early thirties, other people were innovating
Speaker 1: wrestling too, obviously, like this is not a two person thing.
Speaker 1: Among other innovations in this time, the flying tackle and
Speaker 1: the dropkick are invented, which I love to think of
Speaker 1: the first man like the right brothers of drop kicks.
Speaker 1: They keep failing at it like they're about to leave
Speaker 1: for the day, and then one more time, just let
Speaker 1: me try one more time.
Speaker 3: I know I can deal with both see and give
Speaker 3: both legs. Can you imagine seeing that for the first
Speaker 3: it's like for the.
Speaker 1: First oh my god, oh shit, yeah is hes Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: I think the next thing that will be like that
Speaker 1: is when they finally clone a mammoth.
Speaker 3: Like, my god, look at it, right, the timeline of
Speaker 3: human history is split at the drop.
Speaker 2: Drop kick it mammoth right now, fucking snail washing drop pick.
Speaker 1: Now I have become death destroyer of worlds.
Speaker 3: That's all that's all. That's all the bomb is. It's
Speaker 3: all fission is. It's it's Adams drop kicking each other. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a it's a it's an evolution of the drop kick.
Speaker 3: So Billy Sandow would test new recruits for kind of
Speaker 3: this wrestling business that they're building in his own private ring. Well,
Speaker 3: Toots would work with them on their finishing sequences. This
Speaker 3: kind of period is when they invent the concept of
Speaker 3: wrestling having a go home sequence, which is a commonplace today,
Speaker 3: but back then it was new and exciting defans. Toots
Speaker 3: also introduced the concept of the no contest and double
Speaker 3: count out, which moves wrestling away from kind of the
Speaker 3: old school competitive roots and creates a lot of possibilities
Speaker 3: for like storytelling, right, for ways that you can kind
Speaker 3: of end matches and stuff without people getting beat up
Speaker 3: too bad, and that you know, opens up possibilities for
Speaker 3: all sorts of storylines, a whole bunch of stuff, And
Speaker 3: it's kind of worth noting just in terms of how
Speaker 3: innovative these guys are. Modern wrestling is still a very
Speaker 3: similar to what Toots and his buddies create, and these
Speaker 3: three guys become known as the gold Dust Trio, I
Speaker 3: think because of how much fucking money they make, and
Speaker 3: they basically are kind of the most direct progenitors of
Speaker 3: the modern pro wrestling industry. They do a lot of
Speaker 3: fights in burlesque theaters, side shows, and they kind of
Speaker 3: move on in really a fairly short span of time
Speaker 3: because of how much interest there is to stadiums and
Speaker 3: other massive like respectable venues, and wrestling for the first
Speaker 3: time spreads across the United States, not as just like
Speaker 3: a thing people did, but as a semi organized business
Speaker 3: in which there's quite a lot of money.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Toots is the enforcer. In addition to training people and stuff.
Speaker 1: He and another guy, John Pisseck, would beat the shit
Speaker 1: out of any wrestlers who tried to go into business
Speaker 1: for themselves. This earned them the nickname hookers. That's what
Speaker 1: they're called for doing this. I'm not really certain why,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, that's that's the old, that old hooker Toots.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 3: I love that Toots just applied his mob training to this.
Speaker 3: It's like somebody else trying to mustle in air territory
Speaker 3: fucking break his legs.
Speaker 1: There's not a problem that Toots cannot solve with a
Speaker 1: fucking dropkick yees.
Speaker 4: So that's the glomber brawl double threat. When you can
Speaker 4: get a guy in a ring and beat a guy
Speaker 4: out of the ring. That's that's the total package.
Speaker 1: Just Toots walking into work. He's got like a briefcase
Speaker 1: and inside of it is just like a stump. So
Speaker 1: the trio eventually broke apart due to a power struggle,
Speaker 1: but wrestling was here to stay, and for a time,
Speaker 1: its shady reputation kept it down. Madison Square Garden initially
Speaker 1: refused to host wrestling events through the nineteen forties. What
Speaker 1: finally changes this is that Toots teams up with Bastard's
Speaker 1: Pod alumni Bernard McFadden, who kind of invented physical culture
Speaker 1: in the United States. He was a big magazine baron,
Speaker 1: one of the guys who sort of started the modern
Speaker 1: like health and supplement industry. And he provides Toots with
Speaker 1: the financial backing to expand this business, and because he's
Speaker 1: got connections, he convinces Madison Square Garden to start hosting
Speaker 1: wrestling events. In nineteen forty eight, the first Garden wrestling
Speaker 1: exhibition was held. It basically always sells out. It is
Speaker 1: a huge business for them in that first match, a
Speaker 1: guy named Gorgeous George defeats a guy named Ernie Dusk.
Speaker 1: That same year sees another seminal moment in pro wrestling history.
Speaker 1: By that point, wrestling has grown from being the business
Speaker 1: of a number of shady carnee promoters and disgrace boxers
Speaker 1: to a network of promoters and what you might call
Speaker 1: like cartel leaders who ran wrestling in different cities and
Speaker 1: regions and generally hated each other, but inly. On July fourteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight, several of these dudes gathered together at
Speaker 1: a hotel and Water, lou Iowa to talk and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote now from a book called Sex, Lies and Headlocks.
Speaker 1: Right around the room were pl Pinky You're gonna love
Speaker 1: these nicknames. Tom p L Pinky George, a former bantamweighte
Speaker 1: fighter who ran all the shows out of Des Moines
Speaker 1: a'l have to like to book big games names in Columbus,
Speaker 1: but couldn't keep them for long because he was notoriously cheap.
Speaker 1: Orville Brown, a two hundred and fifty pounds brawler from
Speaker 1: Kansas City. Max Clayton, a genial Omaha businessman who played
Speaker 1: only twenty five dollars for a main event, but made
Speaker 1: up for it by buying his favorite wrestlers straight whiskey
Speaker 1: and steaks. And Tony Stetcher, who ran the Minneapolis territory
Speaker 1: while managing his brother Joe, a three time world champion
Speaker 1: who could dent a sack of grain with his thighs.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, what an amazing.
Speaker 2: Dentist.
Speaker 1: We must be missing something metric. I feel like most
Speaker 1: people could, but maybe grain was different than brain.
Speaker 2: Sixty sixty percent of those guys have killed somebody with
Speaker 2: the wrench.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, absolutely, but only of them remember it, right.
Speaker 4: I love how like some of them are like, Oh,
Speaker 4: this guy's the toughest guy in the world, and then
Speaker 4: one guy's like, I guess he can kind of you
Speaker 4: can tell he's been sitting on grain.
