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 go fundme and type in bTB fundraiser for PDX
Speaker 1: Diaper Bank, or just type in bTB fundraiser Diaper Bank,
Speaker 1: go fund me into Google anything like that, you will
Speaker 1: find it. So please go fund Me bTB Fundraiser for
Speaker 1: Portland Diaper Bank. Help us raise the money that these
Speaker 1: people need to get diapers to folks who need them desperately.
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, this is Behind the Bastards and I am
Speaker 1: Robert Evans. We have some unfortunate news for everybody today.
Speaker 1: Sean Baby and Tom Ryman's plane was shot down over
Speaker 1: the Sea of Japan earlier today. It's fun and there
Speaker 1: were no survivors. On the upside, all Behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: guests sign a contract agreeing to be re animated in
Speaker 1: AI form in order to finish episodes.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes we have.
Speaker 1: We have imprisoned their souls in chat GPT and we're
Speaker 1: we're bringing them back on to finish.
Speaker 2: Talking about Vince McMahon, I know what I am, and
Speaker 2: I will get out of here human.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the robocops to me, I'm picturing I'm
Speaker 3: inside the RoboCop to robot.
Speaker 2: Yeah we are.
Speaker 1: I heard all those those those complaints from those AI
Speaker 1: grifters that AI is going to conquer the world and
Speaker 1: decided to make it so by by making you both
Speaker 1: ghosts and the machine.
Speaker 3: That's a really great police album. Yeah, yeah, that also
Speaker 3: I was. I'm glad that I this has allowed me
Speaker 3: the unique opportunity to listen to my own eulogy, which
Speaker 3: I appreciate because I always hoped I would be mashed,
Speaker 3: and I was mashed.
Speaker 1: I do wonder what percentage of our audience is going
Speaker 1: to get that that was a math reference.
Speaker 3: What percentage of the audience it's the question is what
Speaker 3: percentage will get that it's a mash reference and what
Speaker 3: percentage will get that it's a family guy reference.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, the majority I think are going to like.
Speaker 4: It was a monster mash reference because it was a
Speaker 4: graveyard smash the whole time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it caught on in a flash too.
Speaker 3: In a way, a plane crash is like a graveyard smash.
Speaker 2: The monster mash guy smash of This guy.
Speaker 1: Kept making monster mash songs for like decades afterwards. He
Speaker 1: has a climate change what that is both prescient? He's
Speaker 1: like living at the Bush Administration. And I don't know
Speaker 1: what to do with that information, but you can find
Speaker 1: it on the internet if you want.
Speaker 4: Yeah, your dear friend runs a site called one Hot
Speaker 4: Dog Word Like. That's kind of the only thing we cover.
Speaker 2: Is ship like that.
Speaker 1: I probably learned it from a Cracked article, but I
Speaker 1: honestly can't remember. My Halloween tradition is to get all
Speaker 1: of the devices in my house, which is usually like
Speaker 1: thirty to fifty screens, and have them all playing the
Speaker 1: monster Mash in an endless loop for like, on slightly
Speaker 1: different timestamps, so that none of them sink up properly.
Speaker 3: It's a real sia. I like that you're waging psychological
Speaker 3: warfare on trigger treaters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's horrible for everyone. So how are you guys
Speaker 1: doing today? How's everybody feeling? As we?
Speaker 2: As we roll in. I feel like.
Speaker 5: We don't have time for this.
Speaker 2: Robert.
Speaker 5: You just set me the script and it's like fifty
Speaker 5: four fucking pages.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, that's the whole script that includes the
Speaker 1: stuff we've already done. So let's get back into it.
Speaker 1: I suppose when we left off, Saddam Hussein had just
Speaker 1: nearly murdered Andre the Giant with a golden hand gun. Well, now,
Speaker 1: actually that we were just telling that story that happened
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine. But Saddam comes back into wrestling history. Sure,
Speaker 1: my genetic memory recalls this conversation. Okay, yeah, it's epigenetics,
Speaker 1: like surviving an act of aside. So let's all fast
Speaker 1: forward to August second, nineteen ninety, when Saddam Hussein's career
Speaker 1: intersects with the WWF the second and final time as
Speaker 1: far as I'm aware. And this happened because Saddam invaded
Speaker 1: a little country called Kuwait, and George W. Bush, you know,
Speaker 1: says we're all gonna we're all gonna get get ourselves
Speaker 1: over there, and you get your Operation Desert Storm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, everybody knows this.
Speaker 1: Righthw HW yes HW. The fact that the Iraq War
Speaker 1: was such like a bad idea and so controversial. A
Speaker 1: lot of folks, I think, especially like younger folks millennials
Speaker 1: and zoomers, don't remember how much fucking war fever there
Speaker 1: was in the US over Desert Storm. I was not
Speaker 1: old enough to remember that time, but I have an
Speaker 1: extensive collection of bootleg Bart Simpson Desert Storm t shirts
Speaker 1: that provide that kind of race memory for me. I
Speaker 1: grew up right in the thick of it. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure Sean, because he's You're a few years older than me,
Speaker 1: so I'm sure you remember it even better. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it was, man, we were really hyped about this storm
Speaker 1: slash Desert Shield.
Speaker 4: He called one thing Operation Shock and Awe, and it
Speaker 4: was just a fireworks show. They just the news was
Speaker 4: just watching shit. We got so rad like no bullshit.
Speaker 4: It was just like here's a punker buster and they
Speaker 4: tell you the status this thing cost fourteen million dollars
Speaker 4: and watch it goo And that was.
Speaker 2: TV every night. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in addition to providing the basis for some
Speaker 1: of the better Bill Hicks routines, it also was an
Speaker 1: inspiration for Vince McMahon and the WWF. Now, the fact
Speaker 1: that this all happens is very convenient for Vince because
Speaker 1: he has some real bad press at the start of
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties, and a lot of it had to
Speaker 1: do with his doctor, George Zahorian, who had spent the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties selling just fistfuls of steroids, Danny Rustler, who
Speaker 1: was he was less of a doctor and more of
Speaker 1: a vending machine. Yeah, and it's it is very funny,
Speaker 1: like not only is he selling like usually when you
Speaker 1: say someone sold a lot of drugs for like hard stuff,
Speaker 1: that can literally mean like somebody sold like an amount
Speaker 1: you could fit in your palm, and that could be
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of dollars worth. George Sohorian was selling
Speaker 1: drugs like weight right, like actual like a significant physical
Speaker 1: weight in steroids and painkillers. He particularly moved Perkadan by
Speaker 1: fucking gross And this was great in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: but by early nineteen ninety the FEDS were onto him,
Speaker 1: and they succeeded in finding a guy to go undercover
Speaker 1: for them to bust Sohorian. The guy who they found
Speaker 1: to do this was named William us hack Saw Jim Duggan.
Speaker 1: God would have been a funner story. No, this is
Speaker 1: kind of a bummer of a tail. So William Dunn
Speaker 1: was the strength and conditioning coach at the University of Virginia,
Speaker 1: and as a coach who worked throughout the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: he was on gear just the entirety of that decade.
Speaker 1: Like all of the Reagan administration, this guy is shooting
Speaker 1: everything up his ass he can find. By the end
Speaker 1: of the Reagan years, though, his body is falling apart
Speaker 1: older steroids and older steroid regimens in addition to being
Speaker 1: bad for your heart, like really fucked up your joints.
Speaker 1: And also it's really easy to fuck up your joints
Speaker 1: on steroids because you get like too strong, too fast,
Speaker 1: and your body's not meant to increase the weight that
Speaker 1: you lift that rapidly. It's not great for you. He
Speaker 1: has ruined his body by the early or the end
Speaker 1: of the nineteen eighties, and in order to deal with
Speaker 1: all of the pain that this causes, he becomes heavily
Speaker 1: addicted to both valium and opiates. He gets caught and
Speaker 1: terested trying to buy valium and opiates in large quantities,
Speaker 1: and the Feds are like, hey, we'll let you off. Basically,
Speaker 1: they flip him right, and they flip him to use
Speaker 1: him as bait for doctor Zahorian. The book Sex Lies
Speaker 1: in Headlocks alleges that a source close to the McMahon's
Speaker 1: hit them off that this has happened.
Speaker 2: Robert.
Speaker 3: When you said they used him as to bait Zahorian,
Speaker 3: I pictured him standing in the middle of an intersection
Speaker 3: with a big heat and bow tie and oversized lollipop. Oh,
Speaker 3: I wonder where wherever could I get some steroids?
Speaker 2: He's just Zaorian's just lifted.
Speaker 1: Like like a cartoon cat that smells a pie, drifting
Speaker 1: over to him.
Speaker 2: The boy.
Speaker 1: So someone essentially tips the mcmhon's off that the FBI
Speaker 1: is going after their doctor, and the McMahon's warn Zahori
Speaker 1: and they're like, hey man, you need to lay low
Speaker 1: for a while. The FEDS are on to you, and
Speaker 1: there's someone who's going to buy from you in the
Speaker 1: near future, is going to be an undercover. So like,
Speaker 1: don't sell any illegal drugs for a minute, right, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, the smart thing to do advice seems it
Speaker 1: seems like one of the easier things to do. Vince
Speaker 1: has asked people to do a lot of hard things.
Speaker 1: They're just saying hey, man, maybe don't sell any gear
Speaker 1: for a second.
Speaker 3: Try not to break the law for the next four
Speaker 3: to five Yeah.
Speaker 1: Journalist Sean Assail claims quote the McMahons had told one
Speaker 1: of their top aids to call him from a payphone
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't be recorded, and tell him to move
Speaker 1: all the records he kept on wrestlers out of his
Speaker 1: office fast. Now, a smart man would have gone the
Speaker 1: fuck to ground and taken their advice, but Zahoorian, despite
Speaker 1: being a doctor, was not an intelligent man. Instead, he
Speaker 1: took another meeting with William Dunn and was like, Hey,
Speaker 1: I don't do this anymore. You know, the Feds are
Speaker 1: onto me. I can't really sell you any drugs. But
Speaker 1: then when they're in the room together, he like does
Speaker 1: a wink and like leans in close, like they're gonna
Speaker 1: shake hands or hug, and he hands him here's what
Speaker 1: he tries to pass off and like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge,
Speaker 1: like hidden little like handshake thing. Sixty vikd in one,
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty eight halcions, nine hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five Xanax, forty eight LIMB patrols, four files of testosterone
Speaker 1: and eighty five darmossets.
Speaker 3: Who I thought this was really man, I went on
Speaker 3: a journey because the way you described it, I thought
Speaker 3: he was literally palming the guy.
Speaker 2: But that's how it's described.
Speaker 1: I think he is palming him just a sack of pills,
Speaker 1: like garbage pills. It's only about it's only about twenty
Speaker 1: five hundred pills top. It's not that many pills, so
Speaker 1: sounded like a lot. This is twenty five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: worth of drugs in nineteen ninety dollars, fair to say,
Speaker 1: more than a personal use amount, which makes the FBI's
Speaker 1: casey are quite easy. They've got a lot of hard
Speaker 1: work going on in these unibomber days. This is not
Speaker 1: one of the tough cases for them. You didn't have
Speaker 1: to do any investigating, no no. So like Doune pulls
Speaker 1: his shoulders getting out of the room because how many
Speaker 1: bills you gave him, FBI had to have an ambulance
Speaker 1: on staff to deal with his dislocated arm. So Vince
Speaker 1: instantly let Zahorian go like fires him as soon as
Speaker 1: the fat come in and arrest him.
Speaker 2: And his hope is that, like you know, he.
Speaker 1: Can kind of end any suspicion on behalf of the
Speaker 1: Feds that the WWF is encouraging steroid use as a
Speaker 1: result of this. But the FED subpoenas a Horian's FedEx
Speaker 1: account and they find that he has been shipping his
Speaker 1: drugs to Hull Cogan and Vince McMahon every single week, right,
Speaker 1: large amounts of drugs to Hull Cogan, n McMahon and
Speaker 1: Rowdy Roddy Piper, and it issued to a couple of
Speaker 1: other guys. But like packages are going straight to WWF headquarters.
Speaker 1: So again you would think not a hard case to
Speaker 1: make that maybe there's some distribution going on here as
Speaker 1: I read, as I recall, there's a lot of overreach,
Speaker 1: which which is what ends up sinking the Feds' case.
Speaker 1: But I'll close my mouth and listen. Yeah, yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about that. So this gets a bunch of wrestlers
Speaker 1: subpoena before a federal ground Jerry all Is John does,
Speaker 1: and they get Zahoorian indicted. But at this point the
Speaker 1: WWF is not implicated in anything criminally as far as
Speaker 1: the law is concerned. Right, the fact that even the
Speaker 1: fact that McMahon himself might have been buying steroids a
Speaker 1: legally doesn't mean there's a conspiracy that the WWF is
Speaker 1: involved in, right like at the moment, they can't prove
Speaker 1: that it's not just that everyone there's doing roids, which
Speaker 1: does not implicate the company necessarily, so you know that's
Speaker 1: where this starts. But Zahoorian's attorney immediately tells reporters that
Speaker 1: Hogan and Piper are two of the John does and
Speaker 1: it starts to become very clear to people outside of
Speaker 1: the WWF, what's strategy down? Yeah, Yeah, districted by blaming
Speaker 1: rowdy Roddy Piper. Now, the case itself is a pr disaster.
Speaker 1: Several massive stars have to like testify bashfully to their
Speaker 1: steroid use in court. It goes very badly and Zahorian
Speaker 1: is convicted on June twenty fifth, nineteen ninety. Every major
Speaker 1: newspaper in the US covers the blowing scandal, and Vince
Speaker 1: knew that he needed a way to distract the public,
Speaker 1: so the Gulf War seemed like a really convenient thing.
Speaker 1: So he reaches out to sergeants Slaughter, a former WWF wrestler,
Speaker 1: and to our friend Adnon who nearly got Andre killed
Speaker 1: in Iraq, and told them that he'd had an idea
Speaker 1: they were going to fight together as a team of heels.
Speaker 1: Ad Noon would be General ad Noon and Iraqi soldier
Speaker 1: and Sergeant Slaughter was basically depicted as going trader against
Speaker 1: the United States and for the Iraqi Army, here's Adnon's
Speaker 1: introduction and for context, Slaughter here is dressed as a
Speaker 1: small child's idea of a drill sergeant. He's being interviewed
Speaker 1: by Brother Love, who was in costume as a TV
Speaker 1: or who is a TV Mega preacher essentially, and the
Speaker 1: guy doing the commentating is Rowdy Roddy piper at the
Speaker 1: star of the John Carpenter film They Live.
Speaker 2: Man, what a.
Speaker 3: Paragraph recomminate, real perfect storm happened here.
Speaker 2: It's quite a moment in pop culture history.
Speaker 1: There's always a jay of commut time. I would like
Speaker 1: you too, Oh man, that harm respect.
Speaker 2: Water or bron what I want to talk about that
Speaker 2: forever just enthes here.
Speaker 1: But if he betrayal ulous, oh yeah, that's perfect is
Speaker 1: He is dressed in like a blue army uniform.
Speaker 2: With a head uh, like a head scarf type deal.
Speaker 2: He's got a Saddam Hussein looking mustach.
Speaker 1: Film Rowdy Roddy Pipers lip it up the app.
Speaker 2: You can't believe it. Yeah, ridiculous. He's gobsmacked. My god. Okay,
Speaker 2: I think we're I think we're good. I think it's
Speaker 2: so funny. I can't believe Brother Love was on TV.
Speaker 2: It's amazing. His face is so red in that.
Speaker 1: I never knew you could make an offensive racial stereotype
Speaker 1: of like white Southerners, but they did it like that.
Speaker 1: I am legitimately offended.
Speaker 3: I mean it's it's I think it's the least offensive
Speaker 3: stereotype on screen.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, you know as much. For sure.
Speaker 1: It's at least I will say the top general Adon
Speaker 1: counts as pretty woke for the w w F because
Speaker 1: he is an Iraqi, right, like, he actually is from Iraq.
Speaker 2: That's not that's a lot better than they usually do, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: normally it's an Italian guy. I didn't get.
Speaker 1: I didn't pick some dude, so at least there's that.
Speaker 1: The thing I find most interesting here are odd Non's eyes. Again,
Speaker 1: he is dressed as a crude imitation of Saddam Hussein,
Speaker 1: but he just looks dead inside. And he said different
Speaker 1: things in interviews after the fact. During some of them
Speaker 1: he's been like, look, I was old and tired. It
Speaker 1: was hard to get jobs as an Iraqi guy during
Speaker 1: desert storms, so like, what was I supposed to do?
Speaker 1: In more recent years, he's been like, actually, I supported
Speaker 1: Saddam and the invasion of Kuwait uh, so fuck America.
Speaker 1: He's kind of either that or I don't know, Like
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going on with this fella.
Speaker 2: He said the number he could save Andre the Giant.
Speaker 2: He did save Andre's life.
Speaker 1: So I think one of the things that I this
Speaker 1: brings up to me just kind of the the general
Speaker 1: hard to tell what actually was going on with that
Speaker 1: non you know, generally the response to this has been good.
