Part Three: Vince McMahon, History's Greatest Monster

Robert, Seanbaby and Tom discuss the time Vince McMahon tried to maim Muhammed Ali with a razor blade, and how he killed old school wrestling in order to remake it in his own fetid image.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Robert Evans here and we'll get to the Vince McMahon
episodes in a second. I wanted to let you all
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(00:24):
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What's vincent, my McMahons, And that's great, Yeah, courageous, courageous.

(00:50):
This is Behind the Master. It's a podcast about the
worst people in all of history, and today I've got
two McMahons here to talk with me about. Vince McMahon,
did you did that work?

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Let me tell you something, brother, that's the gotten I'm
showing baby from the internet.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Good news, Sean baby, we will be talking about Hulk
Cogan today.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Hm, let me tell you some dude.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
My name's Tom Rayman. Mm hmmm.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
And do you do you both have a lump of
scar tissue in your asses from injecting steroids the size
of a softball.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
I do, and several on my forehead from cutting it
up with raisin lights.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Oh you know a brother. Yeah, yeah, my forehead looks
like a grotesque topocryphal map that looks like a look
Abdul of the butcher.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
We call that the hulkster. When you can, when you
can read, and braille on my forehead scars.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, you might not be, brother. No one knows about it.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Uh, Terry Terry bolea Hulk's real name.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
When I was a little little kid, you know, before
I made my friend and in the Attitude era, I
was not a fan of wrestling because I don't think
we got any of the channels that it was on.
But I loved Hull Cogan because I would watch almost
every single day when I was like sitting in the
back room of the donut shop where my parents worked.
The movie Suburban Commando, of course, hell yeah, absolutely a

(02:20):
fucking legendary.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
I have long stretches of that movie memorized.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Hule Cogan. So we are back for part three. We're
talking about Vince Senior still because he is still the
one running the wrestling business. When we left off, Vince
Junior had just started using the name Vince McMahon as
he got sent to a military school, possibly for being
too racist to be in an integrated high school, but

(02:48):
it's unclear.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
He's so more likely than him beating up a kuma
te full of marines.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yes, that is probably true. You have to separate him
from the general population. After that, he's far too damy
interest So Vince was well regarded. Vince Senior was well regarded,
as I said, in the national wrestling business. His company
was an affiliate of the NWA, the big wrestling organizer
union that ran most of the country, but he wasn't

(03:14):
a member at first, and when he became one, he
very quickly fell behind on his dues and threatened to resign.
He seems to have understood the value of such an organization,
but disliked the fact that being a member of it
would mean he had to inevitably seed some of his
control over how storylines of his wrestlers proceeded. Vince Senior
was also different from most of the other promoters and

(03:35):
owners across the country. While while his competitors generally booked
technical wrestlers above all else, guys who were really good
at kind of the choreography of ringwork, Vince Senior grew
increasingly obsessed with bringing in giant, muscle bound monsters and
was willing to sacrifice ring skill for having the absolute
biggest dudes that he could hire. Now, this actually worked

(03:58):
out really well for everyone for a while, because by
this point the government had slapped the wrestling industry with
some anti trust regulations, which meant that owners had to
let their play their wrestlers travel around the country more
or less at will. This was great for everybody because
it means that audiences got a lot of choice and variety,
and even the whims of a guy like Vince Senior
couldn't exercise total control even in the region.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
That he owned.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
So Vince preferred to hire muscle bound, giant guys, and
because they got to start with him, those giant muscle
freaks would get to travel around the country and wrestle
at other places. But also Vince would have to hire
people who came in from other regions of the country,
so he got a lot of technical wrestlers. It worked
out really well for people who like to watch wrestling, right,
You got a lot of variety in the kind of

(04:41):
people who were, you know, taking part in wrestling matches.
In nineteen sixty two, Vince Senior wanted to keep the
National Championship belt on his champion, nature Boy Buddy Rogers.
And I believe Rick Flair also gets called nature boy later, right,
isn't that he sure does? Yeah, yeah, he's sure. There's
a couple of nature boys in wrestling history, is what
I'm saying. At this point, nature Boy Buddy Rogers, who's

(05:05):
Vince Senior's wrestler. He wants to keep the belt on him,
but the cartel, the NWA, has other plans. And there's
this big dispute between the cartel, who's like, we want
to give this to Luthez, you know, who's their big wrestler,
and Vince Senior, who's like, no, I want to keep
the belt on my guy. And this argument between the
NWA and between Vince Senior's kind of wrestling syndicate actually

(05:26):
puts the future of Kfabe at risk. For a while,
there was a fear that Capital Wrestling, Vince Senior's company,
might take the belt so that they could keep it
on Buddy Rogers and leave the NWA, putting belief in
the reality behind established KFA to risk. Right, If like
he's able to just like leave the NWA and keep
the belt, then it means that wrestling's not really a sport.

(05:49):
So eventually they came to an agreement to kind of
rescue Kfabe that Rogers would in fact lose to luth
As after all. But the next year, Vince Senior and
Toots Mom, who's his business partner at this point, decided
to leave anyway and launch an independent wrestling federation of
their own. They call it the WWWF or Worldwide Wrestling Federation.

(06:11):
That eventually dropped one of the w's, giving us the
WWF that most people listening grew up with. It's called
the WWE now, but we're just going to call it
the WWF for our purposes today. While all this was
going on, Vince was acclimating to military school and the
departure of his stepfather, Leo, who bounced and got divorced
from Vincent Vince's mom around the same time. She got

(06:33):
remarried to some other dude about a half year later,
But this doesn't seem to have impacted Vince as much.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
He was old enough.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Now he's spending all his time with his biological father,
and to his credit, Vince Senior seems to have legitimately
committed to being a part of Vincent's life, even though
he never kind of got over his awkwardness with his son,
who he doesn't really seem to have fully understood. It's
worth noting that four years later, in nineteen sixty six,
Leo Lupton would marry Vince's cousin, the young kid he

(07:00):
put leaves in in his early childhood. He was twenty
eight years older than her. So that's oh, that's good.
That's good.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
That's like the four d Chess of Troubling.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
But they marry in Florida, so at least this one's
not on North Carolina, so hey, you know, that's good.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
He didn't even have to tell us that. I knew
from the story where they got married.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
I assume most of these stories take place in Florida
because it's pro wrestling.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
It is prominent in nearly every wrestler's life.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
Those dry Florida leaves. When you're stuffing leaves into your bride.
You're twenty eight years younger cousin Brian and details the story.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
It's fine anyway, every one of those details is significant.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
Back in nineteen sixty two, eleventh grade, Vince tried his
first attempt at becoming a wrestling promoter. Now he's in
military school. At this point, he's become pretty muscular. You know,
he's working out with the weight set that uh doctor
Graham gave him, and he's you know, he's done some football.
He's an OK defensive tackle. But he doesn't really like

