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. What's vincent, my McMahons, And that's great, Yeah, courageous, courageous.
This is Behind the Master. It's a podcast about the worst people in all of history, and today I've got two McMahons here to talk with me about. Vince McMahon, did you did that work?
Let me tell you something, brother, that's the gotten I'm showing baby from the internet.
Good news, Sean baby, we will be talking about Hulk Cogan today.
Yes.
Hm, let me tell you some dude.
My name's Tom Rayman. Mm hmmm.
And do you do you both have a lump of scar tissue in your asses from injecting steroids the size of a softball.
I do, and several on my forehead from cutting it up with raisin lights.
Oh you know a brother. Yeah, yeah, my forehead looks like a grotesque topocryphal map that looks like a look Abdul of the butcher.
We call that the hulkster. When you can, when you can read, and braille on my forehead scars.
Yeah, you might not be, brother. No one knows about it.
Uh, Terry Terry bolea Hulk's real name.
You know.
When I was a little little kid, you know, before I made my friend and in the Attitude era, I was not a fan of wrestling because I don't think we got any of the channels that it was on. But I loved Hull Cogan because I would watch almost every single day when I was like sitting in the back room of the donut shop where my parents worked. The movie Suburban Commando, of course, hell yeah, absolutely a fucking legendary.
I have long stretches of that movie memorized.
Hule Cogan. So we are back for part three. We're talking about Vince Senior still because he is still the one running the wrestling business. When we left off, Vince Junior had just started using the name Vince McMahon as he got sent to a military school, possibly for being too racist to be in an integrated high school, but it's unclear.
He's so more likely than him beating up a kuma te full of marines.
Yes, that is probably true. You have to separate him from the general population. After that, he's far too damy interest So Vince was well regarded. Vince Senior was well regarded, as I said, in the national wrestling business. His company was an affiliate of the NWA, the big wrestling organizer union that ran most of the country, but he wasn't a member at first, and when he became one, he very quickly fell behind on his dues and threatened to resign.
He seems to have understood the value of such an organization, but disliked the fact that being a member of it would mean he had to inevitably seed some of his control over how storylines of his wrestlers proceeded. Vince Senior was also different from most of the other promoters and
owners across the country. While while his competitors generally booked technical wrestlers above all else, guys who were really good at kind of the choreography of ringwork, Vince Senior grew increasingly obsessed with bringing in giant, muscle bound monsters and was willing to sacrifice ring skill for having the absolute
biggest dudes that he could hire. Now, this actually worked out really well for everyone for a while, because by this point the government had slapped the wrestling industry with some anti trust regulations, which meant that owners had to let their play their wrestlers travel around the country more
or less at will. This was great for everybody because it means that audiences got a lot of choice and variety, and even the whims of a guy like Vince Senior couldn't exercise total control even in the region.
That he owned.
So Vince preferred to hire muscle bound, giant guys, and because they got to start with him, those giant muscle freaks would get to travel around the country and wrestle at other places. But also Vince would have to hire people who came in from other regions of the country, so he got a lot of technical wrestlers. It worked out really well for people who like to watch wrestling, right, You got a lot of variety in the kind of people who were, you know, taking part in wrestling matches.
In nineteen sixty two, Vince Senior wanted to keep the National Championship belt on his champion, nature Boy Buddy Rogers. And I believe Rick Flair also gets called nature boy later, right, isn't that he sure does? Yeah, yeah, he's sure. There's a couple of nature boys in wrestling history, is what I'm saying. At this point, nature Boy Buddy Rogers, who's Vince Senior's wrestler. He wants to keep the belt on him,
but the cartel, the NWA, has other plans. And there's this big dispute between the cartel, who's like, we want to give this to Luthez, you know, who's their big wrestler, and Vince Senior, who's like, no, I want to keep the belt on my guy. And this argument between the NWA and between Vince Senior's kind of wrestling syndicate actually
puts the future of Kfabe at risk. For a while, there was a fear that Capital Wrestling, Vince Senior's company, might take the belt so that they could keep it on Buddy Rogers and leave the NWA, putting belief in the reality behind established KFA to risk. Right, If like he's able to just like leave the NWA and keep the belt, then it means that wrestling's not really a sport. So eventually they came to an agreement to kind of rescue Kfabe that Rogers would in fact lose to luth
As after all. But the next year, Vince Senior and Toots Mom, who's his business partner at this point, decided to leave anyway and launch an independent wrestling federation of their own. They call it the WWWF or Worldwide Wrestling Federation. That eventually dropped one of the w's, giving us the WWF that most people listening grew up with. It's called the WWE now, but we're just going to call it
the WWF for our purposes today. While all this was going on, Vince was acclimating to military school and the departure of his stepfather, Leo, who bounced and got divorced from Vincent Vince's mom around the same time. She got remarried to some other dude about a half year later, But this doesn't seem to have impacted Vince as much.
He was old enough.
Now he's spending all his time with his biological father, and to his credit, Vince Senior seems to have legitimately committed to being a part of Vincent's life, even though he never kind of got over his awkwardness with his son, who he doesn't really seem to have fully understood. It's worth noting that four years later, in nineteen sixty six, Leo Lupton would marry Vince's cousin, the young kid he put leaves in in his early childhood. He was twenty
eight years older than her. So that's oh, that's good. That's good.
That's like the four d Chess of Troubling.
But they marry in Florida, so at least this one's not on North Carolina, so hey, you know, that's good.
He didn't even have to tell us that. I knew from the story where they got married.
I assume most of these stories take place in Florida because it's pro wrestling.
It is prominent in nearly every wrestler's life.
Those dry Florida leaves. When you're stuffing leaves into your bride. You're twenty eight years younger cousin Brian and details the story.
It's fine anyway, every one of those details is significant.
Back in nineteen sixty two, eleventh grade, Vince tried his first attempt at becoming a wrestling promoter. Now he's in military school. At this point, he's become pretty muscular. You know, he's working out with the weight set that uh doctor Graham gave him, and he's you know, he's done some football. He's an OK defensive tackle. But he doesn't really like actual competition sports. He doesn't seem to like super engage with him. Wrestling is what his bio dad did, and
so wrestling is what Vincent Junior loved. He decided to create a youth copy of his dad's league at Fishbourne Military School. Now Vince McMahon's first shows were carried out in a high school gym after hours, and included the costumes and ring stunts that were already such a part of the past. Time Vince wrestled himself as ape Man McMahon. One friend at the time explained that's not a bad name to be honest, like solid wrestling name.
