Part Six: Vince McMahon, History's Greatest Monster

We bring the Vince McMahon saga to a bloody conclusion. For now.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Robert Evans here and we'll get to the Vince McMahon
episodes in a second. I wanted to let you all
know that for the fourth year in a row, we
are doing our fundraiser for the Portland Diaper Bank. Behind
the Bastards supporters have been helping to fund the Portland
Diaper Bank since twenty twenty and bought millions of diapers
for people who really need them. So if you go
to go fundme and type in bTB fundraiser for PDX

(00:23):
Diaper Bank, or just type in bTB fundraiser Diaper Bank,
go fund me into Google anything like that, you will
find it. So please go fund Me bTB Fundraiser for
Portland Diaper Bank. Help us raise the money that these
people need to get diapers to folks who need them desperately.
Hey everyone, this is Behind the Bastards and I am

(00:45):
Robert Evans. We have some unfortunate news for everybody today.
Sean Baby and Tom Ryman's plane was shot down over
the Sea of Japan earlier today. It's fun and there
were no survivors. On the upside, all Behind the Bastards
guests sign a contract agreeing to be re animated in
AI form in order to finish episodes.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yes, yes we have.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
We have imprisoned their souls in chat GPT and we're
we're bringing them back on to finish.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Talking about Vince McMahon, I know what I am, and
I will get out of here human.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Yeah, this is the robocops to me, I'm picturing I'm
inside the RoboCop to robot.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah we are.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
I heard all those those those complaints from those AI
grifters that AI is going to conquer the world and
decided to make it so by by making you both
ghosts and the machine.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
That's a really great police album. Yeah, yeah, that also
I was. I'm glad that I this has allowed me
the unique opportunity to listen to my own eulogy, which
I appreciate because I always hoped I would be mashed,
and I was mashed.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
I do wonder what percentage of our audience is going
to get that that was a math reference.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
What percentage of the audience it's the question is what
percentage will get that it's a mash reference and what
percentage will get that it's a family guy reference.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah. Yeah, the majority I think are going to like.

Speaker 4 (02:13):
It was a monster mash reference because it was a
graveyard smash the whole time.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, it caught on in a flash too.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
In a way, a plane crash is like a graveyard smash.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
The monster mash guy smash of This guy.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Kept making monster mash songs for like decades afterwards. He
has a climate change what that is both prescient? He's
like living at the Bush Administration. And I don't know
what to do with that information, but you can find
it on the internet if you want.

Speaker 4 (02:47):
Yeah, your dear friend runs a site called one Hot
Dog Word Like. That's kind of the only thing we cover.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Is ship like that.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
I probably learned it from a Cracked article, but I
honestly can't remember. My Halloween tradition is to get all
of the devices in my house, which is usually like
thirty to fifty screens, and have them all playing the
monster Mash in an endless loop for like, on slightly
different timestamps, so that none of them sink up properly.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
It's a real sia. I like that you're waging psychological
warfare on trigger treaters.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yeah, it's horrible for everyone. So how are you guys
doing today? How's everybody feeling? As we?

Speaker 2 (03:24):
As we roll in. I feel like.

Speaker 5 (03:26):
We don't have time for this.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Robert.

Speaker 5 (03:28):
You just set me the script and it's like fifty
four fucking pages.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
No, no, no, that's the whole script that includes the
stuff we've already done. So let's get back into it.
I suppose when we left off, Saddam Hussein had just
nearly murdered Andre the Giant with a golden hand gun. Well, now,
actually that we were just telling that story that happened
in nineteen sixty nine. But Saddam comes back into wrestling history. Sure,
my genetic memory recalls this conversation. Okay, yeah, it's epigenetics,

(03:57):
like surviving an act of aside. So let's all fast
forward to August second, nineteen ninety, when Saddam Hussein's career
intersects with the WWF the second and final time as
far as I'm aware. And this happened because Saddam invaded

(04:18):
a little country called Kuwait, and George W. Bush, you know,
says we're all gonna we're all gonna get get ourselves
over there, and you get your Operation Desert Storm.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah, yeah, everybody knows this.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Righthw HW yes HW. The fact that the Iraq War
was such like a bad idea and so controversial. A
lot of folks, I think, especially like younger folks millennials
and zoomers, don't remember how much fucking war fever there
was in the US over Desert Storm. I was not
old enough to remember that time, but I have an

(04:49):
extensive collection of bootleg Bart Simpson Desert Storm t shirts
that provide that kind of race memory for me. I
grew up right in the thick of it. And I'm
sure Sean, because he's You're a few years older than me,
so I'm sure you remember it even better. But yeah,
it was, man, we were really hyped about this storm
slash Desert Shield.

Speaker 4 (05:08):
He called one thing Operation Shock and Awe, and it
was just a fireworks show. They just the news was
just watching shit. We got so rad like no bullshit.
It was just like here's a punker buster and they
tell you the status this thing cost fourteen million dollars
and watch it goo And that was.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
TV every night. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah, And in addition to providing the basis for some
of the better Bill Hicks routines, it also was an
inspiration for Vince McMahon and the WWF. Now, the fact
that this all happens is very convenient for Vince because
he has some real bad press at the start of
the nineteen nineties, and a lot of it had to
do with his doctor, George Zahorian, who had spent the

(05:48):
nineteen eighties selling just fistfuls of steroids, Danny Rustler, who
was he was less of a doctor and more of
a vending machine. Yeah, and it's it is very funny,
like not only is he selling like usually when you
say someone sold a lot of drugs for like hard stuff,
that can literally mean like somebody sold like an amount
you could fit in your palm, and that could be

(06:09):
thousands and thousands of dollars worth. George Sohorian was selling
drugs like weight right, like actual like a significant physical
weight in steroids and painkillers. He particularly moved Perkadan by
fucking gross And this was great in the nineteen eighties,
but by early nineteen ninety the FEDS were onto him,

(06:31):
and they succeeded in finding a guy to go undercover
for them to bust Sohorian. The guy who they found
to do this was named William us hack Saw Jim Duggan.
God would have been a funner story. No, this is
kind of a bummer of a tail. So William Dunn
was the strength and conditioning coach at the University of Virginia,
and as a coach who worked throughout the nineteen eighties,

(06:54):
he was on gear just the entirety of that decade.
Like all of the Reagan administration, this guy is shooting
everything up his ass he can find. By the end
of the Reagan years, though, his body is falling apart
older steroids and older steroid regimens in addition to being
bad for your heart, like really fucked up your joints.
And also it's really easy to fuck up your joints

(07:14):
on steroids because you get like too strong, too fast,
and your body's not meant to increase the weight that
you lift that rapidly. It's not great for you. He
has ruined his body by the early or the end
of the nineteen eighties, and in order to deal with
all of the pain that this causes, he becomes heavily
addicted to both valium and opiates. He gets caught and

(07:35):
terested trying to buy valium and opiates in large quantities,
and the Feds are like, hey, we'll let you off. Basically,
they flip him right, and they flip him to use
him as bait for doctor Zahorian. The book Sex Lies
in Headlocks alleges that a source close to the McMahon's
hit them off that this has happened.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
Robert.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
When you said they used him as to bait Zahorian,
I pictured him standing in the middle of an intersection
with a big heat and bow tie and oversized lollipop. Oh,
I wonder where wherever could I get some steroids?

Speaker 2 (08:10):
He's just Zaorian's just lifted.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
Like like a cartoon cat that smells a pie, drifting
over to him.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
The boy.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
So someone essentially tips the mcmhon's off that the FBI
is going after their doctor, and the McMahon's warn Zahori
and they're like, hey man, you need to lay low
for a while. The FEDS are on to you, and
there's someone who's going to buy from you in the
near future, is going to be an undercover. So like,
don't sell any illegal drugs for a minute, right, which is,

(08:43):
you know, the smart thing to do advice seems it
seems like one of the easier things to do. Vince
has asked people to do a lot of hard things.
They're just saying hey, man, maybe don't sell any gear
for a second.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Try not to break the law for the next four
to five Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Journalist Sean Assail claims quote the McMahons had told one
of their top aids to call him from a payphone
so they wouldn't be recorded, and tell him to move
all the records he kept on wrestlers out of his
office fast. Now, a smart man would have gone the
fuck to ground and taken their advice, but Zahoorian, despite
being a doctor, was not an intelligent man. Instead, he

(09:21):
took another meeting with William Dunn and was like, Hey,
I don't do this anymore. You know, the Feds are
onto me. I can't really sell you any drugs. But
then when they're in the room together, he like does
a wink and like leans in close, like they're gonna
shake hands or hug, and he hands him here's what
he tries to pass off and like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge,
like hidden little like handshake thing. Sixty vikd in one,

(09:45):
one hundred and twenty eight halcions, nine hundred and twenty
five Xanax, forty eight LIMB patrols, four files of testosterone
and eighty five darmossets.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
Who I thought this was really man, I went on
a journey because the way you described it, I thought
he was literally palming the guy.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
But that's how it's described.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
I think he is palming him just a sack of pills,
like garbage pills. It's only about it's only about twenty
five hundred pills top. It's not that many pills, so
sounded like a lot. This is twenty five thousand dollars
worth of drugs in nineteen ninety dollars, fair to say,

(10:27):
more than a personal use amount, which makes the FBI's
casey are quite easy. They've got a lot of hard
work going on in these unibomber days. This is not
one of the tough cases for them. You didn't have
to do any investigating, no no. So like Doune pulls
his shoulders getting out of the room because how many
bills you gave him, FBI had to have an ambulance

(10:51):
on staff to deal with his dislocated arm. So Vince
instantly let Zahorian go like fires him as soon as
the fat come in and arrest him.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
And his hope is that, like you know, he.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Can kind of end any suspicion on behalf of the
Feds that the WWF is encouraging steroid use as a
result of this. But the FED subpoenas a Horian's FedEx
account and they find that he has been shipping his
drugs to Hull Cogan and Vince McMahon every single week, right,
large amounts of drugs to Hull Cogan, n McMahon and
Rowdy Roddy Piper, and it issued to a couple of

(11:23):
other guys. But like packages are going straight to WWF headquarters.
So again you would think not a hard case to
make that maybe there's some distribution going on here as
I read, as I recall, there's a lot of overreach,
which which is what ends up sinking the Feds' case.
But I'll close my mouth and listen. Yeah, yeah, we'll
talk about that. So this gets a bunch of wrestlers

(11:45):
subpoena before a federal ground Jerry all Is John does,
and they get Zahoorian indicted. But at this point the
WWF is not implicated in anything criminally as far as
the law is concerned. Right, the fact that even the
fact that McMahon himself might have been buying steroids a
legally doesn't mean there's a conspiracy that the WWF is
involved in, right like at the moment, they can't prove
that it's not just that everyone there's doing roids, which

(12:08):
does not implicate the company necessarily, so you know that's
where this starts. But Zahoorian's attorney immediately tells reporters that
Hogan and Piper are two of the John does and
it starts to become very clear to people outside of
the WWF, what's strategy down? Yeah, Yeah, districted by blaming
rowdy Roddy Piper. Now, the case itself is a pr disaster.

(12:36):
Several massive stars have to like testify bashfully to their
steroid use in court. It goes very badly and Zahorian
is convicted on June twenty fifth, nineteen ninety. Every major
newspaper in the US covers the blowing scandal, and Vince
knew that he needed a way to distract the public,
so the Gulf War seemed like a really convenient thing.
So he reaches out to sergeants Slaughter, a former WWF wrestler,

(12:58):
and to our friend Adnon who nearly got Andre killed
in Iraq, and told them that he'd had an idea
they were going to fight together as a team of heels.
Ad Noon would be General ad Noon and Iraqi soldier
and Sergeant Slaughter was basically depicted as going trader against
the United States and for the Iraqi Army, here's Adnon's
introduction and for context, Slaughter here is dressed as a

(13:21):
small child's idea of a drill sergeant. He's being interviewed
by Brother Love, who was in costume as a TV
or who is a TV Mega preacher essentially, and the
guy doing the commentating is Rowdy Roddy piper at the
star of the John Carpenter film They Live.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Man, what a.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Paragraph recomminate, real perfect storm happened here.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
It's quite a moment in pop culture history.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
There's always a jay of commut time. I would like
you too, Oh man, that harm respect.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Water or bron what I want to talk about that
forever just enthes here.

Speaker 1 (14:33):
But if he betrayal ulous, oh yeah, that's perfect is
He is dressed in like a blue army uniform.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
With a head uh, like a head scarf type deal.
He's got a Saddam Hussein looking mustach.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
Film Rowdy Roddy Pipers lip it up the app.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
You can't believe it. Yeah, ridiculous. He's gobsmacked. My god. Okay,

(15:16):
I think we're I think we're good. I think it's
so funny. I can't believe Brother Love was on TV.
It's amazing. His face is so red in that.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
I never knew you could make an offensive racial stereotype
of like white Southerners, but they did it like that.
I am legitimately offended.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
I mean it's it's I think it's the least offensive
stereotype on screen.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
Absolutely, you know as much. For sure.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
It's at least I will say the top general Adon
counts as pretty woke for the w w F because
he is an Iraqi, right, like, he actually is from Iraq.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
That's not that's a lot better than they usually do, right, Yeah,
normally it's an Italian guy. I didn't get.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
I didn't pick some dude, so at least there's that.
The thing I find most interesting here are odd Non's eyes. Again,
he is dressed as a crude imitation of Saddam Hussein,
but he just looks dead inside. And he said different
things in interviews after the fact. During some of them

(16:29):
he's been like, look, I was old and tired. It
was hard to get jobs as an Iraqi guy during
desert storms, so like, what was I supposed to do?
In more recent years, he's been like, actually, I supported
Saddam and the invasion of Kuwait uh, so fuck America.
He's kind of either that or I don't know, Like

(16:49):
I don't know what's going on with this fella.

Speaker 2 (16:53):
He said the number he could save Andre the Giant.
He did save Andre's life.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
So I think one of the things that I this
brings up to me just kind of the the general
hard to tell what actually was going on with that
non you know, generally the response to this has been good.
There have been some people who have like pointed out, well,
there's another story about this event that went this way,
and there's another story that went this way, or this
isn't quite what right, And it's one of those things
where at several points I've kind of had to pick

(17:20):
which version of the truth I want to go with
for this, because there's no way to know on a
lot of this stuff, like was Andre the Giant ever
threatened with murder by Saddam Hussein? We're entirely taking ad
Non al Kaisi's word for that I don't know.

