Behind the Bastards - Part Six: Vince McMahon, History's Greatest Monster

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

We bring the Vince McMahon saga to a bloody conclusion. For now. You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. http://apple.co/coolerzoneSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know

on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up y'all? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast FlakyBiscuit. I'm going to help y'all learn how to cook and bake new things as we get to know our guests through their favorite nostalgic meal. If you are ever at a place in your life where things are too busy or your head gets too big, having a meal like this,

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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 Dipper Bank. Behind the bastard supporters have been helping to fund the Portland Dipper Bank since 2020 and bought millions of diapers for people who really need them. So, if you go to GoFundMe and type in BTB FundRaser for PDX Dipper Bank or just type in BTB FundRaser Dipper Bank, GoFundMe, Indigoogle, anything like that, you will find it. for PDX diaper bank or just type in BTB fund razor diaper bank go fund me into Google anything like that.

You will find it. So please go fund me BTB fund razor 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 Rhyman'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 gets a sign of contract agreeing to be reanimated in AI form in order to release me from the episodes. 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 Robocop's tube me. I'm picturing I'm inside the Robocop tube 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 in the machine. It's a really great police album. Yeah. Yeah, that also I'm glad that I this is 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 match reference. What percentage of the audience can get that eye? The question is, what percentage will get that it's a match reference and what percentage will get that it's a family guy reference. Yeah, yeah, the majority I think They're going to like why see making a family guy. It was a monster mash reference because it was graveyard smash The whole time. Yeah, it caught on in a flash too In a way of no crash is like a graveyard smash

The monster match guy is like a graveyard smash. The, uh, the monster match guy. Yes, smash the sky kept making monster mash songs for like decades afterwards. He has a climate change. What that is both pressure. He's like, live it 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, you're dear Yeah. You're different. Front's a site called one at a hundred hot dog word. Like that's kind of the only thing we cover is shit like that. Um, I probably learned it from a, a crack article, but I honestly can't remember my, my Halloween tradition is to get all of the devices in my house, which is usually like 30 to 50 screens and have them all playing the monster mash in an endless loop for like on

slightly different timestamps so that none of them sync up properly. It's a real 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 time for this, Robert, you just set me the script and it's like 54 fucking pages. No, no, no, that's the whole script that we've already done. So let's get back into it, I suppose. Yes. When we left off, Saddam Hussein had just nearly murdered Andre the giant with a golden handgun. Well, no, actually, that we were just telling that story.

That happened in 1969, but Saddam comes back into wrestling history. My genetic memory recalls this conversation. Okay. Yeah, it's epigenetics, like surviving an act of genocide. We remember. So let's all fast forward to August 2nd, 1990, 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 says, we're all going to get

ourselves over there. And you get your Operation Desert Storm. Y Desert Storm, yeah, yeah, everybody knows this, right? And HW, HW, 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 a few years older than me, so I'm sure you remember it even better. But yeah, it was man, we were, we were really hyped about desert storm slash desert shield. Yeah. Well, it's called one thing, Operation Shock. That's a storm slash desert shield. Yeah. Yeah. It's called one thing, a operation shock and awe and it was just a firework show. They just the news is just watching.

You did everything we got. You did everything we got. So rad. Like no bullshit. It was just like, here's a bunker buster and they tell you the stances. This thing costs 14 million dollars and watch it go. Boom. And that was TV every night.

Yeah. Yeah. 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 1990s, and a lot of it had to do with his doctor George Zahorian, who had spent the 1980s selling just fistfuls of steroids, Danny Rezeler, who was one of those. 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 out, 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 Sohorean was selling drugs like weight right like actual like a significant physical weight in steroids in bank killers. He particularly moved per cadet and by the fucking gross and this was great in the 1980s, but by early 1990, the feds were onto him, and they succeeded in finding a guy to go undercover for them to bust Sohorean.

The guy who they found to do this was named William Duggan. Let me guess. Paxa Jim Duggan. I forgot what a funner story. No, this is kind of a bummer of a tale. So William Duggan was the strength and conditioning coach at the University of Virginia.

And as a coach who worked throughout the 1980s, he was on gear just the entirety of that decade. Like all of the Reagan administration, this guy is shooting everything up as 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 1980s. And in order to deal with all of the pain that this causes, he has ruined his body by the early, uh, or the end of the 1980s. 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 arrested trying to buy valium and opiates in large quantities,

and the feds are like, Hey, we'll let you off. Basically, they flip them. Right. Um, and they flip them to use him as bait for doctors, aahorian. The book's sex lies in headlocks, alleges that a source close to the McMahon's tip them off that this is happened. Right, when you said they used him as to bait Zahorian, I pictured him standing in the middle of an intersection with a big hat and bow tie and oversized lollipop. He's like, oh, I wonder where ever could I get some sterile?

Yes. Yes. I wonder where wherever could I get some steroids. He's just, so Horeans just lifted like a cartoon cat that smells of pie. It's drifting over to him. Oh, that's I could help with the boy. So, um, someone essentially tips them at man's off that the FBI is going after their doctor. And the McMahon's warns the Hori 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 it from you in the near

future is going to be in undercover. So like, don't sell any illegal drugs for a minute, right? Which is, you know, the smart thing to do. It seems like a really easy advice. It seems like it's one of the smart thing to do. It seems like a easy advice. It seems like, well, the easier things to do. Yeah. 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 weeks. Yeah. Journalist Sean Asale claims, quote, the McMahon said told one of their top aides to call him from a pay phone, 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 Zahorian, 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 fed Zirronomy. 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 and clothes, 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. 60 vikin' and 1,128 housey ons, 925 Xanax, 48 limbitrals, 4 files of test stosterone and 85 darbysets. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this was really man, I went on a journey because the way you described it, I thought he was literally paulning the guy. This is it. That's how it's described, I think he is paulning him just a sack of bills.

Yeah, like a garbage pile. That's how it's described. I think he is pulming him just a sack of bills It's only about 2500 pills Top that's not that many bills So sounded like a lot this is $25,000 worth of drugs in $1990 fair to say more than a personal use amount, which makes the FBI's case here quite easy. They've got a lot of hard work going on in these Unibaba days. This is not one of the tough cases for them.

