Jim Cornette’s Drive-Thru - Episode 361: Jim Reviews Mr. McMahon
Episode Date: October 2, 2024This week on the Drive Thru, Jim reviews the Mr. McMahon docuseries on Netflix! Send in your question for the Drive-Thru to: CornyDriveThru@gmail.com Follow Jim and Brian on Twitter: @TheJimCorne...tte @GreatBrianLast Join Jim Cornette's College Of Wrestling Knowledge on Patreon to access the archives & more! https://www.patreon.com/Cornette Subscribe to the Official Jim Cornette channel on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/c/OfficialJimCornette Visit Jim's official site at www.JimCornette.com for merch, live dates, commentaries and more! You can listen to Brian on the 6:05 Superpodcast at 605pod.com or wherever you find your favorite podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hello again, friends!
And you are our friends,
and welcome back to another edition of Jim Cornett's Drive-Thru.
This is a special edition.
We're only going to be talking about one thing,
one subject, one person, one docu-series today.
And you know what we're talking about.
But before we get there,
I'm your host, the great Brian Last,
and here he is, the leader of the cult of Cornett,
Mr. Jim Cornett.
Well, thank you very much.
Great Brian Last for that introduction.
and I'm glad we finally got,
we're doing the first part last
because for the past 36 hours,
we have been doing nothing
but watching the Vince McMahon Netflix,
Mr. McMahon docu series,
we watched some,
then we'd come and record about it,
and we'd watch some, record about it,
blah, blah, blah, blah.
And finally, this marathon session has come to an end.
We're doing the open of the show
that you're about to hear that we've already recorded.
And to complicate things,
even further, we're rushing through that because
I've got a hurricane
coming. Not Shane Helms, but the actual hurricane,
Helene, I believe.
We're in Kentucky.
And apparently
Florida and Georgia and
Carolina's my old hometown
has been hammered and we hope
everybody's okay, but I'm 700
miles from where that thing hit land
and we've got today
torrential rain and 50 mile an hour
wins. So while, and I've already lost power once today, so while we've got it, we're finishing this
thing up and getting it out to the people. That we are. And of course, if you are someone, not someone
like Vince McMahon in his current legal predicament, but if you are a good person who is in a jam,
there's one man, Jim, that we know they can call. And that is exactly right. If you are on the
innocent side of the equation, if you have been put upon instead of put yourself upon someone else,
like Vince McMahon, then call this man.
Call Stephen P. A show for two. Those are the rest. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you can't
sue a hurricane, but you can sue any people that you've been put upon by. Just put Stephen P.
new on them at new law office.com. 87750, Steve.
He's a specialist in deposing weasels and other types of criminal elements.
And see, we got that right out of the way here at the top of the program.
Right at the top of the program because this is a program filled with criminal sleazy elements or whatever it is you just said.
But more about that, more about another one very, very soon.
Jim, let's now go to, again, we recorded this in many parts.
Let's go to part one, your review of episode one of Mr. McMahon.
Well, of course, Jim, you know what time it is.
We've got to talk about the thing everyone's been talking about.
On Netflix, everyone's been rushing over there since the stroke of 3 a.m.
To see...
The stroke of 3.
To see the Dump Matsumoto documentary series.
Have you watched it?
What did you think?
Oh, come on.
You don't be swerving these people around here, Brian Lass.
You know what the people want.
We got to give the people what they want.
I'm going to talk about a different kind of dump.
I can't even make that transition.
but what we're going to talk about today is episode one.
Well, we're going to talk about all of them, I guess,
but let's start with episode one of the brand new Vince McMahon Netflix docu-series
entitled Mr. McMahon.
Well, do you know what the title of episode number one was?
Did you notice that?
That was probably the first thing that made Vince unhappy
when he screamed the show, I would imagine, right?
Junior.
And for everybody that knows Vince or knows anything about,
Vince, he despises.
Being called
Jr. and Vince Jr.
There's been so much made in
modern times of
his father was Vincent
James McMahon, and
he is Vincent Kennedy
McMahon.
And that's one of his things. That's along
with doce belt and
don't say wrestling and
don't sneeze and all the other
famous Vince Piccadillo's is
and Vinny too, because that's what the boys called him.
When he first started coming around,
we'll talk about this in a second that, you know,
he goes over that he didn't meet his father until he was 12 or whatever,
but when he was a, I guess, older teenager,
got out of, you know, the military school or whatever,
and he started coming around, the boys and all of Vince seniors,
business associates called him Vinny.
and that was almost as bad as junior.
I like to think whenever he hears or whatever he sees those words,
he thinks of Albano yelling it,
because he would combine the two, Vinnie Jr.
Yeah, it's Vinnie Jr.
It's Vinny Jr.
But there's, right off the bat at the top of this thing,
they made plain there's going to be no shortage of star power
because that was, they just showed the talking heads
sitting down for the sit-down interviews,
preparing whatever
that Rock had a plate of food
in his lap I don't know I didn't see a
giant Gatorade bottle full of yellow liquid
but
go to that
there's the biggest names in the wrestling
business that they teased us with
from Sina, Rock, Austin
Undertaker all the way on down
and the family
Stephanie, Shane and Linda
does Linda look better
now or not better but younger
now than she did 20 years ago?
Well, clearly her plastic surgeon
does better work than Vince's.
Well, I'm telling you, I mean,
besides the fact that, you know, with that last
facelift, you could tell because the nipples
were on her chin,
she's smoother, she's plumber.
She always looked a little gaunt to me.
Like she wouldn't,
she probably around the house there, she didn't get to snack on any
fatty foods or whatever, but
but yeah, how old is she now?
She got to be 70,
four or five.
She's 96 years old.
Oh, come on!
Hold on, let me see. Linda McMahon.
But she looked older 20 years ago
when they were trying to force her to be on television.
75 years old, and I apologize for the noise of the gardeners.
Oh, good Lord.
All right, so they had Vince sit, get in the ring.
They're doing his sit down in a ring in a warehouse,
you know, the motif there, the, the,
look. But when they showed him getting in the ring, stepping through the ropes and sitting down,
he's, he didn't have the spring in his step, he stooped over, he had the hair dye, he didn't
have the mustache, but the eyebrows looked like they had taken on a life of their own. He looked
like Ernie Kovacs. His lips were purple. I noticed that too. The voice is a growl. I don't know
whether it's from the constant overuse of the Mr. McMahon projection voice,
Aretha Franklin?
Or whether it was the, you know, steroids or growth hormone or whatever, that's why
certain of these women bodybuilders, they sound like mini mouse when they're teenagers,
and then they sound like Vince when they're 35 or whatever.
and then also age but I think that's why he hasn't been able to get out of any of the things he
hadn't been able to get out of the last couple years because he's not the young Vince
with the voice and standing up straight we've talked about it before that age you know erosion
set in but god damn it you never expected him to be in any way.
way, shape, or form show any
feebleness,
febility? What is that?
And again, what we're seeing is him sitting
in a ring. You saw him enter the ring, but we're seeing
him sit in the ring and answer questions.
What we're not seeing is
his handlers,
him shuffling there with his handlers,
being fed things that he may have forgotten.
We're not seeing any of that.
This is the finished product.
And he said, you know,
I've never talked about me.
Well, he doesn't say it that good anymore.
I've never talked about me.
He's, I haven't quite figured out who I am yet.
But with those shows...
There were a lot of early quotes there that because of everything that came
at after they had started filming, and obviously that's why they edited it the way they did.
It takes on a double meaning.
Yeah.
And, you know, when you kind of know the finish, it stands out more.
That's why I had to stop it, write down certain quotes a lot.
from a number of people.
Triple H said he's going to show you what he wants you to see.
And that's coming from his son-in-law, but that's true.
And that's the thing.
Did you see the footage of Vince in production meetings,
Vince, when they're working, Vince producing the pencil in his hand or whatever?
You still look, there's not a hair out of place.
There's no wrinkles in his suit.
his tie is perfect.
He's not a loosen my tie
and roll up my sleeves kind of guy.
When he would get in the car,
he would be the last one
to put his stuff in the trunk
so that he could take his suit jacket
and he had a special way of folding it
inside out where the lining was out
where not only wouldn't it get wrinkled
but also he would get a speck on his,
on the outside of his jacket, it would be on the lining, and then he would lay it like a
carrying a newlywed across a threshold over the top of everybody else's bags and stuff
so it's right on top in a trunk and close a lid. Is that a person that needs to be investigated
by some type of authorities? Well, he's obviously quite meticulous, and he's obviously a narcissist.
So maybe, who knows? I mean, that's just the start. Well, but anyway, that's the thing is you
I don't
I see him sweat when he was on television
right
but God damn it
when he was just being a normal person
you would even see him sweat
except if he was working out
but I mean you know he's there in the tie
and the jacket and the
the production meeting
and I'm sitting there by fucking balls are itching
he's not scratching shit
you know
anyway
they made clear
that this program was being released
and all of the
all of the footage that they shot with Vince
and I assume
Shane, Stephanie, Linda, the family members
was done before the first
NDA broke. We talked about that the other day on the show.
We were prefacing this thing
and it was right before the final interview
they were going to do with him.
And as a result, he didn't do no more interviews.
I wonder if what they would like to have asked him that when they got down to the end of the thing that they didn't get a chance to in that last interview.
I guess would primarily be about all the women and all these stories.
Well, but did they know that at this point?
You're saying for the last interview after these things came out, he canceled that last interview.
That would have changed the...
Well, but what had they been planning?
Because they had the last interview scheduled when the shit came out and then he said, I'm fucking I ain't doing it.
So I wonder what they were going to ask him before all this shit came out.
And again, you have to remember who's behind this.
This is a Bill Simmons documentary.
He's the guy who started 30 for 30 at ESPN.
He has a company now the ringer.
That David Schumacher, idiot.
Who, have we ever figured out who this fucking guy is?
David Shoemaker that has an opinion on wrestling when nobody's ever heard of him?
That made up facts.
I shouldn't even say facts.
Made up stories in the Andre the Giant document.
that never happened.
That was produced by Bill Simmons.
That's the common trait.
He's the in-house wrestling expert and I guess historian for Bill Simmons.
The problem is, I don't know, a single wrestling historian in the history of wrestling
historians that thinks anything of this guy because he doesn't know anything.
And he just talks gibberish.
And I think a lot of his role here was specifically to tie things together because they didn't
have someone to say the things they needed.
Just sit Shoemaker down and tell him to say this shit.
That way our story makes sense.
But these are the guys behind it.
So when you ask him about a last interview event, I don't know.
I don't know because I don't think there's a deep wrestling knowledge in the making of the documentary from the production side.
And again, the Andre the Giant documentary, it's Bill Simmons thing and they got a lot of credit for it.
And there's a lot of good stuff in there.
This Shoemaker just lied and made stuff up that Andre was a touring heel in the terror.
Tories. I remember that. Well, he just didn't know
what he is. He didn't even say a touring heel. He just
didn't know what he was talking about. He said, yeah, I'd go to
from town to town and wrestle the top
star, a hero star. No, he
didn't.
But anyway,
what an idiot.
Well, that's the thing
is that
I wanted
I wanted more
insight
from
an Uncle Dave is on there.
Uncle Dave actually sounds like
the voice of reason here. He had less
hair dye than Vince
also. Well, it makes
you wonder when he died his hair if this was
the reason, because Dave's hair was darker
than it should be there. But I thought Dave did a good job
here. Dave, at a few points,
was a necessary
fact checker, because obviously no one
else was going to do that.
Well, and you, you know, you have people
and we'll see old Phil
Mushnick here, I think,
in episode two,
unfortunately, he's still alive and
kicking. But you have people that are just really egregiously to one side of the issue, and then
you have Vince and the family that are going to be egregiously to the other side. So it's nice
to have somebody's kind of halfway in the middle. But again, some of the comments, you know,
Vince saying, joking, supposedly, I don't want anybody to really know me, but that was another one
of those double meaning statements after, you know, everything that's happening.
happened. And I think that, did you hear what Brent said, well, I was a true artist?
How do you not know?
Oh, Brett's my favorite one in this whole series. Again, I've watched more than one episode
so far. Brett's the best one in this whole thing. Well, and the thing is, Tony Atlas ain't
doing bad. Tony Atlas is great. And Tony Atlas tells the truth, Brett is so blunt and doesn't
give a fuck. And he just says the truth, even if it's putting himself over, which sounds like a
braggadocious statement until you realize
he's actually telling the truth.
Well, I know it, and the thing is, he was
an artist, but it's just so funny to hear
somebody actually called himself an artist.
And Bob Costas,
you know, he had kind of
a decent
explanation for what wrestling was.
From St. Louis. Important to note, right? Isn't he from
St. Louis? Yes. Yes. But also
he made the point, I think,
episode two again and we're getting ahead of ourselves
that he liked
the wrestling of the mid-80s, but by the 90s it had gotten
with all the bullshit
going on, it had gotten troubling and changed, and it kind of did.
Paul Heyman said Vince Sr. was the Pope of Madison
Square Garden, which is kind of, again,
Paulie has the way with words,
but the whole thing, I still have not got enough
on the childhood.
And that is the
origin story of this super villain.
His childhood in the trailer park,
not meeting Vince Sr. till he was 12.
The incredible inferiority complex
that boomerangs all the way back
into the goddamn
superiority complex where he always
has to be in control.
the bias against southern people, things, ideals, whatever,
southern wrestling, anything that reminds him of the trailer park
and the stepfather who we still,
what did this guy do for a living besides beat his son up?
Is there it?
He drank and he beat Vince up all the time.
Well, but that's the thing.
Is there anybody still living that knew this fucking guy that could say,
no, he was okay until he got brain damage from getting hit in the head with a hammer,
or he was always an asshole.
How did Vince's mother meet this guy?
How did Vince's mother meet Vince Sr.?
But apparently not, you know, for long, or whatever the fuck.
This whole dynamic that created this is the reason for all of Vince's issues.
You can trace them back.
And nobody digs deep.
Well, we've seen a few efforts recently, and one of them is a little reminiscent of this.
But Brad Beluchian in the six-pack, you know, tried to research the rise of Vince and the rise at the WWF, the national expansion, and came up with a lot of new info that wasn't publicly available.
And then Abraham Josephine Reisman or Reisman, I'm not sure.
The book, I think Ringmaster, remember the best part of that book by far.
was the research into Vince's childhood
and debunking a lot of the myths
that Vince put out there about him being a tough street fighter
and all of these things,
no one in the town remembered that.
And much like the documentary,
at least up to the point I'm watching so far,
the Ringmaster book quickly goes from talking about Vince,
the human being as a child,
the road to wrestling,
to everything's just about
him and the wrestling.
You know, we don't get really anything
about the personal life,
about what it was like at home growing up a McMahon.
Again, maybe that's on one of the later episodes,
but so far...
I don't think it's going to be
because I don't think anybody else was there
that is still around.
Vince won't go into details.
He's always made
allusions to things
and how, you know, bad he was mistreated,
but he's not sitting down,
okay, here's the family tree.
Now, when my mother met Vince McMahon Sr.,
they were taking a trip at a Cadillac LaSalle
or whatever.
That's the thing.
And he didn't even know his name was McMahon
until he was 12 years old,
and he met Vince Sr.
But he wouldn't, on this program,
he wouldn't even call his stepfather by name.
Remember his quote in,
was it the Playboy magazine interview?
was I wish he had lived long enough so I could have murdered him.
So, but that's the thing.
And when he said when he met Vince Sr., there was no hug.
But he immediately fell in love with his dad.
He had kind of a glow about him.
Like the Pope.
The Pope was going.
Well, and he never talked with his father about why he wasn't there.
All those, you know, years of his childhood,
one would have thought he would have got.
some story from his mother.
Well, I think that may be the reason why Vince Sr.
wasn't there.
Was Vince Sr. and the mother, it didn't work out.
And Vince moved on and he moved away.
He wasn't going to live in a trailer park.
He wasn't going to live in North Carolina.
Well, but here's the thing.
Was the mother living in a trailer park in North Carolina?
When she knew Vince Sr., did she end up there because that didn't work out?
All these details.
Well, who did he blame for ending up where the fuck he was?
Yeah, we never got to hear, because I guess he died a few years before this,
we never got to hear Rod McMahon's story, Vince's brother.
Yes, the only people that are talked to on this,
are Shane and Stephanie, who were kids, they weren't there.
Linda, she met Vince when he was 16.
He had already met Vince Sr. when he was 12.
He'd already, that was the military school years for him, wasn't it?
16 and up or whatever.
But by that point, she says he always wanted to be involved in the wrestling business like his father,
but she didn't know him before he knew who the fuck his father was, otherwise than this asshole stepfather.
So I'm saying, psychiatrists could trace a lot of this shit back to whatever the fuck was going on at that point.
And then he would say, he said he always talked.
business with his dad even when he was a teenager. No baseball, no whatever. Maybe was Vince
Sr. the workaholic that Vince Jr. is, but Vince Sr. was always thought of as more
kind-hearted individual than Vince Jr. So was that the difference, but they were the same about
business? I don't know. I mean, Vince Jr. admitted that he had an obsession with wrestling from the
moment he discovered that his dad had something to do with wrestling. I don't know what outside
topics he'd be chit-chatting about. What other topics or hobbies as Vince Jr. have then or now?
I don't think Vince Sr. was a bodybuilder. I think wrestling was the thing that really tied them together and made the
relationship work. Even though the way Vince Jr. describes it here wasn't, you know, necessarily,
you know, there weren't a lot of hugs or anything. Yeah. But, I mean, he was working side by side
with him for years. Well, and then... And they didn't even mention Cape Cod, by the way.
well they did real bangor main is it was basically their gloss over of the cape cod coliseum and the whole you know tryout thing but that's what i was going to go to next is besides the part where linda said well we met he was 16 i was 13 you know and and uh there's no there's no mention of how vince had had to be sent to the
the military school.
And then when he got out trying to
apprentice and the brief
you know, mention of
Vince Sr. said, hey,
there's a building up in
Cape Cod, the Cape Cod
Coliseum.
Vince was the manager of that building, not just for
promoting wrestling,
but managed the building and other
events that came there and blah, blah, blah.
And that was the first time his old man
had tried to set him up with something.
That was the first time he did what he would later do with the WWF shareholders,
which is he got the Cape Cod Coliseum.
He didn't put any money down.
He just agreed to pick up whatever the ongoing mortgage payments were.
And so they jumped ahead from, well, we had this awkward meeting when I was 12 and, you know,
met my dad to kind of almost no explanation, but just a nod to Cape Cod.
And that Ray Morgan was a greedy.
bastard. And then automatically, what was that, 1972, three?
72, I think. So they skipped pretty much ahead from when Vince met Vince Sr.
to when he was, what, 26 years old or whatever. So I think there could have been more
involvement there, but then again, besides taking Vince's word for it, and maybe Linda, who else,
you know, is a round that was around.
But when Ray Morgan was the unnamed
previous television announcer that wanted more money
and Vince Sr. said,
oh, fuck it, you're done.
And that was ballsy because Ray Morgan
at the time had been doing that program
for what, 10, 10 years or more.
He was the voice.
Yeah, more since the late 50s.
Yeah, so 15 years at that point.
So he was the voice to the wrestling fans
and suddenly here comes, you know, Vince and even Bruce.
Bruce said he had to tell the truth about this.
Vince was a rotten announcer, but he could tell the stories.
See, I don't think Vince was a rotten announcer when he was trying to be Howard
CoSell.
I think he became a rotten announcer when he took over and all of a sudden the type of
announcer he could make himself was the screaming, yelling, excited guy.
Yes.
and I think that's when he was really kind of just not very good,
but I like Vince McMahon, the neutral Howard Cosell-like announcer on those episodes.
He's so milk toast, it's amazing.
At least he didn't have to wear a toupee like CoSell, but he used to like to have people
joke about that.
Jesse Ventura always said that Vince would tell me, make fun of my toupee.
But he didn't have a toupee.
Exactly.
His hair was so perfect, it looked fake.
And that was the thing I was going to mention also besides glossing over, well, his father
and set him up, you know, managed the building up there.
And, you know, then the announcing thing, they skipped over, even when talking about
WrestleMania, which we'll get to in a while when they get to it,
they skipped over Vince being involved in the evil caneval, the Snake River Canyon jump.
which was closed circuit television.
And Muhammad Ali Anoki.
That was Vince Jr.
Yes.
Well,
because Ali and Anoki,
evil,
Knievel was 74,
974,
Ali and Anoki was
1976.
There was still no
pay-per-view television technology.
But the,
the wrestling promoters
had gotten convinced
to go along with it,
and Vince Sr.
had,
but,
Nobody really made any money on it because the wrestling fans in America had no idea who Anoki was.
I mean, there's been books written about this.
Everybody can go read one.
But nobody knew who Anoki was in this country.
He was paying Ali to come over there and supposedly do a job for him to make him a big star in Japan.
But when the American wrestling promoters heard about it at first, they're like, my God,
Muhammad Ali on closed circuit with wrestling.
and so they got in on it,
but most everyone didn't make any significant money
because the closed circuit in this country didn't draw,
but in the Northeast,
that's how Vince Sr. saved the day.
He had talked Bruno into coming back out of the hospital
from his broken neck early to work with Stan Hanson
in the grudge match,
and they did 35,000,
thousand people at Shea Stadium.
It wasn't because of Ali and Anoki.