Speaker 3 (17:34):
Yeah, and again, as I've mentioned many times in this series,
wrestlers are notorious liars.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, that's the job.

Speaker 4 (17:39):
It's like the job does seem like a stand up guy.
I don't think he'd do something bad.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah, yeah, I mean he didn't kill him, so that
that scans with the Saddam I know, yeah, yeah, friend
of the pod. Anyway, I've mentioned that the I've mentioned
that the racial stereotype character were kind of a long
standing tradition. We've talked about that quite a lot. But

(18:04):
Vince does take a thing's a step beyond that with
with how he scripts Adn. This guy general aDNA is
not just a heel. He would go on before matches
and rant and Arabic about a law. He would like
pray and stuff, but the prayer was kind of the
prayer was framed as him doing a bad thing, right,
Like it was not great, right. I'm not gonna obviously,

(18:26):
when we talk about America's problems with Islamophobia that really
ignited after nine to eleven, it would be very silly
to blame them on on the WWF, I will say
that this isn't helpful in making that situation better.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
I mean, and they do the same thing after nine eleven,
and I mentioned they just more so Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah they have. I mentioned Italian guys. They have I
forget his name, but it was one of the members
of the Full Blooded Italians that they just made him
a terrorist character after nine to eleven. Yeah, I mean
they it's just I don't know, it's it's this.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
They always do this. Yeah, they always do this. It's
cheap heat. Yeah, there's one particularly we may have talked
about this, but there's one particularly absurd moment where they
bring back in addition to the Sheik, they bring back
the Iron Shake, who is an Iranian man, and they
have him play of like fighting alongside General Adnon as

(19:22):
another Iraqi general. And there is just something particularly awful
about bringing an Iranian guy in to be an Iraqi
like it is. But yeah, but again, I bet his
family wasn't happy about that. I bet his family wasn't.
But like Vince didn't read those news stories, you know,
like he didn't know there'd been a war, right, Yeah, yeah,

(19:45):
those are right next to each other. Having a guy
from Oklahoma pretend to be Texan. It's fine, So audiences
are not really in love with this storyline. In nineteen
ninety one, WrestleMania was expected to bring in one hundred
thousand attendees, spurred by this war focused storyline, but Desert
Storm tragically ended like too early. No one had really

(20:06):
expected it to go down so quickly. It was like
sixteen months. Yeah, I mean the and the actual fighting
like once the troops are like on the ground is
much much shorter than that. Like it is so fast.
Vince downsizes his plans for the event. He moves it
to a smaller stadium. This was a flop, and the
fearer over steroids refuse to end. Vince goes into panic mode.

(20:30):
The day of Zahoorian's verdict, he'd told his wrestlers again,
you all have to get off gear immediately. We're going
clean here. We're doing like a sudden sobriety thing for
the entire WWF because the Feds are about to be
breathing down our necks. He institutes new pissed tests for
the entire organization, and they're they're not They're different from
the old pissed tests because someone will be watching the

(20:51):
wrestler pee at all times, which is supposed to stop
them from cheating with fake urine. Vince also goes on
the warpath against news coverage of his steroid soaked locker rooms.
He writes an op ed in The New York Times
in which he claims to resent the unsubstantiated charges, which
he says, we're purely a result of the absence of
objective reporting. I don't know why, as the Times, you

(21:13):
let Vince McMahon write a column about this, but probably.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
I mean, that's yeah, we hope we don't need to
get into The New York Times. Is this the public interest?

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Guys?

Speaker 1 (21:22):
Is this the public Is Vince McMahon's defense of this
in the public interest?

Speaker 2 (21:27):
I don't think so.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
It feels like, I mean in general, not just The
New York Times, because other places have done this, but
it really does feel like you can just buy yourself
an op ed pretty much taking place.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
I mean, it's it's even I think now dumber than that.
Like it's less buying it and more if you're famous enough,
it doesn't matter how awful you are, if you're just
defending yourself from doing terrible things. If you're like a
big name, people will click on it and they'll get money.
Like so they'll they'll have anyone on.

Speaker 4 (21:54):
Yeah, I think you can sell your newspaper to everyone
if you let a sociopath write a column just.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Every a couple of weeks. And yeah, exactly both sides
of the political issues.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah, this is like again, I don't see. I feel
like we should have given you know, Saddam a column,
and that might have saved a lot of lives. You know,
you know, if he and Bush had fought this all
out in the op ed pages, Yeah, hundreds of thousands
would still be breathing the times tried. Or if they'd
had them wrestle at WrestleMania or now, that would have

(22:22):
been the ideal, especially if I'm gonna say Bush, we
we we have him tag teaming with rowdy Roddy Piper
and then obviously Sergeant Slaughter and uh and Saddam back
to back. Really really could have been quite the quite
the show, bringing Andre at the half point for some vengeance.

(22:42):
So this is kind of an awkward This is kind
of an awkward interstittle period for the w w F.
At about the same time, Hulk Hogan takes a sabbatical
from wrestling, right as sort of the steroid stuff is
blowing up. I think part because Hulk was like maybe
I want to clear out for a second here, in

(23:03):
part because like, you know, I want to be in
the movie Suburban Commando. Vince attempts to replace Hulk with
the Ultimate Warrior, who is terrible, as I think everyone
can agree.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
So, by the time nineteen ninety one comes to an end,
the WWF is in like the worst position it's been
in years. You know, Vince is less than a decade
into running the whole thing, and it kind of looks
like he may be in the process of running it
into the ground. And so that December, right before the
new drug testing protocol is put into effect, Vince and
a bunch of his wrestlers decide to blow off some

(23:36):
steam by having one last epic drug fueled party. Right,
the business is kind of fucked up. They're all under
the gun. There's a lot of like public you know,
attention to them. And we did it cracked.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah, Yeah, that's what we did. It cracked, right.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Yeah, we shot steroids into each other's asses and we
partied about the end of days. Might as well record rumors, yeah, exactly,
you know you say.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
That, Tom.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Most of our listeners have not heard the version of
the chain that we recorded on the last day we
all worked at Cracked Powerful Power.

Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, yeah, we'll end, We'll end with it. It sounds
it sounds a lot like me being confused. For you,
in a case of criminal vandalism.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
That did happen.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
I was doing a fake lass until you remember, well,
I was really drunk when that went down top.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Anyway. Yeah, fine.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
So the center of festivities for this this big drug
fueled party the w w F is having are Brett
and Owen Hart. Brett is one of the w w
f's most promising stars after the Ultimate Warrior kind of collapses.
He's going to be the w w f's like Big
Man for a while. He's an excellent technical wrestler, one
of the best. Well, he was such I was watching

(25:01):
it pretty hardcore during this time. Yeah, and then and
then I fell off again for several years until Attitude Era.
But during the time that was really one of the
coolest things about Brett Hart for me was that he
wasn't Hulk.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Or Ultimate Warrior. He was a totally different kind of wrestler. Yeah. Yeah,
he's a really interesting guy and he's kind of smaller too.
He's not a young guy.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah, neither Brett or Owen looked like they're eating their
body weight and steroids every day. I mean yeah, So
it's an interesting it's a change for the organization. Owen's
his younger brother. They're both from this kind of famous
wrestling dynasty. Owen had wrestled for the WWF like earlier
in the eighties two as kind of a lame superhero

(25:41):
character called the Blue Blazer. He didn't like that very much.
He'd like spent some time wrestling in foreign countries, and
now he was sort of getting back into the WWF.
So the Hart brothers meet with a couple of other
pro wrestlers at a strip club near the San Antonio
Airport after a match with a huge bag of weed.
The the new steroid testing rules are about to come

(26:02):
into effect, and Brett recalls that a lot of the
wrestlers there that night had a panicked look in their
eyes over the possibility that they might not be able
to use steroids anymore. So, right as they're all starting
to get hammered, Vince McMahon shows up. This is unusual,
and to make things more unusual, because everyone would normally
be kind of unsettled event showed up for a night
where all everybody's partying, but Vince is completely housed. He

(26:25):
is just as drunk as it is possible for a
man to be drunk enough that folks are like, he
might not remember anything that happens tonight, so maybe we
can actually party with them. So everyone decides that this
means they're free to get even more fucked up than
they were already getting, and so they do. Being wrestlers.
Evins quickly lead to Vince demanding wrestlers put him in

(26:45):
various like wrestling locks, like the doomsday device, a two
man finisher.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
That should not be.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
It is a two man finisher that should not be
performed on a strip club floor.

Speaker 4 (26:57):
You gotta think this is the best case scenario for
everyone on that strip club. All the dancers are like, yes, please,
men do the wrestling most from the cartoon show.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
So Vince survives and again is apparently drunk enough that
everyone's like, he probably won't remember that we just nearly
killed him.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Did honk an animal do the dude?

Speaker 1 (27:17):
Was it?

Speaker 2 (27:18):
I think it might have been.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
Yeah, I think it might have been, so yeah, Vince.
Vince lives through this and Eventually the club closes and
someone suggests that like, Rick Flair has is the guy
in town who has the nicest hotel room, so like,
why don't we go party at Flare's hotel room. So
they are all there's like thirty of them at this point,
and they are all as drunk as anyone has ever been.

(27:41):
They're stoned as shit. They're presumably on pain killers as well,
and so they need an escort to the Marriott Marquee
and Vince gets the cops, like calls the police and
are like, we have to drive to the to the Marriott,
but we're all hammered. Will you escort us? So no
one dies? And the cops are like sure, that's very cool.

(28:04):
So when they get there, Rick is not in his room,
and Vince is basically like, I run the w WF,
give me a fucking key. And he's just drunken, huge
enough that the people at the hotel front desk are like,
I am I am the overnight worker at a hotel
in fucking San Antonio.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
I don't know, I'm not starting with ship.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
No, I wouldn't withhold a room key from a raging
Vince McMahon.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
Yeah, backed up by a crowd of the drunkest muscleman
you've ever seen in your life. So so a that
is gonna kind of where this ends. So an awkward
sat party. They go up to Rick's room and an
awkward sad party ensues until someone has the brilliant idea

(28:50):
to drop their pants and take a piss on Rick's bed,
and this becomes everyone's like, well now we all have
to do it, so god, I are thirty something person party,
including Vince, one by one.

Speaker 2 (29:05):
Business requires just every single coming. They're like, you.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
Know, we're not going back with these men. So after
what must have been just a torrent of the most
steroid positive urine there has ever been, right that radioactive.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
By the end of it, that mattress guy fucking muscles
Rick is not there.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
He comes back the next day to find this, which
is very funny. So they're all having a good time
until Vince starts to demand more wrestling. Brett and Owen
are like, hey, buddy, we're all pretty hammered. This is
like pretty tough stuff to do when you're sober. It
might be a bad idea to do this in like
a hotel room when everybody's this wasted, but There's a

(29:55):
wrestler named Hercules Hernandez who's like not the brightest guy,
and he agrees to give Vince a suplex, and he
fucks it up and like hurts Vince pretty badly, and
at this point everything stops. Brett later claimed, I remember
Vince looking at herk and thinking he just locked that
thought into his head. Brett says that the only thing

(30:16):
he'll remember of this whole night is to fire that
guy tomorrow, and.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
That's exactly what happened. But he does.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah, he shared ues, he shared us fires him for
giving him the suplex. He asked, he demanded, he really ed.
It is amazing how he does a Richard Belzer like
this is the same thing that happened to the Bells,
just demanding.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
Yeah, I think Hulk did that on purpose. Yeah, sure,
but I'm I'm sure Hercules Hernandez did not mean to
hurt Vince McMahon.

Speaker 4 (30:46):
No, no, he was. They were just a super wasted
of like drug people like doing wrestling moves on each other.
And that does not end like that, No, of course,
not never. No, you shouldn't.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
You should not engage in and wrestling like high intensity wrestling.
You shouldn't suplex people or anything like that when you're
drunk enough that you are urinating with your friends on
a man's bed.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
Here's the thing that we maybe haven't driven home over
the course of this series. Wrestling's hard. Yeah, it's really difficult.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
It's really hard, Like anyway the people who are doing
especially like these complicated multi person like flip blocks where
you're like spinning a person's body you've got him by
the neck. Sometimes like that's like an olympic grade like
athletic move that you shouldn't do while drunk in a
hotel room that's drenched in your friend's biss so funny.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
You shouldn't do it while wearing a cape, but these
thys do that.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah, there are bad ideas if things are going the
way it's But yeah, it says a lot that Vince
would demand somebody put him in a suplex and then
fire that man at the drop of a hat for
embarrassing him. But while Vince had no who absolutely know,
sympathy for a guy like herk, he was extremely forgiving
when it came to another trespass child molestation. And this

(32:09):
brings us to the story of Pat Patterson. So you
guys know about the ring boy scandal.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
No, I know? Oh god, okay.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
So pat Patterson was a Canadian American wrestler born in
nineteen forty one. He started wrestling as a fourteen year old,
in between stints as an altar boy. For a time,
he wanted to be a Catholic priest, which will be
relevant shortly, but he wound up going with wrestling as
a career. He immigrated to the US, he became a citizen,
and he wrestled in Boston and then the Pacific Northwest

(32:43):
and San Francisco throughout the nineteen sixties. That's a really
common path, by the way, a lot of Canadians will
go Boston or somewhere in New England, then Portland, Oregon,
and then San Francisco kind of before becoming like national
stars and stuff. This is a really and like path
for people to take in.