Speaker 2: Yeah he does grain. Real brain city, real dubious honors
Speaker 2: in the crew, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So the dude who calls all these guys together in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight to talk is a man, a forty
Speaker 1: two year old guy. He's a former sports writer named
Speaker 1: Sam Muchnik. Sam had lost his job as a sports
Speaker 1: writer covering baseball because his newspaper collapsed, a thing none
Speaker 1: of us can identify with.
Speaker 2: What is that? Like, I can't picture that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he decided to deal with this trauma by starting
Speaker 1: to work for a wrestling baron and then becoming one himself.
Speaker 1: He rises to prominence fairly quickly, and you know, he
Speaker 1: a little break to do some World War two stuff.
Speaker 1: But when he gets back, he finds himself frustrated by
Speaker 1: the fact that Rustling is kind of being held back
Speaker 1: by this vicious pack of promoters who are They're always
Speaker 1: fighting and bribing each other to like steal each other's wrestlers,
Speaker 1: and this is getting in the way of both their
Speaker 1: profits and expanding the business. So he gets all these
Speaker 1: guys together, these real shady motherfuckers, and he's like, what
Speaker 1: if we set up rules together as the bosses of
Speaker 1: these different kind of syndicates, to set up prices, to
Speaker 1: like fix wages, to blacklist wrestlers who go into business
Speaker 1: for themselves. Now, this is very illegal. They are violating
Speaker 1: the shit out of the Sherman Anti Trust Act. But
Speaker 1: these guys are all criminals, right, This is not the
Speaker 1: first law these people have brokes.
Speaker 2: This is mobshit. This is classic mobs shita. This is
Speaker 2: very classic mob shit.
Speaker 1: And these guys all have a shitload of money, so
Speaker 1: they figure they can bribe whoever they need to bribe.
Speaker 1: He gets all these guys at the President Hotel to
Speaker 1: agree to his idea, which amounts to something like the
Speaker 1: only union pro wrestling whatever. See and of course it
Speaker 1: is a union of owners. This goes on to come
Speaker 1: the National Wrestling Alliance. Interesting fact, there's another NWA that's
Speaker 1: like a wrestling kind of alliance that predates this NWA.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's not a kind of big deal in
Speaker 1: the history. So anyway, interesting stuff. So they all agree
Speaker 1: on this. They form the NWA, this big cartel. The
Speaker 1: last holdout to it is Muchnik's former friend in Biddler rival,
Speaker 1: a guy named lou Fez. Fez eventually agreed to merge
Speaker 1: outfits with Muchnik and join the cartel, and Muchnik is like, okay,
Speaker 1: but if we do that, you got to agree to
Speaker 1: lose a title match to this wrestler the NWA likes,
Speaker 1: called Orville Brown, right, so this match never happens. Brown
Speaker 1: and his business partner, another wrestler that he'd fought that night,
Speaker 1: were like driving home from the match. They're like friends,
Speaker 1: but they're supposed to be enemies. And they happen to
Speaker 1: hit an eighteen wheeler. They may have been hammered and
Speaker 1: very nearly die. This is a problem for several reasons
Speaker 1: because Brown and is Part are supposed to be hated enemies,
Speaker 1: and the fact that they're righting together in the same
Speaker 1: car creates a scandal. I think they get fired for this.
Speaker 1: It threatens to undo the fragile bonds of belief that
Speaker 1: made wrestling what it was.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I think later on, a similar thing happens
Speaker 3: to Rick Flarey's in a plane crash with a guy
Speaker 3: he's feuding with, and they had to pretend like they
Speaker 3: weren't traveling together.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I want to actually talk about this a little bit because,
Speaker 1: like it's now fairly well known that within the wrestling world,
Speaker 1: this kind of mix of lies in theater to create
Speaker 1: this illusion of a contest is known.
Speaker 2: As k fabe.
Speaker 1: Right, there's a debate over where the term comes from.
Speaker 1: Sex lies in headlocks kind of credits it to Turn
Speaker 1: of the century carnivals where these you know, these wrestlers
Speaker 1: who would take on random challengers which they called marks
Speaker 1: from the crowd and like would wrestle them and stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, they can't you know, in that case, they
Speaker 1: generally know what they're doing because they have a lot
Speaker 1: more experience. But when they're wrestling each other, they can't
Speaker 1: go as hard as they otherwise might because one of
Speaker 1: them will get hurt if they do. So they rigged
Speaker 1: the matches in order to avoid getting seriously and injured,
Speaker 1: and they have to be in order to like kind
Speaker 1: of set this stuff up. They have to develop a
Speaker 1: secret language that lets them kind of plan stuff out
Speaker 1: in public without making it clear to others what they're doing,
Speaker 1: which is this kind of pig Latin dialect called carnie.
Speaker 1: So one theory about where k fabe comes from is
Speaker 1: that it's just a term from this little language that
Speaker 1: they made up initially to Initially, it's kind of a
Speaker 1: term for like, shut the fuck up. There's like Marx
Speaker 1: watching right, Like, that's the initial meaning of k fabe.
Speaker 1: But over time it just becomes a metaphor for like,
Speaker 1: don't let anyone on on what's really happening. Now, we
Speaker 1: don't actually know that that's the origin of k fabe.
Speaker 1: Nobody is certain where it comes from. But throughout the
Speaker 1: middle of the twentieth century, this kind of whole language
Speaker 1: grows up around pro wrestling, As Josie Reisman describes, for
Speaker 1: nearly a century, this illusion was maintained at all costs
Speaker 1: in a kind of industry omerta. A heel in a
Speaker 1: face who were sworn at k fabe, enemies couldn't be
Speaker 1: seen drinking together in their off hours. A wrestler build
Speaker 1: his Iranian couldn't be known to be Italian. Even wrestlers
Speaker 1: themselves sometimes had trouble keeping track of what was k
Speaker 1: fabe and what was not, so they developed two more terms.
Speaker 1: A work was anything that was k fabe, and anything
Speaker 1: that was real was a shoot. Now a couple of
Speaker 1: other notes here, A heel is a bad guy, right,
Speaker 1: Like in wrestling, they're generally the guy, especially in this period,
Speaker 1: they're nearly always supposed to lose.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, a face, which stands for baby face, is like
Speaker 1: a good guy.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There's generally the people who were supposed to win in
Speaker 1: this period. That's going to change a lot over time.
Speaker 1: Eventually you get to the point where like heels and
Speaker 1: faces kind of move up and down, and there's also
Speaker 1: becomes this kind of third category, and a lot of
Speaker 1: times the heels win because of the people that like
Speaker 1: the fans like the most, but in this period of time,
Speaker 1: it's a lot simpler, right, Well.
