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

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Robert, Seanbaby and Tom discuss the time Vince McMahon tried to maim Muhammed Ali with a razor blade, and how he killed old school wrestling in order to remake it in his own fetid image. Behind the Bastards is once again funding the Portland Diaper Bank! You can donate here to make sure families suffering financial hardship have one less thing to worry about: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ah24n-btb-fundraiser-for-pdx-diaper-bank?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington D.C. This child was laying on the side of the road. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen. I will admit the others when you catch

me if you can. Sign Freeway Phantom. Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Queen Charlotte, the official podcast, we're stepping behind the scenes and the drawing boards of this team to experience the life breathed into the Bridgerton prequel. Listen to the leaps executive producer and series director Tom Verica took to capture the feeling that puts that lump in your throat. And you've got to catch creator Shonda Rhimes. She's dropping gems, diamonds, and mics. You can listen to Queen Charlotte, the official podcast every Thursday on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Robert Evans here, and we'll get to the Vince McMahon episodes

in a second. I wanted to let you all know that for the fourth year in a row, we are doing our fundraiser for the Portland Diaper Bank. Behind the Bastard supporters have been helping to fund the Portland Diaper Bank since 2020 and bought millions of diapers for people who really need them. So if you go to GoFundMe and type in BTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or just type in BTB Fundraiser Diaper Bank GoFundMe into Google, anything like that, you will find it. So please, GoFundMe, BTB Fundraiser for Portland Diaper Bank, help us raise the money that these people need to get diapers to folks who need them desperately. What's Vincent My McMahon's? And that's great. Yeah, courageous, courageous. This is Behind the Bastard. It's a podcast about the worst people

in all of history. And today I've got two McMahon's here to talk with me about Vince McMahon. Did you did that work? Let me tell you something, brother. That's the best intro I've ever gotten. I'm Sean Baby from the internet. Good news, Sean Baby. We will be talking about Hulk Hogan today. Yes. Let me tell you something, dude. My name's Tom Reiman. And do you do you both have a lump of scar tissue in your asses from injecting steroids the size of a softball? I do. And several of my forehead from cutting it up with razor blades. Oh, you know, brother. Yeah. My forehead looks like a grotesque, topography of map. It looks like a duel of the butcher. We call that the Hulkster. When you can when you can read and braille on my forehead scars,

yeah, you might be a wrestler. And I'm holding this under a napkin, brother. No one knows about it. Terry Bolia, Hulk's real name. You know, when I was a little, little kid, you know, before I made my friend and watched wrestling in the attitude era, I was not a fan of wrestling, because I don't think we got any of the channels that it was on. But I loved Hulk Hogan because I would watch almost every single day when I was like sitting in the back room of the donut shop where my parents worked. The movie Suburban Commando. Hell yeah. Absolutely a fucking legendary film. I have long stretches of that movie memorized. Hulk Hogan. So we are back for part three. We're talking about Vince senior still, because he is still the one running the wrestling business.

When we left off, Vince Jr. had just started using the name Vince McMahon as he got sent to a military school, possibly for being too racist to be in an integrated high school, but it's unclear. It's more likely that he's beating up Akumatay full of Marines. That is probably true. You have to separate him from the general population after that. He's far too dangerous. So Vince was well regarded. Vince senior was well regarded, as I said, in the national wrestling business. His company was an affiliate of the NWA, the big wrestling organizer union that ran most of the country. But he wasn't a member at first. And when he became one, he very quickly fell behind on his dues and threatened to resign. He seems to have understood the value of such an

organization, but this like the fact that being a member of it would mean he had to inevitably cede some of his control over how storylines of his wrestlers proceeded. Vince senior was also different from most of the other promoters and owners across the country. While while his competitors generally booked technical wrestlers above all else guys who were really good at kind of the choreography of ring work, Vince senior grew increasingly obsessed with bringing in giant muscle bound monsters and was willing to sacrifice ring skill for having the absolute biggest dudes that he could hire. Now, this actually worked out really well for everyone for a while, because by this point, the government had slapped the wrestling industry with some antitrust regulations,

which meant that owners had to let their plate their wrestlers travel around the country more or less at will. This was great for everybody because it means that audiences got a lot of choice and variety. And even the whims of a guy like Vince senior couldn't exercise total control even in the region that he owned. So Vince preferred to hire muscle bound giant guys. And because they got to start with him, those giant muscle freaks would get to travel around the country and wrestle at other places. But also Vince would have to hire people who came in from other regions of the country. So he got a lot of technical wrestlers and worked out really well for for people who like to watch wrestling, right? You got a lot of variety and the kind of people who were, you know,

taking part in wrestling matches. In 1962, Vince senior wanted to keep the national championship belt on his champion, Nature Boy Buddy Rogers. And I believe Rick Flair also gets called Nature Boy later, right? Isn't that he sure does? Yeah, yeah, he sure. There's a couple of nature boys in wrestling history is what I'm saying. At this point, Nature Boy Buddy Rogers, who's Vince seniors wrestler, he wants to keep the belt on him. But the cartel, the NWA has other plans. And there's this big dispute between the cartel, who's like, we want to give this to Lou Fez, you know, who's their big wrestler and Vince senior, who's like, no, I want to keep the belt on my guy. And this argument between the NWA and between Vince seniors kind of wrestling syndicate actually puts the future of

kayfabe at risk for a while. There was a fear that capital wrestling, Vince seniors company, might take the belt so that they could keep it on Buddy Rogers and leave the NWA, putting belief in the reality behind established kayfabe to risk, right? If like, he's able to just like, leave the NWA and keep the belt, then it means that wrestling's not really a sport. Right. So eventually they came to an agreement to kind of rescue kayfabe that Rogers would in fact lose to Lou Fez after all. But the next year, Vince senior and Toots Mond, who's his business partner at this point, decide to leave anyway and launch an independent wrestling federation of their own. They call it the WWWF or Worldwide Wrestling Federation that eventually dropped one of the

