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 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 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.
Yes, yes we have.
We have imprisoned their souls in chat GPT and we're we're bringing them back on to finish.
Talking about Vince McMahon, I know what I am, and I will get out of here human.
Yeah, this is the robocops to me, I'm picturing I'm inside the RoboCop to robot.
Yeah we are.
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.
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.
I do wonder what percentage of our audience is going to get that that was a math reference.
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.
Yeah. Yeah, the majority I think are going to like.
It was a monster mash reference because it was a graveyard smash the whole time.
Yeah, it caught on in a flash too.
In a way, a plane crash is like a graveyard smash.
The monster mash guy smash of This guy.
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.
Yeah, your dear friend runs a site called one Hot Dog Word Like. That's kind of the only thing we cover.
Is ship like that.
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.
It's a real sia. I like that you're waging psychological warfare on trigger treaters.
Yeah, it's horrible for everyone. So how are you guys doing today? How's everybody feeling? As we?
As we roll in. I feel like.
We don't have time for this.
Robert.
You just set me the script and it's like fifty four fucking pages.
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,
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 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.
Yeah, yeah, everybody knows this.
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 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.
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.
TV every night. Yeah.
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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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.
Robert.
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?
He's just Zaorian's just lifted.
Like like a cartoon cat that smells a pie, drifting over to him.
The boy.
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, 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.
Try not to break the law for the next four to five Yeah.
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 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, one hundred and twenty eight halcions, nine hundred and twenty five Xanax, forty eight LIMB patrols, four files of testosterone and eighty five darmossets.
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.
But that's how it's described.
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, 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 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.
And his hope is that, like you know, he.
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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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.
Man, what a.
Paragraph recomminate, real perfect storm happened here.
It's quite a moment in pop culture history.
There's always a jay of commut time. I would like you too, Oh man, that harm respect.
Water or bron what I want to talk about that forever just enthes here.
But if he betrayal ulous, oh yeah, that's perfect is He is dressed in like a blue army uniform.
With a head uh, like a head scarf type deal. He's got a Saddam Hussein looking mustach.
Film Rowdy Roddy Pipers lip it up the app.
You can't believe it. Yeah, ridiculous. He's gobsmacked. My god. Okay, 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.
I never knew you could make an offensive racial stereotype of like white Southerners, but they did it like that. I am legitimately offended.
I mean it's it's I think it's the least offensive stereotype on screen.
Absolutely, you know as much. For sure.
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.
That's not that's a lot better than they usually do, right, Yeah, normally it's an Italian guy. I didn't get.
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 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 I don't know what's going on with this fella.
He said the number he could save Andre the Giant. He did save Andre's life.
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 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.
Yeah, and again, as I've mentioned many times in this series, wrestlers are notorious liars.
Yeah, that's the job.
It's like the job does seem like a stand up guy. I don't think he'd do something bad.
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 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, 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.
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.
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 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, 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 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. 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 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 let Vince McMahon write a column about this, but probably.
I mean, that's yeah, we hope we don't need to get into The New York Times. Is this the public interest?
Guys?
Is this the public Is Vince McMahon's defense of this in the public interest?
I don't think so.
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.
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.
Yeah, I think you can sell your newspaper to everyone if you let a sociopath write a column just.
Every a couple of weeks. And yeah, exactly both sides of the political issues.
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 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.
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 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.
Yeah.
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 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.
Yeah, Yeah, that's what we did. It cracked, right.
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.
That, Tom.
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.
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.
That did happen.
I was doing a fake lass until you remember, well, I was really drunk when that went down top.
Anyway. Yeah, fine.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 various like wrestling locks, like the doomsday device, a two man finisher.
That should not be.
It is a two man finisher that should not be performed on a strip club floor.
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.
So Vince survives and again is apparently drunk enough that everyone's like, he probably won't remember that we just nearly killed him.
Did honk an animal do the dude?
Was it?
I think it might have been.
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.
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. 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.