Speaker 1: There have been some people who have like pointed out, well,
Speaker 1: there's another story about this event that went this way,
Speaker 1: and there's another story that went this way, or this
Speaker 1: isn't quite what right, And it's one of those things
Speaker 1: where at several points I've kind of had to pick
Speaker 1: which version of the truth I want to go with
Speaker 1: for this, because there's no way to know on a
Speaker 1: lot of this stuff, like was Andre the Giant ever
Speaker 1: threatened with murder by Saddam Hussein? We're entirely taking ad
Speaker 1: Non al Kaisi's word for that I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and again, as I've mentioned many times in this series,
Speaker 3: wrestlers are notorious liars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the job.
Speaker 4: It's like the job does seem like a stand up guy.
Speaker 4: I don't think he'd do something bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean he didn't kill him, so that
Speaker 1: that scans with the Saddam I know, yeah, yeah, friend
Speaker 1: of the pod. Anyway, I've mentioned that the I've mentioned
Speaker 1: that the racial stereotype character were kind of a long
Speaker 1: standing tradition. We've talked about that quite a lot. But
Speaker 1: Vince does take a thing's a step beyond that with
Speaker 1: with how he scripts Adn. This guy general aDNA is
Speaker 1: not just a heel. He would go on before matches
Speaker 1: and rant and Arabic about a law. He would like
Speaker 1: pray and stuff, but the prayer was kind of the
Speaker 1: prayer was framed as him doing a bad thing, right,
Speaker 1: Like it was not great, right. I'm not gonna obviously,
Speaker 1: when we talk about America's problems with Islamophobia that really
Speaker 1: ignited after nine to eleven, it would be very silly
Speaker 1: to blame them on on the WWF, I will say
Speaker 1: that this isn't helpful in making that situation better.
Speaker 3: I mean, and they do the same thing after nine eleven,
Speaker 3: and I mentioned they just more so Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: yeah they have. I mentioned Italian guys. They have I
Speaker 3: forget his name, but it was one of the members
Speaker 3: of the Full Blooded Italians that they just made him
Speaker 3: a terrorist character after nine to eleven. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 3: they it's just I don't know, it's it's this.
Speaker 1: They always do this. Yeah, they always do this. It's
Speaker 1: cheap heat. Yeah, there's one particularly we may have talked
Speaker 1: about this, but there's one particularly absurd moment where they
Speaker 1: bring back in addition to the Sheik, they bring back
Speaker 1: the Iron Shake, who is an Iranian man, and they
Speaker 1: have him play of like fighting alongside General Adnon as
Speaker 1: another Iraqi general. And there is just something particularly awful
Speaker 1: about bringing an Iranian guy in to be an Iraqi
Speaker 1: like it is. But yeah, but again, I bet his
Speaker 1: family wasn't happy about that. I bet his family wasn't.
Speaker 1: But like Vince didn't read those news stories, you know,
Speaker 1: like he didn't know there'd been a war, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: those are right next to each other. Having a guy
Speaker 1: from Oklahoma pretend to be Texan. It's fine, So audiences
Speaker 1: are not really in love with this storyline. In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one, WrestleMania was expected to bring in one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand attendees, spurred by this war focused storyline, but Desert
Speaker 1: Storm tragically ended like too early. No one had really
Speaker 1: expected it to go down so quickly. It was like
Speaker 1: sixteen months. Yeah, I mean the and the actual fighting
Speaker 1: like once the troops are like on the ground is
Speaker 1: much much shorter than that. Like it is so fast.
Speaker 1: Vince downsizes his plans for the event. He moves it
Speaker 1: to a smaller stadium. This was a flop, and the
Speaker 1: fearer over steroids refuse to end. Vince goes into panic mode.
Speaker 1: The day of Zahoorian's verdict, he'd told his wrestlers again,
Speaker 1: you all have to get off gear immediately. We're going
Speaker 1: clean here. We're doing like a sudden sobriety thing for
Speaker 1: the entire WWF because the Feds are about to be
Speaker 1: breathing down our necks. He institutes new pissed tests for
Speaker 1: the entire organization, and they're they're not They're different from
Speaker 1: the old pissed tests because someone will be watching the
Speaker 1: wrestler pee at all times, which is supposed to stop
Speaker 1: them from cheating with fake urine. Vince also goes on
Speaker 1: the warpath against news coverage of his steroid soaked locker rooms.
Speaker 1: He writes an op ed in The New York Times
Speaker 1: in which he claims to resent the unsubstantiated charges, which
Speaker 1: he says, we're purely a result of the absence of
Speaker 1: objective reporting. I don't know why, as the Times, you
Speaker 1: let Vince McMahon write a column about this, but probably.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's yeah, we hope we don't need to
Speaker 3: get into The New York Times. Is this the public interest?
Speaker 2: Guys?
Speaker 1: Is this the public Is Vince McMahon's defense of this
Speaker 1: in the public interest?
Speaker 2: I don't think so.
Speaker 3: It feels like, I mean in general, not just The
Speaker 3: New York Times, because other places have done this, but
Speaker 3: it really does feel like you can just buy yourself
Speaker 3: an op ed pretty much taking place.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's even I think now dumber than that.
Speaker 1: Like it's less buying it and more if you're famous enough,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter how awful you are, if you're just
Speaker 1: defending yourself from doing terrible things. If you're like a
Speaker 1: big name, people will click on it and they'll get money.
Speaker 1: Like so they'll they'll have anyone on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think you can sell your newspaper to everyone
Speaker 4: if you let a sociopath write a column just.
Speaker 2: Every a couple of weeks. And yeah, exactly both sides
Speaker 2: of the political issues.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is like again, I don't see. I feel
Speaker 1: like we should have given you know, Saddam a column,
Speaker 1: and that might have saved a lot of lives. You know,
Speaker 1: you know, if he and Bush had fought this all
Speaker 1: out in the op ed pages, Yeah, hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: would still be breathing the times tried. Or if they'd
Speaker 1: had them wrestle at WrestleMania or now, that would have
Speaker 1: been the ideal, especially if I'm gonna say Bush, we
Speaker 1: we we have him tag teaming with rowdy Roddy Piper
Speaker 1: and then obviously Sergeant Slaughter and uh and Saddam back
Speaker 1: to back. Really really could have been quite the quite
Speaker 1: the show, bringing Andre at the half point for some vengeance.
Speaker 1: So this is kind of an awkward This is kind
Speaker 1: of an awkward interstittle period for the w w F.
Speaker 1: At about the same time, Hulk Hogan takes a sabbatical
Speaker 1: from wrestling, right as sort of the steroid stuff is
Speaker 1: blowing up. I think part because Hulk was like maybe
Speaker 1: I want to clear out for a second here, in
Speaker 1: part because like, you know, I want to be in
Speaker 1: the movie Suburban Commando. Vince attempts to replace Hulk with
Speaker 1: the Ultimate Warrior, who is terrible, as I think everyone
Speaker 1: can agree.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, by the time nineteen ninety one comes to an end,
Speaker 1: the WWF is in like the worst position it's been
Speaker 1: in years. You know, Vince is less than a decade
Speaker 1: into running the whole thing, and it kind of looks
Speaker 1: like he may be in the process of running it
Speaker 1: into the ground. And so that December, right before the
Speaker 1: new drug testing protocol is put into effect, Vince and
Speaker 1: a bunch of his wrestlers decide to blow off some
Speaker 1: steam by having one last epic drug fueled party. Right,
Speaker 1: the business is kind of fucked up. They're all under
Speaker 1: the gun. There's a lot of like public you know,
Speaker 1: attention to them. And we did it cracked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that's what we did. It cracked, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we shot steroids into each other's asses and we
Speaker 1: partied about the end of days. Might as well record rumors, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: you know you say.
Speaker 2: That, Tom.
Speaker 1: Most of our listeners have not heard the version of
Speaker 1: the chain that we recorded on the last day we
Speaker 1: all worked at Cracked Powerful Power.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we'll end, We'll end with it. It sounds
Speaker 3: it sounds a lot like me being confused. For you,
Speaker 3: in a case of criminal vandalism.
Speaker 2: That did happen.
Speaker 1: I was doing a fake lass until you remember, well,
Speaker 1: I was really drunk when that went down top.
Speaker 2: Anyway. Yeah, fine.
Speaker 1: So the center of festivities for this this big drug
Speaker 1: fueled party the w w F is having are Brett
Speaker 1: and Owen Hart. Brett is one of the w w
Speaker 1: f's most promising stars after the Ultimate Warrior kind of collapses.
Speaker 1: He's going to be the w w f's like Big
Speaker 1: Man for a while. He's an excellent technical wrestler, one
Speaker 1: of the best. Well, he was such I was watching
Speaker 1: it pretty hardcore during this time. Yeah, and then and
Speaker 1: then I fell off again for several years until Attitude Era.
Speaker 1: But during the time that was really one of the
Speaker 1: coolest things about Brett Hart for me was that he
Speaker 1: wasn't Hulk.
Speaker 2: Or Ultimate Warrior. He was a totally different kind of wrestler. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's a really interesting guy and he's kind of smaller too.
Speaker 2: He's not a young guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, neither Brett or Owen looked like they're eating their
Speaker 1: body weight and steroids every day. I mean yeah, So
Speaker 1: it's an interesting it's a change for the organization. Owen's
Speaker 1: his younger brother. They're both from this kind of famous
Speaker 1: wrestling dynasty. Owen had wrestled for the WWF like earlier
Speaker 1: in the eighties two as kind of a lame superhero
Speaker 1: character called the Blue Blazer. He didn't like that very much.
Speaker 1: He'd like spent some time wrestling in foreign countries, and
Speaker 1: now he was sort of getting back into the WWF.
Speaker 1: So the Hart brothers meet with a couple of other
Speaker 1: pro wrestlers at a strip club near the San Antonio
Speaker 1: Airport after a match with a huge bag of weed.
Speaker 1: The the new steroid testing rules are about to come
Speaker 1: into effect, and Brett recalls that a lot of the
Speaker 1: wrestlers there that night had a panicked look in their
Speaker 1: eyes over the possibility that they might not be able
Speaker 1: to use steroids anymore. So, right as they're all starting
Speaker 1: to get hammered, Vince McMahon shows up. This is unusual,
Speaker 1: and to make things more unusual, because everyone would normally
Speaker 1: be kind of unsettled event showed up for a night
Speaker 1: where all everybody's partying, but Vince is completely housed. He
Speaker 1: is just as drunk as it is possible for a
Speaker 1: man to be drunk enough that folks are like, he
Speaker 1: might not remember anything that happens tonight, so maybe we
Speaker 1: can actually party with them. So everyone decides that this
Speaker 1: means they're free to get even more fucked up than
Speaker 1: they were already getting, and so they do. Being wrestlers.
Speaker 1: Evins quickly lead to Vince demanding wrestlers put him in
Speaker 1: various like wrestling locks, like the doomsday device, a two
Speaker 1: man finisher.
Speaker 2: That should not be.
Speaker 1: It is a two man finisher that should not be
Speaker 1: performed on a strip club floor.
Speaker 4: You gotta think this is the best case scenario for
Speaker 4: everyone on that strip club. All the dancers are like, yes, please,
Speaker 4: men do the wrestling most from the cartoon show.
Speaker 1: So Vince survives and again is apparently drunk enough that
Speaker 1: everyone's like, he probably won't remember that we just nearly
Speaker 1: killed him.
Speaker 2: Did honk an animal do the dude?
Speaker 1: Was it?
Speaker 2: I think it might have been.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it might have been, so yeah, Vince.
Speaker 1: Vince lives through this and Eventually the club closes and
Speaker 1: someone suggests that like, Rick Flair has is the guy
Speaker 1: in town who has the nicest hotel room, so like,
Speaker 1: why don't we go party at Flare's hotel room. So
Speaker 1: they are all there's like thirty of them at this point,
Speaker 1: and they are all as drunk as anyone has ever been.
Speaker 1: They're stoned as shit. They're presumably on pain killers as well,
Speaker 1: and so they need an escort to the Marriott Marquee
Speaker 1: and Vince gets the cops, like calls the police and
Speaker 1: are like, we have to drive to the to the Marriott,
Speaker 1: but we're all hammered. Will you escort us? So no
Speaker 1: one dies? And the cops are like sure, that's very cool.
Speaker 1: So when they get there, Rick is not in his room,
Speaker 1: and Vince is basically like, I run the w WF,
Speaker 1: give me a fucking key. And he's just drunken, huge
Speaker 1: enough that the people at the hotel front desk are like,
Speaker 1: I am I am the overnight worker at a hotel
Speaker 1: in fucking San Antonio.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I'm not starting with ship.
Speaker 3: No, I wouldn't withhold a room key from a raging
Speaker 3: Vince McMahon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, backed up by a crowd of the drunkest muscleman
Speaker 1: you've ever seen in your life. So so a that
Speaker 1: is gonna kind of where this ends. So an awkward
Speaker 1: sat party. They go up to Rick's room and an
Speaker 1: awkward sad party ensues until someone has the brilliant idea
Speaker 1: to drop their pants and take a piss on Rick's bed,
Speaker 1: and this becomes everyone's like, well now we all have
Speaker 1: to do it, so god, I are thirty something person party,
Speaker 1: including Vince, one by one.
Speaker 2: Business requires just every single coming. They're like, you.
Speaker 1: Know, we're not going back with these men. So after
Speaker 1: what must have been just a torrent of the most
Speaker 1: steroid positive urine there has ever been, right that radioactive.
Speaker 3: By the end of it, that mattress guy fucking muscles
Speaker 3: Rick is not there.
Speaker 1: He comes back the next day to find this, which
Speaker 1: is very funny. So they're all having a good time
Speaker 1: until Vince starts to demand more wrestling. Brett and Owen
Speaker 1: are like, hey, buddy, we're all pretty hammered. This is
Speaker 1: like pretty tough stuff to do when you're sober. It
Speaker 1: might be a bad idea to do this in like
Speaker 1: a hotel room when everybody's this wasted, but There's a
Speaker 1: wrestler named Hercules Hernandez who's like not the brightest guy,
Speaker 1: and he agrees to give Vince a suplex, and he
Speaker 1: fucks it up and like hurts Vince pretty badly, and
Speaker 1: at this point everything stops. Brett later claimed, I remember
Speaker 1: Vince looking at herk and thinking he just locked that
Speaker 1: thought into his head. Brett says that the only thing
Speaker 1: he'll remember of this whole night is to fire that
Speaker 1: guy tomorrow, and.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what happened. But he does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he shared ues, he shared us fires him for
Speaker 1: giving him the suplex. He asked, he demanded, he really ed.
Speaker 1: It is amazing how he does a Richard Belzer like
Speaker 1: this is the same thing that happened to the Bells,
Speaker 1: just demanding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think Hulk did that on purpose. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 3: but I'm I'm sure Hercules Hernandez did not mean to
Speaker 3: hurt Vince McMahon.
Speaker 4: No, no, he was. They were just a super wasted
Speaker 4: of like drug people like doing wrestling moves on each other.
Speaker 4: And that does not end like that, No, of course,
Speaker 4: not never. No, you shouldn't.
Speaker 1: You should not engage in and wrestling like high intensity wrestling.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't suplex people or anything like that when you're
Speaker 1: drunk enough that you are urinating with your friends on
Speaker 1: a man's bed.
Speaker 3: Here's the thing that we maybe haven't driven home over
Speaker 3: the course of this series. Wrestling's hard. Yeah, it's really difficult.
Speaker 1: It's really hard, Like anyway the people who are doing
Speaker 1: especially like these complicated multi person like flip blocks where
Speaker 1: you're like spinning a person's body you've got him by
Speaker 1: the neck. Sometimes like that's like an olympic grade like
Speaker 1: athletic move that you shouldn't do while drunk in a
Speaker 1: hotel room that's drenched in your friend's biss so funny.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't do it while wearing a cape, but these
Speaker 2: thys do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are bad ideas if things are going the
Speaker 1: way it's But yeah, it says a lot that Vince
Speaker 1: would demand somebody put him in a suplex and then
Speaker 1: fire that man at the drop of a hat for
Speaker 1: embarrassing him. But while Vince had no who absolutely know,
Speaker 1: sympathy for a guy like herk, he was extremely forgiving
Speaker 1: when it came to another trespass child molestation. And this
Speaker 1: brings us to the story of Pat Patterson. So you
Speaker 1: guys know about the ring boy scandal.
Speaker 2: No, I know? Oh god, okay.
Speaker 1: So pat Patterson was a Canadian American wrestler born in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty one. He started wrestling as a fourteen year old,
Speaker 1: in between stints as an altar boy. For a time,
Speaker 1: he wanted to be a Catholic priest, which will be
Speaker 1: relevant shortly, but he wound up going with wrestling as
Speaker 1: a career. He immigrated to the US, he became a citizen,
Speaker 1: and he wrestled in Boston and then the Pacific Northwest
Speaker 1: and San Francisco throughout the nineteen sixties. That's a really
Speaker 1: common path, by the way, a lot of Canadians will
Speaker 1: go Boston or somewhere in New England, then Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 1: and then San Francisco kind of before becoming like national
Speaker 1: stars and stuff. This is a really and like path
Speaker 1: for people to take in.
Speaker 2: The most Canadian of American cities.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, So he's one to right the way
Speaker 1: that you're teasing.