Yeah, it's it's you know you. You you graduate from that, you evolve, But it's not bad for a first first try.
As a high school wrestling starting point, perfectly acceptable.
You become.
Some of the people listening think Gorilla Monsoon's a joke that you came up with.
He is not. That's a real guy.
That is an absolute real guy. One friend at the time explained he was just into dress up, putting on masks or something, and he would wrestle just to have fun. Sometimes people would participate, sometimes they just come watch Vince was Vince.
He loves the first part LF.
He's just choking, pop gouging his own eyes out, throat punching himself.
This is what I did to those Marines.
They coming. This is I have to say.
One of the things that's actually really interesting about Vince McMahon. He is a cutthroat businessman. He is like, uh it does a lot of terrible things in the name of prophets. But he's also not one of those bloodless weirdos who just lives to soak money out of wrestling. Like he loves to wrestle like he becomes a very prominent in ring character because he just can't stop himself from being like physically an.
Involved with it.
A lot of people argue he ruined wrestling, and there's certainly a case to be made there, but you can't really argue he's not like enthralled by everything that is involved in in pro wrestling, Like this is an obsession for him and it kind of always has been. Kids who wrestled with him would later talk about his strut, like the strut with which he walked into the ring, which you can still see in like videos of him from the nineties and early two thousands.
Yeah, you can.
They describe him as walking like baby Hueye and it would still be part of his ring presence half a century later. That is a great way to describe the way he walks, like one of the kids from Ductails.
It really sits well. Baby Hughey's a different character. Oh bough, we're not talking about Huey Dewey and Louis no. Oh okay, but maybe Baby Hughey is the great big one.
I don't know who that is. See, this is this is me learning something. I'm going to google it. Yeah, google it. Google baby.
I assume this was this was a duck. Oh oh, oh my god.
Okay, no, I do know this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the gigantic weird baby duck. Yes, okay, that also works. Look, both of these work, is what I'm saying. Cartoon cartoon duck generally a good thing to compare to Vince McMahon. Yeah, has never been a more apt comparison.
No. Interesting.
So wrestling was not the only kind of performing that teen Vince was into, as Josie Reisman found when she interviewed his friend Dutch for her book Quote, we would go over to Fairfax Hall, the girls school across town, and he would put on a healing show over there. He had a fellow named Dutch Lindsay Charles Lindsay. Dutch was kind of short, stocky guy, and he'd grabbed Dutch by the head and he'd do this healing routine and Dutch would fall to the ground and Vince would heal him.
What the book, I did not call medicine shows being part of his early life when I started doing this, but uh.
Yeah, neither did I.
But of course, yeah, absolutely, Scance. I love that it's a girls school. So there's this implied motivation that that he was doing it to get laid. He's like, you know what ladies love. Yeah, well that's interesting.
That's interesting trying to see because and this is something that the when Josie talks to other kids at the military school, they'd bring up is that, like, you know, we're men in a military school, our access to women who are our age was very strictly curtailed at this point, right, So these performances at the women's school was kind of like one of our few chances to mingle with with other, you know, girls who were kind of in our same
age group. But Vincent doesn't seem to have been into this. He is at this point in love with the woman who will become his wife, Linda McMahon.
Uh. I can already see the scene where she's like watching from her dorm window of this this maniac and the parking lot, like healing his friend from a wheelchair and thinking, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna murder that man one day, and then.
I'm gonna somehow become a member of Donald Trump's White House.
My god.
So they had very specific dreams.
Yeah, friends, recall that he talked about Linda constantly, even though he generally didn't talk about girls, Wrestling was pretty much all Vince chatted about, like they thought. They noted that he talked about Linda and that it was kind of weird because he otherwise did not seem to notice that female people existed.
Maybe she had a real crisp.
Man.
She plants your head in a canvas like something you've never seen.
Now, as we have come to expect, always keeps a razor blade in her palm, now, as we've come to expect from our boy adult. Vince would later claim to have been a bed dude at school, constantly in trouble, in committing crimes. I wasn't caught for some stuff that would have been immediate dismissal, like stealing the commandant's car. He also had a dog he was nuts about. I love animals, but one day I couldn't resist giving that
dog a laxative. With the laxative and some hamburger, and the dog did his business all over the commandant's apartment, which thrilled me greatly.
Now it thrilled me greatly. Yeah, when no, he absolutely did. When did he When did he give this interview? Oh? This was decades later. So it's in like the nineties, right, Yeah, at the eighties ninety, I think, not like the eighteen. He chose to describe giving a dog a lax to ship all over a guy's apartment was it was quite thrilling.
We got crazy friends on her head. We make a girl with a.
Computer, our friend Bluto. You should have seen the one in That guy could rain a whole handle at once. Anyway, it killed me greatly.
It is also interesting to me we're focusing on the even weirder things that he wants us to believe about him. But he really wants us to think he stole a lot of cars. And that's that's such a strange thing to what people. It's it's okay, man. He claims that he was the first student to be court martialed at Fishburne over depending on the interview, either in subordination or a threat he made that he might somehow sabotage sabotage finals week again sabotage, Yeah.
Threat of a bomb threat is what he's claiming.
I think it was more like a prank. Okay, but but yeah, this is like and he like. So he says that basically the administration thought I was gonna sabotage Finals week. So they court martialed me and they were gonna kick me out, But then all of the other students and teachers rose up and like threatened to leave the school if they didn't clear me of all charges. Like there was a rebellion. No, absolutely, none of they didn't. Fucking Dead Poet Society, for as you.
Are accused of threatening to shut down the entire finals week with your pranks. What's this clapping? Everyone is in support of you, captain.
My captain.
Has a feed a dog laxative. I know this is you the dumbest ship.
Yeah, he wants to believe it was Dead Poet Society but also Animal House.