W's giving us the WWF that most people listening grew up with. It's called the WWE now, but we're just going to call it the WWF for our purposes today. While all this was going on, Vince was acclimating to military school and the departure of his stepfather, Leo, who bounced and got divorced from Vince's mom around the same time. She got remarried to some other dude about a half year later, but this doesn't seem to have impacted Vince as much. He was old enough now. He's spending all his time with his biological father. And to his credit, Vince senior seems to have legitimately committed to being a part of Vincent's life, even though he never kind of got over his awkwardness with his son, who he doesn't really seem to have fully understood. It's worth noting that four

years later in 1966, Leo Lupton would marry Vince's cousin, the young kid he put leaves in in his early childhood. He was 28 years older than her. So that's, oh, that's good. That's, um, that's good. That's like the 4D chess of troubling. But they, they, they marry in Florida. So at least this one's not on North Carolina. So, hey, you know, that's good. He didn't, he didn't even have to tell us that. I knew from the story where they got married. I assume most of these stories, stories take place in Florida, uh, because it's pro wrestling. It is prominent in nearly every wrestler's life. Um, all those, those dry Florida leaves when you're stuffing leaves into your bride,

you're 28 years younger cousin bride. Sorry, I lost some details of the story. It's fine. Anyway, every one of those details is significant. Back in 1962, 11th grade Vince tried his first attempt at becoming a wrestling promoter. Now he's in military school at this point. He's become pretty muscular. You know, he's working out with the, uh, the weight set that Dr. Dr. Graham gave him. Um, and he's, you know, he's done some football. He's an okay defensive tackle, but he doesn't really like actual competition sports. He doesn't seem to like super engage with them. Wrestling is what his bio dad did. And so wrestling is what Vincent Jr. loved. He decided to create a youth copy of his dad's league at Fishburne military school. Now Vince

McMahon's first shows were carried out in a high school gym after hours and included the costumes and ring stunts that were already such a part of the pastime. Vince wrestled himself as ape man, McMahon. One friend at the time explained, that's not a bad name to be honest. Like solid wrestling name. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, you, you, you graduate from that. You evolve, but it's not bad for a first, first try as a high school wrestling starting point. Perfectly acceptable. You become gorilla monsoon. Some of the people listening think gorilla monsoon is a joke that you came up with. He is not. That's a real guy. That is, that is an absolute real guy. Uh, one friend at the time explained, he was just into dress up, putting on masks or something,

and he would wrestle just to have fun. Sometimes people would participate. Sometimes they'd just come watch. Vince was Vince. He loved to wrestle. He's the first part of it. He's fighting himself. He's just choked, poked, gouging his own eyes out, throat punching himself. This is what I did to those Marines. They never saw it coming. This is, I have to say, one of the things that's actually really interesting about Vince McMahon. He is a cutthroat businessman. He is like, uh, it does a lot of terrible things in the name of profits, but he's also not one of those bloodless weirdos who just lives to soak money out of wrestling. Like he loves to wrestle. Like he, he becomes a very prominent in ring character because he just can't stop himself from being

like physically involved with it. Um, I, a lot of people argue he ruined wrestling and there's certainly a case to be made there, but you can't really argue he's not like enthralled by everything that is involved in pro wrestling. Like this is an obsession for him and it kind of always has been. Kids who wrestled with him would later talk about his strut, uh, like the strut with which he walked into the ring, which you can still see in like videos of him from the nineties and early 2000s. Yeah, you can. They describe him as walking like baby Huey, uh, and it would still be part of his ring presence half a century later. That is a great way to describe the way he walks, like one of the kids from DuckTales. It really sits. Well, baby Huey is a different character.

Oh, we're not talking about Huey, Dewey and Louie. No. Oh, okay. But baby, baby Huey is, uh, the great, the great big one. I don't know who that is. See, this is, this is me learning something. I'm going to Google it. Yeah, Google it. Google baby. I assume this was a, this was a duck. Oh, oh my God. Okay. No, I do know this guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The gigantic weird baby duck. Yes. Okay. That also works. Look, both of these work is what I'm saying. Cartoon. Cartoon duck generally a good thing to compare to Vince McMahon. Yeah. Um, fascinating. It has never been a more apt comparison. No. Um, interesting. So wrestling was not the only kind of performing that teen Vince was into, as Josie Reisman found when she interviewed his friend Dutch

for her book. Quote, we would go over to Fairfax Hall, the girl school across town, and he would put on a healing, a healing show over there. He had a fella named Dutch Lindsay, Charles Lindsay. Dutch was kind of short, stocky guy, and he'd grab Dutch by the head and he'd do this healing routine and Dutch would fall to the ground and Vince would heal him. What the fuck? I did not call medicine shows being part of his early life when I, I started doing this, but yeah. Neither did I, but of course. Yeah. Absolutely scarce. I love that it's a girl's school. So there's this implied motivation that that he was doing it to get laid. He's like, you know what ladies love? Yeah. Well, that's interesting. That's

interesting shot. A mysterious healer. Because and this is something that the when Josie talks to other kids at the military school, they'd bring up is that like, you know, we're men in a military school. Our access to women who are our age was very strictly curtailed at this point, right? So these performances at the women's school was kind of like one of our few chances to mingle with with other, you know, girls who are kind of in our same age group. But Vincent doesn't seem to have been into this. He is at this point in love with the woman who will become his wife, Linda McMahon. In the biopic, I can already see the scene where she's like watching from her dorm window of this this maniac in the parking lot, like healing his friend from a wheelchair and

thinking, yeah, I'm going to I'm going to murder that man one day. And then I'm going to somehow become a member of Donald Trump's White House. My God. So they had very specific dreams. Yeah. Friends recall that he talked about Linda constantly, even though he generally didn't talk about girls. Wrestling was pretty much all events chatted about like they thought they noted that he talked about Linda and that it was kind of weird because he otherwise did not seem to notice that female people existed. Maybe she had a real crisp DDT. I'm telling you this, Linda, man, she plants your head in the canvas like so you've never seen. Now, as we have come to expect from you while you're unconscious,

always keeps her razor blade in her palm. Now, as we've come to expect from our boy, adult Vince would later claim to have been a bad dude at school constantly in trouble in committing crimes. I wasn't caught for some stuff that would have been immediate dismissal like stealing the commandant's car. He also had a dog he was nuts about. I love animals, but one day I couldn't resist giving that dog a laxative. I put the laxative in some hamburger and the dog did his business all over the commandant's apartment, which thrilled me greatly. Now, it's thrilled me greatly. 80s comedy nonsense. No, he absolutely did none of this. When did he when did he give this interview?