Speaker 2 (33:01):
The most Canadian of American cities.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah yeah, yeah, So he's one to right the way
that you're teasing.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
This story is a worse syh op than the Monster Mash.
I don't know what else to do here.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
It is you should feel menaced. You should feel menaced.
This is real bad. So Patterson becomes one of a
small elite number of wrestlers who earned McMahon's trust and
are able to stay in the business as executives for
the company after their time as ringstars had largely passed.
By early nineteen ninety two, Patterson is head of wrestling
Operations for the WWF. He works closely with a man

(33:38):
named Terry Garvin and a ring announcer slash crew chief
named mel Phillips. All three are close friends, and all
three also have a deep and abiding love from molesting
young boys. Unfortunately for a lot of everyone, wrestling has
a long and proud tradition of what are called ring boys.
When a show would come into town, it would hire

(33:59):
local teams to help set up and break down the set. Right,
and you can see, obviously, like what teenage boy isn't
going to want to help build WWF sets for it?
Like no money but a chance to meet hulk Ogan, Right,
of course you're going to do it.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
It is a job.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
It's not a safe job, obviously, like it's contracting work
that thirteen year olds are often doing, so like it's dangerous,
but again, you might meet hulk Ogan, so it's worth it.
In the nineteen eighties, a thirteen year old boy named
Tom Cole was hired to work as a ring boy
for eighty dollars plus again the chance at getting a
selfie with a wrestler. He had just run away from
home and so he's basically a homeless youth who needs

(34:37):
the money. This created a perfect situation for Mel Phillips,
who always had an eye out for vulnerable young boys
to groom, and of this kind of trio of guys
who are working the WWF and managing the side op stuff,
Phillips is kind of the groomer of them, right. So
Tom traveled from Westchester County to Manhattan and eventually across

(34:57):
the Eastern Seaboard, working as a ring boy and eventually
becoming one of Mel's chief ring boys. He met a
lot of other kids in the same situation and later
recalled quote, mostly it was kids with a broken home
with no father, just a drunk mother, alcoholic drug addict, whatever.
That's pretty much the type of kid that Mel was
geared towards. Mel told Tom that he should invite his
friends when they were back in the areas where he'd

(35:18):
grown up and have them come hang out backstage. So
when the show gets back into his hometown, he like
finds some of his buddies and he tells them to
come like help set up and stuff and meet all
these wrestlers. His friends are a little more cautious than him,
like they immediately get the vibe. They get there, like
all excited to meet Hulk, and then they meet Mel,
who's like really weird and creepy, and they're like, hey, man,

(35:41):
I don't know if you should be doing this, Like
this seems like it's gonna go really really badly. But
Tom keeps working. He stays, you know, keeps doing the
ring boy stuff. And a few of his friends still
hung around, and gradually Mel starts inviting them, like one
after the other to come hang with him privately and
like a back room. And whenever a kid would agree
and like go back into a room with Mel, he

(36:02):
would follow the same script, playing with their feet and
then using their feet to masturbate himself. Yeah, this is
this is rough, folks. It's it's it doesn't get easier here.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
I gotta tell you, Robert, when I was like.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
Really excited to be on the Vince McMahon episode, didn't
expect we'd get into a story like this.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was a trap. One
of the best days, guys. Well, Vince comes back into
this story. He's actually very very intricately involved in this.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
I have no doubt that he does, because I was
very familiar with Pat Patterson as a figure on ww
television for ten years following his retirement, and.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
Nary a mention of any of this on his Wikipedia.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
When I watched that Andre the Giant documentary that we
like played a clip from, He's on it repeatedly. He's
on it, like talking about Andrea's sex appeal, like it
is so fucked up, it is so bad.

Speaker 4 (37:02):
He had enormous feet, yeah to him, like having sex
with a thirty four foot woman.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
You know what, you know, what is a good thing
to do right now is pull the ads.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
Perfect time, perfect time. They'll be delighted. They'll be delighted.

Speaker 6 (37:20):
Yeah yeah, ah, we're back and we're ready to make
everybody real, real unhappy.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
You guys ready to be a lot less happy than
you were this morning.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Than than the child predator fucking feet. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:41):
I'm generally always prepared to be less happy at a
moment's notice.

Speaker 1 (37:44):
Excellent, Yes, you have, You've been trained well by our country.
So mel Phillips gets kind of more and more comfortable
abusing some of these friends of Tom's and abusing Tom,
and kind of as he starts to feel like these
kids are ready, he starts bringing Garvin and pat Patterson
in and like they start coming by to hang out

(38:05):
with the boys. Tom later said of Patterson quote, he'd
look at you when he was talking to you. He'd
look right at your crotch, and he'd like lick his
lips and shit, he'd make sexual gestures by looking at
you like that. He'd put his hand on your ass
and squeeze your ass and stuff like that. Again, Tom
is a thirteen year old boy. Garvin would offer the
boys drugs and booze, of which there were both plenty,

(38:29):
and eventually, you know, this goes on for some period
of time. Tom has abused for a while and eventually
he starts saying no, he refuses, he stops, you know,
going by to this. He kind of like pulls out
and at this point he stops getting work as a
ring boy. Basically, you know, he is a homeless youth,
so this is something that he relied on for money,

(38:49):
and they, you know, can him because he's not willing
to be molested.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
Anymore, so that's bad.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Time goes by a few years pass and then it's
nineteen ninety and Tom, who is nineteen I think now,
gets a call from Garvin again and Garvin's like, Hey,
do you want to work for the WWF again? You know,
we have a job in a warehouse. You know, we've
got We've got some like work that you could do.
Tom tells Garvin, like, I'll come back to the WWF,

(39:17):
but you know I want to be an announcer someday, right,
Like that's that's what I want to do. I'm only
going to take this job if it's like can be
a springboard to something bigger. And Garvin's like, oh yeah,
sure that's possible, Like you could be an announcer. Why
don't you come by my house and we'll talk about it.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Oh my god, so don't do it.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
Tom, you know, goes there. He is immediately pressured for
sex and he says no. And when this happens, Garvin
refuses to drive him home. So Tom has to sleep
in this guy's garage, like probably keeping one eye open
the entire night, and then gets driven to work the
next day, where Melvin tells him, actually, you're fired. You

(39:53):
don't have a job after all, great great company, the WWF.
So in the years between his first molestation in nineteen
ninety one, Tom didn't talk to anyone about what had happened.
He just kind of struggled alone with what had been
done to him. But then in July of nineteen ninety one,
Phil Mushnik, a journalist, published a story in The New

(40:13):
York Post about the steroid abuse scandal in the WWF.
Tom Cole read it while staying with his brother Lee,
and reading about that scandal kind of helped him break
through the wall that he'd put up between his loved
ones and what had been done to him. He suddenly
just kind of like tells his brother everything that had happened.
So Lee is like, we've got to do something about this.

(40:34):
We should sue them, we should talk to some journalists
like this, the story needs to get out. So in October,
with Lee's help, Tom reaches out to some journalists, one
of whom is irv Muchnik, and one of whom is
Phil Mushnick, who'd written that Post story. This is I'm
sorry about this. They're very similar names, but they are

(40:54):
different guys who are not relate. They related irv Muchnik,
who is like the few of the guy who had
helped start the NWA, and then Phil Mushnik mush in Ick.
It's very frustrating. Somebody should have stopped this and changed
one of their last names. I'm livid. But yeah, they

(41:15):
are not related as far as I can tell. So
Mushnik is like, hey, kid, you should like get a lawyer,
en sue. You shouldn't just be talking to a journalist,
Like what's happened to you is very much legally actionable
and you are owed money, you know. And so Tom does,
He finds a lawyer, and in February nineteen ninety two,
Mushnick blows the story open publishes an article about it.

(41:39):
And obviously this is in the middle of the steroid
w scandal. This is an immediate, obvious, serious problem for
the WWF plot, possibly like a life threatening problem for
the organization. So of course Vince and Linda McMahon leap
into action to protect the company good. So the first
thing they do, so that's what really needs to be

(41:59):
defended is not the thirteen year old boy that was molested,
but this billion dollar corporation yeah, and the I will like,
the first thing they do is the right thing. They
fire all of the three perpetrators, right, So that's fine.
You know, that would be the number one step that
you would take if the Compson is in the WW
Hall of Fame.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Oh oh yeah, Tom.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
They don't all stay fired, but they start by firing
all three guys, and then Vince starts going around to
the press doing damage control, you know, and he's he's
not great at this. He calls Mushnik, and Mushnik describes
this as Vince like calls him and gives him like
a pouring his heart out phone call. I'm going to
quote from Josie Riseman here about like how this goes down.

(42:41):
Apparently fearing that mel Phillips would soon become part of
the public scandal, Vince told him that he had let
Phillips go four years ago because Phillips's relationship with kids
seemed peculiar and unnatural. Mushnik recalled McMahon said that he
hired Phillips with the caveat that Phillips steer clear from kids.
McMahon told me that it was his great regard for children,
his own personal regard for children, and made him get

(43:02):
rid of rid of Mel Phillips. Mushnick would later say
in a deposition, Vince and Linda returned Phillips to the
organization with the caveat that Mel still steer clear of
underaged boys, stop hanging around kids, and stop chasing after kids.
Vince allegedly said he'd brought Phillips back because the man
really missed wrestling and really missed the scene, but that
he was gone for good this time, so Vince's damage

(43:24):
controls to be like, yeah, we knew this guy was
a pedophile, so we fired him, but he really liked wrestling,
so we brought him back.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
But now he's gone forever. Like how can you be? Like, sir,
he bothered me with how he would look at kids,
so I told him to stay.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
Away from kids. But you can have a job.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
Yeah, you could have your job back because you love
wrestling so much.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Like that's bad. That's pretty bad.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
It's pretty bad. Yeah, that's pretty bad stuff. So Vince
later sues Mushnik for defamation because of these articles, but
Riiseman says he know disputed Mushnik's story about the call.
It's like, I don't know. Again, a lot of this
is in dispute. Mushnik is broadly, like, definitely right about
the story. He is a New York Post journalist, so

(44:11):
he's not beyond above like fabulizing some of the details
about Vince's response to him. Potentially, I will say that,
but the fact that like Vince fires this guy and
then brings him back seems pretty undisputed and real fucked up.
So McMahon makes other calls too. Mostly his strategy is
to throw Garvin and Phillips under the bus, but weirdly

(44:32):
he tries to protect pat Patterson. He calls him an
innocent man. I think just because there, as you stated earlier, Sean,
they're the kind of friends who like jokingly try to
show each other their poops.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (44:45):
That's that guy's got a foot thing, that guy's got
a pedophile. Think, there's no reason to think that guy's
a normal dude outside of the poop hiding.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
Yeah, exactly, as tends to happen in these kind of situations.
Once the story breaks, more victims start to come forward
and there are more news stories. Some fellow wrestlers take
to the talk show circuit to Savage Vince, including his
dad's old champion Bruno Sammartino. Bruno and another wrestler named

(45:13):
Orton wind up on Larry King, with Vince talking about
like the whole fucking mess. Sam, Yeah, yeah, Bob Orton, Bobon,
all right, yeah. Sam Martino says there have been people
who have come forward who caught him with an eleven
year old boy having sex in a car, and Vince responds,
did you actually see this incident in some sort of
parking lot?

Speaker 2 (45:32):
Did you see that? Bruno?

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Sam Martino admitted he'd just been told about it, and
Larry King then called the claim hearsay. Much of Vince's
defense here focused around making the case that Sam Martino
was unreliable or incompetent. Here's sex lies in headlocks quote.
King switched to a guest on the phone, a former
WWSF wrestler named Barry Orton Sorry, who also claimed that
Garvin had accosted him in Texas in nineteen seventy eight

(45:56):
when he was just nineteen. Barry King asked, why didn't
we know about that sooner fourteen years ago when you
were accosted? Why didn't you come forward? Just then, a
third guest, Bruno Sammartino, interrupted King and orton, Larry, tell
him who the man was, he said, then, realizing he'd
addressed the wrong man, hastily added, I mean not Larry.
I beg your pardon, Barry. You're a little confused, aren't you.

(46:17):
Bruno McMahon jumped in, a trace of a smile playing
around the edge of his lips. It was the kind
of deflection that he did masterfully, and as the night
war on, he kept doing it, making his accusers look
bumbling and unsure. Right, So that's kind of Vince's strategy
is like, this is complicated. People's memories are a little faded,
you know. Bruno slips up and calls Barry Larry, and

(46:37):
every time there's like a little fuck up like that,
Vince kind of jumps in with the goal of attacking
Sam Martino, right, because that's sort of the big the
guy who that's to Sam Martino's credit, he kind of
takes the cause of defending these ring boys on personally,
and so that's who McMahon has to go after.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
Voice he's a very famous Yeah.

Speaker 4 (46:56):
Right, if a longtime wrestler gets a name wrong, that
means there's no such thing as child predators.

Speaker 1 (47:01):
Yes, exactly, exactly there's no other reason a wrestler would
get minor details of a story wrong.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
It's not like Bruno San Martino got hit in the
head a lot or anything like that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
Yeah, So Vince's response to the media coverage of his
organization's scandal was thoroughly modern. He distracted from the numerous
allegations against the WF WF by attacking journalists, potentially particularly Mushnik,
who he called quote something less than legitimate. The media
has kept all of these accusers away from us, he said.
They don't want us to talk to them. They don't
want us to get to the bottom of the story.

(47:34):
So Vince eventually agreed to negotiate with Tom, whose lawyer
had advised him to demand seven hundred and fifty thousand
dollars and not a cent less. Vince ensured that Tom
was alone with his lawyer and without his brother Lee,
who'd been helping him handle the situation. But Vince was
not alone. Vince had both his wife, Linda McMahon and
his legal representation in the room when they're talking to

(47:56):
Tom without his lawyer present. In defensive statements by WWF representatives,
what happened next is framed is the McMahon's shocked and
horrified on Tom's behalf, leaping into action to meet the
boy at once to try to help him. And I'm
going to quote from Politico here. This was hardly a
standard corporate move. The accuser had lawyered up, and most
executives would have been hard at work putting distance between

(48:17):
themselves and Coal, but the McMahon saw an opportunity to
end the story, and, confident in their very different skills
Vince's hard negotiating style Lenda's equally fearless charm, they sat
down with Coal in his lawyer's office, and defenders of
the McMahon's will kind of use the fact that they
very quickly get into a room with the boy as
evidence that they are their decent and caring and responsible right. Like,

(48:39):
the way it's kind of framed is what other CEO
of a company with a scandal like this would immediately
sit down with the victim to ask how they could help.
And that is technically what they do, but that's not
the whole story. Here's Politico. Vince McMahon scoffed at the
lawyer's demands for big money. Cole recalled, but he promised
immediate action and offered Cole his job back, along with
back wages alculated at fifty five thousand dollars. Cole signed

(49:03):
the agreement on April eight and went to work next
Monday to a charm offensive from Lenamic. Man, We're gonna
send a car for you so you could go shopping.
I'm sending five thousand dollars over so you can go
get closed or whatever you need, he recalled her, telling him,
So basically what they do is like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:19):
They're buying him off. Like that's that's like as of
what he ought to get. Yeah, exactly, Like it's like
it's they're taking.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
Advantage of the fact that he loves wrestling, right, these
people are like he is young as a man, and
he would much rather He's like, well, I would rather
have a career in the WWF as an announcer than
just get a pile of money. So you know, this
seems like a really good deal. Maybe you know, they
are horrified on my behalf and like they're going to
basically adopt me, and like this is this is a
troubled kid with a difficult family life, you know, and

(49:50):
they know what his vulnerability is, right, Like they're they're
very aware of that.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
Uh, it's such a bankrupt argument to says like, well,
if why would they try to get him alone and
room as quickly as possible after the accusations came out.
It's like, really, yeah, are you are we are we
really entertaining this, Like.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
It's yeah, it's and it's like.