Yeah, and yeah it's it's it's very funny. He is such a liar. So Fishburne the school has like Josie Riseman again, the author of Ringmaster, Uh talked to a bunch of his former classmates at fishburn and none of them recall any of this happening. She also like reached out to Fishbourne and was like you, he says, you court martialed him. You guys keep records. Do you have any records that he was ever court martialed? Uh, they
did not have any records, and Vince has never presented any. Instead, interviews with his peers portray him as a decent student who simply wasn't a great student because he wasn't that interested in school. Right. He was one of those kids who was like, he was smart, so he could do okay if he didn't work too hard at class, and so he devoted you know, he kind of scraped by
and spent most of his time on wrestling. Right that, I'm sure that kind of dude is actually pretty familiar to our listeners, right, Like, that describes me without It wasn't wrestling for me, but that describes me in high school pretty well. Yeah, So once again Vince lied to make himself look like a badass. The reality is that he was a nerd. He was a wrestling nerd, and he was more jacked than we tend to associate with
that term. But like most nerds, he kind of did what he had to at school, avoided trouble, and spent all of his free time on the stuff he was obsessed with. Right Like, for me, this was Warhammer, but it's the same pattern. Yeah, he graduated and he got into college at East Carolina University. Around the same time, his dad took on a new championship wrestler, a guy
named Bruno. Semartino still regarded today as maybe the greatest pro wrestler of all time, although there's a couple of people who folks wind up throwing out in that category. Bruno conversation, he's in the conversation, right. Yeah, he was a obviously, he's huge, and he was an extremely skilled
technical wrestler. Bruno was also the kind of person who trained like a world class athlete, and as a result of how careful he was about his training, he was able to remain a high skill technical performer for more than thirty years, which is a lot of longevity, especially for this period of time in pro wrestling. With Bruno, Vince Senior pioneered a strategy totally new to the field. And I'm going to quote now from a book called
Death of the Territories by Tim Hornbaker. The central idea was to build up a succession of threatening challengers for Sammartino, and Bruno would show his vulnerability in near defeats, only to rise up in the to conquer his opponents. His performance never failed to capture the imagination of audiences. Among his villainous rivals were a three hundred and fifty pound Guerrilla Monsoon, the six foot five Bill Miller, and the six foot three, two hundred and seventy five pound Bill Watts.
As Semmartino worked through one feud, McMahon pushed several other prominent challengers at the same time to keep the cycle going all over the circuit. Now, while this is all going on in the wrestling world, you know, Linda graduates high school about a year after Vince, and the two of them get married when they're both in college in nineteen sixty six, which is, interestingly enough, the same year
that Leo marries Vince's cousin. Linda joins him at ECU, and because she's an excellent student, she qualifies for an accelerated program in French, which is I wouldn't have called as Linda McMahon's focus in college, but there you go. They graduated in nineteen sixty nine, which is the same year that she got pregnant. Now, Vince tell another possible lie about his time in college. He claims that his grades there were so low because he was spending so
much time fighting. I guess that he had to talk several professors into bumping his grades so he could get a two point zero zero one and graduate.
I was just so tough, I kept punching my books.
Now, I will say, of all of the things he's told us that might be lies, I think this one might be true because this relies on him being good at like manipulating people, and that is his actual skill. Yes, so yeah, I could see him manipulating his teachers to giving him a passing grade. I'm not gonna say that one's definitely fake. The year after he left college, Vince got a job working for his father at the then WWWF.
He'd initially wanted to be a wrestler, but again, his dad sees what happens to wrestlers when they age, right, Like, he knows that this is a job that kills you, and he's like, the fuck no, you are not going
to do this for a living. And yeah, at the start of the nineteen seventies, though, Vin Junior joins his dad's company anyway, and at this point kind of the WWF's territory had eleven states, basically the whole Northeast in pieces of the Virginias and Ohio, it's the largest wrestling federation at the time, but it's also very much.
Integrated with the others. Right.
The heads of the different syndicates would change sometimes, but the actual territory wouldn't because everything was kind of spoken for. So nobody can really expand without somebody else losing some ground. And for you know, all of the that he is a pretty cutthroat businessman, Vince Senior was one of these guys who's like, look, these other people are my peers, these other owners of syndicates, and we have a handshake deal, right, Like,
I'm not going to fuck too mouthy. You'll help, I'll fuck around a little bit sometimes to get an advantage, but I'm not going to fuck with the overall system too much, you know. Yeah, So at the very beginning of his career, Vince found a place for himself as a referee. Now, in this stage, wrestling refs were legitimate sports referees. They were licensed by the states, and they had to have specific trade in order to do the job.
This is again wrestling is not an actual sport still at this point, but the referees do all of but they're lying about that, right, Like wrestler, like the company promoters, everybody pretends it is a real sport, and so the government's like, well, then you have to have actual reps, right, like, you know, like we'll go along with it, We'll go along with this, but you got to do the thing
other sports do. We can't just like pretend that you're a real sport but be like for no reason, they're exempt from all the rules right now.
Obviously, so all eventually becomes the whole thing behind sports entertainment, right.
Yes, yes, yes, which we will. That will be a major focus of part four. So the main job of reps at this point is to act as storytellers, right they kind of Honestly, there's a lot of similarities between wrestling and dungeons and dragons. The reps in a lot of ways are kind of acting like dms, right, They're
making it clear when someone's won or lost. Sometimes when you have to, like you know, somebody gets out of pocket and they're not willing to like actually take a fall when they're sppos to take a fall, you find ways to like deque them or call the match for the other guy in order to make sure things still in the way that they need to. The ref has actually a lot of power, and so do the announcers.
It's kind of the two of them together are helping to sort of tell the story to the audience of what's happening in the ring, right, And it's also part of their job and part of the announcer's job what Vince Junior is doing to sell what's happening to the audience. So maybe sometimes you've got like a wrestler who's not as technically skilled, or just somebody's off and a hit doesn't really, you know, land the way that it should have.
It's your job to kind of hype that hit up so that the audience, you know, gets carried along in the enthusiasm and doesn't notice.
One of the funniest things clips you can watch on YouTube are blown spots like that where somebody misses like a drop kick or a hole doesn't go right, or they screw up a special move and listening to the announcers trying to sell what happened as if they didn't just fuck up. Yeah, it's an incredible genre of YouTube video.