I don't know, I'm not starting with ship.
No, I wouldn't withhold a room key from a raging Vince McMahon.
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 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.
Business requires just every single coming. They're like, you.
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.
By the end of it, that mattress guy fucking muscles Rick is not there.
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 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 he'll remember of this whole night is to fire that guy tomorrow, and.
That's exactly what happened. But he does.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You shouldn't do it while wearing a cape, but these thys do that.
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 brings us to the story of Pat Patterson. So you guys know about the ring boy scandal.
No, I know? Oh god, okay.
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
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.
The most Canadian of American cities.
Yeah yeah, yeah, So he's one to right the way that you're teasing.
This story is a worse syh op than the Monster Mash. I don't know what else to do here.
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 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 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.
It is a job.
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
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 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
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, 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 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.
I gotta tell you, Robert, when I was like.
Really excited to be on the Vince McMahon episode, didn't expect we'd get into a story like this.
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.
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.
Nary a mention of any of this on his Wikipedia.
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.
He had enormous feet, yeah to him, like having sex with a thirty four foot woman.
You know what, you know, what is a good thing to do right now is pull the ads.
Perfect time, perfect time. They'll be delighted. They'll be delighted.
Yeah yeah, ah, we're back and we're ready to make everybody real, real unhappy.
You guys ready to be a lot less happy than you were this morning.
Than than the child predator fucking feet. Yeah.
I'm generally always prepared to be less happy at a moment's notice.
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 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, 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, and they, you know, can him because he's not willing to be molested.
Anymore, so that's bad.
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, 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.
Oh my god, so don't do it.
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 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 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. 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
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 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. 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 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.
Oh oh yeah, Tom.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Away from kids. But you can have a job.
Yeah, you could have your job back because you love wrestling so much.
Like that's bad. That's pretty bad.
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 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 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.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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.
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 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?
Did you see that? Bruno?
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
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. 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 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.
Voice he's a very famous Yeah.
Right, if a longtime wrestler gets a name wrong, that means there's no such thing as child predators.
Yes, exactly, exactly there's no other reason a wrestler would get minor details of a story wrong.
It's not like Bruno San Martino got hit in the head a lot or anything like that. Yeah.
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.
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
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 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, 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 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.
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.
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 they know what his vulnerability is, right, Like they're they're very aware of that.
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.
It's yeah, it's and it's like.
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, 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 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 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?
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, Like he's not allowed in. He's really angry about the fact that he's not there.
Once we're not in, Robert, the way that you keep teasing this story, kind of telling us Tom not around anymore.
We'll get to that. Yeah, I mean, I.
Don't know how else to tell it.
It is. It's messy.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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.
Vince spent like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars hiring people to distract him from his studies.
Yeah, having people steal his school books. Yeah, make sure he gets a D or do come back to my office?
Yeah, I mean I'm sure he probably did have this guy like followed probably right.
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.
Yep.
Pat Patterson's a major TV figure during the Attitude era. Yeah, so Pat gets brought back.
Yeah.
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 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 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?
Right now?
Yeah? Did nobody look into this? Like yeah, jesus.
Yeah.
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.
It seems weird. Yeah, it seems peculiar, seems like an odd special feature for the Warrior DVD.
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.
The poor persecution of the child predator, and.
It is okay, yeah he is pretty yet yeah, because Patterson is openly homosexual.
So okay, that's what this is about.
He's one of the first, I believe, one of the first pro wrestlers to be openly gay.
I think, yeah, he is the first.
Yeah wow.
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, that's my ass club. Can we just talk about that?
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?
We talked about Jerry the King Waller screaming puppies over and over again, just for ten straight years.
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.
Ted.
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 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.
This was not true.
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. 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, thinks that there might be provable wrongdoing by Vince.
That's kind of in.
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 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.
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.
Yeah wow, it's almost like you never cover it up a child abuse scandal or a steroid abuse ring.
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.
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.
But yeah you could.
