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
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Speaker 1: So please go fund me bTB Fundraiser for Portland Diaper Bank.
Speaker 1: Help us raise the money that these people need to
Speaker 1: get diapers to folks who need them desperately. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: it's another episode of us talking about Vince fucking McMahon
Speaker 1: and also wrestling history because they're kind of inextricable. And
Speaker 1: you know who else is inextricable. My guests on this episode,
Speaker 1: Tom Ryman and Sean Riley aka Sean Baby, how are
Speaker 1: you both doing today?
Speaker 2: So ready for some Vince? Yeah? That is so true.
Speaker 2: I cannot be extracted. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: You both had blood tests recently then showed blood infection.
Speaker 1: Yeah you are, you are deficient in vitamin v OH
Speaker 1: for Vince. Yeah, anyway, here we go. So as Vince
Speaker 1: Junior remade wrestling in his own image, he knew that
Speaker 1: he was going to remake the popular image of wrestlers.
Speaker 1: His dad's most recent big star, the man who had
Speaker 1: sold out matches and ignited imaginations throughout the seventies, was
Speaker 1: one of the all time coolest people to ever live
Speaker 1: on this planet. Andre the fucking Giant.
Speaker 2: And I thought you were gonna say, Brudus the barber beefcake.
Speaker 1: No, non fucking Andre man, we we are. I am
Speaker 1: so excited.
Speaker 3: I am so excited to talk about Andre the Giant.
Speaker 1: Up one or two so. Born Andre Rene Russamov in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty six, Andre had gigantism caused by too many
Speaker 1: growth hormones, which kind of as a young kid, you know,
Speaker 1: he's a normal size, but like once he kind of
Speaker 1: hits you know, gets into his late teens, I think
Speaker 1: he starts to grow and just never stops like he's
Speaker 1: growing until the day he dies. It's part of why
Speaker 1: he dies. Right, because his organs can't really keep up
Speaker 1: with how.
Speaker 2: Big he is.
Speaker 1: He winds up kind of at his height, being about
Speaker 1: seven foot four normal landing most of his wrestling career
Speaker 1: is about four hundred and fifty pounds kind of by
Speaker 1: the end, he's like five twenty. He's he's a very
Speaker 1: large man. He is. He is a massive dude.
Speaker 2: I think he listened him at seven hundred on some announcement.
Speaker 1: Ye, yeah, it look it's credible. If you saw Andre
Speaker 1: the Giant, someone said that man weighs seven hundred pounds.
Speaker 1: You go, yeah, man, I don't know.
Speaker 4: Sure, yeah, they always they always increase those numbers. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but he is massive. Sure yeah, yeah, you would believe you.
Speaker 4: I believed that he was seven out of hell. Sure, yes,
Speaker 4: it scans now. Andre is a very bright guy. He's
Speaker 4: a really smart kid. He's very good at math. It's
Speaker 4: interesting he's when he's in kind of primary school, he
Speaker 4: does really well in math, and some of the like
Speaker 4: adults around him are kind of surprised when he doesn't
Speaker 4: continue his education at fourteen. But he's like, I'm not
Speaker 4: supposed to be a smart person. I'm just gonna like
Speaker 4: work on a farm, you know. It was kind of
Speaker 4: noted by people around him at the time that he
Speaker 4: very easily did the work of four men. And one
Speaker 4: thing you have to know when you look at Andre,
Speaker 4: his most famous kind of cultural touchstone is obviously the
Speaker 4: movie Princess Bride, that is near the end of his life.
Speaker 4: He is not in great health in that movie, kind
Speaker 4: of very famously in that scene when Princess Buttercup like
Speaker 4: leaps into his arms, they actually had to have her
Speaker 4: like on wrote strings or something so that the weight
Speaker 4: was not put on his back because he was in
Speaker 4: he was in such bad shape. You know, he was
Speaker 4: sick at that point in his life. At the height,
Speaker 4: like when he is a.
Speaker 1: Young man in his you know, eighteen, you know, early
Speaker 1: twenties and stuff, Andre is jacked and not just a
Speaker 1: huge man. Like he's a big guy, you know, in
Speaker 1: the Andre most people know if you watch videos of
Speaker 1: young Andre, he is both swoll and seven foot four.
Speaker 1: Some of the shit some people will write that like
Speaker 1: he was not a great technical wrestler. He was just
Speaker 1: good at kind of presenting himself and he was entertaining.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's fair. I've watched videos of him
Speaker 1: wrestling as a young man, and he can do shit.
Speaker 1: He's picking up like two hundred and fifty pound dudes
Speaker 1: and throwing them one handed across the fucking ring. He
Speaker 1: is deeping and landing onto people with his entire body
Speaker 1: weight and not killing them. That's a that's a technical skill, right,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a tech in boss. Yeah he is.
Speaker 2: And he's mesmerizing like young andres.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah, amazing.
Speaker 2: Anyone's saying he wasn't a good wrestlers.
Speaker 5: No, no, wrong, he's looking incredible. Yeah they only saw
Speaker 5: eighties Andre.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you say that, even then, he was pretty meschive.
Speaker 1: There's some pretty early eighties he's got some. But it's
Speaker 1: it's also you know, it's one of those things. As
Speaker 1: a kid, I guess I knew that his like nickname
Speaker 1: was the eighth Wonder of the world. Watching Young Andre
Speaker 1: wrestle dudes like it is awe inspiring. It's like watching
Speaker 1: a fucking hurricane. Like it's like, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: an exaggerate. He's amazing, Big Andre. The giant fans it
Speaker 1: sounds like all around the table to taund Yeah, he's great.
Speaker 1: So it is true. Obviously, you know, as he gets older,
Speaker 1: especially his mobility issues mean that he can't handles, and
Speaker 1: he's never really he's never able to do like the
Speaker 1: leaping off the turnbuckles stuff, kay, because he's he is,
Speaker 1: you know, too big for some things. He is very
Speaker 1: skilled anyway. Andre is such a big hit for his
Speaker 1: dad that Vince Junior is like, I want this guy,
Speaker 1: but more so so. The first thing he does is
Speaker 1: he keeps Andre the Giant traveling more than ever in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen eighties, I don't think there's a man
Speaker 1: in America who puts together the air miles this man does.
Speaker 1: He said about Andre in nineteen eighty three. He's traveling
Speaker 1: every day. Two weeks ago he was in Japan. He's everywhere.
Speaker 1: Lucky for us, his IQ was as large as his body.
Speaker 1: He travels most of the time on his own, does
Speaker 1: everything for himself. There are guys who have to have
Speaker 1: someone with them all the time. I don't think any
Speaker 1: general manager in a sport says he has a larger
Speaker 1: can say he has a larger collection of eccentrics than
Speaker 1: we do, but not Andre. He'll always be there when
Speaker 1: you need him, and this is real genius.
Speaker 2: He can book his own plane.
Speaker 1: Chickens it is like one of the say like obviously
Speaker 1: Andre did love I think love the job, love doing it.
Speaker 1: These flights are nightmares for him. One of the things
Speaker 1: I work he can Yeah, he literally couldn't fit in
Speaker 1: the airplane bathrooms. They had to like like put a
Speaker 1: curtain aside and let him like go into a bucket
Speaker 1: when he was on long haul flights because there was
Speaker 1: like you can't fit Andre the Giant, and they.
Speaker 2: Would fly so that they could window pressure dong out
Speaker 2: the emergency exit. There you go. He destroys more American
Speaker 2: cities that way, yeah, and nine Japanese ones.
Speaker 1: He was kind of known for being like the boss,
Speaker 1: Like that's literally that's what other wrestlers called him, was
Speaker 1: the boss in the locker room. And one of the
Speaker 1: kind of the things with Andrea was he was really
Speaker 1: the only guy in the business who would never lose. Right,
Speaker 1: if Andrea's in a match, He's going to win the match.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that kind of like and
Speaker 1: still everyone wanted to wrestle him because like, if you're
Speaker 1: a big regional wrestler, you want to wrestle, you want
Speaker 1: to lose to Andre the Giant and just lose well,
Speaker 1: because that can make your career, right, just fighting him
Speaker 1: can make your career because he's fucking Andre the giant.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: The sheer ferocity of Andrea's travel schedule and the social
Speaker 1: demands of stardom wore him down over time, as did
Speaker 1: his lifestyle, being massive. He ate incredibly huge meals, but
Speaker 1: he also drank an estimated seven thousand calories of beer
Speaker 1: and wine per day at one point, Yeah, he sure did.
Speaker 1: At one point he got into a contest with an
Speaker 1: olympian named Chris Taylor that ended with Taylor tapping out
Speaker 1: at one hundred and twenty six bottles of beer and
Speaker 1: Andre drinking more than one hundred and forty seven.
Speaker 2: Good for both them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's too much beer. It's too much beer.
Speaker 6: Honestly, honest to hear, what's the most beer either of
Speaker 6: you have ever drank? Like, and let's say like a day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean maybe like thirty, you know, And that
Speaker 1: was like that was intense, that was like regretted it.
Speaker 2: For days, Like I've had twenty six before, I've never
Speaker 2: gotten to I think I've been in the twenties.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so we all understand that that that's like a
Speaker 6: one time in your life you drink yeah, like a
Speaker 6: quarter of what Andre did kind of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and it and you and it hurts you
Speaker 1: for possibly years.
Speaker 5: It's one of those things that you kind of you
Speaker 5: have to do it when you're like twenty five because.
Speaker 1: Your limits, you know. Yeah, I couldn't do that now, No, no, God, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'd never wake up.
Speaker 6: It'd be real sad if we all did it now.
Speaker 6: But yes, or twice in your life. You gotta party.
Speaker 6: You gotta test the limits of your party. Look at
Speaker 6: that event horizon of alcoholism.
Speaker 2: You must taste the oblivion of partying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And with Andre, you know, part of why he
Speaker 1: drank so much is just that like it affected him
Speaker 1: less than it does people who are not seven foot
Speaker 1: four giants. And part of it was he was in
Speaker 1: a horrible pain because his body was far too large
Speaker 1: for his back, in his knees.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Andre, there's some sadness behind those, Yeah, there is some.
Speaker 1: Now, there's some funny stories too, because like so one
Speaker 1: of like when kind of Andre is this is in
Speaker 1: the kind of the mid eighties, when he's sort of
Speaker 1: at his near his addor near his height as a
Speaker 1: as a famous wrestler. He and Arnold Schwarzeneger become friends,
Speaker 1: and this is like peak body built, almost peak bodybuilding
Speaker 1: Arnold a little bit.