Yeah, I know, yeah, and it is interesting, Like the more I get into it, the more I understand why, Like all of the kids that I played Dungeons and Dragons with when I was twelve were into pro wrestling. It's like, oh, I get I actually and this makes complete sense. These are extremely similar in a lot of ways.
You know.
It's just a lot of it is.
Make believe in choreography and kind of the high fantasy, a weird kind of fantasy storytelling.
I love the theatrics of when the referee like tells, like in a tag team match, he'll like tell the good guy tag team member like, hey, just turn and start yelling at him for no reason, and then the bad guy tag team guys will like beat out of the other guy, and then he turns around and he has to act like what happened to you? I just love that. Yeah.
So object permanence?
Yeah yeah, yeah, you know who else has no object permanence?
I love where this is going. Yeah, the sponsors.
Look, we have one simple rule for the sponsors of Behind the Bastards, and it's that none of them can be above the age where they understand object permanence. Every one of our sponsors. The one guarantee I'll make is that if you put your hands over their eyes, they will freak out because they don't know that you haven't just disappeared from existence.
Support these babies and goldfish.
I guess yes, goldfish as well.
We do take a lot of money from the goldfish industrial car from.
Big gold Big goldfish.
They can't get quite large if you keep feed them, Tom, It's all about the size of the bowl. Same is true of wrestlers.
Actually, all right, ah, we're back, yeah, brother. So in nineteen seventies.
Seventy two, Vince Junior starts working as a referee. Now there's nothing that Vince McMahon hates more than being called Vince junior. And it is true, he's not a junior, right, he and his dad have different names, Like, they're not
actually Vince Senior and Vince Junior. But because they are both a Vince McMahon, everyone they worked with at the time, and this I get this from Tim Hornbaker's book, everyone they worked with at the time in the wrestling world just called them Vince Senior and Vince Junior because, like I found out writing this podcast, that's just the easiest way to talk about the both of them. Because anyway, NS Slayer was not sticking as an Yeah Marin Slayer, Yeah,
that doesn't work as well. Anyway, Vince McMahon hates it when you call him Vince Junior. So the job Vince Junior took previous had previously been done like this, This announce or referee, you know, announcer job that he gets, sorry, this announcer job that he gets had previously been done by a renowned sports broadcaster named Ray Morgan. He was a very good announcer, but he was also a union man, and both Vince McMahon's hated unions, so one to have that,
you can't have that. So there's a couple versions of the story. One of them is that one day Vince's backstage with his dad in Hamburg, Pennsylvania one night and he sees his dad having this really mean, nasty argument with Ray Morgan over the fact that Ray wants a raise. Ray is like, I'm not going out and announcing tonight unless I get a raise, and Vince Senior's like, fuck you,
then you're fired. Vince Junior then later claims, quote, I'm sitting in this cloakroom and I'm saying to myself, Wow, that was awesome. I was just proud to be there and listen to all that, and proud of my dad proud of the fact that he told this guy to take uh and so you know, his dad gives him the job to because he'd fired this guy for you know, trying to trying to get a raise. Now that's the
Vince McMahon version of the story. Josie Riiseman's research includes uncovering arbitration documents from a separate legal case at around the same time before you, I just want to say real quick that my prediction is that those things happen. It is just not on the same night. Yeah, that's actually Tom. You you have gotten it completely right. That is literally what I'm about to say. So he was not masturbating in the closet. Finds somebody well that I didn't.
I never said that. I never said that, Sean. So basically what happens, based on these arbitration documents is that Morgan had previously negotiated a pay raise and Vince Senior had agreed to give him a pay raise, and after they have the face to face meeting where he agrees to a new contract in a pay raise, he fired Morgan like when they're no longer in a room together. So he doesn't have like the guts to get up
in front of him and tell him he's fired. He pretends to agree to a raise to avoid a conflict, and then fires him later, and then he hires his son for the same rate that Morgan had just signed at. Now, basically, he's doing this to be like, hey, anybody who tries to like argue for a better stake, like, fuck you. It's not about the money to me, it's about winning. Right. If you get a raise, that means you beat me and I won't be beat son gets your job. Yeah,
my fucking kid gets your job. Now again, this is a little confusing. This story is a little confusing if you kind of buy all these recollections of Vince Senior that you get from other wrestlers that talk about how honest he was, and it is true, you can find a lot of positive accounts of Vince Senior as a boss from wrestlers from this era, and in fact, some of these accounts sort of verge on adoration, but that affection to.
The degree that it was going to remember not everyone's an asshole all the time, exactly exactly.
And it's also there's a lot of dudes that love Vince McMahon. Yeah, yeah, because he's nice to them in person. And that's what That's what Jesse the Body Ventura said that, like, you would always feel good after a talk with Vince, but you wouldn't get a dime, you know, And it's what's I think. It does seem to me that the affection a lot of his wrestlers had for him was honest, but it was not reciprocated by Vince Senior. Any warmth
he showed his employees was k fabe right. And here's the book Ring Master describing a conversation between ex wrestler JJ Dillon and Vince Junior. Vince the Younger told Dylan about a conversation he'd had with Vince Senior. The father's wisdom, as imparted to the son, was wrestlers are like seagulls. All they do is shit, eat and squawk all day. Dylan was taken aback and never forgot it, even went so far as to name his memoir wrestlers are like seagulls.
From McMahon to McMahon. That gave an insight there and how his father truly felt deep inside, Dylan says, though he never spoke openly that way, And yeah, I think that's interesting, accurate. Probably seems like Dylan's got his number. Now.
The fact that Vince Senior gives Vince Junior this job is probably the most obvious example of nepotism that he shows.
His son.
Junior was expected to run himself ragged, though, driving across the country to call shows from Maine to Georgia. He kind of breaks into the business really because his dad gives him this impossible task of like bringing up numbers in Maine, and he's good at it. He's able to actually promote, he gets more people coming in, so he's he's not paid an enormous amount of money, Like I think, it's a reasonably comfortable living once he really gets in there.