It was because of Bruno and Hanson.
And again, the deal was Vince Jr.
and Bob Aram, right?
Weren't they the guys who put together?
Yeah.
And so he was always ambitious.
It was a boxing model.
So later on when they get to the WrestleMania story,
you know, it wasn't as far-fetched that,
you know, he would think of something like this.
It just instead of going on a vacation for two weeks and oh,
golly.
But anyway,
I love the old footage.
They went deep in the WWF library.
We haven't seen a lot of this stuff,
but it looks fucking fantastic.
Even Bruno and Zabisco.
That footage, I don't remember them just throwing it out every goddamn week, do you?
Well, that footage is actually popular.
That was on their first best of WWF videotape,
and then it went away for a lot of years when Bruno fell out with them.
But, you know, they've remastered it and brought it back a few times.
But Vince was, see, that's the thing.
On commentary there, I don't think Vince was a problem.
Vince was getting the whole story over.
Yeah.
What did you want?
What do you want?
Ed Whalen?
Oh, come on.
I didn't mean to offend you.
I'm not saying you.
I'm saying Bruce.
He was listening to Paul Bosch.
We'd all due respect.
He's going to talk about bad commentators.
Paul Bosch, a great promoter.
Was he good on the mic as a commentator?
Well, not really.
Not really, no.
But anyway, then there was no mention of Vince Senior getting cancer.
It's just he said, my old man was going to sell the company to get out of the business.
He wanted to sell to Gorilla Monsoon.
But I made the deal instead.
Yeah, and apparently there'll be a lot more about that in the Gorilla Monsoon biography that Brian Solomon, I think he'd just finish writing it.
Yes.
It'll be out next year.
And I was about to say it wasn't really as simple as that Vince two sentence statement there.
And, you know, they set it up to tell the story for just a few, for a minute, and they never did.
Gorilla Monsoon was the heir apparent.
Gorilla Monsoon was the person that Vince Sr. thought he was going to sell the company to.
Vince Jr. makes this sweetheart deal with his dad.
And it needs to be said.
Linda said it more than anyone else I've ever heard.
Yes, she did, yes.
I've never heard anyone from the company or the family ever admit it like she did.
They paid for it out of the company profits.
the income that was coming in for running Boston and Philadelphia and New York City and everywhere
else.
You run the company from here on out and pay me for it with the money that you take in
in the fucking business that I've already set up.
How the fuck did that even, could that possibly have failed?
Yeah, again, his dad gave him a sweetheart deal and that wasn't just said and it needed to be.
And then the other partners were all paid and all went away.
I mean, Arnold Scholland hung around for a lot of years, but he wasn't.
a partner anymore. Well, no, well, no, but they, they were all paid, but they continued to get pay.
Well, the biggest case of that is Gorilla Monsoon, who got whatever, you know, for his shares from Vince,
but then also not only continued employment, but when they were running three shows, sometimes
even four shows a night, he had a deal where he got one and a half times the preliminary money
for every single show they ever run.
Yes.
So he made off better than Vince Senior on that deal.
He was making tens of thousands of dollars a week in the 80s.
To not wrestle anymore.
And that's why, you know,
and Gorilla was smart.
Gorilla had been, you know,
he was Gorilla monsoon in the ring,
but he was Gino Morella with the glass.
is on and a pocket protector and a nerd
from college in the early 60s
and he saved his money and figured all that stuff out
and had a piece of the company and got paid for that plus paid
until pretty much the day he died for a variety of other things
but Arnold Scholin still went to some of the towns white planes
that was Ardy's town he checked up he gave you the draws
he sat in the locker room and smoked his cigars and played
cards with the boys.
But if you went to the Westchester County Center,
you were working for Arnold Scholar.
Phil Zacko fucked off right away.
He said, I'll see you later on.
Yeah, he said, fuck it.
Yeah.
Well, he didn't like hanging around to boys as much.
But that was the thing, Vince Sr.,
there was people at Jack Lanzah had a job
until he didn't want a job anymore.
People at Vince had to take care of.
But they didn't mention that, you know,
Vince Sr. getting cancer
and being motivated in that way.
Vince Jr.
said, I didn't want to be pro wrestling.
I don't like that term today.
Well, thankfully we can say it again
because you're not running to fucking show.
But it was, this was, I think they could have gone into a little bit more,
but it was pretty much said by Tony Atlas and a variety of people.
everybody, the wrestlers, Vince Sr., they thought Vince was crazy,
and they didn't like his ideas.
Now, he wasn't crazy, he made a ton of money in the end,
but they still didn't like his ideas because it wasn't wrestling.
They even said it wasn't wrestling when they were showing the T&T
Tuesday Night Titans talk show.
The guys at that point, they didn't want to be doing it.
that shit but the guy's paying them but nobody wanted to do that shit because it wasn't wrestling
and many of them probably besides the money they made still didn't want to do it because it
wasn't wrestling but they did it but it wasn't that he didn't when he when he started going in
the territories Vince Sr. didn't like that and I think Vince didn't understand it wasn't that
he was competing with the other promoters
he was competing against the business
they all knew that
if he did what he was going to do
which has been proven factual
if he did what he was going to do
you couldn't run wrestling companies anymore
it had to be that shit or nothing
and who else could run that shit
one of the other thing too about Vince senior
complaining
it's always been interesting in terms of the timeline
because the story's always been that Vince Sr., Vince Jr., who owned the company and no one knew it really yet,
and Jim Barnett quit the NWA, the NWA meeting in whatever, September, I think, 1983.
There's no mention of any of that, but Vince was already in charge.
At that point, no one knew it.
They had already gone to L.A. They had already gone to San Francisco.
Those were, San Francisco was a Vern town, so that was right up against Vern.
At the end of 83, he gets to St. Louis TV.
makes the moves into Minneapolis, gets their talent, and starts growing, Vince dies, Vince Senior
died in, what, May of 84? I think so. So, I mean, it happened pretty quick for, you know,
everyone's like, oh, Vince Senior was against it and he had problems with it, but then he said,
fuck it, you know, screw them or whatever. When did he say that? Yeah, see, that's, Vince said,
well, you know, my
dad finally said he was proud of me
when I started beating all these other promoters,
but his dad died before he really started
beating any of those promoters.
He got towns and he got other people's talent,
but it...
Unless he's talking specifically about Oli Anderson.
Because Oli was the first one to make a really big stink
about those towns in what,
not Cincinnati, but Pennsylvania,
West Virginia. Ohio. Ohio.
West Virginia, yeah.
Those were the towns that were the first ones really
up for grabs from companies that had national TV presence?
Yeah, so I think that all of these things can be true.
Vince Jr. does remember that Vince Sr. congratulated him once.
I said, I'm proud of you one time, because he probably beat somebody in some town.
He hadn't won the whole goddamn thing yet.
And at the same time, I think all the boys, they didn't want to expose.
the business and or go into entertainment to the extent that Vince did because they knew that it would
hurt everybody else's business, which it did.
And they knew that they weren't going to work for this guy forever.
Yes, a lot of people went for, you know, the money because Vince was offering it, blah, blah,
blah, blah, but they weren't, I was in the business at the time and hearing people talk.
It wasn't like, we're going to work for Vince McMahon for the next 20 years for the rest of our fucking careers.
It was like, holy shit, they're making a fortune up there.
We got to go.
But they also didn't want that to be the only place that they ever fucking had the chance to wrestle again and make any money.
And some guys saw that as being what was going to happen.
Anyway, meanwhile, Hulk Hogan said, Shea Stadium,
sold out with me and Andre.
Him and Andre sold out Shea Stadium.
News to Bruno and Zabisco who didn't
sell out Shea Stadium.
But who still drew a record
crowd and Hogan and Andre were underneath
that main
event.
And Vince, Vince, Vince,
Vince, I said to Vince.
Vince Sr.
didn't want Hogan and Rocky 3,
but Vince Jr. did because that was
the thing.
The kid was figuring out ways,
to do this better than his father
because he may love his father, but he can do it
better. See, it's always been
if Vince has to prove himself,
the inferiority complex, clouds everything.
I've got to prove I'm bigger, stronger, faster, tougher, richer,
whatever the fuck.
I mean, there are things in this house
that are still in the exact same place they were in 1957,
because that's where my dad thought they should be.
I never dreamed of changing anything that he would ever do.
Well, Vince would do the opposite.
We'd burn the house down.
Exactly.
But it's, he thinks, in a bizarre fashion.
Bruce explained the foreign menaces,
the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese, the Iranian,
when they were talking about the deal with putting a belt on Hulk
from the Iron Sheik and Iran versus USA,
but go ahead.
What were you going to say?
Another thing they talked about publicly here was the idea that Vince's first choice was Dusty Road,
something we've heard before,
something that Vince said to Brian Solomon years ago when he interviewed him.
And he said,
what was the quote there?
Because I remember it,
but I didn't write it down.
Dusty didn't believe in it.
Dusty didn't believe in it.
Because Dusty was like, what the, no, we can't do that, baby.
Dusty didn't believe in it.
because he
what does that mean though
does that mean he didn't believe in going
against the other territories
do you take that as being
he doesn't believe in it being that
I think so yeah
I think you know
Dusty
would not have wanted to
you know
just work for a guy that said
we're going to control everything
we're going to run everything
or we're going to dominate everything
or we're going to go nationwide
and everybody else's, you know, Dusty, whether he owed Eddie Graham or owed this guy or that guy, you know, for putting him in that spot.
I think as smart as Dusty, he wanted to be a booker and a creator, and he didn't want there to just be one place to do that either.
And again, the timing was perfect.
Hogan was the right guy at the end, but Dusty in 83, he's booking Florida.
He's getting ready to go leave him book for Crockett.
So he's going to be leaving Florida.
And you could tell he appears in lots of different places like Mid-South.
He was almost trying to figure out what his next move was.
And this was one of the options.
And, you know, again, it was the right move.
It was the right move for Vince.
Maybe it was the right move for Dusty, too, actually.
It was.
It was because, you know, again, Vince's idea of what he wanted to present
and how he wanted to do it did not mesh with Dusty strengths,
which was strong heat on heels, right, so that the hero could overcome.
But it wasn't as kid-friendly and as simple and good, you know, white hat, black hat as Vince.
That's where I was going with the thing with Sheik and Hulk.
Bruce kind of explained it.
But they were almost like, well, this was a thing that, you know, Vince and the WWF came up with,
these foreign menaces.
It was the terrible Turk existed in the 1880s, right?
He was the biggest drawing card.
Yeah.
So it was natural xenophobia.
Whoever we're in a war with, whoever there's strife with around the world with the United States,
that person's countryman comes into wrestling and we don't like him.
Again, going back to Dusty, though, what makes it interesting is we don't know when Dusty turned down the proposal.
or just said he didn't believe in it.
But if it happened a few months earlier,
there's a chance,
because obviously Vince was not happy with Bob Backland,
didn't want that as his champion,
that was his dad's champion.
Right.
And he couldn't put the belt on Snooka.
And he didn't have Hogan yet.
If Dusty had said in August, yeah, I'll come in,
we may not get the Iron Sheek.
There's always been rumors that
maybe the mass superstar was going to get it
and drop it to someone.
I'm not saying it would have been that,
but it worked out perfect for Hogan.
If Dusty had said, yes,
you got to think Vince was going to get the belt off Backlin as fast as he could.
Yeah, and the Backland thing was so typical of Vince Sr.
To just say, well, I'm just going to leave this on him for years, right?
Because we've talked about.
Backland was quite a bit past stale at that point.
But Vince Sr. didn't have to work for it anymore.
New York, everything was selling out.
but Vince Jr. knew that
Bob Backlin was not going to get over in
fucking Atlanta or Tampa or Dallas or whatever
because he didn't have the history there
that he'd had the previous six years in the WWF.
I guess here's a way to look at the difference.
I'll ask you what you think.
If Jimmy Snooka had murdered his girlfriend
a year earlier before the sale of the company to Vince Jr.,
would Vince Sr. had fired him or would he have kept him around?
Because that's one of the big differences that Vince kept pushing him until eventually he couldn't a couple years later.
But, you know, Bill Watts had to leave town in 60.
I know it's a few, a couple decades earlier, but he had to leave town when there was too much heat.
They got him out of town.
He never came back.
You have to wonder if Jimmy Snook had done all that stuff in 81 or 82 and he was already working there,
what he kept working there?
I think probably Vince Sr. would have probably have gotten rid of him because
can you think of anybody else
that Vince Senior put up with shit like that
of that level for any length of time
they didn't need to
and like I said in those days everything was selling out
they had an incredible run going to Northeast
so if Bruno hadn't been gone that long
so I don't know that he would have kept Snooka
but and then again you know
Snooka would have not been the choice as champion because he couldn't say Suey if the hogs had him.
But what an attraction he was just to seem physically in person without having to listen to him.
And they didn't even bring up Japan, but Hogan at the same time he became the biggest star in the AWA and he did Rocky 3.
And give Hogan credit.
That's a pretty brave move.
Vince Sr. says you're fired and you'll never come back.
And he says, okay, I'm going to go make this movie.
That's a big risk that he took.
But again, he was a big star in Japan, so it wasn't just taking him from Vern Gondon.
it was Vince really having to solidify the New Japan relationship, which from a financial
level would be very important leading into WrestleMania.
It wasn't mentioned here, but Hogan was the biggest star in New Japan amongst the
Guyjin and the AWA at the same time.
And he was just, what, six months off of, or so with that point, was it off of knocking
Inoki out with the, the Axe Bomber clothesline?
That was 83.
That was 83, yeah.
For the first time in history,
somebody had left Antonio Inoki laying
and he was over like God.
But again, as you alluded to,
and we'll move on,
the New Japan booking deal
for American talent from Vince,
because the Fonks booked NWA talent to Baba,
that got Vince another million dollars to use
on the first WrestleMania.
right when he needed it.
Anyway,
um,
I've got some notes.
I mentioned Linda looks younger now.
Boy,
nobody else does though.
Tony Atlas looks good for his age.
Well,
that's true.
But he doesn't look like,
he's one of my favorite people.
Anytime he's a talking head,
he's brutally honest and funny at the same time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, he just did it like this.
and he'd just say it flat out.
But the story,
they get into Cindy Lopper and MTV and Mr. T.
And that's been well documented,
as they say also in other places.
But then Vince says, well,
Linda made me take a vacation.
And I was gone for two weeks
and I thought of an annual show
like our Super Bowl called WrestleMania.
Bullshit.
Yeah, version I've never heard.
of that story.
Well, and the thing is, again, we talked about earlier, it's not,
it wasn't ridiculous that Vince would think about a closed circuit promotional concept.
He had done Ali and Anoki, he had done Evil Caneval Snake River Canyon.
He knew what close he'd worked with Bob Aram.
He knew what closed circuit was.
There was no pay-per-view television.
He didn't come up with the name of WrestleMania, though.
Well, and that's why he might very well have thought of.
a big event like our Super Bowl
and we could put it on closed circuit
since they were already doing that with big boxing matches
it's not a fucking stretch
he didn't think of it as an annual event
because they didn't know for sure they were
not going to lose their ass on the first one until they didn't
but Howard Finkel
named it WrestleMania they didn't have a name for the fucking event
and Finkel as everyone who ever knew him knows
being the
biggest
music trivia
expert
and oldies fan
or whatever
Beatlemania
Hokomania
WrestleMania
WrestleMania
that's
that's how
it was
so it wasn't
like it
just came
fully formed
out of
Vince's mouth
when he
came back
from
El Salvador
wherever he took
a vacation
to
how about
those picks
on the
boat
Vince was
jacked
holy shit
I know
it's ridiculous
that's
85
yeah
But he always wore the suits, but that's why his suits always looked like somebody had left the hanger in the jacket.
Anyway, and then the John Stossel story again.
And Vince still won't, you know, if I could admit to anything.
But did you notice, first of all, that Hoke had to claim credit for being the first one to tell Vince that Stossel was out for him?
They establish in the series that Hogan is a snitch.
Well, yeah, but how many times did he say, I made a beeline to Vince?
Yeah.
I went straight to Vince.
I could believe that, though, because, again, he interviewed Hogan, the biggest star on the company
before the Garden Show, if that is indeed the proper timeline.
I can understand why that would be concerning that it's not just that he was trying to expose
the business, but I think the offensive part to a lot of people was the smugness.
Yeah.
And the attitude from Stossel.
No, he was a complete fucking dick
and is probably a dick
still to this day because
dicks usually, unless they get circumcised,
don't really change that much.
But, so Hokes said Stossel asked him,
hey, do you guys really cut yourselves with a razor blade?
So he said, I made a beeline defense.
And then remember we've talked about this before,
he didn't need to go to anybody
and say you,
but say you need to do this to this guy,
Tony says he was in a locker room
I wish somebody'd put this guy
in his place, right?
And I said anybody knows
David Schultz
Yes, talk to that guy over there
They were just, they were
Conditions were forming
to be right for the tornado warning
to break out
And then they showed a clip of
Stossel's report
Well, I hate to tell you people, but this is fake
Yeah, fuck you
That was
everybody in the wrestling business,
wrestlers, referees, managers,
TV announcers, promoters, whatever,
I don't care who you were.
If in 1985 somebody said,
I think wrestling's fake,
your fucking head burst into flames.
It's not like today where they're like, oh,
you're right, yeah, I'll show you how fake it is.
Come here.
We cared about the shit then.
and there was nobody that was going to laugh at that, right?
Not anybody.
They were going to get pissed.
It was just a degree of pissedness.
But Schultz was a whole new level of fucking,
that's what Stossel deserved it, in my opinion.
If for nothing else, then,
what the fuck do you think is going to happen
when you walk up to a guy that looks like David Schultz
and you tell him that he's a phony and his business is phony.
How was that an unexpected result for John Stossel?
Again, what he said was, I think it's fake.
That was what he said, I think it's fake.
How's he supposed to respond?
I think it's fake.
Yeah, well, I think I'm going to slap the shit out of you.
My favorite part, and they never mentioned it, is Mr. Fuji and the Iron Sheik in the background watching.
They had to see it.
They knew something was going to go down, like, let's go see this.
Well, yeah, everybody was standing there at a hall
because this fucking little fucking prick
is going to talk to Schultz.
But again, how did John Stossel imagine
that anything else would happen
when you go up to a guy that looks like that
and you start calling him names?
So anyway, but Vince said,
well, you're out of nowhere.
Schultz just slept.
And Adelis said, we all celebrated all of us.
And they did.
And then the Richard Belser clip,
again because now they're starting to talk about
all the publicity wrestling
is getting and Vince is getting but now some
of the publicity's turning bad
I timed it
because remember we've done an
in-depth breakdown on this before
Hogan had him
for six seconds total, three
seconds in a working way
and three seconds have cinched
up and that put bells are under
and that's because I guarantee
you he had
half of Bolivia or
Columbia or wherever Peru, wherever the good stuff comes from,
he had a half of it in his fucking bloodstream.
Because did you, you saw what,
you can tell when he cinched up from the regular one, right?
Oh yeah, you could see it.
I mean, you see him grip it.
And even when he first gets it in and you see him put his hand on his,
wrist, you know, across.
Yes.
You're like, oh man, Hogan's got a really good grip of this thing.
Well, yeah.
And then you see him grip it.
And, you know, I don't think we're speaking out of school.
Richard Belzer was known to be a hard partier, I guess, at that time.
Well, yeah, I don't care if anybody knows it or not.
I'm just telling you from fucking my observation, that's what happened.
His heart was going a million miles an hour.
The first three seconds of the front face lock was Hogan putting it on and showing him
tightly without squeezing, and you could see Belser's arm kind of go up like, oh, golly.
and then you can see Hogan's looking at Mr. T off camera.
He says, what do you think, T?
And he cinches up for three seconds and then lets him go and boom.
Because that's the thing.
If you watch the actual segment, you would have thought Mr. T was going to be the one
to hurt him.
Because him and T did not get along and it was not like a good, you were getting a bad vibe
from the whole thing.
Yeah.
And then Hogan does this, and they left out the best part when they returned from commercial.
And it's Hogan, Mr. T, and the executive producer.
explaining that Richard's gone.
He had to go to the hospital.
And Hogan starts to, you know, almost apologize, but explain, I was trying to do a move.
These are real things.
And then Mr. T's just not having it.
Just, you know, he provoked us and everything else.
Well, see, that's the thing because Mr. T could have punched him.
But there's no plausible deniability in that.
Oh, golly, I didn't realize what I pushed him as hard as I couldn't have face.
It would hurt him.
But with Hogan, say, oh, let me just dim it.
T didn't know any wrestling moves or he wrestling holes.
T can say, well, let me just show you what,
or Hogan can say, let me just show you what we do all the time.
And, oh, golly, that hurt you?
See, that's how, you know, but he still got sued and still, you know,
Belser got money to buy a house, right?
Yeah, but again, that was not necessarily something you would want to happen,
that David Schultz, John Stossel thing, same thing,
but they both lent themselves to the,
whirlwind of publicity that was happening around
WrestleMania happening
because the Belzer thing was right before it.
Yeah, I watched it in my apartment in Dallas.
I was still working in world class
and remember plain as day seeing it.
It didn't hurt WWF that those things happened
that helped them.
Yes, because it was publicity.
But it was starting to,
there could be things go wrong.
And then, you know, that's what Vince said.