Speaker 2: It was the Monster and Kommando Destroyer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the two of them go out
Speaker 1: like drinking and have a meal one night, and at
Speaker 1: the end of the dinner they have a fight over
Speaker 1: who's going to pay, and Arnold tries to be like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna pay, and Andre the Giant picks him up,
Speaker 1: picks up Arnold Schwarzenegger and sets him in the eve
Speaker 1: of a window above them so that he can go
Speaker 1: pay like like lifts.
Speaker 3: Up like Arnold, like he's a Gina doll, like carrying
Speaker 3: a cat out of the room, exactly.
Speaker 1: To Arnold Schwarzenegger, he was so cool still that night
Speaker 1: because he was in de Yeah, you have to assume,
Speaker 1: so you have to assume they just drank all of
Speaker 1: the liquor in that small man.
Speaker 2: That must have been cool. It must have been a
Speaker 2: cool night. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So by the time Vince takes over, he's already starting
Speaker 1: to look for Andre's replacement.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 1: Andre is probably the biggest name in wrestling, or close
Speaker 1: to it, you know, and tied with a couple of
Speaker 1: other guys. But he's also he's old, He's not able
Speaker 1: to move the way he was. It's kind of clear
Speaker 1: that he's on the downswing of his career. And Vince
Speaker 1: finds Andre's replacement and a young man named Terry Bolia.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Terry was just in his twenties when he'd started wrestling
Speaker 1: for the WWF. A child of the nineteen fifties and
Speaker 1: of a dirt poor neighborhood in Port Tampa, Florida, Terry
Speaker 1: loved wrestling, had loved wrestling as long as he could remember.
Speaker 1: His favorite wrestler as a kid was Billy Graham, of
Speaker 1: the younger brother of Vince's mentor, doctor Jerry Graham, which
Speaker 1: is pretty cool. I do love that the Grahams had
Speaker 1: such an impact. Young Terry was particularly drawn to Billy
Speaker 1: because of his larger than life physique, including improbable twenty
Speaker 1: two inch biceps. These muscles were the product of steroids.
Speaker 1: As Billy was among the first generation of wrestlers to
Speaker 1: get really into that shit, he evangelized them to other wrestlers, saying,
Speaker 1: you can feel your body stretch. Just lay in bed
Speaker 1: and you'll feel yourself grow. So that's right, good stuff.
Speaker 2: What okmus wizard.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, So Terry starts up infected with strength. So
Speaker 1: Terry still out your chest a little. Sure, So Terry
Speaker 1: starts wrestling small time in Florida. Graham notices his skill
Speaker 1: and he buys him a drink one night in Tampa,
Speaker 1: and Boleiah stated what everyone else knew by now. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: guys aren't breaking into the big leagues of wrestling anymore
Speaker 1: without chemical assistance. Yeah, And so young Terry is like, hey,
Speaker 1: I know that you kind of need to be roided
Speaker 1: out to some extent. You have to be larger than
Speaker 1: life to make it in this business. Now what should
Speaker 1: I do to take my career to the next level?
Speaker 1: And Graham is like, you should take Diana ball and
Speaker 1: winstrol and then chase them with valium because that's what
Speaker 1: I too.
Speaker 2: Great's gonna get.
Speaker 6: Some real like you know, you got to get out
Speaker 6: there and grind, you got to try your best.
Speaker 2: But no, he's like, no, take this. Yeah, you have
Speaker 2: to rus growth.
Speaker 1: If you have any space in your ass that isn't drugs,
Speaker 1: you're doing it wrong. Like fill that butt. So within
Speaker 1: the WWF, the task of handing out steroids went to
Speaker 1: an osteopathic doctor named George Zahorian. He'd started as a
Speaker 1: house doctor for the McMahon's League and then became one
Speaker 1: of the chief state athletic representatives for Pennsylvania. He was
Speaker 1: required to examine every wrestler to see if they were
Speaker 1: healthy enough to perform. The allegation made later was that Vince,
Speaker 1: who was alleged to be a steroid user himself, would
Speaker 1: not so subtly encourage wrestlers to get bigger. This didn't
Speaker 1: take much of a push since it was obvious that
Speaker 1: only the monsters got the choice roles, so doctor Zohoian
Speaker 1: would go through wrestlers one by one to check them out.
Speaker 1: He brought a doctor bag full of steroids, painkillers, and
Speaker 1: valium with them and would ask, is there anything else
Speaker 1: what you would like? If it isn't here, I can
Speaker 1: get it for you and send it to you.
Speaker 6: I honestly cannot imagine a more corrupt job than WWF
Speaker 6: house doctor. No, you just say that, and you're like,
Speaker 6: there's not a person in the world that doesn't immediately
Speaker 6: know what that means.
Speaker 1: I will note there are This is not an allegation
Speaker 1: that Vince or the WWF broke any laws because steroids
Speaker 1: are not illegal at this point, right, Okay, sure, right,
Speaker 1: like this this is like the like by just handing
Speaker 1: them out like candy, you're not necessarily breaking the law.
Speaker 2: As a doctor.
Speaker 1: No, maybe hypocratic, you know, we can argue that on
Speaker 1: a personal level, but this is not like illegal drug
Speaker 1: dealing in the eighties.
Speaker 5: Right Listen, It's it's my sworn oath to make every
Speaker 5: one of these wrestlers' asses as hard as a concrete
Speaker 5: dipped horse.
Speaker 1: So, Terry Bowley, statues, that is that is that is sewn.
Speaker 1: That's why Pete hates statues so much, every one of them,
Speaker 1: even the ones not of horses. Look right, you go
Speaker 1: to the Washington Monument, that's full of horses. It is
Speaker 1: horses all the way up that side.
Speaker 5: It's just fifty eight thousand horses stacks on top of
Speaker 5: each other, always screaming.
Speaker 1: For that's what That's what happened to all of the
Speaker 1: horses from the South that we captured in the Civil War.
Speaker 1: That's how we punished them. So, Terry Bowl, it would
Speaker 1: be very America if we just punished the horses, for
Speaker 1: they wouldn't have been a war if they hadn't carried
Speaker 1: them down. There were those horses were no angel, tell
Speaker 1: it to God. So Terry Bowleia is going to become
Speaker 1: the poster child of the success that steroid use could
Speaker 1: bring one of Vince's wrestlers. He could not have succeeded
Speaker 1: in the business during an earlier era. Holk Hogan, as
Speaker 1: he came to be known, was not a good technical wrestler.
Speaker 1: He never gets very good at the technical stuff. He's
Speaker 1: good at number one, he's a good performer in that
Speaker 1: he's like good at, you know, presenting an appealing personality
Speaker 1: to the fans, and he's good at being a gigantic muscle.
Speaker 2: So freak right.
Speaker 1: Matches with him had to be kind of scripted to
Speaker 1: avoid some of the choreography that guys like Brett Owen
Speaker 1: could have done right, or Brett Hart could have done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know he's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he just he.
Speaker 2: Was pretty great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And again, wrestling is but this has always been
Speaker 1: the case. We talked about this in that earlier age.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be a great technical wrestler to
Speaker 1: be a good wrestler. It's it's different kind of things. Hogan,
Speaker 1: though a lot of his early success comes from the
Speaker 1: fact that he is just so fucking big. Ten years
Speaker 1: after their meeting, Superstar Graham met Hogan again at WrestleMania three,
Speaker 1: and he later told Inside Edition, we went off to
Speaker 1: a shower stall and Hogan pulled down his wrestling tights.
Speaker 1: I injected him with six hundred milligrams of testosterone and
Speaker 1: the right buttock. He had scar tissue on his butt
Speaker 1: from so many injections over the years, and it was
Speaker 1: hard to shove the needle in that Leavery Dinas skin.
Speaker 1: He does have skin like a fucking leather jacket. Like
Speaker 1: he has a complexion of Indiana Jones's jacket.
Speaker 2: Always sunny. They had that bit where they sit. He
Speaker 2: had the skin of a hot Yeah, that's perfect, perfect analogy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Gus this ideal.
Speaker 1: So by the late nineteen eighties, Hogan was the WWF's
Speaker 1: biggest star. Andre still drew crowds, but his body was
Speaker 1: by now very much failing him. Vince became aware that
Speaker 1: his former main draw was on the way out.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 1: Previously, Andre had been treated like a supernatural force. No
Speaker 1: one was ever allowed to actually beat him, and again
Speaker 1: careers were made by just getting hits in against the giant.
Speaker 1: He was beloved, He was cheered every time he came on,
Speaker 1: he was kind of the ultimate babyface, but now Vince
Speaker 1: engineered a storyline to turn him into a heel. Andre
Speaker 1: was somewhat uncomfortable with the whole turn, but Vince executed
Speaker 1: it effectively, having the Giant betray Hogan and turning him
Speaker 1: into an object of disdain for the audience. At WrestleMania three,
Speaker 1: they cheered as for the first time, Andre was beaten
Speaker 1: in the ring by Vince's new golden boy, hul Cogan.
Speaker 1: From here, Andre's career descended rapidly, and his last matches
Speaker 1: where a dispiriting series of villainous appearances. For the first
Speaker 1: time in his life, he was booed and jeered as
Speaker 1: he entered the stadium, an experience that his friends say
Speaker 1: caused him some amount of anguish as his body continued
Speaker 1: to fail him. Now, yeah, making a big sweet man
Speaker 1: feel bad is given. The crimes this guy commits is
Speaker 1: low on the list of Vince McMahon evil, but the
Speaker 1: way this all goes down says a lot about him.
Speaker 1: I found a documentary. There's a documentary he came out
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen by Bill Simmons, just titled Andre the Giant.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of criticisms of the documentary. There's
Speaker 1: a degree of whitewashing in it that's pretty significant, but
Speaker 1: they get Vince to talk for it. And there's a
Speaker 1: moment in this that is extremely revealing, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to play that for you now.
Speaker 2: When his career is over, the net.
Speaker 7: Of value YO to himself.
Speaker 8: No longer.
Speaker 7: I'm not gonna be around the boys and socializing and
Speaker 7: takes nature. I'm stuck here in North Carolina, and I
Speaker 7: was responsible for the fact that business was going and
Speaker 7: everybody else was going on aloud him Andrey more or
Speaker 7: less wanted to buy me, you know, and presented me
Speaker 7: a bit because he knew the business were going to
Speaker 7: go on without him. I think Hatrey resented that a
Speaker 7: little bit too, as time was up, damn it, you know.
Speaker 7: And yet I was going to continue on. And sometimes
Speaker 7: it can even be a situation whereby what you used
Speaker 7: me no longer when I was Gore's presence, no longer
Speaker 7: was it this loving, warm admiration that we have for
Speaker 7: each other, wasn't there.
Speaker 2: Now There's something real.