But his dad also he's not grooming his air, right he does. Vince is not going to inherit the business, and his dad is like open with him that, like, no nobody, I am not giving the business to you. He's not, in fact going to give the business to anybody. So, in order to prove himself, Vince Junior decided that, like, while he's sort of building his career as a wrestling promoter, he's going to try and get independently wealthy by engaging in a series of business schemes with his wife Linda.
Uh So, the first thing they do is they buy an old cement plant and a horse farm to try to make money both of the stilling.
Horse guy.
You know you've heard that phrase. They go together like cement in horses. Right, you got horse in my cement. You got cement in my horses? Ohing, dip your horse and cementas delicious.
Everyone loves a good cement horse. So Vince is heavily reliant on Linda as his money manager while they attempt to, you know, remain solvent. But even this early in their relationship, he cheated with enough regularity that his friends warned him about it. The genital just was, Vince, this woman is way too good for you. Why are you being an asshole like this? And you have to assume the kind of people that Vince McMahon has at friends at this point.
For them to be like, you're not treating your wife right, You've got to be really cheating, outrageous. You gotta be cheating, like Olympic grade cheating. So, because Vince, you gotta be fucking women in the next room. Yeah, it's gotta be bad. It's gotta be like guys in North Carolina in the nineteen seventies go, I don't think this guy respects women like that. So Vince Junior is not set to inherit the WWF outright, And so again he's going to Ultimately
he's going to pay his father for the business. He's often tried to describe this, the fact that his dad made him pay for the WWF. It's sort of like a a kind of like ode to self reliance, right, But the truth is that he did still get a lot of help from his father. In nineteen seventy four, Vince Senior got his son an unpaid gig with a boxing promoter top rank that was meant to teach him the ropes of the industry. Less than a week into this job, Vince went to his boss and said, quote,
I've got this great idea. I know a guy who's been jumping over trucks with a motorcycle evil caneval and now he wants to with a space rocket jump over the Snake River Canyon.
Now did really well, thank.
You if you're a young aue.
He didn't quite make it. He didn't quite.
Make it right.
I'm gonna guess most of our gen z ers don't remember Evil Knievel. If you've ever watched the Simpsons episode where Homer all down that canyon twice, the stunt man in the beginning of the episode is based on Evil Caniebl. Evil was a famous stunt man who jumped things and occasionally got badly hurt.
Right real quick, I want to point out, Robert that you're touchstone for people who are too young to remember Evil Caniebl is a thirty three year old Simpsons The good Simpsons episodes are eternal, Tom, they never died, they never die.
Still a touchstone to kids. I have to believe that, Tom, I have nothing else. Sure, it's it's I showed Garrison Starship Troopers the other week. All of all of the the icons of my childhood are have died and faded. It's it's tragic. I never thought it would happen to me. I thought, uh no, I thought those movies would be forever.
Anyway.
Evil Canel, famous stunt man, jumped things, occasionally hurt himself at the day. I remember it was a little kid knowing about Evil Knievel and like my cousins and I like he was this kind of like superhero figure to us. But the reality is he was a giant piece of shit.
He was going to make that at jumping motorcycles as well, Like, yeah, he was not good at any other Like more modern motorcycle jumpers talk about him, they don't talk about like his technique. He just got off Harley and just held the throttle down, did not pitch that motorcycle.
Right.
He was generally thought he would die, like he just had balls to he didn't care if he lived. Yeah, he's like whatever if I die, fuck it cool.
He's just Johnny Knoxville, like, yeah, forty years earlier, without a sense of humor or charm.
Yeah, or skill or any of the things.
But yeah, it's Yeah.
Honestly, I think like fifty percent of his appeal was the fact that Evil canebl is a pretty cool name for a stunt man.
You might see a man die, Yeah, there's that was the big appeal to all of his stunts is that, like, there's pretty good chance he doesn't live through this, so obviously.
It won't be a gentle death. I know.
No, you will watch a man come apart on landing crash dummy. So you know, he was a giant bigot. He was very sexist. He was There are allegations at least that he was abusive to his children, but Vince didn't care about that, although he may not have known any of that at the time, but I don't think he would have cared either way because he wanted to people to get to get people to pay for like pay There used to be a thing called pay per view kids, uh, where you would pay to watch things
like a la carte that weren't cable TV. I know that's basically how all television works now for most people, but at the time this was special things, right, So his goal is, like, I want to get people to pay for pay per view so they can like see if this guy is going to die life on camera, Vince works out a potentially sweet deal with Evil and Evil and ABC were He's like, hey, we'll do this on pay per view while it's live, but then after it airs, ABC will get the exclusive right to rebroadcast
it and so we'll get even more money from this thing. But when he sits down at it with Evil, canievl in a meeting with his boss, who is a Jewish lawyer from New York. His boss at this promotion company. The first thing Evil can Eevil says is there are three kinds of people. I can't stand New Yorkers, lawyers and Jews.
Oh so so the meeting. The meeting went well, then.
Yeah, the meeting went great, so gradu, Yeah, I don't believe in the Holocaust.
How are you doing?
They all haven't even sat down yet.
Yeah, he's showing off his SS tattoo.
So it's just brought. It brought a briefcase of Nazi parafamiliar with him bring meetings.
So it gradually became clear that Evil was not a good person to be in business with. Now his boss, whose name is a room Vince, you know the decent thing to do when you realize that, like you've got that, there's two decent things to do, I would say, when you realize that, like you've brought this guy in for a meeting with your boss and he's being really racist to your boss, the most decent thing to do would be just like, fuck you, get out of here, We're
not doing this deal. The second most decent thing would be like, hey, boss, really sorry, I didn't know he was fucking bigot. I will take point on this, so you don't have to interact with him, and I'll get you know, get this thing done and we can move on with our lives.
Right.
Vince does neither of those things. Instead, he abandons his boss and his unpaid job at the agency and leaves them to clean up the mess after they've signed a deal with Evil. The canyon jump is a disaster, and
a room had to spin this again. His boss, who is a Jewish lawyer, had to spend the summer promoting it with Evil, and Evil, who, on one memorable occasion, while they are together at a hotel, gets angry and a bunch of off duty soldiers and their families swimming at the hotel pool and pulls a gun and threatens them out of the hotel pool so they'll be quiet.