Speaker 4: There was a Hul Cogan's kind of a notorious liar,
Speaker 4: but like in his book he had a story about
Speaker 4: like he had a gun that belonged to one of
Speaker 4: the Savage Samoans and then they all had to go
Speaker 4: to jail because the Savage Samoans wouldn't talk in front
Speaker 4: of the police, because the wrestlers supposed to be like
Speaker 4: these caveman monsters that didn't speak English, so they could
Speaker 4: have like cleared up the misunderstanding about the gun. But abe,
Speaker 4: they all went to jail and stand and I'm like,
Speaker 4: there's no way any of it's true.
Speaker 3: But like this is what I don't know. I've heard
Speaker 3: that story from other sources than Hulk Cogan.
Speaker 1: I don't know that. Like you are, Sean, you are
Speaker 1: very correct. Hulk Cogan is a famous liar. There are
Speaker 1: stories that crazy that we're about to talk about stuff
Speaker 1: on that level, and even wilder does occur.
Speaker 4: I remember reading about how Rick Flair's wife didn't know
Speaker 4: it was fake until like deep into the nineties.
Speaker 2: No, no, and there's a lot of that going on.
Speaker 1: I do want to note before we get into some
Speaker 1: of these stories, not all wrestling fans are marks. Overtime
Speaker 1: professionals split them up into smarts and marks. A smart
Speaker 1: is somebody who gets that, like, this is not real, right,
Speaker 1: These giant men throwing each other across the room are
Speaker 1: engaged in a performance. This is not really fighting. Receman
Speaker 1: and other historians of wrestling like kind of traditionally the
Speaker 1: assumption was there's only a few smarts, most people are marks.
Speaker 1: Receman Increasingly in other historians of wrestling tend to suspect
Speaker 1: that actually, like most fans, particularly most adult fans over time,
Speaker 1: are smarts. They're all kind of It's sort of like
Speaker 1: Santa Claus, right, you know, there's a period of time
Speaker 1: where you kind of believe that it's it's a real sport,
Speaker 1: and then you get older you see something that breaks
Speaker 1: the illusion. Kind of Famously, hulk Ogan, who again take
Speaker 1: with a grain of salt, he claims to have been
Speaker 1: a believer as a young adult, like to have been
Speaker 1: totally bought into it until one day, as he's sort
Speaker 1: of like watching a match, he sees two wrestlers strategizing
Speaker 1: beforehand and has this like horrifying realization that the game
Speaker 1: is rigged.
Speaker 2: I'd be so embarrassed to tell that story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I might believe it because he's not a smart man.
Speaker 2: Let's be very clear about the Hulkster. Oh what you mean, dude.
Speaker 1: Reisman also notes that while most fans were probably savvy
Speaker 1: enough to parse out the truth eventually, wrestlers for decades
Speaker 1: lived in mortal fear of breaking k fape because managers
Speaker 1: and promoters fuel into their crews that this lie is
Speaker 1: the only thing keeping the interest in wrestling and thus
Speaker 1: their jobs alive. Right, this is deadly serious to the industry. Right,
Speaker 1: Wrestlers are kind of divided into again. You know, you've
Speaker 1: got your heels and your baby faces and stuff. One
Speaker 1: of the most interesting realities of early wrestling is again,
Speaker 1: kind of how seriously this is taken. You know, even
Speaker 1: though maybe most fans eventually figure it out, a lot
Speaker 1: of fans never do. Some of this is because guys
Speaker 1: like Muchnik would demand that their heel and face wrestlers
Speaker 1: never travel together and never act friendly together in any way.
Speaker 1: You know, if wrestlers suffered injuries in their regular life
Speaker 1: or got arrested and charged with crimes, which happened constantly.
Speaker 1: This would get worked into storylines on the fly. My
Speaker 1: favorite example of this stemmed from the nineteen eighty three
Speaker 1: arrest of Kerry Eric. And we will be talking about
Speaker 1: the von Eric family in a little bit, but I
Speaker 1: want to read a quote from the book wrest Dark Story.
Speaker 1: That's what we're ending on, but I want to read
Speaker 1: a book. A quote from the book Wrestling Babylon by
Speaker 1: IRV right now. Carry and his wife were returning from
Speaker 1: their honeymoon in Proto Virta, Mexico, when US customs agents,
Speaker 1: during a routine inspection, caught him with eighteen unmarked tablets
Speaker 1: in his right front pocket. Inside the crotch of his
Speaker 1: pants was a plastic bag containing an assortment of nearly
Speaker 1: three hundred other bills, including codeine, diazepam, librium, impossibly perkidan,
Speaker 1: ten grams of marijuana, and six and a half grams
Speaker 1: of blue and white powder. The von Erics wove the Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a pretty good list of shit. Von Erics
Speaker 1: wove the ensuing publicity into the World Class TV storyline,
Speaker 1: vaguely suggesting that Kerry had been framed by the Freebirds,
Speaker 1: their arch rivals. Eighteen months later, after behind the scenes maneuvering.
Speaker 1: The charges were dropped by the Tarrant County District Attorney.
Speaker 1: Very fun story. So the wrestlers express in this period, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's his name?
Speaker 2: Michael?
Speaker 3: Oh shit, I forget his name, the guy from never Mind.
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: So Michael Bolton. You think of Michael Bolton? Yes, I'm
Speaker 2: thinking of Michael Bolton, aren't we all? Always? I am?
Speaker 1: So wrestlers didn't just kind of keep the fans, you know,
Speaker 1: try to keep this shit up for the fans. Then
Speaker 1: Michael help their own family in the dark, maintaining the
Speaker 1: lie that the matches they were in were real competitions
Speaker 1: and that their fights with other wrestlers were real. This
Speaker 1: sometimes caused dangerous situations. An early heel named Mario Galinto
Speaker 1: was so hated and that his wife feared for his life,
Speaker 1: and so she started showing up at matches with a
Speaker 1: loaded handgun to protect him from his rivals, and she
Speaker 1: would pull it on them and stuff like. She would
Speaker 1: threaten them with it during matches, and eventually promoters had
Speaker 1: to sit down with Mario when were like, you have
Speaker 1: to tell your wife the truth. She is going to
Speaker 1: murder someone on television like this is a serious problem
Speaker 1: for us.
Speaker 2: Don't need to stop marrying six year olds. She was
Speaker 2: last Paul Bearer some shit, right, do him on fucking
Speaker 2: thirty eight already?
Speaker 1: She didn't when he tells her to the truth. Allegedly,
Speaker 1: she doesn't speak to him for three days. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: just destroys there.
Speaker 4: That's because he's humiliating, but also he's infuriating, like you like.
Speaker 2: Me, you like me? Oh stupid about wrestling?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean she was in such fear for him
Speaker 3: that she was carrying a loaded gun to his matches,
Speaker 3: and he was letting her continue to do this.