Speaker 5: Telling about that, because he's characterizing something that is a
Speaker 5: normal practice in wrestling, where you can't you can't stay
Speaker 5: on top forever. The guy on top has to pass
Speaker 5: the bell Tonto on the top. That's just how the
Speaker 5: business works. However, Vincent, this clip is ignoring the fact
Speaker 5: that Andre's career is ending, because Andre is literally dying,
Speaker 5: like this is this is a unique situation, Like you
Speaker 5: didn't have to put the strap on Hogan like that
Speaker 5: by making by making Andre end his career as a
Speaker 5: bad guy. Uh so he's that's so, man, There's.
Speaker 2: No real fucking way to spin this.
Speaker 6: Andre hates me and there's a lot of good reasons
Speaker 6: for him to hate me, and uh yeah, I really
Speaker 6: kind of phoned him.
Speaker 1: There's also that very beginning line where he's like, Andre
Speaker 1: was like he had no value, and then he pauses
Speaker 1: a second and goes to himself. It's like that's how
Speaker 1: Vince feels, can't wrestle, no more value, and he has
Speaker 1: to be like, oh no, to himself. He has no value.
Speaker 2: Let me fix it. He's worthless and has no self esteem.
Speaker 2: All right, he fixed it?
Speaker 5: Yes, what a piece of ship, true, says Andre wasn't
Speaker 5: drawing anymore.
Speaker 1: So yeah, now I will say this is not in
Speaker 1: that documentary because again at whitewashes some shit, but there
Speaker 1: was something else in Andrea's the fact that Andre, in
Speaker 1: his late life seems to have hated Vince McMahon, something
Speaker 1: else besides the fact that he'd been made into a heel,
Speaker 1: because Andre was very close to one of the earliest
Speaker 1: actual crimes that Vince has been accused of committing. Rita
Speaker 1: Chatterton was born in Albany in nineteen fifty seven, and
Speaker 1: she fell in love with wrestling as a little kid
Speaker 1: through her little brother Christopher. He was obsessed with the
Speaker 1: past time and his life ambition was to go into wrestling,
Speaker 1: but in nineteen seventy nine he died in a tragic
Speaker 1: car accident. Rita decided to become professionally involved in wrestling
Speaker 1: as a way to honor her younger brother's memory. She
Speaker 1: was twenty two years old working as a driver for Wonderbread.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: She'd had a lung injury earlier in life, so she
Speaker 1: was unable to actually be a female wrestler. But she
Speaker 1: realized that pro wrestling had never had a female referee,
Speaker 1: so she set herself to the task of getting that job.
Speaker 1: She gets licensed as a ref in the state of
Speaker 1: New York in nineteen eighty four, and she almost immediately
Speaker 1: starts to work reffing small regional shows. She's really good
Speaker 1: at this, and she develops a reputation for being competent
Speaker 1: and a good performer, and she's soon making a decent
Speaker 1: sideline doing these kind of three and four thousand fan
Speaker 1: little venues. So she's doing okay, she's supplementing her income
Speaker 1: when in January of nineteen fifty five, three years in
Speaker 1: events taking over the WWE, he gives her a call. Now,
Speaker 1: at this point, Vince is kind of in the middle
Speaker 1: of his quest to take out the regionals, and he's
Speaker 1: launched a super storyline in his own in the WWF
Speaker 1: involving a pop star named Cindy Lauper, and Cindy is like,
Speaker 1: she's kind of a regular character in WWF events at
Speaker 1: this period of time. He's got her managing a lady wrestler,
Speaker 1: and he's also got her engaged in a KFA battle
Speaker 1: against a wrestler who's kind of a he makes a
Speaker 1: misogynists so that it can be kind of a because
Speaker 1: women's rights is big at the time in the news, right,
Speaker 1: so Vince is like, we'll have Cindy Lauper be, you know,
Speaker 1: representing the ladies and we'll have this wrestler be a bigot,
Speaker 1: and you know they all that storyline's right, that is
Speaker 1: why that's that is where it came from.
Speaker 5: That's how the e R had passed. Yes, Robert, I
Speaker 5: am white knuckling it through this story. Yeah, do you
Speaker 5: know what's coming? Tom?
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, oh boy, it's not good. So Vince heard
Speaker 1: there was a young female ref that was working, you know,
Speaker 1: some regional shows she done, I think a couple of
Speaker 1: w smaller ww F affiliated gigs, and so he's like, hey,
Speaker 1: we've got this kind of feminist storyline going on. Let's
Speaker 1: bring in this lady ref. That'll probably put some butts
Speaker 1: in seats. So so far this is all fine. Obviously
Speaker 1: it's a little bit cynical, but nearly all social progress
Speaker 1: in this country involves cynical entertainment people increasing representation in
Speaker 1: order to make money and whatever.
Speaker 2: It's okay.
Speaker 1: So sure, he calls Rita up and he asks her
Speaker 1: to work at Madison Square Garden the coming week. She
Speaker 1: took the job and she did it quite well. McMahon
Speaker 1: called her afterwards, and she later claimed he said he
Speaker 1: was impressed with what I did impressed with my work
Speaker 1: and he wanted me to go full time. He promised
Speaker 1: me half a million dollars a year. At a time,
Speaker 1: I knew that's a huge amount of money, but I
Speaker 1: didn't know what the wrestlers were making. And obviously she
Speaker 1: knows that guys like Hulkogan are richest shit. So she's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe if I become a star referee,
Speaker 1: I could make that kind of money. Obviously, very few
Speaker 1: people involved in wrestling made anything near that much money,
Speaker 1: and Vince had no way incentive to give a shitload
Speaker 1: of cash to her. But you know, she doesn't know
Speaker 1: that she's making the choice that seems like the best
Speaker 1: choice for her at the time. I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: next from a write up in New York Magazine.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: McMahon also had a warning keep yourself clean. He said,
Speaker 1: in Chatterton's telling, I don't want to see you messing
Speaker 1: around with any of the wrestlers. You keep it professional. Look. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's not great a great sign for where things
Speaker 1: are going with So I'm sorry, this is this is yes, okay, okay, yep,
Speaker 1: that's like first normal. So Rita is excited. She thinks
Speaker 1: she's gonna this is gonna be the start of like
Speaker 1: a career and money, and you know it's this is great, right.
Speaker 1: She reaches out to a friend of her She's got
Speaker 1: two good friends in the wrestling business, and one of
Speaker 1: them is a wrestler. His last name's in Zatari, and
Speaker 1: she tells him, Hey, I'm gonna be on the cover
Speaker 1: of Women's Daily and Time and all these other magazines,
Speaker 1: and Inzatari is like, well, what do you why do
Speaker 1: you think that's gonna happen, And she's like, Vince promised
Speaker 1: it to me. And Inzatari has been in the business
Speaker 1: long enough, and he's like, oh, Rita, please, if you
Speaker 1: do anything with him, you're gonna be gone. Stay away
Speaker 1: from Vince, right, Like that's his advice to her, is like,
Speaker 1: keep doing the job, don't like do not like avoid
Speaker 1: Vince McMahon at all fucking costs, right, And I think
Speaker 1: it's one of those things he had heard rumors, is not.
Speaker 1: You know, at this point there's not anything kind of
Speaker 1: publicly out about Vince being a sex weirdo. But you know,
Speaker 1: you work in the business, you hear. And he tries
Speaker 1: to warn his friend away. He's like, look, this is
Speaker 1: a bad guy to be fucking in business.
Speaker 2: Casual time magazine reader.
Speaker 6: He knew that they don't do a lot of cover
Speaker 6: features on wwfes.
Speaker 1: So if you're in Rita's position, working as the first
Speaker 1: female ref and pro wrestling, and it seems like starting
Speaker 1: to succeed in a massive scale, though, like, how can
Speaker 1: you not move forward with this?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 1: And for a while Vince kind of kept his promise.
Speaker 1: She kept getting brought in for very big matches. She
Speaker 1: gets a kind of a small part in a spread
Speaker 1: in Cosmo, so she's like, like, it's it sort of
Speaker 1: seems like this is starting to happen for her. She's
Speaker 1: optimistic enough about the future for good reason that she
Speaker 1: quits her job as a delivery driver. McMahon also had
Speaker 1: her on his unsuccessful cable talk show Tuesday Night Titans.
Speaker 1: She wore a loose fitting white dress, and McMahon praised
Speaker 1: her in ways that we're vaguely off putting, saying, you
Speaker 1: have been accomplishing things that certainly women have never accomplished before.
Speaker 1: I mean, you weigh approximately one hundred and twenty two
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty pounds, not getting personal somewhere in there,
Speaker 1: and for you to step into the ring with the giants.
Speaker 1: I mean, you realize what can happen to you?
Speaker 7: Do you not?
Speaker 2: Now what does that mean that you could go with
Speaker 2: crushed and not?
Speaker 1: I mean you go with crushed.
Speaker 5: I think he's trying to sell the danger of it,
Speaker 5: because he's always that Carnival barker. But also I don't
Speaker 5: want to be recorded giving Vince McMahon the benefit of
Speaker 5: the down No, sir, like you could people.
Speaker 1: At the time, you could give him the benefit of
Speaker 1: the doubt. It's going to become very clear later.
Speaker 5: Free of any context. Yeah, let me let me rephrase it,
Speaker 5: free of any context, that context, That is how I
Speaker 5: would interpret that.
Speaker 1: Sure, absolutely, Yeah. Now, for the most part, Vicky's pretty happy.
Speaker 1: But week after week and eventually months go by and
Speaker 1: the contract that Vince had promised her didn't show up.
Speaker 2: That half a million dollars contract didn't happen.
Speaker 1: Sure, So, Vicky d I don't know why I said.
Speaker 1: Vicky Rita claims that she asked McMahon for an audience
Speaker 1: and he agreed to meet with her after a show.
Speaker 1: When she arrived for the meeting, a bunch of other
Speaker 1: industry people were there meeting with him. She tried to
Speaker 1: start a conversation during dinner, but he kind of brushes
Speaker 1: her off, and then he catches her as she's leaving
Speaker 1: the bathroom, and he's like, Hey, I don't want to
Speaker 1: talk to you about your career in front of all
Speaker 1: these other people. It's none of their business. Why don't
Speaker 1: we go to a second location and you get in.
Speaker 2: My limo with me?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Right, Rita, Yeah, bring a knife.
Speaker 1: Yep, yeah, knife, maybe like some kind of I don't
Speaker 1: know gun that launches mace, any of that good idea obviously. Look,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna like beat her on the bush. Here
Speaker 1: Vince zips his pants and he propositions her. This is
Speaker 1: how Rita later describes what happens. Vince continued to you know,
Speaker 1: if you want a half a million dollar contract, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to satisfy me, and this is the way
Speaker 1: things have to go. Vince grabbed my hand, kept trying
Speaker 1: to put my hand on him. I was scared at
Speaker 1: the end. My wrist was all purple, black and blue.