American hero, great guy.
So the jump is a flop. Yeah, there's ay.
I was wondering. I was like, man, I didn't know Vince was involved with the Snake River Canyon Jump, and it's like he.
Wasn't He invented it and then he abandoned it.
He just fucking left.
He was out. In your future episode, there's still plenty for the don't worry, we'll make it work.
I do like it's a snake River is not even it's not even like an entertaining catastrophe. No, No, he just doesn't make it in his parachute open off the side. Yeah, it's a climactics, a very lame jump.
If you just type bass jumping fails into YouTube, you will find more impressive failure fails of reckless human beings.
If you cat's trying to circle around a full back, you'll get.
More more thrilling videos than jumping snake River can.
So it goes really badly. And I will say, even though Vince abandons the entire effort, he and his wife are heavily invested in this stunt for some fucking reason, and they do lose a quarter of a million dollars.
So God, but she loves him. She is very loyal. You gotta give her that.
In normal people world, being responsible for the Snake River Canyon jump and then losing a quarter of a million dollars on it would be the end of your big industry dreams.
But Vince, that would be like opening al Capone's vault. There was nothing inside.
Yeah, but unfortunate.
Can you imagine if that guy was still in media? But Vince Junior is Vince Senior son. So a room wound up reaching out again to Vince Junior when he had another idea for a stunt promotion. Now, this one involved a guy you might know called Muhammad Ali, him Ali. We are talking the mid seventies here. Ali is a big name at this point in time. He is he is, he is fucking a big, big, big dude, and he has been approached by the Japanese to fight a famous
Japanese wrestler in like a big show match. Now, there's a lot of money in getting Muhammad Ali to fight the most famous wrestler in Japan, Right, you can make You're gonna make a shitload on that if you can, if you can pull it out. But Ali wasn't Mahmad Ali is Muhammad Ali, right, He's he's kind of hesitant. He doesn't really get why anyone would want to see this. So Vince Junior made a plan that he thought he could sell to Ali. And I'm gonna quote again from Josie Reisman here.
Dying to hear what this is.
Oh boy, tom So I got a hold of Vince Junior and I said, how do I do this? A room says, and Vince, of course had brilliance when it came to wrestling and gave me the sin. He recounts Vince's plan, which involved a well worn wrestling practice known as blading, in which your wrestler will covertly cut their own skin to make it look as though they've endured
enormous damage. The scenario was, and I'll never forget it, that Ali, after two or three rounds was going to be ostensibly pounding the hell out of Anoch for fake but make it look real. And Anoki was the kind of wrestler that had a razor like you shave with in his mouth, and he would take the razor out and slit his own eyebrows. And as Ali was punishing him, the blood would be falling down and a Lee would
turn to the referee, please stop the fight. The referee wouldn't, and Ali turns around and says, you got to stop the fight, Andnoki would jump on his back pin him one two, three count. Anok would win the fight. Everyone would be happy, and a Lee would win with a big paycheck. Okay, okay, is yeah, that sort of works.
That has like a wrestling logic to it that like yeah, he lost, but like it's not a clean pin, you know.
Yeah, it's the thing that theoretically could work, although I might add that having somebody take a punch from Muhammad Ali with a razor blade in their mouth seems reckless.
Yeah, and that fake punching is not it's like a specific thing you train. Yeah, that like when you watch The Rock and Steve Austin throw fake punches, You're like, God, that looks really close to real. Yeah, they're quite good at it. It took probably forty years of wrestling before anyone like landed on that. Like if you watch Hulkogan punch somebody who'll like put his hand over their forehead, dogs and then his own hand, You're like, well, I know how you did that trick. Yeah.
Yeah, a counterpoint, have you seen an Oki? I feel like that dude's face could take a up.
Camera.
Well you got to get you do have to give him. He is he is one of like three people who have lived on this earth who looks like he could take a punch from Muhammad Ali.
Yeah, for dude looks like a very serious statue.
Yeah, very very large man. So actual wrestling people. So again, this is like, this is a problem for Ali because Mom and Ali, I don't know if you know this about him not a loser, right not part of his brand.
Doesn't really have anything to prove by doing this weird exhibition work, so.
They may they do make a tentative agree agreement and they haven't like, Ali hasn't agreed to the plan, but he's like, well, we'll figure out something. So they start promoting the match as they're still kind of working behind the scenes to figure out exactly how this is going
to play out. The actual wrestling people, both you know, on the US side working with Ali and the people who are in Japan working with Aenoki, both agree that Ali shouldn't beat like he can't win, right because this is in Japan and an Oki is a Japanese babyface, and you're not going to bring in a foreigner and have him win on an OKI's own turf, right kind of Famously, the only wrestler who regularly got to do that is Andre the Giant, but we're we haven't gotten to him yet.
So hugely hugely famous he is. He is massive, it's just he's got to win, right, But Ali isn't really willing to budge on losing right, he doesn't like because he's Muhammad Ali. Vince Junior is ordered to Tokyo to like figure this out, to like because they again it kind of gets close to the wire and they still haven't figured out how they're going to do this. So Vince Junior, according to one version of the story, flies
down to Tokyo to figure this out. And here's what Josie says, and I'm going to quote her here because this is fucking unbelievable. In Vince's telling, he went to Ali's room and discussed the matter with him. Ali refused to play ball, so Vince lunged forward and grabbed Ali in a wrestling hole.
My surprise.
They took him to the floor, just to demonstrate that in Noki abs there is that is physically impossible.
You don't, absolutely not.
If you lunged at Muhammad Ali in the nineteen seventies, you died in the nineteen.
Seventies, h tom My only disagreement is you would die in like the eighteen seventies.
He would punch you so hard you would go back in time.
He did not. Oh my god, Okay, yeah, we've gone from stuff and leaves into my cousin's vagina to I took down Mohammed Ali in a hotel room.
That left my life absolutely not. There are other.
People who were there who recall Vince being in a room with Ali, but that he never touched him. You know, I feel like I don't remember that. I do feel like they'd remember that across.
The room from Muhammad Ali, like him getting taken to the ground by some fucking guy's kid.