I don't know if it was good for the industry,
but it was good for my business.
business. That's all I cared about.
That's the thing.
A lot of these other promoters,
yes, they always wanted their business to do good,
but they didn't want to do something that would be bad for the whole industry
because everybody depended on it.
And Vince didn't care as long as,
as long as I'm competing.
Well, with him, the business doesn't mean the business.
It just means his business.
His business, yes.
And you know, it's a weird, you want to talk about it.
insecure thing or insecurities of Vince McMahon, always having to be in the suit and everything,
but just the constant references to, you know, I'm a businessman or this is how we do business and
this is business. Your background was working for your dad and selling calculators. I,
stop pretending like you're the expert in this. He'd created a way that he thought he had to be
to portray the character behind the scenes that he needed to be. Well, anyway, but now we had
families, Brian. That's what Hokes said.
We didn't have the cigar smoking beer drinkers anymore.
The audience, we had families.
We always had families.
There was a goddamn family of people in the Louisville Gardens.
There was four different generations,
sent ringside to the same seats every week before Hulk Hogan
stepped in a wrestling ring.
But that's the story that then you, all the news reports,
you'd say, well, wrestling is making a comeback from second-rate arenas to the big
buildings or whatever. You would hear all these things about the smoky arenas. Vince McMahon ran the
same arenas. Yes, and Vince Sr. ran those arenas and that's where Vince Jr. got the money
to buy Vince Sr. out was from the old arenas that Vince Sr. was running. See, do you think the
documentary, I mean, up to this point so far, we're still in episode one, did they do a good
enough job of explaining the genius of Vince McMahon's promotional wing, the ability to lie to the
press and know that they'll probably run with it?
I don't think, I think that if you know what's going on, you could see that,
but I don't think they actually came out and spelled it out that, no, this shit had been
tremendously popular, but this guy came along and said, well, I'm going to fucking do it a
different way and it's all about me and, and then, you know, they ran with that.
But in all honesty,
nationwide
I would think
that wrestling had probably
even been stronger
in what 77, 77, 78,
78, 79
than it probably was in 80, 81, or 82.
Even though a lot of towns were still doing great
and then in 83 things started taking off
but it wasn't all centered around Vince.
Dusty went to Crockett
created Starcade. Hogan started working for
Vern and they were doing massive houses in St. Paul.
A lot of different things happened.
But Vince was able to
take all the credit and all the publicity
off of this resurgence in wrestling that had really never been away.
People just weren't talking about it in the media.
But that was episode one, Jr.,
again, the very beginning of it, they referenced the later scandals, and that's the only reference
for the most part throughout the episode.
Did you think it did a good job all laying the foundation for the rest of the series?
Yeah, I think, I mean, for good and bad, I think there's probably going to be some things,
more things left out that the wrestling fan, or at least the devoted historian fan, would want
to hear about.
but at the same point
this is 40 something years of a guy's life
that's done everything you can't do it in six hours even
and thankfully it's not 12 hours
so again I understand why things have to be left out
but every once in a while you hear
and we've started hearing a few things dropped in
you hear some things it's like well no okay it actually
didn't happen that way but they're doing a wonderful job of production
and I love the footage.
I think that was one of the pleasant things.
I don't know, pleasant's the word, but...
Pleasant?
They didn't say the whole story,
but sometimes when Vince said something,
they didn't mind having someone there to say that that wasn't true.
Yes.
So they are...
I mean, we haven't...
I don't see a burial yet.
I don't see anything tremendously unfair yet.
I see the most egregious thing about
episode number one
is that sometimes things that Vince just says or people say about what Vince has done
as a matter of course are not challenged, but small details overall in the big picture.
Well, you know, Jim, that was episode one of the Vince McMahon biosu-series,
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Well, on that note, back to the creator of IcoPro, the Vince McMahon,
docu series Mr. McMahon
episode two
well we are back and so are the gardeners and has lots of noise
and speaking of lots of noise let's get going
we went from episode one we're now going to episode two
of the brand new Vince McMahon
Netflix docu-series
that he once cooperated with
and then he didn't
and he once had one PR company for
and then he has a new PR company apparently
but Mr. McMahon the brand new docu-series
episode two. Yes, and by the way, if you want to know what we thought about episode one,
if you're not listening to this as a podcast, but rather you're on YouTube, go back and
listen to episode one first because we can't recap everything or else why it'll take twice as long,
and by the time we get to episode six, we'll be here for hours. So we have come to the point
where that now, WrestleMania 1 has taken place, and Vince is getting into the
NBC Saturday night's main event.
We're still in that 85-86-ish time frame.
And the episode title for number two is heat.
Heat, baby.
I love heat.
Is there heat?
I can feel it.
You know that story, don't you?
Austin Idol and Eddie Gilbert?
Yes, Eddie Gilbert was booking Continental for David Woods
and he burned Austin Idol with a fireball
and like wherever they did TV
in Birmingham one night
and Dothan one night
and then the next night
he comes into a town like 40 miles away
goes into the baby face locker room
Austin Idol does with no fucking burn mark
on his face no bandage
no nothing
and immediately the stooge's run over and tell Eddie
he goddamn he's got no fucking
scar or bandage
or anything
and then Eddie comes in a locker room and
He looks up at him and he licks the end of his finger
And he holds it up to the wind and he says
Is there heat?
I can feel it.
It's not scalding, but it's there.
See, that's why it's impossible to stay mad at him over anything ever.
He's just so funny.
Hey, what did you think real quick?
I'll ask you here at the top.
We talked in the review of Part 1 about Dave Meltzer
Did a pretty good job here.
Shoemaker always sucks.
I swear to God, I wrote.
again at the top of this. Again, who the fuck
is David Shoemaker? He's their in-house
guy. That's why he's there. Well, I know, but why do I
care? Again, who is this guy?
He's the Brian Gowertz to Bill
Simmons is nothing. I'm not exactly sure.
But the woman, and I forget
her name, and she
had a book, and I think I have it.
But they interviewed her as one of the
people to explain things around wrestling
and at one point she explained heat.
She did a good job in this.
Who is that?
I don't remember her name.
Unfortunately, I'm giving her a compliment.
I don't remember what her name is.
Well, this nameless person.
She was good, though.
Like, she saw it from a different, or she explained it from a different angle from, like, above.
And I thought you did a good job.
An angle from above.
Maybe she's a fucking saint.
All right.
Well, let's get going with episode two, because we're going so well so far.
All righty, well, they started talking about the hard road schedule and the injuries
and guys getting on pain.
killers because of the grind and the travel.
Yeah, right there I have a problem.
That was one of the David Shoemaker, Schumacher, whatever to fuck his name is.
He doesn't know anything about wrestling.
That was one of his comments.
After WrestleMania, they really had to buckle up and the road schedule got crazy.
Has anyone looked at the schedule from 84 to 85?
It was nuts already.
It was the same schedule.
Yeah, it was the same schedule.
Just a bunch of shows, non-stop.
But they're, again, they're all over the question.
They're just glossing over things for the bigger picture here.
But that's where they brought up.
Bob Costas mentioned it.
There's no union.
These guys don't have any medical plan, blah, blah, blah.
And so I don't know which is worse.
The fact that now people were starting,
oh, these poor wrestlers, when these poor wrestlers were making more money than ever made in their life
for five years earlier when they were doing practically the same schedule
for a quarter of the money or whatever.
They didn't care then.
But anyway, so Jesse Ventura tries to start a union.
And we've talked about this.
This has been known, but it wasn't known fully at the time
how that Vince found out in time to stop the thing.
And that came out in one of the lawsuits,
positions in what, the early 90s.
They came out when Jesse Ventura sued
WWE. When he sued for the royalties on
because we were just talking about this a few months ago.
Yeah.
Jesse, when they signed the first wrestler contracts,
there was no royalties even mentioned.
And then they started putting royalties
into contracts for the guys, but it was still a very
rudimentary form of, you know, they could pay you,
whatever they wanted to pay you.
But when Jesse had to get out of the ring,
because of his blood clots or whatever,
he discovered,
when he was doing all this commentary,
and he became the biggest commentator in the business.
When they were selling the home videos,
the announcers didn't get a cut.
They didn't get any royalties.
And Jesse was as big a name as any of the boys at that point.
So there was the bone of contention.
But before that,
in 86,
before WrestleMania 2, Jesse had tried
to get everybody together and say,
look, what's he going to do?
If we all before WrestleMania 2 say,
we're not going out.
What's he going to do?
Well, the problem is, before they found out
what Vince was going to do, what you're going to do, brother?
Wait a minute, I've got the quote again.
Hold on.
I went straight to Vince.
I made a beeline, brother.
Hogan's the way Hogan told it
he was Jesse was trying to undermine Vince
so I went straight to Vince because he deserved
and then they had like five or six guys say yeah
Hogan ratted him out Hogan was a rat
Hogan stooge Jesse
and then Vince says
well nobody would ever follow Jesse in the locker room anyway
which it truthfully in 1985
86 there may have been a case
for that, but a lot of guys thought it sounded like a good idea.
But when Vince got the advance word, he had a meeting in advance and squashed that.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but they never really were able to finger Jesse as the guy
for sure until the deposition and the testimony, were they?
Well, no, they never fingered Hogan until...
Or that, I'm sorry, I said that wrong.
Jesse never knew who stooged him out to Vince.
And in the deposition, Vince McMahon admitted under oath.
that it was Hogan, and they also left out the part of the story.
And by the way, how cool did Jesse Ventura look at 1986?
As cool as anyone ever.
He got fired. He left. He went to do Predator.
And NBC, Dick Ebersol, they demanded him back on Saturday night's main event.
As good as Bobby Heenan was, that wasn't what they signed up for.
They wanted Jesse Ventura hosting that show.
And they got him.
and at that point
Hogan owed a lot to Jesse
because Hogan had ripped off quite a bit of Jesse's shit
speaking of Austin Idol
he's ripped off a lot of Austin Idol shit
Well there you go they've got ripped off a lot of Austin Idol shit
yeah
so
so then
correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe that Jesse
and Hogan have been on good terms
since that time have they
Jesse thought Hogan was his friend, according to Jesse, and then that came out,
and he has no respect for him and things very little of them,
and lets everyone know it.
And when Hogan came into WCW, Jesse disappeared from WCW.
But then Vince said my idea for WrestleMania 2,
how can we top one?
Well, we're going to do it in three different cities.
they didn't mention that the previous November,
Dusty had had the idea to do it in two different cities.
So Vince was really just doing one more city,
but he didn't have the concept idea.
They didn't mention Starcade when they mentioned how he came up with the idea for WrestleMania.
They didn't even mention the brawl to settle at all
to say how he came up with the idea for WrestleMania
or the war to settle the score.
Or any of the other events he tried to do that year.
Well, but anyway, Atlanta and Greensboro,
the first bi-location wrestling event in history.
Any technical difficulties that you know of?
No, I don't remember any.
I don't remember anybody complaining or talking about anything.
Otherwise, that card, there was a lot of matches on that fucking card.
The home video clipped out about five or six of them.
But technical difficulties, no, I don't remember anything.
and they did it the next year.
They did it in 862.
Same thing, Atlanta and Greensboro.
But nevertheless, so then what do you do, Brian, for WrestleMania 3?
Well, you got to go to the Silver Dome.
Boy, that place looked like it was ready to be fucking imploded in 1987, didn't it?
You know what?
It's still my favorite look ever for a wrestling event from the inside.
I love the way it looks where it's still bright out.
Everything's lit inside, but every seat is filled up, so it looks incredible.
And then when it gets dark for the main event, looks incredible.
I love the way the Silver Dome looks for that event.
But it also looked like you could have taken that thing down with a good ball peen hammer.
Well, it's Michigan.
Oh, come on now.
The palace at Auburn Hills was a palace.
so they got the introduction in
of Aretha Franklin
and actually were very artful with it
where they juxtaposed the video of her singing America
The Beautiful with all the craziness that went on on the show
but that's
how Bruce used to get a rise-out event
was imitating him
introducing a
that quote of soul
Aretha Franklin
So they still went with the story
and I know Hogan tells it, but now Vince is telling it
that Andre wouldn't tell anybody whether or not he was going to do the job,
and Hoke said, this was a quote,
I didn't know whether I was going to win the match until Andre didn't kick out.
And I guess, you know, I guess it does make it a more mythical thing and everything,
but on a documentary that's supposed to be talking about some serious subjects coming up,
to have that bullshit about something that's obviously bullshit,
does that hurt them in a long run?
I mean, I don't know.
Again, we don't know how much Vince actually remembers
versus what Vince is being told.
They did lie in this or at least...
Oh, God damn it.
I guarantee God damn T you.
When I had the Night of Legends in Knoxville
or Christmas chaos in OVW,
there wasn't nearly as much money on the line.
I knew who was going to win my fucking main event
before it went to the ring.
They also said Vince went to visit Andre on the set of Princess Pride,
convince him to have the back surgery,
which he then did and then wrestled WrestleMania.
That's wrong.
That's right.
He had the surgery afterwards.
After WrestleMania.
That's right.
That's right.
So that's wrong.
It's probably my favorite all-time wrestling event.
I still love watching it.
It still feels like a big event.
Everything in the commentary.
They didn't have as big as celebrities as they used to,
but Bob Euker and Mary Hart were perfect.
Yeah, so the back surgery thing, they got that completely wrong.
And then you're not going to promote that event if you don't know who's going to win.
Now, were Vince and Andre, could they have been fucking with Hogan and pretending like they didn't know what was going to happen?
Yeah, and I've said that before.
I can believe that at some point, Andre was ribbing the kid, Hogan.
I think Vince may have liked to be in on something like that just to make a guy sweat a little bit.
it would be fun, but no, there was no doubt in Andre's mind or in Fence's mind what was going to
happen that day or elsewise it wouldn't have been happening to begin with.
I mean, it's my favorite event ever, but it's just surrounded by bullshit.
Like, there's just so much bullshit around it, from the number that they announced that they
figured out days beforehand to everything else, but I love it.
Well, the quote, it was actually the way they edited this was funny also because, you know,
know they had people saying and Vince was saying
Andre had never been beaten
Andre had never been body slammed
there were 93,000
people and then Dave said well actually
Andre had been beaten and he'd been slammed
about 25 times and it was really
78,000 and it
was just it was entertaining
but again
nobody else was drawn
78,000 people
so it was great
regardless but just
the way the
they put that together with the fact-checking, I thought it was entertaining.
Plus, the impact it had just the visual of it.
Like, that was when Bill Watts knew it was over.
Yeah.
When he saw that.
Because who's going to compete with that?
Well, and also you had serendipitously, you had the biggest attraction of the previous
era in the business versus the biggest attraction of the current era.
And you don't often get a chance to pull that off.
And then the extra, you know, bonus of Andre being so near the end of his career,
and they knew it that they didn't mind just beating him flat, leg drop, one, two, three.
And who had ever seen that happen before?
Nobody ever.
So it was all right there ready to be made.
Yeah, it's funny.
Now that I think about it, no mention of even, it was after WrestleMania 3,
no mention of the million-dollar man, which everyone always says was the gimmick that Vince
based on how he would book himself.
well yeah it wasn't even
based on how he would book himself it was just based on him
just himself himself going to the bathroom
well if debiase was asked to take a shit
how would Vince do it?
Where would he do it?
Well now come on now we didn't know any of that then
it's episode six
did you
did you enjoy that they actually admitted
that the movie No Holes Bard was the
shits.
I went to see that opening weekend with my next door neighbor.
We were nine years old.
It was the worst movie ever.
Man, that was a movie.
Our parents wouldn't even see it.
Like, that was the first movie ever where my parents and my neighbor's parents agreed to
allow us to be dropped off at the movie theater without supervision.
Because they didn't want to see that movie.
No holds barred.
But see, now that's the difference in generations.
Because when my bad wrestling movie, when I was a kid,
came along. The wrestler
with Vern Gagne and Billy
Robinson when I was 12
it was in a theater
where my mother could not drop me off
and leave me alone. She had to go in
with me because that was
the United Artists'
penthouse theater before they renovated it back to be in the
Louisville Palace and there was
Winoes sleeping up there.
Yeah, no holds part is Vince
McMahon and Hulk Hogan writing a script to a movie
and it's the worst thing ever and Hogan. Hogan
acting is never worse than it is there.
You know who steals the movie?
Stan Hansen, actually.
I remember that, yes.
Well, because what a fucking personality is.
But everybody else was acting. Hansen was just being Hansen, right?
Well, maybe dialed up to 10, but no holds barred was certainly.
Well, but I mean, it was still, it was Stan.
It wasn't, you know, Hogan wearing a tutu or whatever.
So they mentioned that.
They didn't mention in 1988, he promoted a Sugar Ray Leonard for,
fight, didn't he? And it didn't go well. It was like the first
Shiger Ray Leonard fight that didn't do well on pay-per-view. That's right. I
forgot about that. Because again, one of the stories is everything Vince
tries to do outside of wrestling, it never works.
Well, they were about to get to that.
First, they had to gloss over the disaster
that was, what number of WrestleMania was 91,
the Gulf War, L.A. Coliseum, Sports Arena, the
Seasco? Seven. Yeah. Well, they talked about the
warrior before then, didn't they?
Yes, well, the warrior made it for about
90 seconds, if that.
It was basically like by 1990,
Hogan was fading a little bit in popularity,
and here came the ultimate warrior,
but we put the belt on him, but then nobody liked him in the locker room,
and he was the shit, so we took it back off of him and put it back on hook.
And that was, thank you for coming warrior.
But that's really, in this story, that's about all he deserves, isn't it?
I mean, if you're not, did I offend you as a childlike WWF fan from the early 90s?
As a childlike or as someone who has a child was a WUWW.
Well, you know what I'm saying.
That's right.
No, you don't offend me with that.
But I guess if you're not going to tell the story of the relationship between Vince McMahon and Jim Helwig, it's okay not to do that.
The Sergeant Slaughter thing, I think it was a missed opportunity.
Maybe it's just me to tell the story about how one of the most popular guys in the
company left because he got the GI Joe deal and you said no you could only do my figure deal
that I get a cut of or you can't work here and he didn't and it wasn't until the toy deal ended
that he went back to the WWF and then Vince took someone who for kids of that era was a natural
baby face and immediately turned him heel and then made him an Iraqi sympathizer. Yeah and just laid waste
to the whole gimmick that he'd spent previous 15 years building, Sergeant Slaughter.
If he had come back as a friend of Hulk Hogan's.
And we talked about this during the slaughter biography also.
That's right. If he had come back as a friend of Hulk Hogan's and turned on him, it would
have meant more.
But nevertheless, then we got in a real war.
They didn't even mention having to go from the L.A. Coliseum with 100,000 seats to the
sports arena.
They just said, well, Vincent, we followed through with the match, but we geared it back or
whatever. And that's when
Costas made the comment that I liked
wrestling in the mid-80s, but then it took
a nastier turn.
And
I mean, even
I remember
the Gulf War I was not a fan of
because we were doing the thing with the fabs
and me against Lawler and Dundee and Memphis
and our TV was preempted. It was killing
that. But at least we weren't
using
Iraqi fucking heels, right?
We weren't actively, whether it was an actual official war or not,
they felt like it was okay as long as we didn't declare war.
But then we declared war.
But it was the whole thing necessary.
That's the other thing.
The war ended in two seconds.
Yes.
Yeah.
The war, it was actually, I think it was three weekends, just enough to fuck up our television.
And there's that.
I was just going to say the taste of the whole thing, even for the fans of
1991 that weren't nearly as smart as they are today, et cetera, et cetera.
Nobody liked that deal not to regular fans and not most of the people in the business, did they?
Well, I was there. You weren't. You were six.
Well, no, I was 11 and 91.
Well, then you should have done something about it.
It wasn't what you wanted from a heel sergeant slaughter.
Again, it was a miss on a bunch of levels even before you get to the idea of it being tasteless because of the war.
But there's also an example.
They talked about the foreign heels in episode one.
this wouldn't have been that out of place in wrestling 10 years, 15 years earlier, 20 years earlier.
But this is an example of times changing, and wrestling had to catch up to that.
Vince McMahon specifically had to catch up to the times.
Yeah, and well, and as you mentioned, they didn't even do the angle right.
So it just bleh.
But then here comes George Zahorian.
And you have the juxtaposed quote.
of Hulk Hogan talking about steroids saying, well, it was the norm back then,
and Costa saying the WWE reeked of steroids.
And, of course, there was the World Bodybuilding Federation,
which Vince decided to start about that time.
Wonderful timing there.
When you find that you're being investigated, what a great thing to do.
Investigated me for steroids?
Let me start a bodybuilding federation.
Yeah.
Well, and remember, we had even down south known something about this,
because that was the Lugar deal.
Right?
The way that he got Lugar away from TBS,
Lugar had the wreck, the accident,
had a plate put in his forearm,
was unable to wrestle.
And help me out on this.
Did either his contract with WCW expire
or did he get out of it
some type of conditional release,
but he told him he wasn't going to go wrestle
he was going to do the World Bodybuilding Federation.
And that's how Vince signed him for the first year
to work for the World Bodybuilding Federation.
Right, and they actually debuted him on WrestleMania 8.
They do a live remote where all of a sudden,
in the middle of the pay-per-view,
Monsoon and Bobby Heena are interviewing Lex Lugar
sitting at home on the couch.