Speaker 1: Things just didn't he just God, he just didn't stop.
Speaker 1: This man just didn't stop. According to Chatterton, the next
Speaker 1: thing that Vince says is how's your daughter going to
Speaker 1: go to college? Of course she doesn't have to go
Speaker 1: to college. Uh yeah, yeah, I guess that she's not
Speaker 1: gonna be able to afford it if she doesn't, you know.
Speaker 1: And it's like, obviously that means this is both sexual
Speaker 1: harassment and also physical, like he's bruising her hand. Right,
Speaker 1: this is not just even like not that it's okay
Speaker 1: to be creepy, like, this is also physical directly physical violence.
Speaker 1: Both of these things are occurring here. So Chatterton later claims,
Speaker 1: I was forced into oral sex with Vince McMahon when
Speaker 1: I couldn't complete his desires that he got really angry,
Speaker 1: started ripping off my jeans, pulled me on top of him,
Speaker 1: and told me again that if I wanted a half
Speaker 1: a million dollar a year contract, that I had to
Speaker 1: satisfy him. He could make me or break me, and
Speaker 1: if I didn't satisfy him, I was blackballed.
Speaker 2: That was I was done.
Speaker 1: One of the things that sticks with me and always
Speaker 1: will was after he got done doing his business, he
Speaker 1: looked at me and said, remember when I told you
Speaker 1: not to mess with any of the wrestlers, Well you
Speaker 1: just did. Oh my god, Yeah, what the yeah, psychopath.
Speaker 1: He's a fucking yeah, he's giant. I mean, he's a
Speaker 1: fucking massive piece of shit. That's why we're spending six
Speaker 1: hours talking about him. She's, yeah, giant piece of shit.
Speaker 1: So that's terrible. In the immediate wake of this assault,
Speaker 1: of this alleged assault, vic Rita reached out to two
Speaker 1: colleagues in Zatari and these are like the two guys
Speaker 1: that are her friends within the business. One of them
Speaker 1: is this guy in Zatari, and one is Andre the Giant,
Speaker 1: So he is like one of the two people that
Speaker 1: she feels confident confiding in about what has happened to her,
Speaker 1: which I don't know, might play into some of the
Speaker 1: reason why Andre hates Vince McMahon.
Speaker 2: Laid in life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, she also speaks yeah anyway, So she talks
Speaker 1: to a lawyer to kind of decide can I sue
Speaker 1: Vince McMahon, Can I like press charges against him? But
Speaker 1: it is he is very powerful and wealthy at this
Speaker 1: point in time. It is not an easy It's not
Speaker 1: an easy thing to do when like it's the guy
Speaker 1: is like a fucking gas station attendant, right, It's especially
Speaker 1: hard when it's fucking Vince McMahon, and she's not sure
Speaker 1: if it's like worth the risk, in part because both
Speaker 1: of her parents are in poor health at this point,
Speaker 1: she's helping to take care of them. She's worried about
Speaker 1: the effect all of this will have on them, so
Speaker 1: she she works keeps quiet for a while. She keeps
Speaker 1: working as a ref in smaller venues off and on
Speaker 1: through the early nineties. When her father dies in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two, she makes her first public allegation, so like
Speaker 1: publicly alleges that Vince McMahon, you know, sexually assaulted her.
Speaker 1: She goes on, you know, she's on a couple of
Speaker 1: different like TV shows and stuff talking about this. She
Speaker 1: makes this as public as she possibly can. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about this a little more in the next episode. But
Speaker 1: for Rita, her wrestling dream finally ended in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: three after she attended Andrea the Giant's funeral. Vince was
Speaker 1: also there, and she recalls quote, Vince walked up to
Speaker 1: me and said, it's nice to meet you. He knew
Speaker 1: exactly who I was. She adds, I said it's nice
Speaker 1: to meet me. I told him to go fuck off
Speaker 1: and walked away.
Speaker 2: That seems yep. The least of what he deserves. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he got off very light in that exchange. Yeah, yep,
Speaker 2: so it's time to plug.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Vince McMahon. Uh, it's pretty bleak. It's it's it's bad,
Speaker 1: bad times, all bad times. And we have one more
Speaker 1: terrible story about Vince McMahon. And this kind of a
Speaker 1: contemporaneous to the other stuff. A lot of bad things
Speaker 1: are happening at once here, So I.
Speaker 2: Should have just told really happy Under the Giant stories.
Speaker 1: That would have been a more fun podcast.
Speaker 6: My buddy Tommy wrote for WWF for a while and
Speaker 6: he used to tell under the Giant stories.
Speaker 2: I don't want to tell any of his, but he
Speaker 2: had one where Ultimate Warrior got him some.
Speaker 6: Wine and Andre's like, this was no French war Warrior,
Speaker 6: and so he sent Warrior like to seven eleven to
Speaker 6: get French wine. And it was like so close to
Speaker 6: the show that he was already in his full Ultimate
Speaker 6: Warrior makeup and in a full sprint, he like went
Speaker 6: into seven eleven to get a bunch of French wine.
Speaker 6: And so this seven eleven clerk watched the Ultimate fucking
Speaker 6: Warrior like burst into his store, rummage through the liquor
Speaker 6: and come out with all this wine, and again I
Speaker 6: don't remember how that story ended, but I just remember
Speaker 6: some twenty people laughing at this.
Speaker 2: Yeah he got a million. Like that's all Under the
Speaker 2: Giant did was fucking drink and make awesome shit happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are there's There are a couple of funny
Speaker 1: stories about him getting like drunk enough that he passed out,
Speaker 1: passes out and like hotel lobbies and stuff, and then
Speaker 1: just having to be like, well, let's put a blanket
Speaker 1: on him. No, what, you can't move him.
Speaker 2: This problem is.
Speaker 1: It's like a row. We need a Bangalore torpedo to
Speaker 1: get through him. So at around the same yeah, would wouldn't.
Speaker 1: At around the same time Rita was starting her career
Speaker 1: as a referee, Vince got himself into an even worse situation.
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know, it's it's a bad another terrible situation,
Speaker 1: let's put it that way. One of his top babyface
Speaker 1: wrestlers was a guy named Jimmy Superfly Snooka.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Snooka had started dating a young Brooklyn girl named Nancy Argentino.
Speaker 1: She was working as a dental assistant. A friend of
Speaker 1: hers that started dating another wrestler so she goes to
Speaker 1: shows with them and she meets Snooka, so she winds
Speaker 1: up becoming Snooker's drive as well as his girlfriend, because
Speaker 1: Jimmy was hooked on every drug conceivable and was never
Speaker 1: in the same galaxy as sober enough to drive a maximum.
Speaker 2: There yeah, yea the most extreme.
Speaker 1: In very short order, the two start fighting, and on
Speaker 1: January eighteenth of nineteen eighty three, the police are called
Speaker 1: to a hotel in Selena, New York for a domestic
Speaker 1: disturbance between them. It wound up taking a whole team
Speaker 1: of cops to subdue Snooka, who was at that point
Speaker 1: about eighty five percent trend and cocaine by body weight.
Speaker 1: Now Snooka kind of like. One of the things that
Speaker 1: happens during the art when the police show up is
Speaker 1: that Argentino runs out of a room to tell the
Speaker 1: cops what he's been doing, and while the cops are there,
Speaker 1: he grabs her by the hair and drags her face
Speaker 1: across the dry wall her. The injuries that she's got
Speaker 1: include she's a contusion in the neck, she has possible
Speaker 1: fractured ribs, her lower back is injured. Snooka gets initially
Speaker 1: charged with assault and resisting arrest. Obviously, Vince, you know
Speaker 1: this is a problem. Snuka is a fairly prominent wrestler.
Speaker 1: He's got to deal with this. He does not care
Speaker 1: that this guy has just beat the absolute shit out
Speaker 1: of a young woman. And yeah, he's like, kind of
Speaker 1: his immediate plan is I have to go into damage
Speaker 1: control mode. And according to an investigation by wrestling journalist
Speaker 1: David Bixon, Span Argentina was initially trying to pursue criminal
Speaker 1: charges against Snuka, but she kind of suddenly makes a
Speaker 1: change to signing an affidavit claiming that she was in
Speaker 1: no way seeking prosecution against him. We don't know exactly
Speaker 1: what happened, but a police report was covered uncovered fairly
Speaker 1: recently that shows that Vince mc I think this was
Speaker 1: a part of Josie Riisman's reporting. That shows Vincent McMahon
Speaker 1: tried to talk a rout of making a complaint against
Speaker 1: Snuka in the first place, and as a result, Snuka
Speaker 1: winds up pleading guilty to harassment, but has his other
Speaker 1: charges dropped. He makes a donation to the Ronald McDonald
Speaker 1: House charity, but otherwise suffers no consequences. Later that year,
Speaker 1: on May tenth, Snuka called the paramedics to his hotel
Speaker 1: room because Argentina was Argentina was unconscious and obviously dying.
Speaker 1: Snooka first claimed that they had a fight. He framed
Speaker 1: it as a playful thing, that they had been play
Speaker 1: wrestling and she'd hit her head and he thought she
Speaker 1: was okay until she had trouble breathing. The next day,
Speaker 1: she gets taken to the er, where she dies. The
Speaker 1: next day at one fifty am, the coroner sees enough
Speaker 1: evidence of violence to suggest a police interview. He believes
Speaker 1: it's a homicide, so they take Snuoka in for questioning.
Speaker 1: Don Moracco, another wrestler staying at the same hotel, claims
Speaker 1: that he has a call with Vince at the same time.
Speaker 1: Quote Vince says, have you ever heard anything about Snooka
Speaker 1: and his girlfriend? Maracco says, I said, as a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, I am here with Lieutenant so and so,
Speaker 1: so I put him on the phone to Vince. Now,
Speaker 1: this is the same time that Vince is in the
Speaker 1: final stage of taking ownership of the WWF. He has
Speaker 1: reason to fear that a murder scandal involving one of
Speaker 1: his top wrestlers could grow up blow every thing up.
Speaker 1: We do not know what he said to the cops
Speaker 1: or to Snuoka, But the next day Snuoka changes his story.
Speaker 1: Instead of this play wrestling bit, he tells cops that, like,
Speaker 1: they'd been driving and she'd gotten out to pee in
Speaker 1: some bushes, and she'd slipped and hit her head on
Speaker 1: the pavement, and that's what caused the injury. Right Receman
Speaker 1: in her book notes that decades later, a wrestler who
Speaker 1: was trying to defend Snuoka in a documentary interview would
Speaker 1: tell the crew that he had been in a car
Speaker 1: with them that morning and had no memory of any
Speaker 1: injury that she suffered by the roadside. He kind of
Speaker 1: accidentally blows up one of Snuoka's claims. Snuka holds to
Speaker 1: that story forever, though, that she just hits her head,
Speaker 1: you know, in a freak accident and that's what causes
Speaker 1: all this. The WWF does cooperate with the investigation, and
Speaker 1: eventually Snooka is released. He is not charged with any crime,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that the coroner had advised the case
Speaker 1: be investigated as a homicide. Josie, writes. Argentino's younger sister,
Speaker 1: Luis Argentina would later recall that Vincer one of his proxies.