This was decades later. So it's in like the 90s, right? Yeah, the 80s. Yeah, I think this is not like the 18. Like the fact that he chose to describe giving a dog a laxative shit all over a guy's apartment was it was quite thrilling. We got crazy. Me and my friends put bras on our head. We make a girl with a computer. Our friend, Pluto, you should have seen the way that guy could drain a whole handle at once. Anyway, it thrilled me greatly. It is also interesting to me. We're focusing on the even weirder things that he wants us to believe about him, but he really wants us to think he stole a lot of cars. And that's that's such a strange thing to do. It's cool. Okay, man. He claims that he was the first student to be court

marshaled at Fishburn over depending on the interview, either in subordination or a threat he made that he might somehow sabotage sabotage finals week. Again, sabotage. Yeah, threat of a bomb threat is what he's claiming. I think it was more like a prank. But but yeah, this is like and he like so he says that basically the the the administration thought I was going to sabotage finals week. So they court marshaled me and they were going to kick me out. But then all of the other students and teachers rose up and like threatened to leave the school if they didn't clear me of all charges like there was a rebellion. Absolutely none of this occurred. They didn't fucking dead poet society. You are accused of of threatening to shut down the entire

finals week with your pranks. What's this clapping? Oh, what? Everyone is in support of you. Oh, captain, my captain. He wants to feed a dog laxative. He wants us to believe it was dead poet society, but also animal house. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's very funny. He is such a liar. So Fishburn, the school has like Josie Reisman, again, the author of Ringmaster, talked to a bunch of his former classmates at Fishburn and none of them recall any of this happening. She also like reached out to Fishburn and was like, he says you court marshaled him. You guys keep records. Do you have any records that he was ever court marshaled? They did not have any records and Vince has never presented any.

Instead, interviews with his peers portray him as a decent student who simply wasn't a great student because he wasn't that interested in school, right? He was one of those kids who was like he was smart so he could do OK if he didn't work too hard at class. And so he devoted, you know, he kind of scraped by and spent most of his time on wrestling, right? That I'm sure that kind of dude is actually pretty familiar to our listeners, right? Like that describes me without it wasn't wrestling for me, but that describes me in high school pretty well. So once again, Vince lied to make himself look like a badass. The reality is that he was a nerd. He was a wrestling nerd and he was more jacked than we tend to associate with that term. But like

most nerds, he kind of did what he had to at school, avoided trouble and spent all of his free time on the stuff he was obsessed with, right? Like for me, this was Warhammer, but it's the same pattern, you know? He graduated and he got into college at East Carolina University. And around the same time, his dad took on a new championship wrestler, a guy named Bruno Semartino. Still regarded today as maybe the greatest pro wrestler of all time, although there's a couple of people who folks wind up throwing out, you know, in that in that category. He's in the conversation. He's in the conversation. Right. Yeah. Obviously, he's huge. And he was an extremely skilled technical wrestler. Bruno was also the kind of person who trained like a world-class athlete. And as a result

of how careful he was about his training, he was able to remain a high skill technical performer for more than 30 years, which is a lot of longevity, especially for this period of time in pro wrestling. With Bruno, Vince senior pioneered a strategy totally new to the field. And I'm going to quote now from a book called Death of the Territories by Tim Hornbaker. The central idea was to build up a succession of threatening challengers for Semartino. And Bruno would show his vulnerability in near defeats, only to rise up in the end to conquer his opponents. His performance never failed to capture the imagination of audiences. Among his villainous rivals were the 350 pound Guerrilla Monson, the six foot five Bill Miller and the six foot three 275 pound Bill Watts.

As Semartino worked through one feud, McMahon pushed several other prominent challengers at the same time to keep the cycle going all over the circuit. Now, while this is all going on in the wrestling world, you know, Linda graduates high school about a year after Vince and the two of them get married when they're both in college in 1966, which is interestingly enough the same year that Leo Marry's Vince's cousin. Linda joins him at ECU. And because she's an excellent student, she qualifies for an accelerated program in French, which is what I wouldn't have called as Linda McMahon's focus in college, but there you go. They graduated in 1969, which is the same year that she got pregnant. Now, Vince tells another possible lie about his time in college. He claims

that his grades there were so low because he was spending so much time fighting, I guess, that he had to talk several professors into bumping his grades so he could get a 2.001 and graduate. I was just so tough, I kept punching my books. Now, I will say of all of the things he's told us that might be lies, I think this one might be true because this relies on him being good at like manipulating people. And that is his actual skill. So yeah, I could see him manipulating his teachers to giving him a passing grade. I'm not going to say that one's definitely fake. The year after he left college, Vince got a job working for his father at the then WWWF. He'd initially wanted to be a wrestler. But again, his dad sees what happens to wrestlers

when they age, right? Like he knows that this is a job that kills you. And he's like, the fuck no, you are not going to do this for a living. And yeah, at the start of the 1970s, though, Vince Jr. joins his dad's company anyway. And at this point, kind of the WWF's territory had 11 states, basically the whole Northeast and pieces of the Virginia's and Ohio. It's the largest wrestling federation at the time. But it's also very much integrated with the others, right? The heads of the different syndicates would change sometimes, but the actual territory wouldn't because everything was kind of spoken for. So nobody can really expand without somebody else losing some ground. And for, you know, all of that he is a pretty cutthroat businessman.

Vince Sr. was one of these guys who's like, look, these other people are my peers, these other owners of syndicates, and we have a handshake deal, right? Like I'm not going to fuck too much. I'll fuck around a little bit sometimes to get an advantage, but I'm not going to fuck with the overall system too much, you know? Yeah. So at the very beginning of his career, Vince found a place for himself as a referee. Now, in this stage, wrestling refs were legitimate sports referees. They were licensed by the states and they had to have specific training in order to do the job. This is, again, wrestling is not an actual sport still at this point, but the referees do all of, but they're lying about that, right? Like wrestler,

like the company promoters, everybody pretends it is a real sport. And so the government's like, well, then you have to have actual refs, right? Like, you know, the government's like, all right, we'll go along with it. We'll go along with this, but you got to do the thing other sports do. Like, we can't just like, pretend that you're a real sport, but be like, for no reason, they're exempt from all the rules. Now, obviously, that eventually becomes the whole thing behind sports entertainment, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. Which we will, that will be a major focus of part four. So the main job of refs at this point is to act as storytellers, right? They kind of, honestly, there's a lot of

simulators between wrestling and Dungeons and Dragons. The refs in a lot of ways are kind of acting like DMs, right? They're making it clear when someone's one or lost. Sometimes when you have to, like, you know, somebody gets out of pocket and they're not willing to, like, actually take a fall when they're supposed to take a fall, you find ways to, like, dequeue them or call the match for the other guy in order to make sure things still in the way that they need to. The ref has actually a lot of power. And so do the announcers. It's kind of the two of them together are helping to sort of tell the story to the audience of what's happening in the ring, right? And it's also part of their job and part of the announcer's job, what Vince

Jr. is doing to sell what's happening to the audience. So maybe sometimes you've got, like, a wrestler who's not as technically skilled or just somebody's off and a hit doesn't really, you know, land the way that it should have. It's your job to kind of hype that hit up so that the audience, you know, gets carried along in the enthusiasm and doesn't notice. One of the funniest things, clips you can watch on YouTube are blown spots like that where somebody misses like a drop kick or a hole doesn't go right. Or they screw up a special move and listening to the announcers trying to sell what happened as if they didn't just fuck up. It's an incredible genre of YouTube video. Yeah, I know.