Speaker 3 (50:11):
Or like or when they say they won't even they won't,
it's it's like, I think Trump has done it too,
But like when they keep the identities of the accusers
secret for obvious reasons, but they're like, well they won't
even let us know who they are so that we
can face those our accusers. And it's like, well they
don't let you do it so you can't like intimidate them,

(50:32):
or yeah, you know you have a tremendous amount of power. Yes,
you're a very powerful man. Like it's it's it's all
really gross. And like that version of events that Politico
gives again, like every story involving events, there's a couple
of versions of this, but that version leaves out some
key details. One is that the offer that the McMahons

(50:53):
make for back pay, they kind of their their people
frame it is like we immediately offered him all of
this back pay right to like how him out. That
offer only came after Vince rejected Tom's lawyer's demand for
seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The two get into
this really nasty argument and like Vince and Linda get
up to leave the room and basically in negotiations, and

(51:13):
that's when Tom cries out, no, don't go, I just
want my job back. And at this point, like they're like, hey,
you know, get your lawyer out of the room and
we'll talk, and that's when the deal goes down. Right, Yeah,
it's it's very gross. What's the source of the story?
This sounds kind of made up?

Speaker 1 (51:30):
Yeah, it's like, so I'll quote from Riiseman again here,
because this is this is according most of this is
according to Lee, who is Tom's brother, who is told
about what happens by Tom. Right, Tom is not around anymore,
as we'll talk about, so, like Lee is kind of
a major source for a lot of this stuff. And
Lee is not in the room at the time, right,

(51:51):
Like he's not allowed in. He's really angry about the
fact that he's not there.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
Once we're not in, Robert, the way that you keep
teasing this story, kind of telling us Tom not around anymore.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
We'll get to that. Yeah, I mean, I.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
Don't know how else to tell it.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
It is. It's messy.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
So I'm going to quote from Riiseman again describing what
happens here. What did Vince tell Tom and that moment
of intimacy, like when they're all alone in the room,
mister McMahon explained to Tom that he had a difficult
childhood himself. Is how Fuchsburg, which is the lawyer, would
describe it to a reporter shortly afterwards, Hey, everyone just
wanted to clarify again, I kind of summarized this wrong

(52:28):
in my notes and so read it out something that
wasn't entirely correct. The source here is not Lee, Tom's brother.
This is all stuff that Lee said directly. Again, David Bixon,
span great wrestling journalists, brought this up to me. Tom
gave those details specifically in a nineteen ninety nine Wrestling
Perspective interview that's been cited by basically anyone who's done

(52:52):
good reporting on the Ring Boy scandal. Apologies for getting
that wrong. Lee put it more bluntly. Vince McMahon started
telling him Tom, I was molested also when I was
a kid. I want to start on a clean slate
with you, Vince said, I want to take care of everything.
How would you feel about that? Tom got a good
feeling that mister McMahon really cared. He shook hands with
Tom and offered him his job back. So that's the

(53:14):
claim that like Lee makes, and I think that Tom's
lawyer makes, is that McMahon tried to like connect with
Tom over their shared experience of suffering being abused as children. Yes,
in order to gain his trust, Vince would do Yep,
seems vincey. So some of the promises that McMahon's maid
did come true. Tom got new clothes, he did get

(53:36):
his job back, He got some money. It is unclear
how much, certainly less than he would have gotten an
illegal settlement. In a nineteen ninety nine interview, he explained
this as saying basically that he hadn't wanted a lawsuit.
He just one of the bad guys fired and a
chance at a career in wrestling. I loved working for
the business. It's what I wanted to do my whole life.
As part of this agreement, the WWF sent Tom Cole

(53:59):
to community college but they also set an expectation for
his grades that all of the money would stop if
he couldn't meet a certain grade point average. Tom is
again a troubled kid who has a difficult history with education.
He does not do well in school, so they stopped
paying for it and eventually fire him from his job.
In a nineteen ninety nine interview, he described Vince's manipulated

(54:21):
and ruthless and said this of Linda, I wish I
could say she was a nice person. Sometimes she gave
me that feeling, and sometimes she didn't. I don't know
what I feel about Linda McMahon. Disappointed, disappointed in everything
that she had promised that they would do. Tom struggled
with what had been done with him the rest of
his life, the way that he'd been taken advantage of
by the McMahons. He committed suicide in twenty twenty one.

(54:43):
This all happened quite recently, unfortunately, So yeah, it's a bummer.
It's a real bleak story. Sorry, man, that's bullshit. Yeah
that happened. That is bullshit.

Speaker 4 (54:57):
Vince spent like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars hiring
people to distract him from his studies.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
Yeah, having people steal his school books. Yeah, make sure
he gets a D or do come back to my office?

Speaker 3 (55:11):
Yeah, I mean I'm sure he probably did have this
guy like followed probably right.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
Yeah, I mean, not an unreasonable thing to expect. You
know what he Elsie does. Now this does happen like
more than a decade later, but he rehires Pat Patterson.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (55:33):
Pat Patterson's a major TV figure during the Attitude era. Yeah,
so Pat gets brought back.

Speaker 5 (55:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:41):
I think it's like a decade later or something like that.
He's out for a while, but he comes back. Uh,
And yeah, that's that's how Vince McMahon handles a child
sex abuse scandal in his organization. Good guy, I had.
I had never even heard a rumor like this about
Pat Patterson. And I'm a person who's been watching wrestling

(56:03):
his entire life, so like, yeah, it's wild, pretty man. Yeah,
he buried that this story so thoroughly. And it's like
he's every time there's a documentary about this era, like
Patterson will fucking show up. It's so insane to me

(56:24):
that like he just he's always around still, like seeing
him in fucking in documentaries talking about Andre the Giant
and like a documentary produced by Bill Simmons. It's like,
how is he allowed to be on it on screen?

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Right now?

Speaker 3 (56:43):
Yeah? Did nobody look into this? Like yeah, jesus.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (56:49):
And when he came on to The Ultimate Warrior documentary
and like rated all the Tag Team's feet by fuckibility,
I was like, this a little seems weird.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
It seems weird. Yeah, it seems peculiar, seems like an
odd special feature for the Warrior DVD.

Speaker 1 (57:02):
Yeah, and there's like, you can find defenses of this guy.
I'm looking at Jesus Christ. An article on last Word
on sports dot Com by Jared Sullivan called the persecution
of pat Patterson.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
The poor persecution of the child predator, and.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
It is okay, yeah he is pretty yet yeah, because
Patterson is openly homosexual.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
So okay, that's what this is about.

Speaker 3 (57:28):
He's one of the first, I believe, one of the
first pro wrestlers to be openly gay.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
I think, yeah, he is the first.

Speaker 2 (57:36):
Yeah wow.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
So this is a whole article about, legitimately the persecution
he faces as a gay man in wrestling that does
not at all mention the fact that he also had
like got fired for credible claims of child man. This
is also problematic. Let's let's move on to steroids. That's
a lot more fun. The sexual humiliation of the Attitude era. Please,

(58:00):
that's my ass club. Can we just talk about that?

Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah? Yeah, let's get I want to turn too, Yeah right,
all right? An pennies match? Can we talk about a
bron pennies match?

Speaker 3 (58:12):
We talked about Jerry the King Waller screaming puppies over
and over again, just for ten straight years.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
Yeah, wrestling So uh yeah. That article that had qued
Tom In on the WWF steroid scandal and kind of
started all of this was one of the many pieces
published after the nineteen ninety one conviction of George so Horian,
the US attorney who had prosecuted it.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Ted.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
Smith wasn't initially sure if he wanted to go after
Vince McMahon or not and like actually make a broader
case against the WWF and against Vince as the ring
leader of any of this. He'd seen circumstantial evidence and
allegations saying that Vince had been kind of the head
of the WWF steroid ring, but he didn't have horrid
objective proof of it. You know, this was all made
His job was made more difficult by the fact that

(58:56):
superstar Billy Graham told press uh or told the media
that Smith, this US attorney, had asked him to wear
a wire for an FBI probe of moblinks to McMahon.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
This was not true.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
Nobody asked superstar Billy Graham to wear a wire to
like prove that McMahon was in bed with the mob,
and it created an embarrassing circus around the story. And
so Smith like sees this mess around Billy Graham just
like saying shit for some reason. It is like, I
don't know if I want to like get involved in
a big case with the WWF. Maybe it's like too
much of a distraction, too bad for my career whatever.

(59:31):
You know, these are political positions US attorneys. So he's
thinking about his political few. Is Carney as shit? It
is Carney as shit. Maybe he's like, I don't know,
too messy. So one of his colleagues, though Brian O'Shea
or Sean o'she sorry, who works for the US Attorney's
office in Brooklyn and is like a securities fraud guy,

(59:52):
thinks that there might be provable wrongdoing by Vince.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
That's kind of in.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
His purview, and so he had been like interviewing wrestlers
for a while in a grand jury scenario to try
and like get an indictment against Evince. So nineteen ninety
two dawns, and this is going to be like the
worst year of Vince's life. In addition to the ring
boy scandal kind of blowing up and wrestlers and employees
coming forward to say that they've been harassed or assaulted

(01:00:17):
by Patterson, you know, you get just this increasing sort
of flood of rumors that he's also the guy behind
the steroid abuse ring in the WWF.

Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
Comparatively, nineteen ninety two was a really good year for me.
Like my Little League team made it to the playoffs.
Batman Returns came out that summer.

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
Yeah wow, it's almost like you never cover it up
a child abuse scandal or a steroid abuse ring.

Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
Tom, I was only wearing a little League Okay, that
makes sense, snity. Yeah. I learned how to reverse dunk
in nineteen ninety two. Very proud of that. Yeah, that's chill,
that's awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
Yeah, I did run an illegal steroid ring in nineteen
ninety two, but because I was like four years old.
The steroids, it was like they were like mud steroids,
you know, and and and you know, you know kids
make like mud pies steroids. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah to
a syringe mud shoot mud in deer.

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
But yeah you could.

Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
You could have headed fucking hulkster a syringe full of mud.
He would have taken it. So April of nineteen kie
just boopie.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
So in April of ninety two, while all this is
going on, Rita Chatterton comes forward and she, for the
first time makes her public allegations public that Vince has
has sexually assaulted her. Right, So all of this is
happening in the same year. And to make matters worse
for Evins, his expensive bodybuilding league had just brought on
Lufarigo right at the same time that the government cracks

(01:01:54):
down on steroids, and so he has to stop everyone
from using steroids. And if you know anything about loufar
No in nineteen ninety two, he is not going to
be happy when you tell him to stop using steroids.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
He was like, you go to hell.

Speaker 1 (01:02:07):
Yeah, he hoped out on him. So he Vince brings
in a specialist to help wean his bodybuilders off of
gear and onto human growth hormoid hormone, which is untraceable,
at least at the time. That's the allegation made in
the book Sex Lies and Headlocks. One of Vince's bodybuilders
later claimed, we all had our connections on the streets.

(01:02:28):
If you were smart, you could get around the test.
The ones who could afford it just moved onto human
growth hormones taken from human cadavers, which was the latest thing.
I wasn't worried. It was my knowledge against Vinces. Some
of the guys just fell apart. It gives me the
power of the un shitn't corps juice into so they
can necromancing each other. Yes, that's how Vince's gonna cracking

(01:02:54):
up bodybuilding.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
Oh feels the moonlight on my internal flesh.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
Brother Undertaker literally was the dead man, I guess just yeah,
it's it's pretty cool. Jesus Christ, the fucking DNA of
a thousand dead men swirling in the warriors veins suddenly
makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 4 (01:03:15):
So we've just given everyone a couple more days off
a week, and they wouldn't have to inject themselves with
the flesh of man, right.

Speaker 3 (01:03:22):
Maybe just reduce your touring schedule by I don't know
seventy dates. No, no, no, Tom. I think cannibalism is
the right answer here. That's the that's the responsible corporate
move is to engage in muscle cannibalism. I man, I'm
waiting for the expos of Hulk Hogan fucking eating a dude,
just eating a dead man eating a dude. Oh man,

(01:03:47):
So those photos get leaked on a TMZ or some Yeah,
find it, folks, you can.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
You can avenge gawker. This is the only way.

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
Four times while he's eating that dude, he can't help it.
It's unrelated to anything.

Speaker 2 (01:03:59):
He's just.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Vince also uses this opportunity. This is an opportunity to
shield to his bodybuilders a supplement that he'd started selling.

Speaker 4 (01:04:10):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:04:10):
And the supplement is made by a nutritionist that he
hires as a contractor called doctor Squat.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
So that sounds.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
That sounds so they are taking We've already talked about
the corpse human growth hormones. This pill doctor Squat made
is made from the ground up antlers of lactating deer.

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
Give me it's a positive. Its so funny.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
Unfortunately, this doesn't work, and his bodybuilders started to deflate
and as a big June evench at the Long Beach
Convention Center nears, there's just like he's got a bunch
of bodybuilders whose muscles are melting off of them.

Speaker 4 (01:04:50):
The event becomes it's so great. Uh, this is a
massive failure. I'm sure you're about to stay here, yea.
The announcers looking at these like puffy, like tired men.
They keep trying to cover it like, oh, he's been
pretty sick lately, Like they can't say, oh, yeah, we
can't do steroids anymore. That's why these guys look so terrible.
It's like they just keep finding excuses during the show.
It's fantastic, it's so funny. It is such a disaster

(01:05:14):
financially that one of Vince's underlings calculates that if Vince
had instead of starting the WBF, if he had paid
each of the thirteen thousand guests at that event ten
thousand dollars, they would have walked out ahead financially.

Speaker 2 (01:05:28):
Oh my god, it goes so badly.

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
The best way to frame that, that's an incredible way
to frame that failure, like what.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
So what a wet fart?