And I remember because he calls Monsoon Fat Boy.
And Monsuon reacts to that.
him and Camio Neuer were the host of Body, was a Body Wars?
Body Stars.
Body Stars, that's what Body Wars.
Body Stars on USA Network.
USA gave them another show for bodybuilding.
For bodybuilding.
And it was unwatchable.
Of course, because it was bodybuilding.
It was trying to insert the Vince McMahon brand of entertainment in the bodybuilding.
This wasn't your mom and dad's pumping iron.
This was a whole different animal.
You saw some of it, the dancing and the girls and the whatever the hell was going on.
And plus, weren't they bragging that they were, they were bragging in some way.
I can't remember what the phrase was, but a drug test free or bodybuilding the way it's supposed to be with drugs somehow.
They were alluding to.
Well, they actually didn't even tell the whole story.
Because remember, they stole all these guys from the weeders.
Like, Vince O'Ban went to whatever, the bodybuilding convention and like announced that he was going to,
to do this and start to steal the balance. By the way, to hold on, you got to pause. We're not talking
about gardeners kids. Joe and Ben Weder. Joe and Ben Wheeler, W-E-I-D-R, were the big head honchos for
decades in bodybuilding and fitness magazines and barbell equipment, all that stuff. They stole these guys
from the weeders. Yeah, and they announced they're going to do this big thing. And they sign a Lou
for Rigno, which is a big get. I mean, that's one of the big gets.
and bodybuilding, you would think.
And when Vince announced all of a sudden
that they're going to be steroid testing, you never
saw Ferrigno ever again.
That was the last time Lou Farragno was aligned
with the WBF.
That's right, because
at first there was going to be
no testing, but then the steroid
and the Zohorian shit hit at the same time.
And then Vince said, well, there's going to be testing.
And then several people, I think, Ferrigno
and some other lesser lights
were never seen again.
but anyway
so then
Hogan lied on
Arsenio Hall
and then they started
backtracking a little bit
with the scandals
because then they go back to mention
the snooka incident
which was kind of glossed over
and nothing was really made of it
but again that's another
good Lord you write a book
and full length
magazine pieces on that story
and again it was kept around for over two years after that
yes which we've covered in great detail
to make up for the fact that they didn't cover it in any detail
and then
the Mel Phillips and Terry Garvin and Ringboy's scandal
and I'm glad they mentioned Pat
so that at least
it could be put out there that no he didn't have anything to do with it
even though that some people aren't going to believe that.
But Meltzer said that, you know, when he asked about Pat,
Vince said one of these guys is innocent.
And Pat's the one that came back.
And I'm sorry.
Anybody that thinks that he was doing anything wrong,
fuck you.
Blow me.
How's that?
Terry Garvin and Mel Phillips,
different story and nobody was defending them.
But I hate that Pat still gets to,
drug into that. Now, again, Tony Atlas had an interesting thing to say about that.
Well, but the thing is, he said, yeah, he grabbed my pecker in the locker room. Now, did
Paterson grab somebody's dick playing around in the shower or in the, or touch him up the ass,
as Adrian Street used to say? Yeah, you see, that's not allowed. That's, that's, that's what's, what's,
what's odd about that? What's odd about that? That's, you think that's okay? I saw a
million people do it, whether they were gay straight or if you, if you see a guy in a locker room.
Doesn't mean it's okay.
Nobody ever thought about it.
You see a guy in a locker room bending over trying to get something in his bag, run up,
rum your fucking thumb up his ass.
It's in, ah, whatever the fuck.
Or it was joking.
It wasn't in a serious fashion.
Would Pat or anybody else grab somebody's ass or dick or whatever in the locker room or in front?
But yeah, hey, oh, hey.
there's nothing unusual about that.
I don't recall anybody ever being offended.
There's plenty unusual about that.
That's completely not normal behavior.
Well, and somebody should have said something
about 50 or 60 years ago before everybody was doing it.
Everybody was doing it?
Well, I'm not every single person,
but whether you were gay or not didn't have anything to do with it.
Whether you're gay or not doesn't mean it's not
some sort of sexual battery.
If you got somebody tied up in a hold in the ring
and they didn't have a free hand to do anything about it
and you're fucking,
you're fucking taking your middle finger
thumping their balls and they're go, oh shit.
Or checking somebody's oil.
That's happened.
You know, it wasn't like anybody was trying to make anybody mad.
Again, none of these things are appropriate.
I just, well, search me.
I didn't know.
I will not.
I will not, you see, I follow my own rules.
But I'm just saying that it's not like if you're talking about sitting somebody down and saying,
hey, if you don't blow me, then I'm going to make sure you're fired and your family will never
eat again.
That's one thing.
But if you just reach over and grab somebody's dick and squeeze it to see if they'll fucking
jump, well, that's just, you've got to have something to do before cell phones in the locker
room. And again, if you're one of the bosses in the company like Tony Atlas said, what are you
supposed to do? It's not like Tony Atlas, if Tony Atlas punched him in the face, Tony Atlas has no job.
No, actually, I think if Tony had to punched him in the face, Vince would have probably
give him a raise just because, he would have thought it was funny. But thing is, again,
but again, that's, you know, but I do think whatever that Paterson was joking around as you're
putting it with a Tony Atlas or whoever.
That's different.
Tony was from a small town.
That's different than...
And he hadn't been out much back in those days.
But that's different than Mel Phillips preying on teenagers.
Well, yes.
And, you know...
And again, there's a whole lot of difference between
exerting your authority over somebody for their job
and or exerting any kind of authority over a teenage boy
and just the fucking guys grabbing
each other's dicks in a locker room to fucking squeeze the head and see if somebody
will fucking get mad or whatever.
You know, this was kind of the only mention, as to the point I'm watching so far of
the relationship with Vince and Pat, did they spell out enough how close Pat was to the
family?
No, but I'm pretty sure he'll be back.
This was only, you know, episode two.
We're still in the 80s.
They did make mention that...
Early 90s, early 90s.
Well, no.
we were well okay early 90s
I'm sorry but the point
is you know Pat was
they did mention he was a wrestling
savant and
you know the finishes and the concepts
and everything and everybody wanted to know what he
thought and everybody respected him and everybody
would ask you know if they need a finish
it was the southern version was you need a finish
call Eddie Graham the northern version you need a finish
call Paterson
so they got to say that at least
but again
if people don't have
a goddamn half-ass sense of humor
fucking run around a locker room
trying to call himself professional wrestlers
and they get their dick yanked every once in a while
and they fucking think somebody's
they flatter themselves into thinking somebody's hitting on them
what the fuck?
No, I'm sorry, I'm on the other side of that.
Anyone who's running around yanking on people's dicks
needs to be dragged out of the locker room
and told, don't act like this.
First of all, you're going to get the company in trouble
because again...
How would that have ever again
in the day, how would that have ever gotten a company in trouble?
In the day?
If, if, if, if, if, if the, if, if Ali Baba goes and tells fucking Jack Pfeffer that Dave
Levin fucking tickled his goddamn taint while he was bent over in a shower.
What the fuck?
If it happened today, there would be a whole bunch of problems.
Well, if anything happens today, there's a problem because today sucks.
No, I think today's better than weird sneak attack sodomy in the law.
I'll take that over that any day of the week.
That isn't funny.
Those are weird people who have no idea how to act.
That's what that is.
Oh, for heaven's sake.
Boy, I tell you, I didn't realize that the locker room was that strange of a place.
It seemed normal to me.
When was the last time anyone got a thumb up the ass in the locker room?
I haven't been in the locker room in a few years, but...
You know, you went right past the Arsenio thing.
where were you when that happened? Were you watching that live?
Oh, no, I didn't care enough to, I was probably at a car somewhere coming back from a show.
I'm pretty sure I've recorded it on the VCR, but I didn't watch it live.
Because that was like devastating. That destroyed Hogan.
Well, and that's why he had to bail out of there and go make movies for a while because he was buried with the wrestling fans.
And all of that started coming out at the same time because the Donahue,
show and the Geraldo show.
It was it was
Mel Phillips and Ringboys.
It was George Zaharian
and steroids. It was Hulk Hogan
and steroids. It was
and Rita Chatterton,
which was in this episode also,
that came out at that
exact point in time. And they
played the footage of
her telling the story
saying, if you want your half million
dollar contract, you're going to have to
satisfy my needs or whatever.
And then immediately Vince says, well, it was a consensual after she's told this horrible story
and she's crying on the talk show.
Well, Vince said it was kind of weird.
They broke it up into two parts because then he said, you know, even if there was a rape,
the statute of limitations is up.
Well, yeah, yeah.
First he said it was consensual.
And he said, but the statute of limitations has long since run out.
And then they had an addendum at the end.
an addendum at the end of this episode that due to that new law in New York,
she was able to refile and got settled with last year or whenever.
And again, you know, I've said it before where we talked about Rita Chatterton in that episode
when it came back up again a year or two ago.
I feel bad for the only thing that I call bullshit on is that she,
genuinely believed that he was going to give her a half million dollar contract if she had
any contact at all with anybody else in a wrestling business she's in the locker room as a referee she
had been trained at who was a wrestling school mario mancini uh that would have been tony altamores
but the point is nobody had a half million dollar a year guaranteed contract at that
that's the thing. That's the thing. There weren't really guaranteed contracts. And maybe a
Hulk Hogan had a guaranteed contract, a minimum guarantee or something, but the referees were
setting up the rings. Yeah, well, I mean, if she'd have gone to any of the top guys, if she'd
had Greg the Hammer Valentine, hey, Greg, do you have a half million dollar a year guaranteed
contract? He said, what are you high? What the, so I'm wondering if she was like,
well, maybe I'll get a half million dollar contract
and then when she found out that he really had
not only lied to her but forced her in it,
and she's like, well, fuck this.
But yeah, that's the only thing about her story
that is remotely unbelievable.
I can believe everything else that she said happened, happened.
And I guess I can believe that Vince told her
he would give her that contract.
I just, that would be like me walking into the lobby at NASA
and somebody saying, hey, we'll give you $5 million to be an astronaut.
I guess something's got to be wrong with this.
And that's the first known example of Vince sleeping with any talent
because as he would spell out, I forget if it was this one or episode three.
Oh, no, it must have been this because it was talking about Wendy Richter.
You know, women's wrestling wasn't really a thing.
There weren't women around.
It wasn't a friendly business to women.
Now there's women everywhere.
Well, yeah, and none of the, I don't think this is groundbreaking,
none of the women that were in the business at the time
would have been classified as centerfold material,
and that's why Wendy Richter got the spot with Cindy Lauper
because she was the youngest and most attractive at that point,
just from a purely physical standpoint, of any of Mullahs'
stable.
She said that Cindy Lopper called her personally.
Yeah, that, I'm sure that sounds good, but no,
Cindy Lopper didn't call and book Wendy Richter.
And I get, Wendy may have been...
She had just been in the Midnight Express a couple months earlier.
Well, all right, for three days.
I mean, I'm not disowning her,
but it wasn't like she was an ongoing member of the team.
we had done an angle in Mid-South wrestling because she was on tour
with other of Mullah's girls.
I think Vivian St. John was on that loop.
And she did a deal where she distracted Jim Duggan
in the Superdome when he was handcuffed to me
so that I could put the ether on him and knock him out
to help the Midnight beat the rock and roll
to retain the Mid-South tag team titles
and on TV I made her an honorary member of the Midnight Express.
however more pertinent to this story
Vince would have been the one to or Pat or
whoever was making phone
Bruce wasn't even there then he wasn't even there
whoever was in in the bookie office George Scott as a matter
fact because Pat was still wrestling some
and transitioning to announcing right
well that's the one thing that people have to remember Pat
was close with Vince you know relative
so because they've been doing commentary for years and he had been a confidat of
vences but he wasn't the number two guide events right away there was Jim Barnett but
it was George Scott and Pat really wasn't you know it wasn't to like what 87 87 88 where
Pat really became the Booker and I would say 86 87ish thereabouts and and remember also
Monsoon was more important in the company than Pat was
at that period of time
but it just Pat's
besides his personality and everybody loved him
he could get along with everybody
his knowledge of wrestling from working for
Shire and Graham and
Ganya and every fucking body
and he was just a genius so
could Vince come up with finishes
no not save his fucking life
hold a gun to him.
He'd just say, shoot me.
He could come up with a spot and idea, a concept.
Wow, wouldn't it be the moment
where the undertaker sits up and is run over by a tractor or whatever,
but he couldn't get you there or get you out of it.
But anyway, that's the thing with, with, um...
We were talking about there were no women around.
So there's the first example of Vince doing anything with,
because we hear that there were other talent involved with talent.
Now, what?
That was the first example of Vince sleeping with someone who was WWE talent.
Yes, but there was other talent involved with talent, but not.
No, we've heard that Vince had relationships or, you know, liaisons with other.
Oh, in the ensuing years since then, is what you're telling.
Yeah, okay, now I've got you.
Now I got you.
I mean, there's no rumors about him and Chief Jay Strongbow or nothing.
No, well, now, hey, there's another time.
Strongbow may want to check your oil when you're...
But, uh, so then...
that's where the whole steroid indictment comes down
where he's not indicted because he's been accused of rape
he's indicted for selling wrestler steroids
and he blames it on Phil Mushnick what do you think of that
well I think a lot of it probably because that fucking guy
and again I don't care what Mushnick's personal problem was with Vince
but when you're knocking the whole business and we're trying to tear the whole
business down and when you're being a dick doing it
fuck you
uh so and still fuck
Phil Mushnick I'm
disheartened to see that he's still breathing
but at the same time
we've talked about this before
we've gone over the steroid trials
and a whole nine yards
the government had a rotten case
they did
there was there were
they didn't have a good case
and they didn't win the case
because they didn't have a good case
for
Vince being a steroid distributor.
And we pointed out the weaknesses in that.
In Long Island.
They said that it happened at the Nassau Coliseum on a certain day that there was no
WWE event.
Yeah.
Didn't even get that right.
And that's a thing.
Again, Vince wasn't a steroid distributor.
Anyway, he was a steroid advocate.
You know, at that point, he would tell the guys, oh, yeah, it's great stuff.
you know.
That's the question I want to hear someone ask him.
And I'm very serious.
I'd like to hear, do you think steroids, do you think people think of them the wrong way?
Do you think they're okay for people?
Oh, I'm sure he does.
Instead of just defending, you know, oh, we did something back then when it was legal or whatever.
Actually, what is the defense?
Give us your defense of steroids.
Well, and that's, you know, and Vince was even in this, they admitted, well, yes, I've used them in the past.
but they overblew it and trying to rein Vince in,
which I have to think part of it was because Muchnik was drumming all this New York
publicity up with how horrible of a person Vince was,
how horrible of a company it was, how wretched all these people involved in this thing were,
and because else flies, why would the government waste that?
Vince sounds like Trump talking about the Justice Department
and we've mentioned
and I think now everybody's seeing
there are a lot of
similarities between
Vince McMahon and Donald Trump
in terms of if their fathers had only
hugged them every once in a while
a lot of people would have been happier
but in this instance
whereas
you know
Vince didn't do
what the government was trying to get him
for doing
he did a lot of other shit but he didn't do that specific thing
and hogan had bailed out because the bad publicity and turner had bought wcw
and vince has been called a rapist and that remember i told you that's when bubba big boss man
he left the w w f because he was convinced that vince was going to go to jail and
and he also he was like oh this is bad i don't want to be a part of this it kind of freaked him
out. That's why he got out of there for a while.
Yeah. He left in 93,
so he left before the trial and everything.
Yeah.
So, but anyway,
um,
then they told the story,
Bischoff met Hogan
at Thunder and Paradise and
hulk smelled Ted Turner's money and got a
incredible deal
for way less work.
Boy, the more things changed,
the more they stay the same.
Somebody didn't want to go through,
the grind and the WWF and they weren't as over as they used to be, so they got a billionaire
to pay them more money for less work somewhere else.
It's a little different.
It wasn't like Vince was bidding for him.
Vince thought he was done.
You know, Vince didn't see any heel turn.
He admitted, I forget if it was this one in the next episode.
And Vince was ready to pass the, he wanted Hogan to pass the torch.
Hogan went home, ran out his contract.
Yeah, because nobody.
thought that Hogan would be worth a shit as a heel.
To be honest at that point,
if he could even pull it off.
And if it had been for National Hall,
I don't think he could pull it off.
Right.
That was really the thing that made him cool
was those two being aligned with him.
But, you know, I don't blame him for taking the deal
that Ted Turner and Eric Bischoff were offering him.
It's a sweetheart deal of all time.
Well, remember we heard at the time
that every time they sold a Hulk Hogan t-shirt and WCW,
they lost money.
By the time they paid for the shirt and paid for the people to sell the shirt
and paid for a shirt to be transported to the arenas and paid Hogan to cut,
they lost money every time they sold a shirt of his.
I said they should have set his merchandise stand up in the shitter.
I mean, that was another story we heard that people were,
or WCW were selling figures and no matter who you bought when you scanned it,
it would say Hulk Hogan.
Yeah.
Yes.
And then he would get a cup, but Vince was never going to allow him.
Vince was never going to give him a cut of the pay-per-views.
Not like here's what I pay you for the pay-per-view,
but literally you're entitled to this percent of the pay-per-view.
And it worked out, I mean, it worked out for WCW.
That's not the cause of their downfalls, the Hogan contract.
Well, and that's the thing that they left episode two with,
with Hogan had told Vince that he would never run against him,
run against, like he was going to open up his own company and run it.
But he'd never go opposition, but he did.
And Vince said it broke my heart.
and Shane said it was a slap in a face
and then the teaser
to the next episode
is that
Hogan was supposed to be the star witness
in the steroid trial for the government
and testify against Vince
and he had said or else he had been told
that and again this is Hogan
and they told him
well you're going to go to jail for 17 years
if you don't testify against Vince
for what? For what? Exactly.
for what?
People have been convicted of murder.
Don't go to fucking...
He was never on trial.
And they didn't have anything.
Are they going to arrest Hulk Hogan for steroid possession?
Is that going to be 17 years?
They can't even put Vince away.
So,
anyway, Hoke's last line is,
I was given immunity,
and then I knew what I would say.
And then they dangle that in front of you.
until episode three starts out.
But remember the original steroid trial for Zohorian,
not for Vince, for Zohorian,
a ton of wrestlers had to testify.
Roddy Piper and I think maybe Brian Blair,
just all forms of different people.
Hogan, with Jerry McDivitt as his attorney,
got out of testifying
because they argued that it would violate
some kind of patient confidentiality
due to other treatments he was getting from Zahorian.
it worked. Yeah, which also was, you know, specious at best, but he had been given special
treatment Hogan had in that case because since he was so much, such a bigger level of celebrity
at the time that they were able to argue that if he was brought in and had to testify like
other people and this and that, that it would be an undue burden on his reputation or all this
others. They were trying everything they could to get him as far away from that thing as possible.
Well, anyway. Episode two, we are on a roll. We will continue with episode three shortly.
But any closing thoughts on episode two and the story so far as it's being told?
Again, I wish there had been more discussion, dissertation, and dissection about the childhood
and the people that he was around in his first 12 years and what they were all about.
and some type of
a little bit like I said
I guess there is no first person
you know
people that can tell the story anymore
and
otherwise I think there needs to be
I'm not saying all the boys are lying
Tony Atlas tell you the fucking truth
but the problem is
a lot of the boys never understood
the business when they were in it
and or they
you know, there's this,
you would be surprised what level of superstars in wrestling
would still subscribe to the,
yeah, Tommy Rich had to blow Jim Barnett,
that's why they put the belt on him,
and that type of gaga
that's not germane to any factual things going on.
So sometimes when you get these comments,
it leads you down more of a Primrose path
because a wrestler said it,
and they ought to know
when in actuality, sometimes they're not
he's smarter than the Mark's work.
Did I say that right?
I believe so, and that sums up episode two.
We'll see what you think, because a lot more
of the wrestling talent will be introduced as talking heads
in episode three, four, five, and, dare I say six.
Well, let's wrap it up, we'll be back with episode three, four, five,
and dare I say six.
Dare say it, dare it, dare it.
Well, Jim, that was the second episode of the Mr. McMahon docu-series, and you have to wonder
how much different a human being he would be if he was into good music.
If, when he was having these psychotic, demented urges, he just sat down and listened to some fine tunes.
Listen to some Strawberry Letter 23 by the Brothers Johnson.
Just get into the cool groove and drift away.
Dobie Gray, maybe.
He could have sat on a, and drifted it.
away and and and and and and and and and avoided all these things couldn't he he could
wouldn't you wouldn't you just like to drift away sometimes so does i feel like i am with
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How many points do you connect to?
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you can you can just you can plug these things in and you can plug things into them and you
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No.
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Well, you punch it, you tap it.
Every once in a while, you got to kick it.
And it's hard to get your foot up that high.
But folks, right now, listen to this, the best part.
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Well, you know, you got to get your foot back around your shoulder
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You know what?
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Well, never...
But you'll hear quadrophonic sound.
Well, let's go back to the quadrophonic sounds that are in the head of Vince McMahon,
episode three of Mr. McMahon.
Well, Jim, we return to the last.
of McMahon episode three of the Netflix docu series.
Let's talk about it.
Well, boy, that was a quick introduction.
Well, this is the same show as the other ones.
If you're on YouTube, this is part of a bigger show.