You could have headed fucking hulkster a syringe full of mud. He would have taken it. So April of nineteen kie just boopie.
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 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.
He was like, you go to hell.
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. 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 up bodybuilding.
Oh feels the moonlight on my internal flesh.
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.
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.
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, So those photos get leaked on a TMZ or some Yeah, find it, folks, you can.
You can avenge gawker. This is the only way.
Four times while he's eating that dude, he can't help it. It's unrelated to anything.
He's just.
Vince also uses this opportunity. This is an opportunity to shield to his bodybuilders a supplement that he'd started selling.
Uh.
And the supplement is made by a nutritionist that he hires as a contractor called doctor Squat.
So that sounds.
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.
Give me it's a positive. Its so funny.
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.
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 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.
Oh my god, it goes so badly.
The best way to frame that, that's an incredible way to frame that failure, like what.
So what a wet fart?
Like anything else, nothing else in history has landed with such a thunderous thud.
We could have established basic income for most of Long Beach and made this.
Yeah, it's a weird bodybuilding league.
I don't know.
Maybe he's made some money with the reindeer pills or the deer pills.
Who knows.
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 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 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.
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.
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, was guilty because I simply can't say that, right, I don't.
I don't mind saying it. Hulk Cogan definitely lie.
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.
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.
Did that were illegal.
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.
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.
Ye.
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.
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.
Except the fact that they paid shoot in never mind.
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 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, 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.
He did the man, that's why I did the warl act It caused me money.
Too bad things if you get money for it, that's it's true.
That it is true.
That is true law. That's the highest law of the land. Protecting profits is the highest law of the Land, so that is.
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 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. 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.
Change his hair color with that snaff of a finger Johnny Cab from Total Recall A lot of a lot of great robot.
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.
I wish some podcast was about that, and yeah, not child suicide.
Yeah, yeah, all that other stuff that.
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.
He Also, I'm trying to imagine where all the air quotes are when Vince says, yes, we do mandatory random.
Yes, steroid testing. Huh?
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 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, 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 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
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. 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.
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.
There's two things I wanted to say. Yeah. One is the Ultimate Worry.
You mentioned that he died three days after he was inducted to the wd WW Hall of.
Fame, and he he died.
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.
Yeah, oh, I lost the other thing.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yeah, yep. It's pretty bleak.
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 murdering his wife and child.
Cool.
Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, everybody in wrestling knows this story, right, at least the bones of it.
I think everybody. I think most.
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 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 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.
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 at the time he.
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, 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 every three to four weeks for a full year.
That's too many steroids.
It is an objectively insane amount of steroids.
Way too many steroids.
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. 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
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 or she needed to be bigger in order to be successful?
No?
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? 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.
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.
Loves big guys. He loves the big body dudes. Yeah, that's his thing, that's his thing. Yeah. Yeah.
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
pissed people off. It is it is a few distracted. Yeah, it's frustrating how consistently this all works for him.
But it's got to hand to him. It's plausible.
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. 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, 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.
Five yours.
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, 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.
And there's a.
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 didn't want to lose to Sean in Calgary specifically because Kyari was like his hometown.
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, like you lose your your championship belt.
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
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 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 do a special episode, so it's like, yeah, you've just done an episode where like well Brett, here's you know anyway.
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, 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.
But we've also singularly weird too. It's weird. It's a weird thing to do.
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 as it does to a lot of Is it did to people at the time?
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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
Spits on him in the show. Show you can see it happen.
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 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.
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.
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.
The hitman heart could knock out a fifty eight year old man.
Yeah yeah, without being offered it. Yeah right, it's like, broh.
It's so funny.
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 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, 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 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.
Yeah.
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.
Uh.
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 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.
He just gets beat up and it's very fun with the real humility for a terrible yeah.
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.
You know, that's.
It's super old story in wrestling.
They do it all the time.
Yeah, and he's he has he has no problem doing that, which is fascinating to me.
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 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 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.