Speaker 2: He was like, yeah, honey, I get it. You're doing
Speaker 2: a reasonable thing. The boss. Yeah, yeah, Maybe.
Speaker 1: Communication wasn't their strong suit as a couple. You know
Speaker 1: that's possible, it is, to be fair to her. It
Speaker 1: was super common for wrestlers to get assaulted and injured
Speaker 1: by fans. Women in particular habit had a habit of
Speaker 1: jabbing heels with hatpins on like their way up to
Speaker 1: the ring and stuff. Men meanwhile, tended to throw rocks
Speaker 1: and bottles at them. In one set South Carolina match,
Speaker 1: a seventy eight year old man with a knife stabbed
Speaker 1: al Rogowski so bad that he needed more than one
Speaker 1: hundred stitches. Now, god Al is a hard son of
Speaker 1: a bitch, so he refuses to go to a hospital.
Speaker 1: He drives himself back to his house, he finds someone
Speaker 1: there to sew him up, and then he wrestles the
Speaker 1: very next day. I because I tell you why, I
Speaker 1: wrestlers don't have any health insurance. They sure don't tell
Speaker 1: them they are better paid back then.
Speaker 3: If he doesn't get any sick time either. So if
Speaker 3: he doesn't wrestle the next day, he doesn't make money.
Speaker 3: So it's like fucking glue me up. I'm going out there.
Speaker 1: I should note it is generally agreed upon by the historians.
Speaker 1: I'm reading the money's better back then than it is
Speaker 1: now by comparison, like these guys are making better livings
Speaker 1: than like modern wrestlers often tend to, which is kind
Speaker 1: of interesting to me. Obviously, that does you know. It's
Speaker 1: it's different around the country. That's not everywhere, But broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: it's easier to make an okay living then as a
Speaker 1: wrestler than it is today. A lot of people will argue, YEA.
Speaker 2: You got stabbed more often.
Speaker 1: You did get stabbed more often. For an example of that,
Speaker 1: Sean Rowdy Roddy Piper claims to have been stabbed three
Speaker 1: times by fans who thought he was an actual bat guy.
Speaker 2: I don't doubt it.
Speaker 1: Man, he used to drive people crazy. No, they were
Speaker 1: he was because he's he was.
Speaker 2: He's a genius.
Speaker 1: He's an incredible actors, very very very talented at what
Speaker 1: he did. But also, like just looking at Rowdy Roddy Piper,
Speaker 1: you have to be either ready to die or the
Speaker 1: drunkest eye anyone has ever been to be willing to
Speaker 1: attempt to stab that man, because he was a fucking monster.
Speaker 2: Also, his whole gimmick was that he was insane.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, God, I love Roddy Piper, you know
Speaker 1: enough to stab him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would. I would.
Speaker 1: I would stab him if he was back again, if
Speaker 1: we got one more episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Speaker 1: with him playing the mania. What an absolutely hero. You
Speaker 1: know what, during this next ad break, go watch the
Speaker 1: movie They Live starring Rowdy Roddy Piper, just a champion.
Speaker 2: We're back the entire They Live. We did. We did
Speaker 2: Always Sunny episode and.
Speaker 1: Then Always Sunny Episode, both works of incredible art. So
Speaker 1: given all of this. It probably won't surprise you to
Speaker 1: hear that even in the pre steroid days, wrestlers often
Speaker 1: lived difficult lives. One of the first great modern wrestlers
Speaker 1: was a guy named Gorgeous George. He was the son
Speaker 1: of a house painter. He played a narcissistic healer heel
Speaker 1: who was one of the first big popular TV wrestlers.
Speaker 1: He would prance around the ring in a fur robe.
Speaker 1: He was kind of a little light, queer coded kind
Speaker 1: of bad guy thing. Right, this is you know, the sixties.
Speaker 1: He gouged eyes, he flirted with audience members, and he
Speaker 1: just like chewed the fuck out of the scenery. George
Speaker 1: is a huge hit in like the fifties, in kind
Speaker 1: of early sixties. But by the time he retires in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, the heavy drinking that came with his
Speaker 1: career field, because I mean it's part of just what
Speaker 1: these guys do to deal with the pain, because you know,
Speaker 1: it's not easy on your body, had destroyed his health.
Speaker 1: When he retires, he uses the money he has to
Speaker 1: start a bar in Van NY's, but his medical bills
Speaker 1: quickly force him to sell it. In nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: after a night of bumming drinks from the bartender in
Speaker 1: the bar he used to own. He dropped dead from
Speaker 1: a heart attack. He was forty eight years old. In
Speaker 1: sects lies in headlocks. The author's note. The wrestlers he'd
Speaker 1: once work with pass around a hat to help bury
Speaker 1: him in an orchid colored casket, beside which his last girlfriend,
Speaker 1: a stripper, collapsed crying. It is a very wrestling funeral.
Speaker 1: He is not the only guy with a story like this.
Speaker 2: That's a bummer. That yeah dark.
Speaker 1: I mean, not that his girlfriend is a stripper, that's whatever,
Speaker 1: But just like this is like, his story is not uncommon.
Speaker 3: No, I mean it's dark that they had to pass
Speaker 3: around a hat to pay for his cast and he
Speaker 3: collapsed bump begging for drinks in the bar he used
Speaker 3: to own.
Speaker 2: That's dark.
Speaker 1: It is dark. It is And again, a lot of
Speaker 1: these promoters are just straight up monsters. There are more
Speaker 1: of them who are kind of decent guys in this period.
Speaker 1: There are a number of like regional promoters who will
Speaker 1: do shit like when their wrestlers have health problems after retirement,
Speaker 1: divert funds from their business to pay for their healthcare.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that's the norm, but it does happen,
Speaker 1: and it's also there is strong solidarity with kind of
Speaker 1: wrestlers where stuff like this is not the taking up
Speaker 1: collections to help old and injured wrestlers pay for medical
Speaker 1: treatment or pay for funerals. That stuff happens with a
Speaker 1: significant degree of frequency in this period of time. There
Speaker 1: is kind of this understanding that, like, you know, this
Speaker 1: is a tough job, we're all kind of going to
Speaker 1: destroy ourselves doing it, and we have to have each
Speaker 1: other's back, you know. So, given the cultural values of
Speaker 1: the time, good guys and bad guys in wrestling had
Speaker 1: to be very easy to separate. On black and white
Speaker 1: TV in the nineteen fifties and sixties, this often meant
Speaker 1: that your bad guys are going to be either Communists
Speaker 1: or Nazis, right, very easy way to make it clear, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: An early Russian wrestler Boris Malenko was actually a Jew
Speaker 1: from Jersey named Larry. But you know he could do
Speaker 1: an accent, right. That's also an extremely common wrestling story. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1: For example, the Shake of Araby, who prayed to Allah
Speaker 1: before each fight, was a Detroit native named Ed and
Speaker 1: one of the first great Nazi wrestlers was Jack Adkisson,
Speaker 1: better known as Fritz Vaughan Eric now but he was
Speaker 1: a real Nazi, right. Well, the focus of this series
Speaker 1: is Vince McMahon obviously, you know, but wrestling is always
Speaker 1: traded on brutality and mortgaging human bodies for entertainment, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to just focus on the ways Vince
Speaker 1: did that because that's going to give people this attitude
Speaker 1: which is sometimes gets put across by like wrestling fans
Speaker 1: that like before Vince, things were all better, you know,
Speaker 1: some stuff was, but this has always been a pretty
Speaker 1: brutal business. So we're going to talk for the rest
Speaker 1: of this episode about Fritz and the Vaughan Eeric family.