And it is interesting, like, the more I get into it, the more I understand why, like, all of the kids that I played Dungeons & Dragons with when I was 12 were into pro wrestling. I was like, oh, I get I actually this makes complete sense. These are extremely similar in a lot of ways. You know, it's just a lot of it is make believe and choreography and kind of the high fantasy, a weird kind of fantasy storytelling. I love the theatrics of when the referee like tells like in a tag team match, he'll like tell the good guy tag team member like, hey, I'll just turn and start yelling at him for no reason. And then the bad guy tag team

guys will like beat the shit out of the other guy. And then he turns around and he has to act like what what happened to you? I just love that. Yeah, like the object permanence. Yeah. Yeah. You know, who else has no object permanence? I love where this is going. Yeah, the sponsors. Look, we have one simple rule for the sponsors of behind the masters. And it's that none of them can be above the age where they understand object permanence. Every one of our sponsors, the one guarantee I'll make is that if you put your hands over their eyes, they will freak out because they don't know that you haven't just disappeared from existence. Support these babies. And goldfish, I guess. Yes. Goldfish as well.

We do. We do take a lot of money from the goldfish industrial complex. Goldfish. Big goldfish. They can get quite large if you keep feeding them, Tom. It's all about the size of the bowl. Same is true of wrestlers, actually. All right. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University. And I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast, I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities. Like, does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident? Or can we

create new senses for humans? Or what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all-new story of Betrayal. Ashley Lytton was helping her husband set up a business Venmo account when she discovered a terrible secret. I scrolled down, and that's when I saw a hidden folder, and I opened it. What the hell did I just see?

I was scared that he was coming home. What Ashley discovered that day was a secret so dark she feared for her life. She was like, oh my god, I got to get out of the house. He's going to find out that I've seen this. He's going to come kill me. Listen to season two of Betrayal on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, D.C. It took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible. I will admit the others when you catch me if you can. Signed freeway fan. This child was laying on the side of the road. It appeared that she was probably

either dragged out of the car or thrown out of the car. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother. That guy is, he's out of sync with even the worst people. I thought that they would catch him. I thought it was just a matter of time. Is it possible that the killer is still alive? Listen to freeway phantom on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Yeah, brother. So in 1972, Vince Jr. starts working as a referee. Now, there's nothing that Vince McMahon hates more than being called Vince Jr.

And it is true. He's not a junior, right? He and his dad have different names, like they're not actually Vince senior and Vince Jr. But because they are both Vince McMahon, everyone they worked with at the time. And this I get this from Tim Hornbaker's book, everyone they worked with at the time in the wrestling world just called them Vince senior and Vince Jr. Because like I found out writing this podcast, that's just the easiest way to talk about the both of them. Because anyway, Slayer was not sticking as a marine Slayer. Yeah, that doesn't work as well. Anyway, Vince McMahon hates it when you call him Vince Jr. So the job Vince Jr. took had previously been done like this this announcer or referee, you know, announcer job that he gets. Sorry,

this announcer job that he gets had previously been done by a renowned sports broadcaster named Ray Morgan. He was a very good announcer, but he was also a union man. And both Vince McMahon's hated unions. So one day that can have that. So there's a couple versions of the story. One of them is that one day Vince's backstage with his dad in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, one night, and he sees his dad having this really mean, nasty argument with Ray Morgan over the fact that Ray wants a raise. Ray is like, I'm not going out and announcing tonight unless I get a raise. And Vince seniors like, fuck you, then you're fired. Vince Jr. Then later claims, quote, I'm sitting in this cloakroom and I'm saying to myself, wow, that was awesome. I was just proud to be there and listen to all that

and proud of my dad, proud of the fact that he told this guy to take off. And so, you know, his dad gives him the job to because he'd fired this guy for, you know, trying to trying to get a raise. Now, that's the Vince McMahon version of the story. Josie Reisman's research includes uncovering arbitration documents from a separate legal case at around the same time. Before you reveal, I just want to say real quick that my prediction is that those things happen is just not on the same night. Yeah. That's actually, Tom, you have gotten it completely right. That is literally what I'm about to say. So he was not masturbating in the closet while his father fired somebody. Well, I didn't, I never said that. I never said that, Sean.

So basically what happens based on these arbitration documents is that Morgan had previously negotiated a pay raise and Vince senior had agreed to give him a pay raise. And after they have the face to face meeting where he agrees to a new contract and a pay raise, he fired Morgan, like when they're no longer in a room together. So he doesn't have like the guts to get up in front of him and tell him he's fired. He pretends to agree to a raise to avoid a conflict and then fires him later. And then he hires his son for the same rate that Morgan had just signed at. Now, basically he's doing this to be like, Hey, anybody who tries to like argue for a better stake like fuck you, it's not about the money to me. It's about winning, right?

If you get a raise, that means that you beat me and I won't be beat. That means your son gets your job. Yeah. My fucking kid gets your job. Now, now, again, this is a little confusing. This story is a little confusing if you kind of buy all these recollections of Vince senior that you get from other wrestlers that talk about how honest he was. And it is true. You can find a lot of positive accounts of Vince senior as a boss from wrestlers from this era. And in fact, some of these accounts sort of verge on adoration, but that affection to the degree that it was a member, not everyone's an asshole all the time. Exactly. Exactly. And it's also there's a lot of dudes that love Vince McMahon.

Yeah. Yeah. Because he's nice to them in person. Yeah. And that's what that's what Jesse, the body of insurance said that like, you would always feel good after a talk with Vince, but she wouldn't get a dime, you know. And it's what I think it does seem to be that the affection a lot of his wrestlers had for him was honest, but it was not reciprocated by Vince senior. Any warrant warmth he showed to his employees was kayfabe, right? And here's the book Ringmaster, describing a conversation between ex-wrestler JJ Dylan and Vince junior. Vince the younger told Dylan about a conversation he'd had with Vince senior. The father's wisdom as imparted to the son was wrestlers are like seagulls. All they do is shit eat and squawk all day. Dylan was taken

aback and never forgot it. Even went so far as to name his memoir, wrestlers are like seagulls from McMahon to McMahon. That gave an insight there into how his father truly felt deep inside, Dylan says, though he never spoke openly that way. And yeah, I think that's that's that's interesting. Accurate probably seems like Dylan's got his number. Now, the fact that Vince senior gives Vince junior this job is probably the most obvious example of nepotism that he shows his son. Junior was expected to run himself ragged, though, driving across the country to call shows from Maine to Georgia. He kind of breaks into the business really because his dad gives him this impossible task of like bringing up numbers in Maine and he's good at