(08:13):
actual competition sports. He doesn't seem to like super engage
with him. Wrestling is what his bio dad did, and
so wrestling is what Vincent Junior loved. He decided to
create a youth copy of his dad's league at Fishbourne
Military School. Now Vince McMahon's first shows were carried out
in a high school gym after hours, and included the
costumes and ring stunts that were already such a part

(08:35):
of the past. Time Vince wrestled himself as ape Man McMahon.
One friend at the time explained that's not a bad
name to be honest, like solid wrestling name.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Yeah, it's it's you know you. You you graduate from that,
you evolve, But it's not bad for a first first try.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
As a high school wrestling starting point, perfectly acceptable.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
You become.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
Some of the people listening think Gorilla Monsoon's a joke
that you came up with.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
He is not. That's a real guy.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
That is an absolute real guy. One friend at the
time explained he was just into dress up, putting on
masks or something, and he would wrestle just to have fun.
Sometimes people would participate, sometimes they just come watch Vince
was Vince.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
He loves the first part LF.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
He's just choking, pop gouging his own eyes out, throat
punching himself.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
This is what I did to those Marines.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
They coming. This is I have to say.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
One of the things that's actually really interesting about Vince McMahon.
He is a cutthroat businessman. He is like, uh it
does a lot of terrible things in the name of prophets.
But he's also not one of those bloodless weirdos who
just lives to soak money out of wrestling. Like he
loves to wrestle like he becomes a very prominent in
ring character because he just can't stop himself from being

(09:59):
like physically an.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Involved with it.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
A lot of people argue he ruined wrestling, and there's
certainly a case to be made there, but you can't
really argue he's not like enthralled by everything that is
involved in in pro wrestling, Like this is an obsession
for him and it kind of always has been. Kids
who wrestled with him would later talk about his strut,
like the strut with which he walked into the ring,

(10:22):
which you can still see in like videos of him
from the nineties and early two thousands.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yeah, you can.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
They describe him as walking like baby Hueye and it
would still be part of his ring presence half a
century later. That is a great way to describe the
way he walks, like one of the kids from Ductails.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
It really sits well. Baby Hughey's a different character. Oh bough,
we're not talking about Huey Dewey and Louis no. Oh okay,
but maybe Baby Hughey is the great big one.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
I don't know who that is. See, this is this
is me learning something. I'm going to google it. Yeah,
google it. Google baby.

Speaker 2 (10:59):
I assume this was this was a duck. Oh oh,
oh my god.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Okay, no, I do know this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
the gigantic weird baby duck. Yes, okay, that also works. Look,
both of these work, is what I'm saying. Cartoon cartoon
duck generally a good thing to compare to Vince McMahon. Yeah,
has never been a more apt comparison.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
No. Interesting.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
So wrestling was not the only kind of performing that
teen Vince was into, as Josie Reisman found when she
interviewed his friend Dutch for her book Quote, we would
go over to Fairfax Hall, the girls school across town,
and he would put on a healing show over there.
He had a fellow named Dutch Lindsay Charles Lindsay. Dutch

(11:44):
was kind of short, stocky guy, and he'd grabbed Dutch
by the head and he'd do this healing routine and
Dutch would fall to the ground and Vince would heal him.
What the book, I did not call medicine shows being
part of his early life when I started doing this,
but uh.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
Yeah, neither did I.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
But of course, yeah, absolutely, Scance. I love that it's
a girls school. So there's this implied motivation that that
he was doing it to get laid. He's like, you
know what ladies love. Yeah, well that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
That's interesting trying to see because and this is something
that the when Josie talks to other kids at the
military school, they'd bring up is that, like, you know,
we're men in a military school, our access to women
who are our age was very strictly curtailed at this point, right,
So these performances at the women's school was kind of
like one of our few chances to mingle with with other,

(12:33):
you know, girls who were kind of in our same
age group. But Vincent doesn't seem to have been into this.
He is at this point in love with the woman
who will become his wife, Linda McMahon.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Uh. I can already see the scene where she's like
watching from her dorm window of this this maniac and
the parking lot, like healing his friend from a wheelchair
and thinking, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna murder that man
one day, and then.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
I'm gonna somehow become a member of Donald Trump's White House.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
My god.

Speaker 3 (13:02):
So they had very specific dreams.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, friends, recall that he talked about Linda constantly, even
though he generally didn't talk about girls, Wrestling was pretty
much all Vince chatted about, like they thought. They noted
that he talked about Linda and that it was kind
of weird because he otherwise did not seem to notice
that female people existed.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
Maybe she had a real crisp.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
Man.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
She plants your head in a canvas like something you've
never seen.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
Now, as we have come to expect, always keeps a
razor blade in her palm, now, as we've come to
expect from our boy adult. Vince would later claim to
have been a bed dude at school, constantly in trouble,
in committing crimes. I wasn't caught for some stuff that
would have been immediate dismissal, like stealing the commandant's car.

(13:54):
He also had a dog he was nuts about. I
love animals, but one day I couldn't resist giving that
dog a laxative. With the laxative and some hamburger, and
the dog did his business all over the commandant's apartment,
which thrilled me greatly.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Now it thrilled me greatly. Yeah, when no, he absolutely did.
When did he When did he give this interview? Oh?
This was decades later. So it's in like the nineties, right, Yeah,
at the eighties ninety, I think, not like the eighteen.

(14:26):
He chose to describe giving a dog a lax to
ship all over a guy's apartment was it was quite thrilling.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
We got crazy friends on her head. We make a
girl with a.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
Computer, our friend Bluto. You should have seen the one
in That guy could rain a whole handle at once. Anyway,
it killed me greatly.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
It is also interesting to me we're focusing on the
even weirder things that he wants us to believe about him.
But he really wants us to think he stole a
lot of cars. And that's that's such a strange thing
to what people. It's it's okay, man. He claims that

(15:08):
he was the first student to be court martialed at
Fishburne over depending on the interview, either in subordination or
a threat he made that he might somehow sabotage sabotage
finals week again sabotage, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Threat of a bomb threat is what he's claiming.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
I think it was more like a prank. Okay, but
but yeah, this is like and he like. So he
says that basically the administration thought I was gonna sabotage
Finals week. So they court martialed me and they were
gonna kick me out, But then all of the other
students and teachers rose up and like threatened to leave
the school if they didn't clear me of all charges.