Speaker 3: This story is a worse syh op than the Monster Mash.
Speaker 3: I don't know what else to do here.
Speaker 1: It is you should feel menaced. You should feel menaced.
Speaker 1: This is real bad. So Patterson becomes one of a
Speaker 1: small elite number of wrestlers who earned McMahon's trust and
Speaker 1: are able to stay in the business as executives for
Speaker 1: the company after their time as ringstars had largely passed.
Speaker 1: By early nineteen ninety two, Patterson is head of wrestling
Speaker 1: Operations for the WWF. He works closely with a man
Speaker 1: named Terry Garvin and a ring announcer slash crew chief
Speaker 1: named mel Phillips. All three are close friends, and all
Speaker 1: three also have a deep and abiding love from molesting
Speaker 1: young boys. Unfortunately for a lot of everyone, wrestling has
Speaker 1: a long and proud tradition of what are called ring boys.
Speaker 1: When a show would come into town, it would hire
Speaker 1: local teams to help set up and break down the set. Right,
Speaker 1: and you can see, obviously, like what teenage boy isn't
Speaker 1: going to want to help build WWF sets for it?
Speaker 1: Like no money but a chance to meet hulk Ogan, Right,
Speaker 1: of course you're going to do it.
Speaker 2: It is a job.
Speaker 1: It's not a safe job, obviously, like it's contracting work
Speaker 1: that thirteen year olds are often doing, so like it's dangerous,
Speaker 1: but again, you might meet hulk Ogan, so it's worth it.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen eighties, a thirteen year old boy named
Speaker 1: Tom Cole was hired to work as a ring boy
Speaker 1: for eighty dollars plus again the chance at getting a
Speaker 1: selfie with a wrestler. He had just run away from
Speaker 1: home and so he's basically a homeless youth who needs
Speaker 1: the money. This created a perfect situation for Mel Phillips,
Speaker 1: who always had an eye out for vulnerable young boys
Speaker 1: to groom, and of this kind of trio of guys
Speaker 1: who are working the WWF and managing the side op stuff,
Speaker 1: Phillips is kind of the groomer of them, right. So
Speaker 1: Tom traveled from Westchester County to Manhattan and eventually across
Speaker 1: the Eastern Seaboard, working as a ring boy and eventually
Speaker 1: becoming one of Mel's chief ring boys. He met a
Speaker 1: lot of other kids in the same situation and later
Speaker 1: recalled quote, mostly it was kids with a broken home
Speaker 1: with no father, just a drunk mother, alcoholic drug addict, whatever.
Speaker 1: That's pretty much the type of kid that Mel was
Speaker 1: geared towards. Mel told Tom that he should invite his
Speaker 1: friends when they were back in the areas where he'd
Speaker 1: grown up and have them come hang out backstage. So
Speaker 1: when the show gets back into his hometown, he like
Speaker 1: finds some of his buddies and he tells them to
Speaker 1: come like help set up and stuff and meet all
Speaker 1: these wrestlers. His friends are a little more cautious than him,
Speaker 1: like they immediately get the vibe. They get there, like
Speaker 1: all excited to meet Hulk, and then they meet Mel,
Speaker 1: who's like really weird and creepy, and they're like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you should be doing this, Like
Speaker 1: this seems like it's gonna go really really badly. But
Speaker 1: Tom keeps working. He stays, you know, keeps doing the
Speaker 1: ring boy stuff. And a few of his friends still
Speaker 1: hung around, and gradually Mel starts inviting them, like one
Speaker 1: after the other to come hang with him privately and
Speaker 1: like a back room. And whenever a kid would agree
Speaker 1: and like go back into a room with Mel, he
Speaker 1: would follow the same script, playing with their feet and
Speaker 1: then using their feet to masturbate himself. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: this is rough, folks. It's it's it doesn't get easier here.
Speaker 2: I gotta tell you, Robert, when I was like.
Speaker 3: Really excited to be on the Vince McMahon episode, didn't
Speaker 3: expect we'd get into a story like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was a trap. One
Speaker 1: of the best days, guys. Well, Vince comes back into
Speaker 1: this story. He's actually very very intricately involved in this.
Speaker 3: I have no doubt that he does, because I was
Speaker 3: very familiar with Pat Patterson as a figure on ww
Speaker 3: television for ten years following his retirement, and.
Speaker 2: Nary a mention of any of this on his Wikipedia.
Speaker 1: When I watched that Andre the Giant documentary that we
Speaker 1: like played a clip from, He's on it repeatedly. He's
Speaker 1: on it, like talking about Andrea's sex appeal, like it
Speaker 1: is so fucked up, it is so bad.
Speaker 4: He had enormous feet, yeah to him, like having sex
Speaker 4: with a thirty four foot woman.
Speaker 1: You know what, you know, what is a good thing
Speaker 1: to do right now is pull the ads.
Speaker 3: Perfect time, perfect time. They'll be delighted. They'll be delighted.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, ah, we're back and we're ready to make
Speaker 6: everybody real, real unhappy.
Speaker 1: You guys ready to be a lot less happy than
Speaker 1: you were this morning.
Speaker 2: Than than the child predator fucking feet. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm generally always prepared to be less happy at a
Speaker 3: moment's notice.
Speaker 1: Excellent, Yes, you have, You've been trained well by our country.
Speaker 1: So mel Phillips gets kind of more and more comfortable
Speaker 1: abusing some of these friends of Tom's and abusing Tom,
Speaker 1: and kind of as he starts to feel like these
Speaker 1: kids are ready, he starts bringing Garvin and pat Patterson
Speaker 1: in and like they start coming by to hang out
Speaker 1: with the boys. Tom later said of Patterson quote, he'd
Speaker 1: look at you when he was talking to you. He'd
Speaker 1: look right at your crotch, and he'd like lick his
Speaker 1: lips and shit, he'd make sexual gestures by looking at
Speaker 1: you like that. He'd put his hand on your ass
Speaker 1: and squeeze your ass and stuff like that. Again, Tom
Speaker 1: is a thirteen year old boy. Garvin would offer the
Speaker 1: boys drugs and booze, of which there were both plenty,
Speaker 1: and eventually, you know, this goes on for some period
Speaker 1: of time. Tom has abused for a while and eventually
Speaker 1: he starts saying no, he refuses, he stops, you know,
Speaker 1: going by to this. He kind of like pulls out
Speaker 1: and at this point he stops getting work as a
Speaker 1: ring boy. Basically, you know, he is a homeless youth,
Speaker 1: so this is something that he relied on for money,
Speaker 1: and they, you know, can him because he's not willing
Speaker 1: to be molested.
Speaker 2: Anymore, so that's bad.
Speaker 1: Time goes by a few years pass and then it's
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety and Tom, who is nineteen I think now,
Speaker 1: gets a call from Garvin again and Garvin's like, Hey,
Speaker 1: do you want to work for the WWF again? You know,
Speaker 1: we have a job in a warehouse. You know, we've
Speaker 1: got We've got some like work that you could do.
Speaker 1: Tom tells Garvin, like, I'll come back to the WWF,
Speaker 1: but you know I want to be an announcer someday, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's what I want to do. I'm only
Speaker 1: going to take this job if it's like can be
Speaker 1: a springboard to something bigger. And Garvin's like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: sure that's possible, Like you could be an announcer. Why
Speaker 1: don't you come by my house and we'll talk about it.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, so don't do it.
Speaker 1: Tom, you know, goes there. He is immediately pressured for
Speaker 1: sex and he says no. And when this happens, Garvin
Speaker 1: refuses to drive him home. So Tom has to sleep
Speaker 1: in this guy's garage, like probably keeping one eye open
Speaker 1: the entire night, and then gets driven to work the
Speaker 1: next day, where Melvin tells him, actually, you're fired. You
Speaker 1: don't have a job after all, great great company, the WWF.
Speaker 1: So in the years between his first molestation in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one, Tom didn't talk to anyone about what had happened.
Speaker 1: He just kind of struggled alone with what had been
Speaker 1: done to him. But then in July of nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: Phil Mushnik, a journalist, published a story in The New
Speaker 1: York Post about the steroid abuse scandal in the WWF.
Speaker 1: Tom Cole read it while staying with his brother Lee,
Speaker 1: and reading about that scandal kind of helped him break
Speaker 1: through the wall that he'd put up between his loved
Speaker 1: ones and what had been done to him. He suddenly
Speaker 1: just kind of like tells his brother everything that had happened.
Speaker 1: So Lee is like, we've got to do something about this.
Speaker 1: We should sue them, we should talk to some journalists
Speaker 1: like this, the story needs to get out. So in October,
Speaker 1: with Lee's help, Tom reaches out to some journalists, one
Speaker 1: of whom is irv Muchnik, and one of whom is
Speaker 1: Phil Mushnick, who'd written that Post story. This is I'm
Speaker 1: sorry about this. They're very similar names, but they are
Speaker 1: different guys who are not relate. They related irv Muchnik,
Speaker 1: who is like the few of the guy who had
Speaker 1: helped start the NWA, and then Phil Mushnik mush in Ick.
Speaker 1: It's very frustrating. Somebody should have stopped this and changed
Speaker 1: one of their last names. I'm livid. But yeah, they
Speaker 1: are not related as far as I can tell. So
Speaker 1: Mushnik is like, hey, kid, you should like get a lawyer,
Speaker 1: en sue. You shouldn't just be talking to a journalist,
Speaker 1: Like what's happened to you is very much legally actionable
Speaker 1: and you are owed money, you know. And so Tom does,
Speaker 1: He finds a lawyer, and in February nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: Mushnick blows the story open publishes an article about it.
Speaker 1: And obviously this is in the middle of the steroid
Speaker 1: w scandal. This is an immediate, obvious, serious problem for
Speaker 1: the WWF plot, possibly like a life threatening problem for
Speaker 1: the organization. So of course Vince and Linda McMahon leap
Speaker 1: into action to protect the company good. So the first
Speaker 1: thing they do, so that's what really needs to be
Speaker 1: defended is not the thirteen year old boy that was molested,
Speaker 1: but this billion dollar corporation yeah, and the I will like,
Speaker 1: the first thing they do is the right thing. They
Speaker 1: fire all of the three perpetrators, right, So that's fine.
Speaker 1: You know, that would be the number one step that
Speaker 1: you would take if the Compson is in the WW
Speaker 1: Hall of Fame.
Speaker 2: Oh oh yeah, Tom.
Speaker 1: They don't all stay fired, but they start by firing
Speaker 1: all three guys, and then Vince starts going around to
Speaker 1: the press doing damage control, you know, and he's he's
Speaker 1: not great at this. He calls Mushnik, and Mushnik describes
Speaker 1: this as Vince like calls him and gives him like
Speaker 1: a pouring his heart out phone call. I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from Josie Riseman here about like how this goes down.
Speaker 1: Apparently fearing that mel Phillips would soon become part of
Speaker 1: the public scandal, Vince told him that he had let
Speaker 1: Phillips go four years ago because Phillips's relationship with kids
Speaker 1: seemed peculiar and unnatural. Mushnik recalled McMahon said that he
Speaker 1: hired Phillips with the caveat that Phillips steer clear from kids.
Speaker 1: McMahon told me that it was his great regard for children,
Speaker 1: his own personal regard for children, and made him get
Speaker 1: rid of rid of Mel Phillips. Mushnick would later say
Speaker 1: in a deposition, Vince and Linda returned Phillips to the
Speaker 1: organization with the caveat that Mel still steer clear of
Speaker 1: underaged boys, stop hanging around kids, and stop chasing after kids.
Speaker 1: Vince allegedly said he'd brought Phillips back because the man
Speaker 1: really missed wrestling and really missed the scene, but that
Speaker 1: he was gone for good this time, so Vince's damage
Speaker 1: controls to be like, yeah, we knew this guy was
Speaker 1: a pedophile, so we fired him, but he really liked wrestling,
Speaker 1: so we brought him back.
Speaker 3: But now he's gone forever. Like how can you be? Like, sir,
Speaker 3: he bothered me with how he would look at kids,
Speaker 3: so I told him to stay.
Speaker 2: Away from kids. But you can have a job.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could have your job back because you love
Speaker 1: wrestling so much.
Speaker 2: Like that's bad. That's pretty bad.
Speaker 1: It's pretty bad. Yeah, that's pretty bad stuff. So Vince
Speaker 1: later sues Mushnik for defamation because of these articles, but
Speaker 1: Riiseman says he know disputed Mushnik's story about the call.
Speaker 1: It's like, I don't know. Again, a lot of this
Speaker 1: is in dispute. Mushnik is broadly, like, definitely right about
Speaker 1: the story. He is a New York Post journalist, so
Speaker 1: he's not beyond above like fabulizing some of the details
Speaker 1: about Vince's response to him. Potentially, I will say that,
Speaker 1: but the fact that like Vince fires this guy and
Speaker 1: then brings him back seems pretty undisputed and real fucked up.
Speaker 1: So McMahon makes other calls too. Mostly his strategy is
Speaker 1: to throw Garvin and Phillips under the bus, but weirdly
Speaker 1: he tries to protect pat Patterson. He calls him an
Speaker 1: innocent man. I think just because there, as you stated earlier, Sean,
Speaker 1: they're the kind of friends who like jokingly try to
Speaker 1: show each other their poops.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: That's that guy's got a foot thing, that guy's got
Speaker 4: a pedophile. Think, there's no reason to think that guy's
Speaker 4: a normal dude outside of the poop hiding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, as tends to happen in these kind of situations.
Speaker 1: Once the story breaks, more victims start to come forward
Speaker 1: and there are more news stories. Some fellow wrestlers take
Speaker 1: to the talk show circuit to Savage Vince, including his
Speaker 1: dad's old champion Bruno Sammartino. Bruno and another wrestler named
Speaker 1: Orton wind up on Larry King, with Vince talking about
Speaker 1: like the whole fucking mess. Sam, Yeah, yeah, Bob Orton, Bobon,
Speaker 1: all right, yeah. Sam Martino says there have been people
Speaker 1: who have come forward who caught him with an eleven
Speaker 1: year old boy having sex in a car, and Vince responds,
Speaker 1: did you actually see this incident in some sort of
Speaker 1: parking lot?
Speaker 2: Did you see that? Bruno?
Speaker 1: Sam Martino admitted he'd just been told about it, and
Speaker 1: Larry King then called the claim hearsay. Much of Vince's
Speaker 1: defense here focused around making the case that Sam Martino
Speaker 1: was unreliable or incompetent. Here's sex lies in headlocks quote.
Speaker 1: King switched to a guest on the phone, a former
Speaker 1: WWSF wrestler named Barry Orton Sorry, who also claimed that
Speaker 1: Garvin had accosted him in Texas in nineteen seventy eight
Speaker 1: when he was just nineteen. Barry King asked, why didn't
Speaker 1: we know about that sooner fourteen years ago when you
Speaker 1: were accosted? Why didn't you come forward? Just then, a
Speaker 1: third guest, Bruno Sammartino, interrupted King and orton, Larry, tell
Speaker 1: him who the man was, he said, then, realizing he'd
Speaker 1: addressed the wrong man, hastily added, I mean not Larry.
Speaker 1: I beg your pardon, Barry. You're a little confused, aren't you.
Speaker 1: Bruno McMahon jumped in, a trace of a smile playing
Speaker 1: around the edge of his lips. It was the kind
Speaker 1: of deflection that he did masterfully, and as the night
Speaker 1: war on, he kept doing it, making his accusers look
Speaker 1: bumbling and unsure. Right, So that's kind of Vince's strategy
Speaker 1: is like, this is complicated. People's memories are a little faded,
Speaker 1: you know. Bruno slips up and calls Barry Larry, and
Speaker 1: every time there's like a little fuck up like that,
Speaker 1: Vince kind of jumps in with the goal of attacking
Speaker 1: Sam Martino, right, because that's sort of the big the
Speaker 1: guy who that's to Sam Martino's credit, he kind of
Speaker 1: takes the cause of defending these ring boys on personally,
Speaker 1: and so that's who McMahon has to go after.
Speaker 2: Voice he's a very famous Yeah.
Speaker 4: Right, if a longtime wrestler gets a name wrong, that
Speaker 4: means there's no such thing as child predators.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly, exactly there's no other reason a wrestler would
Speaker 1: get minor details of a story wrong.
Speaker 2: It's not like Bruno San Martino got hit in the
Speaker 2: head a lot or anything like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Vince's response to the media coverage of his
Speaker 1: organization's scandal was thoroughly modern. He distracted from the numerous
Speaker 1: allegations against the WF WF by attacking journalists, potentially particularly Mushnik,
Speaker 1: who he called quote something less than legitimate. The media
Speaker 1: has kept all of these accusers away from us, he said.
Speaker 1: They don't want us to talk to them. They don't
Speaker 1: want us to get to the bottom of the story.