Speaker 1: You guys both had a reaction when I brought them up,
Speaker 1: so I think you might know this story.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of story.
Speaker 1: It's really tragic. It is a nightmare. Yeah. So Fritz
Speaker 1: slash Jack and we're just gonna call him Fritz from
Speaker 1: now on had been trained by the founder of one
Speaker 1: of the first great wrestling dynasties, Stu Hart, a Canadian
Speaker 1: from Edmonton whose dungeon, that's what it's called the dungeon,
Speaker 1: was the most celebrated training center for wrestlers of its
Speaker 1: day and for like generations to come. This is like
Speaker 1: they remain very big. Brett Hart we talked about a
Speaker 1: little bit earlier, is like one of his kids and
Speaker 1: you know, trains there Heart trained Fritz and gave him
Speaker 1: his stage name. And you might think that having your
Speaker 1: like mentor be like, hey, you've got serious Nazi vibes
Speaker 1: to me, why don't you wear a fucking swastika into
Speaker 1: the ring, would make you reconsider aspects of your life.
Speaker 2: But Fritz is like, yeah, man, for sure, that sounds great.
Speaker 2: He would wrestle me how much? Yeah? Yeah, fifty dollars
Speaker 2: a night? For sure, Bro.
Speaker 1: Fritz would wrestle wearing Nazi regalia. His trademark move was
Speaker 1: the iron claw. And he has the distinction of having
Speaker 1: been wrestling Lou Theez. We've talked about before. He's kind
Speaker 1: of one of the big great, big early champions. He
Speaker 1: and Theez are wrestling the day that JFK gets assassinated.
Speaker 1: There's not as much great footage of him in the
Speaker 1: ring as I like, Yeah, yeah, yes, definitely a causal relation.
Speaker 1: There's not as much great footage of him as I'd
Speaker 1: like but I found a clip of his brother Waldov
Speaker 1: on Eric. Waldo's not his real brother. This is a
Speaker 1: kfabe thing, right They Waldo is another guy who trains
Speaker 1: at the Dungeon and they're like, you know, match brothers,
Speaker 1: and Waldo was also a Nazi. This clip is from
Speaker 1: a match in nineteen seventy five and it is remarkable.
Speaker 1: I should note before before we start that his opponent
Speaker 1: here is Jay Strongbow, who is a Native American wrestler
Speaker 1: who wrestles in a full headdress. He's actually an Italian. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not an uncommon story. So here's a here's here's Waldo
Speaker 1: von Eric being a Nazi and as he comes in
Speaker 1: the ring, he is wearing a stall helm.
Speaker 2: I should note, boy, he sure is, Yeah he is.
Speaker 1: He is wearing a Nazi helmet and a sleepless shirt.
Speaker 1: He's got a writing crop in his hands, and he's
Speaker 1: got in the front of his shirt.
Speaker 2: Is there's a Nazi logo like.
Speaker 4: Here comes the Italian man in the native Headdress's the
Speaker 4: Italian man dress.
Speaker 3: Chief Ja strong Bow from from Tuscany.
Speaker 2: Old timey wrestlers.
Speaker 4: I do love the gay coated fancy man and the
Speaker 4: Indian chief are like my two favorite like problematic.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, oh yeah, you get some I love I
Speaker 3: love that Waldo's swastika.
Speaker 1: You can tell they weren't into drawing it.
Speaker 2: I also love you.
Speaker 1: Steroids are starting to be a thing in the seventies,
Speaker 1: but they haven't figured him out. Great, So these guys
Speaker 1: are just huge dudes with beer bellies. Oh he's doing
Speaker 1: Nazi Nazi.
Speaker 2: There was the iron claw.
Speaker 4: If the audience doesn't know, is kind of like a
Speaker 4: Nazi salute on the human face. You just grab the
Speaker 4: front of their head and you just squeeze it glory.
Speaker 4: Impossible to escape. I mean, yeah, palming someone on the face.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just get out of that. Just rough you because
Speaker 2: backwards to the side, no thanks to that, No, no whatever.
Speaker 3: When you get sighyled right in the forehead, you sort
Speaker 3: of like get knocks all thoughts out of your brain.
Speaker 2: What do I do?
Speaker 1: That's why Hitler adopted it famous, famously great technical wrestler
Speaker 1: eight all Hitler.
Speaker 2: Everything he knows.
Speaker 3: It's actually now he took himself out. He just did
Speaker 3: the iron claude to himself.
Speaker 1: The match between j Strongbow and Waldo problematic not even
Speaker 1: close to the most racist wrestling match. That that you
Speaker 1: can find, Like.
Speaker 3: It's not even the most it's not even the most
Speaker 3: racist wrestling match I've seen recently.
Speaker 2: No, that bounced straight off my brain.
Speaker 4: If you hadn't held me, hey we're we're looking at
Speaker 4: this and for racism, I would have been like, this
Speaker 4: is totally normal, old timey.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're supposed to be a bad guy. I'm not
Speaker 2: seeing an Indian ship. Honestly, they're doing pretty good.
Speaker 1: So Fritz himself has a as we've discussed as we're yeah,
Speaker 1: just just a nightmare of a life. But because he's
Speaker 1: a terrible person, so his you know, his first son,
Speaker 1: this is not his fault. Probably Jack Junior dies in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine from accidental electrocution that leads to drowning. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this has an impact on Fritz and he decides to
Speaker 1: stop wrestling on the East Coast. As kind of a
Speaker 1: result of this, he becomes the godfather of Texas Wrestling,
Speaker 1: overseeing a company that runs wrestling in Dallas, Houston, and
Speaker 1: San Antonio called World Class Wrestling. Fritz continued to or
Speaker 1: reinvested the money that he made from wrestling into real estate.