Speaker 1: She didn't remember the name, just called him. Snook's promoter
Speaker 1: called Argentino's mother not long after her daughter was buried.
Speaker 1: Miss Argentino, I'm so sorry for your loss, the sister
Speaker 1: remembered him, saying, do you think twenty five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: would help you? The mother hung up on him. Gross yep. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we live in a.
Speaker 6: Universe where, like cocaine filled Jimmy Snooka might accidentally kill
Speaker 6: somebody by like shoving them and they hit their head
Speaker 6: on something, and I'd be like, that's within the realm possibility.
Speaker 6: But then he's like, oh no, no, no, it happened
Speaker 6: earlier when she got out of the car and slipped
Speaker 6: and fed Like, okay, you're a murderer, Like like that
Speaker 6: sort of clinches it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And the history of the they had a long
Speaker 5: history of domestic violence.
Speaker 2: And that doesn't help either.
Speaker 6: I'm saying there's a world where that story didn't exist,
Speaker 6: and you're just saying, Hi, I'm a gigantic dude, and yeah,
Speaker 6: we were making love and I hit her head on
Speaker 6: the board or whatever.
Speaker 2: But yeah, that didn't happen. I don't know why I'm
Speaker 2: even bringing up a hypothetical that's the murderer. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you're obviously a murderer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is very very clearly a fucking murder. Right.
Speaker 1: There's a little more to it in terms of Vince's sketchiness.
Speaker 8: Here.
Speaker 1: We know that Vince walked into a meeting with Snooka
Speaker 1: and the DA, the medical Examiner, and several cops on
Speaker 1: June first, which is the same day he makes his
Speaker 1: final payment to his dad for the WWF. Now, the
Speaker 1: DA at this meeting later recalls that Vince did all
Speaker 1: the talking. Snooka himself later wrote this cryptic paragraph about
Speaker 1: the meeting for his autobiography. At one point, I went
Speaker 1: with Vince McMahon Junior to either a court or a
Speaker 1: law office. I don't remember which because I was still
Speaker 1: in shocked. All I remember is he had a briefcase
Speaker 1: with him. I don't know what happened. I think Vince
Speaker 1: Junior picked me up from the hotel and took me there.
Speaker 1: He didn't say an maybe it was a spaceship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm a mania atractor. There are a lot of conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories about that. Briefcase, because Vince doesn't carry a briefcase. Right,
Speaker 1: Everyone who's like been in meetings with him says that,
Speaker 1: like this is a weird thing for him. That's kind
Speaker 1: of why Snooka wrote it, right, is that snooke has
Speaker 1: known him a while, he hasn't seen him do this before.
Speaker 1: We don't know anything more than this. There are a
Speaker 1: ton of conspiracy theories that, oh, did he have a
Speaker 1: bribe in the briefcase for the cops or you know whatever.
Speaker 1: There's not evidence of this. It's just something. There's a
Speaker 1: there's a lot of theories about right. I think that
Speaker 1: there's plenty without him bribing the cops. There's plenty of
Speaker 1: shadiness here. But to like make this be a mark
Speaker 1: in the bastard column for Vince McMahon, Oh sure he did.
Speaker 5: He didn't even need to do something as as now
Speaker 5: ostentatious as to bring a briefcase full of money. He
Speaker 5: had plenty of power and inexactly exactly happen.
Speaker 6: Pat Patterson had a long running prank where they were
Speaker 6: trick each other into looking at each other's poop, So
Speaker 6: there could have been a human turn.
Speaker 2: In that briefcase.
Speaker 5: Could have just been completely unrelated to this, showed Pat
Speaker 5: Patterson his ship later.
Speaker 1: He wouldn't do it here, but I got there again, Pat, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you thought I wouldn't do this when trying to talk
Speaker 1: a wrestler out of a murdered charge, But by god,
Speaker 1: I got you again. That does remind I have a
Speaker 1: good poop in a suitcase story. So I'm at this
Speaker 1: big outdoor party, this big like festival, you know, event
Speaker 1: in Texas, uh kind of near Texar Canon one time,
Speaker 1: and I've got some friends who are are part of
Speaker 1: this group at this festival that like there their primary
Speaker 1: thing is doing like light terrorism, right where they just
Speaker 1: kind of try to mess with people while they're on
Speaker 1: drugs and having a good time. And a couple of
Speaker 1: them would go around the event with a suitcase full
Speaker 1: of peanut butter, trying to get people to eat out
Speaker 1: of the suitcase full of peanut butter. It was offered
Speaker 1: to me several times, and I knew them well enough
Speaker 1: to be like, I am not going to eat out
Speaker 1: of that peanut butter suitcase. And sure enough, it later
Speaker 1: comes out that somebody had chatting the peanut butter suitcase.
Speaker 2: And you call that light terrorism? Light terrorism is a
Speaker 2: six out of ten terrorism to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh boy, there's a couple of people in Texas
Speaker 1: that are gonna know what I'm talking about, and they're
Speaker 1: going to be shocked that that. Hope you didn't eat
Speaker 1: the fucking peanut butter A good stuff. Well, speaking of
Speaker 1: cobbra vinom today, we're about to right now, we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about a man who could drink raw Cobravinomu
Speaker 1: and and feel nothing a hero. I think we're all
Speaker 1: familiar with Jesse the Body Ventura.
Speaker 2: We love Jesse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everyone loves Jesse. And there's very few people that
Speaker 1: Jesse hates more than Vince McMahon. So born, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this is as a result of it being a story
Speaker 1: about Jesse the Body Ventura, this is going to be
Speaker 1: a story about Vince McMahon as well, and a story
Speaker 1: about unions. So yeah, strap in here born James George Janos,
Speaker 1: which is not nearly as good in it. I can
Speaker 1: see why he went with Jesse Ventura. James George Janos
Speaker 1: just not the not the same kind.
Speaker 5: Of but it's also not not a wrestling name, no no,
Speaker 5: and for sure, yeah, yeah, JJ, I'd go with JJ Janos.
Speaker 5: That's Janos Janos, the hands of Fate. You know, there's
Speaker 5: a lot of the name of a champion.
Speaker 1: So born in nineteen fifty one, Jesse is the a
Speaker 1: child of Minneapolis. His parents were World War Two veterans.
Speaker 1: Both of them and his older brothers served in nom
Speaker 1: Jesse opted to join the Navy in nineteen sixty nine
Speaker 1: rather than be drafted, and he was you know, you've
Speaker 1: seen if you've seen Jesse the body of Van Sero
Speaker 1: when he was young. He's a very fit guy. He's
Speaker 1: he's pretty large and frightening. So his superiors are like,
Speaker 1: this guy, we should maybe, you know, put in for
Speaker 1: some more intense training. So they wind up sticking him
Speaker 1: in a program called BUDS, which is like underwater demolition.
Speaker 1: Yeah Janos, Yeah, Janos. So without getting into like too
Speaker 1: much military nerds stuff, this is Buds is what becomes
Speaker 1: the Navy Seals, right, Like the Navy Seals kind of
Speaker 1: evolve out of this elite underwater demolition program. There will
Speaker 1: be some conflict later with Chris Kyle, the American sniper guy,
Speaker 1: who is a kind of a dick, and he'll accuse
Speaker 1: Jesse the Body Ventura of lying about having been a seal.
Speaker 1: Basically everyone agrees it's fine for him to call himself
Speaker 1: a seal. Like they turned into the Navy Seals right
Speaker 1: after he was in there. It's it's whatever, It's okay, that's.
Speaker 2: A real technicality.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm not gonna call that one stolen valor really
Speaker 5: split in hairs, and Jesse doesn't have that many of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, exactly, he doesn't have any room for splitting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's got to keep what he's got. So he's stationed
Speaker 1: in Vietnam. He's like, he is a Vietnam veteran, but
Speaker 1: he never he never winds up in like combat or
Speaker 1: anything like that, which is which is good, it's combat's bad.
Speaker 1: You want to avoid it. As a general rule. He
Speaker 1: is able to transition to civilian life, and he does
Speaker 1: so with the help of the mom Ungles Motorcycle Club,
Speaker 1: which is based out of I think San Diego at
Speaker 1: the time, and kind of not long after he's in there,
Speaker 1: they wind up in this like really bloody gang thing
Speaker 1: with the Hell's Angels. Jesse actually winds up testifying on
Speaker 1: their behalf at one point to be like, when I
Speaker 1: was in them, it wasn't like a criminal gang whatever,
Speaker 1: you want to say about them, Like they didn't start
Speaker 1: out as like part of a criminal enterprise. You know,
Speaker 1: they really had my back. They helped me transition into
Speaker 1: civilian life, which is like that's why motorcycle gangs start up,
Speaker 1: by the way, like the first of them come up
Speaker 1: after World War Two as like a thing for vets
Speaker 1: who can't really fit in with the rest of society whatever.
Speaker 1: That's how Jesse gets out of being in the military.
Speaker 1: He transitions, you know, back to civilian life, and he
Speaker 1: decides like, well, now that I'm back in you know,
Speaker 1: the normal world, nothing makes more sense than getting incredibly
Speaker 1: jacked and working as a bodybuilder. And after getting incredibly jacked,
Speaker 1: because he's this huge dude who has military training, he's
Speaker 1: able to get a gig working as a bodyguard for
Speaker 1: the Rolling Stones. He's like, whenever the Rolling Stones come
Speaker 1: to Minnesota, Jesse Ventura is is watching their back. Get
Speaker 1: me Jetos, Yeah, get me Janos. That's I mean, that's
Speaker 1: a pretty cool gig, except for Rolling Stones. Bodyguard is
Speaker 1: a job with a body count. But that's not his fault,
Speaker 1: right sure the hells Angels, you know. Yeah, So because
Speaker 1: he's you know, this giant guy who's great at fighting.
Speaker 1: It kind of increasingly becomes clear to him that the
Speaker 1: real way for him to make some money off of
Speaker 1: his most evident assets is to get into pro wrestling.
Speaker 1: Now he knows that Janos is not the best name
Speaker 1: he could possibly have.
Speaker 2: Hard disagree.
Speaker 1: Wow, Wow do you want to do you know why
Speaker 1: he picks Jesse the body Ventura.