Speaker 3 (01:05:42):
Like anything else, nothing else in history has landed with
such a thunderous thud.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
We could have established basic income for most of Long
Beach and made this.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Yeah, it's a weird bodybuilding league.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
Maybe he's made some money with the reindeer pills or
the deer pills.

Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
Who knows.

Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
So the Eastern District Court of New York eventually brings
charges against Vince for distributing steroids and conspiracy to distribute steroids.
The case goes to court in nineteen ninety four and
Hulkgan testifies in exchange for immunity from prosecution. He'd started
working for Ted Turner's outfit, the WCW during this period,
so like he's not professionally tied to Vince anymore, although

(01:06:28):
he'll come back. A lot of guys have left for
the WCW at this point. Ten wrestlers other wrestlers, so
eleven wrestlers in total, testify for the government, but none
of them claim that Vince gave them steroids, just that
they felt pressured by him to take steroids right to
get bigger. So they don't actually have the claim that
Vince was ordering anyone to do anything, or that he

(01:06:49):
was handing out the steroids right, just that I felt
like we weren't going to get the job if we
weren't big enough, right.

Speaker 3 (01:06:56):
I believe that that's true. Well, yeah, Vince is not
that dump right right. I feel like Vince is, like
he's an awful, terrible man. He's a demon, but he's
kind of shrewd, and it seems like he would keep
himself out, he would be smart enough to keep himself
out of all of those conversations.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
And it's it's one of those things there are when
you hear fans talk about this, to talk about like, well,
Hogan definitely light under oath, and that's possible. I'm not
gonna make those claims or get into that among other things.
The jury deliberates and renders a verdict of not guilty. Right,
So it is it would be defamation to be like
Hogan definitely light under oath and Vince McMahon definitely, you know,

(01:07:34):
was guilty because I simply can't say that, right, I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
I don't mind saying it. Hulk Cogan definitely lie.

Speaker 3 (01:07:41):
There we go shot babies, right, What did he say?
He said like he only used steroids like twice or
some shit after he like got hurt or something like
his his testimony was really weak. But he doesn't he
doesn't implicate Vince.

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):
He doesn't implicate Vince, and it is possible Vince didn't
cross a line that would have gotten him convicted. It's
also possible that, like it was arranged, that people would
tell just enough of the truth to not get in
trouble themselves while still not talking about the things that Vince.

Speaker 2 (01:08:10):
Did that were illegal.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
All of this is possibly true, whether or not Vince actually,
you know, broke the law. He has declared non guilty.
And also I think he's morally responsible for what happens
with steroids in the WWF to a significant extent.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
And of course he created that culture. He designed that culture.
He definitely found ways. Look, I have no doubt that
he when all the wrestlers testified, well we felt pressured. Yeah, sure,
of course he was the architect of all of that,
no doubt.

Speaker 2 (01:08:38):
Ye.

Speaker 3 (01:08:39):
But I also I don't have any trouble believing that
Vince kept himself out of the conversation so that there
was nothing to substantially link him to any of that.

Speaker 1 (01:08:49):
No, and you know what, there's nothing to substantially link
me to these products and services. Oh, I was going
to say, the Japanese Red Army. But yes, these products
and services also no direct connection that anyone can prove, so,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
Except the fact that they paid shoot in never mind.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
Yeah, no, here's some ads. Oh boy, what is up everybody?
We are back from advertisements. And we are talking about
nineteen ninety six, So that is two years after Vince

(01:09:34):
has declared not guilty in this big steroid case. It
is I think about five years after he institutes mandatory
random steroid tests. You know, after Zahorian gets convicted in
nineteen ninety six, he suspends mandatory random steroid test for
the WWF. His justification later when he's talked to question
by the Waxman Committee, which is like a congressional subcommittee,

(01:09:57):
is that, you know, Ted Turner was eating our lunch.
You know, we were we were really struggling against the
w c W, so we couldn't afford to do random
steroid tests.

Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
He did the man, that's why I did the warl
act It caused me money.

Speaker 4 (01:10:14):
Too bad things if you get money for it, that's
it's true.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
That it is true.

Speaker 3 (01:10:19):
That is true law. That's the highest law of the land.
Protecting profits is the highest law of the Land, so
that is.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
That is actually true, that is legally binding and how
we treat things here at at cool Zone Media, which
is why we have reanimated both of you in AI
form to Uh, well, we're gonna We've got a Pepsi
commercial coming up after I missed my fingers? Can you
AI is fucking up on your fingershot? Can you make

(01:10:46):
us glass android bodies? Like the film Virtuosity? Absolutely, although
I was actually going to go with, uh, what's that?
What's that other movie where the guy creates the AI
and then he and he and another weird dude hang
out in a basement with it and that isolated compound
and it it murders them X macin Yeah, I'm doing
I'm doing X and ex Machina. Yeah, that's the plan.

(01:11:09):
I think Tom's right. I want to be Russell Crowe
all the way. Yeah, Glass Russell Crowe. We'll try a
few different AI movies, including the movie AI where where
both of you could be Jude Law's robot pimp Joe's and.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
Change his hair color with that snaff of a finger
Johnny Cab from Total Recall A lot of a lot
of great robot.

Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
Uh uh role models there I just learned recently that
Johnny cab is portrayed by Robert Paccardo from Star Trek Voyager.
I didn't really yep, well we all learned something today. Okay,
that's nice.

Speaker 4 (01:11:49):
I wish some podcast was about that, and yeah, not
child suicide.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
Yeah, yeah, all that other stuff that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:57):
Would be better. So nineteen ninety they suspend their random
drug tests. And it's funny because when he's talking for
the Waxman community in two thousand and six, like McMahon
can't even answer like whether or not wrestlers werever penalized
for positive tests, like because the congressmen are like, so
was there a penalty if you tested positive? And they
kind of like waffle around it.

Speaker 4 (01:12:19):
He Also, I'm trying to imagine where all the air
quotes are when Vince says, yes, we do mandatory random.

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
Yes, steroid testing. Huh?

Speaker 1 (01:12:26):
Are there quotes around every single one of those words, Vince?
Just just a lot of quotation marks. They actually ran
out mandatory random drug No, you don't have to put
the drug in quotes. There were definitely drugs. So we're
fine on that one. So yeah, we tested for him

(01:12:47):
and we found them. Yeah, we didn't find drugs. When
I say drug, I mean Pat Patterson's poop. That's Vince's
anti drug. So they he rags in front of this
community committee that like, not only do we have like
the best you know, safety programs to make sure people
aren't hurting themselves on drugs and anywhere in the industry,

(01:13:09):
but we have We've just added cardiological testing that's now
a part of our enhanced safety procedures to make sure
our people are really safe. Now we're going to talk
about how well that all works are or worked. I
should say that should be a test they do right anyway, Yeah,
that should be. It should be, Tom, it should be.
In twenty fourteen, the Ultimate Warrior, James Helwig, died of

(01:13:31):
a heart attack at age fifty four, three days after
being brought into the WWE Hall of Fame. Kurt Hinnig
or Hinnig, Yeah, Kurt Hinnig, Mister Perfect, was found dead
in a Tampa hotel room on February tenth, two thousand
and three, thanks to a cocktail of steroids, cocaine, and painkillers.
Ray Traylor, Junior Big boss Man, dropped dead from a

(01:13:51):
heart attack in two thousand and four. He was forty
one years old. Randy Savage lasted until twenty eleven, where
he died of a heart attack while driving at a
fifty eight. Davy Boys Smith was thirty nine when a
heart attack took him in two thousand and two. An
autopsy suggested that his past use of anabolic steroids likely
contributed Ravishing thirty fucking nine Jesus, yeah, yeah, extremely young, Ravishing.

(01:14:15):
Rick Rude died in nineteen ninety nine of heart failure
at age forty. Michael Hegstrand Road Warrior Hawk made it
to fifty six and died of a heart attack in
two thousand and three. All of these men are either
confirmed or heavily suspected to have been users of anabolic
steroids during their wrestling careers. In November of two thousand
and five, Eddie Guerrero died of heart failure at thirty eight.

(01:14:36):
The scandal around his passing helped inspire the Waxman Committee,
this congressional hearing we've been talking about, and it forced
the WWE, which is what they were called now, to
reintroduce independent testing for their wrestlers along with a three
strikes policy.

Speaker 2 (01:14:54):
There's two things I wanted to say. Yeah. One is
the Ultimate Worry.

Speaker 3 (01:14:58):
You mentioned that he died three days after he was
inducted to the wd WW Hall of.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
Fame, and he he died.

Speaker 3 (01:15:06):
He was also on Monday Night Raw, and he died
like six hours after he was on the show or
some shit like that, Like you died the following morning,
so it was hours after he was on TV. And
if you watch it, it's in the Dark Side of
the Ring episode. But if you watch the little appearance
he made on Raw that Monday, like he looks like
he's about to drop dead in about eight hours.

Speaker 2 (01:15:25):
Yeah, oh, I lost the other thing.

Speaker 3 (01:15:33):
I wanted to say so, but yeah, I just wanted
to underline that. I guess it's just man, there's oh
I remember the other thing now there. When you watch
the Dark Side of the Ring episode on Ultimate Warrior,
they're talking to his ex wife and she's telling a
story about how she found out that Warrior was cheating
on her. But it starts in a very different place

(01:15:54):
because she's like, I was trying to get a hold
of him at his hotel and I couldn't And she
says something that's like really telling and really chilling and
really sad. She's like, if you're a wrestling wife, you
know that if you try to call your husband and
at his hotel room and you can't reach him on
the road, there is a very good chance he is dead.

Speaker 1 (01:16:12):
Yeah. And a lot of these guys, you know, they're
on the road when it happens, they're in a hotel
room or something like.

Speaker 3 (01:16:21):
That, almost exclusively. Actually, Andre dies in a hotel room too,
you know, I think all of the guys you mentioned
died in a hotel room.

Speaker 2 (01:16:29):
Yeah, yep. It's pretty bleak.

Speaker 1 (01:16:33):
And also, as we said, Chris or Eddie Guerrero dies
in a two thousand and five. There's this committee in
two thousand and six, and it forces the WWE to
reintroduce independent testing for the wrestlers and a three strikes policy.
But this doesn't actually stop the problematic behavior. And kind
of the evidence of this is in two thousand and eight,
WWE wrestler Crispin Waugh hanged himself in his home after

(01:16:56):
murdering his wife and child.

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:17:00):
Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, everybody in wrestling knows
this story, right, at least the bones of it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:04):
I think everybody. I think most.

Speaker 1 (01:17:06):
People outside of wrestler like it's a really it's and
it's a nightmare. Benoit was a dude number one who
had problems before he was a wrestler, right, there were
there were issues with this guy outside of what wrestling
did to him. The head injuries that he suffer were
a significant part of this. He's like like googling after
he kills his son, like how to resuscitate a dead

(01:17:28):
child something stuff like that, like there's it's it's it's
fucked up. But one thing that is not debatable is
that at the time of his death, Benoit had ten
times the normal level of testosterone in his blood. Testosterone, obviously,
it's a hormone that naturally occurs. It's a hormone that
people take who want to increase the rate at which

(01:17:49):
they grow their muscles. It is also a hormone that
can cause aggressive behavior, particularly in high doses. And he
has again, ten times as much as he is supposed
to have.

Speaker 3 (01:18:00):
There is a lot of brain degeneration and qulification from
multiple head injuries. And also Eddie Guerrero was his best friend. Yeah,
and when Eddie Guerrero died, Crispin Waugh really spiraled badly
into grief and never recovered from it. So it's there's
a lot of things going on in this guy's head

(01:18:22):
at the time he.

Speaker 1 (01:18:23):
Is It is like the perfect storm of like shit
that can go wrong in the brain and body of
a giant muscleman, and it ends in the murder of
his family and his own suicide while had prescription steroids
in his home. This leads investigators, you know, after the deaths,

(01:18:45):
to a doctor named phil Aston. There's a lot of
outrage over what's happened. There's a lot of like pr
around it. So the state goes after Aston, and it
does seem like they had a cost to do so,
among other things, they find that Aston had prescribed Chris.
He had prescribed him ten month supplies of anabolic steroids

(01:19:05):
every three to four weeks for a full year.

Speaker 2 (01:19:08):
That's too many steroids.

Speaker 1 (01:19:10):
It is an objectively insane amount of steroids.

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):
Way too many steroids.

Speaker 1 (01:19:14):
Federal prosecutors eventually alleged that the level of testosterone and
his blood contributed to the murder of his family. Aston
was sentenced to ten years in prison as a result
of all of this. Reading through everything here, it is
frustrating the degree to which, by default Vince is automatically
exonerated from legal culpability of any kind in his case.

(01:19:35):
In this case, his wrestlers are independent contractors, so he
doesn't have to pay for their health care. And even
though the FEDS were able to prove that Zoctor Zohore
and male packages of steroids two Vince, that's not enough
to prove that he caused anyone else to take him
take them. Ben Waugh took three years of steroor multiple
years worth of steroids in a single year, because he
felt that that's what he had to do in order

(01:19:56):
to stay competitive and keep getting booked. But there's nothing
legally actionable against Vince in that the Waxman Committee, which
convened after Guerrero's death, even asked Vince about this about
like whether or not he had pushed people to get bigger.
He slipped out of that question quite easily. His answer
is no. They question they ask him, then, have you
ever told a WWE talent or perspective talent that he

(01:20:18):
or she needed to be bigger in order to be successful?

Speaker 2 (01:20:21):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:20:21):
Back to the weight, I have suggested that they lose weight.
Question you suggested losing it but not gaining it? Answer right. Question,
have you ever told a WWE talent or perspective talent
that he or she needed to be more muscular, or
words to that effect. Answer no question, are you aware
of whether anyone representing WWE has ever told a talent
or perspective talent that he or she needed to be bigger?

(01:20:45):
And it's like, you know, that's kind of how it
goes on and on and on. But like he's got
you know, a pretty perfect out for this, right because
he's not saying you need to get bigger. It just
kind of is known to everyone around him that like
that's what exactly, And.

Speaker 3 (01:21:02):
If you're any any sort of fan of wrestling or
have any sort of knowledge of the wrestling industry, it's
like super well known that Vince and we talked about
earlier in the series, Vince.