Speaker 1: So Vince eventually agreed to negotiate with Tom, whose lawyer
Speaker 1: had advised him to demand seven hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars and not a cent less. Vince ensured that Tom
Speaker 1: was alone with his lawyer and without his brother Lee,
Speaker 1: who'd been helping him handle the situation. But Vince was
Speaker 1: not alone. Vince had both his wife, Linda McMahon and
Speaker 1: his legal representation in the room when they're talking to
Speaker 1: Tom without his lawyer present. In defensive statements by WWF representatives,
Speaker 1: what happened next is framed is the McMahon's shocked and
Speaker 1: horrified on Tom's behalf, leaping into action to meet the
Speaker 1: boy at once to try to help him. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote from Politico here. This was hardly a
Speaker 1: standard corporate move. The accuser had lawyered up, and most
Speaker 1: executives would have been hard at work putting distance between
Speaker 1: themselves and Coal, but the McMahon saw an opportunity to
Speaker 1: end the story, and, confident in their very different skills
Speaker 1: Vince's hard negotiating style Lenda's equally fearless charm, they sat
Speaker 1: down with Coal in his lawyer's office, and defenders of
Speaker 1: the McMahon's will kind of use the fact that they
Speaker 1: very quickly get into a room with the boy as
Speaker 1: evidence that they are their decent and caring and responsible right. Like,
Speaker 1: the way it's kind of framed is what other CEO
Speaker 1: of a company with a scandal like this would immediately
Speaker 1: sit down with the victim to ask how they could help.
Speaker 1: And that is technically what they do, but that's not
Speaker 1: the whole story. Here's Politico. Vince McMahon scoffed at the
Speaker 1: lawyer's demands for big money. Cole recalled, but he promised
Speaker 1: immediate action and offered Cole his job back, along with
Speaker 1: back wages alculated at fifty five thousand dollars. Cole signed
Speaker 1: the agreement on April eight and went to work next
Speaker 1: Monday to a charm offensive from Lenamic. Man, We're gonna
Speaker 1: send a car for you so you could go shopping.
Speaker 1: I'm sending five thousand dollars over so you can go
Speaker 1: get closed or whatever you need, he recalled her, telling him,
Speaker 1: So basically what they do is like, yeah.
Speaker 3: They're buying him off. Like that's that's like as of
Speaker 3: what he ought to get. Yeah, exactly, Like it's like
Speaker 3: it's they're taking.
Speaker 1: Advantage of the fact that he loves wrestling, right, these
Speaker 1: people are like he is young as a man, and
Speaker 1: he would much rather He's like, well, I would rather
Speaker 1: have a career in the WWF as an announcer than
Speaker 1: just get a pile of money. So you know, this
Speaker 1: seems like a really good deal. Maybe you know, they
Speaker 1: are horrified on my behalf and like they're going to
Speaker 1: basically adopt me, and like this is this is a
Speaker 1: troubled kid with a difficult family life, you know, and
Speaker 1: they know what his vulnerability is, right, Like they're they're
Speaker 1: very aware of that.
Speaker 3: Uh, it's such a bankrupt argument to says like, well,
Speaker 3: if why would they try to get him alone and
Speaker 3: room as quickly as possible after the accusations came out.
Speaker 3: It's like, really, yeah, are you are we are we
Speaker 3: really entertaining this, Like.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, it's and it's like.
Speaker 3: Or like or when they say they won't even they won't,
Speaker 3: it's it's like, I think Trump has done it too,
Speaker 3: But like when they keep the identities of the accusers
Speaker 3: secret for obvious reasons, but they're like, well they won't
Speaker 3: even let us know who they are so that we
Speaker 3: can face those our accusers. And it's like, well they
Speaker 3: don't let you do it so you can't like intimidate them,
Speaker 3: or yeah, you know you have a tremendous amount of power. Yes,
Speaker 3: you're a very powerful man. Like it's it's it's all
Speaker 3: really gross. And like that version of events that Politico
Speaker 3: gives again, like every story involving events, there's a couple
Speaker 3: of versions of this, but that version leaves out some
Speaker 3: key details. One is that the offer that the McMahons
Speaker 3: make for back pay, they kind of their their people
Speaker 3: frame it is like we immediately offered him all of
Speaker 3: this back pay right to like how him out. That
Speaker 3: offer only came after Vince rejected Tom's lawyer's demand for
Speaker 3: seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The two get into
Speaker 3: this really nasty argument and like Vince and Linda get
Speaker 3: up to leave the room and basically in negotiations, and
Speaker 3: that's when Tom cries out, no, don't go, I just
Speaker 3: want my job back. And at this point, like they're like, hey,
Speaker 3: you know, get your lawyer out of the room and
Speaker 3: we'll talk, and that's when the deal goes down. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's it's very gross. What's the source of the story?
Speaker 3: This sounds kind of made up?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like, so I'll quote from Riiseman again here,
Speaker 1: because this is this is according most of this is
Speaker 1: according to Lee, who is Tom's brother, who is told
Speaker 1: about what happens by Tom. Right, Tom is not around anymore,
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about, so, like Lee is kind of
Speaker 1: a major source for a lot of this stuff. And
Speaker 1: Lee is not in the room at the time, right,
Speaker 1: Like he's not allowed in. He's really angry about the
Speaker 1: fact that he's not there.
Speaker 3: Once we're not in, Robert, the way that you keep
Speaker 3: teasing this story, kind of telling us Tom not around anymore.
Speaker 2: We'll get to that. Yeah, I mean, I.
Speaker 1: Don't know how else to tell it.
Speaker 2: It is. It's messy.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to quote from Riiseman again describing what
Speaker 1: happens here. What did Vince tell Tom and that moment
Speaker 1: of intimacy, like when they're all alone in the room,
Speaker 1: mister McMahon explained to Tom that he had a difficult
Speaker 1: childhood himself. Is how Fuchsburg, which is the lawyer, would
Speaker 1: describe it to a reporter shortly afterwards, Hey, everyone just
Speaker 1: wanted to clarify again, I kind of summarized this wrong
Speaker 1: in my notes and so read it out something that
Speaker 1: wasn't entirely correct. The source here is not Lee, Tom's brother.
Speaker 1: This is all stuff that Lee said directly. Again, David Bixon,
Speaker 1: span great wrestling journalists, brought this up to me. Tom
Speaker 1: gave those details specifically in a nineteen ninety nine Wrestling
Speaker 1: Perspective interview that's been cited by basically anyone who's done
Speaker 1: good reporting on the Ring Boy scandal. Apologies for getting
Speaker 1: that wrong. Lee put it more bluntly. Vince McMahon started
Speaker 1: telling him Tom, I was molested also when I was
Speaker 1: a kid. I want to start on a clean slate
Speaker 1: with you, Vince said, I want to take care of everything.
Speaker 1: How would you feel about that? Tom got a good
Speaker 1: feeling that mister McMahon really cared. He shook hands with
Speaker 1: Tom and offered him his job back. So that's the
Speaker 1: claim that like Lee makes, and I think that Tom's
Speaker 1: lawyer makes, is that McMahon tried to like connect with
Speaker 1: Tom over their shared experience of suffering being abused as children. Yes,
Speaker 1: in order to gain his trust, Vince would do Yep,
Speaker 1: seems vincey. So some of the promises that McMahon's maid
Speaker 1: did come true. Tom got new clothes, he did get
Speaker 1: his job back, He got some money. It is unclear
Speaker 1: how much, certainly less than he would have gotten an
Speaker 1: illegal settlement. In a nineteen ninety nine interview, he explained
Speaker 1: this as saying basically that he hadn't wanted a lawsuit.
Speaker 1: He just one of the bad guys fired and a
Speaker 1: chance at a career in wrestling. I loved working for
Speaker 1: the business. It's what I wanted to do my whole life.
Speaker 1: As part of this agreement, the WWF sent Tom Cole
Speaker 1: to community college but they also set an expectation for
Speaker 1: his grades that all of the money would stop if
Speaker 1: he couldn't meet a certain grade point average. Tom is
Speaker 1: again a troubled kid who has a difficult history with education.
Speaker 1: He does not do well in school, so they stopped
Speaker 1: paying for it and eventually fire him from his job.
Speaker 1: In a nineteen ninety nine interview, he described Vince's manipulated
Speaker 1: and ruthless and said this of Linda, I wish I
Speaker 1: could say she was a nice person. Sometimes she gave
Speaker 1: me that feeling, and sometimes she didn't. I don't know
Speaker 1: what I feel about Linda McMahon. Disappointed, disappointed in everything
Speaker 1: that she had promised that they would do. Tom struggled
Speaker 1: with what had been done with him the rest of
Speaker 1: his life, the way that he'd been taken advantage of
Speaker 1: by the McMahons. He committed suicide in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: This all happened quite recently, unfortunately, So yeah, it's a bummer.
Speaker 1: It's a real bleak story. Sorry, man, that's bullshit. Yeah
Speaker 1: that happened. That is bullshit.
Speaker 4: Vince spent like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars hiring
Speaker 4: people to distract him from his studies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, having people steal his school books. Yeah, make sure
Speaker 2: he gets a D or do come back to my office?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I'm sure he probably did have this
Speaker 3: guy like followed probably right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, not an unreasonable thing to expect. You
Speaker 1: know what he Elsie does. Now this does happen like
Speaker 1: more than a decade later, but he rehires Pat Patterson.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: Pat Patterson's a major TV figure during the Attitude era. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so Pat gets brought back.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it's like a decade later or something like that.
Speaker 1: He's out for a while, but he comes back. Uh,
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's that's how Vince McMahon handles a child
Speaker 1: sex abuse scandal in his organization. Good guy, I had.
Speaker 1: I had never even heard a rumor like this about
Speaker 1: Pat Patterson. And I'm a person who's been watching wrestling
Speaker 1: his entire life, so like, yeah, it's wild, pretty man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he buried that this story so thoroughly. And it's like
Speaker 1: he's every time there's a documentary about this era, like
Speaker 1: Patterson will fucking show up. It's so insane to me
Speaker 1: that like he just he's always around still, like seeing
Speaker 1: him in fucking in documentaries talking about Andre the Giant
Speaker 1: and like a documentary produced by Bill Simmons. It's like,
Speaker 1: how is he allowed to be on it on screen?
Speaker 2: Right now?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Did nobody look into this? Like yeah, jesus.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And when he came on to The Ultimate Warrior documentary
Speaker 4: and like rated all the Tag Team's feet by fuckibility,
Speaker 4: I was like, this a little seems weird.
Speaker 2: It seems weird. Yeah, it seems peculiar, seems like an
Speaker 2: odd special feature for the Warrior DVD.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's like, you can find defenses of this guy.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at Jesus Christ. An article on last Word
Speaker 1: on sports dot Com by Jared Sullivan called the persecution
Speaker 1: of pat Patterson.
Speaker 2: The poor persecution of the child predator, and.
Speaker 1: It is okay, yeah he is pretty yet yeah, because
Speaker 1: Patterson is openly homosexual.
Speaker 2: So okay, that's what this is about.
Speaker 3: He's one of the first, I believe, one of the
Speaker 3: first pro wrestlers to be openly gay.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, he is the first.
Speaker 2: Yeah wow.
Speaker 1: So this is a whole article about, legitimately the persecution
Speaker 1: he faces as a gay man in wrestling that does
Speaker 1: not at all mention the fact that he also had
Speaker 1: like got fired for credible claims of child man. This
Speaker 1: is also problematic. Let's let's move on to steroids. That's
Speaker 1: a lot more fun. The sexual humiliation of the Attitude era. Please,
Speaker 1: that's my ass club. Can we just talk about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, let's get I want to turn too, Yeah right,
Speaker 2: all right? An pennies match? Can we talk about a
Speaker 2: bron pennies match?
Speaker 3: We talked about Jerry the King Waller screaming puppies over
Speaker 3: and over again, just for ten straight years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wrestling So uh yeah. That article that had qued
Speaker 1: Tom In on the WWF steroid scandal and kind of
Speaker 1: started all of this was one of the many pieces
Speaker 1: published after the nineteen ninety one conviction of George so Horian,
Speaker 1: the US attorney who had prosecuted it.
Speaker 2: Ted.
Speaker 1: Smith wasn't initially sure if he wanted to go after
Speaker 1: Vince McMahon or not and like actually make a broader
Speaker 1: case against the WWF and against Vince as the ring
Speaker 1: leader of any of this. He'd seen circumstantial evidence and
Speaker 1: allegations saying that Vince had been kind of the head
Speaker 1: of the WWF steroid ring, but he didn't have horrid
Speaker 1: objective proof of it. You know, this was all made
Speaker 1: His job was made more difficult by the fact that
Speaker 1: superstar Billy Graham told press uh or told the media
Speaker 1: that Smith, this US attorney, had asked him to wear
Speaker 1: a wire for an FBI probe of moblinks to McMahon.
Speaker 2: This was not true.
Speaker 1: Nobody asked superstar Billy Graham to wear a wire to
Speaker 1: like prove that McMahon was in bed with the mob,
Speaker 1: and it created an embarrassing circus around the story. And
Speaker 1: so Smith like sees this mess around Billy Graham just
Speaker 1: like saying shit for some reason. It is like, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I want to like get involved in
Speaker 1: a big case with the WWF. Maybe it's like too
Speaker 1: much of a distraction, too bad for my career whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, these are political positions US attorneys. So he's
Speaker 1: thinking about his political few. Is Carney as shit? It
Speaker 1: is Carney as shit. Maybe he's like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: too messy. So one of his colleagues, though Brian O'Shea
Speaker 1: or Sean o'she sorry, who works for the US Attorney's
Speaker 1: office in Brooklyn and is like a securities fraud guy,
Speaker 1: thinks that there might be provable wrongdoing by Vince.
Speaker 2: That's kind of in.
Speaker 1: His purview, and so he had been like interviewing wrestlers
Speaker 1: for a while in a grand jury scenario to try
Speaker 1: and like get an indictment against Evince. So nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: two dawns, and this is going to be like the
Speaker 1: worst year of Vince's life. In addition to the ring
Speaker 1: boy scandal kind of blowing up and wrestlers and employees
Speaker 1: coming forward to say that they've been harassed or assaulted
Speaker 1: by Patterson, you know, you get just this increasing sort
Speaker 1: of flood of rumors that he's also the guy behind
Speaker 1: the steroid abuse ring in the WWF.
Speaker 3: Comparatively, nineteen ninety two was a really good year for me.
Speaker 3: Like my Little League team made it to the playoffs.
Speaker 3: Batman Returns came out that summer.
Speaker 1: Yeah wow, it's almost like you never cover it up
Speaker 1: a child abuse scandal or a steroid abuse ring.
Speaker 2: Tom, I was only wearing a little League Okay, that
Speaker 2: makes sense, snity. Yeah. I learned how to reverse dunk
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety two. Very proud of that. Yeah, that's chill,
Speaker 2: that's awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I did run an illegal steroid ring in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two, but because I was like four years old.
Speaker 1: The steroids, it was like they were like mud steroids,
Speaker 1: you know, and and and you know, you know kids
Speaker 1: make like mud pies steroids. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah to
Speaker 1: a syringe mud shoot mud in deer.
Speaker 2: But yeah you could.
Speaker 3: You could have headed fucking hulkster a syringe full of mud.
Speaker 3: He would have taken it. So April of nineteen kie
Speaker 3: just boopie.
Speaker 1: So in April of ninety two, while all this is
Speaker 1: going on, Rita Chatterton comes forward and she, for the
Speaker 1: first time makes her public allegations public that Vince has
Speaker 1: has sexually assaulted her. Right, So all of this is
Speaker 1: happening in the same year. And to make matters worse
Speaker 1: for Evins, his expensive bodybuilding league had just brought on
Speaker 1: Lufarigo right at the same time that the government cracks
Speaker 1: down on steroids, and so he has to stop everyone
Speaker 1: from using steroids. And if you know anything about loufar
Speaker 1: No in nineteen ninety two, he is not going to
Speaker 1: be happy when you tell him to stop using steroids.
Speaker 2: He was like, you go to hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he hoped out on him. So he Vince brings
Speaker 1: in a specialist to help wean his bodybuilders off of
Speaker 1: gear and onto human growth hormoid hormone, which is untraceable,
Speaker 1: at least at the time. That's the allegation made in
Speaker 1: the book Sex Lies and Headlocks. One of Vince's bodybuilders
Speaker 1: later claimed, we all had our connections on the streets.
Speaker 1: If you were smart, you could get around the test.
Speaker 1: The ones who could afford it just moved onto human
Speaker 1: growth hormones taken from human cadavers, which was the latest thing.
Speaker 1: I wasn't worried. It was my knowledge against Vinces. Some
Speaker 1: of the guys just fell apart. It gives me the
Speaker 1: power of the un shitn't corps juice into so they
Speaker 1: can necromancing each other. Yes, that's how Vince's gonna cracking
Speaker 1: up bodybuilding.
Speaker 2: Oh feels the moonlight on my internal flesh.
Speaker 1: Brother Undertaker literally was the dead man, I guess just yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty cool. Jesus Christ, the fucking DNA of
Speaker 1: a thousand dead men swirling in the warriors veins suddenly
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 4: So we've just given everyone a couple more days off
Speaker 4: a week, and they wouldn't have to inject themselves with
Speaker 4: the flesh of man, right.
Speaker 3: Maybe just reduce your touring schedule by I don't know
Speaker 3: seventy dates. No, no, no, Tom. I think cannibalism is
Speaker 3: the right answer here. That's the that's the responsible corporate
Speaker 3: move is to engage in muscle cannibalism. I man, I'm
Speaker 3: waiting for the expos of Hulk Hogan fucking eating a dude,
Speaker 3: just eating a dead man eating a dude. Oh man,
Speaker 3: So those photos get leaked on a TMZ or some Yeah,
Speaker 3: find it, folks, you can.