it. He's able to actually promote. He gets more people coming in. So he's not paid an enormous amount of money. Like I think it's a reasonably comfortable living once he really gets in there. But his dad also he's not grooming his air, right? He does he Vince is not going to inherit the business. And his dad is like open with him that like, no, nobody I am not giving the business to you. He's not in fact going to give the business to anybody. So in order to prove himself, Vince junior decided that like, while he's sort of building his career as a wrestling promoter, he's going to try and get independently wealthy by engaging in a series of business schemes with his wife, Linda. So the first thing they do is they buy an old cement plant and a horse farm

to try to make money. Both of these collapse. You know, you've heard that phrase. They go together like cement and horses, right? You got horse in my cement. You got cement in my horses. Dip your horse in cement. It's delicious. Everyone loves a good cement horse. So Vince is heavily reliant on Linda as his money manager while they attempt to, you know, remain solvent. But even this early in their relationship, he cheated with enough regularity that his friends warned him about it. The general just was, Vince, this woman is way too good for you. Why are you being an asshole like this? And you have to assume the kind of people that Vince McMahon has at friends at this point for them to be like, you're not treating

your wife right. You've got to be really cheater. You've got to be cheating like Olympic grade cheating. So because you've got to be fucking women in the next room. Yeah. Yeah. It's got to be bad. It's got to be like guys in North Carolina in the 1970s go, I don't think this guy respects women. So Vince Junior is not set to inherit the WWF outright. And so again, he's going to ultimately he's going to pay his father like for the business. He's often tried to describe this. The fact that his dad made him pay for the WWF is sort of like a kind of like owed to self-reliance, right? But the truth is that he did still get a lot of help from his father in 1974. Vince senior got his son an unpaid gig with a boxing promoter top rank that was meant to teach him the ropes of the industry.

Less than a week into this job, Vince went to his boss and said, quote, I've got this great idea. I know a guy who's been jumping over trucks with a motorcycle, Evil Knievel. And now he wants to with a space rocket, jump over the Snake River Canyon. That ended really well. Thank you. If you're a if you're a young and he didn't quite make it, he didn't quite make it, right? I'm going to guess most of our Gen Zers don't remember Evil Knievel. If you've ever watched the Simpsons episode where Homer falls down that canyon twice, the stunt man in the beginning of the episode is based on Evil Knievel. Evil was a famous stunt man who jumped things and occasionally got badly hurt, right? Real quick, I want to point out, Robert, that your touchstone

for people who are too young to remember Evil Knievel is a 33 year old episode of the Simpsons. The good Simpsons episodes are eternal, Tom. They never die. They never die. It's still a touchstone to kids. I have to believe that, Tom. I have nothing else. Sure. I showed Garrison Starship Troopers the other week. All of the icons of my childhood are have died and faded. It's tragic. I never thought it would happen to me. I thought, uh, no. I thought those movies would be forever. Anyway, Evil Knievel, famous stunt man, jumped things, occasionally hurt himself. I remember there was a little kid knowing about Evil Knievel and like my cousins and I, like he was this kind of like superhero figure to us. But the

reality is he was a giant piece of shit. He was a mat. He was famously bad at jumping motorcycles as well. He was not good at any of this. Like when modern motorcycle jumpers talk about him, they don't talk about like his technique. He just got a Harley and just held the throttle down, did not pitch that motorcycle, right? He was generally thought he would die. Like he just had balls too big for this. He just didn't care if he lived. Yeah. He's like, whatever. If I die, fuck it. Cool. He's just Johnny Knoxville like 40 years earlier. Without the sense of humor or charm. Yeah. Or skill or any of the things. Honestly, I think like 50% of his appeal was the fact that Evil Knievel is a pretty cool name for a stunt man. Yeah. Super cool name and you

might see a man die. Yeah. That was the big appeal to all of his stunts. Is that like, there's pretty good chance he doesn't live through this? Yeah. So obviously, it won't be a gentle death. No, no, you will watch a man come apart on landing. Crash test dummy. So, you know, he was a giant bigot. He was very sexist. He was there are allegations, at least, that he was abusive to his children. But Vince didn't care about that, although he may not have known any of that at the time. But I don't think he would have cared either way because he wanted to people to get to get people to pay for like pay. There used to be a thing called pay-per-view kids where you would pay to watch things like a la carte that weren't cable TV.

I know that's basically how all television works now for most people. But at the time, this was special things, right? So his goal is like, I want to get people to pay for pay-per-view so they can like see if this guy is going to die life on camera. Vince works out a potentially sweet deal with Evil Knievel and ABC where he's like, hey, we'll do this on pay-per-view while it's live. But then after it airs, ABC will get the exclusive right to rebroadcast it. And so we'll get even more money from this thing. But when he sits down with Evil Knievel in a meeting with his boss, who is a Jewish lawyer from New York, his boss at this promotion company, the first thing Evil Knievel says is, there are three kinds of people I can't stand,

New Yorkers, lawyers, and Jews. Oh, so the meeting went well, though. Yeah, the meeting went great. So it granted him- He's even a lawyer, too. That's like- Yeah, that's just your bigotry. All right, if I am a racist, I shouldn't see you, too, sir. Evil Knievel, I don't believe in the Holocaust. How are you doing? They all haven't even sat down yet. He's showing off his SS tattoo.

So it's just brought a briefcase of Nazi paraphernalia with him. I bring this to all my meetings. So it gradually became clear that Evil was not a good person to be in business with. Now, his boss, whose name is Arum, Vince, you know, the decent thing to do when you realize that like you've got that there's two decent things to do, I would say, when you realize that like you've brought this guy in for a meeting with your boss and he's being really racist to your boss, the most decent thing to do would be just like, fuck you, get out of here. We're not doing this deal. The second most decent thing would be like, hey, boss, really sorry, I didn't

know he was fucking bigot. I will take point on this so you don't have to interact with him and I'll get, you know, get this thing done and we can move on with our lives, right? Vince does neither of those things. Instead, he abandons his boss and his unpaid job at the agency and leaves them to clean up the mess after they've signed a deal with Evil. The canyon jump is a disaster and Arum had to spin this. Yeah, again, his boss, who is a Jewish lawyer, had to spin the summer promoting it with Evil Knievel, who on one memorable occasion, while they are together at a hotel, gets angry at a bunch of off-duty soldiers and their families swimming at the hotel pool and pulls a gun and

threatens them out of the hotel pool so that they'll be quiet. American hero, Evil Knievel. Great guy. So the jump is a flop. Yeah, there's a real guy I was wondering why I was like, man, I didn't know Vince was involved with the Snake River Canyon Jump. He invented it and then he abandoned it. And then he just fucking left. He was like, we're spoiling your future Evil Knievel episode. There's still plenty for the heat. Don't worry.