He didn't have to do any investigation. No, no. So Hort, like, done 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 fire them as soon as the the feds come in and arrest him. And his hope is that like you know, he can kind of end in a suspicion on behalf of the feds that the WWF is encouraging steroid use as a result of this. But the feds subpoena Zohorians FedEx account and they find that he has been shipping

his drugs to Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon every single week, right? Large amounts of drugs to Hulk Hogan, Vince McMahon and Rowdy Roddy Piper. In addition to a couple of other guys, but like packages are going straight to W.W.F. headquarters. So again, you would think not a hard case to make that maybe there's some distribution going on here. As I recall, there's a lot of overreach, which is what ends up syncing the Thed's case, but I'll close my mouth and listen. Yeah, we'll talk about that. So this gets a bunch of wrestlers subpoenaed before a federal ground jury, all is John Does and they get Zahorian 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 illegally 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 Royates, which does not implicate the company necessarily. Right. So, you know, that's where this starts. But Zahorian'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 a strategy. Yeah, yeah, just distracted by blaming Rady, Rady 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 Zohorian is convicted on June 25th 1990. 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 Sargent Slotter, a former WWF wrestler, and to our friend Adnon, who nearly got Andre killed in Iraq, and told them that he had had an idea. They were going to fight together as a team of heels. Adnon would be general Ad adnan and Iraqi soldier. And Sergeant Slotter was basically depicted as going traitor against the United States

and for the Iraqi army. Here's Adnan's introduction and the context. Slotter 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-ruddy Piper the star of the of the John Garperder film they live man what a paragraph Recombinate real perfect storm happening. Yeah it's it's quite a chain of command that at this time I would like to introduce the man that I respect I want to talk about that forever. Just the random precedent pushes you. He's got a Saddam Hussein looking mustache on.

You know what there's guys over there right there? Rady Rady Piper is nicked up to half a beat. He can't believe it. Yeah. He's gobsmacked. He's from Rady Rady! I think we're good. I think we're good. It's so funny. I can't believe brother love was ever on TV.

Amazing. I never was ever on TV. Amazing. I never was face is so red in that. I never knew you could make an offensive racial stereotype of like white southerners, but they did it. I am legitimately offended. I mean, it's, I think it's the least offensive stereotype on screen. Absolutely. You know, Adnon is much worse. For sure. It's, at least I will say over the top. General Adnon counts his pretty woke for the WWF, because he isn't 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. Yeah. They didn't pick some dude from the office. Yeah, normally it's an Italian guy. They didn't pick some dude from the service. So at least there's that. The thing I find most interesting here are Adnan's eyes. Again, he has dressed as a crew limitation 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 storm. So like, what was I supposed to do? In more recent years, he's been like,

actually, I supported Saddam in the invasion of Kuwait. So fuck America. He's kind of all like, he altered either that or make, I don't know, like, I don't know what's going on with this fella. He said a number of complaints. He did save Andre the giant from Saddam. He did save Andre's life. So I think one of the things that I, this brings up to me, just kind of 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

This isn't quite right. 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 were entirely taking Adnan al-Qaisi's word for that. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And again, as we've mentioned many times in this series, wrestlers are notorious liars.

Yeah, that's the job. It's like this. Yeah, 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 that scans with the Saddam I know. Um, yeah, friend of the pod. Um, anyway, I've mentioned that the I've mentioned that the racial stereotype characters were kind of a long standing tradition. We've talked about that quite a lot. But Vince does take a things a step beyond that with how he scripts ad-none. This guy, General Adon is not just a heel. He would go on before matches and

rant an Arabic about a law. He would like prey and stuff. And 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 going to, obviously, when we talk about America's problems with Islamophobia that really ignited after 9-11, it would be very silly to blame them on the WWF. I will say that this isn't helpful in making that situation better. I mean, it's a sign they do the same thing after 9-11. Right. Mm-hmm.

I mentioned they just more so. 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 9-11. Yeah. I mean, they, it's just, I don't know,

it's, 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 shake, they bring back the iron shake, who is an Iranian man,

and they have him fighting alongside General Adnan 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. And 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. I don't know why you. No. The Vince, they're all the same thing, right? Yeah, yeah. Those are right next to each other. It's the thing. Having a guy from Oklahoma pretend to be Texan. It's fine

So audiences are not really in love with this storyline In 1991 WrestleMania was expected to bring in a 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 over like 16 months, yeah. Yeah, I mean, and the actual fighting, like once the troops are 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 fewer over steroids refused to end. Vince goes into panic mode. The Dave Zahorians verdict he told his wrestlers again, y'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 piss tests for the entire organization, and they're different from the old piss 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 were purely a result of the absence of objective reporting. I don't know why as the time she let Vince McMahon write a column about this, but probably I mean, that's, yeah, we don't need to get it.

Is this the public interest guys? Is this in 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. It pretty much in place. I mean, it's even, I think now, dumber than that.

It's less buying it and more. If you're famous enough, it doesn't matter how awful you are, or 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. So they'll have anyone on. I think you can sell your newspaper to everyone if you let a sociopath write a column, just every couple weeks. Exactly. And then you get both sides of the political issues.

Yeah, this is like a, 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. If he and Bush had fought this all out in the op-ed pages, 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 ideal. Especially if I'm going to say Bush, we have him tag teaming with Rowdy Roddy Piper.

And then obviously Sergeant Slotter and Saddam back to back really, really could have been quite the show, bringing Andre at the half point for some vengeance. So this is kind of an awkward interstellar. This is kind of an awkward interstellar period for the WWF. 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. And 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.

So by the time 1991 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 to the ground, into the ground. And so that December, right before the new drug testing protocol has put into effect, Vincent, 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 public attention to them. And we did it crack.

Yeah, that's what we did it crack, right? Yeah, we shot steroids into each other's asses and we partied about the end of days. My dad. Record rumors. Yeah, exactly. 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 it cracked.

Powerful, powerful, and intense. We'll end with it. It sounds like me being confused for you in a case of criminal vandalism. Oh, that did happen? I was doing a fake laugh until you remembered. I was really drunk when that went down top. Anyway, fine.

So the center of festivities for this big drug fueled party, the WWEwf is having, are Brett and Owen Hart. Brett is one of the WWE.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. He was cool. He was such a... I was watching it pretty hardcore during this time. Yeah. And then I fell off again for several years until attitude era. But during this time, it was really one of the coolest things about Bret Hart for me was that he wasn't

Hulk or Ultimate Warrior. He was totally different kind of wrestler. Yeah. Yeah. He's a really interesting guy. He's kind of smaller too. He's not a big guy. Yeah. And neither Bret or Owen look like they're eating their body weight in 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 80s too, is 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 Heart 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 new steroid testing rules are about to come into effect in Brett recalls that a lot of the wrestlers there that night had a panic 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 if Vince 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 him. 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, Vince 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 finisher. 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 in that strip club.

All the dancers are like, yes, please do the wrestling moves 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, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, do, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did,

did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did Vince lives through this and eventually the club closes and someone to suggest that like Rick Flair is the guy in town who has the nicest hotel room. So like why don't we go party at Flair's hotel room? So there are, there's like 30 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 Marquis. And Vince gets the cops, like calls the police and are like, we have to drive 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 WWF, give me a fucking key. And he's just drunken huge enough that the people at the hotel front desk are like, I am the overnight worker at a hotel in fucking San Antonio. I don't know. I'm not starting up with shit. No, I wouldn't withhold a room key from a raging Vince McMahon. Yeah, backed up by a crowd of the drest musclemen you've ever seen in your life.