(15:48):
Like there was a rebellion. No, absolutely, none of they didn't.
Fucking Dead Poet Society, for as you.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Are accused of threatening to shut down the entire finals
week with your pranks. What's this clapping? Everyone is in
support of you, captain.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
My captain.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
Has a feed a dog laxative. I know this is
you the dumbest ship.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
Yeah, he wants to believe it was Dead Poet Society
but also Animal House.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, and yeah it's it's it's very funny. He is
such a liar. So Fishburne the school has like Josie
Riseman again, the author of Ringmaster, Uh talked to a
bunch of his former classmates at fishburn and none of
them recall any of this happening. She also like reached

(16:50):
out to Fishbourne and was like you, he says, you
court martialed him. You guys keep records. Do you have
any records that he was ever court martialed? Uh, they
did not have any records, and Vince has never presented any. Instead,
interviews with his peers portray him as a decent student
who simply wasn't a great student because he wasn't that
interested in school. Right. He was one of those kids

(17:12):
who was like, he was smart, so he could do
okay if he didn't work too hard at class, and
so he devoted you know, he kind of scraped by
and spent most of his time on wrestling. Right that,
I'm sure that kind of dude is actually pretty familiar
to our listeners, right, Like, that describes me without It
wasn't wrestling for me, but that describes me in high
school pretty well. Yeah, So once again Vince lied to

(17:35):
make himself look like a badass. The reality is that
he was a nerd. He was a wrestling nerd, and
he was more jacked than we tend to associate with
that term. But like most nerds, he kind of did
what he had to at school, avoided trouble, and spent
all of his free time on the stuff he was
obsessed with. Right Like, for me, this was Warhammer, but
it's the same pattern. Yeah, he graduated and he got

(17:57):
into college at East Carolina University. Around the same time,
his dad took on a new championship wrestler, a guy
named Bruno. Semartino still regarded today as maybe the greatest
pro wrestler of all time, although there's a couple of
people who folks wind up throwing out in that category.
Bruno conversation, he's in the conversation, right. Yeah, he was

(18:19):
a obviously, he's huge, and he was an extremely skilled
technical wrestler. Bruno was also the kind of person who
trained like a world class athlete, and as a result
of how careful he was about his training, he was
able to remain a high skill technical performer for more
than thirty years, which is a lot of longevity, especially
for this period of time in pro wrestling. With Bruno,

(18:43):
Vince Senior pioneered a strategy totally new to the field.
And I'm going to quote now from a book called
Death of the Territories by Tim Hornbaker. The central idea
was to build up a succession of threatening challengers for Sammartino,
and Bruno would show his vulnerability in near defeats, only
to rise up in the to conquer his opponents. His
performance never failed to capture the imagination of audiences. Among

(19:05):
his villainous rivals were a three hundred and fifty pound
Guerrilla Monsoon, the six foot five Bill Miller, and the
six foot three, two hundred and seventy five pound Bill Watts.
As Semmartino worked through one feud, McMahon pushed several other
prominent challengers at the same time to keep the cycle
going all over the circuit. Now, while this is all
going on in the wrestling world, you know, Linda graduates

(19:27):
high school about a year after Vince, and the two
of them get married when they're both in college in
nineteen sixty six, which is, interestingly enough, the same year
that Leo marries Vince's cousin. Linda joins him at ECU,
and because she's an excellent student, she qualifies for an
accelerated program in French, which is I wouldn't have called

(19:48):
as Linda McMahon's focus in college, but there you go.
They graduated in nineteen sixty nine, which is the same
year that she got pregnant. Now, Vince tell another possible
lie about his time in college. He claims that his
grades there were so low because he was spending so
much time fighting. I guess that he had to talk
several professors into bumping his grades so he could get

(20:11):
a two point zero zero one and graduate.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
I was just so tough, I kept punching my books.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
Now, I will say, of all of the things he's
told us that might be lies, I think this one
might be true because this relies on him being good
at like manipulating people, and that is his actual skill. Yes,
so yeah, I could see him manipulating his teachers to
giving him a passing grade. I'm not gonna say that
one's definitely fake. The year after he left college, Vince

(20:40):
got a job working for his father at the then WWWF.
He'd initially wanted to be a wrestler, but again, his
dad sees what happens to wrestlers when they age, right, Like,
he knows that this is a job that kills you,
and he's like, the fuck no, you are not going
to do this for a living. And yeah, at the
start of the nineteen seventies, though, Vin Junior joins his

(21:01):
dad's company anyway, and at this point kind of the
WWF's territory had eleven states, basically the whole Northeast in
pieces of the Virginias and Ohio, it's the largest wrestling
federation at the time, but it's also very much.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Integrated with the others. Right.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
The heads of the different syndicates would change sometimes, but
the actual territory wouldn't because everything was kind of spoken for.
So nobody can really expand without somebody else losing some ground.
And for you know, all of the that he is
a pretty cutthroat businessman, Vince Senior was one of these
guys who's like, look, these other people are my peers,
these other owners of syndicates, and we have a handshake deal, right, Like,

(21:37):
I'm not going to fuck too mouthy. You'll help, I'll
fuck around a little bit sometimes to get an advantage,
but I'm not going to fuck with the overall system
too much, you know. Yeah, So at the very beginning
of his career, Vince found a place for himself as
a referee. Now, in this stage, wrestling refs were legitimate
sports referees. They were licensed by the states, and they

(21:58):
had to have specific trade in order to do the job.
This is again wrestling is not an actual sport still
at this point, but the referees do all of but
they're lying about that, right, Like wrestler, like the company promoters,
everybody pretends it is a real sport, and so the
government's like, well, then you have to have actual reps, right, like,
you know, like we'll go along with it, We'll go

(22:20):
along with this, but you got to do the thing
other sports do. We can't just like pretend that you're
a real sport but be like for no reason, they're
exempt from all the rules right now.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Obviously, so all eventually becomes the whole thing behind sports entertainment, right.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yes, yes, yes, which we will. That will be a
major focus of part four. So the main job of
reps at this point is to act as storytellers, right
they kind of Honestly, there's a lot of similarities between
wrestling and dungeons and dragons. The reps in a lot
of ways are kind of acting like dms, right, They're
making it clear when someone's won or lost. Sometimes when

(22:54):
you have to, like you know, somebody gets out of
pocket and they're not willing to like actually take a
fall when they're sppos to take a fall, you find
ways to like deque them or call the match for
the other guy in order to make sure things still
in the way that they need to. The ref has
actually a lot of power, and so do the announcers.
It's kind of the two of them together are helping
to sort of tell the story to the audience of

(23:16):
what's happening in the ring, right, And it's also part
of their job and part of the announcer's job what
Vince Junior is doing to sell what's happening to the audience.
So maybe sometimes you've got like a wrestler who's not
as technically skilled, or just somebody's off and a hit
doesn't really, you know, land the way that it should have.
It's your job to kind of hype that hit up
so that the audience, you know, gets carried along in

(23:39):
the enthusiasm and doesn't notice.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
One of the funniest things clips you can watch on
YouTube are blown spots like that where somebody misses like
a drop kick or a hole doesn't go right, or
they screw up a special move and listening to the
announcers trying to sell what happened as if they didn't
just fuck up. Yeah, it's an incredible genre of YouTube video.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, I know, yeah, and it is interesting, Like the
more I get into it, the more I understand why,
Like all of the kids that I played Dungeons and
Dragons with when I was twelve were into pro wrestling.
It's like, oh, I get I actually and this makes
complete sense. These are extremely similar in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
You know.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
It's just a lot of it is.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
Make believe in choreography and kind of the high fantasy,
a weird kind of fantasy storytelling.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
I love the theatrics of when the referee like tells,
like in a tag team match, he'll like tell the
good guy tag team member like, hey, just turn and
start yelling at him for no reason, and then the
bad guy tag team guys will like beat out of
the other guy, and then he turns around and he
has to act like what happened to you? I just
love that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
So object permanence?