Speaker 2: Uh, probably to sound more like Hulk Cogan, more Californian.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, more California. That's exactly right. He wants to
Speaker 1: his like initial like. The kind of like theme of
Speaker 1: his character is he's like a southern California muscle beach
Speaker 1: bodybuilder guy. And so yeah, that's why. That's why he
Speaker 1: does it better no, no, no, better than And this
Speaker 1: is the real Stolen Valor. There's a lot of muscle
Speaker 1: freaks in southern California that Jesse's taken work from. Neon,
Speaker 1: So the Stolen Valor kind of guy who's fine with
Speaker 1: him calling himself a Navy seal, but livid about the
Speaker 1: last name.
Speaker 2: Ventura.
Speaker 1: You're not from Vncura Beach.
Speaker 2: Come on, you've never rollerbladed in your life.
Speaker 1: So he gets involved in wrestling in the early seventies
Speaker 1: and at first, he's kind of like he's basically like
Speaker 1: starts off his favorite This is again a pretty common story.
Speaker 1: His favorite wrestler is Superstar Billy Graham, which is the
Speaker 1: same guy that like hul Cogan. Yeah, you know learns
Speaker 1: learns to be hul Cogan from great wrestler Superstar Billy Graham.
Speaker 1: If you want to look up pictures of him, incredible
Speaker 1: looking fellow, like he's he's really one of the he's
Speaker 1: really if you want to pick one wrestler as like
Speaker 1: the the physical dividing line between like huge guys pre steroids,
Speaker 1: huge guys post steroids. Superstar Billy Graham is about your
Speaker 1: best bet, real cool looking dude. So he's ah, he
Speaker 1: loved the timeline, Yeah, really split that timeline. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: the he's the he's like the fucking the KT boundary
Speaker 1: for wrestling and steroids. So yeah, his career goes pretty
Speaker 1: well until nineteen eighty four. Jesse's like steadily moving up
Speaker 1: at his peak, he's like a rival to houl Cogan.
Speaker 1: He has like these three consecutive matches against him and
Speaker 1: he loses them. But like obviously the fact that you're
Speaker 1: like build next to Hulk means that you're doing pretty good,
Speaker 1: you know, in nineteen eighty four, and then kind of
Speaker 1: at the peak of his wrestling career, he has to
Speaker 1: quit because he nearly dies. He develops like a series
Speaker 1: of nearly fatal blood clots and his lungs. His like
Speaker 1: wife has to fly in because she thinks that he's
Speaker 1: like not he's like about to die. Like it's very
Speaker 1: he comes very close to like leaving this earth as
Speaker 1: a result of it. Now, one of the interviews I
Speaker 1: read with him, Jesse claims that his Navy training taught
Speaker 1: him how to deal with the trauma of imminent death.
Speaker 1: He's snuck inside his own lungs and steed, I yeah,
Speaker 1: I had a anyway. So he he thinks that the
Speaker 1: blood clots that he nearly died from were caused by
Speaker 1: his Agent orange exposure in Vietnam. I mean, I have
Speaker 1: no way of proving that, but maybe it was for him.
Speaker 2: It couldn't have.
Speaker 1: Helped people die from Agent orange, so you know, pretty
Speaker 1: pretty decent chance, actually, And this may explain why he
Speaker 1: becomes an anti government conspiracy theorist in the in the
Speaker 1: not too distant future. Not a bad reason to become
Speaker 1: an anti government conspiracy theorist.
Speaker 2: It may explain it in more than one way. His
Speaker 2: government literally tried to kill him. Yeah, it's a genuine conspiracy,
Speaker 2: and also his brain was poisoned.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is one of those. We'll talk about this more.
Speaker 1: But like there's the thirty thousand foot view of Jesse
Speaker 1: Ventura where it's like, Wow, that guy looks like a kook.
Speaker 1: And then in most situations, the closer you get to him,
Speaker 1: the more you're like, no, I mean I kind of
Speaker 1: get where he's coming from. I understand ya, Jesse. There's
Speaker 1: a few exceptions to that, but sure, he's.
Speaker 5: Never a guy that I'm comfortable getting totally getting behind,
Speaker 5: but sure, yeah, I was got the idea that he
Speaker 5: was a reasonable man and like he could correct mistakes
Speaker 5: and sort of shoot straight.
Speaker 2: But he's such a monster that like, who's going to
Speaker 2: correct him? I feel like that's where he landed.
Speaker 6: Where he's he's capable of being wrong and fixing his behavior,
Speaker 6: but who could possibly stand.
Speaker 8: Up and do that.
Speaker 1: I described him recently as a basically decent man who
Speaker 1: read too many books about Atlantis to be truly saying again,
Speaker 1: that's kind of where I find Jesse. I told you
Speaker 1: what man, They've got a city down there. It's cold Lemuria.
Speaker 2: He just needs to me in Atlantia and straight. Ess body,
Speaker 2: I met someone from down there. I was I had
Speaker 2: a lot of wrong impressions.
Speaker 5: I tell you what, MacMahon, if you can find Poseidon's
Speaker 5: tried and down there, you can breathe forever.
Speaker 1: He's slow enough now that we can make these jokes.
Speaker 1: He's not catching us.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So.
Speaker 1: Nineteen eighty four, he's out of commission because of this
Speaker 1: lung thing, but he's still pretty popular and Vince, you know,
Speaker 1: say what, there's a lot I mean, we are saying
Speaker 1: what we will about Vince. He's pretty good at like
Speaker 1: recognizing talent, and he sees like, well this guy can't
Speaker 1: wrestle right now, but I don't want to just like
Speaker 1: throw away money. And he's got some skill like he's
Speaker 1: really good at talking. People seem to like enjoy his
Speaker 1: personality as as Jesse later said, I was out of commission,
Speaker 1: but Vince doesn't want you not working, no matter what
Speaker 1: ails you. So he came up with the idea and
Speaker 1: asked if I could do color commentating, and I said sure.
Speaker 1: He deserves the credit for thinking it up. I've always
Speaker 1: given the man credit. He's the P. T. Barnum of
Speaker 1: this generation. Accurate comparison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't. I don't know that.
Speaker 1: Hmm.
Speaker 5: That's actually an interesting question because I would argue that
Speaker 5: Vince might not necessarily necessarily be the best at picking talent.
Speaker 5: He's always I feel like he's always been a guy
Speaker 5: that's best at noticing marketability, which is yeah different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that that's fair. I think they wind
Speaker 1: up like sometimes working similar court. Of course, there's there's
Speaker 1: some there's testimony that I read through where Vince is
Speaker 1: testifying to the Waxman Committee in nineteen ninety six about
Speaker 1: a bunch of shit that we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the steroids and safety precautions and stuff. But they ask
Speaker 1: him during this how talent gets picked and like the
Speaker 1: way in which it works. When like someone is a
Speaker 1: new wrestler, at what point does Vince come in and
Speaker 1: start having an influence on their career and kind of
Speaker 1: shaping their storylines? And it's he seems to use kind
Speaker 1: of the rest of the company and lower level employeers
Speaker 1: as like a talent filter, and by the time someone's
Speaker 1: kind of proven themselves, he seems to be pretty good
Speaker 1: at like figuring out what about them is working and
Speaker 1: then exploiting that in order to make more money out
Speaker 1: of them. Right, that's something.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know he's got scouts and managers and
Speaker 5: everything that watch that stuff for him. It's just I
Speaker 5: say that just because Vince's I mean, we've already identified
Speaker 5: a few, but has very famously backed some terrible.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, I mean.
Speaker 8: It is.
Speaker 1: It is like like with Steve Jobs, you know, like
Speaker 1: the man had some good ideas, but we've got the
Speaker 1: Newton in there too, you know, like there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of craft that whites up getting out. And you know,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Katzenberg was behind some stuff that worked and also Quibi,
Speaker 1: so you know, mixed mixed bags.
Speaker 9: All around with entertainment people. Everybody's got their Eugene Yeah, right, huge,
Speaker 9: Oh my god, and Laurence are yeah, yeah, great stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 9: you can actually go back and appreciate Eugene. Those tapes
Speaker 9: cannot see the light of day.
Speaker 6: The day Eugene walked out for the first time, I said,
Speaker 6: there's no fucking way they're doing this.
Speaker 5: So that might actually be the most offensive wrestling story. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 5: I mean they get to that one worst one. So
Speaker 5: maybe maybe when May Young gave birth to a hand.
Speaker 1: Wrestling, we're actually about to talk to one that might
Speaker 1: be close to that. So Vince this says a decent
Speaker 1: amount about the man. Before Jesse goes out for his
Speaker 1: first night doing color commentating, Vince gives him some advice
Speaker 1: that I think kind of lays out how Vince McMahon
Speaker 1: sees like life in general. Like I think he just
Speaker 1: kind of inadvertently gave Jesse the body of Ventura, like
Speaker 1: his his perspective on on the world. Quote the first
Speaker 1: night I was going to broadcast, Vince pulled me aside.
Speaker 1: Vince said, Jesse, here's your thought process, and here's the
Speaker 1: best way for you to operate. He said, very simply,
Speaker 1: if you believe it, then it's true.
Speaker 2: Beautiful. Yeah, yeah, Vince wrote the secret.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that is how like you know, if
Speaker 1: you're if you're like the job, as we said of
Speaker 1: like the reps and the commentators is to sell fantasy
Speaker 1: to the audience. But also like that's kind of how
Speaker 1: being an entertainer works a lot of the time, right,
Speaker 1: that's like, yeah, advice, Yeah, it's acting. I mean honestly,
Speaker 1: like there's a degree. It's like writing fiction to a degree,
Speaker 1: Like you're sitting down with a blank page and you're
Speaker 1: like inventing a guy in a world that shit happens in.
Speaker 1: Like you've got to kind of sell it to people.
Speaker 7: You have to make it.
Speaker 2: If you're not yeah, if you're not buying it, like
Speaker 2: everybody can tell immediately.
Speaker 1: But it's also exactly how a con artist has to think, right,
Speaker 1: Like Jesse's or Vince is kind of at the intersection
Speaker 1: of all of the creative arts, but he definitely lands
Speaker 1: more on like the cult leader con artist end of
Speaker 1: the scale. Yeah, that's that's kind of at least the way.
Speaker 1: And I mean it's also you see like kind of
Speaker 1: shades of his dad here right where like I'm sure
Speaker 1: when his dad is with these wrestlers, being super nice,
Speaker 1: getting them on his side, there was a degree of
Speaker 1: him that like believed what he was saying, that like
Speaker 1: could commit to the act and then as soon as
Speaker 1: he's away from those wrestlers, fuck them, Let's get every
Speaker 1: dime out of them we can. You know, It's it's compartmentalization,
Speaker 1: you know. Anyway, that's that's that's enough of that. So
Speaker 1: Jesse did eventually recover enough to wrestle in the ring,
Speaker 1: but he was more popular as a commentator after this point.