So that is kind of where this ends. So an awkward sad party. It's plain plain. 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 you got to use the entire 30 something person party, including required, Spent, just every single sentence on the strip or so this coming. They're like, I know how this thing goes.

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 matches what's in radioactive by the end of it. That mattress got fucking muscles. Rick is not there, he comes back the next day to find this. It's just 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. Yeah, he sure does. He sure does. Fireself for giving him the suplex, he asked. He demanded. He really demanded. It is amazing how he he 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. But this I'm sure Hercules Hernandez did not mean to hurt Vince McMahon. No, no, no, they were just all super wasted of like drunk people like doing wrestling moves on each other and like that. No, of course not. Never. No, you shouldn't, you should not engage in 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, the people who are doing especially like these complicated multi-person like flip-locks, where you're like spinning a person's body. You've got to buy them next sometimes. That's an Olympic-grade athletic move that you shouldn't do while drunk in a hotel room that's drenched in your friend's piss. So funny. You shouldn't do it while wearing a cape that has these things to do that. 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 from barricading him. But while Vince had no absolutely no sympathy for a guy like Herc, he was extremely forgiving when it came to another trespass, child molestation. And this brings us to the story of Pat Patterson. So have you guys know about the Ringboy scandal? No, I know Pat Patterson is. Oh god, okay. So Pat Patterson was a Canadian American wrestler born in 1941.

He started wrestling as a 14- 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 U.S., he became a citizen, and he wrestled in Boston and then the Pacific Northwest in San Francisco throughout the 1960s. 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 common path for people to take into this. The most Canadian of American cities. Yeah, yeah. So. So, he's one of... Robert, the way that you're teasing this story

is a worse side up than the Monster Mashed. I don't know what else to do here. I'm not a monster. You should feel a minister. You should feel a minister. This is real bad. 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 ring stars had largely passed. By early 1992, 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 for 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 hires it would hire local teens 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, no money but a chance to meet Hulk Ogan, right? Of course you're going to do it. It's not a safe job, obviously, it's contracting work that 13-year-olds are often doing, so it's dangerous, but again, you might meet Hulk Ogan, so it's worth it. In the 1980s, a 13-year-old boy named Tom Cole was hired to work as a ring boy for $80 plus the chance of 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 sideop stuff, Phillips is kind of the groomer of them, right? So Tom traveled from Westchester County to Manhattan and eventually across the Eastern Sea Board 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 going to go really, really badly. But Tom keeps working, he stays, 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 rough folks. It's, it doesn't get easier here. Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you, Robert, when I, uh, 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. This is a trap. Yeah, it was a trap. I'm talking about, um, it's to talk about one of the backstage 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 WWE television for 10 years of following his retirement and Nari mentioned 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 Andre's sex appeal. Like it is so fucked up, it is so bad. Well, I hit enormous feet. Yeah. I mean, to him that'd be like having sex with a 34 foot woman You know what you know what is a good thing to do right now is pull the ads

Perfect time perfect. Yeah, they'll be delighted. They'll be delighted. Yeah There's a ton of stuff. They don't want to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We've spent a decade applying critical thinking

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Sarah Weddington, for challenging the Texas abortion laws in federal court and Academy Award nominee, William H. Macy, as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. My chief qualification being, I'm uncontroversial. You know how we both ended up on the Supreme Court? Politics? Damn right. This may be the longest of shots,

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Yes. 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 lip, 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 13 year old boy. Garvin would offer the boys drugs and booze of which there were both plenty. And eventually, this goes on for some period of time. Tom is abused for a while. And eventually he starts saying, no, he refuses.

He stops going by to this, he kind of like pulls out. And at this point, he stops getting workers a ring boy, basically, you know, he is a homeless youth. So this is something that he relied on for money and they can him because he's not willing to be molested anymore. So that's bad. Time goes by a few years past and then it's 1990. And Tom, who is 19, 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 some like work that you could do. Tom tells Garvin, like, I'll come back to WWF, but you know, I want to be an announcer someday, right? Like that's what I want to do. I'm only going to take this job ifvin, like, I'll come back to WWF, but, you know, I want to be an announcer someday, right? Like, 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. Tom, 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 Mel then tells him actually you're fired, you don't have a job after all. Great company, the WFF. Cool. So, in the years between his first molestation in 1991, 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 1991, 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 has to. The story needs to get out. We should talk to some journalists like this has to 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 Muchnik 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 different guys who are not related. Are they related? What? Munchnik, who is like the nephew of the guy who had helped start the NWA and then film Munchnik, MUSH, and ICK. I, 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 Munchnik is like, hey kid, you should like get a lawyer in Sioux. 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. And so Tom does. He finds a lawyer and in February 1992 Moussnick blows the story open, publishes an article

about it. And obviously this is in the middle of the steroid abuse 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. Um, good. So the first thing they do is that's what really needs really needs to be defended is not the 13 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 as the copperson is in the WWE Hall of Fame. Oh, oh, yeah, 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.

And he's not great at this. He calls Moussnick and Moussnick 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 Reisman here about 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' relationship with kids seemed peculiar and unnatural. Mushnip recalled,

McMahon said that he rehired 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 Mel Phillips. Munchdick would later say in a deposition, Vincent 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 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 now he's gone forever Like how can you be like yeah, sir? He bothered me with how he like would look at kids until I'm taste away from kids But you can have a job. Yeah, he could have your job back because you love wrestling so much. 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 Ryan says he never 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 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 they're, as you stated earlier Sean, they're the kind of friends who like jokingly try to show each other their poop. Yeah. Yeah. That guy's got a foot thing. That guy's got to pedify. I think there's no reason to think that that guy's a normal dude outside of the poop hiding. Yeah, exactly.

So 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 Samartino. Bruno and another wrestler named Orton wind up on Larry King with Vince talking about like the whole fucking mess. Yeah, yeah, Bob Orton. Yeah, Sam Martino says there have been people who have come forward who caught him with

an 11 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 here say much of Vince's defense here focused around making the case that Sam Martino admitted he'd just been told about it, and Larry King then called the claim here say, much of Vince's defense here focused around making the case that Samartino was unreliable or incompetent. Here's sex lies and headlocks. Quote,

King switched to a guest on the phone, a former W.S.F. wrestler named Barry Ordn, sorry, who also claimed that Garvin had accosted him in Texas in 1978 when he was just 19. Barry King asked, why didn't we know about this sooner? 14 years ago when you were accosted, why didn't you come forward? Just then a third guest, Bruno Samartino, interrupted King and Orton. Larry tell him who the man was, he said.