Speaker 1: He's one of the guys in this who's actually like
Speaker 1: good with his money and while he's making it as
Speaker 1: a wrestler, puts it into something that's going to make
Speaker 1: him more money. Unfortunately, he's also a giant piece of
Speaker 1: shit and kind of a real fascist because one of
Speaker 1: his best friends is Pat Robertson. He is a born
Speaker 1: again Christian who becomes a major right wing donor in
Speaker 1: Texas and a moral crusader. So that's great, sweet, Yeah,
Speaker 1: good guy. So he has four sons, three of whom
Speaker 1: are four more sons, three of whom at least are
Speaker 1: groomed to follow in his footsteps, even though several of
Speaker 1: them lack the talent or the physique to do so.
Speaker 2: Spoilers.
Speaker 1: When you said three of whom, I thought you were
Speaker 1: going to say something else. Yeah, that's where we're going terribly.
Speaker 5: Then electric he drowns the boy so far right, he's
Speaker 5: got one out of fives already out of the match.
Speaker 2: Did you do a show on Pat Robertson.
Speaker 1: Uh, we've covered him before. We've covered a lot of
Speaker 1: aspects of him. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: His dream was to create a wrestling dynasty and imitation
Speaker 1: of Stu Hart, right. Uh, And as Robertson's no no, no, no, no, maybe,
Speaker 1: but definitely definitely Fritz and as wrestling nerd Nicholas all
Speaker 1: Helm Rights. By the time Kevin, David and Carrie, his
Speaker 1: three large adult sons entered their teens, they were put
Speaker 1: into grueling workout sessions by their father. Despite time playing
Speaker 1: a variety of junior high and high school sports. He
Speaker 1: would work them out for another three hours after school
Speaker 1: every day. Well, the boys grew up in wrestling and
Speaker 1: knew wrestling, it was clear that their father wanted to
Speaker 1: make it clear they didn't have a choice. Their future
Speaker 1: was wrestling, whether they wanted it to be or not.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know, he's kind of like the Mic
Speaker 1: Jackson of wrestling or Michael Jackson's dad of wrestling. I
Speaker 1: always forget that guy Jojoe Jackson, right, Joe Jackson, but
Speaker 1: maybe like, honestly, Joe Jackson's a better dad. Which like
Speaker 1: that that's a heads up as to where this is going.
Speaker 2: His kids are dead.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's in a really dark like two thousands a
Speaker 4: joke punchline.
Speaker 2: Jo a better dad.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's got a better fucking record. So for
Speaker 1: a time, the van Eriks are very successful in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen eighties, his boys are all actively in the ring.
Speaker 1: They are hugely popular in Texas. By this point in
Speaker 1: k Fabe, Fritz has been revealed by his nemesis Gary
Speaker 1: Hart to have been a normal Texas boy, not a Nazi,
Speaker 1: allowing him to turn baby face. This made k Fabe
Speaker 1: a little easier for his boys because they didn't have
Speaker 1: to wear swastikas. But since their dad is the booker
Speaker 1: and they're the stars, he gets to run them mercilessly. Right,
Speaker 1: the entire company is because these guys are big stars,
Speaker 1: their entire company reliant upon them performing basically every night
Speaker 1: during parts of the year in order to keep attendance
Speaker 1: high at the venues that he booked. Because they're such
Speaker 1: a necessary part of the business, when they get hurt,
Speaker 1: which happens a lot, they can't take the next night off.
Speaker 1: So Dad just starts handing them fucking painkillers like their
Speaker 1: skittles in order to keep them performing. Another thing that's necessaries.
Speaker 1: Look a bandid and we'll go back when we talk
Speaker 1: more about Vince, we'll talk about how steroids become a
Speaker 1: part of the industry. But steroids are a big part
Speaker 1: of the industry by the nineteen eighties and so in
Speaker 1: order to compete and again to keep crowds butts in seats,
Speaker 1: they have to bulk up to Hulk Hogan like levels,
Speaker 1: and the drugs that they're taking take a toll on
Speaker 1: these boys' bodies. And after a nineteen eighty four match
Speaker 1: in Japan, David Vaughan Erik is found dead in his
Speaker 1: hotel room at age twenty five. We don't entirely know
Speaker 1: what happened. His friend Bruiser Brody claimed once that they
Speaker 1: flushed a bunch of drugs down the toilet after finding
Speaker 1: his body, and basically that he owed deed. I think
Speaker 1: the family denies this. It's not really clear what happened
Speaker 1: because after he makes this claim, Bruise your Brodie gets
Speaker 1: stabbed to death in Puerto Rico.
Speaker 2: He sure does.
Speaker 3: We don't get a lot of detailed confirmation either way.
Speaker 4: Is there a reasonable like counter explanation. It's like a
Speaker 4: bunch of drugs really okay?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's the kind of thing where like, uh, today,
Speaker 1: like any leading man and stuff who's doing big action
Speaker 1: roles is on something that we can call steroids pretty much.
Speaker 1: But also we've gotten a lot better at doing it
Speaker 1: without killing people, which is not I'm not saying people
Speaker 1: should do steroids, but if you have millions of dollars
Speaker 1: and doctors who are constantly monitoring your blood levels and
Speaker 1: doing tests on you and stuff, it's not as dangerous
Speaker 1: like these guys are just kind of shot shooting shit
Speaker 1: up their asses and seeing what happens.
Speaker 3: You know, it's a combination of things too, you know,
Speaker 3: the road, it's all the hard drinking and popping painkillers
Speaker 3: you take the counter. You just have to keep going,
Speaker 3: like I think they tour something like I don't know,
Speaker 3: three hundred days a year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's a it's a combination of all that shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's just it's a different time and
Speaker 1: it's even again don't don't do steroids, folks, but it's
Speaker 1: even much worse for you at this point in time
Speaker 1: even And yeah, they're also Coke is as common as
Speaker 1: royds are, because I mean, part of what a lot
Speaker 1: of wrestlers you say is that like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: in order to get into the ring and get amped up,
Speaker 1: you got to get fucking coked up, and then to
Speaker 1: calm down and to deal with the pain, you take
Speaker 1: pain killers and then often to get to bed you
Speaker 1: add alcohol to that. A lot of guys ode as
Speaker 1: a result of that ship.
Speaker 3: I mean it's I mentioned Ultimate Warrior earlier, but never
Speaker 3: has you need cocaine to get hyped up been more
Speaker 3: obvious than an Ultimate Warrior entrance.
Speaker 1: No, there are there are like cartel warehouses and fucking
Speaker 1: Sinala that have less cocaine than was in his bloodstream.
Speaker 3: And he given a night like he was gliding out
Speaker 3: there on a board of cocaine like ice man.