Just I want you, I want you listeners. Go to YouTube, look up any interview with Vince McMahon and try to imagine that dude taking down Muhammad Ali in his prime. It's simply inconceivable. It's the greatest strike of all time versus a leaf molester close, I mean, absolutely not. What an insane thing to lie.
About, boldness of telling that lie.
So he did that, like if he's to be believed, he did that to prove to Muhammad Ali like you can't deal with.
A wrestler, no, no, just to show him like how it would work, right.
As if he had this conversation two hundred times a day since he started being a boxer.
Yeah, it's it's incredibly silly. So at any rate, Vince does allegedly cook up a plan. So his partner on this fight is a promoter named Mike Labell, who I believe is the brother of Judo Jean LaBelle, who has come up in both of the Bastards episodes. So you've done with me now, shots, I love Jean's fucking hero.
So Jean was going to be the referee of the match and Vincent's Vince McMahon's plan is that he was going to sneak Judo jan a razor blade, which Jean was supposed to use to cut Muhammad Ali's forehead and force it into the match. They were going to do this without warning.
Alife on the man in the middle of the match.
They were going to surprise blade Muhammad Ali, now one of the greatest athletes of all time.
I will get I will say one thing. On the shirt list of people who might not die after blading Muhammad Ali, Jean label is on that list.
Sure, I still don't favor him, It's sure, but I'm I'm reacting to like the insanity is do it? Dacity?
Like this isna say Mahamad Ali with a razor blade without telling him?
What if he because he's not gonna understand, it's it's what's happening. So what if you fucking miss and cut his eye out? Like yes, Like, there's so many things that can go wrong with this.
Not only is this unethical, this is illegal, Like this isn't illegal by the rules of wrestling. This is a crime in Japan in the United States. That's that's actual assault. Yeah, that is just a straight up.
A very legendarily hard maniac. You give him the knife. I think he can take Muhammad Ali in his crime three four times maybe, yeah, three maybe four?
So you know who would never agree to slash Muhammad Ali in the face with a razor blade. The sponsors of this podcast.
The Fine Toddler Baby Goldfish.
Yeah, Toddler's and Goldfish never gets caught up in schemes like this.
We're back.
So again.
The plan is Judo Jean's kind of blade Muhammad Ali and then use that as an excuse to stop the fight, right And basically the idea is he'll make it look as if all these bleeding because.
It could have got a hit by the other guy. No one will sell together that the referee just lunged at Muhammad Ali with a knife and suddenly he's spurting blood and Mohamed at least very very mad at him, and they'll say that that injury must have been from the unrelated thing happened earlier in the fight. I think it's a believable story. Grace is whoever came up with this plan is probably a genius, And.
So there's there is I will say a pretty good chance that what I've told you is true that Vince McMahon goes to Tokyo and comes up with this insane plan.
Mike level, No, there's no doubt in my mind that this plan was true.
Possibility dred percent.
Mike Leabell claims that Vince never even went to Japan. Again, everyone involved in this are like liars, so.
Hard to say what went down.
You have to consider none of it happens at all, true, might not exist. I never met him, what.
Liars, So whatever the truth, Vince is definitely not there. The day of the fight, which is again a debacle, they have kind of a brief, unsatisfying skirmish, and then Ainoki kicks Ali with cleats and cuts his leg, which gives Jean Lebelle an excuse to call the fight.
Here everyone a.
Quick correction, I summarize this wrong in my notes. The Ali Andoki fight ended in a draw, not a ref stoppage. Also, Allie nearly lost his leg from the infection caused by the injury he got there, which is wild.
Sorry about that. So fo a disaster wanders after him while he like throws Antonio and Oki kept throwing himself on the mat and throwing like lake kicks from like a butt scoot position. So it just it felt like an eight year old who heard the rules of the match and he's like, aha, technically, I know how I can defeat you, and there's nothing you can do. It's so unn and stupid and pathetic and boring, and everybody lost.
Yeah, we all lost all real alien versus predator situation.
Yeah.
So at this point, Vincent's career as a promoter is not looking promising, right, And in fact, two months the do.
Sound like ideas that came from the guy who invented XFL. They certainly do. They certainly do the.
Organization.
Yeah, two months before the alianok fight, he and Linda go bankrupt to a million. There are a million dollars in debt. And then right after the well deserved, well deserved, right after the fight. They have a kid. Now, for most people this would be an impossible to recover from situation, right,
But Vince Junior is Vince Senior's son. Using the connections that he had made through being the kid of a rich and successful guy, he and Linda, dealing with bankruptcy, are able to put together enough investment money to buy the Cape Cod Coliseum, which yeah, yeah, yeah there because again they're rich people, right, it's fine. So their plan is to turn this into a modestly successful venue for concerts and the like and kind of get their bones
about how to do this business through it. By this point, by the time they're up and running with the Cape Cod Colisseum, they've got two kids, Shane and Stephanie. Both of them will go on to work in the WWF, but since Vince started having them work clean up at the coliseum as a parent. He described himself as a disciplinarian, telling Playboy, I'm real big on respect. I was on the road a lot, and I'm sure that when I was at home the kids wanted me back on the road. I do not doubt that.
Vents. Yeah, yeah, that's Scance magazine.
What a weird fucking story.
To share.
He brags about the strangest things in that interview. It's a remarkable document. I was real monster, daved been terror of the sound of my voice. Anyway, that's my love, my kids.
So Cape Cod is not a big party town, and the previous owner of the coliseum had banned rock shows after a disastrous Ted Nugent concert.
If it was going to be anyone.
Yeah, I'm surprised it was the new.
Town. Yeah yeah, now yeah, I will say Ted NuGen, if he were to tell me that he stole a bunch of cars, I would say, that does sound like you, Ted NuGen, thank you. One of these days. Well that got that one loaded up in the hopper. So the town did not love the McMahon's plans there, and the local government decided to go after them by modifying their license in order to restrict the alcohol that they could
sell at the coliseum. The McMahons were sure that this would sink the business, and they decided the best response was to fight the local government head on. The way that they do this is like they show up at a hearing with all of the selectmen, which is the town legislators, and they bring a bunch of supporters. Right, they get a bunch of like local fans, people who want to like go to shows and be able to drink and think that their plans for the coliseum are good.