This is all part of a bigger plot.
Yes, it's a bigger conspiracy.
There's a whole fucking worldwide conglomeration
adjoining into this thing.
This is episode three of the six part.
Jesus, Roots wasn't this long.
documentary on Vince McMahon.
The title of the episode Screw Job.
Sounds like a Quinn Martin production.
Tonight's episode, Screw Job.
And obviously with that title,
Montreal is going to take some element of importance
in this production here tonight,
but they throw you a curve wild card, bitches.
They go back to 1984
to the first world title screw job.
85.
That's what I said.
They go back to 1985.
That's what it was.
Prick.
With the first world title screw job,
only it was the women's division.
And they had to get to belt off Wendy Richter.
We talked about this for some reason
a year or two ago, didn't we?
I feel like we did,
but I don't know why,
because if Darkside did something,
think it was that recent.
And that would have been something that would have prompted that kind of discussion, but I can't
think of the world.
No, they did the show on Mula and maybe it was just longer ago.
But basically, they start out with Wendy Richter as the champion and she's done the
Cindy Lopper thing, the MTV thing, you know, the girl empowerment thing, whatever things
were going on back over there.
And then Vince says, well, it was fine for a while with Wendy as champion.
but then she became a problem,
which was,
as we recalled at the time, whenever that time was,
she wouldn't sign
a new contract
before she went out, right?
Vince's,
that was the story that we had pretty much
concurred upon was
the way it happened was they were
bugging her to sign a new contract.
She was wanting more money
because she was,
featured on all the magazine covers and everything.
She was the female Hulk Hogan.
Now, there would still be a massive pay discrepancy
and be in any other Hulk Hogan,
but the Hulk Hogan Hoke Hogan.
But Vince wanted her to sign when she went out in the garden that night
before she went out and she wouldn't do it.
And so the spider lady, instead of being,
normally it was Judy Martin, right?
but in this case it was the fabulous Mula.
Yeah, and that's part of the story I think needs to be said.
The idea that Wendy Richter didn't know it was Mula is ridiculous
because she was trained by Mula.
And once you got in there with Mula, you knew it was not Judy Martin.
Well, and that's the thing.
Wendy, you know, I haven't seen Wendy in 40 years or so.
But at the time, you know, you can say she's protecting the business.
I'm wondering, is she still...
trying to protect the business in her own way when she's...
Well, Cindy Lauper called me to ask me to be, you know, her wrestler,
and, well, I didn't know it was Mula.
She was under a mask, even though that Mula's fucking satchel ass alone was somewhat of a giveaway.
Was she...
Is she still kind of protecting the business in some fashion, she thinks,
or has she said that so many times?
she doesn't want to admit she was bullshitting
now and she still
says it. I don't know
and again, you know, they
played it and they replayed it so you kind of get to see
her reaction with the referee
and her yelling at him.
Who was a commission referee?
By the way, he wasn't even one of the
referees that would have been traveling
with the WWF across the country.
He was a goddamn New York commission
referee like about 70 years old
and just like, what the fuck am I?
That was the guy that refereed the midget matches at the garden.
You know what I mean?
Like that was the guy that they sent for that.
No, but obviously the screw job was in and she didn't fully appreciate what it was.
It's a ridiculous three count.
Even Gorilla Matsuda commentary is like, what was that?
Well, yeah, but it was a last minute, uh, December.
Probably Vince told Mula say, well, she doesn't sign this thing is, you know, take it back, right?
But at the same time, there's Mula 50-something years old, even if she was a little.
a salty old
broad as they used
to say back in the day
Wendy was like what
25 or whatever and pretty
fucking tall and rangy she kicked
out of the small package because
even if she didn't know that was coming
when Mula
just kind of grabbed her and small packaged
her you can tell if somebody
cinches up on it or not
and you've got
you know you got a chance you got a second or so
to
but anyway
she kicked out and they counted it anyway
and then they had the awkward tug of war with the belt
and it was the sloppiest double cross in the history of wrestling
and Moola wanted to prance around and fucking celebrate
and Wendy's trying to half-ass
should I hit this old bitch or will she fucking hand me my ass?
What the fuck is going on here?
Because Wendy was not in the business long enough to get real smart to it
at that point in time anyway.
If she had given her a field goal,
kick to the pussy. It would have gotten the biggest pop in the history of the garden.
But that's just the noise it would have made when she drew her foot back out. We're talking about
the fans now. So, I knew we'd find some kind of entertainment in this episode. So anyway,
but the point was the way that Vince tells it, she was fine for a while, she became a problem.
when it was time to do the honors.
He'd always, again, the same terminology later on.
And whenever somebody didn't want to do a job,
he would always subtle heal them to other people by saying,
well, they didn't want to do the honors,
which makes you sound like a real prick, right?
And he said, it's my belt.
I'll make you give it up then.
And that's what they did.
But the most not telling thing,
but the most pertinent thing
to a Vince documentary
in this particular story
was the one quote he had
he said get the match in the ring
and I think we've talked about this before
that was Vince Senior's philosophy
when people are arguing about
goddamn when you've got something
advertised as a promoter
especially as the promoter of the Pope
of Madison Square Garden a big fucking deal
when you've got something advertised, get the match in the ring.
If they're bitching about to finish, find some way to smooth it out, work it out,
or even just get it in the ring and see what's going to happen,
but get the match in the ring.
That was Vince Sr's motto, one of them, and that's what Vince Jr. would do,
and he did it again.
He did it to the warrior.
Remember, he did it to the warrior.
Did it to the warrior.
SummerSlam 91, Warrior wanted more money.
He wanted the same deal as Hogan.
And Vince felt he had to at least kind of agree to it just to get him into the match.
And then he, according to Vince, fired him as soon as he came back through the curtain.
Yeah.
Okay, when the bell is about to ring and once the bell has rung to end it,
fuck you, you're fired.
Hey, by the way, when you hear stuff like this,
you can't blame Jeff Jarrett for holding him up for money before he dropped the belt to China.
Well, exactly.
And because Jeff knew what to fuck was going on.
And because he'd been around for a while in his family.
And that's what Vince's this little piece on, you know,
Wendy and that moral of that story was Vince said there's nothing I wouldn't do for our business.
For his business.
Well, he said for our business.
But there's nothing that he wouldn't do for our business as long as our is mostly
he or I or pronouns pal whatever the fuck and then they went back to where they had been
previously on our episode number two where they're still in the middle of the steroid trial
and the fallout testimony blah blah blah and they told a story of hulk
the government apparently thought that he was going to corroborate all this stuff was
they gave him immunity, then he testified it.
He was with Vince all every step of the way.
He worked the government because he said, I told him what they wanted to hear,
and then I told the truth.
Do you think when they gave him immunity, he thought it applied to the rest of his life?
I'm not sure.
That's why he says everything he says now.
He just, all right, I don't know.
I've got immunity.
Well, see, the thing is you don't have immunity.
You don't need immunity from just being a bullshit artist.
It's only if it's criminal activity.
They should have changed it from the immortal Hulk Hogan
to the immune Hulke Hogan.
It would have worked well.
There's still time.
And I'm sure he'll need it.
But that's the thing is that
he told him, oh yeah,
give me immunity.
I'll spill the bill.
He gave him immunity.
And he said, well, here's the beans.
Nothing.
So that's how he got out of that.
But at the same time,
as we've talked about,
there wasn't a case for Vince
distributing steroids, especially
not only the jurisdictional
thing you pointed out, but Tony Atlas said
he let us do it. He never told us to do it.
And Brett Hart, who's very
blunt, said it was just common sense.
Who's in the fucking main event, right?
Once Vince came back from that Caribbean vacation
showing us the photos,
Oh, shit.
This guy's in the bodybuilding.
He looks better than we do.
We've got to do something about this.
No, that's the thing is that, and I've said this for 30 years or however long it's been.
He wasn't telling guys individually, you know, send him down, okay, you got to get on this and that and the other thing and do this.
You know, again, there might be the illusion to, you know, work out, look at your body.
You look like shit, whatever.
but you could see who was getting the jobs,
who was being pushed, what the look was,
and see it'd have to be an idiot,
and then there was still some idiots that still figured it out,
not to figure it out.
Do you think they did a good enough job pointing out that Vince,
when he went national, you know, the big thing,
it wasn't really a style difference as much as a look difference.
Everyone getting pushed started to be guys that were all pumped up.
You didn't have that everywhere else.
Well, and no, they didn't really bring that up because they,
they spent a lot of time early on talking about him signing the guys that were popular in key markets,
which he did.
But then, remember, didn't he sign the fucking crusher?
Or am I just imagining it?
He got mad dog.
He signed anyone he could to hurt Verenganya.
Yeah.
I mean, anyone who got signed to be a commentator signed.
Anyone who got a gig to be a commentator on AWATV got signed by Vince.
But that's the thing is that, you know, some of those guys.
Yeah, because Crusher Team, the Hogan at one point.
Yes, in Milwaukee.
And that's what he needed.
But Crusher Nationwide, because he was almost 60,
and Mad Dogg was almost 60,
and wrestling 2 was almost 60.
but he got him for Atlanta.
But those guys were, you know, short-lived because they, you know,
they were at the end of their careers and a brand-new audience said they didn't have time.
If I only had time.
But with a lot of the guys that he kept, it was big, you know, it was the look, right?
And then the guys that started going there, he immediately saw,
shit, look at me next to this guy, I got to do something.
So that, but there was no.
There was no memo from Vince.
Get on the sauce.
Or did you get that memo?
I didn't get that memo.
That wasn't part of my collection.
I think it was gravy he was talking about with you instead of that.
I got the gravy memo.
I think that one of the issues with the trial wasn't a memo.
Wasn't there a quote from like Paterson to someone like, the boys need their candy?
The boys need their candy.
Or was that in a memo?
Was it in a memo to Linda or something?
The boys need their candy.
Somebody, he didn't write it in a memo.
but somebody referred to him saying that in a memo.
I believe it was.
Anyway.
Do you think enough people talk about the fact that Dr. Zahorian looks like Mark David Chapman?
No, I can, you know what?
He doesn't he?
I swear to God, I hadn't seen him in so long and it really paid any attention that
now that, you know, now that you look back in hindsight, yes, he kind of did.
I wonder where he was a few years earlier.
Maybe they got the wrong guy.
We have an interview on 605 way back with Mike Mitman
who worked for the Athletic Commission.
He's the one who brought Dr. Zohorian.
He's the one who introduced him to the wrestlers.
How long did he get for that?
Three to five?
No, he's still out there.
He's still out there having a good time.
Walking around loose, huh?
Well, yeah, he's an older man now.
Back to Vince, speaking of older men.
Wheeling around loose then.
So, of course, the verdict was not guilty.
And surprise, surprise.
But then they started moving on
with talking about how Vince was moving on.
And, you know, because again, 92 or whatever that was, business started going into tubes.
It was okay in 93 when I got there.
I'm not saying one had anything to do with the other,
but business to me was okay at that point.
But they were still on the, you know, downhill slide of the fallout from the steroids and the ring
boys and the Donah Hughes and the
remember they had that odd
cast of characters that Vince had been talked into
hiring in the office through Linda to
bring respectability in that
Lisa Wolfe and the human relations department human
why can't I ever say it human resources
and um
who was that Osbert de Arce
some fucking
con man that they had
hired that supposedly was going to try to help him be more business oriented and run this thing
like a real company, Pinocchio, because they'd gotten so much trouble.
You know, they didn't really talk about it.
And again, for a documentary series called Mr. McMahon, where he's saying they conflated
Mr. McMahon with Vince McMahon, they didn't really talk a lot about him outside of work at all.
And what is there talk about?
I don't know.
When can you find that instance?
I don't, well, we can now find it in an affidavit or whatever the fuck was filed with
the court from Janelle Grant.
that's what he does at home apparently now.
Well, that shit wasn't going on there because Linda was in the house.
Well, A, you don't know what was going on where, but the second thing is Linda, we could talk in a later episode about how they haven't done anything to evaluate that relationship where it is now.
But this period of time is the first time that in a lot of ways Linda helped bail out the company by being a public face of the company.
When they needed Vince to step down, at least publicly, Linda took over the corporate duties.
and all of a sudden it was her
doing corporate interviews and stuff on behalf of WWF
and I think that was one of the big benefits to Vince
was she was able to soften a lot of the blow
well yeah that
but see would you put it like that
your filthy mind I didn't put it anyway
with what's going on here
see we're seeing odd meanings and everything now
but Linda was the most normal
boring
you know lady
it is perfect for something like that
because you got this fucking
madman's not able to say or do anything
depending on obviously
you know what the situation is
and he's just gotten off of a federal
trial today well here's this kindly
middle aged woman over here running this family
business so it did that
but at the same point
all of these fucking people
that they hired to make them look like a normal company
and the business end of it and all this.
They ended up either getting fired, being screwy,
or stealing from them,
and I think potentially going to jail.
I think that was the merchandise guy.
What was his name?
God damn it.
Oh, you know, I just saw that episode of The Toys
that made us on Netflix about that,
and they said the guy's name.
I can't remember it now.
Jim Bell.
Was that it?
Sounds like it could be right.
Jim Bell.
well, if it's not, and
fuck him, he's probably dead now
because he had to be almost 50,
30 years ago.
So anyway, back to Vince.
So then they
talked about, well, they tried to replace
Hulk Hogan with Lex Lugar,
you know,
the body and
the look, but that didn't,
Lex didn't connect
with people in that spot, as we mentioned
before, he was more natural heel,
blah, blah, blah.
But Brett,
Brett Hart is fucking great.
He said, the guy that pulled the sword out of the stone was Brett Hart.
And by the way, they left out a big part of that story.
It wasn't Hogan the Luger.
After Hogan left, after the Warrior and Davy Boy were suspended.
Yeah.
That's right around a period of time where Brett was made the champion.
And he was establishing himself as the champion when all of a sudden,
Hogan came back for WrestleMania 9
and at the end of the show
surprise they put the belt
on them right after Yoko Zuna beat Brett
and then surprise surprise
Hogan goes away again and they
the fireball from the photographer
right? Right.
And Yoko was the champion again
and then here I came because they're
like Jesus Christ now we need somebody talk for this guy
but anyway I just love the terminology
from Brett. The guy that pulled the sword out, because they had tried a number of things.
And finally, you know, Brett, the second time around there, caught on because he made a great point.
With the bad publicity on a wrestling business, scandals, and whatever, they knew he wasn't going to get fucking busted with a dead girl or a live boy in his hotel room.
or a pound of cocaine in the trunk of his car or whatever the fuck.
He wasn't a steroid abuser.
And it was a new generation.
It was new talent.
Now they had to do something with Brett Hart and Sean Michaels and Razor Ramon, Diesel,
and Undertaker was still fresher at that point.
But that's another reason that Brett,
I'm pretty sure got it before Michaels did
because they couldn't take a chance on
even Vince is like,
we just got out of a bunch of fucking hot water.
We're going to put the belt on this fucking guy at this point.
Well, Brett was more established.
He was established first as a singles,
but secondly,
when Brett lost the belt in between,
I guess Yokazuna's run until WrestleMania,
what, Sean walked out or got fired,
whatever happened at that point, suspended.
and they had to have a new intercontinental champion.
So it wasn't like they're already
weren't a lot of problems with Sean.
Yeah.
So, but anyway,
because they started talking about
how, you know, Turner began
taking the talent,
or Turner, Turner Entertainment, TBS.
We don't want to gloss over poor Eric.
He gets mad when it's Turner mentioned instead of him.
Well, no, because he's right.
Because Vince McMahon's obsessed with Ted Turner.
and Ted Turner never has uttered the name Vince McMahon
and cared about it at all.
They literally had footage I'd never seen of Ted Turner
laughing at the billionaire Ted skits.
Yes, I didn't know they ever shot any of that stuff.
But yeah, but see, that's the thing to Vince.
It had to be billionaire against billionaire.
And once again, Vince, a brilliant marketer,
even with somebody he's in a real-life shoot with,
he changes the narrative perception is reality
to it's me versus Ted Turner because he's a billionaire
Bischoff was a job guy at that point
invents his mind he's not over people don't know who he is
but Turner
was taking the talent
there went Savage after Hulk and then
they told a story they got the prime time
slot and Lugar walks out
on the first nitro.
In hindsight, it does look a little cheesy for people
not aware what the situation was at the time
that they did their first prime time show
in a fucking mall next to a service merchandise,
I think, or whatever the fucking store was.
But Vince, then, did you catch what he said
about Lugar walking out on the first nitro?
I don't remember the exact quote.
What was it?
He said, I had handshed.
with these guys.
Oh, that's right.
Yes.
He has all those years, I had handshakes.
No, not for the previous 10 fucking years you hadn't.
See, and that's a thing.
Part of it is he remembers the way things were at one time.
He might not have a great spatial ability to put him in chronological order.
But Lugar had been under contract.
First, he had him under contract to the World Bodybuilding Federation.
We just talked about that, so he'd get him away from WC.
W after Lugar had a car wreck.
And then
the reason why Lugar was able to walk out
was because
his contract had expired
and they were still talking
and Vince was so
sure of himself that Lugar
had assured him
that he wasn't going anywhere. I can't
remember what the deal or what the
details were that they were working on.
It wasn't even like money
It was some minute shit that in hindsight was Lugar letting his fucking deer or working his deal to run out so that he could be free by saying, you know, oh Vince, let's work.
You know, just on the travel, can I get business class, whatever the fuck it was, right?
But so it was Vince his, you know, and it's happened to me.
you know when you believe any one of these guys
even the people you think oh I wouldn't believe anybody
but I'll believe that whatever
but you know that's what happened
Lugar that's why Lugar was able to walk out there
because he ran his contract out
and he had convinced Vince
that oh there was no problem
we just got to work on this other fucking thing
and that used to happen back in those days
because the legal department
consisted of people that would
you know prepare all the contracts that Vince and or
the head of talent relations told them to goddamn
prepare it wasn't like there was full staffs
doing nothing but monitoring these guys and their dates
and their rollovers and all that shit
but no that that was the thing with Lugar and everybody was
you know dumbfounded when he came out in the mall
you can't blame him again Vince this episode screw job
It's about how Vince screwed over talent whenever he felt he wanted to do for his business.
Lex Lugar's business was Lex Luger.
He did the right thing for himself.
And the end of the day, Vince was never going to do the right thing for him.
It's going to be about Vince.
Well, and that's the thing is that Vince was playing the victim here with Turner signing the guys away,
which is the same thing that he did.
In one of these other episodes, we've been going back and forth, watch a record,
Watch,
watch record,
but in one of these other episodes,
they really delve into it.
A lot of the times he would do the same thing
to the territory people in the past
that he was then claiming that Turner or WCW
or TBS or whatever was doing to him
and whether it be stealing talent or,
you know,
predatory business practices.
As soon as someone with more money,
I mean,
that was his whole business model was I'll use as much money as I can,
even if I don't have it,
to steal everyone's talent.
But if somebody has more money, then that's not fair.
Right.
And that's where Eric Bischoff was, and again, Eric is, was one of the,
there was a couple people on here that you could tell, well, I'll say what I think.
And if they don't want to fucking give me a job again or book me for a signing or whatever,
I don't care, because Eric was a little, you know, prickly about some of the things here
that you would think might have chapped Vince's buttocks,
but he was talking about WCW becoming a more adult
and more reality-based product.
And that kind of,
that phrase kind of takes a bad rap
because our friend Schittstein, Mr. Rousseau,
for the sake of any of the new listeners,
would say that that's what he was trying to do
with his rotten, crummy booking, reality-based.
There was absolutely nothing either reality-based or believable
or even spelled properly in any of his writing,
but he called it that.
Eric was talking a more reality-based in terms of opening up.
Once again, everybody's wanted to open up and admit
that everything's a work at a show,
but what's real and what's not to block?
blah, blah, blah.
But I told Vince the same thing when I started on the creative team in February
1996, right?
By first week, I said, reality-based as far as what is believable in your,
they want to call it a WW universe now.
We didn't have that term then.
But in your universe of logic, in your program.
what would be real and what would be bullshit be reality bad i use cops as an example
and see you know when they fucking find the perp and pull him out of the car and they start
hammering him with the fucking flashlight there's not a goddamn camera inside the car
getting another viewpoint and you kind of believe everything's really going on
it's not so slick but there's more real heat i think that that's
That is what WCW had over WWF at the time because of Vince's insistence on still being, you know, the land of the gobbledy gooker.
Do you see what I'm trying to say?
I do.
And, you know, if you think about the Hogan turn in 96, it happened in Florida on a WCW show.
If that had taken place in the Northeast or in California on a WWF show, would the reaction have been the same?
there still were different fan bases for different companies.
Oh, yeah.
And the WWF fan base at that point,
the reason why from 94-ish and 5-ish there was very few of them
is because, good Lord, not only now had Vince lost
a number of his most prominent stars of the previous period,
but that was some silly-ass shit.
I mean, Yoko was the champion for much of that.
He wasn't out there being silly.
Brett was the champion for some of that.
He wasn't out there being silly.
But there was a lot of silly shit.
And, you know, that's, again, Bruce would do what Vince likes to do.
And I think Pat had kind of hit a bit of a wall there with just they were amusing themselves.
but no, there was no oomph to it.
There was no goddamn, you know,
the breadheart Steve Austin kind of thing
you'd get in 97, there was none of that in 90 fucking 5.