I don't know, this.
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.
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 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.
Gets kidnapped uh huh. Yeah.
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 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 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 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 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.
And I watched this live. It is insane. So Bearer turns to the under team.
Would have completed the rituals, she would have actually become a zombie, Like that's the.
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
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 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 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 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.
You did well out there tonight, honey, beautiful daughter. You made daddy so much money. So rock hard, rock hard, Sweetheart, It's dark.
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 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 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 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 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, 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.
Actually it is.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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, 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.
Quote.
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.
Yeah, that's not great. Well I didn't do it.
Yeah, well the next thing he does, yeah, oh he both Pilman's widow on television and shit does point blame if Brian had.
A drug addiction? Yeah?
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.
Thank you.
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.
Right, He like they have told her that they wouldn't ask her any questions like that.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
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 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 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, 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 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 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?
He asked? Oh my god, yeah, uh you like older now they're single, you like older fellas.
Yeah, they want a job, Vince McMahon, everybody.
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 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 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
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.
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 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. 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 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 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
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 kind of thing.
Oh god if the case.
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 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 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 to me. Maybe that's just the cheapest way to actually do it.
I don't know, yeah yet attack and got the guys there.
There are ambulance services for hire.
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 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.
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
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.
Really.
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 are big stadiums, right, Yeah. They cut the feed almost immediately.
I was also watching this live. Yeah, oh god, did you know what had happened?
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.
Because they did. Yeah, because they did. Yeah.
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.
So they do.
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 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.
Maybe do bad things for money.
Yeah, it's told us that, Yeah, yeah, you can do it.
I don't know.
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
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.
His blood is literally in the ring for the entire pay per view.
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 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 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
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 a backup line protecting Owen and Vince replies, I'm not an expert in rigging.
I guess you are. Oh, don't be antagonist.
Don't be antagonistic at the press conference of arrestler that just died in the ring because of your negligence, Vince.
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.
Yeah, somebody died. Something went wrong with the rigging.
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.
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?
Tell me exactly, Vince had Vince had hours to figure out what went wrong.
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?
Right?
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 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, 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.
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, 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, 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.
Yeah.
Martha does sue and settles with Vince and the WWF for eighteen million. Oh. He goes, yeah, yeah, that's at least something.
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 like she she and her children refuse to allow Vince to induct Owen into the WWE Hall of Fame.
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 the amount of rage that you must have in this situation is like beyond measure.
Yeah.
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, 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.
I can't believe we did thirty two hours in Vince McMahon and never got to the Kiss My Ass Club.
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 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.
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 do the scene with Vince.
Just sitting down in the ring.
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.
The exact bad quads that family quad genetic quads out. It's it's so funny. So I don't know.
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.
Yeah, it's a really really, really really horrifying mustache.
It really is. It tells the story that we took so many hours to tell.
It looks like he knew these episodes were going to come out and he was like, well, I might as well grow this mustache.
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.
The conditions of his parole. Part of it was wearing this pencil thin predator's mustache.
It's his way of going do to door and killing everyone.
Looking like Clark Gable. Spending too long at a high school, he does look like a version of Clark Gable.
That.
Yeah, instead of going to World War Two, went to I don't know whatever.
Yeah, I went to a high school to trowl Roberts.
Well, we got a good wrestling stories that I messed here, gang.
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.
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.
You know that that still trying to arouchy and authoritative.
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.
Yeah, well, got anything to plug? Oh Tom, please go first? Meet to go first? Oh, I would love it if you did.
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 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.
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.
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.
Show speak anyway, speaking, I was gonna say, Robert, speaking of things that are cool, do you know what's cool but also cooler?
Oh? Yeah, you can get ad free stuff cooler.
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.
I mean that would be really funny. I would enjoy that activity. My handwriting is horrendous.
Yeah.
Well, I was just gonna say, I love your show, Robert, but it does make me sad every time I listen to it.
Yeah, what we go for it is sorrow, all right, everybody