Yeah, we'll make it work. I do look like it's Snake River. It's not even, it's not even like an entertaining catastrophe. No, no. He just doesn't make it in his parachute open. Dribbles off the side. It's like really a diplomatic. It's a fairy lame jump. If you just type base jumping fails into YouTube, you will find more impressive

fails of reckless human beings. If you type cats trying to circle around a full bathtub, you'll get more impressive falls. More thrilling videos than evil Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon. So it goes really badly. And I will say, even though Vince abandons the entire effort, he and his wife are heavily invested in this stunt for some fucking reason. And they do lose a quarter of a million dollars. Oh my God. But she loves him.

He loves me all my money, but I love him. She is very loyal. You got to give her that. In normal people world, being responsible for the Snake River Canyon Jump and then losing a quarter of a million dollars on it would be the end of your big industry dreams. Right. But that would be like opening Al Capone's vault when there was nothing inside. Yeah. But unfortunately, can you imagine if that guy was still in media history later?

But Vince Jr. is Vince senior son. So a room wound up reaching out again to Vince Jr. when he had another idea for a stunt promotion. Now, this one involved a guy you might know called Muhammad Ali Ali. We are talking the mid 70s here. Ali is a big name at this point in time. He is he is he is fucking a big big big dude. And he has been approached by the Japanese to fight a famous Japanese wrestler

in like a big show match. Now, there's a lot of money in getting Muhammad Ali to fight the most famous wrestler in Japan. Right. You can make you're going to make a shitload on that if you can if you can pull it out. But Ali wasn't Muhammad Ali is Muhammad Ali. Right. He's he's kind of hesitant. He doesn't really get why anyone would want to see this.

So Vince Jr. made a plan that he thought he could sell to Ali. And I'm going to quote again from Josie Reisman here dying to hear what this is. Oh boy, Tom. So I got a hold of Vince Jr. And I said, how do I do this? A room says and Vince, of course, had brilliance when it came to wrestling and gave me the scenario. He recounts Vince's plan, which involved a well-worn wrestling practice known as blading

in which a wrestler will covertly cut their own skin to make it look as though they've endured enormous damage. The scenario was, and I'll never forget it, that Ali, after two or three rounds, was going to be ostensibly pounding the hell out of Enoki for fake, but make it look real. And Enoki was the kind of wrestler that had a razor like you shave with in his mouth. And he would take the razor out and slit his own eyebrows. And as Ali was punishing him, the blood would be falling down. And Ali would turn to the referee.

Please stop the fight. The referee wouldn't. And Ali turns around and says, you've got to stop the fight. Enoki would jump on his back, pin him. One, two, three, count. Enoki would win the fight. Everyone would be happy. And Ali would win with a big paycheck.

Like, OK. OK. Yeah. That sort of works. That has like a wrestling logic to it that like he lost, but like it's not a clean pin. You know, yeah, it's the thing that theoretically could work. Although I might add that having somebody take a punch from Muhammad Ali with a razor blade in their mouth seems reckless.

Yeah. It's like a specific thing you train. Like when you watch the Rock and Steve Austin throw fake punches, you're like, God, that looks really close to real. Yeah, they're quite good at it. It took probably 40 years of wrestling before anyone like landed on that. Like if you watch Hulk Hogan punch somebody, he'll like put his hand over their forehead and then punch his own hand.

You're like, well, I know how you did that trick, pal. A counterpoint. Have you seen Enoki? I feel like that dude's face could take a couple of days. I see Enchin with the sledgehammer. Well, you got to give him. You do have to give him. He is he is one of like three people who have lived on this earth who looks like

he could take a punch from Muhammad Ali. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Dude looks like a very serious statue. Yeah, very, very large man. So actual wrestling people. So again, this is like this is a problem for Ali because Muhammad Ali, I don't know if you know this about him, not a loser, right?

Not part of his brand. Doesn't really have anything to prove by doing this weird exhibition work. So they may they do make a tentative agree agreement and they haven't like Ali hasn't agreed to the plan, but he's like, well, we'll figure out something. So they start promoting the match as they're still kind of working behind the scenes to figure out exactly how this is going to play out. The actual wrestling people both, you know, on the U.S. side working with Ali and the people who are in Japan working with Enoki, both agree that Ali shouldn't beat like he

can't win, right? Because this is in Japan and Enoki is a Japanese babyface and you're not going to bring in a foreigner and have him win on Enoki's own turf, right? Kind of famously the only wrestler who regularly got to do that is Andre the Giant, but we haven't gotten to him yet. So like Enoki is like hugely, hugely famous. He is he is massive. It's just he's got to win, right? But Ali isn't really willing to budge on losing, right?

He doesn't like because he's Muhammad Ali. Vince Jr. is ordered to Tokyo to like figure this out to like because they again, it kind of gets close to the wire and they still haven't figured out how they're going to do this. So Vince Jr., according to one version of the story, flies down to Tokyo to figure this out. And here's what Josie says. And I'm going to quote her here because this is fucking unbelievable. In Vince's telling, he went to Ali's room and discussed the matter with him.

Ali refused to play ball. So Vince lunged forward and grabbed Ali in a wrestling hole by surprise. Then took him to the floor just to demonstrate that Enoki might have there is that is physically impossible. Absolutely not. If you launched at Muhammad Ali in the 1970s, you died in the 1970s. Tom, my only disagreement is you would die in like the 1870s. He would punch you so hard you would go back and die.

He did not. Oh, my God. OK, we've gone from stuff and leaves into my cousin's vagina to I took down Muhammad Ali in a hotel room. The real sir, nobody else saw it. It was just me and Muhammad. It was me and Muhammad. I left with my life.

Absolutely not. There are other people who were there who recall Vince being in a room with Ali, but that he never touched him, you know. I feel like I remember that. I do feel like they'd remember that across the room from Muhammad Ali, like getting taken to the ground by some fucking guy's kid. Just I want you. I want you listeners.

Go to YouTube, look up any interview with Vince McMahon and try to imagine that dude taking down Muhammad Ali in his prime. It's simply inconceivable. It's the greatest strike of all time versus a leaf molester. Close. I mean, that's a good style matchup for the leaf molester. Absolutely not. What an insane thing to lie about.

Boldness of telling that lie. And so he did that. If he's to be believed, he did that to prove to Muhammad Ali like you can't deal with a wrestler. No, no, just to show him like how it would work, right? As if he's not had this conversation 200 times a day since he started being a boxer. Yeah, it's it's incredibly silly. So at any rate, Vince does allegedly cook up a plan.