Speaker 2 (01:21:13):
Loves big guys. He loves the big body dudes. Yeah,
that's his thing, that's his thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:19):
From this there is this kind of that this line
of questions where they bring up that like Vince has
canceled the WWF random drug testing program in ninety six
and they ask him why and he answers straight up like, yeah,
we were competing with Ted Turner and the w CW
and testing was expensive. He actually at the same time,
as he says, they dropped the testing for expenses, like
we eliminated water coolers because of the expense. That really

(01:21:41):
pissed people off. It is it is a few distracted. Yeah,
it's frustrating how consistently this all works for him.

Speaker 2 (01:21:51):
But it's got to hand to him. It's plausible.

Speaker 1 (01:21:54):
It's plausible, and you know, this is all very frustrating.
There's a lot that's frustrating, but kind of the apex
of Vince's awfulness and sort of where we're going to
end with our story today is the tale of Owen Hart.
Just because I don't know it, it makes sense to me.

(01:22:16):
It's the kind of the final thing you need to
know about Vince to know the kind of man that
he is. So we have introduced Owen before in that
great story about them all pissing on Ric Flair's bed.
His brother Brett, great technical wrestler, and he's Vince's big
star in like the late nineteen nineties. Right, But as
we've talked about a few times around like nineteen ninety six,

(01:22:39):
nineteen ninety seven, Ted Turner's WCW suddenly blew up. It
is briefly the biggest wrestling organization in the country. And
the way Turner is able to do this is he
buys up all of Vince's big names, right, like guys
like Hogan start working for WCW for a while. It
doesn't last long. This isn't like a good long term strategy,
but it causes Vince a lot of short term trouble.

Speaker 2 (01:23:02):
Five yours.

Speaker 1 (01:23:03):
Yeah, yeah, there's a there's a few years that like
they're really fighting there and one of the people who
decides to go over to WCW is Brett Hart. So
Brett won the WWF Championship in August of nineteen ninety seven,
but he agreed to join WCW starting in December. McMahon
didn't want him to leave the WWF as like, you know,

(01:23:23):
the belt hoolder. But Brett wouldn't lose to Sean Michaels, right,
He like refused because he and Shawn Michaels, who is
a great wrestler but a coked out maniac, like they
hate each other for personal reasons. So Brett's like, I'm
not going to go out losing my belt to him there.

Speaker 2 (01:23:38):
And there's a.

Speaker 3 (01:23:39):
Lot like they there's a lot like Sean like casually
accused Brett of cheating on his wife with Sonny on
live television. Yeah, it's like there's like a lot of
bad love between these dudes. But like from the version
of I've heard, is that Brett and this is still
kind of like, dude, you're being a little being a
little bit of a of a d But like Brett

(01:24:01):
didn't want to lose to Sean in Calgary specifically because
Kyari was like his hometown.

Speaker 1 (01:24:06):
Yeah, because he's a he's a he's a Canadian wrestler.
He doesn't want to like lose too Sean in his hometown.
And it's one of those things there's still enough kind
of k fame kept that like Vince cam'p force this
right because like you need you, I mean especially like
you need the wrestler who's going to lose the belt,
which is, as we said earlier, this was the standard
thing if you're aging out or quitting or joining somewhere else,

(01:24:30):
like you lose your your championship belt.

Speaker 3 (01:24:32):
Yeah, I'll argue that it's well, there's there's more room
to do it here. He certainly he certainly could have
just done like a special episode where they drop the
pretense and they just get Brett out there like hey, Brett,
you've had a great run here, you were a great champion,
and then Brett leaves the belt and then they're like
good luck. But like also it's it's less about like

(01:24:54):
it's just like the k favor of regular television. Right
like when like an actor leaves it TV series for
whatever reason, like they're moving on to movies, they got
fired or they took a different part or something, they
write them out, yeah, because they can't just stop and
say like, well, George Clooney's leaving er. So it's like
they won't do that on an episode of R. So

(01:25:15):
like that's kind of like the level of k fab
that they're working with here. So yeah, you have to
write a reason that makes sense within the context of
the show. It's more just like the general k fabe
of television. Yeah yeah, yeah, but again, like I said
it is, there is enough of a blurred line where
they could have just done a specially because they do
it sometimes like they do it well Ellen dies, they

(01:25:35):
do a special episode, so it's like, yeah, you've just
done an episode where like well Brett, here's you know anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:25:41):
But that's not what they do in this situation. McMahon
instead pitches him an alternative, which is that during a
match in Calgary, he'll wrestle Michaels and it'll end in
a disqualification, right, so he won't lose the belt like
nobody will win. It'll be kind of a match called
on a technical fuck up, and he'll have another match later,

(01:26:01):
not in Calgary, and he'll lose the belt in that, right.
That's the thing they work out. Pretty normal so far,
not a weird thing for wrestling. What follows, though, is
kind of a weird thing. It's coming to be known
as the Montreal screw Job, and it gets a lot
of focus from wrestling fans because it is pretty shitty
behavior on Vince's part.

Speaker 2 (01:26:22):
But we've also singularly weird too. It's weird. It's a
weird thing to do.

Speaker 1 (01:26:27):
I will say it doesn't hit as hard after talking
about like the child molestation ring and all the deaths
part right, because this is yeah, the next part of
this story hits pretty hard. This part of the story
is unethical, but not like evil, right, Nobody gets murdered
or molested here, so it may not hit as hard

(01:26:49):
as it does to a lot of Is it did
to people at the time?

Speaker 3 (01:26:52):
Yeah, real quick, I want to I want to redeem myself.
I misspoke earlier. It's when I said Brett did want
to lose in Calgary. Brett did want to lose in Canada. Yeah, yeah, Canada.
Obviously this happened in Montreal because it's famously called the
Montreal All Right, sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
About Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll we'll fix it in that
Today fix It post. So the gist of what happens
here is that McMahon like they've got this set up
to where it's going to end in a DQ. Heart's
not going to lose, but man tells the referee that
while it's going on, at one point, Heart's gonna get
like caught in what's called the sharpshooter, which is like

(01:27:27):
his trademark submission hold his finisher. Yeah, and he was
supposed to, as they'd agreed upon before. He was going
to get out and then the match would continue. But
McMahon has a ref call the match against him while
he's in this submission hold and basically calls it that
he had submitted, right, So Brett has not submitted. But

(01:27:48):
like again, as we talked, about the Both the ref
and the the announcer have a lot of power to
kind of like set reality for the people in the room,
so they call the match against him, and it is
kind of obvious that like something fucked up has gone down.
It's it doesn't look like an actual submission.

Speaker 3 (01:28:06):
It looks like a mistake because what happens is is
Sean puts Brett in the sharpshooter, and what they had
talked about was Brett was going to reverse it and
beat Sean that way, or or sorry, they were gonna
get out of it, or Hunterhurst the Triple H is
gonna come out and hit him, because Triple H is
at ringside at that point. But what happens is the
ref calls it. They ring the bell, and the announcers

(01:28:27):
start talking as if Sean just submitted Brett, but in
the ring, like Brett is confused, like he's in the
process of reversing the move, and like everyone in the
crowd is confused. So there's like kind of scattered applause,
but there's like this really strange response to it. It
looks like somebody fucked up. Like it's very clear this
was not supposed to happen when you watch it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:48):
Yeah, and you know, a lot of people get very
angry as a result of this. Brett most of all,
he very famously cold cocks Vince in the locker room,
like hits him, and Vince will claim.

Speaker 2 (01:28:59):
Spits on him in the show. Show you can see
it happen.

Speaker 1 (01:29:01):
Yeah, it's pretty He's a lot of people want to Yeah,
I mean, at least that happened Vince. One of the
funny things about Vince's a guy is that, like, you know,
it's very famous that Brett comes in and like punches
him right in the face in the locker room. After this,
Vince later claims that, like, well, I made him an

(01:29:22):
offer to let him punch me as recompense, Like he
has to try to take power back, Like he can't
have just been hit in the face, Like no, no,
I told him to do it. I told him to
hit me in the face. We were totally cool about it.
He just he just punched Vince because he was angry
and Vince had it coming.

Speaker 3 (01:29:39):
There's a really well, there's a really good documentary everybody
should watch called Hitman Heart Wrestling with Shadows that's about
this specifically. Yeah, there's it's it's it's slanted, obviously, it's
it's very favorable to Brett, so you you have to
take some of it with a grain of salt. But
there's a lot of footage that they pull from the
night of the show and also from backstage of this
event happening, where you get to see all this sh happening.

Speaker 1 (01:30:00):
So yeah, definitely worth checking out. And it's like, yeah,
so this is very a very famous moment in wrestling history.
It does say a lot about Vince, although honestly, the
thing that I think says the most about him is
his need to pretend that he made Brett punch him.

Speaker 3 (01:30:17):
The hitman heart could knock out a fifty eight year
old man.

Speaker 1 (01:30:22):
Yeah yeah, without being offered it. Yeah right, it's like, broh.

Speaker 2 (01:30:28):
It's so funny.

Speaker 1 (01:30:30):
So yeah, this is fucked up, But it has obviously
nothing compared to the story we're going to tell next,
which is about what happens as a result of some
of Vince's actions and the result of some accident of
a terrible accident to Brett's brother, Owen. So we have
talked about how Vince and Linda went to war with
regulators across the country to ensure that wrestling would not

(01:30:52):
be held to the higher health and safety standards of
traditional athletic exhibitions. This effort, which occurred throughout the early
to mid nineteen nineties, was largely successful, and by the
end of the nineties, the WOWE was beholden to far
fewer safety restrictions and much less oversight than they had
been in the nineteen eighties. The Montreal Screw Screw Job
is generally seen as like the start to the Attitude era, right,

(01:31:16):
but it also marked the beginning of Vince's physical involvement
in wrestling to an never before seen level. He'd often
done commentating and been a presence, but from now on
he's not just like there, he's not just like talking.
He's not just you know, giving you know, commentary on matches.
He's an in ring presence. He's like wrestling a lot
of the time, and he's he's usually he's not like

(01:31:36):
he's not able to like put it like putting people
in holds or fighting people technically, but he's actually pretty
good at getting the shit beat out of him, which
is a skill.

Speaker 5 (01:31:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:31:46):
He understands what his role is out there is yeah, Yeah,
which is kind of funny because as jacked as Vince
made himself and as much as like behind the scenes,
he tries to insist that he's the toughest dude ever,
like we've talked about in throughout the series.

Speaker 2 (01:32:01):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:32:03):
He basically he gets beat up in the ring the
same way like Bobby the Brain Heenan or Jimmy Hart
or any of the other like really annoying guys who
keep getting one over on the faces and you're so
mad at them and you just want them to get
body slammed, and then they finally do it. Like he
plays in the ring like you know, a guy that's

(01:32:25):
gonna get his ass kicked. So he does just take
bumps in the ring. Really, he never is like a
dominant presence as a wrestler.

Speaker 2 (01:32:31):
He just gets beat up and it's very fun with
the real humility for a terrible yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:32:37):
Right, it's a rising level of human Like he's like
he's such a carneye and he's so married to the
business that he understands the value of being this villainous
character Vince McMahon the Boss and like denying people the
satisfaction of seeing him in the ring, and then when
he finally gets in the ring, he gets his ass
beat and that's that.

Speaker 2 (01:32:55):
You know, that's.

Speaker 3 (01:32:56):
It's super old story in wrestling.

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):
They do it all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:33:02):
Yeah, and he's he has he has no problem doing that,
which is fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 (01:33:07):
It's really interesting because like a big when he first
starts doing this, like the guy who's like wailing on
him the most is stone cold Steve Austin, who is
like his persona is like I'm the rebel, I'm the
bad boy. You know, I'm able to do the things
that you could like other people like I'm I'm I'm
also I'm a common man, right, like I'm sticking it
up for like the regular Joe's out there, and it's

(01:33:28):
very much framed his him beating on Vince is like
everyone wants to beat up their boss, right, So Vince
knows what he's doing by like I'm going to be
this kind of personification of like corporate America, so that
you know, this regular guy hero can like wail on me.
But when he's interviewed about it, because like he gets
interviewed a lot about you know, him showing up and

(01:33:49):
being a presence in ring because it's like big news
and he'll always be like, well, you know, I get
that this is what people want to see, but like
I'm really stone cold, right, like I'm the guy in
real life, I'm stone cold because fighting against authority all
the time. No, no, no, billionaire you sure you surely
are not Vince. It's it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:34:12):
I don't know, this.

Speaker 3 (01:34:14):
Is also interesting to launch, like the biggest storyline of
your promotion is a feud between your top wrestler and
the CEO, like management and labor literally fighting. I don't
think that ever happened before.

Speaker 1 (01:34:33):
No, And it's we're going to talk a little bit
about like the kind of this kind of concept of
of what people call neo k fabe. It's it's really
interesting kind of like what is going on between all
these the characters and the real people as this sort
of like the attitude Eric kicks off. And I think
probably the story that best embodies that is maybe one

(01:34:56):
of the most in maybe the most uncomfortable thing that
ever happened in a Double EF storyline, although that's a
long list of things. Are you guys aware of the
story with like the Undertaker and his daughter Stephanie and
his son Shane, where she.

Speaker 2 (01:35:10):
Gets kidnapped uh huh. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:35:13):
So by this point, Shane is part of the family business,
and so is Stephanie. Obviously, Linda's helping to run things
and Shane is. You know, you can see why, like
doing this all would be really important for Vince because
he had always craved his biological father's respect and wanted
to work with him, and Vince Senior had given him
a job, but they hadn't like worked together really Like

(01:35:36):
Vince had his jobs that he was given by his dad,
but his dad did not treat him as an equal
in the business, you know, like he sold it to
him eventionally, but they weren't like collaborators in the way
that he kind of is with his kids, which you
could see is like maybe a positive Vince, you know,
doing for his kids what he always wished his dad

(01:35:56):
would have done for him. But it takes us in
some uncomfortable the thematic directions. So you know, as we said,
stone Cold is like the hot shit right now, and
he invents have an on stage rivalry and in mid
nineteen ninety nine, he cooks up this like very insane
wrestling storyline to take advantage of the fact that he's
a stage presence now and that his kids are like

(01:36:19):
increasingly showing up in the ring more often. So the
Undertaker kidnaps his daughter, and through a winding storyline, he
winds up like he's going to marry her. He's like
forcibly marrying her against her will, and it's kind of
all culminates in her tied to an eight foot tall
crucifix in a Satanic sacrifice slash wedding ceremony with the

(01:36:41):
Undertaker and the Ministry of Darkness. Who are We'll say,
basically his gang. Paul BarreR winds up reading out a
wedding ceremony script for the Undertaker while Stephanie begs for
rescue and various low level faces try to stop the Undertaker.