Speaker 1: Probably the weirdest example of this came in December of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five, when he and Roddy Piper attacked a
Speaker 1: wedding between two characters affiliated with a group of wrestlers
Speaker 1: known as the Hillbillies for reasons that are I shouldn't
Speaker 1: have to explain.
Speaker 2: Series of him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so for reasons that have not. I have read
Speaker 1: several explanations of this. None of them make much sense
Speaker 1: to me. The new Jersey State Athletic Control Board will
Speaker 1: not allow the WWF to stage a fake wedding. I
Speaker 1: don't know why they get to make that decision. That
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like it's in their wheelhouse, but they're not
Speaker 1: allowed to. Where's the overlap there?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Why not? What's the problem with the fake wedding?
Speaker 2: What did you marry? Vince? Yeah? One of these people
Speaker 2: married a horse and it was your fault and your
Speaker 2: Jersey knows it.
Speaker 1: This is an area where I will say, like the
Speaker 1: regulators were maybe getting a little getting a little bit
Speaker 1: handsy here, because that doesn't make much sense to me.
Speaker 1: But the two characters getting married for this fake wedding
Speaker 1: are also fiance's in real life, so they agree to
Speaker 1: have an actual in ring wedding that will be broken
Speaker 1: up by a mass wrestling melee. Now, Ventura insists that
Speaker 1: he's under orders from Vince during this to barry the
Speaker 1: two Hillbillies getting married. Vince is basically like, I want
Speaker 1: you to make like insult them as badly as you
Speaker 1: possibly can, like, really hurt these people when you're out
Speaker 1: on stage, like fuck them up with your voice as
Speaker 1: badly as possible. And so Jesse makes a point of
Speaker 1: insulting them as badly as possible. Kind of the line
Speaker 1: that everyone takes out of this is he says that
Speaker 1: when these two who are actual fiances, he says that
Speaker 1: when they kiss, quote, it looked like too carp in
Speaker 1: the middle of the Mississippi River going after the same
Speaker 1: piece of corn.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful, it is poetic.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's not a bad line, but that's awesome, pretty mean,
Speaker 3: it's very mean.
Speaker 2: Heavid, but whimsy whimsical enough that like, yeah to take
Speaker 2: personal right, Yeah, Yeah, it's he's the bad guy in
Speaker 2: the situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a heel. Yeah, it's cruel in a way.
Speaker 1: That's impressive. I don't know where you want to mark
Speaker 1: that on, like the bastard scale for events, but it's
Speaker 1: on a merited inclusion anyway in terms of the actual
Speaker 1: real bastard shit. Jesse became a quainted with Vince's dark
Speaker 1: side after he made the transition to being a movie
Speaker 1: star thanks to his memorable role in the nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: seven classic Predator, a film that contains the only lessons
Speaker 1: a young person needs to be successful in life. Don't
Speaker 1: don't send kids to school, make them watch Predators. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just watch Predator enough. Step one, make sure you don't
Speaker 1: got time to bleed, Yeah, exactly. Step two, find something
Speaker 1: that'll turn into a sexual tyrannosaurs. That's more stolen valor
Speaker 1: from Jesse because he did take almost a year to bleed.
Speaker 2: Wow. Wow, that's fucking meaner than the carp one.
Speaker 1: That is pretty bad. So since he was now an actor,
Speaker 1: Jesse qualified for the Screen Actors Guild and he joins
Speaker 1: SAG and he's like, man's there's a lot of nice
Speaker 1: stuff about being in a union.
Speaker 2: Pretty nice.
Speaker 1: This is full of benefits for me, And then he
Speaker 1: kind of looks back at his previous career in wrestling
Speaker 1: and all of his colleagues, and like they're desperately low pay,
Speaker 1: like there's zero benefits. The fact that they are all
Speaker 1: destroying their bodies at like a pace Heroin Addicts would
Speaker 1: consider excessive, and goes, maybe we should have a union.
Speaker 5: This might make sense. Yeah, Vince is going to handle
Speaker 5: this well. Vince and the Hulkster both are huge fans
Speaker 5: of this idea.
Speaker 1: So WrestleMania too comes around and Jesse kind of gets
Speaker 1: everyone together in the locker room when they're they're getting
Speaker 1: ready and he's like, hey, guys. He characterizes this is
Speaker 1: a speech to the boys, and he's like, look, you know,
Speaker 1: we need a union. We're getting fucked. Here's the different
Speaker 1: things I think we should go for, And the only
Speaker 1: thing to do is to like threaten to workstoppers, say
Speaker 1: this is what we want, and we won't go out there.
Speaker 1: Like the whole business at this point in WWF history
Speaker 1: relies on WrestleMania. If WrestleMania is a flop, like Vince's fucked,
Speaker 1: Like Vince's maybe irreparably fucked, Like the first WrestleMania was
Speaker 1: like really a gamble that he bet the whole fucking
Speaker 1: house on, and wrestleman to like, it's still one of
Speaker 1: those things if they were to like just not go
Speaker 1: out and the event collapses, that's like they really did
Speaker 1: have a lot of leverage. And he's like, look, man,
Speaker 1: we should go. We should threaten a work stoppage if
Speaker 1: we don't get if Jesse doesn't agree to recognize our
Speaker 1: union and come to the table and let us negotiate
Speaker 1: for a better deal, right, And he's also like, and
Speaker 1: I think this is pretty smarter, Jesse. He's like, look,
Speaker 1: and while we're here, you know, there's all these locals
Speaker 1: in Charlotte who are fans of us. They're not fans
Speaker 1: of just the WWF. They like love us as wrestlers.
Speaker 1: We can get them on our side. We can get
Speaker 1: all this local support. We have the ability to really
Speaker 1: put Vince over a barrel here. Let's fucking do it.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: It's kind of you know, there's at least some interest
Speaker 1: from people in the night when they're talking about it.
Speaker 1: Jesse's basically like, don't bring this up to Vince. You know,
Speaker 1: we're talking about a thing that could get us all
Speaker 1: in a lot of trouble. And then he goes home
Speaker 1: feeling pretty good about the meeting, but the next day
Speaker 1: he gets a call from Vince and says, quote, he
Speaker 1: basically threw and to fire me if I ever brought
Speaker 1: it up again and read me the Riot Act. So
Speaker 1: when I came back to Vince, I told him point blank, Vince,
Speaker 1: I won't ever bring up union again. I said, if
Speaker 1: these guys are too stupid to fight for their rights,
Speaker 1: I have my union. Now he's talking about SAG there.
Speaker 1: So basically he gets called by Vince, which lets him
Speaker 1: know somebody ratted me out. And so Jesse's kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: fuck it, you know, I guess that's that's the shot of.
Speaker 2: Jim the anvil Nightheart. Well, no, he knows what he did.
Speaker 1: Tragically. No, this is gonna hurt a lot of us
Speaker 1: were who were children with hearts.
Speaker 2: In the late.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the Holster. Yeah, because if they had a union,
Speaker 5: he makes way less money. Yeah, it is, in fact
Speaker 5: the Holster.
Speaker 1: So for years Jesse knew obviously he knows immediately someone
Speaker 1: rated on me, but he doesn't know who. And this
Speaker 1: is kind of a mystery for him. You know, as
Speaker 1: he leaves, he stops being you know in the WWF,
Speaker 1: he starts doing other shit. In nineteen ninety one, he
Speaker 1: finds out that Vince McMahon he's So it becomes out
Speaker 1: that like Vince had told his wrestlers that they would
Speaker 1: be getting like royalty payments I think from videotape sales,
Speaker 1: but he like fucks them in a way that's illegal.
Speaker 1: And Jesse finds out and he sues and he wins
Speaker 1: the lawsuit against Vince over these royalty payments. But as
Speaker 1: a result of that, there's a deposition and I'm going
Speaker 1: to quote now from a write up on this deposition
Speaker 1: in The Sportster, Vince McMahon admitted under oath that Hulk
Speaker 1: Hogan had snitched on his fellow wrestlers in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: six and he came away to Vince McMahon and informed
Speaker 1: him about Ventura trying to get people together to form
Speaker 1: a union. So, you know, it comes out that the
Speaker 1: Hulkster has betrayed Jesse Ventura. And on a pretty recent
Speaker 1: podcast with Stone Cold Steve Austin, Jesse said, it was
Speaker 1: like someone punched me in the face. This was my friend,
Speaker 1: and I thought Hogan betrayed me. Hogan called Vince and
Speaker 1: ratted me. It's a it's a tragic story. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a real bummer bummer about the hulkster bummer that
Speaker 1: that Jesse got betrayed. I do feel like, if you're
Speaker 1: a wrestler, you shouldn't compare a betrayal to getting punched
Speaker 1: in the face, because getting punched in the face is
Speaker 1: like things working well, Like that is the job, is it?
Speaker 2: Normally?
Speaker 1: It's like not getting punched in the face.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The good news on this story at least is that,
Speaker 1: unlike every other wrestler we've talked about, Jesse has about
Speaker 1: as happy ending as it can have because he's actually
Speaker 1: lived a pretty amazing life. He goes on to be
Speaker 1: elected in nineteen ninety nine the governor of Minnesota. He's
Speaker 1: not a bad governor. It's not like Arnold, where like
Speaker 1: he's this kind of right wing ghoul for you know,
Speaker 1: or at least like normal right wing governor, and then
Speaker 1: kind of becomes a more progressive person afterwards. Jesse, despite
Speaker 1: being like a hardcore libertarian, like immediately his so number
Speaker 1: one because he wins this kind of surprising victory. The Republicans,
Speaker 1: the Democrats hate him. But the thing that he makes
Speaker 1: like his central campaign issue is establishing a light rail
Speaker 1: system from Minnesota and like connecting the Twin cities a
Speaker 1: light rail and he has to like go to fucking
Speaker 1: war in order to push this light rail system through.
Speaker 1: But he's like why they have it, which is pretty dope.
Speaker 1: He also overhauls the property tax system to reduce the
Speaker 1: tax burden on poor people, which is also pretty cool.