So anyway, that's what real,
a reality-based, is, to me,
is that type of thing that you can, okay,
in this program that I'm watching,
these people legitimately mean what they're fucking doing.
and holy shit
that kind of actually might not have been supposed to happen
that type of thing
but that's events was always
you know
you would pitch him something
it'd sound like old southern rasslin
to try to make people believe
I said the same thing
the other day with the punk interview
if you know the movie is fake
does that mean De Niro and Pacino
aren't still trying
or I don't get that.
But anyway, they made a point that they finally made Vince react sell as something, as they said.
When they, you know, Medusa threw the belt in the trash and Bischoff was giving out the results of Raw.
And finally, he came back with the billionaire Ted skits.
And, okay, Koppelowitz.
where do they get these fucking names?
She should have changed her name before she got in show business.
But Kay Koppelowitz made them stop the network executive
because I guess that they were either friends
or just they felt it was unseemly for the one cable network
to be parodying another head of another cable network
in such a demeaning fashion.
You don't see that.
You don't usually see cable channels attack one another.
on the air.
Well, it was about goddamn time then, wasn't it?
Anyway, I like the billionaire Ted stuff.
You know, it was goofy.
Horrible.
I know.
How much did they cost?
No, whatever.
Well, you know, no, I got to say this now.
That's one thing.
You can't blame them for wasting money when they just had,
because I think, I can't remember everybody was in the room at the time,
but most of those people actually worked in the office or the
studio and they just put wigs on them and they were in a fucking room remember it was in t and a
which in no way shape or form had the finances of the w wf they made shark boy a goddamn fish
tank he could live in remember that's right i remember you tell me about it i never saw it thankfully
yeah well die he didn't have you over yes i get or maybe it would have he didn't have you under
i didn't watch tna i was smart well you know you
Every time a hook would come down from the ceiling,
that would mean it was time to leave the dinner party.
All right, so speaking of leaving the party, that's what Hall and Nash did.
And I remember, again, and I've told a story, I'm not going to get,
we've got hours of this thing to go, I'm not going to get sideways.
But what Hall and Nash did was, I think it was probably after WrestleMania
96, sometime in April, were we in Omaha?
Des Moines, not Kansas City, but another some kind of depressing Midwestern location.
And their contracts were coming up.
And the creative team had been asking Vince, what's going on?
Well, we're going to get some definitive answers there, pal.
And he talked to both of them there and came out of the meeting and said,
okay, both Hall and Nash are staying.
All right, so they're staying.
and now we know what we're doing.
And then immediately we got back to Connecticut
and one guy called him on the phone
and the other guy sent him a letter by fax
saying, no, we're leaving.
And that was not the, to me it was not ever,
because let's face it,
we did better once we got rid of them
and they did better once they got there.
So everybody was happy.
But why tell the guy,
Oh, I'm with you.
I think it was Hall
that Vince told us, told me,
told Bruce, told Jim Ross,
Hall said he's going to get up in the locker room
and tell everybody in front of all of them
that I'm the one that made him what he is today
and he would never think of leaving.
That's a lot of bullshit.
How could Vince even believe that?
Would you believe that?
Well, it was kind of true.
He was fucking,
underneath preliminary fucking musclehead in WCW before Vince had him be razor.
They weren't going to let him be razor because they hadn't thought a razor.
The idea that he was going to stand up and give this speech before the locker room putting over the company.
You believe that?
Vince believed it.
I wasn't in the conversation.
I didn't believe Hall or Nash as far as I could throw their respective fucking houses.
And I'm going to the Lugar argument.
They got deals that set.
them up for life. I mean, you know, again, how do you compete? It's like competing with Tony
Khan now. He could just throw so much money against you. Well, yes, but that's why I would have
said, Vince, I'm sorry, brother. I'm sorry, but a million dollars or whatever the fuck it is.
I got to, I can't, I don't know what to tell you. Thank you for everything. I'm going to buy you a
goddamn new Jeep. Whatever the fuck. Just like shit stain. Don't call the guy on the phone
when he's just landed back from another fucking country when he's at a
a building 40 miles from your fucking house, go down there and tell him, hey, I'm leaving.
They're going to give me a ridiculous amount of money.
And I don't know what else to tell you, but thank you.
But don't, you know, anyway.
So they left, wherever it was, Omaha, Des Moines, whatever the fuck.
And then they did the curtain call.
And they all tried to explain the curtain call.
And, of course, the Undertaker hated it and Brett Hart hated it.
You can tell who really gave a shit about the business and wasn't falling for this delusion they have in their head that they're all fucking movie style and entertain us by who liked it and who didn't like it.
What do you think of Vince's reaction?
I've given up trying to figure out what they pitched him, what he agreed to, what they ended up doing, why he wasn't a lot.
upset about it afterwards
until everybody else got up
and said he wouldn't really pissed off about it
afterwards and Jerry Briscoe I remember
through his
fucking wasn't a suitcase
but a big old satchel bag
halfway down to
the hallway
the hallway at Madison Square Garden
I was kicking mine
these fucking embecils
but anyway
that's
that's where they tried to explain
K-Fabe
with the curtain call thing
and what they had done and how it wasn't
done at the time
and I think Undertaker probably
understood it, not understood it,
but explained it, conveyed it best.
He was always,
even if you knew it's bullshit,
he was trying to create doubt
in people's heads, which is
intrigue, which leads to interest.
Does that guy think he's the Undertaker?
maybe there is there is no fucking undertaker but is the guy think he's a fucking is he
all there look at this fucking guy so that's you know there's triple h calling well k fabe
kind of this antiquated thing you know you just got to be friendly to the kids
unfortunately michael said well i didn't know why k fabe was so important and he's the one
teach the kids, which is
why a lot of the guys
get into business these days with
fucked up attitudes.
Did David Copperfield
when he was selling out arenas
when he was the biggest magician in the world
in the 80s, I've got a goddamn program
from a David Copperfield show
that looks like it's from a Rolling Stone show.
This guy was making fucking money.
Did he have to bring out
the woman that he saw it in half to explain to the audience how that her intestines remained unharmed
and they really enjoyed working together on that illusion?
Or could he just let to people wonder how that he did it?
Do you see what I'm saying here?
Yeah, and I guess also there's different levels of K-FAB.
K-Fabe, in front of the camera, when you're watching a wrestling show, I think it's a necessity.
The world has to exist in the world of K-Fab.
The world of K-Fabe can exist in the real world, but this specific show, this hour, two hours,
is in the world of K-Fabe.
And then there's K-Fabe when the cameras aren't on, outside the arena and everything.
Like, this wasn't the click hanging out in New York City and people snapped photos.
This was combining the two areas of K-Fabe and destroying both.
And it was unknown.
And K-Fabe is a necessity for a wrestling television show in America.
I'm sorry, it is.
There you have it.
but of course triple
H was the one who's head rolled over it
because I've said 10 million times
what's he going to do to
Hall and Nash and Michaels was the champion
so but it
it ended up that they sold Vince
a lot of the
he wasn't going to do it right then
but they were insidiously
earworming into his brain
the world is changing.
They all know
so that he'd eventually open up
even more than he already had
with its entertainment
and the product
regardless what you say about the business
the product never recovered
because
remember we've talked about this
from about that period
in the next five years or so
anything after that
it's few and far between
that it has not only the
the aggression and the ring
and the appearance of
chaos and mayhem,
but that the people
are not going as bad shit either
because of that.
So, and they can make money
and they're certainly doing it now,
but the actual product
that is being perpetrated
has never gotten past this generation
that don't realize
that it's wrong
to let everybody know exactly what you did about everything.
But they make a lot more money off of fewer people individually now.
And they better be glad of that because they've lost about $8 million.
Anyway, back to this,
there was the story they were telling about Vince Crying,
you know, predatory business practices,
when Bischoff mocking him for it,
billionaire 10 trying to run us out of business our small family business
when he had done the same thing in 84 with the territories
and Vince was there with
you know some attempt to justify it with twisted logic
and meanwhile down south they've turned
they've started the outsiders they've turned Hogan heel
and you know when Vince said
he never considered a heel Hulk Hogan.
It wouldn't have mattered anyway because if he'd have done it,
it had been the biggest popcorn fart in history of the world,
because Hogan and the WWE wouldn't have worked as a heel.
They were just tired of him.
And at that time with all the silliness,
he couldn't have that new audience that was already predisposed to dislike him
because the remnants of WCW was Flair country.
So you had a base and fuck you, Hogan, just anyway.
And then he had the guys to fucking stand in the middle of with Hall and Nash and it all worked.
But it wouldn't have worked if Vince had done it, would it?
You know, again, Vince had amazing successes with things that he supervised.
But there's also a lot of misses, a lot of things that worked in other places that Vince
couldn't replicate because he couldn't leave things alone.
He had to put his spin on it.
I don't think it would have been able to play out as well as it did in WCW under Vince.
Not in 1996.
Yeah, no.
And not at any time, you know, after 1992, I don't think so.
And so that ran the win streak of WCW to 83 weeks.
I keep hearing that number.
But Bischoff got it.
That's where he was talking about it, as we made.
mentioned earlier, Vince could be, in his mind at least, if not in maybe his fan's minds,
the sympathetic baby face against Ted Turner.
And Bruce said, Vince never considered Bischoff.
He talked about Ted Turner.
That was to not only elevate Vince, because everybody had heard of Ted Turner, whether
you're a wrestling fan or not, that elevated Vince to being in a restaurant.
rivalry with a, you know, a fucking major league celebrity and, you know, business person.
But also that way he could be the sympathetic baby face because Turner had so much money
and had fucked so many women and et cetera that people were kind of jealous of him at the time.
So, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And Bischoff gets that.
So what did you think about his audition video as an announcer?
I mean, he wasn't a very good commentator ever.
And the AWA was fine as an interviewer,
but as a commentator, he wasn't good,
and WCW, he wasn't good when he took over,
and when he had Nitro and he made himself a commentator,
wasn't very good.
Well, see, that's...
He became good, actually, when he became a heel commentator,
because then it worked, because that was his natural self.
Yeah, but that's the thing is he knew almost nothing about wrestling.
When he got the job with Vern, he knew nothing.
about wrestling. And
he couldn't be expected
to be an announcer calling holes
and get all the
natural things
you've got to just instinctive is
what I'm trying to say.
He couldn't do that, but he's a
salesman and he's glib
and he can talk extemporaneously
which means off the cuff for the kids out there.
And that's what he's good at. So doing interviews
or sales pitches for the
hey Tuesday night we're going to be back at the St. Paul Civic Center type of thing.
He's fucking great.
And also, and you've won a brand new car.
So he could do that stuff too.
No, he wasn't very good at that, though.
He wasn't good at getting the enthusiasm and seeming genuine with it.
He couldn't do that.
I don't know.
I've always thought that he was a good enough con man, that he could fake that, you know,
enthusiastic genuineness.
Bischoff is a good con.
man talking to you one-on-one or on the mic selling a concept but as a host as someone who needs
to bring the excitement no way someone who needs to bring the excitement no way he can't do it he doesn't
seem natural john davidson seemed natural bischoff doesn't uh well all right then that's why john
davidson got all the big jobs the new hollywood squares so then we finally get to
Montreal
Vince makes the deal with Brad for 20 years
and I mean again
they've done movies and documentaries
and written books on this whole
one thing here
so... And they still got it wrong
well yeah well and we're
they skipped almost... They still got it wrong
well I don't know that you can say they got it wrong
because I don't know if there was a goddamn detail in here
I don't know if they got it right but they didn't get anything wrong
because they didn't really tell you anything.
By not saying
that Vince and Bruce Pritchard and anyone who says any of the things they say are lying about
this, that's getting it wrong because Brett had creative control. Brett was willing to lose the title
to anyone else. Brett couldn't debut on WCW the next day with the belt. I mean, there was so many
different things that the WWE side is always trying to avoid because their story doesn't hold up.
It was just pure and simple. Vince wanted to screw Brett. He didn't have to. It wasn't,
I have to get the belt because otherwise, Wendy Richter will run into a cat.
Like, it wasn't that.
It was, I'm going to screw him over.
A cab will run into Wendy Richter.
This was more about sending some kind of weird statement
because Brett was willing to do it for,
if you would ask Brett to do a job in Montreal to the Undertaker,
do you think it would have been a problem?
No.
Well, that's what I'm saying, folks.
If you want to hear what we have to say about Montreal,
I think we got an omnibus on the YouTube channel.
Yes, we do.
Yes, we do.
But they went through this in five minutes or whatever.
Brett said, Sean was a real dick.
And then Sean said, I was such a prick.
And Bruce knew nothing.
Brett was expecting something.
Vince called for the bell and Brett wrecked the place and spit on him.
And then Brett asked Sean if he knew.
And Sean said, as God is my witness, I didn't know.
Right.
And then right afterwards, he said, of course, Vince made us not tell.
And then Vince owed Brett one.
so he went over and Brett knocked him out and...
Listening to Brett tell the story about how perfect the punch was.
Brett Hart stole the show in his whole thing.
Yeah.
But it may have been petty theft in this episode.
He's so blunt and everything he says.
And honestly, again, that's what it...
I think Vince somehow was...
See, I can't.
can't psychoanalyze people like
Heyman. It's almost like he's spent a lot of time
on the couch and heard
the psychoanalyst,
psychoanaly. But, you know, everyone
always said that Hayman's like the Northern
You and you were the Southern Hamon. I think
it's more him and Bruce Pritchard.
They spin the same kind of shit,
but Heyman's just a lot better at it.
Oh, Hayman's glorious.
But,
but to try to
psychoanalyze this, somehow
Vince in his mind
said, it will make me,
the baby face, the
sympathetic figure,
the fucking the man
my dick will be larger,
whatever in his head
makes him happier about himself
if he went over there
so that Brett could hit him
because he figured Brett was probably going to hit him
or fight him or whatever the fuck
and that's why he went over there
because he had to go and be a man about it
so that he could actually go and later on
and say I was a man about it
but the story that I heard also
it wasn't like that he stood there and went
okay I'm putting my hands by my back
right well no
from the people in the room
at the time
they suddenly Brett charged Tori
and they locked up
like Brett said
they you know
not in a full referee
position collar and elbow, but they locked up like two people about to have a fight and
people surged around them and Brett had one time for one fucking shot and he landed it.
But that was the deal.
But I think some people have thought that Vince was standing there like going,
go ahead, I can take it.
But anyway.
And then they tease that, well, now Mr. McMahon will emerge.
And that was the end of episode number three.
It's just weird the way it,
it bounces over stuff and past stuff.
And then it focuses on other things.
But it's like, again, it's never about Vince McMahon.
You know, after the show ended, he went back to the hotel.
He had a drink.
And he thought about things.
Like, it's never that.
It's always just, here's what you saw on TV.
And here's what you saw in other documentaries.
And he'll be here.
But also, I see what they're doing.
In some cases, they're going back like for the next episode.
they will start with the influence of Dr. Jerry Graham on a teenage Vince McMahon
and then they'll, you know, come back to the modern time or they'll go back to
the way he's utilized and or, you know, taking some of his,
utilized his family members and taking some weird positions toward his family members
on television.
And there'll be some kind of overall theme of the piece, but you're right,
But there is no...
There's no substance.
Not substance, but there's nothing that like...
I see what you're trying.
I'm trying to verbalize it also, but there's no...
There's no...
You see a picture of Vince once having taken a vacation.
But there's nobody from his life that's like, yeah, shit, me and Vince, we used to fucking
go down and go fishing.
Because there is nobody.
Well, but there are some people, you know, Brad Beluchian who did the six-pack of
interviewed Jim Troy and other people. Jim Troy work with Vince at Cape Cod, went to work for
WWF. They were a friend inside and outside the office. Like there were people around Vince.
But I think that's the most recent one and that was 40 years ago. Well, actually,
know, the most recent one is probably that personal trainer that he hangs out with.
Oh, well, I'm serious though. I mean, I know that he's, his name's in the lawsuit, but that's who he
hangs out with. His handlers. You had to say hang out. He hangs out with his handlers and also
that... And handler. See, every word you say.
And the physical therapist guy or the, uh, well, the physical therapist guy worked for the other doctor.
But again, that was Vince has a click outside of work, is my point.
Well, apparently we found it, but they're all under indictment or, um, unindicted co-conspirators
or whatever they're fucking called. Um, but yeah, you know, and, and nobody was here to say in the,
you know, as it progresses from start to finish,
there was nobody really here to say,
well, you know, when the IPO happened
and he became a billionaire for real,
his behavior really started getting bizarre.
You know, it's...
What is Linda brought to this?
I mean, again, it's about who's interviewing you
and what kind of questions are asking and what you'll say,
but we're not finding about...
What did they do?
We're not finding out about anything about Vince the man at all,
other than, you know, and he says don't confuse the character with that.
How are we supposed to think of you otherwise?
There's no life.
Did they ask Linda, okay, when you were 15 and he was 17 or whatever,
and you went to the tasty freeze, what did he order?
Was he, because there's pictures of him as a young man,
he still apparently found the physical culture,
but he was some fucking abused child in a trailer park up until he was 12,
so he couldn't have been on the
finest nutrition and had a Joe Wheater barbell set
from the time he was four.
You know,
formulative things in his life,
you were around for some of them?
Anything.
When they went bankrupt in the 70s,
did we hear anything about that?
I don't think so.
Bruce could have told the story about he was on his way
of the bankruptcy,
fucking court proceeding,
and he went and spent,
$50 for a fucking manicure.
And because, oh, you can't fucking go and look like a savage.
I didn't know about this.
Yes.
They wanted to make sure he presented the proper image when he went into bankruptcy court.
But, but I mean, that's, yeah, I see what you're saying.
But there, how did he, how did he get the money?
How did he get money?
How did he get this way?
How did he get this way?
Who was his friend?
Who were his friends?
Who was he hanging out with the different points in his life?
Again, Dick Ebersol was his friend inside and outside of work.
We haven't even heard that name on this.
Dangerous Danny Davis, not mine, but the other one.
Not the nightmare Danny Davis, but the referee from the WWF in the 80s, Danny Davis.
Is he still around?
Why, was he a buddy of Inces?
You never heard that deal?
I never, no, I don't think I've ever heard anything about Dangerous Danny Davis, no.
I was told the story that was conveyed to me and who was I to tell anyone any difference since I wasn't even there was that Danny Davis had gone to the military school with Vince and had at one point taken the blame for him for something.
So that's why he got a job as a referee and later on as a ring crew referee and later as a ring crew referee and later as a manager slash.
wrestler fella.
Yeah, never really a manager.
He wrestled after, well, it's a funny thing.
And Johnny Valiant went to military school with him, too, but obviously he's passed away.
But dangerous Danny Davis, now that you say this, he was a referee, then he became a heel referee,
then he was suspended for life plus 10 years.
And he became a wrestler, and if you think about the way he would strut around the ring
and the way he would bump, he works like Vince.
I'd never even thought of it until you said this.
I got to go back down and watch it.
In my head, he moves around like Vince in the ring.
And then he became a referee again.
There was never really an explanation how that happened.
Yeah, and to my knowledge, he never worked,
never had a job in any other wrestling promotion or company, did he?
I guess maybe after his run, he would have done independence or...
Maybe, I don't know.
Or to get a, you know, signing or whatever.
but it was not like he was in the business
in the territory days
bopping around.
It was just that.
That's what I was told.
I'm willing to be corrected.
Like even if you want to say, like, I want to know
about Vince McMahon, like, the romantic side.
Like, Linda, anything you could tell us about him
as a boyfriend, as a husband, things he did.
There's nothing.
There's nothing that explains who he is as a human being
unless it's nothing but WWE and WWF.
That's his entire being.
So I don't know.
It's, uh, I mean, there's more episodes to discuss and we'll do that shortly, but
there's a lot here, but there's not a lot here.
There's like nothing here.
But, but there's everything's here.
Well, that is there and we are here and we will soon be there.
And we are all together.
We will return pretty soon with the walrus, aka episode four.
It's not called the walrus, but we'll be back with episode four right after this.
Well, Jim, there it is, episode three of me.
Mr. McMahon on Netflix.
Screw jobs galore.
And of course,
you know, there are other kinds of screw jobs
for people that are not in the wrestling business.
There are other kinds of transitions, too.
Why don't you use one?
I was trying to think of one,
but, you know, another thing is I need a good night's sleep.
Ah, we're going with the sleeping, eh?
And if I got a good night's sleep,
perhaps I wouldn't be flubbing my lines
and, you know, getting more and more
Vince like here on the show. I need a good night's sleep, Jim. Boy, I'll tell you where you can lay down
your weary head and get one because I need one too after this marathon production that we're
undergoing. Our friends at Helix that make the Helix sleep mattresses, the incredible line of varied
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or your disposition. You want to sleep on your back, sleep on your face, sleep on somebody else.
It doesn't matter. They got to match kids. They got mattresses for kids. They have mattresses
for old people. The mattresses for old people sometimes double as a coffin just in case you want
to make some money. You just unzip the middle, roll grandpop, and
pop into the thing, zip it back up, and they'll come and haul it away for you.
No, they will not do that, and there are no wooden chambers inside your fine Helix mattress,
which unfolds.
I didn't say anything about wood.
I said there was a zipper.
Have you been inside yours?
That's the only way you'd know there was wooded there.
There are no zipper chambers with your Helix mattress.