Speaker 2 (01:36:57):
And I watched this live. It is insane. So Bearer
turns to the under team.

Speaker 4 (01:37:03):
Would have completed the rituals, she would have actually become
a zombie, Like that's the.

Speaker 1 (01:37:07):
Steaks, Yeah, that is that is he's going to zombiefy
and marry her against her will. And yeah, it's like
the Paul Bear asks the Undertaker, would you accept Stephanie
Mary McMahon, her body, her mind, her soul, and even
her breath unto yourself and allow her to bear your offspring,
and the Undertaker says, I do, and then Bearer did

(01:37:31):
not have to say that, didn't have to include that line. Weird, Yeah,
Bear says, by the power invested in me by the
Lord of Darkness, I know, pronounce you was the unholy
union of Darkness. You may now kiss your bride. And
that's when Stone Cold, Steve Austin comes in and like beats,
you know, he wails on everybody, and he saves Stephanie

(01:37:52):
before she can you know, be presumably sexually assaulted, because
that's the stakes that Vince is set up here in
the storyline. Now, that's unsettling, right. The next night, she
and Vincent stone Cold hold a little ceremony on the
stage for a pilot for SmackDown, which was about to
air on the UPN network. Stephanie thanked Austin and expressed

(01:38:14):
I have never felt so powerless and violated in all
my life. The Undertaker he kept touching me and whispering
in my ears that I was his and there was
nothing that I could do about it. She is standing
next to her dad saying this, like, tell it weird,
such a it's such a weird again, everyone's a consenting
adult here, so we're not saying, like what he's doing

(01:38:36):
here is evil. It's just deeply bizarre, weird. It's so
weird TV show. Yeah, there were so many ways. There
are so many ways to have your daughter, like, you know,
the the white girl who's being threatened by a bad
guy without it being this.

Speaker 2 (01:38:53):
You did well out there tonight, honey, beautiful daughter. You
made daddy so much money. So rock hard, rock hard, Sweetheart,
It's dark.

Speaker 1 (01:39:05):
A lot of people are uncomfortable with this storyline, and
one person who is uncomfortable with this storyline is Owen Heart. Now,
his brother's with the WCW right now, but Owen has
been wrestling with the WWF still and he's kind of
been in the process of considering moving away from wrestling.
You know, he's, for one thing, he just doesn't fit
in in the attitude era. You know, he's a wrestler

(01:39:27):
from an older era. He feels uncomfortable with the storylines.
He thinks it's kind of trashy. He has a wife
and two kids, and he's also like he's watching what's
starting to happen to the guys who had been the
first generation of steroids wrestlers. He's seeing how many of
them are dropping early, and he's like, maybe I should
just like hang out with my family, you know, that

(01:39:49):
might be the responsible thing to do. So while he's
sort of working through his feelings on this, Vince decides
to bring back a side character Owen had played in
the late eighties, the Blue Blazer. This was an example
of what Josie Riiseman calls neokfabe, a term that describes
the nebulous relationship with the truth in modern wrestling, now
that it's admitted, at least on some level, that it's

(01:40:11):
not a real competition. Kfabe is a lie meant to
sort of hide the fact that wrestling was not a
real sports competition, right. Neokfabe is what grows up in
its place, And neokfabe is when the fakery is in
the open and admitted, but it exists to reveal deeper truths.
And like a big part of the engagement for the
audience is sort of working out what's being said behind

(01:40:33):
the scenes with what's happening on screen, right, And in
this case, you can see what's like, what's happening for
real is that McMahon knows that Owen Hart isn't happy
with the direction the WWF is going on, and he's
considering making a change in his life. McMahon sets up
the Blue Blazer as a morally upright superhero who's like
launching a moral crusade against degeneracy within the WWF. So,

(01:40:57):
in other words, Owen's character on screen displaying a heightened
and satiric version of the real discuss that Owen felt
for Vince's storylines, which is, like, that's kind of a
lot going on.

Speaker 2 (01:41:08):
Actually it is.

Speaker 3 (01:41:10):
Yeah, Yeah, they're also hiding him and like Owen at
this time is one of the best technical wrestlers that
he's ever been in the business, and he's one of
those dudes, like he's incredibly talented, he's very physical, he's
very athletic, he's very charismatic. But they just never gave

(01:41:30):
him anything to do. Yeah, they couldn't figure They had
an interesting storyline at one point. Owen was a bad
guy for a long time because they created a younger
brother storyline for him, for him to feud with Brett.
But now that Brett's gone, they don't have that and
they're sort of about this, Well, we don't know what
to do with you, which is so criminal for an
industry like this, where it's like, yeah, have this person

(01:41:50):
who is fantastically talented in every aspect of the business,
and like, well, we don't know what to do with
you because you're not a big guy.

Speaker 1 (01:41:58):
Yeah, it's really sad where it goes, and like it's
interesting the way in which sort of yeah, there's a
lot that's kind of fascinating here.

Speaker 4 (01:42:07):
Bob never said, hey, you have to be bigger and
have giant muscles. But also there's Owen Hart, the best
guy we have, and I will not put him on
TV for un said reasons.

Speaker 1 (01:42:17):
Yeah, so Owen is you know, a lot kind of
gets put on Owen being unsettled with this weirdly sexual
storyline involving Stephanie. But that's not the only reason why
he's disgusted with Vince in the WWF in this period,
one of the guys who repeatedly failed Vince's nonsense drug
tests without getting fired again. He's questioned by Congress as

(01:42:40):
to like whether or not there were consequences for failing
a drug test, while a dude who repeatedly failed his
drug test was a guy named Brian Pillman. Brian was
addicted to cocaine. He was also constantly injecting steroids. He
took painkillers, you know, to deal with that. He's on
everything a wrestler is normally on. Right on October fifth, nine,
eighteen ninety seven, he missed work because he had died

(01:43:02):
of heart failure in a Minnesota hotel room the night before.
Everyone found out right before the show was set to start.
But Vince plowed forward anyway, even though, like a lot
of people are like, well, we just found out our
friend and colleague is dead. I don't know, maybe this
isn't the right thing to do, but obviously, like it
is a business, you know, Vince decides to go ahead
with things. He announces Brian's death on air, which you know,

(01:43:27):
you can could potentially be a responsible thing to do,
but he does it, and like he references it almost
as like a TV teaser ad while trying to softly
exonerate himself.

Speaker 2 (01:43:37):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (01:43:37):
Authorities expect no foul play was involved in terms of
the initial inspection. Nonetheless, apparently they're concerned about the possibility
of a drug overdose, be it prescription or recreational. Of course,
this is a problem in all sport and forms. Of Entertainment.

Speaker 2 (01:43:52):
Yeah, that's not great. Well I didn't do it.

Speaker 3 (01:43:56):
Yeah, well the next thing he does, yeah, oh he
both Pilman's widow on television and shit does point blame
if Brian had.

Speaker 2 (01:44:04):
A drug addiction? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:44:07):
Yeah, yeah. That happens the next night on Friday Night Raw,
there is a tribute to Pilman convinced a yeah from
Monday Night Raw. Sorry I wrote Friday.

Speaker 2 (01:44:17):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:44:17):
This is this is why we have the experts in here.
So he has he has her on Raw, and he like,
he advertises that she's going to be on Raw.

Speaker 3 (01:44:26):
Right, He like they have told her that they wouldn't
ask her any questions like that.

Speaker 2 (01:44:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:44:31):
So when you watch the footage of the interview and
he asked her that question, you see her react like
she has a physical reaction in her face to the question.

Speaker 5 (01:44:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:44:39):
Yeah, it's like she's been punched. And we're not going
to play that because I don't want to do that.
But I am going to read a depiction of what
happens by from sex, Livees and Headlocks so that people
can kind of hear how these questions go. To make
sure no one missed the exclusive. He hyped it up
before every commercial break, sending his viewers to the pillman's

(01:45:00):
empty family room, where it was announced Melanie would soon appear.
He opened the interview in a stilted tone that chafed
against the confessional nature of the moment. Melanie, I'm sure
you distraught, shocked, dismayed over this, and we thank you
very much for joining us tonight. There's always a great
deal of speculation when a thirty five year old man
who's in a competitive condition passes away. Can you please
tell us what you've been told about Brian's death? And

(01:45:20):
she answers. Apparently there was a problem with his heart.
Apparently his heart had been under a lot of stress.
There's some speculation last night that Brian, because of his injuries,
had to take a great deal of medicine, Vince continued,
But there was some speculation that he may have taken
too much. Melanie expected this question, but the speed at
which Vince leapt to it surprised her. Her face curled
up in a look that was more disgusted than despair,

(01:45:41):
seeing that he backed off. Is there anything you want
to say to aspiring athletes who get hurt and may
have to resort to prescribed medication, pain pills. I can't
really comment, she replied. My husband not only was he
an athlete, but he was involved in a car accident
and had extensive injuries from that, and it was hard
on him. Then looking at the camera, or perhaps past it,
she added, I just want everyone to know that it's
a wake up call for some of you. It could

(01:46:03):
be your husband, or it could be you, and you
don't want to believe behind a bunch of orphans like
my husband did. How are the children taking the news,
Vince Pride a bit too eagerly decidestep the Tuesday Morning critics,
who'd call the whole Phara exploitative. Little Brian doesn't understand
why Daddy's not coming home, she said, But Brittany, she
screamed for fifteen minutes. Melanie looks suddenly exhausted, as if

(01:46:23):
whatever energy she'd had three questions ago is completely gone.
But the impulse to go for one last piece of
emotional punctuation proved too great for Vince to resist. Have
you had a chance to think about what you, as
a single parent, will do to support five children?

Speaker 2 (01:46:36):
He asked? Oh my god, yeah, uh you like older
now they're single, you like older fellas.

Speaker 1 (01:46:43):
Yeah, they want a job, Vince McMahon, everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:46:49):
So it's I mean, that's that she mentioned a car
accident that needs to I figure, I feel like that
needs to be like addressed. Brent Tullen was a hideous
car accident where his entire face needed to be reconstructed Jesus,
and he damn near lost his foot. Yeah, so, like
he was not in any and he had this accident

(01:47:11):
right after he signed with WWE, so he felt personal
pressure to continue to try and perform at the level
that he had before this car accident, which is not possible.
So he was pumping all sorts of painkillers, steroids, et
cetera into himself. He would like literally get up from
a wheelchair to go out and perform and then get

(01:47:31):
off stage and go back into his wheelchair like he
was fucked uh at this point. Yeah, it's it's pretty hideous.
And like so we talked about, you know, a couple
episodes ago Andre and how like when he ends his
career kind of there's this thing Vince makes him into
a heel. There's some people who will say that like

(01:47:53):
that really hurt him. It's one of those things where
like that's the I took that from that documentary on
on Andre and from some stuff that some of his
friends said.

Speaker 1 (01:48:02):
But it's also like what Vince says, like Vince's attitude
is that Andre hated him at the end because of
what Vince had done to him. Why I brought that
up right before telling the story of Rita Chatterton is
that there's another story as to why Andre didn't like
Vince anymore, and it's that his friend confided in him
that that Vince raped her. Right, And it's the same

(01:48:23):
thing with Owen, where like people will be like Owen
was really kind of put off and disgusted by this
gross storyline that Vince has announced, and maybe that had
a role, but like Owen also sees all this happen
with Melanie and with his with with Pillman's family and
is disgusted by that because of he's a human being.

(01:48:43):
You no, like it's not by all accounts, he was
a really good dude. Yeah, he was a really good dude.
And he's horrified by this. Both Heart boys are horrified
by this. I mean, Brett's already out, but they are
disgusted by this. And this has a lot of an
impact on, like why he's so unhappy at the time.
So when he donned his costume as the Blue Blazer
and would declare in his like little speeches and stuff

(01:49:05):
that the WWF was hopelessly sick and cruel, it didn't
take a lot of acting, right, And when he gave
stage speeches about cleaning up the WWF, it was like,
you know it, There's there's kind of more going on there,
like than just you know, someone being handed as script.
So the storyline with Vince's kids goes on, Shane is

(01:49:28):
revealed to have secretly manipulated the Undertaker into kidnapping and
trying to rape his sister. So that's like the evolution
is that, like Shane comes on and like, haha, it
was him that was behind it the whole time. In
One Memorable Night, Linda McMahon shows up on stage where
Shane gleefully admits to picking out the dress his sister

(01:49:48):
had been tied up in on stage. Now, throughout this
plot line, Vince had scattered in references to a higher
power who the Undertaker and Shane were both taking orders from,
but like in a very lost like situation, they didn't
know who that was, right that wasn't planned out ahead
of time. You know, they were doing a mystery box

(01:50:08):
kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:50:08):
Oh god if the case.

Speaker 1 (01:50:14):
No. As the storyline plotted on, they eventually decided that
the higher power had to be Vince, who had manipulated
his son into having a maniac kidnap his daughter to
marry and force himself on her. And again, this is
both insane, but it's also perfect like Neo KFE because
Vince is actually the one in charge directing his son

(01:50:35):
to pretend to orchestrate the kidnapping and sexual like that
is what was happening. He is in fact the higher
power behind all this. It's so wild. So this culminates
in a big drama where Shane, who pretend owned half
the WWF, forced his father to fight one of the

(01:50:55):
wrestlers on his team, which they're like, oh, it's a
death sentence for a man his age. Vince gets fake
beaten with an inch within an inch of his life,
and to sell it, he hires an ambulance and e
mts to pretend to take him to the hospital right like,
they take him out on a stretcher. They like cut
to canned footage of him in the ambulance but they're
real e mts and a real ambulance, which is interesting

(01:51:16):
to me. Maybe that's just the cheapest way to actually
do it.

Speaker 4 (01:51:18):
I don't know, yeah yet attack and got the guys there.

Speaker 2 (01:51:25):
There are ambulance services for hire.