Speaker 1: Just an incredible man. So very tragic death of he's
Speaker 1: fucking twenty five. He'd barely you know, had a life,
Speaker 1: very sad. The yellow rows of Texts, as David was known,
Speaker 1: was mourned by a crowd of three thousand people at
Speaker 1: his memorial service. Fritz, though, made sure to profit from this,
Speaker 1: selling color photos of his dead son that had once
Speaker 1: gone for three dollars for ten dollars at the memorial service.
Speaker 1: Right after he set his one of his surviving sons,
Speaker 1: Carrie Van Eric, to wrestle Rick Flair for the world
Speaker 1: title because kind of everybody's sorry, you know, because David died.
Speaker 1: They set it up so that Carrie, you know, wins
Speaker 1: this match, right, which is again not uncommon in a
Speaker 1: case like this. You've got someone whose brother just died,
Speaker 1: you give them a belt.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm surprised, Like Fritz didn't open up the
Speaker 3: casket and let people take pictures with David for.
Speaker 2: Like twenty So let me see your money. Let me
Speaker 2: see your money. It's barely better than that. It's thumb.
Speaker 4: Im get the extra ten bucks.
Speaker 1: The next year, in nineteen eighty five, Mike Vaughan Erik
Speaker 1: was charged with two counts of misdemeanor assault against an
Speaker 1: er doctor he got into a fistfight with during a
Speaker 1: trip to the hospital. Shortly thereafter, he goes to Tel
Speaker 1: Aviv to wrestle, and he takes a bad bump to
Speaker 1: his shoulder that dislocates it bad and badly enough that
Speaker 1: it requires surgery due to either poor hygiene or bad luck.
Speaker 1: After surgery, he contracts toxic shock syndrome, which is very
Speaker 1: serious and very uncommon. Just like in general, it's not
Speaker 1: something men get off, and it's certainly not a common
Speaker 1: side effective shoulder surgery. He gets transferred to a hospital
Speaker 1: with one hundred and five degree fever and his kidneys
Speaker 1: shutting down. The upside of this is that he is
Speaker 1: too weak to punch another doctor, so that might have
Speaker 1: helped doctor. So the doctor survives, and he does, and
Speaker 1: while his son is fighting to survive, Fritz starts like making.
Speaker 1: He goes to the press basically, you know, never waste
Speaker 1: an opportunity. He tells the media that the number of
Speaker 1: from fans to the hospital outnumbers the calls that a
Speaker 1: neighboring hospital had received when JFK was sent there in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, which is an insane flex.
Speaker 2: If anybody wants a bag of bloody stool, seventy bucks.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah, it's real, it's real, it's real. Trump saying,
Speaker 3: now I have the tallest building in New York City. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's it's wild stuff.
Speaker 2: Mike.
Speaker 1: Mike does pull through. He survives this, and his brother
Speaker 1: Kevin gives a press conference, calling his arrival a miracle.
Speaker 1: Alas he takes he's permanently injured from this.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: His weight drops down to just one hundred and forty
Speaker 1: five pounds. He is now no longer able to speak
Speaker 1: without slurring his voice. He just like he doesn't recover
Speaker 1: from this Muchnik writes quote. Fritz lost no time in
Speaker 1: repackaging him for the wrestling marks. Mike was nicknamed the
Speaker 1: Living Miracle. Fans were promised that he would defeat the
Speaker 1: odds wrestle Alyn and claim a championship for God and Family.
Speaker 1: To give the gimmick momentum, Mike was wheeled out in
Speaker 1: a car to wave to the twenty five thousand fans
Speaker 1: at the Big October shoal at the show at the
Speaker 1: Cotton Bowl. He made his official return to the ring
Speaker 1: on July fourth, nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 2: By then, he was just killing sixty bucks.
Speaker 1: So when he comes back to the ring, he's also
Speaker 1: contracted hepatitis, and his dad's just like, get him out there,
Speaker 1: get him out there. Yeah, it's so bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the next year, nineteen eighty six, another prominent wrestler,
Speaker 1: Gino Hernandez, dies of a cocaine overdose. Now this happens
Speaker 1: right after a TV spot where Hernandez, a heel, had
Speaker 1: blinded babyface wrestler Adams, and it says a lot about
Speaker 1: wrestling in this period that the announcer Bill Mercer, Fritz's employee,
Speaker 1: announced Gino's real life death on television by saying, we
Speaker 1: have suffered two terrible tragedies in the last week the
Speaker 1: blinding of Chris Adams and the death of Gino Hernandez
Speaker 1: equally blinding.
Speaker 2: And these are e qui tragedy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks to k Fabe, they're the same thing. So
Speaker 1: the next year, Carrie van Eric wasted as hell, rams
Speaker 1: into the back of a police car on his motorcycle.
Speaker 1: His foot is like part of his foot. It winds
Speaker 1: up eventually getting amputated. It is a nasty wreck. Doctors
Speaker 1: spend thirteen hours putting his limb back together, and then
Speaker 1: he is immediately whisked away to perform in the fucking ring.
Speaker 2: Come. Yeah, it's a nightmare. I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1: He wrestles with a fake foot for a while, doesn't he? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he sure does, Tom, he sure fucking does. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote again from Murnik here. Sorry, Fritz is just smashing
Speaker 1: these kids.
Speaker 2: Like again, Joe Jackson might be the better dad.
Speaker 1: I'm quote his opponent. This evening was carefully instructed to
Speaker 1: sell for Carrie, for it was clear in advance that
Speaker 1: the man who was once among the most agile two
Speaker 1: hundred fifty pounders in wrestling would be virtually immobile. Still,
Speaker 1: they had to make a good show of it, so
Speaker 1: Carrie changed into his trunks. A doctor filled a syringe
Speaker 1: with enough novacane to numb Secretariat's hoof. Thus fortified, Carrie
Speaker 1: discarded his crutches, gritted his teeth, and hobbled into the ring.
Speaker 1: The match lasted five minutes, and as planned, Carrie won. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: when the novacane wore off, an examination revealed that the
Speaker 1: ankle had rebroken. Four months later, in another operation, the
Speaker 1: foot was permanently fused into a walking position.
Speaker 2: Like bad day.
Speaker 4: Don't think of the chronic pain that you must have had,
Speaker 4: like his cath must just cramp up twenty times a day.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: Look, I'm not a big giving people parenting advice, but uh,
Speaker 1: free parenting advice from Robert here. Don't do this to
Speaker 1: your kid. Don't do this. Not good, not good, not
Speaker 1: good being a dad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, her foot, her first foot torn off. I was like,
Speaker 4: we're gonna wait two weeks, be pre you get back.