Jim's getting some off brand, brand X.
Where else are you going to put, where else are you going to put Grampop?
Anyway, Helix has the award-winning Lux collection.
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Anyway, all you got to do is take the quiz,
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They'll pick the mattress that's perfect,
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you requested that you'd like to sleep with and they'll lay down right on it next to you.
It doesn't work like that. It does not work like that in any way. You have to go to a different
vendor for that, then is what you're saying. I don't know what vendor you're going to go
for that. Puff Daddy or Vince, but we're talking about Helix sleep mattresses and good mattress
that we're going to focus on, not perverts. And then, well, perverts are allowed to sleep too.
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Since I had that food poisoning last week,
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And then you leave a trail of evidence behind.
Helixleep.com slash JCE.
They will not have stains until you get them.
And then, well, it's a crapshoot.
No, pun intended.
No, not at all.
Not on this Vince McMahon special.
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But ladies and gentlemen, Helix Sleep, great mattresses.
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And I'm sure you'll love them wherever you are.
Let's go back, Mr. Shapoopoe up to Vince McMahon.
Episode four it is.
Back to episode four of the Mr. McMahon docu-series on Netflix.
We are back with more.
Yes, there's more.
More of Vince McMahon, more of this endless Netflix,
Mr. McMahon docu series that some people thought may be an expose.
Some people thought maybe a puff piece.
Turns out everyone was right and everyone was wrong.
but here he is once again Mr. Jim Cornett.
I heard a double shovel burial.
And as a person who has conductified a few of those,
I don't see it yet.
But here's an important point,
and this is a point that a very smart individual made to me earlier today,
that this program is not for you and me, Brian, for the experts,
or even for the fans that really know a lot of the stories
or at least know the gist of the stories,
because then we're not surprised,
but to the average Netflix viewer
that they're going for,
people are probably thinking,
this guy's a fucking nut, aren't they?
You know, that's one of the things
about the Clipsday show.
When you think of the early episodes,
if you're someone who hasn't watched wrestling
since it was big in the 80s,
there are plenty of people like that.
You remember that stuff, it draws you in.
If you're someone who hasn't watched since the 90s, same thing.
He's always been a central figure,
and if you were inside, or, you know, if you were a fan who like Inside Info,
or just a really knowledgeable fan, you know a little bit about him,
but he's a fascinating character to people who know nothing about him.
Fascinating character now may be charitable in the way that, well, that goddamn
snake that bit me and gave me that gangrene in my leg.
That was an interesting fucking snake. Fascinating.
But anyway, this may have been my favorite episode,
just because of the way it started with Dr. Jerry Graham.
Episode number four, attitude.
We're about to get to the attitude era
that so many people tootot the horn of,
but we've talked about this on the show, Vince,
the Graham family and the McMahon family.
It's so interesting because Vince Sr.,
as we talked about, did business throughout his
time in the in you know as czar of new york wrestling with eddie graham in florida
and they socialized and eddie graham's talent made shots of the garden anywhere from eddie and
mike himself to dusty vince senior was impressed by eddie graham who after he was jerry's brother
until he couldn't take it anymore became the promoter in florida established the heyday of florida wrestling it had
never been that big before down there.
And one of the most
respected minds and one of the movers
and shakers in the NWA,
but Vince Jr.
was fascinated by
Jerry Graham, who was the
eccentric
genius performer,
but was bat shit fucking
crazy and
completely unable
to exist within the rules of polite
society. Is
there some kind of moral there?
You know, again, you talked about your disappointment in the earlier episodes that you didn't get the backstory.
You didn't get more about the childhood or anything.
In a sense, this was one of the closest cases of getting it.
You got him talking about the influence of Dr. Jerry Graham on him, and they're tying it into everything he did later on as a heel.
When you look at it in that context, it's very interesting.
Yeah, and a lot of it was.
A lot of it.
He did get from Jerry Graham, and I heard the stories of the fire engine red Cadillac convertible
and, you know, driving through the streets of New York, blowing the horn, running stoplights,
the blonde hair, the strut.
That's when Mr. McMahon finally had to wrestle, a lot of that attitude,
hence the title of the piece here, and a lot of his, he,
work and thought process he got from Dr. Jerry Graham.
And they juxtaposed that with footage of Vince doing stuff as a heel,
and you could see it.
But, you know, anyway, that, again, that's the kind of personality that Vince was drawn to.
And not that his father gave Dr. Jerry a number of chances that he fucked up.
But that was because he had drawn such immense money for him just a few years previous.
This is a grown man.
It is how old was Vince.
At the time, he's about 50 years old.
And, you know, he's still, he's the guy that he idolized as a teenager.
The guy who clearly taught him out of drive.
Yes.
And, you know.
They didn't talk anything about that stuff.
I mean, that's always been a popular subject when you've,
brought it up, like how he drove, his habit of going into the city to get his haircut,
you know, his personal habits.
Nothing about any of that.
They didn't have any footage of him with the electric shaver.
I bet if they could have interviewed the barber, yes, he's been coming here every week for
fucking, however I've been 25 years and he pays me $100, he gives me a tip.
I, you know, I don't know what's the matter with the fucking guy.
But anyway, so that was another formative piece in Vince's childhood.
was, again, he was 12 years old, so
when he met Vince Sr.
And spending that time, you know, the
Grams were there, 57, 58, 59.
He's 14, 15 years old.
You know, how cool could it be to see a guy
in the late 50s, lighten cigars with, you know,
$50 and $100 bills,
which is not bullshit when he said it.
Graham would do that because
it made him look like a fucking maniac.
And Vince always wanted to
to be in the business
I think he secretly wanted to be a wrestler
and his father wouldn't hear of it
and he harbored those
you know those urges all that time
and then finally when Montreal had happened
because we picked up in the fallout
from Montreal
where the insider fans went crazy
and they, you know, I think that's what, again,
not only spurred Vince to be Mr. McMahon,
but also all of the people that they had hired in the office and the studio and everything,
oh gosh, we can get on the internet if we give them inside news.
And then they just, the whole thing went to shit.
But no mention of his heel run in 93 in Memphis.
Well, and, you know, I can understand that because...
That was his first time doing.
anything like that.
Yeah, but at the same time, this thing was already six hours
fucking long.
And, you know, it was
a lark. That was almost like
Vince going to a fantasy camp for wrestling
at that point, but to be, to do it
in his own company.
Well, I mean, really, right? It's true. I never thought of it that way, but
it's true. He's a billionaire businessman, a millionaire at that time,
multimillionaire businessman and all over the world, but he gets to come to
one place on vacation.
and act out his fantasies of being a heel wrestler.
But it was also practice.
Anyway, they didn't really again flesh out anything
passed like one sentence that Vince at first thought he was going to be the baby face.
That sit-down interview where Brett screwed Brett,
the time-honored tradition,
he had makeup on, but you could still see.
the remnants of the black eye
and he had the somewhat furrowed brow
he thought for the first week or however long it was
it wasn't more than two weeks that he was going to be the baby face
and that he was going to explain the way that Brett just
was selfish and you know screwed this whole thing up for everybody
and damn his eyes
and that was his thought until it massively backfired
and people. Imagine this
didn't side with the millionaire
promoter, but the wrestler
that was screwed that they loved.
And that's when
all right, you know, if he's
going to do something, it's going to be all
the way, so that's when Mr.
McMahon became a thing.
And he decided to go with it.
But it was not part
of the plan. That's why
would everybody say, well, Montreal
was a work, and I know we've covered
it. Go to the YouTube channel, folks. There's
an omnibus.
When I say Montreal was a work, and then Vince just switched heel, it wasn't the plan.
He thought he was going to get by with it.
Am I exaggerating this, Brian?
I get, I mean, you're not exaggerating it, but, you know, you're saying it a lot.
Well, he thought he was going to get by with it.
Okay, I'm beating it to death then.
But again, that's part of the whole thing.
He, you know, he played the wrong hand.
I shouldn't say that.
He thinks he did the right thing.
thing, but the hand he played with Montreal,
the reaction he thought
everything was getting was wrong at that time.
And he kind of went with it until it was an abrupt
change. And
I'll say this again and then I'll move on.
I know we've covered it again before,
but the only reason or the only
when I said,
double cross him then, take your belt back,
right? We've covered this before,
but the idea was that nobody would
know that it happened, that bread would have to be the one afterwards.
There'd be no acknowledgement of it visually or verbally to the crowd.
And that bread would have to be the one afterwards.
It would people believe him whatever?
If he said, oh, I didn't quit.
But he made it a big thing out in front of the public.
And that's what caused everybody to go, what the fuck just happened?
Yeah, I think that's one of those things that doesn't get said enough.
I was watching it that night on pay-per-view,
from the moment the match started,
there was a weird vibe to it.
And Vince and the Stooges being out there,
you almost felt like it could happen.
So that when it did happen,
you're like, holy shit, it happened,
but it wasn't out of nowhere.
And well, and also,
I understand that with Vince
and the Stooges slaughter,
everybody out there,
it was the nominal reason was to make sure that these two don't go completely out of control or whatever,
but it was telegraphing something, and then that thing got done,
and then they told everybody what had happened afterwards,
and it became the story, which in hindsight, you know, did a lot of business for everybody,
but the whole idea of doing that, I don't know how Vince thought he was going to become the baby face out of it.
The whole idea of doing that was to try to get by without the fans really knowing anything wrong had happened until it was too late.
But Vince was convinced that the fans would side with him because he was just taking back his property, as he said in one of these episodes.
It's mine.
I'll take it back with Wendy.
You know, rather than the fucking Brett's a hitman heart.
They loved Brett.
so anyway
but yes
so then
and I've finally
seen Bonnie Hammer
I used to hate that
broad
you know why
she had a great name
no actually that was one of the reasons
things I kind of liked about her
but no every time
that her name Bonnie Hammer
was the lady at USA in programming
and every time
her name was mentioned it meant either
more work or rework for the creative team or stress or all of the above.
Because every once in a while she used to have opinions on wrestling.
And I don't recall any specific examples, but I also don't recall anything being any
fucking good.
But every time Vince would have, well, Bob, talk to Bonnie Hammer, I'm like, fuck, how long
is this going to fucking take?
That's a name, though, that you don't hear anymore, but she had a big influence over all the
wrestling anyone saw for a very long time.
And that's, you know, again, when we talk about
with Tony Kahn and their current television situation,
predicament, whatever it is,
it's great until it's not great or until somebody
that's, you know, the wrong kind of person
or doesn't like it or likes it too much or just, oh boy,
that you never know exists on the face of the planet
as a wrestling fan, that you've never heard of,
it's somebody with the network
that's going to end, you're going to end up with
zombies of the stratosphere at intermission on your
fucking wrestling program or whatever.
And then they
also then talked about
leading Bonnie Hammer and USA Network into the
programming aspect
Vince's promo about the new way of producing
television.
A more adult approach.
That was another thing.
I don't think he needed to do that.
I think he just needed to do that.
In other words,
don't do the promo and put it on the air
telling people that you're going to write
your fake show a different way.
Just start writing your fake show a different way.
And they'll probably notice, right?
Did he need to do that in your opinion?
No, but obviously he wanted to do that.
What do you think that's...
Oh, yes.
Well, he wanted to do it because now...
It was like a mission statement.
Yes, and it was probably more of it was to,
not to the fans or the people already watching the show,
but to the other side, to WCW, to the TV network.
He was prefacing, I'm going to start trying to get away with some shit.
And, you know, but again, that was just another example of,
we're telling them shit they don't even need to know.
It's not, we're not even, we're opening up about stuff that's not even,
Germain, just as I said, don't say you're going to do it a different way,
just start doing it the different way and they'll pick up on it, which they did.
And then one of the examples that they had of what they were doing a different way
was when Michael stuffed his fucking gym shorts with a goddamn tube sock on
TV, but it was so entertaining.
Were you entertained, Brian? I was there that night. I wasn't entertained.
Again, I always said it. Sean Michaels had go-away heat with a lot of fans like me
in the later half of 97 into 98, more than even Vince screaming at him for being the boy toy,
when all of a sudden he was being obnoxious like this and being allowed to on TV,
I wasn't entertained by it. I don't think DX took off until he left. That's always been my argument.
Yeah.
but DX gets hailed and praised and it was about to again
because Triple H, one of the
you know, one of the victors in the wrestling war
is in a nice position now, so they have to remember it fondly.
But when you had great wrestling and great promos
with The Undertaker and Steve Austin and Mick Foley
and et cetera, et cetera,
and then you've got Sean Michaels,
jumping up and down, wagging his dick around, and doing all kinds of bullshit.
You never knew again which one was going to show up, the bad Sean, the good Sean, the
clear-headed Sean, fucking Sean from Neptune, or the planet Zambodia.
I know, Triple H is doing a wonderful job now in his current role.
I'm not saying he's not, but he's going to defend that DX horse shit to the
death and that's that to me if they had excised that out and kept everything else they did
they'd have done the same amount of business and they wouldn't add so many problems with
people complaining about television in my opinion but they wouldn't have sold as many
suck it shirts well that was that was the most annoying part of the attitude error was
people who weren't wrestlers started doing suck it it still remains the most annoying part
the attitude era. It remains
it when people who are wrestlers
do suck it.
But that was the thing at this point there
to the part where Steve Austin gets
over, ECW has become
a thing, whatever that thing was,
not sure, but it became a thing, and it was
the everybody gets to
cuss era.
And then they get Mike Tyson.
So now down
south, you know, Bischoff
has been said, well, we're
more adult oriented and we're
you know, we're more reality-based.
Well, now they've not only on the WWF,
they've got titties and tube sock penises,
but now they got Mike Tyson.
And WCW could have had him.
They didn't even say that.
Yep.
Well, and they didn't bring that up,
but he needed money.
And he was going to do something
if you paid him enough money,
and WCW passed on him.
And then did you see where Stephanie was doing
her modern sit down and they said well what did you think because you know with the the rape conviction
and all what did you think about the doing the thing with mike tyson and she was like he hadn't
been arrested yet right he just got out of prison for three years not only it had been arrested
happened like 91 yes and and he was this was what about six months after he'd bitten evander
holofield's ear off so and that was you know again
that was the whole reason why that he was the fucking hottest celebrity on the planet.
And of course, Austin Tyson, Austin Tyson, that whole thing happens.
And then as soon as now Austin is the man officially, and he's the champion,
and Tyson has served his purpose, and Michaels has taken his back and gone home,
and that's when they start Austin and McMahon.
And then that pretty much opens up the floodgates also to the
everybody becomes a weirdo era.
But it was it or was it not?
I guess so, yeah.
But Mr. McMahon and Steve Austin becomes an Uncle Dave said it.
And this is one thing I can't argue with.
And I don't think anybody else can argue with.
the biggest, not only the biggest money program rivalry, I should say, for the un-initiated,
but probably the best one in the history of wrestling, wasn't it?
You know, it's akin more to Jerry Lager versus Jimmy Hart than any feud between two wrestlers.
Yeah.
Just the ever-changing nature of it.
It went on for a long time.
It never really ended.
I mean, there was no real clear-cut end.
I mean, I know Austin turned, and that was the wrong thing, but that wasn't a
the end of the whole thing.
I mean, technically, Vince's last match, Austin,
came the stunner again.
Yeah.
It went on, I mean, that was,
whenever you saw Mr. McMahon, that was Mr.
McMahon's arch nemesis, and
Steve Austin was the biggest star in history of the business.
So...
And they didn't do enough to point that out.
You know, Hogan is a massive star.
They did a great job of pointing that out.
Steve Austin is what caused them to be able to go public.
Yeah.
And they...
There's different types of popularity, and Meltzer mentioned at one point that they're making more money now, but the height of their mainstream popularity was the attitude era, the 90s.
Well, with the television ratings and those amount of tickets being sold for that amount of shows, you can see that mathematically.
In the 80s, it was different than the attitude era, and that there were.
were probably even more people watching the television cumulatively overall,
but because so much of it was local syndication, there weren't national numbers,
and the WWF may even have been selling more tickets at that point in time,
but they're much cheaper priced, and there was also three and four shows a night
rather than one or two.
so they go through different eras of popularity,
but really, you know, the attitude era
because it's modern enough that people remember it in their memories
and it still was a lot of people watching, you know,
one specific product, that's pretty much the peak of the popularity,
but they're making a ton more money now, multiple times
what they were making before off fewer people.
And again, you think a T-shirt,
shirts, the attitude error was a time where it was common to see NWO, Austin 316, DX,
a number of different shirts from both companies out in public.
It was probably the height of wrestling shirts being sold in malls.
Yeah.
So, I mean, that's the thing.
If things were priced then, if T-shirts were priced then, like they're priced now,
just that alone would have boosted things.
That was a period, I think.
And again, you have to look.
Merch was easier to get then than it wasn't 84.
There were Hulkomania shirts out,
and maybe some Hot Rod shirts,
but nothing else really hit from WWF.
But that period in the late 90s,
that's when people outside of wrestling fans were watching.
Well, anyway, speaking of watching,
now everybody's watching Mr. McMahon.
And he says,
he invented Mr. McMahon because he really hates rich people.
He hates people that flaunt their own.
wealth and think they're better than other people.
And he drew memories from his childhood.
He hates himself.
Yes.
Well, and he said, that's another one.
I was good at fighting.
Nobody remembers that.
Remember when we've seen the book and the ringmaster and et cetera?
Nobody remembers Vince being this accomplished street fighter.
No, I think there was a story that like they remember some older kids chasing him and some
other kids away at some point.
But there was nothing about that.
Although when you see the photos of him when he's young,
even before he got on the steroids,
he had like a big, like he has long arms.
Yes.
And a big torso or a long torso.
So you could see him being, you know, a good fight for sure.
Well, he might have the reach on the other guy,
except when they come with the upper cut.
And boy, you got to watch out for the bread heart, they call it.
Yeah, low key, I'm really enjoying The Undertaker on this, too,
just the way he sits back and tells him.
tells these stories.
Like, he was there in the room and that happened.
So we didn't just get Brett talking about the beauty of the uppercut.
We also got The Undertaker.
But anyway, they asked Vince, they said,
what similarities do you share with Mr. McMahon?
And he said, oh, none whatsoever.
And Sean Michael says there's not that much difference between the two.
And Hoke Hogan says they're exactly the same person.
And Bruce says, it's really just Vince.
And then Vince says, well, I'm.
passionate about things.
But that's where
he came up with another of his favorite
statements. Perception is reality.
He doesn't understand
why people think he's really
Mr. McMahon.
But perception, and that's what
Vince says. It doesn't
to him, in
his world, in his way of thinking,
it doesn't matter
what the facts are, what people
predominantly believe
becomes the truth.
and therefore if you can change their perception
then you can change reality
if you make them think that something is different
than what it actually is then that that thing becomes that
to those people in Vince's mind
and he's got a fucking point
but see these and I know there's a family episode
coming up but a lot of these
little life lessons are reasons
why I'm glad that I was already a full-grown adult and had another family before I met Vince McMahon.
Yeah, and then you hear some of these people say like, oh, he was a father figure to me. Yeah, no shit, John Cena.
You're dressing like him now. What the hell is that? A father-frey. Did he introduce you a guy who makes his jackets?
Yeah, he told him, we're at a shop in the same place in Hong Kong, Barnett used to go.
But anyway, then, about now the WWF is winning the war and beating WCW and the Rock has come along and got added to the
top mix and
the WWE has become a cultural
phenomenon
and as they mentioned it was the peak of popularity
but also the valley of bad taste
and they started
you know focusing a bit on
what was actually on this show
and remember I was there for a lot of it
but then I left and I was in OVW
and an
and a lot of it I just didn't watch on purpose,
but God Almighty.
They showed all the footage of all the insane things
that were going on and lewd or crude or whatever.
And there's Vince.
He said, well, no, no, no, come on now, pal.
No one got killed.
And then they have footage of the Buried Live match.
And there's a guy that, he's in that casket.
And Vince says, nobody got raped.
And then they have a piece of video of Vince.
screaming in the microphone, come on out here,
you rapist.
I forgot about that one.
And then they have been saying, well,
people didn't use any knives or guns.
And then they have the clip of Pilman drawing a gun on fucking Austin.
And, you know, the bad influence on the kids.
And the kids are all grabbing toward their,
their peckle areas and telling people to suck things.
Who is he calling out to the ring when he said,
come on out here, you rapist.
Who knows? Who knows?
Who has any
fucking idea?
And so, and
then there's Michael's, and by the
way, goddamn, I wish that somebody
would get Henry Kissinger out of retirement
to broker a fucking settlement between
Michael's his left eye and his right eye
because they're getting further apart all the time.
Hey, you know what happened? He was in the locker room. Brett said,
Sean, you didn't know about this? And he goes, God is my witness
I haven't. God struck those eyeballs.
Oh, God said, I'll
teach you out of witness here boom right then what happened after that his eyes went two different
ways and he hurt his back in a casket match in a mysterious injury almost like it was from above
from above or below uh but michael's admitted well we went too far with our treatment of women
when they're just fucking beating up the women and drop kicking them and stripping their clothes off
the bra and panties era
and Bruce was like
well that was what was on TV at the time
you know again I always thought
with the bra and panties thing
and hired these lingerie models
getting a ring and stagger around like
fucking baby fucking deer on ice
I always
had the
the eating dog shit analogy
if it became a popular
thing to eat dog shit
and people were just
everywhere just down on all
on a street eating dog shit,
I still don't believe
I'd be partaking in the dog shit.