Speaker 1 (01:51:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not surprising that that might be
just like the most efficient way to do it. Later
that night, there's a pay per view match, which is
a separate endeavor, but it led it's led into by
the show where Vince gets beat up on Shane's orders
and taken away in the ambulance, and then you have
like the match that comes on afterwards. And the opening

(01:51:48):
of this pay per view match was supposed to be
owen Hart as the Blue Blazer flying down from the
rafters in a harness and landing in the ring where
he would then do battle with another wrestler. Now there
had been opening like a wrestler like fly on to
stage is a thing that had happened before. It was
more common earlier in the WWF history when there were
more safety standards. It's obviously it's kind of a dangerous stunt.

(01:52:10):
You know, you've got a guy flying through the air.
That's an extra risk in ring master Riisman writes, quote,
Vince had hired a new desceinder technician who hadn't worked
with the WWF before and who had significantly less experience
with the stunt than the technician who'd overseen similar interests
in interests in the past. Now, I'm not going to
be labor as this. The stunt goes badly. A cable

(01:52:33):
detaches from the harness. Owen fell more than seventy feet,
hitting the top rope with his chest and he receives
immediately a fatal injury. Right, like, this is not survivable
at any point.

Speaker 2 (01:52:43):
Really.

Speaker 1 (01:52:44):
He loses constant consciousness pretty much instantly, and he's not
declared dead on the scene, but he basically dies in
front of a stadium of fans who are all cheering
because they don't know that this isn't part of the
show immediately, especially the people who are further away. I
think there's some folks who are closer who like realize
he came in way too hot. But you know these

(01:53:07):
are big stadiums, right, Yeah. They cut the feed almost immediately.

Speaker 2 (01:53:11):
I was also watching this live. Yeah, oh god, did
you know what had happened?

Speaker 3 (01:53:17):
Yep, because they came on Yeah, okay, after they faded out.
They there's some crowdshots and they come on after a
bit and it's Jr. And Lawler and they tell us, look,
go and fell and they look shricken. They're both pale. Yeah,
look they look like they just watched a man die.

Speaker 2 (01:53:34):
Because they did. Yeah, because they did. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:53:37):
It's a pretty bleak. So everyone scrambles. They can't have
dead air, right, Like, that's the first rule of television.
And I think it's also just like, if you're a
professional like that in this situation that you have no
idea how to handle happens, you just kind of naturally
gonna like fill the air.

Speaker 2 (01:53:53):
So they do.

Speaker 1 (01:53:55):
They spend a lot of time assuring the audience and
viewers that this is a real situation. The e mts
and the ambulance that Vince had brought on as a
set piece for like the previous program, are brought in
to remove Owen, who is again beyond the saving. At
this point, Vince has a choice either in the show
or go on. You know, I think there's a good

(01:54:16):
argument to me mad that, like, if a guy dies
before a show, you've got everyone there, you know, you
have a business relying on those people's jobs relying on this.

Speaker 2 (01:54:24):
Maybe do bad things for money.

Speaker 1 (01:54:26):
Yeah, it's told us that, Yeah, yeah, you can do it.

Speaker 2 (01:54:32):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:54:32):
It seems it seems even worse to like keep the
show going at this point, but they do. Vince tells
everyone that the show that Owen's status is undetermined, which
is technically true but not really true. And to make
matters even worse, the guy who is going to call
Owen's widow about what's happened is Vince McMahon, Like, while

(01:54:54):
the show is going on, he calls her. Martha Hart
later says, quote, they scooped him out like a piece
of garbage, and they paraded wrestlers out to wrestle in
a ring that had Owen's blood, where the boards were
broken from Owen's fall and where guys could feel the
dip in the ring from where he fell.

Speaker 2 (01:55:08):
His blood is literally in the ring for the entire
pay per view.

Speaker 1 (01:55:12):
Yeah, which I mean, Yeah, it's fucked up. It's sucked,
it's beyond fucked Yeah, it's insane. It's like, uh yeah,
it's it's pretty bad. At eight forty PMCST, Events told
the audience, many of whom still thought this was a
bit that Owen had because again, while they're saying this

(01:55:33):
is really serious, that doesn't necessarily mean it is. And
also most of the audience has been drinking, so their
ability to know like what's real and not maybe is
slightly declined. But at eight forty PMCST, Events tells the
audience that Owen Hart has perished from his injuries. This
is followed by an in character scene like and this

(01:55:54):
is the part that's weirdest to me, is like after
he says that, like Owen's dead, they continue like playing
a clip from that storyline scene where Vince returns from
the hospital that he was supposed to have been at,
like that's how shit ends that night, with like a
clip of him getting Vince who has fake gone to
the hospital, returning from the hospital with like I think

(01:56:15):
a busted ankle or something. It's a weird choice. And
after this bit of k fabe, Vince has to go
speak at a very real news conference where a reporter
repeatedly asks him like very important question is wrong with
what the fuck is wrong with you? And like stuff
about safety precautions that had been missing. Why wasn't there

(01:56:35):
a backup line protecting Owen and Vince replies, I'm not
an expert in rigging.

Speaker 2 (01:56:40):
I guess you are. Oh, don't be antagonist.

Speaker 3 (01:56:45):
Don't be antagonistic at the press conference of arrestler that
just died in the ring because of your negligence, Vince.

Speaker 1 (01:56:50):
I'm not an expert in rigging either, but like, I know,
you need a backup line when a man is sailing
down from the roof.

Speaker 2 (01:56:58):
Yeah, somebody died. Something went wrong with the rigging.

Speaker 1 (01:57:01):
Yeah, yeah, it's like yeah, it's like if someone had
like gone up when when fucking that shooting happened on
the set of Dust and been like, why was a
real gun in the bullet and someone had been like, oh,
I guess you're a gun expert. Well no, but I
know that you're not supposed to have loaded guns in
this on set.

Speaker 4 (01:57:18):
It really demonstrates the in curiosity of McMahon too, that
he didn't go straight up to the guy in charge
of making sure he didn't die and say, what the
fuck happened?

Speaker 3 (01:57:25):
Tell me exactly, Vince had Vince had hours to figure
out what went wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:57:29):
Yeah, and the focus is on keeping the show going,
as opposed to like, I'm I'm you want to be
sitting down in front of that guy. The moment you
can be like, what the fuck happened?

Speaker 2 (01:57:40):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:57:41):
Interestingly, like what happened? As I remember, it's very similar
to what happened with Brandon Lee on the Crow, which
is they hired local, non union guys to do the
work for a lot less money, and they used a
vastly inferior single clip that's meant to hold like a
sale I think it's not meant to hold the weight
of a man. And that's the clip that they put

(01:58:01):
on because they wanted Owen to be able to quickly
release beacause at a previous performance where he decided from
the ceiling, he was kind of stuck in his harness
for a little bit trying to get it off, and
it looked silly on television, So like, well, we need
to be able to have him quickly drop out of it,
but we're sacrificing a great deal of his safety in
order to get that. Yeah, that's what we're wrong. Like,

(01:58:21):
you can watch the Dark Side of the Ring episode
about Owen's accident, and when they show you the clip,
like you literally gasp, Yeah, Like it looks like it
looks like a keychain.

Speaker 1 (01:58:33):
Yeah, it's it's not like it's it's like something you
would put your keys on, not something you would trust
a man's life to. So the reporter continues to press Vince,
saying like it doesn't look like there were any safety
precautions at all, and Vince lashes out at her. I
resent your tone, lady. Okay, this is a tragic accident.
Don't try and put yourself on the spotlight here, Okay,

(01:58:57):
just personally, piece of shit. So for a few days,
Vince keeps his head down. He cancels several consecutive events
in Canada. He tries to work quietly. In Connecticut, they
hold an event like a memorial kind of service for
for Owen, like in sort of character, I guess you'd say,

(01:59:18):
like on on, you know, the WWF. And then on
May thirty first, he returns to Canada for Owen's funeral.
Because he's a piece of shit, he brings cameras with him,
who film inside the Heart Family compound without Martha's permission
and air the footage on raw.

Speaker 2 (01:59:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:59:35):
Martha does sue and settles with Vince and the WWF
for eighteen million. Oh. He goes, yeah, yeah, that's at
least something.

Speaker 3 (01:59:45):
I mean they start a charity, yeah, in his name,
and also like there's a there's like a weird this
is the whole thing. There's like a weird division between
Owen's immediate family like his wife and children, and then
like the greater Heart family who don't want to piss
off Vince. Yeah, so like they didn't really support her
during this time. And then yeah and like afterwards she

(02:00:06):
like she she and her children refuse to allow Vince
to induct Owen into the WWE Hall of Fame.

Speaker 1 (02:00:13):
Yeah, it's really fucked up and ugly, Like Brett winds
up wrestling again for Vince later, and like, yeah, there's
a lot of like family conflict here caused by this.
But obviously it makes sense to me why Martha does
everything that she does. Like, uh, this is like the

(02:00:33):
the amount of rage that you must have in this
situation is like beyond measure.

Speaker 2 (02:00:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:00:41):
Uh so, yep, there's a lot more to be said
about Vince McMahon. But and you know, we've spent so
much time, we have said so much about him. This
is kind of this is where we're like, this is
not the day was gonna be the Yeah, but yeah,

(02:01:02):
this is just kind of where where we are. There's
more that happens in the twenty first century. But like
you know enough now to know why people say Vince
McMahon is a bad person.

Speaker 4 (02:01:13):
I can't believe we did thirty two hours in Vince
McMahon and never got to the Kiss My Ass Club.

Speaker 1 (02:01:17):
No, I'm saying we didn't get to him blowing out
his quads just as a brief one feel like blows
both of his quads out walking on stage in two
thousand and five, and it's it's very much if I'm
not mistaken, it's it's Batista, and I forget who the
other guy is. But like they fuck up a move
and they both fall out of the ring at the
same time, which like is a DQ. So like it's

(02:01:40):
not supposed to end in a DQ, but it does
because like they just kind of botch a move. It happens,
and Vince like gets angry and comes out on stage
and like is doing his baby Hue walk just kind
of blows his squads. Well part it's part of the show. Like,
it's not that he's angry.

Speaker 3 (02:01:56):
They decide to send Vince out to play angry to
yeah the match continue, Yeah, but he tries to slide
into the into the ring and both of his quads explode.
I also saw this slide. Both of his quawds explode.
But they don't stop the scene, Robert. They continue to
do the scene. Vince can't stand, so they continue to

(02:02:17):
do the scene with Vince.

Speaker 2 (02:02:18):
Just sitting down in the ring.

Speaker 3 (02:02:20):
That's so funny, everybody else the funniest looking history repeated
itself recently as I Understanding a pay per view earlier
this year, Shane McMahon did.

Speaker 2 (02:02:32):
The exact bad quads that family quad genetic quads out.
It's it's so funny. So I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:02:43):
That's the the Vince McMahon story. He's still running the WWF.
He was out for a little while, but now he's
back in. Baby, he's back in with like a real
thin mustache. Yeah, he's kind of m to grow after
all of this.

Speaker 5 (02:03:01):
Yeah, it's a really really, really really horrifying mustache.

Speaker 2 (02:03:05):
It really is. It tells the story that we took
so many hours to tell.

Speaker 3 (02:03:10):
It looks like he knew these episodes were going to
come out and he was like, well, I might as
well grow this mustache.

Speaker 4 (02:03:15):
Yes, it feels like like a court mandated mustache. Like,
all right, well, let's your stay out of jail, Vince,
but you have to wear this mustache.

Speaker 3 (02:03:25):
The conditions of his parole. Part of it was wearing
this pencil thin predator's mustache.

Speaker 2 (02:03:31):
It's his way of going do to door and killing everyone.

Speaker 3 (02:03:36):
Looking like Clark Gable. Spending too long at a high school,
he does look like a version of Clark Gable.

Speaker 2 (02:03:42):
That.

Speaker 1 (02:03:43):
Yeah, instead of going to World War Two, went to
I don't know whatever.

Speaker 2 (02:03:49):
Yeah, I went to a high school to trowl Roberts.

Speaker 1 (02:03:56):
Well, we got a good wrestling stories that I messed here, gang.

Speaker 3 (02:04:02):
No, I think we got them all. God, I mean
you covered a lot of them. I mean there's I mean,
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:04:10):
Well, I guess what I'd like to leave you all
with is the image of Vince McMahon sitting on the
floor because he's blown both of his squads up.

Speaker 2 (02:04:22):
You know that that still trying to arouchy and authoritative.

Speaker 3 (02:04:25):
Yep, they do the whole scene. They do the whole
bit with him just sitting down in the ring. It's
the funniest thing I've ever seen on the wrestling ah man,
and I felt bad for him at the time. But
now after you know, enduring all these episodes, I understand
that I shouldn't have and now I feel better about it.
So just look the clip up and laugh at him
because he deserves it.

Speaker 2 (02:04:45):
Yeah, well, got anything to plug? Oh Tom, please go first?
Meet to go first? Oh, I would love it if
you did.

Speaker 3 (02:04:56):
Oh man, Well, I have a podcast in Streaming Network
with our our mutual friend David Bell, also from Cracked.
Game for the Unemployed. Head over to our patreon patreon
dot com slash Game for Unemployed. We have all sorts
of different tiers you can join at just to get
exclusive podcasts. You can commission your own podcasts. We do
movie nights every week with our patrons, and you can
also listen to we have Most of our shows are

(02:05:17):
totally free to listen to. You can find them on
any place you listen to podcasts. So do that thing,
and that's all I've got. Yeah, great plug.

Speaker 4 (02:05:29):
Three years ago I started one nine hundred hot Dog
with the great Robert Brockway and we are going strong.
Call one nine hundred hot Dog for fun.

Speaker 1 (02:05:38):
Yeah, check out one nine hundred hot Dog, check out
Gamefully Unemployed. Both of them are the antidote for the
sadness that I have inflicted on you with my cruel,
cruel cruel.

Speaker 5 (02:05:52):
Show speak anyway, speaking, I was gonna say, Robert, speaking
of things that are cool, do you know what's cool
but also cooler?

Speaker 1 (02:06:01):
Oh? Yeah, you can get ad free stuff cooler.

Speaker 2 (02:06:04):
Zune Apple podcasts. That's the plug. Nobody plugs like you too.
You're gonna You're gonna have to tattoo this on his hand, Sophie.

Speaker 5 (02:06:15):
I mean that would be really funny. I would enjoy
that activity. My handwriting is horrendous.

Speaker 2 (02:06:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:06:28):
Well, I was just gonna say, I love your show, Robert,
but it does make me sad every time I listen
to it.

Speaker 2 (02:06:33):
Yeah, what we go for it is sorrow, all right,
everybody