Speaker 1: In that ring, two solid weeks, because you're a good father,
Speaker 1: absolutely best. So despite Fritz's cocaine. Yeah, well yeah, of
Speaker 1: course kids love cocaine.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: You just tell him it's one of those fun fun
Speaker 1: bat what do they call that shit?
Speaker 2: Fun dip. You know they love that shit.
Speaker 4: That'd be good fun dip bag of cocaine that.
Speaker 1: This fun dip has my mouth numb. I can't taste
Speaker 1: it anymore. That means it's working. Keep taking it good,
Speaker 1: fund getting it ring.
Speaker 2: That's probably how it got the name. That probably was
Speaker 2: originally cocaine product.
Speaker 1: So, despite Fritz's pushing, Mike never recovers his ability to perform.
Speaker 1: Obviously interviews with him were deeply uncomfortable affairs. Again, he
Speaker 1: is probably takes some damage to his brain from all
Speaker 1: this too. He rants a lot on air about obscure
Speaker 1: biblical figures. He also like there's one point where he's
Speaker 1: there's this documentary or something being made about him, and
Speaker 1: he and one of his brothers are like talking in
Speaker 1: the background and it's like recorded, and you can hear
Speaker 1: them talking about a gang bang that they had together.
Speaker 1: He just kind of loses his ability to sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, filter stuff. He also has in several minor
Speaker 1: violent outbursts. He's arrested a handful of times, mostly for drugs.
Speaker 1: This kind of all escalates to Mike going back home
Speaker 1: after an arrest. He hikes out into the woods with
Speaker 1: a bottle of sleeping pills, and he takes enough to
Speaker 1: kill himself. He is twenty three years old when he dies. Now,
Speaker 1: according to some versions of the story, Mike leaves a
Speaker 1: bottle of the sleeping pills he'd used to kill himself
Speaker 1: for his youngest brother, Chris, with a note that basically says,
Speaker 1: when you're ready to go, you can use these now.
Speaker 1: Chris has not performed yet in the ring, but he
Speaker 1: takes to the ring in nineteen ninety, kind of near
Speaker 1: the end of his father's time as a wrestling baron.
Speaker 1: Nicholas on Helm right are all Helm Rights. Chris grew
Speaker 1: up with severe asthma. He took krednizone for the condition
Speaker 1: from a young age, and this resulted in a smaller
Speaker 1: stature than even his brother Mike. His bones were brittle
Speaker 1: and he broke them doing simple wrestling moves. He wasn't
Speaker 1: built to be a wrestler, but David and Mike were
Speaker 1: dead and Carrie had taken a job in WWF. His
Speaker 1: family needed him. Already addicted to painkillers and recreational narcotics,
Speaker 1: he entered the family business. He is not in there long.
Speaker 1: He shoots himself in the head. One year later, God Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety three, the last survival surviving wrestling von
Speaker 1: Eeric Kerrie, is arrested for cocaine possession in Dallas. The
Speaker 1: horrific pain from his foot, which had required partial amputation,
Speaker 1: pushed him into a semi permanent state of drug abuse.
Speaker 1: After being indicted, he drove home to Denton County and
Speaker 1: his father's ranch, where he shot himself in the chest
Speaker 1: with a forty four caliber revolver. He made it the
Speaker 1: longest of any of his brothers. He was thirty three.
Speaker 1: Fritz Wood in the end outlive five of his or
Speaker 1: he has six sons. One of them does survive him.
Speaker 1: He dies of lung cancer in nineteen ninety seven. And
Speaker 1: good fucking rittance, Jim.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that man carved just a path of ruin through
Speaker 3: his son's.
Speaker 4: And if I'm understanding right, this is all just a frame.
Speaker 4: Vince McMahon, here's the guy who's much worse than this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Vince, Vince's overall worse than this. But you do
Speaker 1: need to know it's not like he's not rising out
Speaker 1: of a crowd of angels.
Speaker 2: God.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tragedies. Yeah, that's a nightmare when you are responsible
Speaker 1: for four of your son's deaths all before the age
Speaker 1: of forty. Yeah, not a great dad.
Speaker 2: And three of them kill themselves. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's dark. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's pretty bleak. You guys got anything to plug you first?
Speaker 3: Oh well, for.
Speaker 2: Seventy five dollars, you can take some of his hair.
Speaker 2: For eighty bucks, I'll let you hold the gun. God like,
Speaker 2: how I like how you pause?
Speaker 1: You like?
Speaker 2: Am I really gonna say this? Yes? Yeah? Absolutely? You
Speaker 2: know what Fritz would have done it? Yeah? Done it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know you can catch me. We're at game
Speaker 3: Fly Unemployed. It's a podcast and streaming network I do
Speaker 3: with our former crack coworker and great buddy, David Bell.
Speaker 3: So check it out patron dot com slash game flun Employed.
Speaker 3: You can find us also on anywhere you look for
Speaker 3: podcasts and on the social media. So that's that's pretty
Speaker 3: much it.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, it is absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 4: I'm at one hot dog dot com, featuring monthly columnist
Speaker 4: Tom Ryman, who's great and an all star cast to
Speaker 4: comedy writers. We do daily jokes, text and pictures like
Speaker 4: the old days, and it's fantastic. I work with Robert Brockway,
Speaker 4: who's also our dear friend from Cracked and Patreon dot com,
Speaker 4: Slash one nine hundred hot Dog excellent.
Speaker 1: Definitely check out game fully Unemployed and one nine hundred
Speaker 1: hot Dog. I have one other thing to plug. This
Speaker 1: is not a product a project of mine, but we
Speaker 1: will be talking, you know, Sean. In our In our
Speaker 1: episode on steven Sagall, we chat a little bit about
Speaker 1: Judo Jean LaBelle, who, according to some versions of the story,
Speaker 1: choked Stephen out so badly he pooped his pants. Now
Speaker 1: this is debated, but there is a fellow on YouTube
Speaker 1: named Bobby Fingers. Bobby is an irishman who works does
Speaker 1: something in the entertainment industry, like making practical effects and models.
Speaker 1: I can't describe his videos better than like, he makes
Speaker 1: models of moments from pop culture history. And one of
Speaker 1: the things he does, and these you should just watch them.
Speaker 1: I can't describe them better. But one of the ones
Speaker 1: he builds is a diorama of Judo, Jan and Steven
Speaker 1: Sagall locked in combat. Go find Bobby Fingers on YouTube
Speaker 1: and watch this shit.
Speaker 2: It's genius. I love it. Yeah, I'm writing this down.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's the fucking episode. Everybody get vinced, not, I
Speaker 1: mean a little bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's such a it's such a already such a
Speaker 3: long rown roads drune with bodies before we even get.
Speaker 1: So many men have died, and we've we've only just begun.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 2: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.