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah yeah, yeah, you know who else has no object permanence?

Speaker 3 (25:00):
I love where this is going. Yeah, the sponsors.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
Look, we have one simple rule for the sponsors of
Behind the Bastards, and it's that none of them can
be above the age where they understand object permanence. Every
one of our sponsors. The one guarantee I'll make is
that if you put your hands over their eyes, they
will freak out because they don't know that you haven't
just disappeared from existence.

Speaker 3 (25:23):
Support these babies and goldfish.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
I guess yes, goldfish as well.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
We do take a lot of money from the goldfish
industrial car from.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Big gold Big goldfish.

Speaker 1 (25:35):
They can't get quite large if you keep feed them, Tom,
It's all about the size of the bowl. Same is
true of wrestlers.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Actually, all right, ah, we're back, yeah, brother. So in
nineteen seventies.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
Seventy two, Vince Junior starts working as a referee. Now
there's nothing that Vince McMahon hates more than being called
Vince junior. And it is true, he's not a junior, right,
he and his dad have different names, Like, they're not
actually Vince Senior and Vince Junior. But because they are
both a Vince McMahon, everyone they worked with at the time,

(26:18):
and this I get this from Tim Hornbaker's book, everyone
they worked with at the time in the wrestling world
just called them Vince Senior and Vince Junior because, like
I found out writing this podcast, that's just the easiest
way to talk about the both of them. Because anyway,
NS Slayer was not sticking as an Yeah Marin Slayer, Yeah,
that doesn't work as well. Anyway, Vince McMahon hates it

(26:39):
when you call him Vince Junior. So the job Vince
Junior took previous had previously been done like this, This
announce or referee, you know, announcer job that he gets, sorry,
this announcer job that he gets had previously been done
by a renowned sports broadcaster named Ray Morgan. He was
a very good announcer, but he was also a union man,

(26:59):
and both Vince McMahon's hated unions, so one to have that,
you can't have that. So there's a couple versions of
the story. One of them is that one day Vince's
backstage with his dad in Hamburg, Pennsylvania one night and
he sees his dad having this really mean, nasty argument
with Ray Morgan over the fact that Ray wants a raise.
Ray is like, I'm not going out and announcing tonight

(27:20):
unless I get a raise, and Vince Senior's like, fuck you,
then you're fired. Vince Junior then later claims, quote, I'm
sitting in this cloakroom and I'm saying to myself, Wow,
that was awesome. I was just proud to be there
and listen to all that, and proud of my dad
proud of the fact that he told this guy to
take uh and so you know, his dad gives him
the job to because he'd fired this guy for you know,

(27:41):
trying to trying to get a raise. Now that's the
Vince McMahon version of the story. Josie Riiseman's research includes
uncovering arbitration documents from a separate legal case at around
the same time before you, I just want to say
real quick that my prediction is that those things happen.
It is just not on the same night. Yeah, that's

(28:02):
actually Tom. You you have gotten it completely right. That
is literally what I'm about to say. So he was
not masturbating in the closet. Finds somebody well that I didn't.
I never said that. I never said that, Sean. So
basically what happens, based on these arbitration documents is that
Morgan had previously negotiated a pay raise and Vince Senior

(28:26):
had agreed to give him a pay raise, and after
they have the face to face meeting where he agrees
to a new contract in a pay raise, he fired
Morgan like when they're no longer in a room together.
So he doesn't have like the guts to get up
in front of him and tell him he's fired. He
pretends to agree to a raise to avoid a conflict,
and then fires him later, and then he hires his
son for the same rate that Morgan had just signed at. Now, basically,

(28:49):
he's doing this to be like, hey, anybody who tries
to like argue for a better stake, like, fuck you.
It's not about the money to me, it's about winning. Right.
If you get a raise, that means you beat me
and I won't be beat son gets your job. Yeah,
my fucking kid gets your job. Now again, this is

(29:09):
a little confusing. This story is a little confusing if
you kind of buy all these recollections of Vince Senior
that you get from other wrestlers that talk about how
honest he was, and it is true, you can find
a lot of positive accounts of Vince Senior as a
boss from wrestlers from this era, and in fact, some
of these accounts sort of verge on adoration, but that
affection to.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
The degree that it was going to remember not everyone's
an asshole all the time, exactly exactly.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
And it's also there's a lot of dudes that love
Vince McMahon. Yeah, yeah, because he's nice to them in person.
And that's what That's what Jesse the Body Ventura said that, like,
you would always feel good after a talk with Vince,
but you wouldn't get a dime, you know, And it's
what's I think. It does seem to me that the
affection a lot of his wrestlers had for him was honest,

(29:55):
but it was not reciprocated by Vince Senior. Any warmth
he showed his employees was k fabe right. And here's
the book Ring Master describing a conversation between ex wrestler
JJ Dillon and Vince Junior. Vince the Younger told Dylan
about a conversation he'd had with Vince Senior. The father's wisdom,
as imparted to the son, was wrestlers are like seagulls.

(30:15):
All they do is shit, eat and squawk all day.
Dylan was taken aback and never forgot it, even went
so far as to name his memoir wrestlers are like seagulls.
From McMahon to McMahon. That gave an insight there and
how his father truly felt deep inside, Dylan says, though
he never spoke openly that way, And yeah, I think
that's interesting, accurate. Probably seems like Dylan's got his number. Now.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
The fact that Vince Senior gives Vince Junior this job
is probably the most obvious example of nepotism that he shows.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
His son.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Junior was expected to run himself ragged, though, driving across
the country to call shows from Maine to Georgia. He
kind of breaks into the business really because his dad
gives him this impossible task of like bringing up numbers
in Maine, and he's good at it. He's able to
actually promote, he gets more people coming in, so he's
he's not paid an enormous amount of money, Like I think,
it's a reasonably comfortable living once he really gets in there.

(31:10):
But his dad also he's not grooming his air, right
he does. Vince is not going to inherit the business,
and his dad is like open with him that, like,
no nobody, I am not giving the business to you.
He's not, in fact going to give the business to anybody. So,
in order to prove himself, Vince Junior decided that, like,
while he's sort of building his career as a wrestling promoter,

(31:34):
he's going to try and get independently wealthy by engaging
in a series of business schemes with his wife Linda.
Uh So, the first thing they do is they buy
an old cement plant and a horse farm to try
to make money both of the stilling.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
Horse guy.