Then realizing he'd addressed the wrong man, he 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 wore on, he kept doing it, making his accusers look bumbling and unsure. Right, so that's kind of Vince's strategy, as 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 Arteno, right? Because that's sort of the big, the guy who, that's to Sam Arteno'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. He's a very famous. Yeah. Right. If a long time 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, Moussnik, 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 $750,000 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 made by WWF representatives, what happened next is framed as the McMahon's shocked and horrified on Tom's behalf, leaping into action to meet the boy at once to try to help him.

I'm going to quote from Politico here. This was hardly a standard corporate move. The accuser had lawured up and most executives would have been hard at work putting distance between themselves and Cole. But the McMahon saw an opportunity to end the story and confident in their very different skills, Vince's hard negotiating style, Linda's equally fearless charm, they sat down with Cole in his lawyer's office. And defenders of the McMahon's will kind of use the fact that they very quickly get

new room with the boy as evidence that they are their decent and caring and responsible light right. Like the way it's kind of framed is what other CEO of a company with a scandal like this would immediately like 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 calculated at $55,000. Cole signed the agreement on April 8th and went to work next Monday to a charm offensive from Lindy McMahon. We're going to send a

car for you so you can go shopping. I'm sending $5,000 over so you can go get clothes or whatever you need. He recalled her telling him. So basically what they do is like, yeah, they're buying him off. That's like a fraction of what he ought to get. Exactly. Like it's, like it's, they're taking advantage of the fact that he loves wrestling, right? These people are like, is young, is 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 gonna basically adopt me. And like, this is a troubled kid with a difficult family life, you know? And they know what his vulnerability is, right? Like, they're very aware of that. It's such a bankrupt argument to say, well, if why would they try to get him alone in a room

as quickly as possible after the accusations came out? It's like, really? Yeah. Are we really entertaining this? Yeah. It's like, or when they say, they won't even, they won't, it's a, 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 as our accusers. And it's like, well, they don't let you do it, so you can't intimidate them or you know, you have a tremendous amount of power. Yes, you're a very powerful man. I 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, they're, their people frame it as like, we immediately offered him all of this back pay, right, to like help him out. That offer only came after Vince rejected Tom's lawyers demand for $750,000. 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 like they're like, hey, get your lawyer out of the room and we'll talk. And that's when the deal goes down, right? Yeah, it's very gross. What's the source of the story? This sounds kind of made of. Yeah. It's like, so I'll quote from Reisman 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. We're not in Robert D. Yeah. Yeah.

That you keep teasing this story. And I telling us Tom's not around anymore. We not in Robert D. Yeah. The way that you keep teasing this story. And I'm telling us Tom's 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 Reisman again describing what happens here. What events tell Tom in that moment of intimacy, like when they're all alone in the room? Mr. McMahon explained to Tom that he had a difficult childhood himself,

is how Fuchsberg, 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 Bixen span.

Great wrestling journalist brought this up to me. Tom gave those details specifically in a 1999 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 Mr. McMahon really cared. He shook hands with Tom and offered him his job back. So that's the claim that 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 in order to gain his trust. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, seems Vinci. So some of the promises that McMahon's made 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 1999 interview, he explained to this as saying, basically, that he hadn't wanted a lawsuit. He just wanted the bad guys fired in 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 stop paying for it and eventually fire him from his job. In a 1999 interview, he described Vince as 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 2021. 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 is bullshit. That is bullshit. The event spent like $250,000 hiring people to distract him from his studies. Yeah, it's like something interesting.

If they haven't people steal a school book, yeah. Make sure he gets a D or do come back to my office. Yeah, that's a neat thing. And then, Sajim Duggan said, you got it. Took that. 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 else he does. Now, this does happen like more than a decade later, but he rehires Pat Patterson.

Bring this back in. Sure does. Yep. Pat Patterson's a major TV figure during the attitude era. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So Pat gets brought back. Yeah, I think it's a good decade later, something like that. He's out for a while, but he comes back. And yeah, that's how Vince McMahon handles a child sex abuse scandal in his organization. Good guy. I had no serenade. 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, that's wild. Pretty man.

Yeah. He buried that 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 and 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 screen right now?

Yeah, did nobody look into this? Like, Jesus. Yeah. And when he came onto the Ultimate Warrior documentary and like rated all the tag teams feet by fuckability, I was like, this seems weird. Seems weird. Yeah. 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.com by Jared Sullivan called the persecution of Pat Patterson. The poor persecution of the child predator. Yeah, I had her. And it is, okay, he is pretty much. 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 in the first day of the story. So I heard about that stuff. Yeah, yeah. Well, so this is a whole article about legitimately the persecution he faces is 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 of a man.

This is also problematic. Let's move on to steroids. That's a lot more fun. Oh, thank you, God. Blessably. Let's move on to the sexual humiliation of the attitude era. Please. Can we just talk about that?

Yeah. Yeah. Let's get me off. We, I want to turn to our green and green pastures. Yeah. All right. All right. A broad panties match.

Can we talk about a broad panties match? Can we talk about Jerry the King of Aller screaming puppies over and over again just for 10 straight years. Yeah. Wrestling. So, yeah, that article that had queued Tom and on the WWF steroids scandal and kind of started all of this was one of the many pieces published after the 1991 conviction of George Sohorean.

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 ringleader of any of this. He'd seen circumstantial evidence and allegations saying that Vince had been kind of the head of the WWF stairway ring, but he didn't have a hard 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 or told the media that Smith, this US attorney, had asked him to wear a wire for an FBI probe of mob links to McMahon.

This was not true. Nobody asked superstar Billy Graham to wear a wire to prove that McMahon was in bed with the mob. And it created an embarrassing circus around the story. And so Smith sees this mess around Billy Graham just like saying shit for some reason. And it's 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 future. W.A.B. is carny as shit. It is carny as shit. Maybe he's like, I don't know, too messy. So one of his colleagues though, Brian O'Shea, or Sean O'Shea, 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 vents 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 Vince. So 1992 dawns and this is going to be like the worst year of Vince's life. In addition to the Ringboy scandal kind of blowing up and wrestlers and employees coming forward to say that they'd been harassed or assaulted by Patterson. 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 1992 was a really good year for me. Like my little league team made it to the playoffs. Batman returns came out that summer. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like you never cover it up a child abuse scandal or a steroid abuse ring. Tom, I was a little late. Okay. That makes an opportunity. Yeah. I learned how to reverse

dunk in 1992. Very proud of that. Yeah. That's chill. That's awesome. Yeah. I did run an illegal steroid ring in 1992. But because I was like four years old, the steroids, it was like they were like mud steroids, you know, and, and, you know, kids make like mud pies. There's a steroid. Yeah, you're just putting your mud in the trash. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, to a syringe mud. You mud and deer. But yeah, you could, you could have headed fucking Hulkster syringe for the mud. He would have taken it. He would have taken it. He would have taken it. So April of 99.