And they have like one hundred and fifty of these people swarm the meeting so that it's crowded out with the people who support them, and basically they kind of bully their way into convincing, you know, the selectmen to give them the votes that they need in order to reduce the restrictions on their operations and allow them to sell all the hard liquor they want right occupy the
Board of Selectors. Yeah, this is the first time that the McMahons ever used the political system for their own profit, but it would not be the last. So as the nineteen eighties dawned, the WWF was a more successful business than Vince Senior had ever dreamed. There was no more penny pinching for him.
At least.
He was wealthy and beloved, but he was also old and mostly spending his time chilling out in Florida. He also saw trouble on the horizon for his b business. By this point, Ted Turner had launched TBS, which I'm going to guess ninety percent of our listeners don't remember, but was the first super channel, right. It was a big deal at the time, and Ted hosted wrestling from another company that was not affiliated with Vince McMahon. Sam Muchnik had retired from the NWA at this point, and
it was teetering. Vince Senior knew that he didn't have the health or the energy to navigate yet another era of the business, but he also didn't particularly want his son to follow him. He didn't want any of his kids to follow him, and most of them seemed fine with this because they were rich, but Vince Junior was still obsessed with wrestling and wanted more than anything to own his dad's business. Still, Vince Senior refused to give it to him, so eventually they worked out a purchase
deal on extremely strict terms. Vince would need to pay one million dollars to his dad and several shareholders in just a year's time. If he missed a single payment, they got back control of the WAF and got to keep all of the money that he'd paid them. Now it is somewhat unclear how he managed to make these payments. He told one reporter that he did it by quote, using mirrors and getting the help of a guru. I don't know what the fuck that means.
Nobody seems to what you use a mirror, you turn ten bucks into twenty bucks.
No one seems to know what.
Right there.
I don't have trouble believing that he was involved with some weird cult leader who helped him out on the radio. That would not be beyond Vince McMahon. Whatever, however he did it. He buys the WWF in nineteen eighty two, and he pays it off before the end of nineteen eighty three. At this point, most people would have described his position in the industry as solid but challenging. Right Ted Turner's rising up, we're kind of entering a new era.
Vince has a plan, though, and he's got a plan not just to kind of keep the business going as his father had, but to destroy all of the other region syndicates and make himself the undisputed king of wrestling nationwide. He later said, I knew my dad wouldn't really have sold me the business had he known what I was going to do.
I believe that party. I do believe that part of the way.
Yeah, so yeah, this could I have to say here when it comes to like how he destroyed the regionals, this is probably going to be one of This is definitely one of the longest scripts we've ever done. It might, by the end, wind up competing with the fucking kiss Kissinger episodes for length. At a certain point, I have had to decide there are chunks of the Vince McMahon story that we are going to have to blow through in order to avoid like driving people insane with a
series that's just far too long. What you need to know is this, after Vince took over from his dad, he shredded the gentleman's agreement that the promoters had previously, and he set to work destroying the NWA and as many of the other regionals as he could by spreading WWF evins across the country, and most of the regional hours die one by one during this period. He doesn't totally wipe them out, but he he spreads the WWF to be nationwide and most of them die kind of
as a result of this, or get acquired. If you want more detail about how this process went, the most accessible and detailed account is in Ringmaster Josie Riisman's book, If you were a huge wrestling nerd and you went forensic detail about how this went, the book Death of the Territories is the best resource by a mile. Now, A big part of the weakness of these kind of regional syndicates is that they didn't understand TV the way that Vince McMahon did. For them, wrestling TV was big business,
but it was kind of a normal TV business. Because did Vince understand TV? Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's good at this. He's been a disaster before. But he figures something important out, which is that most people in the biz are using TV the way that normal people use TV to make money, right, where you put on a thing and it attracts advertisers and you make money.
Right.
Vince was willing to give his shows to broadcasters for free because he realized that whatever money he could get from ads, especially in these local TV networks, is pennies next to the value of promoting live shows and filling stadiums with fans. Vince was the guy who realized televised wrestling doesn't exist because TV's a good business. Televised wrestling puts butts in seats and sells merchandise and that's how you make the big fucking bucks. And he's very successful
at this. Now, Vincent Senor is not proud of what his son's doing here because he's kind of doing this
as he's using TV. He'll basically like give you know, broadcast rights to a bunch of local TV stations that he's not currently the WWF isn't currently in this town, or the state, or this part of the country, and that he'll use that to build up interests so that he can then bring the WWF to this new state, start hosting show and slowly choke out another regional competitor, right, Like that's the actual tact.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And assuming a lot of the other promotions aren't rich enough to do the same thing.
Yeah, exactly. He's got the size, he's got the money to use as a base to kind of conquer from. And Vincent Senior is kind of horrified by what his son's doing here. For all that he could be ruthless, he was also kind of a team player with the guys he saw as his equals, and some of these guys are also his friends, right, These are his like buddies that he's been in business around for years. So some of these guys call Vince Senior in a panic once it becomes clear that his son is on the
cusp of destroying them. He complained to his son, He apologized to them, but it didn't matter. He wasn't in charge anymore and there was nothing he could do. Hey, everybody, Robert here. This wound up running long, like two hours long, and so we just needed to roll some of this episode into part four, which we're going to do so that this is not insane and d wieldy for our
editing team and for us. Since we don't have a normal outro for this one, I'm just gonna let you guys know that you can find you know what I'll do. I'll fake their voices while I do their pluggables.
I'm shown Baby.
You can find me at one.
Now, Okay, that's actually kind of disrespectful since this is their plugs. You can find Sean Baby at one nine hundred hot Dog, the last comedy website tragically pretty close to true, and you can back them on Patreon as well. That is again one nine hundred hot Dog, And of course Tom Ryman you can find on Gamefully Unemployed, which does podcasts and all sorts of great content there, everything from like movie reviews to you know, watch throughs of shows like X Files and yeah, a lot of great
content gamefully unemployed on Patreon. You can find them there. I apologize for not doing a fake Tom voice, but let's all be honest, it would have been almost identical to my fake.
Sean Baby voice. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.