Speaker 3 (31:51):
You know you've heard that phrase. They go together like
cement in horses. Right, you got horse in my cement.
You got cement in my horses? Ohing, dip your horse
and cementas delicious.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Everyone loves a good cement horse. So Vince is heavily
reliant on Linda as his money manager while they attempt to,
you know, remain solvent. But even this early in their relationship,
he cheated with enough regularity that his friends warned him
about it. The genital just was, Vince, this woman is
way too good for you. Why are you being an

(32:25):
asshole like this? And you have to assume the kind
of people that Vince McMahon has at friends at this point.
For them to be like, you're not treating your wife right,
You've got to be really cheating, outrageous. You gotta be cheating,
like Olympic grade cheating. So, because Vince, you gotta be

(32:45):
fucking women in the next room. Yeah, it's gotta be bad.
It's gotta be like guys in North Carolina in the
nineteen seventies go, I don't think this guy respects women
like that. So Vince Junior is not set to inherit
the WWF outright, And so again he's going to Ultimately

(33:07):
he's going to pay his father for the business. He's
often tried to describe this, the fact that his dad
made him pay for the WWF. It's sort of like
a a kind of like ode to self reliance, right,
But the truth is that he did still get a
lot of help from his father. In nineteen seventy four,
Vince Senior got his son an unpaid gig with a
boxing promoter top rank that was meant to teach him

(33:30):
the ropes of the industry. Less than a week into
this job, Vince went to his boss and said, quote,
I've got this great idea. I know a guy who's
been jumping over trucks with a motorcycle evil caneval and
now he wants to with a space rocket jump over
the Snake River Canyon.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Now did really well, thank.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
You if you're a young aue.

Speaker 3 (33:50):
He didn't quite make it. He didn't quite.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Make it right.

Speaker 1 (33:53):
I'm gonna guess most of our gen z ers don't
remember Evil Knievel. If you've ever watched the Simpsons episode
where Homer all down that canyon twice, the stunt man
in the beginning of the episode is based on Evil Caniebl.
Evil was a famous stunt man who jumped things and
occasionally got badly hurt.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Right real quick, I want to point out, Robert that
you're touchstone for people who are too young to remember
Evil Caniebl is a thirty three year old Simpsons The
good Simpsons episodes are eternal, Tom, they never died, they
never die.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Still a touchstone to kids. I have to believe that, Tom,
I have nothing else. Sure, it's it's I showed Garrison
Starship Troopers the other week. All of all of the
the icons of my childhood are have died and faded.
It's it's tragic. I never thought it would happen to me.

(34:51):
I thought, uh no, I thought those movies would be forever.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
Evil Canel, famous stunt man, jumped things, occasionally hurt himself
at the day. I remember it was a little kid
knowing about Evil Knievel and like my cousins and I
like he was this kind of like superhero figure to us.
But the reality is he was a giant piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
He was going to make that at jumping motorcycles as well, Like, yeah,
he was not good at any other Like more modern
motorcycle jumpers talk about him, they don't talk about like
his technique. He just got off Harley and just held
the throttle down, did not pitch that motorcycle.

Speaker 3 (35:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
He was generally thought he would die, like he just
had balls to he didn't care if he lived. Yeah,
he's like whatever if I die, fuck it cool.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
He's just Johnny Knoxville, like, yeah, forty years earlier, without
a sense of humor or charm.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah, or skill or any of the things.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
But yeah, it's Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
Honestly, I think like fifty percent of his appeal was
the fact that Evil canebl is a pretty cool name
for a stunt man.

Speaker 4 (35:54):
You might see a man die, Yeah, there's that was
the big appeal to all of his stunts is that, like,
there's pretty good chance he doesn't live through this, so obviously.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
It won't be a gentle death. I know.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
No, you will watch a man come apart on landing
crash dummy. So you know, he was a giant bigot.
He was very sexist. He was There are allegations at
least that he was abusive to his children, but Vince
didn't care about that, although he may not have known
any of that at the time, but I don't think

(36:28):
he would have cared either way because he wanted to
people to get to get people to pay for like
pay There used to be a thing called pay per
view kids, uh, where you would pay to watch things
like a la carte that weren't cable TV. I know
that's basically how all television works now for most people,
but at the time this was special things, right, So
his goal is, like, I want to get people to

(36:49):
pay for pay per view so they can like see
if this guy is going to die life on camera,
Vince works out a potentially sweet deal with Evil and
Evil and ABC were He's like, hey, we'll do this
on pay per view while it's live, but then after
it airs, ABC will get the exclusive right to rebroadcast
it and so we'll get even more money from this thing.

(37:10):
But when he sits down at it with Evil, canievl
in a meeting with his boss, who is a Jewish
lawyer from New York. His boss at this promotion company.
The first thing Evil can Eevil says is there are
three kinds of people. I can't stand New Yorkers, lawyers
and Jews.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Oh so so the meeting. The meeting went well, then.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, the meeting went great, so gradu, Yeah, I don't
believe in the Holocaust.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
How are you doing?

Speaker 3 (37:43):
They all haven't even sat down yet.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah, he's showing off his SS tattoo.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
So it's just brought. It brought a briefcase of Nazi
parafamiliar with him bring meetings.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
So it gradually became clear that Evil was not a
good person to be in business with. Now his boss,
whose name is a room Vince, you know the decent
thing to do when you realize that, like you've got that,
there's two decent things to do, I would say, when
you realize that, like you've brought this guy in for
a meeting with your boss and he's being really racist
to your boss, the most decent thing to do would

(38:19):
be just like, fuck you, get out of here, We're
not doing this deal. The second most decent thing would
be like, hey, boss, really sorry, I didn't know he
was fucking bigot. I will take point on this, so
you don't have to interact with him, and I'll get
you know, get this thing done and we can move
on with our lives.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
Vince does neither of those things. Instead, he abandons his
boss and his unpaid job at the agency and leaves
them to clean up the mess after they've signed a
deal with Evil. The canyon jump is a disaster, and
a room had to spin this again. His boss, who
is a Jewish lawyer, had to spend the summer promoting
it with Evil, and Evil, who, on one memorable occasion,

(38:56):
while they are together at a hotel, gets angry and
a bunch of off duty soldiers and their families swimming
at the hotel pool and pulls a gun and threatens
them out of the hotel pool so they'll be quiet.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
American hero, great guy.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
So the jump is a flop. Yeah, there's ay.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
I was wondering. I was like, man, I didn't know
Vince was involved with the Snake River Canyon Jump, and
it's like he.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
Wasn't He invented it and then he abandoned it.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
He just fucking left.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
He was out. In your future episode, there's still plenty
for the don't worry, we'll make it work.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
I do like it's a snake River is not even
it's not even like an entertaining catastrophe. No, No, he
just doesn't make it in his parachute open off the side. Yeah,
it's a climactics, a very lame jump.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
If you just type bass jumping fails into YouTube, you
will find more impressive failure fails of reckless human beings.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
If you cat's trying to circle around a full back,
you'll get.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
More more thrilling videos than jumping snake River can.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
So it goes really badly. And I will say, even
though Vince abandons the entire effort, he and his wife
are heavily invested in this stunt for some fucking reason,
and they do lose a quarter of a million dollars.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
So God, but she loves him. She is very loyal.
You gotta give her that.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
In normal people world, being responsible for the Snake River
Canyon jump and then losing a quarter of a million
dollars on it would be the end of your big
industry dreams.