I said, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, while all this is going on, Rita Chatterton comes forward and she for the first time makes her publications public that Vince has sexually assaulted her, right? So all of this is happening in the same year. And to make matters worse for Vince, his expensive bodybuilding leak had just brought on Luforigno 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 Luforigno in 1992, he is not going to be happy when you tell him to stop using steroids. He was like, you go to hell. Yeah. He hooked down on him. So he then springs in a specialist to

help wean his bodybuilders off of gear and onto human growth 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 Vince's, but some of the guys just fell apart. It gives me the power of a night dude. I shouldn't have cursed you, send them.

I don't know. They can necromancing each other. Yes. Let's make that happen. That's how vincis can take crack in a bodybuilding. I feel the moonlight on my internal flesh, brother. I don't think it really literally was the dead man I guess just yeah it's it's pretty cool. Jesus Christ. The the fucking D.A.A. I have a thousand dead men swirling in the warrior's vein

suddenly makes a lot of sense. So I'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, 70 dates. No, no, no, Tom, I think cannibalism is the right answer here. That's the responsible corporate move is to engage in muscle cannibalism. I, man, I'm waiting for the expose of Hulk Hogan fucking eating a dude. Just eating a dead man. Just eating a dude.

Oh, man. So those photos get leaked on a TMZ or some shit. Yeah, find it folks. You can, you can avenge Gawker. This is the only way. Four times we'll eat him that dude. He can't help it. It's not unrelated to anything.

He just says it. Like he's broken. Vince also uses this opportunity to shill to his bodybuilders, a supplement that he'd started selling. And the supplement is made by a nutritionist that he is as a contractor called Dr. Squat. So that sounds like John Dracula. Totally legit. So they are taking, we've already talked about the corpse human growth hormones.

The, this pill Dr. Squat made is made from the ground up antlers of lactating deer. Yeah. Give me a, it's a positive. It's so funny. Unfortunately, this doesn't work and his bodybuilder started to deflate. And as a big June event at the Long Beach Convention Center nearers, 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. This is a massive failure, I'm sure you're about to say. Yeah. 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 events is underlings calculate that events had instead of starting the WBF, if he had paid each of the 13,000 guests at that event $10,000, they would have walked out ahead financial. Oh my God. It's so badly. That is 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. His landed was such a thunderous thud. We could have established basic income for most of Long Beach and made off that. Made off that. Made off that.

Yeah. It's a weird bodybuilding week. I don't know. Maybe then some money with the rain, the air pills or the, the deer pills, who knows? So, the Eastern District Court of New York eventually brings charges against vents for distributing steroids and conspiracy to distribute steroids. The case goes to court in 1994 and Holkogen testifies an 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 events anymore, although he'll come back. A lot of guys have left for the WCW at this point. Ten wrestlers, other wrestlers, so 11 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.

Oh, yeah, Vince is not that dumb, 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 one of those things there are, when you hear fans talk about this, they'll talk about like, well, Hogan definitely lied 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 would be defamation to be like, Hogan definitely lied under oath and Vince McMahon definitely was guilty because I simply can't say that, right? I don't mind saying it, Hogan definitely lied.

There we go. Shot babies. What did he say? He said he only used steroids twice or some shit after he got hurt or something. His testimony was really weak, but 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 broke the law, he is declared non-guilty. And also I think he's morally responsible for what happens with steroids in the WWE to a significant extent. And of course, he created that culture.

He designed that culture. He definitely found ways. Like I have no doubt that he, when they all the wrestlers testified, well, we felt pressured. Yeah, sure, of course. He was the architect of all of that, no doubt. But I also, I don't have any trouble believing

that Vince kept himself out of the conversation so that there was no... There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers,

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You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up, fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Vaker, and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm gonna get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving Jurassic. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right.

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Nothing to substantially link him to any of that. No, and you know what there's 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, accept the fact that they paid in every month. Yeah, no. Here's some ads.

Oh boy. What is up everybody? We are back from advertisements and we are talking about 1996 So that is two years after vince has declared not guilty in this big steroid case It is I think about five years after the institutes mandatory random steroid tests, you know after zohorian gets convicted In 1996 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 really struggling against the WCW, so he couldn't afford to do random steroid tests. He did the right. tests. He did that. That's why I did the in war like it. It costs money. It's a kind of two bad things if you get money for it. That's it's true. That is true. That is true. That is the highest law of the land protecting profits is the highest law of the land. 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 a well, we're going to we're going to Pepsi commercial coming up. I miss my fingers. Can you can you may I is fucking up on your fingers shot. Can you make us glass Android bodies like the film virtuosity? Absolutely. although I was actually gonna go with 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 And so I'm gonna next mock in a yeah, I'm doing I'm doing next month and X machina. Yeah, that's the plan I think Tom's right. I want to be Russell Crowe all the way. Yeah, go ask Russell Crowe.

We'll try a few different AI movies, including the movie AI, where both of you could be Jude Law's robot pimple. Jiggle-O-Jow? Jiggle-O-Jow, that's right. You can change his hair color with that snap of a finger. I'm gonna be Johnny Cabe from Total Recall. A lot of great robot, uh, uh, uh, uh, race models there. I just learned recently that Johnny cab is, is portrayed by Robert Picardo

from Star Trek Voyager. I didn't really. Yeah. Well, we all learned something today. Okay. That's nice. I wish. So. lot of guests was about that in the perfect, not the list of child suicide. Not the list of child suicide. Yeah, all that other stuff. That would be better. So 1996, they suspend their random drug tests. And it's funny, because when he's talking

for the Waxman community in 2006, McMahon can't even answer, like whether or not wrestlers were ever penalized for positive tests. Like the, because the congressman are like, so was there a penalty if you tested positive and they kind of like waffle around it? Um, he also, I'm trying to imagine where all the the air quotes are when Vince says, yes, we do mandatory random, steroid testing. Uh huh. Are there quotes around every single one of those words Vince? He just just a lot of quotation marks. They actually ran out mandatory random drug testing. No, you don't have to put the drug in quotes. There were definitely drugs. So we're fine on that one.

So we tested for them when we found them. So we did it in five drugs. So, we tested for them and we found them. So, we did it in the test. We did it in the test. Find drugs. When I say drug, I mean Pat Patterson's poop. That's Vince's anti-drug. So he brags in front of this 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'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 gonna talk about how well that all works. Our all 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 2014, the ultimate warrior, James Hellwig died of a heart attack at age 54, three days after being brought into the WWE Hall of Fame. Kurt Henig, or Henig, yeah Kurt Henig, Mr. Perfect, was found dead in a Tampa hotel room on February 10, 2003 thanks to a cocktail of steroids, cocaine, and painkillers. Ray Trailer, Jr. Big Boss Man dropped dead from a heart attack in 2004. He was 41 years old. Randy Savage lasted until 2011, where he died of a heart attack while driving at age 58. Davey Boy Smith was 39 when a heart attack took him in 2002.