So his partner on this fight is a promoter named Mike LaBelle, who I believe is the brother of Judo Jean LaBelle, who has come up in both of the bastards episodes that you've done with me now. I love Judo Jean. Judo Jean's a fucking hero. So Jean was going to be the referee of the match. And Vincent's Vince McMahon's plan is that he was going to sneak Judo Jean a razor blade, which Jean was supposed to use to cut Muhammad Ali's forehead and force it into the match.

Holy shit. They were going to do this without warning Ali. Without Muhammad Ali's, just pull a knife on the man in the middle of the match. They were going to surprise blade Muhammad Ali. Now, one of the greatest athletes of all time. I will get I will say one thing on the shirt list of people who might not die after blading Muhammad Ali. Jean LaBelle is on that list.

Sure, but I still don't favor him. It's sure, but I'm I'm reacting to like the insanity. You do it like this is Muhammad Ali with a razor blade without telling him. What if he gets he's not going to understand? It's it's what's happening. So what if you fucking miss and cut his eye out? Like yes, like there's so many things that can go wrong with this. Not only is this unethical.

This is illegal. Like this isn't illegal by the rules of wrestling. This is a crime in Japan and the United States. That's that's actual assault. Yeah, that is just a straight up crime. A very legendarily hard maniac. You give him a knife. I think he can take Muhammad Ali in his crime.

Three times out of ten. Four times out of ten. I don't know. Three maybe four. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe not. So, you know, who would never agree to slash Muhammad Ali in the face with a razor blade?

The sponsors of this podcast, the fine toddler baby goldfish. Yeah, yeah, toddlers and goldfish never get caught up in schemes like this. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast, I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities.

Like, does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident? Or, can we create new senses for humans? Or, what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? So, join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now, we're sharing an all-new story of Betrayal.

Ashley Lytton was helping her husband set up a business Venmo account when she discovered a terrible secret. I scrolled down, and that's when I saw a hidden folder, and I opened it. What the hell did I just see? I was scared that he was coming home. What Ashley discovered that day was a secret so dark, she feared for her life. She was like, oh my god, I gotta get out of the house. He's gonna find out that I've seen this, he's gonna come kill me. Listen to Season 2 of Betrayal on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, D.C. It took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible. I will admit the others, when you catch me, if you can, sign Freeway Fance. This child was laying on the floor, and I was like, oh my god, I can't believe I'm going to die. This child was laying on the side of the road. It appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car or thrown out of the car. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother.

That guy is, he's out of sync with even the worst people. I thought that they would catch him, I thought it was just a matter of time. Is it possible that the killer is still alive? Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So again, the plan is, Judo Jean's going to blade Mohammed Ali, and then use that as an excuse to stop the fight, right? And basically the idea is he'll make it look as if Ali's bleeding because it could have got a hit by the other guy. No one will put it together that the referee just lunged at Mohammed Ali with a knife,

and suddenly he's spurting blood, and Mohammed Ali's very, very mad at him. And they'll say, oh, that, that injury must have been from the unrelated thing happened earlier in the fight. I think it's a believable story. It's a great idea. Whoever came up with this plan is probably a genius and not a big cluster. So there's, there is, I will say, a pretty good chance that what I've told you is true, that Vince McMahon goes to Tokyo and comes up with this insane plan. Mike Labelle. No, there's no doubt in my mind that this plan was true. Only within the realm of possibility. Yeah. 100%.

Mike Labelle claims that Vince never even went to Japan. Again, everyone involved in this are like liars. So hard to say what went down. We have to consider none of it happened at all. Yeah, that's true. And Tony Onoki might not exist. I never met him. Whatever this are notorious liars.

So whatever the truth, Vince is definitely not there the day of the fight, which is, again, a debacle. They have kind of a brief, unsatisfying skirmish. And then Anoki kicks Ali with cleats and cuts his leg, which gives Gene Labelle an excuse to call the fight. So this fucking file. A disaster. Wonders after him while he like throws. And Tony Anoki kept throwing himself on the mat and throwing like leg kicks from like a butt scoot position. So it just it felt like an eight year old who heard the rules of the match.

And he's like, ha, ha, technically, I know how I can defeat you and there's nothing you can do. It's so so funny and stupid and pathetic and boring. And everybody lost. Yeah, yeah, we all lost real real alien versus predator situation. Yeah. So at this point, Vincent's career as a promoter is not looking promising, right? And in fact, two months. I mean, these do sound like ideas that came from the guy who invented XFL. They certainly do. They certainly do. The body. Yeah, organization. Yeah.

Two months before the Ali and Okie fight, he and Linda go bankrupt to a million. They're a million dollars in debt. And then right after well deserved, well deserved. Right after the fight, they have a kid. Now, for most people, this would be an impossible to recover from situation, right? But Vince Jr. is Vince senior son using the connections that he had made through being the kid of a rich and successful guy. He and Linda, while dealing with bankruptcy, are able to put together enough investment money to buy the Cape Cod Coliseum, which, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're playing because again, they're rich people, right? It's fine.

So their plan is to turn this into a modestly successful venue for concerts and the like and kind of get their bones about how to do this business through it. By this point, by the time they're up and running with the Cape Cod Coliseum, they've got two kids, Shane and Stephanie. Both of them will go on to work in the WWF, but since Vince started having them work cleanup at the Coliseum as a parent, he described himself as a disciplinarian, telling Playboy, I'm real big on respect. I was on the road a lot, and I'm sure that when I was at home, the kids wanted me back on the road. I do not doubt that, Vince.

Yeah, I'm by the way. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's scant. My children hated me, Playboy Magazine. What a weird fucking story to share. He brags about the strangest things in that interview. It's a remarkable document. I was a real little girl, a real monster. They lived in terror of the sound of my voice. Anyway, that's my father. Love my kids. So, Cape Cod is not a big party town, and the previous owner of the Coliseum had banned rock shows after a disastrous Ted Nugent concert.

If it was going to be anyone. I'm not surprised it was the Nugent. The Nugent, yeah. That's when the rock and roll says town after Ted Nugent comes. I will say Ted Nugent, if he were to tell me that he stole a bunch of cars, I would say that does sound like you, Ted Nugent. It does sound like you. Where's the Ted Nugent episode, Robert?

One of these days. Well, I got that one loaded up in the hopper. So, the town did not love the McMahon's plans there, and the local government decided to go after them by modifying their license in order to restrict the alcohol that they could sell at the Coliseum. The McMahon's were sure that this would sink the business, and they decided the best response was to fight the local government head on. The way that they do this is they show up at a hearing with all of the selectmen, which is the town legislators, and they bring a bunch of supporters.