Speaker 3 (40:41):
But Vince, that would be like opening al Capone's vault.
There was nothing inside.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Yeah, but unfortunate.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
Can you imagine if that guy was still in media?
But Vince Junior is Vince Senior son. So a room
wound up reaching out again to Vince Junior when he
had another idea for a stunt promotion. Now, this one
involved a guy you might know called Muhammad Ali, him Ali.
We are talking the mid seventies here. Ali is a

(41:11):
big name at this point in time. He is he is,
he is fucking a big, big, big dude, and he
has been approached by the Japanese to fight a famous
Japanese wrestler in like a big show match. Now, there's
a lot of money in getting Muhammad Ali to fight
the most famous wrestler in Japan, Right, you can make
You're gonna make a shitload on that if you can,

(41:33):
if you can pull it out. But Ali wasn't Mahmad
Ali is Muhammad Ali, right, He's he's kind of hesitant.
He doesn't really get why anyone would want to see this.
So Vince Junior made a plan that he thought he
could sell to Ali. And I'm gonna quote again from
Josie Reisman here.

Speaker 3 (41:49):
Dying to hear what this is.

Speaker 1 (41:51):
Oh boy, tom So I got a hold of Vince
Junior and I said, how do I do this? A
room says, and Vince, of course had brilliance when it
came to wrestling and gave me the sin. He recounts
Vince's plan, which involved a well worn wrestling practice known
as blading, in which your wrestler will covertly cut their
own skin to make it look as though they've endured
enormous damage. The scenario was, and I'll never forget it,

(42:13):
that Ali, after two or three rounds was going to
be ostensibly pounding the hell out of Anoch for fake
but make it look real. And Anoki was the kind
of wrestler that had a razor like you shave with
in his mouth, and he would take the razor out
and slit his own eyebrows. And as Ali was punishing him,
the blood would be falling down and a Lee would
turn to the referee, please stop the fight. The referee wouldn't,
and Ali turns around and says, you got to stop

(42:35):
the fight, Andnoki would jump on his back pin him
one two, three count. Anok would win the fight. Everyone
would be happy, and a Lee would win with a
big paycheck. Okay, okay, is yeah, that sort of works.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
That has like a wrestling logic to it that like yeah,
he lost, but like it's not a clean pin, you know.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
Yeah, it's the thing that theoretically could work, although I
might add that having somebody take a punch from Muhammad
Ali with a razor blade in their mouth seems reckless.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, and that fake punching is not it's like a
specific thing you train. Yeah, that like when you watch
The Rock and Steve Austin throw fake punches, You're like, God,
that looks really close to real. Yeah, they're quite good
at it. It took probably forty years of wrestling before
anyone like landed on that. Like if you watch Hulkogan
punch somebody who'll like put his hand over their forehead,

(43:25):
dogs and then his own hand, You're like, well, I
know how you did that trick. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah, a counterpoint, have you seen an Oki? I feel
like that dude's face could take a up.

Speaker 2 (43:40):
Camera.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
Well you got to get you do have to give him.
He is he is one of like three people who
have lived on this earth who looks like he could
take a punch from Muhammad Ali.

Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, for dude looks like a very serious statue.

Speaker 1 (43:56):
Yeah, very very large man. So actual wrestling people. So again,
this is like, this is a problem for Ali because
Mom and Ali, I don't know if you know this
about him not a loser, right not part of his brand.

Speaker 3 (44:12):
Doesn't really have anything to prove by doing this weird
exhibition work, so.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
They may they do make a tentative agree agreement and
they haven't like, Ali hasn't agreed to the plan, but
he's like, well, we'll figure out something. So they start
promoting the match as they're still kind of working behind
the scenes to figure out exactly how this is going
to play out. The actual wrestling people, both you know,
on the US side working with Ali and the people
who are in Japan working with Aenoki, both agree that

(44:41):
Ali shouldn't beat like he can't win, right because this
is in Japan and an Oki is a Japanese babyface,
and you're not going to bring in a foreigner and
have him win on an OKI's own turf, right kind
of Famously, the only wrestler who regularly got to do
that is Andre the Giant, but we're we haven't gotten
to him yet.

Speaker 3 (44:58):
So hugely hugely famous he is. He is massive, it's
just he's got to win, right, But Ali isn't really
willing to budge on losing right, he doesn't like because
he's Muhammad Ali. Vince Junior is ordered to Tokyo to
like figure this out, to like because they again it
kind of gets close to the wire and they still

(45:18):
haven't figured out how they're going to do this. So
Vince Junior, according to one version of the story, flies
down to Tokyo to figure this out. And here's what
Josie says, and I'm going to quote her here because
this is fucking unbelievable. In Vince's telling, he went to
Ali's room and discussed the matter with him. Ali refused
to play ball, so Vince lunged forward and grabbed Ali

(45:39):
in a wrestling hole.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
My surprise.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
They took him to the floor, just to demonstrate that
in Noki abs there is that is physically impossible.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
You don't, absolutely not.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
If you lunged at Muhammad Ali in the nineteen seventies,
you died in the nineteen.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
Seventies, h tom My only disagreement is you would die
in like the eighteen seventies.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
He would punch you so hard you would go back
in time.

Speaker 3 (46:10):
He did not. Oh my god, Okay, yeah, we've gone
from stuff and leaves into my cousin's vagina to I
took down Mohammed Ali in a hotel room.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
That left my life absolutely not. There are other.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
People who were there who recall Vince being in a
room with Ali, but that he never touched him. You know,
I feel like I don't remember that. I do feel
like they'd remember that across.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
The room from Muhammad Ali, like him getting taken to
the ground by some fucking guy's kid.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Just I want you, I want you listeners. Go to YouTube,
look up any interview with Vince McMahon and try to
imagine that dude taking down Muhammad Ali in his prime.
It's simply inconceivable. It's the greatest strike of all time
versus a leaf molester close, I mean, absolutely not. What

(47:18):
an insane thing to lie.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
About, boldness of telling that lie.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
So he did that, like if he's to be believed,
he did that to prove to Muhammad Ali like you
can't deal with.