An autopsy suggested that his past use of anabolic steroids likely contributed. Ravishing really fucking nine. Yeah, yeah, extremely young. Ravishing Rick Rude died in 1999 of heart failure at age 40. Michael Hegg Strand, Road Warrior Hawk, made it to 56 in died of a heart attack in 2003. All of these men are either confirmed or heavily suspected to have been users of anabolic steroids during their wrestling careers. In November of 2005, Eddie Guerrero died of heart failure at 38.

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. One is the ultimate worry. You mentioned that he died three days after he was inducted to the WWE Hall of Fame. And he died, he was also on Monday night Raw. And he died like six hours after he was on the show.

He was a shit like that. Like you died the following morning. So it was hours after he was on TV. That's fucked up. 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. 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 so oh that 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 add 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. I think that's how great dies in a hotel room, too, you know. I think all of the guys you mentioned died in a hotel room. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. It's pretty bleak. And also, as we said, Chris or Eddie Guerrero dies in 2005. There's this committee in 2006, and it forces the WWE to reintroduce independent testing

for the wrestlers into three strikes policy. But this doesn't actually stop the problematic behavior and kind of the evidence of this is in 2008 WWE wrestler Chris Benoit hanged himself in his home after murdering his wife and child Yeah, there's a lot. I mean everybody in wrestling knows this story right at least the bones bit I think everybody yeah, I think most people outside of wrestling like it's a really it's and it's a nightmare I think most people have a sort of wrestler. It's a really, and it's a nightmare. Benoit was a dude number one who had problems before he was a wrestler, right?

There were issues with this guy outside of what wrestling did to him. The head injuries that he suffered were a significant part of this. He's like Googling after he kills his son, like how to resuscitate a dead child, something stuff like that. Like there's, it's fucked up, after he kills his son, like, had to resuscitate a dead child, something, stuff like that.

There's, it's fucked up, but one thing that is not debatable is that at the time of his death, Benoit had 10 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 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, 10 times as much as he is supposed to have. There is a lot of brain degeneration and classification from multiple head injuries.

And also, Eddie Guerrero was his best friend. And when Eddie Guerrero died, Crispin was really spiraled badly into grief and never recovered from it. So there are a lot of things going on in this guy's head. At that time. He is, it is like the perfect storm of like shit that can go wrong in the brain and body of a giant muscle man. And it ends in the murder of his family and his own suicide.

Benoit 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 10 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 10 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 copeability 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 Zauktor Zahorian mailed packages of steroids

to Vince, that's not enough to prove that he caused anyone else to take him. Take them. Ben Wat took three years of ster- or 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 told 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 you're doing. It's a matter of my job. And if you're any, any sort of a fan of wrestling or have any sort of knowledge of the wrestling industry, it's like super well known that that Vince, and we talked about it 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, this kind of, this line of questions is where they bring up that like Vince has canceled the WWF Random Drug Testing Program in 96, and they ask him why. And he answers straight up like, yeah, we were competing with Ted Turner and the WCW and testing was expensive. He actually at the same time

as he says they dropped the testing for expense is like, we eliminated water coolers because of the expense that really pissed people off. It is, it is a few. I'm distracted. Yeah. It's frustrating. How consistently this all works for him. But very, it's got to have to him. It's plausible. It's plausible. And, you know, this is all very frustrating. There's a lot here 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 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 the mall pissing on Rick Flair's bed. His brother Brett, great technical wrestler, and he's Vince's big star in like the late 1990s, right?

But as we've talked about a few times, around like 1996, 1997, 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 I was like, Hoagans 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 years. Yeah, yeah, 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 1997, but he agreed to join WCW starting in December. McMahon didn't want him to leave the WWF as like, you know, the belt holder, but Brett wouldn't lose to Sean Michaels, right? He like refused because he and Sean Michaels, who is a great wrestler, but a coaked 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's a lot. Like 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 blood 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, you're being a little bit of a, of a dick, but like Brett didn't want to lose to Sean in Calgary specifically because Calgary was like his hometown.

Yeah, because he's a, he's a Canadian wrestler. He doesn't want to like lose to Sean in his hometown. Yeah, because he's a he's a Canadian wrestler. He doesn't want to like lose Tushon in his hometown. And it's one of those things. There's still enough kind of K-fabe cap that like Vince can't force this, right? Cause like you need, you, I mean, especially like you need the wrestler who's going to lose the belt, which is as you said earlier, this was the standard thing. If you're aging out or quitting or joining somewhere else, like you lose your lose your championship belt. Yeah. I'll argue that it's, well, there's more room to do it here.

He certainly could have just done like a special episode where they dropped the pretense and they just get bread 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 also, it's less about like, it's just like the K-favor of regular television, right? Like when like an actor leaves a 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, well, George Clooney is leaving ER.

So it's like they won't do that on an episode of ER. So that's kind of like the level of K-Fa that they're working with here. Yeah. So you don't have to write a reason that makes sense within the context of the show. It's more just like the general K-Fa 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 special, because they do it sometimes, like they do it when Owen dies, they do a special

episode. So it's like they just done an episode where like, well, Brett, here's, you know, anyway. But that's not what they do in this situation. No. McMahon instead pitches him an alternative, which is that during a match in Calgary, Hill 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 then 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, pretty 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,

It's pretty singularly weird too. It's weird. It's a weird thing to do. I will say it doesn't hit his heart after talking about like the child molestation ring and all the deaths part, right? Because this is, there's that. Yeah, the next part of this story hits pretty hard.

This part of the story is unethical, but not like evil, right? I got to close molestate. Nobody gets murdered or molested here. So it may not hit his heart as it does to a lot of it. As it did to people at the time, yeah. Real quick, 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. I was saying this happened in Montreal because it's famously called the Montreal Strait Shop. All right, sorry about that. Yeah, yeah, we'll fix it in that a day. Fix it first.

So the gist of what happens here is that MacMan, like they've got this setup to where it's gonna end in a DQ, hearts not gonna lose, but MacMan tells the referee that while it's going on, at one point, hearts gonna get caught in what's called the sharpshooter, which is like his trademark submission hold. It's a signature. His finisher, yeah, and he was supposed to, the sharpshooter, which is like his trademark submission hold. And 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 MacMan 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, both the ref and 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 doesn't look like an actual submission. It looks like a mistake because what happens 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 they were going to get out of it or something. I heard the Triple H is going to come out and hit him because Triple H is at ring side 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 and the locker room, like hits him. And Vince will claim spits on him in the show. You can see it happen.