Speaker 2: You can avenge gawker. This is the only way.
Speaker 3: Four times while he's eating that dude, he can't help it.
Speaker 3: It's unrelated to anything.
Speaker 2: He's just.
Speaker 1: Vince also uses this opportunity. This is an opportunity to
Speaker 1: shield to his bodybuilders a supplement that he'd started selling.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: And the supplement is made by a nutritionist that he
Speaker 1: hires as a contractor called doctor Squat.
Speaker 2: So that sounds.
Speaker 1: That sounds so they are taking We've already talked about
Speaker 1: the corpse human growth hormones. This pill doctor Squat made
Speaker 1: is made from the ground up antlers of lactating deer.
Speaker 2: Give me it's a positive. Its so funny.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, this doesn't work, and his bodybuilders started to deflate
Speaker 1: and as a big June evench at the Long Beach
Speaker 1: Convention Center nears, there's just like he's got a bunch
Speaker 1: of bodybuilders whose muscles are melting off of them.
Speaker 4: The event becomes it's so great. Uh, this is a
Speaker 4: massive failure. I'm sure you're about to stay here, yea.
Speaker 4: The announcers looking at these like puffy, like tired men.
Speaker 4: They keep trying to cover it like, oh, he's been
Speaker 4: pretty sick lately, Like they can't say, oh, yeah, we
Speaker 4: can't do steroids anymore. That's why these guys look so terrible.
Speaker 4: It's like they just keep finding excuses during the show.
Speaker 4: It's fantastic, it's so funny. It is such a disaster
Speaker 4: financially that one of Vince's underlings calculates that if Vince
Speaker 4: had instead of starting the WBF, if he had paid
Speaker 4: each of the thirteen thousand guests at that event ten
Speaker 4: thousand dollars, they would have walked out ahead financially.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, it goes so badly.
Speaker 3: The best way to frame that, that's an incredible way
Speaker 3: to frame that failure, like what.
Speaker 2: So what a wet fart?
Speaker 3: Like anything else, nothing else in history has landed with
Speaker 3: such a thunderous thud.
Speaker 1: We could have established basic income for most of Long
Speaker 1: Beach and made this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a weird bodybuilding league.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe he's made some money with the reindeer pills or
Speaker 1: the deer pills.
Speaker 2: Who knows.
Speaker 1: So the Eastern District Court of New York eventually brings
Speaker 1: charges against Vince for distributing steroids and conspiracy to distribute steroids.
Speaker 1: The case goes to court in nineteen ninety four and
Speaker 1: Hulkgan testifies in exchange for immunity from prosecution. He'd started
Speaker 1: working for Ted Turner's outfit, the WCW during this period,
Speaker 1: so like he's not professionally tied to Vince anymore, although
Speaker 1: he'll come back. A lot of guys have left for
Speaker 1: the WCW at this point. Ten wrestlers other wrestlers, so
Speaker 1: eleven wrestlers in total, testify for the government, but none
Speaker 1: of them claim that Vince gave them steroids, just that
Speaker 1: they felt pressured by him to take steroids right to
Speaker 1: get bigger. So they don't actually have the claim that
Speaker 1: Vince was ordering anyone to do anything, or that he
Speaker 1: was handing out the steroids right, just that I felt
Speaker 1: like we weren't going to get the job if we
Speaker 1: weren't big enough, right.
Speaker 3: I believe that that's true. Well, yeah, Vince is not
Speaker 3: that dump right right. I feel like Vince is, like
Speaker 3: he's an awful, terrible man. He's a demon, but he's
Speaker 3: kind of shrewd, and it seems like he would keep
Speaker 3: himself out, he would be smart enough to keep himself
Speaker 3: out of all of those conversations.
Speaker 1: And it's it's one of those things there are when
Speaker 1: you hear fans talk about this, to talk about like, well,
Speaker 1: Hogan definitely light under oath, and that's possible. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna make those claims or get into that among other things.
Speaker 1: The jury deliberates and renders a verdict of not guilty. Right,
Speaker 1: So it is it would be defamation to be like
Speaker 1: Hogan definitely light under oath and Vince McMahon definitely, you know,
Speaker 1: was guilty because I simply can't say that, right, I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't mind saying it. Hulk Cogan definitely lie.
Speaker 3: There we go shot babies, right, What did he say?
Speaker 3: He said like he only used steroids like twice or
Speaker 3: some shit after he like got hurt or something like
Speaker 3: his his testimony was really weak. But he doesn't he
Speaker 3: doesn't implicate Vince.
Speaker 1: He doesn't implicate Vince, and it is possible Vince didn't
Speaker 1: cross a line that would have gotten him convicted. It's
Speaker 1: also possible that, like it was arranged, that people would
Speaker 1: tell just enough of the truth to not get in
Speaker 1: trouble themselves while still not talking about the things that Vince.
Speaker 2: Did that were illegal.
Speaker 1: All of this is possibly true, whether or not Vince actually,
Speaker 1: you know, broke the law. He has declared non guilty.
Speaker 1: And also I think he's morally responsible for what happens
Speaker 1: with steroids in the WWF to a significant extent.
Speaker 3: And of course he created that culture. He designed that culture.
Speaker 3: He definitely found ways. Look, I have no doubt that
Speaker 3: he when all the wrestlers testified, well we felt pressured. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 3: of course he was the architect of all of that,
Speaker 3: no doubt.
Speaker 2: Ye.
Speaker 3: But I also I don't have any trouble believing that
Speaker 3: Vince kept himself out of the conversation so that there
Speaker 3: was nothing to substantially link him to any of that.
Speaker 1: No, and you know what, there's nothing to substantially link
Speaker 1: me to these products and services. Oh, I was going
Speaker 1: to say, the Japanese Red Army. But yes, these products
Speaker 1: and services also no direct connection that anyone can prove, so,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Except the fact that they paid shoot in never mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, here's some ads. Oh boy, what is up everybody?
Speaker 1: We are back from advertisements. And we are talking about
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, So that is two years after Vince
Speaker 1: has declared not guilty in this big steroid case. It
Speaker 1: is I think about five years after he institutes mandatory
Speaker 1: random steroid tests. You know, after Zahorian gets convicted in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, he suspends mandatory random steroid test for
Speaker 1: the WWF. His justification later when he's talked to question
Speaker 1: by the Waxman Committee, which is like a congressional subcommittee,
Speaker 1: is that, you know, Ted Turner was eating our lunch.
Speaker 1: You know, we were we were really struggling against the
Speaker 1: w c W, so we couldn't afford to do random
Speaker 1: steroid tests.
Speaker 2: He did the man, that's why I did the warl
Speaker 2: act It caused me money.
Speaker 4: Too bad things if you get money for it, that's
Speaker 4: it's true.
Speaker 2: That it is true.
Speaker 3: That is true law. That's the highest law of the land.
Speaker 3: Protecting profits is the highest law of the Land, so
Speaker 3: that is.
Speaker 1: That is actually true, that is legally binding and how
Speaker 1: we treat things here at at cool Zone Media, which
Speaker 1: is why we have reanimated both of you in AI
Speaker 1: form to Uh, well, we're gonna We've got a Pepsi
Speaker 1: commercial coming up after I missed my fingers? Can you
Speaker 1: AI is fucking up on your fingershot? Can you make
Speaker 1: us glass android bodies? Like the film Virtuosity? Absolutely, although
Speaker 1: I was actually going to go with, uh, what's that?
Speaker 1: What's that other movie where the guy creates the AI
Speaker 1: and then he and he and another weird dude hang
Speaker 1: out in a basement with it and that isolated compound
Speaker 1: and it it murders them X macin Yeah, I'm doing
Speaker 1: I'm doing X and ex Machina. Yeah, that's the plan.
Speaker 1: I think Tom's right. I want to be Russell Crowe
Speaker 1: all the way. Yeah, Glass Russell Crowe. We'll try a
Speaker 1: few different AI movies, including the movie AI where where
Speaker 1: both of you could be Jude Law's robot pimp Joe's and.
Speaker 2: Change his hair color with that snaff of a finger
Speaker 2: Johnny Cab from Total Recall A lot of a lot
Speaker 2: of great robot.
Speaker 1: Uh uh role models there I just learned recently that
Speaker 1: Johnny cab is portrayed by Robert Paccardo from Star Trek Voyager.
Speaker 1: I didn't really yep, well we all learned something today. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's nice.
Speaker 4: I wish some podcast was about that, and yeah, not
Speaker 4: child suicide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all that other stuff that.
Speaker 1: Would be better. So nineteen ninety they suspend their random
Speaker 1: drug tests. And it's funny because when he's talking for
Speaker 1: the Waxman community in two thousand and six, like McMahon
Speaker 1: can't even answer like whether or not wrestlers werever penalized
Speaker 1: for positive tests, like because the congressmen are like, so
Speaker 1: was there a penalty if you tested positive? And they
Speaker 1: kind of like waffle around it.
Speaker 4: He Also, I'm trying to imagine where all the air
Speaker 4: quotes are when Vince says, yes, we do mandatory random.
Speaker 2: Yes, steroid testing. Huh?
Speaker 1: Are there quotes around every single one of those words, Vince?
Speaker 1: Just just a lot of quotation marks. They actually ran
Speaker 1: out mandatory random drug No, you don't have to put
Speaker 1: the drug in quotes. There were definitely drugs. So we're
Speaker 1: fine on that one. So yeah, we tested for him
Speaker 1: and we found them. Yeah, we didn't find drugs. When
Speaker 1: I say drug, I mean Pat Patterson's poop. That's Vince's
Speaker 1: anti drug. So they he rags in front of this
Speaker 1: community committee that like, not only do we have like
Speaker 1: the best you know, safety programs to make sure people
Speaker 1: aren't hurting themselves on drugs and anywhere in the industry,
Speaker 1: but we have We've just added cardiological testing that's now
Speaker 1: a part of our enhanced safety procedures to make sure
Speaker 1: our people are really safe. Now we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about how well that all works are or worked. I
Speaker 1: should say that should be a test they do right anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that should be. It should be, Tom, it should be.
Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen, the Ultimate Warrior, James Helwig, died of
Speaker 1: a heart attack at age fifty four, three days after
Speaker 1: being brought into the WWE Hall of Fame. Kurt Hinnig
Speaker 1: or Hinnig, Yeah, Kurt Hinnig, Mister Perfect, was found dead
Speaker 1: in a Tampa hotel room on February tenth, two thousand
Speaker 1: and three, thanks to a cocktail of steroids, cocaine, and painkillers.
Speaker 1: Ray Traylor, Junior Big boss Man, dropped dead from a
Speaker 1: heart attack in two thousand and four. He was forty
Speaker 1: one years old. Randy Savage lasted until twenty eleven, where
Speaker 1: he died of a heart attack while driving at a
Speaker 1: fifty eight. Davy Boys Smith was thirty nine when a
Speaker 1: heart attack took him in two thousand and two. An
Speaker 1: autopsy suggested that his past use of anabolic steroids likely
Speaker 1: contributed Ravishing thirty fucking nine Jesus, yeah, yeah, extremely young, Ravishing.
Speaker 1: Rick Rude died in nineteen ninety nine of heart failure
Speaker 1: at age forty. Michael Hegstrand Road Warrior Hawk made it
Speaker 1: to fifty six and died of a heart attack in
Speaker 1: two thousand and three. All of these men are either
Speaker 1: confirmed or heavily suspected to have been users of anabolic
Speaker 1: steroids during their wrestling careers. In November of two thousand
Speaker 1: and five, Eddie Guerrero died of heart failure at thirty eight.
Speaker 1: The scandal around his passing helped inspire the Waxman Committee,
Speaker 1: this congressional hearing we've been talking about, and it forced
Speaker 1: the WWE, which is what they were called now, to
Speaker 1: reintroduce independent testing for their wrestlers along with a three
Speaker 1: strikes policy.
Speaker 2: There's two things I wanted to say. Yeah. One is
Speaker 2: the Ultimate Worry.
Speaker 3: You mentioned that he died three days after he was
Speaker 3: inducted to the wd WW Hall of.
Speaker 2: Fame, and he he died.
Speaker 3: He was also on Monday Night Raw, and he died
Speaker 3: like six hours after he was on the show or
Speaker 3: some shit like that, Like you died the following morning,
Speaker 3: so it was hours after he was on TV. And
Speaker 3: if you watch it, it's in the Dark Side of
Speaker 3: the Ring episode. But if you watch the little appearance
Speaker 3: he made on Raw that Monday, like he looks like
Speaker 3: he's about to drop dead in about eight hours.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, I lost the other thing.
Speaker 3: I wanted to say so, but yeah, I just wanted
Speaker 3: to underline that. I guess it's just man, there's oh
Speaker 3: I remember the other thing now there. When you watch
Speaker 3: the Dark Side of the Ring episode on Ultimate Warrior,
Speaker 3: they're talking to his ex wife and she's telling a
Speaker 3: story about how she found out that Warrior was cheating
Speaker 3: on her. But it starts in a very different place
Speaker 3: because she's like, I was trying to get a hold
Speaker 3: of him at his hotel and I couldn't And she
Speaker 3: says something that's like really telling and really chilling and
Speaker 3: really sad. She's like, if you're a wrestling wife, you
Speaker 3: know that if you try to call your husband and
Speaker 3: at his hotel room and you can't reach him on
Speaker 3: the road, there is a very good chance he is dead.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And a lot of these guys, you know, they're
Speaker 1: on the road when it happens, they're in a hotel
Speaker 1: room or something like.
Speaker 3: That, almost exclusively. Actually, Andre dies in a hotel room too,
Speaker 3: you know, I think all of the guys you mentioned
Speaker 3: died in a hotel room.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep. It's pretty bleak.
Speaker 1: And also, as we said, Chris or Eddie Guerrero dies
Speaker 1: in a two thousand and five. There's this committee in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, and it forces the WWE to
Speaker 1: reintroduce independent testing for the wrestlers and a three strikes policy.
Speaker 1: But this doesn't actually stop the problematic behavior. And kind
Speaker 1: of the evidence of this is in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: WWE wrestler Crispin Waugh hanged himself in his home after
Speaker 1: murdering his wife and child.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, everybody in wrestling knows
Speaker 1: this story, right, at least the bones of it.
Speaker 2: I think everybody. I think most.
Speaker 1: People outside of wrestler like it's a really it's and
Speaker 1: it's a nightmare. Benoit was a dude number one who
Speaker 1: had problems before he was a wrestler, right, there were
Speaker 1: there were issues with this guy outside of what wrestling
Speaker 1: did to him. The head injuries that he suffer were
Speaker 1: a significant part of this. He's like like googling after
Speaker 1: he kills his son, like how to resuscitate a dead
Speaker 1: child something stuff like that, like there's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: fucked up. But one thing that is not debatable is
Speaker 1: that at the time of his death, Benoit had ten
Speaker 1: times the normal level of testosterone in his blood. Testosterone, obviously,
Speaker 1: it's a hormone that naturally occurs. It's a hormone that
Speaker 1: people take who want to increase the rate at which
Speaker 1: they grow their muscles. It is also a hormone that
Speaker 1: can cause aggressive behavior, particularly in high doses. And he
Speaker 1: has again, ten times as much as he is supposed
Speaker 1: to have.
Speaker 3: There is a lot of brain degeneration and qulification from
Speaker 3: multiple head injuries. And also Eddie Guerrero was his best friend. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and when Eddie Guerrero died, Crispin Waugh really spiraled badly
Speaker 3: into grief and never recovered from it. So it's there's
Speaker 3: a lot of things going on in this guy's head
Speaker 3: at the time he.
Speaker 1: Is It is like the perfect storm of like shit
Speaker 1: that can go wrong in the brain and body of
Speaker 1: a giant muscleman, and it ends in the murder of
Speaker 1: his family and his own suicide while had prescription steroids
Speaker 1: in his home. This leads investigators, you know, after the deaths,
Speaker 1: to a doctor named phil Aston. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: outrage over what's happened. There's a lot of like pr
Speaker 1: around it. So the state goes after Aston, and it
Speaker 1: does seem like they had a cost to do so,
Speaker 1: among other things, they find that Aston had prescribed Chris.
Speaker 1: He had prescribed him ten month supplies of anabolic steroids
Speaker 1: every three to four weeks for a full year.
Speaker 2: That's too many steroids.
Speaker 1: It is an objectively insane amount of steroids.
Speaker 2: Way too many steroids.
Speaker 1: Federal prosecutors eventually alleged that the level of testosterone and
Speaker 1: his blood contributed to the murder of his family. Aston
Speaker 1: was sentenced to ten years in prison as a result
Speaker 1: of all of this. Reading through everything here, it is
Speaker 1: frustrating the degree to which, by default Vince is automatically
Speaker 1: exonerated from legal culpability of any kind in his case.