Speaker 1: He's surprisingly progressive on gay rights for a governor in
Speaker 1: the late nineties early two thousands, and he wrote one
Speaker 1: of them is interesting. I checked in on his opinions
Speaker 1: on some recent stuff because I was like, man, there's
Speaker 1: no way Jesse the body Vanura Ventura has like a
Speaker 1: good take on you know, like the trans you know,
Speaker 1: stuff going around on the right right now. But in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen he actually wrote a whole article on his
Speaker 1: blog about the bathroom bills going around and was like,
Speaker 1: you know, I think this is bullshit. You shouldn't be
Speaker 1: fucking with people like this. Trans people have enough problems
Speaker 1: to deal with. And then he explained that when he
Speaker 1: was a wrestler, he doesn't say who it was, but
Speaker 1: one of his best friends in the WWF was a
Speaker 1: gay guy who had a partner who got really sick
Speaker 1: and he was like and you know, my friend couldn't
Speaker 1: visit his partner in the hospital, and that really broke
Speaker 1: my heart. And it was like the thing that caused
Speaker 1: me to realize, you know, that this was a really
Speaker 1: unjust system. So that's kind of that's that's nice, you know, Jesse. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it gets all right because Jesse also becomes a professional
Speaker 1: conspiracy theorist. At one point he hosts the TV show
Speaker 1: Conspiracy Theory with Jesse van Chia, which is quite charming.
Speaker 1: He also guests on info Wars several times, although this
Speaker 1: is this is during the era when like Gnome Chomsky's
Speaker 1: on Info Wars, so you didn't have to be like
Speaker 1: a howling fascist to be on the show. And he's
Speaker 1: usually talking about so like the specific thing that Jesse
Speaker 1: is really into is the conspiracy the theory that the
Speaker 1: CIA uses HARP, the high Frequency act of Aurural Research
Speaker 1: program to control the weather as like a super weapon.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty funny. Yeah, it's pretty funny. There's some
Speaker 1: like good there's there's a really funny clip from the
Speaker 1: Oh I thought I'd had it in here, but I
Speaker 1: I I, oh wait, no, no, I think it's a ship.
Speaker 2: Uh one s Robert.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I just had I had it in the
Speaker 1: wrong position. So I want to play you a clip
Speaker 1: from or at least force Sophie to play you a
Speaker 1: clip from this this episode of Conspiracy Theory where he
Speaker 1: talks about the CIA weather Control machine. Sophie, will you
Speaker 1: play that first Daily Motion link? Yeah, Glory, that's so funny,
Speaker 1: that's all I wanted to show you. He floats that. No,
Speaker 1: absolutely not.
Speaker 6: So you're saying that this ten dollars bill fell out
Speaker 6: of my pocket, I could go inside.
Speaker 1: That's that's pretty funny, and it's a pretty harmless conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory to believe in. I encountered a conspiracy theory about
Speaker 1: this conspiracy theory on Twitter, and I forgot who told
Speaker 1: it to me. I apologize for stealing from you, but
Speaker 1: it's too fascinating not to say. And this, this guy's
Speaker 1: theory was that Jesse became a believer in like the
Speaker 1: CIA weather control weapon conspiracy theory because he watched an
Speaker 1: old Gi Joe cartoon And yeah, it is true. In
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, the same year that Jesse spent a
Speaker 1: bunch of time bedridden and sick because of his blood clots.
Speaker 1: Gi Joe The Revenge of Cobra, a TV mini series
Speaker 1: aired which focused on a Cobra plot to control the
Speaker 1: world using the weather Dominator. So it is not a
Speaker 1: possible that Jesse's like hallucinating and like sick and thinking
Speaker 1: about Agent Orange when he like flips past this G
Speaker 1: I Joe miniseries on dB.
Speaker 2: It could be for dream of his seers in Vietnam.
Speaker 2: Think of the joy he must feel every day if
Speaker 2: he thinks G I. Joe is real.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Sarge and Slaughter was in and he probably knows
Speaker 5: Sergeant slaughterforcer with an elbow drop.
Speaker 1: I don't know that we've tested to see if like
Speaker 1: that's not a side effective Agent Orange exposure.
Speaker 5: Is what believing G I Joe is real? Yeah, it's possible, Tom,
Speaker 5: you can't prove it. It's not Listen, if we can't,
Speaker 5: we can't test for stuff. We don't know what we're
Speaker 5: testing for. So the do O D is trying to
Speaker 5: keep a lid on this ship. We got to blow
Speaker 5: it open one of the things that uh, I can't.
Speaker 5: So again, what kind of Jesse being the guy that
Speaker 5: he is, You get a lot of like people who
Speaker 5: kind of just sort of assume, especially because he's been
Speaker 5: on Info Wars that he's like he's in sort of
Speaker 5: the Alex Jones sphere, and that he probably has a
Speaker 5: lot of really bad takes on a lot of things.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say he doesn't have. We all have
Speaker 1: some bad takes, right, but he actually has a lot
Speaker 1: less of them than you'd expect. And I think some
Speaker 1: of like what people expect of him is based on
Speaker 1: shit he did a very long time ago. For example,
Speaker 1: in July of twenty twenty one, a post went viral
Speaker 1: on Facebook with the text Jesse Ventura warned us since
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, which is about the COVID nineteen pandemic,
Speaker 1: and it's a clip from this episode of his show. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's a clip of him in his two thousand and
Speaker 1: nine show being like visiting a Builderberg group meeting and
Speaker 1: being like, they're going to make a bioweapon to kill people, right,
Speaker 1: So you can see how it like, like a lot
Speaker 1: of COVID people will be like Jesse was warning us
Speaker 1: that like the elites were going to make a bioweapon,
Speaker 1: And I can see how seeing that you would assume
Speaker 1: that he was just kind of involved in the anti
Speaker 1: like lockdown anti mask shit. That is not the case,
Speaker 1: and in fact, in October of twenty twenty, Jesse Ventura
Speaker 1: made a public statement claiming that modern America, based on
Speaker 1: his experience in the COVID nineteen pandemic, he believed modern
Speaker 1: America would have lost the Second World War. Quote the country,
Speaker 1: this country sacrificed in World War Two? Do you think
Speaker 1: there would have been any argument over wearing a mask
Speaker 1: for the people of World War Two. I'll tell you,
Speaker 1: if we behave like we are right now, Hitler would
Speaker 1: have won. He'd won because this country won't face any
Speaker 1: type of They don't want to sacrifice. What is wearing
Speaker 1: a mask? That is nothing to do for it to
Speaker 1: be required to do that, And yet we have half
Speaker 1: the country who won't put it on because they got egos.
Speaker 1: We got a president that won't wear one and even
Speaker 1: get sick and he still won't wear one. I'm just
Speaker 1: glad that this generation wasn't around when my mom and
Speaker 1: dad fought in World War Two, because we would have
Speaker 1: lost had we had the same type of response we're
Speaker 1: having today to simple things of sacrificing a little bit
Speaker 1: for the common good.
Speaker 2: That's some real shit there. Yeah, he's not wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean, no, he's very right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But I mean you can look back at like
Speaker 5: the the what they called it, the Spanish flu at
Speaker 5: the beginning of the twentieth century, and there they were
Speaker 5: people who had a similar response back then.
Speaker 1: But sure, his his what he's saying is historically debatable.
Speaker 1: But in terms of like, yeah, what it says about
Speaker 1: him as a person, I think the thing you have
Speaker 1: to conclude really looking into it, which is not to
Speaker 1: say he's not wrong about stuff, but like he's maybe
Speaker 1: he's like up there with you know, one or two
Speaker 1: other people as like the most consistently reasonable politicians with
Speaker 1: meaningful electoral success in the United States just always you know,
Speaker 1: during the invasion of Iraq, he was really consistently anti
Speaker 1: the invasion of Iraq. My favorite Jesse Ventura moment is
Speaker 1: he goes on the view when the stuff about the
Speaker 1: Bush administration's torture policy comes out. He goes on the
Speaker 1: view and they're being like, well, you know, they're saying,
Speaker 1: you know, this is waterboarding. I you know, maybe it's
Speaker 1: not really torture necessarily, and he's like, no, Look, when
Speaker 1: I was in Buds training, we had like, you know,
Speaker 1: capture evasion resistance sort of like training and I got waterboarded,
Speaker 1: and I'll tell you it's torture. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: think Jesse the body Ventura kinda kind of alright, guy.
Speaker 6: Here is a quote I remember from him where like
Speaker 6: someone was snowmobiling in Minnesota and they like crashed through
Speaker 6: the ice on a lake and died. And they came
Speaker 6: to just Eventure, who's the governor at the time. They're like, yeah,
Speaker 6: we need to change the regulations to make like snowmobiling safer.
Speaker 6: And he said where TV cameras could see him. He's like,
Speaker 6: you can't regulate stupidity.
Speaker 2: I mean, those guys the lake and died. God, what
Speaker 2: a normal guy thing to say. As a politician, it is.
Speaker 1: He has a couple of those that. My other favorite
Speaker 1: Jesse moment is when he's governor of Minnesota the state
Speaker 1: of Virginia. Every so often there's this Confederate battle flag
Speaker 1: that got captured by a Minnesota infantry unit during the
Speaker 1: Civil War, and periodically Virginia will be like, please give
Speaker 1: us our flag back, And when they did it to Jesse,
Speaker 1: his response was, why we won it.
Speaker 5: If your response is anything other than to do the
Speaker 5: jerk off motion as far as you possibly can.
Speaker 1: Conquered not stolen motherfuckers. Anyway, that's that's our very long
Speaker 1: jesse the body of the shareed digression, and also how
Speaker 1: Vince McMahon and Hulkogan killed the WWF union. Uh now,
Speaker 1: I feel like this episode is full enough for you all.
Speaker 1: Probably several human beings as a result. Yes, almost certainly, Tom,
Speaker 1: If you're including the lack of medical care as an
Speaker 1: act of murder, I sure am a non zero body count.
Speaker 5: Listen, if Hulkster didn't stop wrestlers from unionizing, we would
Speaker 5: have never got no holts barred, mister Nanny, Suburban Commando,
Speaker 5: none of these things.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, now that you mentioned Suburban Commando, I've come
Speaker 1: back around. Any body count is worth having that movie anyway,
Speaker 1: speaking a body count, I got too high body count. Guys, right,
Speaker 1: why don't you plug your plugables? I don't know where
Speaker 1: I'm going with us. All right, you are right, we
Speaker 1: have murdered scores of people. You know, you could all
Speaker 1: either interpret it as murdered or as sex in the
Speaker 1: way that the kids today are Anyway, that's uh, that's
Speaker 1: gotta do it for all of us here at behind
Speaker 1: the WWF. Yeah, having a having a good day, Tom Sean,
Speaker 1: you got a pluggable to throw up in here?
Speaker 2: Go ahead, tom oh sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: All right.
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Speaker 8: If people liked this episode but said, hmm, there were
Speaker 8: a lot of ads, what could they do about that?
Speaker 1: They could go to Apple Premium and Apple Premium can
Speaker 1: figure out their fucking problems.
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Speaker 8: didn't see it, listeners, but I gave you a really
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Speaker 2: I didn't. I was selling the whole plug.
Speaker 1: Oh thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
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Speaker 2: See, this is what makes you a pro. Really send
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