They get a bunch of local fans, people who want to go to shows and be able to drink and think that their plans for the Coliseum are good, and they have 150 of these people swarm the meeting so that it's crowded out with the people who support them. And basically, they kind of bully their way into convincing, you know, the selectmen to give them the votes that they need in order to reduce the restrictions on their operations and allow them to sell all the hard liquor they want, right?

Occupy the board of selectors. Yeah. This is the first time that the McMahon's ever used the political system for their own profit, but it would not be the last. So, as the 1980s dawned, the WWF was a more successful business than Vince Sr. had ever dreamed. There was no more penny pinching for him, at least. He was wealthy and beloved. But he was also old and mostly spending his time chilling out in Florida. He also saw trouble on the horizon for his business.

By this point, Ted Turner had launched TBS, which I'm going to guess 90 percent of our listeners don't remember, but was the first super channel, right? It was a big deal at the time. And Ted hosted wrestling from another company that was not affiliated with Vince McMahon. Sam Muchnick had retired from the NWA at this point, and it was teetering. Vince Sr. knew that he didn't have the health or the energy to navigate yet another era of the

business, but he also didn't particularly want his son to follow him. He didn't want any of his kids to follow him. And most of them seemed fine with this because they were rich. But Vince Jr. was still obsessed with wrestling and wanted more than anything to own his dad's business. Still, Vince Sr. refused to give it to him. So eventually they worked out a purchase deal on extremely strict terms. Vince would need to pay $1 million to his dad and several shareholders in just a year's time. If he missed a single payment, they got back control of the WWF and got to keep all of the

money that he'd paid them. Now, it is somewhat unclear how he managed to make these payments. He told one reporter that he did it by, quote, using mirrors and getting the help of a guru. I don't know what the fuck that means. Nobody seems to. What? You use a mirror, you turn 10 bucks into 20 bucks. No, no one seems to know what he's talking about. That's 800 bucks right there. I don't have trouble believing that he was involved with some weird cult leader who helped

him out on the payment. That would not be beyond Vince McMahon. Whatever. However, he did it. He buys the WWF in 1982 and he pays it off before the end of 1983. At this point, most people would have described his position in the industry as solid but challenging, right? Ted Turner's rising up. We're kind of entering a new era. Vince has a plan, though, and he's got a plan not just to kind of keep the business going as his father had, but to destroy all of the other regional syndicates and make himself the undisputed king of wrestling nationwide. He later said, I knew my dad wouldn't really have sold me the business had he known what I was going to do. I believe that part of the story.

I do believe that part of the story. I believe that's true. Yeah. So, yeah, this could, I have to say here, when it comes to like how he destroyed the regionals, this is probably going to be one of, this is definitely one of the longest scripts we've ever done. It might, by the end, wind up competing with the fucking Kissinger episodes for length. At a certain point, I have had to decide there are chunks of the Vince McMahon story that we are going to have to blow through in order to avoid like driving people insane with a series that's just far too long. What you need to know is this. After Vince took over from his dad, he shredded the gentleman's agreement that the promoters had had previously and he's set to

work destroying the NWA and as many of the other regionals as he could by spreading WWF events across the country. And most of the regional powers die one by one during this period. He doesn't totally wipe them out, but he, he spreads the WWF to be nationwide and most of them die kind of as a result of this or get acquired. If you want more detail about how this process went, the most accessible and detailed account is in Ringmaster, Josie Reisman's book. If you are a huge wrestling nerd and you want forensic detail about how this went, the book, Death of the Territories is the best resource by a mile. Now, a big part of the weakness of these kind of regional syndicates is that they didn't understand TV the way that Vince

McMahon did. For them, wrestling TV was big business, but it was kind of a normal TV business. Hold on. Pause. Did Vince understand TV? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, he's, he's, he's good at this. What are the events he's put on? Explain brother love. He's been a disaster before, but he figures something important out, which is that most people in the biz are using TV the way that normal people use TV to make money, right? Where you put on a thing and it attracts advertisers and you make money, right? Vince was willing to give his shows to broadcasters for free because he realized that whatever money he could get from ads on, especially on these local TV networks is pennies next to the value of promoting live shows

and filling stadiums with fans. Vince was the guy who realized televised wrestling doesn't exist because TV is a good business. Televised wrestling puts butts in seats and sells merchandise. And that's how you make the big fucking bucks. And he's very successful at this. Now, Vincent Senior is not proud of what his son's doing here because he's kind of doing this as he's using TV. He'll, he'll, he'll basically sell, like, give, you know, broadcast rights to a bunch of local TV stations that he's not currently, his, the WWF isn't currently in this town or this state or this part of the country. And he'll use that to build up interest so that he can then bring the WWF to this new state, start hosting shows and slowly choke out another regional competitor, right?

Like that's the actual technique. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm assuming a lot of the other promotions aren't rich enough to do the same thing. Yeah, exactly. He's got the size. He's got the money to use as a base to kind of conquer from. And Vincent Senior is kind of horrified by what his son's doing here for all that he could be ruthless. He was also kind of a team player with the guys he saw as his equals. And some of these guys are also his friends, right? These are his like buddies that he's been in business around for years. So some of these guys call Vince Senior in a panic once it becomes clear that his son is on the cusp of destroying them. He complained to his son. He apologized to them, but it didn't matter. He wasn't in

charge anymore. And there was nothing he could do. Hey, everybody, Robert here. This wound up running long, like two hours long. And so we just needed to roll some of this episode into part four, which we're going to do so that this is not insane and unwieldy for our editing team and for us. Since we don't have a normal outro for this one, I'm just going to let you guys know that you can find, you know what? I'll do, I'll fake their voices while I do their plugables. I'm Sean, baby. You can find me at one night. Okay, that's actually kind of disrespectful since this is their plugs. You can find Sean, baby, at one 900 hot dog, the last comedy website, tragically pretty close to true. And you can back them on Patreon as well. That is again,

one 900 hot dog. And of course, Tom Reiman, you can find on Gamefully Unemployed, which does podcasts and all sorts of great content there, everything from like movie reviews to, you know, watch throughs of shows like X Files. And yeah, a lot of great content. Gamefully Unemployed on Patreon, you can find them there. I apologize for not doing a fake Tom voice, but let's all be honest, it would have been almost identical to my fake Sean, baby voice. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions. Like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington D.C. This child was laying on the side of the road. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen. I will admit the others when you catch

me if you can. Signed Freeway Phantom. Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Queen Charlotte, the official podcast, we're stepping behind the scenes and the drawing boards of this team to experience the life breathed into the Bridgerton prequel. Listen to the leaps executive producer and series director Tom Verica took to capture the feeling that puts that lump in your throat. And you've got to catch creator Shonda Rhimes. She's dropping gems, diamonds, and mics. You can listen to Queen Charlotte, the official podcast every Thursday on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.