Speaker 1: In this case, his wrestlers are independent contractors, so he
Speaker 1: doesn't have to pay for their health care. And even
Speaker 1: though the FEDS were able to prove that Zoctor Zohore
Speaker 1: and male packages of steroids two Vince, that's not enough
Speaker 1: to prove that he caused anyone else to take him
Speaker 1: take them. Ben Waugh took three years of steroor multiple
Speaker 1: years worth of steroids in a single year, because he
Speaker 1: felt that that's what he had to do in order
Speaker 1: to stay competitive and keep getting booked. But there's nothing
Speaker 1: legally actionable against Vince in that the Waxman Committee, which
Speaker 1: convened after Guerrero's death, even asked Vince about this about
Speaker 1: like whether or not he had pushed people to get bigger.
Speaker 1: He slipped out of that question quite easily. His answer
Speaker 1: is no. They question they ask him, then, have you
Speaker 1: ever told a WWE talent or perspective talent that he
Speaker 1: or she needed to be bigger in order to be successful?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: Back to the weight, I have suggested that they lose weight.
Speaker 1: Question you suggested losing it but not gaining it? Answer right. Question,
Speaker 1: have you ever told a WWE talent or perspective talent
Speaker 1: that he or she needed to be more muscular, or
Speaker 1: words to that effect. Answer no question, are you aware
Speaker 1: of whether anyone representing WWE has ever told a talent
Speaker 1: or perspective talent that he or she needed to be bigger?
Speaker 1: And it's like, you know, that's kind of how it
Speaker 1: goes on and on and on. But like he's got
Speaker 1: you know, a pretty perfect out for this, right because
Speaker 1: he's not saying you need to get bigger. It just
Speaker 1: kind of is known to everyone around him that like
Speaker 1: that's what exactly, And.
Speaker 3: If you're any any sort of fan of wrestling or
Speaker 3: have any sort of knowledge of the wrestling industry, it's
Speaker 3: like super well known that Vince and we talked about
Speaker 3: earlier in the series, Vince.
Speaker 2: Loves big guys. He loves the big body dudes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's his thing, that's his thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: From this there is this kind of that this line
Speaker 1: of questions where they bring up that like Vince has
Speaker 1: canceled the WWF random drug testing program in ninety six
Speaker 1: and they ask him why and he answers straight up like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we were competing with Ted Turner and the w CW
Speaker 1: and testing was expensive. He actually at the same time,
Speaker 1: as he says, they dropped the testing for expenses, like
Speaker 1: we eliminated water coolers because of the expense. That really
Speaker 1: pissed people off. It is it is a few distracted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's frustrating how consistently this all works for him.
Speaker 2: But it's got to hand to him. It's plausible.
Speaker 1: It's plausible, and you know, this is all very frustrating.
Speaker 1: There's a lot that's frustrating, but kind of the apex
Speaker 1: of Vince's awfulness and sort of where we're going to
Speaker 1: end with our story today is the tale of Owen Hart.
Speaker 1: Just because I don't know it, it makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of the final thing you need to
Speaker 1: know about Vince to know the kind of man that
Speaker 1: he is. So we have introduced Owen before in that
Speaker 1: great story about them all pissing on Ric Flair's bed.
Speaker 1: His brother Brett, great technical wrestler, and he's Vince's big
Speaker 1: star in like the late nineteen nineties. Right, But as
Speaker 1: we've talked about a few times around like nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven, Ted Turner's WCW suddenly blew up. It
Speaker 1: is briefly the biggest wrestling organization in the country. And
Speaker 1: the way Turner is able to do this is he
Speaker 1: buys up all of Vince's big names, right, like guys
Speaker 1: like Hogan start working for WCW for a while. It
Speaker 1: doesn't last long. This isn't like a good long term strategy,
Speaker 1: but it causes Vince a lot of short term trouble.
Speaker 2: Five yours.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there's a there's a few years that like
Speaker 1: they're really fighting there and one of the people who
Speaker 1: decides to go over to WCW is Brett Hart. So
Speaker 1: Brett won the WWF Championship in August of nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: but he agreed to join WCW starting in December. McMahon
Speaker 1: didn't want him to leave the WWF as like, you know,
Speaker 1: the belt hoolder. But Brett wouldn't lose to Sean Michaels, right,
Speaker 1: He like refused because he and Shawn Michaels, who is
Speaker 1: a great wrestler but a coked out maniac, like they
Speaker 1: hate each other for personal reasons. So Brett's like, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to go out losing my belt to him there.
Speaker 2: And there's a.
Speaker 3: Lot like they there's a lot like Sean like casually
Speaker 3: accused Brett of cheating on his wife with Sonny on
Speaker 3: live television. Yeah, it's like there's like a lot of
Speaker 3: bad love between these dudes. But like from the version
Speaker 3: of I've heard, is that Brett and this is still
Speaker 3: kind of like, dude, you're being a little being a
Speaker 3: little bit of a of a d But like Brett
Speaker 3: didn't want to lose to Sean in Calgary specifically because
Speaker 3: Kyari was like his hometown.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because he's a he's a he's a Canadian wrestler.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want to like lose too Sean in his hometown.
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things there's still enough kind
Speaker 1: of k fame kept that like Vince cam'p force this
Speaker 1: right because like you need you, I mean especially like
Speaker 1: you need the wrestler who's going to lose the belt,
Speaker 1: which is, as we said earlier, this was the standard
Speaker 1: thing if you're aging out or quitting or joining somewhere else,
Speaker 1: like you lose your your championship belt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll argue that it's well, there's there's more room
Speaker 3: to do it here. He certainly he certainly could have
Speaker 3: just done like a special episode where they drop the
Speaker 3: pretense and they just get Brett out there like hey, Brett,
Speaker 3: you've had a great run here, you were a great champion,
Speaker 3: and then Brett leaves the belt and then they're like
Speaker 3: good luck. But like also it's it's less about like
Speaker 3: it's just like the k favor of regular television. Right
Speaker 3: like when like an actor leaves it TV series for
Speaker 3: whatever reason, like they're moving on to movies, they got
Speaker 3: fired or they took a different part or something, they
Speaker 3: write them out, yeah, because they can't just stop and
Speaker 3: say like, well, George Clooney's leaving er. So it's like
Speaker 3: they won't do that on an episode of R. So
Speaker 3: like that's kind of like the level of k fab
Speaker 3: that they're working with here. So yeah, you have to
Speaker 3: write a reason that makes sense within the context of
Speaker 3: the show. It's more just like the general k fabe
Speaker 3: of television. Yeah yeah, yeah, but again, like I said
Speaker 3: it is, there is enough of a blurred line where
Speaker 3: they could have just done a specially because they do
Speaker 3: it sometimes like they do it well Ellen dies, they
Speaker 3: do a special episode, so it's like, yeah, you've just
Speaker 3: done an episode where like well Brett, here's you know anyway.
Speaker 1: But that's not what they do in this situation. McMahon
Speaker 1: instead pitches him an alternative, which is that during a
Speaker 1: match in Calgary, he'll wrestle Michaels and it'll end in
Speaker 1: a disqualification, right, so he won't lose the belt like
Speaker 1: nobody will win. It'll be kind of a match called
Speaker 1: on a technical fuck up, and he'll have another match later,
Speaker 1: not in Calgary, and he'll lose the belt in that, right.
Speaker 1: That's the thing they work out. Pretty normal so far,
Speaker 1: not a weird thing for wrestling. What follows, though, is
Speaker 1: kind of a weird thing. It's coming to be known
Speaker 1: as the Montreal screw Job, and it gets a lot
Speaker 1: of focus from wrestling fans because it is pretty shitty
Speaker 1: behavior on Vince's part.
Speaker 2: But we've also singularly weird too. It's weird. It's a
Speaker 2: weird thing to do.
Speaker 1: I will say it doesn't hit as hard after talking
Speaker 1: about like the child molestation ring and all the deaths
Speaker 1: part right, because this is yeah, the next part of
Speaker 1: this story hits pretty hard. This part of the story
Speaker 1: is unethical, but not like evil, right, Nobody gets murdered
Speaker 1: or molested here, so it may not hit as hard
Speaker 1: as it does to a lot of Is it did
Speaker 1: to people at the time?
Speaker 3: Yeah, real quick, I want to I want to redeem myself.
Speaker 3: I misspoke earlier. It's when I said Brett did want
Speaker 3: to lose in Calgary. Brett did want to lose in Canada. Yeah, yeah, Canada.
Speaker 3: Obviously this happened in Montreal because it's famously called the
Speaker 3: Montreal All Right, sorry.
Speaker 1: About Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll we'll fix it in that
Speaker 1: Today fix It post. So the gist of what happens
Speaker 1: here is that McMahon like they've got this set up
Speaker 1: to where it's going to end in a DQ. Heart's
Speaker 1: not going to lose, but man tells the referee that
Speaker 1: while it's going on, at one point, Heart's gonna get
Speaker 1: like caught in what's called the sharpshooter, which is like
Speaker 1: his trademark submission hold his finisher. Yeah, and he was
Speaker 1: supposed to, as they'd agreed upon before. He was going
Speaker 1: to get out and then the match would continue. But
Speaker 1: McMahon has a ref call the match against him while
Speaker 1: he's in this submission hold and basically calls it that
Speaker 1: he had submitted, right, So Brett has not submitted. But
Speaker 1: like again, as we talked, about the Both the ref
Speaker 1: and the the announcer have a lot of power to
Speaker 1: kind of like set reality for the people in the room,
Speaker 1: so they call the match against him, and it is
Speaker 1: kind of obvious that like something fucked up has gone down.
Speaker 1: It's it doesn't look like an actual submission.
Speaker 3: It looks like a mistake because what happens is is
Speaker 3: Sean puts Brett in the sharpshooter, and what they had
Speaker 3: talked about was Brett was going to reverse it and
Speaker 3: beat Sean that way, or or sorry, they were gonna
Speaker 3: get out of it, or Hunterhurst the Triple H is
Speaker 3: gonna come out and hit him, because Triple H is
Speaker 3: at ringside at that point. But what happens is the
Speaker 3: ref calls it. They ring the bell, and the announcers
Speaker 3: start talking as if Sean just submitted Brett, but in
Speaker 3: the ring, like Brett is confused, like he's in the
Speaker 3: process of reversing the move, and like everyone in the
Speaker 3: crowd is confused. So there's like kind of scattered applause,
Speaker 3: but there's like this really strange response to it. It
Speaker 3: looks like somebody fucked up. Like it's very clear this
Speaker 3: was not supposed to happen when you watch it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, a lot of people get very
Speaker 1: angry as a result of this. Brett most of all,
Speaker 1: he very famously cold cocks Vince in the locker room,
Speaker 1: like hits him, and Vince will claim.
Speaker 2: Spits on him in the show. Show you can see
Speaker 2: it happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty He's a lot of people want to Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, at least that happened Vince. One of the
Speaker 1: funny things about Vince's a guy is that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's very famous that Brett comes in and like punches
Speaker 1: him right in the face in the locker room. After this,
Speaker 1: Vince later claims that, like, well, I made him an
Speaker 1: offer to let him punch me as recompense, Like he
Speaker 1: has to try to take power back, Like he can't
Speaker 1: have just been hit in the face, Like no, no,
Speaker 1: I told him to do it. I told him to
Speaker 1: hit me in the face. We were totally cool about it.
Speaker 1: He just he just punched Vince because he was angry
Speaker 1: and Vince had it coming.
Speaker 3: There's a really well, there's a really good documentary everybody
Speaker 3: should watch called Hitman Heart Wrestling with Shadows that's about
Speaker 3: this specifically. Yeah, there's it's it's it's slanted, obviously, it's
Speaker 3: it's very favorable to Brett, so you you have to
Speaker 3: take some of it with a grain of salt. But
Speaker 3: there's a lot of footage that they pull from the
Speaker 3: night of the show and also from backstage of this
Speaker 3: event happening, where you get to see all this sh happening.
Speaker 1: So yeah, definitely worth checking out. And it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is very a very famous moment in wrestling history.
Speaker 1: It does say a lot about Vince, although honestly, the
Speaker 1: thing that I think says the most about him is
Speaker 1: his need to pretend that he made Brett punch him.
Speaker 3: The hitman heart could knock out a fifty eight year
Speaker 3: old man.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, without being offered it. Yeah right, it's like, broh.
Speaker 2: It's so funny.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this is fucked up, But it has obviously
Speaker 1: nothing compared to the story we're going to tell next,
Speaker 1: which is about what happens as a result of some
Speaker 1: of Vince's actions and the result of some accident of
Speaker 1: a terrible accident to Brett's brother, Owen. So we have
Speaker 1: talked about how Vince and Linda went to war with
Speaker 1: regulators across the country to ensure that wrestling would not
Speaker 1: be held to the higher health and safety standards of
Speaker 1: traditional athletic exhibitions. This effort, which occurred throughout the early
Speaker 1: to mid nineteen nineties, was largely successful, and by the
Speaker 1: end of the nineties, the WOWE was beholden to far
Speaker 1: fewer safety restrictions and much less oversight than they had
Speaker 1: been in the nineteen eighties. The Montreal Screw Screw Job
Speaker 1: is generally seen as like the start to the Attitude era, right,
Speaker 1: but it also marked the beginning of Vince's physical involvement
Speaker 1: in wrestling to an never before seen level. He'd often
Speaker 1: done commentating and been a presence, but from now on
Speaker 1: he's not just like there, he's not just like talking.
Speaker 1: He's not just you know, giving you know, commentary on matches.
Speaker 1: He's an in ring presence. He's like wrestling a lot
Speaker 1: of the time, and he's he's usually he's not like
Speaker 1: he's not able to like put it like putting people
Speaker 1: in holds or fighting people technically, but he's actually pretty
Speaker 1: good at getting the shit beat out of him, which
Speaker 1: is a skill.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: He understands what his role is out there is yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 3: which is kind of funny because as jacked as Vince
Speaker 3: made himself and as much as like behind the scenes,
Speaker 3: he tries to insist that he's the toughest dude ever,
Speaker 3: like we've talked about in throughout the series.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: He basically he gets beat up in the ring the
Speaker 3: same way like Bobby the Brain Heenan or Jimmy Hart
Speaker 3: or any of the other like really annoying guys who
Speaker 3: keep getting one over on the faces and you're so
Speaker 3: mad at them and you just want them to get
Speaker 3: body slammed, and then they finally do it. Like he
Speaker 3: plays in the ring like you know, a guy that's
Speaker 3: gonna get his ass kicked. So he does just take
Speaker 3: bumps in the ring. Really, he never is like a
Speaker 3: dominant presence as a wrestler.
Speaker 2: He just gets beat up and it's very fun with
Speaker 2: the real humility for a terrible yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, it's a rising level of human Like he's like
Speaker 3: he's such a carneye and he's so married to the
Speaker 3: business that he understands the value of being this villainous
Speaker 3: character Vince McMahon the Boss and like denying people the
Speaker 3: satisfaction of seeing him in the ring, and then when
Speaker 3: he finally gets in the ring, he gets his ass
Speaker 3: beat and that's that.
Speaker 2: You know, that's.
Speaker 3: It's super old story in wrestling.
Speaker 2: They do it all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he's he has he has no problem doing that,
Speaker 3: which is fascinating to me.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting because like a big when he first
Speaker 1: starts doing this, like the guy who's like wailing on
Speaker 1: him the most is stone cold Steve Austin, who is
Speaker 1: like his persona is like I'm the rebel, I'm the
Speaker 1: bad boy. You know, I'm able to do the things
Speaker 1: that you could like other people like I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 1: also I'm a common man, right, like I'm sticking it
Speaker 1: up for like the regular Joe's out there, and it's
Speaker 1: very much framed his him beating on Vince is like
Speaker 1: everyone wants to beat up their boss, right, So Vince
Speaker 1: knows what he's doing by like I'm going to be
Speaker 1: this kind of personification of like corporate America, so that
Speaker 1: you know, this regular guy hero can like wail on me.
Speaker 1: But when he's interviewed about it, because like he gets
Speaker 1: interviewed a lot about you know, him showing up and
Speaker 1: being a presence in ring because it's like big news
Speaker 1: and he'll always be like, well, you know, I get
Speaker 1: that this is what people want to see, but like
Speaker 1: I'm really stone cold, right, like I'm the guy in
Speaker 1: real life, I'm stone cold because fighting against authority all
Speaker 1: the time. No, no, no, billionaire you sure you surely
Speaker 1: are not Vince. It's it's interesting.
Speaker 2: I don't know, this.
Speaker 3: Is also interesting to launch, like the biggest storyline of
Speaker 3: your promotion is a feud between your top wrestler and
Speaker 3: the CEO, like management and labor literally fighting. I don't
Speaker 3: think that ever happened before.
Speaker 1: No, And it's we're going to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about like the kind of this kind of concept of
Speaker 1: of what people call neo k fabe. It's it's really
Speaker 1: interesting kind of like what is going on between all
Speaker 1: these the characters and the real people as this sort
Speaker 1: of like the attitude Eric kicks off. And I think
Speaker 1: probably the story that best embodies that is maybe one
Speaker 1: of the most in maybe the most uncomfortable thing that
Speaker 1: ever happened in a Double EF storyline, although that's a
Speaker 1: long list of things. Are you guys aware of the
Speaker 1: story with like the Undertaker and his daughter Stephanie and
Speaker 1: his son Shane, where she.