Speaker 3 (47:32):
A wrestler, no, no, just to show him like how
it would work, right.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
As if he had this conversation two hundred times a
day since he started being a boxer.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah, it's it's incredibly silly. So at any rate, Vince
does allegedly cook up a plan. So his partner on
this fight is a promoter named Mike Labell, who I
believe is the brother of Judo Jean LaBelle, who has
come up in both of the Bastards episodes. So you've
done with me now, shots, I love Jean's fucking hero.

(48:02):
So Jean was going to be the referee of the
match and Vincent's Vince McMahon's plan is that he was
going to sneak Judo jan a razor blade, which Jean
was supposed to use to cut Muhammad Ali's forehead and
force it into the match. They were going to do
this without warning.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Alife on the man in the middle of the match.

Speaker 3 (48:24):
They were going to surprise blade Muhammad Ali, now one
of the greatest athletes of all time.

Speaker 1 (48:32):
I will get I will say one thing. On the
shirt list of people who might not die after blading
Muhammad Ali, Jean label is on that list.

Speaker 3 (48:41):
Sure, I still don't favor him, It's sure, but I'm
I'm reacting to like the insanity is do it? Dacity?

Speaker 1 (48:52):
Like this isna say Mahamad Ali with a razor blade
without telling him?

Speaker 3 (48:57):
What if he because he's not gonna understand, it's it's
what's happening. So what if you fucking miss and cut
his eye out? Like yes, Like, there's so many things
that can go wrong with this.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Not only is this unethical, this is illegal, Like this
isn't illegal by the rules of wrestling. This is a
crime in Japan in the United States. That's that's actual assault. Yeah,
that is just a straight up.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
A very legendarily hard maniac. You give him the knife.
I think he can take Muhammad Ali in his crime
three four times maybe, yeah, three maybe four?

Speaker 1 (49:34):
So you know who would never agree to slash Muhammad
Ali in the face with a razor blade. The sponsors
of this podcast.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
The Fine Toddler Baby Goldfish.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
Yeah, Toddler's and Goldfish never gets caught up in schemes
like this.

Speaker 2 (49:59):
We're back.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
So again.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
The plan is Judo Jean's kind of blade Muhammad Ali
and then use that as an excuse to stop the fight,
right And basically the idea is he'll make it look
as if all these bleeding because.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
It could have got a hit by the other guy.
No one will sell together that the referee just lunged
at Muhammad Ali with a knife and suddenly he's spurting
blood and Mohamed at least very very mad at him,
and they'll say that that injury must have been from
the unrelated thing happened earlier in the fight. I think
it's a believable story. Grace is whoever came up with
this plan is probably a genius, And.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
So there's there is I will say a pretty good
chance that what I've told you is true that Vince
McMahon goes to Tokyo and comes up with this insane plan.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
Mike level, No, there's no doubt in my mind that
this plan was true.

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Possibility dred percent.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
Mike Leabell claims that Vince never even went to Japan. Again,
everyone involved in this are like liars, so.

Speaker 3 (50:55):
Hard to say what went down.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
You have to consider none of it happens at all, true,
might not exist. I never met him, what.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Liars, So whatever the truth, Vince is definitely not there.
The day of the fight, which is again a debacle,
they have kind of a brief, unsatisfying skirmish, and then
Ainoki kicks Ali with cleats and cuts his leg, which
gives Jean Lebelle an excuse to call the fight.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Here everyone a.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
Quick correction, I summarize this wrong in my notes. The
Ali Andoki fight ended in a draw, not a ref stoppage. Also,
Allie nearly lost his leg from the infection caused by
the injury he got there, which is wild.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Sorry about that. So fo a disaster wanders after him
while he like throws Antonio and Oki kept throwing himself
on the mat and throwing like lake kicks from like
a butt scoot position. So it just it felt like
an eight year old who heard the rules of the
match and he's like, aha, technically, I know how I
can defeat you, and there's nothing you can do. It's

(51:58):
so unn and stupid and pathetic and boring, and everybody lost.

Speaker 3 (52:05):
Yeah, we all lost all real alien versus predator situation.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
So at this point, Vincent's career as a promoter is
not looking promising, right, And in fact, two months the do.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
Sound like ideas that came from the guy who invented XFL.
They certainly do. They certainly do the.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
Organization.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
Yeah, two months before the alianok fight, he and Linda
go bankrupt to a million. There are a million dollars
in debt. And then right after the well deserved, well deserved,
right after the fight. They have a kid. Now, for
most people this would be an impossible to recover from situation, right,
But Vince Junior is Vince Senior's son. Using the connections

(52:55):
that he had made through being the kid of a
rich and successful guy, he and Linda, dealing with bankruptcy,
are able to put together enough investment money to buy
the Cape Cod Coliseum, which yeah, yeah, yeah there because
again they're rich people, right, it's fine. So their plan
is to turn this into a modestly successful venue for

(53:15):
concerts and the like and kind of get their bones
about how to do this business through it. By this point,
by the time they're up and running with the Cape
Cod Colisseum, they've got two kids, Shane and Stephanie. Both
of them will go on to work in the WWF,
but since Vince started having them work clean up at
the coliseum as a parent. He described himself as a disciplinarian,
telling Playboy, I'm real big on respect. I was on

(53:37):
the road a lot, and I'm sure that when I
was at home the kids wanted me back on the road.
I do not doubt that.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Vents. Yeah, yeah, that's Scance magazine.

Speaker 3 (53:47):
What a weird fucking story.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
To share.

Speaker 3 (53:49):
He brags about the strangest things in that interview. It's
a remarkable document. I was real monster, daved been terror
of the sound of my voice. Anyway, that's my love,
my kids.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
So Cape Cod is not a big party town, and
the previous owner of the coliseum had banned rock shows
after a disastrous Ted Nugent concert.

Speaker 3 (54:13):
If it was going to be anyone.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Yeah, I'm surprised it was the new.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Town. Yeah yeah, now yeah, I will say Ted NuGen,
if he were to tell me that he stole a
bunch of cars, I would say, that does sound like you,
Ted NuGen, thank you. One of these days. Well that
got that one loaded up in the hopper. So the

(54:41):
town did not love the McMahon's plans there, and the
local government decided to go after them by modifying their
license in order to restrict the alcohol that they could
sell at the coliseum. The McMahons were sure that this
would sink the business, and they decided the best response
was to fight the local government head on. The way
that they do this is like they show up at

(55:02):
a hearing with all of the selectmen, which is the
town legislators, and they bring a bunch of supporters. Right,
they get a bunch of like local fans, people who
want to like go to shows and be able to
drink and think that their plans for the coliseum are good.
And they have like one hundred and fifty of these
people swarm the meeting so that it's crowded out with
the people who support them, and basically they kind of
bully their way into convincing, you know, the selectmen to

(55:26):
give them the votes that they need in order to
reduce the restrictions on their operations and allow them to
sell all the hard liquor they want right occupy the
Board of Selectors. Yeah, this is the first time that
the McMahons ever used the political system for their own profit,
but it would not be the last. So as the
nineteen eighties dawned, the WWF was a more successful business

(55:47):
than Vince Senior had ever dreamed. There was no more
penny pinching for him.