Yeah, it's pretty, he's, he's so pissed. He's a lot of people want to, yeah, I mean, at least that happened. Vince, one of the funny things about Vince as a guy is that like, you know, it's a 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 hitting 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. No, he just punched Vince. He just punched Vince because he was angry and Vince had it coming.

There's a really good documentary everybody should watch called Hitman Heart Wrestling Waschadows. That's about this specifically. Yeah. It's slanted, obviously. It's very favorable to Brett. So 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 shit happening. Yeah, definitely worth checking out. And it's like, yeah, so this is 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. Right. It's in the pretent of the ring. The hitman heart could knock out a 58 year old man. Yeah, yeah, without being offered it. Yeah. Right. It's like bro. 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 events as actions and the result of some accident of a terrible accident to Brett's brother Owen. So we have talked about how Vincent 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-1990s, was largely successful, and by the end of the 90s, the WWE was beholden to far fewer safety restrictions and much less oversight than they had been in the 1980s. The Montreal 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 ever before scene level. He'd often done commentating in Minute Presence, but from now on he's not just like there, he's not just like talking, he's not just giving commentary on matches.

He's an in-ring presence, he's like wrestling a lot of the time. And he's usually, he's not able to 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. Yeah, yeah. Which is kind of funny because as Jack 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. 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 slam and then they finally do it. Like he plays in the ring like you know a guy that's going to 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. This is with the real humility for a terrible situation. Yeah, right. It's a surprising level of human. Like he's like he's such a carny 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 boss, and 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, it's super old story and wrestling. They do it all the time. And he has no problem doing that, which is fascinating to me. It's really interesting, because 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 know the do the things that you, like other people, like I'm also 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 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 corporate America so that this regular guy, hero, can like, wail on me. But when he's interviewed about it, because he gets interviewed a lot about 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 I'm fighting against authority all the time. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no You surely are not Vince. It's interesting. I know where you look at this.

It is also interesting to launch like the biggest storyline of your promotion is a feud between your top wrestler and the CEO, like leader management and labor, literally fighting. I don't think that ever happened before. the CEO, like the management and labor, literally fighting. I don't think that ever happened before. No, and we're gonna talk a little bit about this kind of concept of what people call Neo K-Fabe. 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 come, maybe the most uncomfortable thing that ever happened in a WWF 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'd 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 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 eventually, but they weren't like collaborators in the way that he kind of is with his kids, which you can see as like maybe a positive events, 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 and Vince have an onstage rivalry. And in mid 1999, 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 Barer 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 it's I watch this live. It is insane.

So Barrier turns to the end. If he would have completed the ritual, she would have actually become a zombie. Like that's the stakes. Yeah. That is, that is, he's going to zombify and marry her against her will. And yeah, it's like the, Paul Barrett 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 bury your offspring? And the undertaker says, I do. And then Barrett, didn't have to put it like that. Did not have to bearer. Didn't have to put it like that. Did not have to say that. Didn't have to include that line.

That would be weird. Yeah, bearer says, by the power invested in me by the Lord of Darkness, I now pronounce you as 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, he, he wails on everybody and he saves Stephanie before she can, you know,

be presumably sexually assaulted because that's the stakes that Vince has set up here in the storyline. Now that's unsettling, right? The next night she and Vince and 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 on television. 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. It's 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 white girl who's being threatened by a bad guy without it being this. Like, when they say to her later, like, you did well out there tonight. You did well, honey. A 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 Hart. Now, his brother is 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, 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 80s, the blue blazer. This was an example of what Josie Reisman calls Neo-Kfay, 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. K-Fabe is a lie meant to sort of hide the fact that wrestling was not a real sports competition, right? Neo K-Fabe is what grows up in its place, and Neo K-Fabe 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 is displaying a heightened and satiric version of the real disgust that Owen felt for Vince's storylines, which is like, that's kind of a lot going on actually. It is, yeah. They're also hiding him and like, oh, and at this time,

it's one of the best technical wrestlers that has ever been in the business. And he's one of those dudes, 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. They couldn't, they couldn't, 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 to

feud with Brett. But now that Brett's gone, they don't have that. And they're sort of at this well, we don't know what to do with you, which is so criminal for an industry like this where it's like you 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.

So, we've never said, hey, you have to be bigger and have giant muscles, but also there's no one hard to best guy we have. And I will not put them on TV for unsaid 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 and the WWE 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 whether or not there were consequences for failing a drug test. Well, a dude who repeatedly failed his drug tests was a guy named Brian Pilman. 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 5th, 1997, 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 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 it is a business. Vince decides to go ahead with things. He announces Brian's death on air, which you know, you could potentially be a responsible thing to do, but he, he, does it in 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 at all sport and forms of entertainment. Oh my God. Yeah, that's not great. Well, at least I didn't do it. Yeah. Well, the next thing he does is he puts Brian Pilman's widow on television and actually does point blank if Brian had a drug addiction. Yeah. Yeah, that happens the next night on Friday night raw. There is a tribute to Pilleman and this ad, yeah, Monday night raw, sorry, I wrote Friday. Thank you. 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? 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 for 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 lies 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 pillment'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're 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 35-year-old man who's in 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 since 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 discussed 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 a bunch of orphans like my husband did. How are the children taking the news, Vince Pride, a bit too eagerly to sidestep the Tuesday morning critics who'd call the whole fairer exploitative? Little Brian doesn't understand why daddy's not coming home,

she said, but Brittany, she screamed for 15 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. You like older, now that you're single, you like older fellas? Yeah. They want a job. Vince, McMahon, everybody. So it's, I mean, that's that that she mentioned to Caraxon. That needs to, I feel like that needs to be like addressed. Brian Tullen was at 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 pain killer 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. He was fucked up at this point.

Yeah, it's pretty hideous. So we talked about a couple episodes ago, Andre, and how when he ends his career, there's this thing Vince makes him into a heal. 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 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 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 with with with Pilleman's family and is disgusted by that because of he's human being. No.

Like it's not. Yeah, I know account. 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 why he's so unhappy at the time. So when he dawned his costume as the blue blazer and would declare in his 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 UWF, it was like, you know, there's kind of more going on there, like than just, you know, someone being handed a 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, it was him that was behind at 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, Vincent 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 only that were 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 K-Fate because Vince is actually the one in charge directing his son to pretend to orchestrate the kidnapping and sexual harassment. Like 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 within an inch of his life and to sell it, he hires an ambulance and EMTs 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 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 EMTs 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. They just picked a heart attack and got the guys there. Hey, why don't you do a me and T. Me? They're 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 having a wrestler like fly on the 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 Ringmaster, Reisman writes, quote, Vince had hired a new descender 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 the past. Now I'm not gonna belabor it. This stunt goes badly. A cable detaches from the past. Now, I'm not going to belabor it. The stunt goes badly. A cable

detaches from the harness. Owen fell more than 70 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.