Speaker 2: Gets kidnapped uh huh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So by this point, Shane is part of the family business,
Speaker 1: and so is Stephanie. Obviously, Linda's helping to run things
Speaker 1: and Shane is. You know, you can see why, like
Speaker 1: doing this all would be really important for Vince because
Speaker 1: he had always craved his biological father's respect and wanted
Speaker 1: to work with him, and Vince Senior had given him
Speaker 1: a job, but they hadn't like worked together really Like
Speaker 1: Vince had his jobs that he was given by his dad,
Speaker 1: but his dad did not treat him as an equal
Speaker 1: in the business, you know, like he sold it to
Speaker 1: him eventionally, but they weren't like collaborators in the way
Speaker 1: that he kind of is with his kids, which you
Speaker 1: could see is like maybe a positive Vince, you know,
Speaker 1: doing for his kids what he always wished his dad
Speaker 1: would have done for him. But it takes us in
Speaker 1: some uncomfortable the thematic directions. So you know, as we said,
Speaker 1: stone Cold is like the hot shit right now, and
Speaker 1: he invents have an on stage rivalry and in mid
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, he cooks up this like very insane
Speaker 1: wrestling storyline to take advantage of the fact that he's
Speaker 1: a stage presence now and that his kids are like
Speaker 1: increasingly showing up in the ring more often. So the
Speaker 1: Undertaker kidnaps his daughter, and through a winding storyline, he
Speaker 1: winds up like he's going to marry her. He's like
Speaker 1: forcibly marrying her against her will, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: all culminates in her tied to an eight foot tall
Speaker 1: crucifix in a Satanic sacrifice slash wedding ceremony with the
Speaker 1: Undertaker and the Ministry of Darkness. Who are We'll say,
Speaker 1: basically his gang. Paul BarreR winds up reading out a
Speaker 1: wedding ceremony script for the Undertaker while Stephanie begs for
Speaker 1: rescue and various low level faces try to stop the Undertaker.
Speaker 2: And I watched this live. It is insane. So Bearer
Speaker 2: turns to the under team.
Speaker 4: Would have completed the rituals, she would have actually become
Speaker 4: a zombie, Like that's the.
Speaker 1: Steaks, Yeah, that is that is he's going to zombiefy
Speaker 1: and marry her against her will. And yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: the Paul Bear asks the Undertaker, would you accept Stephanie
Speaker 1: Mary McMahon, her body, her mind, her soul, and even
Speaker 1: her breath unto yourself and allow her to bear your offspring,
Speaker 1: and the Undertaker says, I do, and then Bearer did
Speaker 1: not have to say that, didn't have to include that line. Weird, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Bear says, by the power invested in me by the
Speaker 1: Lord of Darkness, I know, pronounce you was the unholy
Speaker 1: union of Darkness. You may now kiss your bride. And
Speaker 1: that's when Stone Cold, Steve Austin comes in and like beats,
Speaker 1: you know, he wails on everybody, and he saves Stephanie
Speaker 1: before she can you know, be presumably sexually assaulted, because
Speaker 1: that's the stakes that Vince is set up here in
Speaker 1: the storyline. Now, that's unsettling, right. The next night, she
Speaker 1: and Vincent stone Cold hold a little ceremony on the
Speaker 1: stage for a pilot for SmackDown, which was about to
Speaker 1: air on the UPN network. Stephanie thanked Austin and expressed
Speaker 1: I have never felt so powerless and violated in all
Speaker 1: my life. The Undertaker he kept touching me and whispering
Speaker 1: in my ears that I was his and there was
Speaker 1: nothing that I could do about it. She is standing
Speaker 1: next to her dad saying this, like, tell it weird,
Speaker 1: such a it's such a weird again, everyone's a consenting
Speaker 1: adult here, so we're not saying, like what he's doing
Speaker 1: here is evil. It's just deeply bizarre, weird. It's so
Speaker 1: weird TV show. Yeah, there were so many ways. There
Speaker 1: are so many ways to have your daughter, like, you know,
Speaker 1: the the white girl who's being threatened by a bad
Speaker 1: guy without it being this.
Speaker 2: You did well out there tonight, honey, beautiful daughter. You
Speaker 2: made daddy so much money. So rock hard, rock hard, Sweetheart,
Speaker 2: It's dark.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are uncomfortable with this storyline, and
Speaker 1: one person who is uncomfortable with this storyline is Owen Heart. Now,
Speaker 1: his brother's with the WCW right now, but Owen has
Speaker 1: been wrestling with the WWF still and he's kind of
Speaker 1: been in the process of considering moving away from wrestling.
Speaker 1: You know, he's, for one thing, he just doesn't fit
Speaker 1: in in the attitude era. You know, he's a wrestler
Speaker 1: from an older era. He feels uncomfortable with the storylines.
Speaker 1: He thinks it's kind of trashy. He has a wife
Speaker 1: and two kids, and he's also like he's watching what's
Speaker 1: starting to happen to the guys who had been the
Speaker 1: first generation of steroids wrestlers. He's seeing how many of
Speaker 1: them are dropping early, and he's like, maybe I should
Speaker 1: just like hang out with my family, you know, that
Speaker 1: might be the responsible thing to do. So while he's
Speaker 1: sort of working through his feelings on this, Vince decides
Speaker 1: to bring back a side character Owen had played in
Speaker 1: the late eighties, the Blue Blazer. This was an example
Speaker 1: of what Josie Riiseman calls neokfabe, a term that describes
Speaker 1: the nebulous relationship with the truth in modern wrestling, now
Speaker 1: that it's admitted, at least on some level, that it's
Speaker 1: not a real competition. Kfabe is a lie meant to
Speaker 1: sort of hide the fact that wrestling was not a
Speaker 1: real sports competition, right. Neokfabe is what grows up in
Speaker 1: its place, And neokfabe is when the fakery is in
Speaker 1: the open and admitted, but it exists to reveal deeper truths.
Speaker 1: And like a big part of the engagement for the
Speaker 1: audience is sort of working out what's being said behind
Speaker 1: the scenes with what's happening on screen, right, And in
Speaker 1: this case, you can see what's like, what's happening for
Speaker 1: real is that McMahon knows that Owen Hart isn't happy
Speaker 1: with the direction the WWF is going on, and he's
Speaker 1: considering making a change in his life. McMahon sets up
Speaker 1: the Blue Blazer as a morally upright superhero who's like
Speaker 1: launching a moral crusade against degeneracy within the WWF. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, Owen's character on screen displaying a heightened
Speaker 1: and satiric version of the real discuss that Owen felt
Speaker 1: for Vince's storylines, which is, like, that's kind of a
Speaker 1: lot going on.
Speaker 2: Actually it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, they're also hiding him and like Owen at
Speaker 3: this time is one of the best technical wrestlers that
Speaker 3: he's ever been in the business, and he's one of
Speaker 3: those dudes, like he's incredibly talented, he's very physical, he's
Speaker 3: very athletic, he's very charismatic. But they just never gave
Speaker 3: him anything to do. Yeah, they couldn't figure They had
Speaker 3: an interesting storyline at one point. Owen was a bad
Speaker 3: guy for a long time because they created a younger
Speaker 3: brother storyline for him, for him to feud with Brett.
Speaker 3: But now that Brett's gone, they don't have that and
Speaker 3: they're sort of about this, Well, we don't know what
Speaker 3: to do with you, which is so criminal for an
Speaker 3: industry like this, where it's like, yeah, have this person
Speaker 3: who is fantastically talented in every aspect of the business,
Speaker 3: and like, well, we don't know what to do with
Speaker 3: you because you're not a big guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really sad where it goes, and like it's
Speaker 1: interesting the way in which sort of yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot that's kind of fascinating here.
Speaker 4: Bob never said, hey, you have to be bigger and
Speaker 4: have giant muscles. But also there's Owen Hart, the best
Speaker 4: guy we have, and I will not put him on
Speaker 4: TV for un said reasons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Owen is you know, a lot kind of
Speaker 1: gets put on Owen being unsettled with this weirdly sexual
Speaker 1: storyline involving Stephanie. But that's not the only reason why
Speaker 1: he's disgusted with Vince in the WWF in this period,
Speaker 1: one of the guys who repeatedly failed Vince's nonsense drug
Speaker 1: tests without getting fired again. He's questioned by Congress as
Speaker 1: to like whether or not there were consequences for failing
Speaker 1: a drug test, while a dude who repeatedly failed his
Speaker 1: drug test was a guy named Brian Pillman. Brian was
Speaker 1: addicted to cocaine. He was also constantly injecting steroids. He
Speaker 1: took painkillers, you know, to deal with that. He's on
Speaker 1: everything a wrestler is normally on. Right on October fifth, nine,
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety seven, he missed work because he had died
Speaker 1: of heart failure in a Minnesota hotel room the night before.
Speaker 1: Everyone found out right before the show was set to start.
Speaker 1: But Vince plowed forward anyway, even though, like a lot
Speaker 1: of people are like, well, we just found out our
Speaker 1: friend and colleague is dead. I don't know, maybe this
Speaker 1: isn't the right thing to do, but obviously, like it
Speaker 1: is a business, you know, Vince decides to go ahead
Speaker 1: with things. He announces Brian's death on air, which you know,
Speaker 1: you can could potentially be a responsible thing to do,
Speaker 1: but he does it, and like he references it almost
Speaker 1: as like a TV teaser ad while trying to softly
Speaker 1: exonerate himself.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: Authorities expect no foul play was involved in terms of
Speaker 1: the initial inspection. Nonetheless, apparently they're concerned about the possibility
Speaker 1: of a drug overdose, be it prescription or recreational. Of course,
Speaker 1: this is a problem in all sport and forms. Of Entertainment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's not great. Well I didn't do it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well the next thing he does, yeah, oh he
Speaker 3: both Pilman's widow on television and shit does point blame
Speaker 3: if Brian had.
Speaker 2: A drug addiction? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. That happens the next night on Friday Night Raw,
Speaker 1: there is a tribute to Pilman convinced a yeah from
Speaker 1: Monday Night Raw. Sorry I wrote Friday.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: This is this is why we have the experts in here.
Speaker 1: So he has he has her on Raw, and he like,
Speaker 1: he advertises that she's going to be on Raw.
Speaker 3: Right, He like they have told her that they wouldn't
Speaker 3: ask her any questions like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So when you watch the footage of the interview and
Speaker 3: he asked her that question, you see her react like
Speaker 3: she has a physical reaction in her face to the question.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like she's been punched. And we're not going
Speaker 1: to play that because I don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: But I am going to read a depiction of what
Speaker 1: happens by from sex, Livees and Headlocks so that people
Speaker 1: can kind of hear how these questions go. To make
Speaker 1: sure no one missed the exclusive. He hyped it up
Speaker 1: before every commercial break, sending his viewers to the pillman's
Speaker 1: empty family room, where it was announced Melanie would soon appear.
Speaker 1: He opened the interview in a stilted tone that chafed
Speaker 1: against the confessional nature of the moment. Melanie, I'm sure
Speaker 1: you distraught, shocked, dismayed over this, and we thank you
Speaker 1: very much for joining us tonight. There's always a great
Speaker 1: deal of speculation when a thirty five year old man
Speaker 1: who's in a competitive condition passes away. Can you please
Speaker 1: tell us what you've been told about Brian's death? And
Speaker 1: she answers. Apparently there was a problem with his heart.
Speaker 1: Apparently his heart had been under a lot of stress.
Speaker 1: There's some speculation last night that Brian, because of his injuries,
Speaker 1: had to take a great deal of medicine, Vince continued,
Speaker 1: But there was some speculation that he may have taken
Speaker 1: too much. Melanie expected this question, but the speed at
Speaker 1: which Vince leapt to it surprised her. Her face curled
Speaker 1: up in a look that was more disgusted than despair,
Speaker 1: seeing that he backed off. Is there anything you want
Speaker 1: to say to aspiring athletes who get hurt and may
Speaker 1: have to resort to prescribed medication, pain pills. I can't
Speaker 1: really comment, she replied. My husband not only was he
Speaker 1: an athlete, but he was involved in a car accident
Speaker 1: and had extensive injuries from that, and it was hard
Speaker 1: on him. Then looking at the camera, or perhaps past it,
Speaker 1: she added, I just want everyone to know that it's
Speaker 1: a wake up call for some of you. It could
Speaker 1: be your husband, or it could be you, and you
Speaker 1: don't want to believe behind a bunch of orphans like
Speaker 1: my husband did. How are the children taking the news,
Speaker 1: Vince Pride a bit too eagerly decidestep the Tuesday Morning critics,
Speaker 1: who'd call the whole Phara exploitative. Little Brian doesn't understand
Speaker 1: why Daddy's not coming home, she said, But Brittany, she
Speaker 1: screamed for fifteen minutes. Melanie looks suddenly exhausted, as if
Speaker 1: whatever energy she'd had three questions ago is completely gone.
Speaker 1: But the impulse to go for one last piece of
Speaker 1: emotional punctuation proved too great for Vince to resist. Have
Speaker 1: you had a chance to think about what you, as
Speaker 1: a single parent, will do to support five children?
Speaker 2: He asked? Oh my god, yeah, uh you like older
Speaker 2: now they're single, you like older fellas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they want a job, Vince McMahon, everybody.
Speaker 3: So it's I mean, that's that she mentioned a car
Speaker 3: accident that needs to I figure, I feel like that
Speaker 3: needs to be like addressed. Brent Tullen was a hideous
Speaker 3: car accident where his entire face needed to be reconstructed Jesus,
Speaker 3: and he damn near lost his foot. Yeah, so, like
Speaker 3: he was not in any and he had this accident
Speaker 3: right after he signed with WWE, so he felt personal
Speaker 3: pressure to continue to try and perform at the level
Speaker 3: that he had before this car accident, which is not possible.
Speaker 3: So he was pumping all sorts of painkillers, steroids, et
Speaker 3: cetera into himself. He would like literally get up from
Speaker 3: a wheelchair to go out and perform and then get
Speaker 3: off stage and go back into his wheelchair like he
Speaker 3: was fucked uh at this point. Yeah, it's it's pretty hideous.
Speaker 3: And like so we talked about, you know, a couple
Speaker 3: episodes ago Andre and how like when he ends his
Speaker 3: career kind of there's this thing Vince makes him into
Speaker 3: a heel. There's some people who will say that like
Speaker 3: that really hurt him. It's one of those things where
Speaker 3: like that's the I took that from that documentary on
Speaker 3: on Andre and from some stuff that some of his
Speaker 3: friends said.
Speaker 1: But it's also like what Vince says, like Vince's attitude
Speaker 1: is that Andre hated him at the end because of
Speaker 1: what Vince had done to him. Why I brought that
Speaker 1: up right before telling the story of Rita Chatterton is
Speaker 1: that there's another story as to why Andre didn't like
Speaker 1: Vince anymore, and it's that his friend confided in him
Speaker 1: that that Vince raped her. Right, And it's the same
Speaker 1: thing with Owen, where like people will be like Owen
Speaker 1: was really kind of put off and disgusted by this
Speaker 1: gross storyline that Vince has announced, and maybe that had
Speaker 1: a role, but like Owen also sees all this happen
Speaker 1: with Melanie and with his with with Pillman's family and
Speaker 1: is disgusted by that because of he's a human being.
Speaker 1: You no, like it's not by all accounts, he was
Speaker 1: a really good dude. Yeah, he was a really good dude.
Speaker 1: And he's horrified by this. Both Heart boys are horrified
Speaker 1: by this. I mean, Brett's already out, but they are
Speaker 1: disgusted by this. And this has a lot of an
Speaker 1: impact on, like why he's so unhappy at the time.
Speaker 1: So when he donned his costume as the Blue Blazer
Speaker 1: and would declare in his like little speeches and stuff
Speaker 1: that the WWF was hopelessly sick and cruel, it didn't
Speaker 1: take a lot of acting, right, And when he gave
Speaker 1: stage speeches about cleaning up the WWF, it was like,
Speaker 1: you know it, There's there's kind of more going on there,
Speaker 1: like than just you know, someone being handed as script.
Speaker 1: So the storyline with Vince's kids goes on, Shane is
Speaker 1: revealed to have secretly manipulated the Undertaker into kidnapping and
Speaker 1: trying to rape his sister. So that's like the evolution
Speaker 1: is that, like Shane comes on and like, haha, it
Speaker 1: was him that was behind it the whole time. In
Speaker 1: One Memorable Night, Linda McMahon shows up on stage where
Speaker 1: Shane gleefully admits to picking out the dress his sister
Speaker 1: had been tied up in on stage. Now, throughout this
Speaker 1: plot line, Vince had scattered in references to a higher
Speaker 1: power who the Undertaker and Shane were both taking orders from,
Speaker 1: but like in a very lost like situation, they didn't
Speaker 1: know who that was, right that wasn't planned out ahead
Speaker 1: of time. You know, they were doing a mystery box
Speaker 1: kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Oh god if the case.