Speaker 3 (55:51):
At least.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
He was wealthy and beloved, but he was also old
and mostly spending his time chilling out in Florida. He
also saw trouble on the horizon for his b business.
By this point, Ted Turner had launched TBS, which I'm
going to guess ninety percent of our listeners don't remember,
but was the first super channel, right. It was a
big deal at the time, and Ted hosted wrestling from

(56:12):
another company that was not affiliated with Vince McMahon. Sam
Muchnik had retired from the NWA at this point, and
it was teetering. Vince Senior knew that he didn't have
the health or the energy to navigate yet another era
of the business, but he also didn't particularly want his
son to follow him. He didn't want any of his

(56:32):
kids to follow him, and most of them seemed fine
with this because they were rich, but Vince Junior was
still obsessed with wrestling and wanted more than anything to
own his dad's business. Still, Vince Senior refused to give
it to him, so eventually they worked out a purchase
deal on extremely strict terms. Vince would need to pay
one million dollars to his dad and several shareholders in

(56:54):
just a year's time. If he missed a single payment,
they got back control of the WAF and got to
keep all of the money that he'd paid them. Now
it is somewhat unclear how he managed to make these payments.
He told one reporter that he did it by quote,
using mirrors and getting the help of a guru. I
don't know what the fuck that means.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
Nobody seems to what you use a mirror, you turn
ten bucks into twenty bucks.

Speaker 3 (57:22):
No one seems to know what.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Right there.

Speaker 3 (57:27):
I don't have trouble believing that he was involved with
some weird cult leader who helped him out on the radio.
That would not be beyond Vince McMahon. Whatever, however he
did it. He buys the WWF in nineteen eighty two,
and he pays it off before the end of nineteen
eighty three. At this point, most people would have described
his position in the industry as solid but challenging. Right

(57:48):
Ted Turner's rising up, we're kind of entering a new era.
Vince has a plan, though, and he's got a plan
not just to kind of keep the business going as
his father had, but to destroy all of the other
region syndicates and make himself the undisputed king of wrestling nationwide.
He later said, I knew my dad wouldn't really have
sold me the business had he known what I was

(58:09):
going to do.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
I believe that party. I do believe that part of
the way.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
Yeah, so yeah, this could I have to say here
when it comes to like how he destroyed the regionals,
this is probably going to be one of This is
definitely one of the longest scripts we've ever done. It might,
by the end, wind up competing with the fucking kiss
Kissinger episodes for length. At a certain point, I have
had to decide there are chunks of the Vince McMahon

(58:37):
story that we are going to have to blow through
in order to avoid like driving people insane with a
series that's just far too long. What you need to
know is this, after Vince took over from his dad,
he shredded the gentleman's agreement that the promoters had previously,
and he set to work destroying the NWA and as
many of the other regionals as he could by spreading
WWF evins across the country, and most of the regional

(59:00):
hours die one by one during this period. He doesn't
totally wipe them out, but he he spreads the WWF
to be nationwide and most of them die kind of
as a result of this, or get acquired. If you
want more detail about how this process went, the most
accessible and detailed account is in Ringmaster Josie Riisman's book,
If you were a huge wrestling nerd and you went

(59:20):
forensic detail about how this went, the book Death of
the Territories is the best resource by a mile. Now,
A big part of the weakness of these kind of
regional syndicates is that they didn't understand TV the way
that Vince McMahon did. For them, wrestling TV was big business,
but it was kind of a normal TV business. Because

(59:41):
did Vince understand TV? Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's good at this.
He's been a disaster before. But he figures something important out,
which is that most people in the biz are using
TV the way that normal people use TV to make money, right,
where you put on a thing and it attracts advertisers

(01:00:03):
and you make money.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
Vince was willing to give his shows to broadcasters for
free because he realized that whatever money he could get
from ads, especially in these local TV networks, is pennies
next to the value of promoting live shows and filling
stadiums with fans. Vince was the guy who realized televised
wrestling doesn't exist because TV's a good business. Televised wrestling

(01:00:27):
puts butts in seats and sells merchandise and that's how
you make the big fucking bucks. And he's very successful
at this. Now, Vincent Senor is not proud of what
his son's doing here because he's kind of doing this
as he's using TV. He'll basically like give you know,
broadcast rights to a bunch of local TV stations that

(01:00:49):
he's not currently the WWF isn't currently in this town,
or the state, or this part of the country, and
that he'll use that to build up interests so that
he can then bring the WWF to this new state,
start hosting show and slowly choke out another regional competitor, right,
Like that's the actual tact.

Speaker 3 (01:01:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And assuming a lot of the other
promotions aren't rich enough to do the same thing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Yeah, exactly. He's got the size, he's got the money
to use as a base to kind of conquer from.
And Vincent Senior is kind of horrified by what his
son's doing here. For all that he could be ruthless,
he was also kind of a team player with the
guys he saw as his equals, and some of these
guys are also his friends, right, These are his like
buddies that he's been in business around for years. So

(01:01:33):
some of these guys call Vince Senior in a panic
once it becomes clear that his son is on the
cusp of destroying them. He complained to his son, He
apologized to them, but it didn't matter. He wasn't in
charge anymore and there was nothing he could do. Hey, everybody,
Robert here. This wound up running long, like two hours long,
and so we just needed to roll some of this

(01:01:54):
episode into part four, which we're going to do so
that this is not insane and d wieldy for our
editing team and for us. Since we don't have a
normal outro for this one, I'm just gonna let you
guys know that you can find you know what I'll do.
I'll fake their voices while I do their pluggables.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
I'm shown Baby.

Speaker 3 (01:02:16):
You can find me at one.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Now, Okay, that's actually kind of disrespectful since this is
their plugs. You can find Sean Baby at one nine
hundred hot Dog, the last comedy website tragically pretty close
to true, and you can back them on Patreon as well.
That is again one nine hundred hot Dog, And of
course Tom Ryman you can find on Gamefully Unemployed, which

(01:02:39):
does podcasts and all sorts of great content there, everything
from like movie reviews to you know, watch throughs of
shows like X Files and yeah, a lot of great
content gamefully unemployed on Patreon. You can find them there.
I apologize for not doing a fake Tom voice, but

(01:03:00):
let's all be honest, it would have been almost identical
to my fake.

Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
Sean Baby voice. Behind the Bastards is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit
our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.