Now, did you know what had happened? Yep. Because they came on. They come on after they faded out. Yeah. They show some crowd shots and they come on after a bit and it's JR and and Lawler and they tell us, look, go and fell and they look shrikin. They're both pale.

They look, they look like they just washed a man die because they did. 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're just kind of naturally gonna like fill the air.

So they do, they spend a lot of time sharing the audience and viewers that this is a real situation. The EMTs 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 saving. At this point Vince has a choice either in the show or go on. I think there's a good argument to me that if a guy dies before a show, you've got everyone

there, you have a business relying on those people's jobs relying on this. Maybe you can do bad things for money. Yeah. It's fun. Jim Doug and told us that. Yeah. You's fine. Jim Dougan told us that. Yeah. You can do it.

I don't know. It seems even worse to keep the show going at this point. But they do. Vince tells everyone 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 fucked. It's beyond fucked. Yeah, it's insane. It's like, yeah, it's pretty bad.

At 8.40 pm, CST, events told the audience, many of whom still thought this was a bit, uh, that Owen head, 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. Um, but at 840 PMCST events tells the audience that Owen Hart has perished from his injuries. This is followed by an in character scene. And this is the part that's weirdest to me.

As 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.

Yeah. 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. It's like, don't be antagonistic at the press conference of a wrestler 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. Somebody died something went wrong with the rigging. Yeah. Yeah, it's like if someone had like gone up when when fucking That shooting happened on the set of dust and been, 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 on set. It really demonstrates the incuriosity 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 what the fuck happened. 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, you wanna be sitting down in front of that guy, the moment you can be like, what the fuck happened? Right. Like, interestingly, like what happened, as I remember, it's very similar to what happened at Brandon Lee on the Crow,

which is the 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 because 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, I'm waiting 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. And that's what went 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 literallyp. Yeah, 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 the man's life to. So the reporter continues to press vents saying like it doesn't look like there were any safety precautions at all and Vince lashes out at her.

I would resent your tone lady, okay? This is a tragic accident. Don't try and put yourself on the spotlight here, okay? Just a personal attraction. It's so good. You 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 Owen, like in sort of character, I should say, like on, you know, the WWF. And then on May 31st, 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. Um, yeah, Martha does sue and settles with Vince and the W. W. F for 18 million. Um, he goes, yeah, yeah.

Uh, that's at least something. Um, I mean, it's hard. They start a charity. Yeah. In his name and also like, there's a, there's. And also, there's a whole thing. There's a weird division between Owens immediate family, like his wife and children, and then the greater heart family

who don't want to piss off events. So they didn't really support her during this time. And then afterwards, she end her children refused to allow Vince to inducto and into the WWE Hall of Fame. Yeah, it's really fucked up and ugly. Brett winds up wrestling again for Vince later and there's a lot of family conflict here caused by this.

But obviously, it makes sense to me why Martha does everything that she does. This is like the amount of rage that you must have in this situation is beyond measure. Yeah. So, yep, there's a lot more to be said about Vince McMahon, but we um, and, you know, we've spent so much time. We've said so much about him. This is kind of, this is where, like, this is not the end of the event story. And the ring was going to be the, yeah, the finale. But, um, yeah, this is just kind of where, where we are.

Uh, there's more that happens in the 21st century, but like, you know, enough now to know why people say Vince McMahon is a bad person. I can't believe we did 32 hours of Vince McMahon and never got to the kiss my ass cloak. No, I'm saying we didn't get to him blowing out his quads. Just just as a brief one, he like blows both of his quads out walking on stage in 2005. And it's it's very much if I'm not mistaken, it some 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 bought you move it happens right then it's like gets angry and comes out on stage And like is doing his baby Huey walk. Just kind of blows it up. Quads. Well, it's 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 deny the match, continue. Yeah. But he tried to slide into the ring and both of his quads exploit.

I also saw this slide. Both of his quads explode, but they don't stop the scene. They continue to do the scene. Vince can't stand. So they continue to be the scene with Vince just sitting down in the ring. That's so funny. Everybody else is the funniest look. It's so awesome.

And he's so modest. History repeated itself recently, as they understand, in a paper view earlier this year, Shane McMahon did the exact same fucking bad quads that family. I'm quite genetic. Flang in the ring blows this quads out. Uh, it's so funny. So I don't know, that's the Vince McMahon story. He's still running the WWF.

He was out for a little while, but now he's back in, baby. That's good. He's back in with like a real thin mustache. Yeah. He's kind of doing it in a walled-dissing. The kind of thing that's from an awalt-dissing effect him to grow is for 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 will grow this mustache. Yes. I feel like a court mandated mustache. Right. Well, let's just stay out of jail Vince, but you have to wear this mustache. It's the conditions of his parole part of that was wearing this pencil thin predators mustache. It's his way of going door to door and telling everyone. 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 II,

went to, I don't know, whatever. Whatever. Yeah, when do I school? Uh, yeah. To prowl Roberts. Well, we got into good wrestling stories that I missed here. Gang. No, I think we got a wall. We got a wall.

You covered a lot of them. I mean, there's, I mean, I don't know. Well, I guess what 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 quads up. You know, that that still trying to act grouchy and authority. Yeah, 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 wrestling.

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? Tom, please go first. You want me to go first? Oh, I would love it if you did. Oh, man, well, I have a podcast and streaming network with our mutual friend David Bell also from Cracked Gameplay and Employed head over to our patreon patreon.com slash Gameplay and Employed. We have all sorts of different tiers. You can join it. 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 a, most of our shows are totally free to listen to. You can find them on any, 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 1 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 with my cruel cruel cruel show. Anyway, I love your 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 zone. Apple Park gas that's the plug. Uh-huh. Nobody plugs like you too. You're gonna have to tap. We're gonna have to tap. You're gonna have to tap the top bar gas, that's the plug. Nobody plugs like you too. You're gonna have to tap so hard.

You're gonna have to have to tattoo this on his hand, Sophie. I mean, that would be really funny. I would enjoy that activity. My handwriting's horrendous. Yeah, I was just gonna say that I love your show Robert, but it does make me sad every time I listen to it. Yeah, there was just gonna say that I love your show Robert, but it does make me sad every time I listen to it. Yeah, there are no.

So what we go for is sorrow. All right, everybody. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding

edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up y'all? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast FlakyBiscuit. I'm gonna help y'all learn how to cook and bake new things as we get to know our guests through their favorite nostalgic meal. If you are ever at a place in your life where things are too busy or your head gets too big, having a meal like this, it reminds you of who you are and also who you still are. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup, with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. So you do personal security all over the world, and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel, alphabet boys, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple

podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.