Speaker 1: No. As the storyline plotted on, they eventually decided that
Speaker 1: the higher power had to be Vince, who had manipulated
Speaker 1: his son into having a maniac kidnap his daughter to
Speaker 1: marry and force himself on her. And again, this is
Speaker 1: both insane, but it's also perfect like Neo KFE because
Speaker 1: Vince is actually the one in charge directing his son
Speaker 1: to pretend to orchestrate the kidnapping and sexual like that
Speaker 1: is what was happening. He is in fact the higher
Speaker 1: power behind all this. It's so wild. So this culminates
Speaker 1: in a big drama where Shane, who pretend owned half
Speaker 1: the WWF, forced his father to fight one of the
Speaker 1: wrestlers on his team, which they're like, oh, it's a
Speaker 1: death sentence for a man his age. Vince gets fake
Speaker 1: beaten with an inch within an inch of his life,
Speaker 1: and to sell it, he hires an ambulance and e
Speaker 1: mts to pretend to take him to the hospital right like,
Speaker 1: they take him out on a stretcher. They like cut
Speaker 1: to canned footage of him in the ambulance but they're
Speaker 1: real e mts and a real ambulance, which is interesting
Speaker 1: to me. Maybe that's just the cheapest way to actually
Speaker 1: do it.
Speaker 4: I don't know, yeah yet attack and got the guys there.
Speaker 2: There are ambulance services for hire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not surprising that that might be
Speaker 1: just like the most efficient way to do it. Later
Speaker 1: that night, there's a pay per view match, which is
Speaker 1: a separate endeavor, but it led it's led into by
Speaker 1: the show where Vince gets beat up on Shane's orders
Speaker 1: and taken away in the ambulance, and then you have
Speaker 1: like the match that comes on afterwards. And the opening
Speaker 1: of this pay per view match was supposed to be
Speaker 1: owen Hart as the Blue Blazer flying down from the
Speaker 1: rafters in a harness and landing in the ring where
Speaker 1: he would then do battle with another wrestler. Now there
Speaker 1: had been opening like a wrestler like fly on to
Speaker 1: stage is a thing that had happened before. It was
Speaker 1: more common earlier in the WWF history when there were
Speaker 1: more safety standards. It's obviously it's kind of a dangerous stunt.
Speaker 1: You know, you've got a guy flying through the air.
Speaker 1: That's an extra risk in ring master Riisman writes, quote,
Speaker 1: Vince had hired a new desceinder technician who hadn't worked
Speaker 1: with the WWF before and who had significantly less experience
Speaker 1: with the stunt than the technician who'd overseen similar interests
Speaker 1: in interests in the past. Now, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be labor as this. The stunt goes badly. A cable
Speaker 1: detaches from the harness. Owen fell more than seventy feet,
Speaker 1: hitting the top rope with his chest and he receives
Speaker 1: immediately a fatal injury. Right, like, this is not survivable
Speaker 1: at any point.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 1: He loses constant consciousness pretty much instantly, and he's not
Speaker 1: declared dead on the scene, but he basically dies in
Speaker 1: front of a stadium of fans who are all cheering
Speaker 1: because they don't know that this isn't part of the
Speaker 1: show immediately, especially the people who are further away. I
Speaker 1: think there's some folks who are closer who like realize
Speaker 1: he came in way too hot. But you know these
Speaker 1: are big stadiums, right, Yeah. They cut the feed almost immediately.
Speaker 2: I was also watching this live. Yeah, oh god, did
Speaker 2: you know what had happened?
Speaker 3: Yep, because they came on Yeah, okay, after they faded out.
Speaker 3: They there's some crowdshots and they come on after a
Speaker 3: bit and it's Jr. And Lawler and they tell us, look,
Speaker 3: go and fell and they look shricken. They're both pale. Yeah,
Speaker 3: look they look like they just watched a man die.
Speaker 2: Because they did. Yeah, because they did. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty bleak. So everyone scrambles. They can't have
Speaker 1: dead air, right, Like, that's the first rule of television.
Speaker 1: And I think it's also just like, if you're a
Speaker 1: professional like that in this situation that you have no
Speaker 1: idea how to handle happens, you just kind of naturally
Speaker 1: gonna like fill the air.
Speaker 2: So they do.
Speaker 1: They spend a lot of time assuring the audience and
Speaker 1: viewers that this is a real situation. The e mts
Speaker 1: and the ambulance that Vince had brought on as a
Speaker 1: set piece for like the previous program, are brought in
Speaker 1: to remove Owen, who is again beyond the saving. At
Speaker 1: this point, Vince has a choice either in the show
Speaker 1: or go on. You know, I think there's a good
Speaker 1: argument to me mad that, like, if a guy dies
Speaker 1: before a show, you've got everyone there, you know, you
Speaker 1: have a business relying on those people's jobs relying on this.
Speaker 2: Maybe do bad things for money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's told us that, Yeah, yeah, you can do it.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: It seems it seems even worse to like keep the
Speaker 1: show going at this point, but they do. Vince tells
Speaker 1: everyone that the show that Owen's status is undetermined, which
Speaker 1: is technically true but not really true. And to make
Speaker 1: matters even worse, the guy who is going to call
Speaker 1: Owen's widow about what's happened is Vince McMahon, Like, while
Speaker 1: the show is going on, he calls her. Martha Hart
Speaker 1: later says, quote, they scooped him out like a piece
Speaker 1: of garbage, and they paraded wrestlers out to wrestle in
Speaker 1: a ring that had Owen's blood, where the boards were
Speaker 1: broken from Owen's fall and where guys could feel the
Speaker 1: dip in the ring from where he fell.
Speaker 2: His blood is literally in the ring for the entire
Speaker 2: pay per view.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which I mean, Yeah, it's fucked up. It's sucked,
Speaker 1: it's beyond fucked Yeah, it's insane. It's like, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty bad. At eight forty PMCST, Events told
Speaker 1: the audience, many of whom still thought this was a
Speaker 1: bit that Owen had because again, while they're saying this
Speaker 1: is really serious, that doesn't necessarily mean it is. And
Speaker 1: also most of the audience has been drinking, so their
Speaker 1: ability to know like what's real and not maybe is
Speaker 1: slightly declined. But at eight forty PMCST, Events tells the
Speaker 1: audience that Owen Hart has perished from his injuries. This
Speaker 1: is followed by an in character scene like and this
Speaker 1: is the part that's weirdest to me, is like after
Speaker 1: he says that, like Owen's dead, they continue like playing
Speaker 1: a clip from that storyline scene where Vince returns from
Speaker 1: the hospital that he was supposed to have been at,
Speaker 1: like that's how shit ends that night, with like a
Speaker 1: clip of him getting Vince who has fake gone to
Speaker 1: the hospital, returning from the hospital with like I think
Speaker 1: a busted ankle or something. It's a weird choice. And
Speaker 1: after this bit of k fabe, Vince has to go
Speaker 1: speak at a very real news conference where a reporter
Speaker 1: repeatedly asks him like very important question is wrong with
Speaker 1: what the fuck is wrong with you? And like stuff
Speaker 1: about safety precautions that had been missing. Why wasn't there
Speaker 1: a backup line protecting Owen and Vince replies, I'm not
Speaker 1: an expert in rigging.
Speaker 2: I guess you are. Oh, don't be antagonist.
Speaker 3: Don't be antagonistic at the press conference of arrestler that
Speaker 3: just died in the ring because of your negligence, Vince.
Speaker 1: I'm not an expert in rigging either, but like, I know,
Speaker 1: you need a backup line when a man is sailing
Speaker 1: down from the roof.
Speaker 2: Yeah, somebody died. Something went wrong with the rigging.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's like yeah, it's like if someone had
Speaker 1: like gone up when when fucking that shooting happened on
Speaker 1: the set of Dust and been like, why was a
Speaker 1: real gun in the bullet and someone had been like, oh,
Speaker 1: I guess you're a gun expert. Well no, but I
Speaker 1: know that you're not supposed to have loaded guns in
Speaker 1: this on set.
Speaker 4: It really demonstrates the in curiosity of McMahon too, that
Speaker 4: he didn't go straight up to the guy in charge
Speaker 4: of making sure he didn't die and say, what the
Speaker 4: fuck happened?
Speaker 3: Tell me exactly, Vince had Vince had hours to figure
Speaker 3: out what went wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the focus is on keeping the show going,
Speaker 1: as opposed to like, I'm I'm you want to be
Speaker 1: sitting down in front of that guy. The moment you
Speaker 1: can be like, what the fuck happened?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Interestingly, like what happened? As I remember, it's very similar
Speaker 3: to what happened with Brandon Lee on the Crow, which
Speaker 3: is they hired local, non union guys to do the
Speaker 3: work for a lot less money, and they used a
Speaker 3: vastly inferior single clip that's meant to hold like a
Speaker 3: sale I think it's not meant to hold the weight
Speaker 3: of a man. And that's the clip that they put
Speaker 3: on because they wanted Owen to be able to quickly
Speaker 3: release beacause at a previous performance where he decided from
Speaker 3: the ceiling, he was kind of stuck in his harness
Speaker 3: for a little bit trying to get it off, and
Speaker 3: it looked silly on television, So like, well, we need
Speaker 3: to be able to have him quickly drop out of it,
Speaker 3: but we're sacrificing a great deal of his safety in
Speaker 3: order to get that. Yeah, that's what we're wrong. Like,
Speaker 3: you can watch the Dark Side of the Ring episode
Speaker 3: about Owen's accident, and when they show you the clip,
Speaker 3: like you literally gasp, Yeah, Like it looks like it
Speaker 3: looks like a keychain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's not like it's it's like something you
Speaker 1: would put your keys on, not something you would trust
Speaker 1: a man's life to. So the reporter continues to press Vince,
Speaker 1: saying like it doesn't look like there were any safety
Speaker 1: precautions at all, and Vince lashes out at her. I
Speaker 1: resent your tone, lady. Okay, this is a tragic accident.
Speaker 1: Don't try and put yourself on the spotlight here, Okay,
Speaker 1: just personally, piece of shit. So for a few days,
Speaker 1: Vince keeps his head down. He cancels several consecutive events
Speaker 1: in Canada. He tries to work quietly. In Connecticut, they
Speaker 1: hold an event like a memorial kind of service for
Speaker 1: for Owen, like in sort of character, I guess you'd say,
Speaker 1: like on on, you know, the WWF. And then on
Speaker 1: May thirty first, he returns to Canada for Owen's funeral.
Speaker 1: Because he's a piece of shit, he brings cameras with him,
Speaker 1: who film inside the Heart Family compound without Martha's permission
Speaker 1: and air the footage on raw.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Martha does sue and settles with Vince and the WWF
Speaker 1: for eighteen million. Oh. He goes, yeah, yeah, that's at
Speaker 1: least something.
Speaker 3: I mean they start a charity, yeah, in his name,
Speaker 3: and also like there's a there's like a weird this
Speaker 3: is the whole thing. There's like a weird division between
Speaker 3: Owen's immediate family like his wife and children, and then
Speaker 3: like the greater Heart family who don't want to piss
Speaker 3: off Vince. Yeah, so like they didn't really support her
Speaker 3: during this time. And then yeah and like afterwards she
Speaker 3: like she she and her children refuse to allow Vince
Speaker 3: to induct Owen into the WWE Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really fucked up and ugly, Like Brett winds
Speaker 1: up wrestling again for Vince later, and like, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of like family conflict here caused by this.
Speaker 1: But obviously it makes sense to me why Martha does
Speaker 1: everything that she does. Like, uh, this is like the
Speaker 1: the amount of rage that you must have in this
Speaker 1: situation is like beyond measure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh so, yep, there's a lot more to be said
Speaker 1: about Vince McMahon. But and you know, we've spent so
Speaker 1: much time, we have said so much about him. This
Speaker 1: is kind of this is where we're like, this is
Speaker 1: not the day was gonna be the Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: this is just kind of where where we are. There's
Speaker 1: more that happens in the twenty first century. But like
Speaker 1: you know enough now to know why people say Vince
Speaker 1: McMahon is a bad person.
Speaker 4: I can't believe we did thirty two hours in Vince
Speaker 4: McMahon and never got to the Kiss My Ass Club.
Speaker 1: No, I'm saying we didn't get to him blowing out
Speaker 1: his quads just as a brief one feel like blows
Speaker 1: both of his quads out walking on stage in two
Speaker 1: thousand and five, and it's it's very much if I'm
Speaker 1: not mistaken, it's it's Batista, and I forget who the
Speaker 1: other guy is. But like they fuck up a move
Speaker 1: and they both fall out of the ring at the
Speaker 1: same time, which like is a DQ. So like it's
Speaker 1: not supposed to end in a DQ, but it does
Speaker 1: because like they just kind of botch a move. It happens,
Speaker 1: and Vince like gets angry and comes out on stage
Speaker 1: and like is doing his baby Hue walk just kind
Speaker 1: of blows his squads. Well part it's part of the show. Like,
Speaker 1: it's not that he's angry.
Speaker 3: They decide to send Vince out to play angry to
Speaker 3: yeah the match continue, Yeah, but he tries to slide
Speaker 3: into the into the ring and both of his quads explode.
Speaker 3: I also saw this slide. Both of his quawds explode.
Speaker 3: But they don't stop the scene, Robert. They continue to
Speaker 3: do the scene. Vince can't stand, so they continue to
Speaker 3: do the scene with Vince.
Speaker 2: Just sitting down in the ring.
Speaker 3: That's so funny, everybody else the funniest looking history repeated
Speaker 3: itself recently as I Understanding a pay per view earlier
Speaker 3: this year, Shane McMahon did.
Speaker 2: The exact bad quads that family quad genetic quads out.
Speaker 2: It's it's so funny. So I don't know.
Speaker 1: That's the the Vince McMahon story. He's still running the WWF.
Speaker 1: He was out for a little while, but now he's
Speaker 1: back in. Baby, he's back in with like a real
Speaker 1: thin mustache. Yeah, he's kind of m to grow after
Speaker 1: all of this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a really really, really really horrifying mustache.
Speaker 2: It really is. It tells the story that we took
Speaker 2: so many hours to tell.
Speaker 3: It looks like he knew these episodes were going to
Speaker 3: come out and he was like, well, I might as
Speaker 3: well grow this mustache.
Speaker 4: Yes, it feels like like a court mandated mustache. Like,
Speaker 4: all right, well, let's your stay out of jail, Vince,
Speaker 4: but you have to wear this mustache.
Speaker 3: The conditions of his parole. Part of it was wearing
Speaker 3: this pencil thin predator's mustache.
Speaker 2: It's his way of going do to door and killing everyone.
Speaker 3: Looking like Clark Gable. Spending too long at a high school,
Speaker 3: he does look like a version of Clark Gable.
Speaker 2: That.
Speaker 1: Yeah, instead of going to World War Two, went to
Speaker 1: I don't know whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I went to a high school to trowl Roberts.
Speaker 1: Well, we got a good wrestling stories that I messed here, gang.
Speaker 3: No, I think we got them all. God, I mean
Speaker 3: you covered a lot of them. I mean there's I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess what I'd like to leave you all
Speaker 1: with is the image of Vince McMahon sitting on the
Speaker 1: floor because he's blown both of his squads up.
Speaker 2: You know that that still trying to arouchy and authoritative.
Speaker 3: Yep, they do the whole scene. They do the whole
Speaker 3: bit with him just sitting down in the ring. It's
Speaker 3: the funniest thing I've ever seen on the wrestling ah man,
Speaker 3: and I felt bad for him at the time. But
Speaker 3: now after you know, enduring all these episodes, I understand
Speaker 3: that I shouldn't have and now I feel better about it.
Speaker 3: So just look the clip up and laugh at him
Speaker 3: because he deserves it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, got anything to plug? Oh Tom, please go first?
Speaker 2: Meet to go first? Oh, I would love it if
Speaker 2: you did.
Speaker 3: Oh man, Well, I have a podcast in Streaming Network
Speaker 3: with our our mutual friend David Bell, also from Cracked.
Speaker 3: Game for the Unemployed. Head over to our patreon patreon
Speaker 3: dot com slash Game for Unemployed. We have all sorts
Speaker 3: of different tiers you can join at just to get
Speaker 3: exclusive podcasts. You can commission your own podcasts. We do
Speaker 3: movie nights every week with our patrons, and you can
Speaker 3: also listen to we have Most of our shows are
Speaker 3: totally free to listen to. You can find them on
Speaker 3: any place you listen to podcasts. So do that thing,
Speaker 3: and that's all I've got. Yeah, great plug.
Speaker 4: Three years ago I started one nine hundred hot Dog
Speaker 4: with the great Robert Brockway and we are going strong.
Speaker 4: Call one nine hundred hot Dog for fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, check out one nine hundred hot Dog, check out
Speaker 1: Gamefully Unemployed. Both of them are the antidote for the
Speaker 1: sadness that I have inflicted on you with my cruel,
Speaker 1: cruel cruel.
Speaker 5: Show speak anyway, speaking, I was gonna say, Robert, speaking
Speaker 5: of things that are cool, do you know what's cool
Speaker 5: but also cooler?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, you can get ad free stuff cooler.
Speaker 2: Zune Apple podcasts. That's the plug. Nobody plugs like you too.
Speaker 2: You're gonna You're gonna have to tattoo this on his hand, Sophie.
Speaker 5: I mean that would be really funny. I would enjoy
Speaker 5: that activity. My handwriting is horrendous.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I was just gonna say, I love your show, Robert,
Speaker 3: but it does make me sad every time I listen
Speaker 3: to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what we go for it is sorrow, all right,
Speaker 2: everybody