By the way, by the way, I was watching
TV. That wasn't everywhere on TV.
It was like every channel, it's like, all right, it's time
for tits.
Yes.
8 p.m. It's tits time.
There's nothing we can do about it. It's the times.
They couldn't admit that the two
morally bankrupt,
mentally inefficient,
and chronologically
growth-stunted fucking
writers that they had
hired that were writing the television
were watching Jerry Springer on a loop all day
for six hours.
And you know what? That says something too. The fact that what
they pitched based off that appeal to Vince.
It says a lot about Vince's sensibilities
based on... See, now, I don't
feel so bad now for sometimes
being downvoted on some of the things I was
pitching versus some of the things as somebody else was
pitching. When I know some...
The reason now why some of them were being
caught. Bark like a dog for me.
See, if you get to actually do that for real
in your private life, you don't have to fucking act out these
delusions on the wrestling program. But nevertheless.
And by the way, let me just once again remark
that Sable's fake tits look bolted on.
When they had the, where she stripped her shirt off
and she's got the handprints painted over her ariolas.
Good Lord, that looks painful to grab a hole.
I would either be afraid one would squish and pop and something,
or they would be very hard and potentially clay-like to the touch.
I mean, that's the thing.
First of all, she had a very pretty face.
Second of all...
You think?
I think so.
I think a pretty woman.
She got to kind of face men-like.
Too bad a man didn't get it.
get it. Again, I didn't say that, but I agree with you. It's one thing if you start with something
and you give them a little boost in size, so they look somewhat natural. But when it's just
basketball is being held up by your collarbone, it's not attractive to me. Because then it just
doesn't look real in any way. The idea is not just, I have big tits now, but they're not tits.
It's supposed to look like tits, but whatever. I'm sorry to tell. I like big tits.
but they're fake as fuck.
That could have been a hit.
For Sir Mixalot?
Somebody.
Sir Titsalot.
Rick Rubin would have produced that.
Hey, Rick Rubin's fucking,
Rick Rubin's bathroom at his place
off of Sunset Boulevard
was wallpapered from floor to ceiling
in naked women pictures.
So I bet you he would have.
And then we get to,
after the other four,
fallout of Montreal and screw job and blah, blah, blah, was Owen.
And Vince had said, we said here, he said, Owen said to him, I'd like to stay.
Well, no, what Owen said was he would stay when Vince tore up his existing contract that,
because Owen couldn't just leave.
He could have asked for his release.
Right, he was still under contract.
But he was still under contract, but before, because.
Vince didn't want to lose Brett and Owen and Nightheart.
Honestly, and I love Jim, he's a great guy,
but Vince wanted to lose Knightheart when he had him.
So, and Davy was another issue we've talked about,
but of the Whole Heart Foundation,
Vince didn't want to lose Brett and Owen.
so he offered owen
$400,000 a year from $250
that is the guy he said I'll tear the existing one up and start you from here
on 400 that's another $150,000 a year in 1998
and everybody knows Owen
at that time only wanted to wrestle another however many
few more years and
go back to Calgary to spend more time with his family
and the kids and be a fireman.
So he was like, okay.
And Vincent promised him also he'd push him
as a single.
And the natural program
was with Michaels.
And Michael's belittled him on the promos
and buried him behind the scenes
and didn't want to work with him, wanted to work
with more of his personal friends and buddies.
And
you know that's so that uh and then the whole back thing
and it Owen but remember when Owen became the nugget
see to me that's what hurt Owen Hart the most
they brought him back as the black heart he looked kind of cool
and then Triple H goes out there and calls him a nugget
and there was no comeuppance well and the and the nugget well yeah we flushed the
main turd but that one little nugget that just won't go down
and they didn't take Owen seriously
and they didn't put him over seriously
and as a result, boom.
It was so by the time that
1999 rolled around,
Michaels was already well long at home.
Triple H was in the main events,
moved on to other people.
And Owen was the fucking blue blazer
and they went to Kansas City
and we know what happened there.
That's one of the big missed opportunities.
There was something to do with Owen
after the Brett Hart stuff that they just completely screwed up?
Yeah, because he wasn't part of the click or the click approved
list of goddamn opponents at the time.
And I was sitting there watching it.
So don't anybody tell me that that wasn't the case.
Anyway, Vince's reasoning now, apparently, I don't know if it's always been the story.
I hadn't heard this one was for not stopping the show.
when Owen fell was, well, the live audience didn't really see what happened.
We were in a blackout.
What the fuck?
They were the only ones who saw what happened.
Yeah, they were in a VTR segment, so the house lights were down because the promo was
airing on the screen in the arena, but it wasn't like they were a pitch black goddamn,
oh my God, my God, I can't see my fucking feet.
No, people, they saw what happened.
and Vincent we felt a duty to continue
and if it was me if I was at fall and I'd want the show to go on
well if you you there's a lot of different things that you feel
that a lot of other people wouldn't feel about you
but that so that was now yeah the live audience didn't really know what went on
except that a guy fell into the ring from the ceiling in front of them
whether the lights were all the way up or not
And, you know, Martha sued and won,
and then the WWF sued the shackle manufacturer,
and I think they won.
Well, settlements, I believe, in both cases.
Well, Martha got $30 million or whatever.
To me, she won as far as the court proceeding.
But then the teaser for the next episode
is now they're starting.
to show not only the bumps, but the explosions and the car wrecks and the furniture and
Undertaker's comment at some point, enough is enough.
Of course, now here we are 25 years later, and all we look at, at least on one channel is car wrecks,
explosions, whatever the fuck.
So apparently they haven't had enough yet, but they were right at some point,
enough was about to be enough because they couldn't keep it going.
But that's the tease.
So overall, Brian, what you'd think about number four attitude?
You know, again, I feel so weird about this.
I enjoyed watching it.
I didn't learn anything new.
I felt there was a lot of stuff left out.
And again, a lot of it depends on the talking heads they have.
Wouldn't even talk about earlier of all the guys they could have gotten from the 80s,
even though Tony Atlas was great,
how did he end up being the guy picked?
I don't know.
You know, he was fired in 86,
came back briefly in 91.
How did he end up being the guy picked for that?
You know, so there's a lot of people.
Well, now, because I'm sure a lot of people didn't actually, you know,
answer the phone or get back with him or whatever.
I would like to say with any certainty that I was either asked for
to do this or not asked to do this,
because I get emails asking me to do things.
and from a few years ago,
I can't remember whether it was the Vince book,
the Vince Doc, or whatever.
But at this point, it may be also the people who said,
yeah, I'll be involved.
And you know, the question we don't know the answer to
is how much of the direction of anything changed
in production and editing and storyboarding
after all these stories started coming out.
This wasn't something they started making
after that point.
They were making it a few years before it.
So what direction was this going to go in if Janelle Grant had not come out or Vince had not been forced out?
At 77, it's time to retire.
Yeah, until he came back.
Yeah.
I mean, if all these things hadn't happened, you know, what were they going to do?
Was it going to be six episodes?
Was it going to be six episodes?
And, you know, I don't want to say anything spoilers for the later episodes, but, you know, it seems like more work and more thought may have been put into
earlier episodes than later episodes.
Well, I will say that
the earlier stuff is tougher
if you're trying to produce a television program anyway
because you have to educate the viewer
in the first episode, especially
and in the first couple,
on who almost all your entire cast of characters are
and how they got to that point.
And then my feeling on this was
that the middle episodes are starting to be
a bit more generic wrestling documentary
and that they
go into a short piece on who this guy was
or why that match happened
or this side incident
and how it kind of involves Vince McMahon
or it's in the periphery of Vince McMahon.
It's under his purview.
And then they go back to Vince's kind of chronological story.
So the middle episodes, I think,
moving more slowly because they're, they got more footage and they're telling more individual
wrestling stories within. Does that make any sense? It does. And again, we've said this about
every episode. We're finding out a lot of things about the storylines and the business decisions
that were happening behind the scenes. Not a lot about Vince McMahon, the human being at all.
Yeah. And that's, you know, like, oh, he came to my birthday party and he did this, nothing.
We're not learning anything about him. Wrestling fans.
aren't learning anything they didn't know to go back to what you said at the start of this.
This is for Netflix viewers, not wrestling fans.
Wrestling fans aren't learning anything, and in fact, you know, we're finding things that are left out,
but we're not, there's no insight into his psyche at all.
If they'd have gone and interviewed the guy that has the little convenience store and lunch counter
down the road from Vince's house, a little old place, right on the side of the road with
a small parking lot, like it's on one of those
roads in Greenwich, Connecticut,
not a major thoroughfare.
And they got the creaky wood floor
and you go in and they got the convenience store stuff,
but also you get the chicken fingers or the sandwiches.
And Vince gets his turkey on regular white bread
with just light fucking mustard, right?
Just the blandest, plainest fucking sandwich you can possibly have.
But if they interviewed the guy, say, yeah, he comes in here every fucking Wednesday.
For like 20 years, he brings two or three people with him.
He buys their lunch and he drives off in a goddamn $100,000 car.
Wonderful guy.
That's crazy.
He would have that much tripped a fan for lunch.
But his reputation being that he never slept, he was always up working.
He always had work to do.
Well, no, that's the thing he would have.
And they were thick turkey sandwiches.
I'm talking an inch tall stack of turkey on these goddamn.
I'm saying, but plain white turkey.
I'm pretty sure it was white bread, although it may have been wheat,
but it seemed like it was just very thin, very plain bread,
and light mustard, because there's no fat in it whatsoever, no calories.
And he would sit there and they'd cut it in a half,
and he would eat each half in about three bites,
because he'd stub it in his face and he was chewing on his big wad of turkey
while he's looking in his book,
because we're working, it's a work day,
and he needs to get the fucking meal out of the way as quick as possible,
and it's not, he's not eating for enjoyment, it's fuel.
He says that, and then the power bar gets unwrapped.
This is not food, this is fuel.
I have to do this to keep going.
There's a great example of something you've talked about in the past that's fascinating,
a look inside of how Vince operates in the real world.
Nothing, like, not even that kind of stuff here.
You know, seriously.
Look at how he eats.
Look at how he behaves in public.
Nothing about Linda running for office and him crying at the back of the stage.
You know, like the examples we know and have seen are all kind of being pushed to the side for, you know, the same WWE-centric documentary we've seen just with some opposing voices, like a Phil Mushnick or even a Dave Meltzer.
Again, it's not for us.
But, you know, I'll say one more thing and we'll close up on this episode.
but Vince is hard on everybody.
It's an overarching theme in this series,
how hard he was on his kids,
because how hard his father was on him, et cetera, et cetera.
He's hard on himself, too.
Remember the story that I've told about his garage door?
He will fuck with his own shit
if he gets mad at himself for making any kind of error.
And the story for the newbies is Vince had like a four-car
garage in his mansion in Greenwich,
and it opened up on this little courtyard
where you'd back out and then you'd pull out
through the gates and onto the road.
And one day he's by himself and he gets in his
land rover, range rover, rover,
rover, come on over, whatever the fuck he was driving.
And he puts it in reverse.
He thinks he has hit the button for his
electric garage door opener.
He hits that, but he doesn't really hit it.
He puts the car in reverse, and he's not paying any attention,
and he backs out and he backs into his garage door.
And he looks up and sees, he's like, God damn it.
He fucking pulled up and put it reverse again
and continued backing all the way through the goddamn door.
Just go, well, fuck it, it's done now.
He penalized his own self because he's goddamn, what the fuck?
And then he drove off.
I've learned more about Vince at home from you,
and people can check it out on your Vince McMahon omnibus that's already out there
than I did from the documentary.
That's the point.
Like at a certain point, and I mean, again, Vince a dirty pervert,
and he needs to pay.
But it goes a little bit to his argument that it wasn't,
that they were conflating Mr. McMahon with Vince McMahon,
only because they focused at some point almost exclusively
on Vince and the business is nothing about Vince McMahon,
Vince McMahon
Off hour
Like there's nothing about it
And you know
There has to be something
And you've said
You said more
The pool stories
Him not knowing
How to press mute
Driving through the garage door
Hanging out at his house
Like all these things
Nothing
Nothing about Vince McMahon
And again
If the only person
They had that had any insight
Into that was Bruce
He's not gonna say anything
Yeah
He's Baghdad Bob
But the thing is
all of those examples that I've been able to give were not in conjunction with
social activities we were all there to work you're always there
whatever Vince does most of it is revolving around his work or people that he is around
to work with and then social things happen because you have to speak to each other
you know then you make that a topic in the thing tell us about Vince's social life
Tell us about Vince's friends.
Well, I don't know if he has any friends.
I've never seen him do anything in a social setting.
Vince, what was the last movie you saw?
Like nothing to just paint the picture.
Well, like you said earlier, it may have been in one of the other segments.
I've lost track now.
We'll do another segment here in a second.
But you said, well, he does have a circle because he's got the physical trainer and a blah, blah, blah.
But again.
Those twin handlers, yeah, the brothers.
The handlers.
But the, that's business.
And to Vince, Vince's thing is.
always been working and working out, and he does both with religious fervor. They kind of blend
together. So yes, he's close to his personal trainer because he's always working out. And yes,
he's got his handlers because they're the ones that carry his suits to the... Remember I said
at the Hall of Fame when I was down there? I said, fuck, he's now got two guys following him around
just to carry his suits to the fucking taping so he can pick which one he wants to... When I was riding around
with him. He had his own suit bag with his own suit, and
he had one. But now they've got
five for him to pick from, and there's two guys whose job it is to go get them.
But it's still related to work. It's not like,
yeah, boy, you know, Clem, it lives down the road from Ron Howard
in my neighborhood. Well, we like to drive down to the lake
every once in a while. There's a fucking seafood place. You don't
hear that.
I don't think it exists.
But again, I've heard Dick Ebersol say that him and his wife would go out to dinner with Vince
and his wife.
They all lived in Connecticut or in the general area.
That was in the 80s.
But again, that's just one example.
Okay.
But that was in the 80s and also who's Dick Ebersole?
Dick Ebersoll was the head of NBC Sports who created Saturday Night's main event.
Yeah.
And taught WWE's production team had to be a major league production team.
Imagine that accidentally Vince would...
develop a friendship on a social basis with a guy that had that job.
But, I mean, nothing. Again, nothing. What's Vince like outside of work? Just even ask the question. How does Vince drive? Have you ever seen Vince hit on a woman or shit on a woman? None of these questions were asked of anybody.
Maybe they will on episode five. We will find out that was episode four, attitude. We shall return. Much to Jace, knock around.
Chagrin with episode five right after this.
You know, Jim, as we take this short break in action for this commercial timeout,
it's important to think about how much more successful the attitude error would have been
if WWE had something like Shopify.
Oh, boy, right there, right there from the very get-go.
Shopify could have been handling the merchandise.
Shopify could have been handling the infrastructure or the whole...
They could have changed the whole game.
But they didn't have Shopify back then,
so we had to make do with human beings and human error.
The game we had.
People sticking their finger in the till, things like that.
But now it's modern times, it's science.
It's space age technology, and nobody,
nobody does selling better than Shopify,
not even Ricky Morton, sells better than Shopify,
because they are the home of,
the number one checkout on the planet.
If you've checked out their checkout,
you'll know there's no way you can check out on that.
And with shop pay, they boost conversions
up to 50% from wherever they were before.
And that means that way less carts are going abandoned.
And it's terrible.
It's a shame to lose a cart.
Those poor carts out there abandoned in the cold, cruel world,
nobody to love them.
That's what led to the problems.
in the McMahon family.
Is people not loving their carts,
abandoning their carts?
I have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
But I'll tell you, Shopify is going to make sure that people are,
they're chained to your cart.
They're not going to get away from your cart until your sale happens.
And then you know what happens every time that they make a sale?
That is not.
Wait, that's not, hold on.
That was the previous spot.
Yeah, I hit the wrong button there, but you will hear,
every time you make a sale over and over again
until it rings out in your eardrums
because Shopify is going to make you money
if you're into growing your business,
your commerce platform better be ready to sell
wherever your customers are.
If they're scrolling or they're strolling
or they're on the web in your store,
if they're in their feelings or their feed,
I'm sorry, small print,
everywhere in between,
you're going to make some money off
You're going to grab them, hold them down, put the boots to them, reach in their pocket,
and pull out all their spare chains with Shopify.
Because businesses that sell more sell on Shopify.
It's no secret.
It's a well-known fact that Shopify will, they're going to go out, people that don't even want
your product.
It's not even a well-known fact.
They're going to force it on you.
No, you see, there you go again.
They're not going to force anything on anyone.
They're going to, they're going to make people.
realize that they need your product.
They're going to help you bring your product
to the masses. They're going to
make sure that these suckers out there
buy the shit that you're selling no matter
what. They're going to make sure that people...
Because they're on your side.
Yes. Shopify is on your
side. They're just not doing any of the nefarious
things that you're assigning to them.
I didn't say anything about nefariosity.
I just said that one way or another
these people are going to walk off with some of your
shit and they're going to pay you for it or Shopify
will know the reason why and they will turn around
and they'll tell these people
that they ain't going to get away with that.
They need to be giving little Burford some more money.
You won't ship until you're paid.
That's right.
No shit, no ship.
That's no shit.
Upgrade your business right now
and get the same checkout as all the big boys are using.
Sign up for your $1 a month trial period.
A dollar a month.
How can we bury that lead?
Only a dollar a month to make all this money
with the best Shopify
checkout system and shop pay
and all the other things that they have,
a dollar a month, that's what is that,
three cents a day?
It's not even.
Except with days,
and you got the months with 34 days in them.
So right now,
sign up for your $1 a month trial period
at Shopify.com slash cornet.
And that's lowercase.
It's not low class, but it's lower.
case, Shopify.com
slash cornet
to upgrade your selling
today $1 a month trial period
see what they can do for you.
You'll never be able to put them down.
You'll never be able to quit Shopify.
You'll be addicted to
she'll be chained to the
bowels of Shopify for the rest of your life.
You'll be so improved.
Because they will make you money.
Just like that.
That's right. Shopify one more time.
What's that promo?
Jim. Well, the promo code is
Cornett. I assume
they know how to spell my name by now. This is
the program that we've been doing for a while.
It's on all the material. And that's
lowercase if you care to know.
Well,
from there, let's go back to
here or there. We are
going here and there back to episode
five of the
Mr. McMahon Netflix docu-series.
He's everywhere. He's
Elko Bonn. But
once again, we are back
with more of more
Vince McMahon,
the six-part docu-series
the world was clamoring for.
We are now at episode five,
a big episode,
and here to talk about it,
Mr. Jim Cornett.
Clammer, clamor, clamor, clamor, clamor, clamor, clamor.
That's the world clamoring.
There was people clamoring everywhere.
The title of episode five is family business.
a family business,
sort of like the mafia.
And I've got to say right off the bat,
Paul Heyman opened this up
by psychoanalizing
Vince McMahon, better than anybody else ever has
verbally at least.
Go out of your way to see it.
I couldn't even write it.
I had to have been a court stenographer to write it down.
It was so eloquent.
And the summation is
that Vince is making up for the first
12 years of his life
by having created
his own world that he is in
soul control of.
And what have I been saying?
Go back
to the childhood.
Examine the childhood.
And Haman, you know,
Haman is the new Orson-Wells.
Is he not? Although 12 was when he met
his dad, not when he moved in with his dad.
Well, but just the first
12 years until he realized
there was something else
going on besides the trailer park and the misery in North Carolina,
here's my way out.
Here's something, right?
You know, Heyman has a very unique perspective because he's a very
observant guy and he's a very smart guy
and he saw them interact before Vince was in charge.
Him and his dad, I mean, he's seen a lot.
Yeah, and the thing is, again, like I said, he's Orson Wells.
It doesn't matter what the subject is now.
You want to sell some cheap wine?
Get Paul Heyman to talk about it.
You got a sci-fi movie that can't get made anywhere, any other way.
Get Paul Heyman to do the narration.
Just the fucking grovitas and the way he words things.
Everything he's doing is like a closing argument for a jury.
Yes.
I'm inclined to say he should do Persian rugstore commercials too.
He can sell anything.
and then they go into
this is the family business episode
where again
they revisited
what we thought they might be finished with
his childhood
the playboy interview he did
where he
and you can't ever get a straight answer
and that's another thing
why does he say these things
but then never clarify these things
he wants to get attention with things he says
but then
when those things get attention
you can't even get him
to go that far again about it.
In the Playboy interview, he's talked about a number of times physical abuse from his stepfather,
but then he alluded to sexual abuse from his mother.
But then when they asked him if that's what he was alluding to,
then he talks in circles.
Well, you get the crap beat out of you every day and there's incest involved.
What the...
I hate the laugh, but you're right.
he doesn't really answer anything about it.
And then the next thing they show is his mom being wheeled backstage.
Yes.
And there is mother who lived to be a hundred years old, right?
Was wheeled in the wheelchair in the recent past.
And there's this gray-haired old woman visiting.
Dress very nicely.
Obviously, she has a budget for this.
So, I mean, he's taken care of her.
And then there were clips of Vince with his kids.
And you wonder, sometimes patterns don't repeat themselves generation to generation.
Sometimes they do and sometimes only part of them.
And what the fuck is going on here?
Because there's a lot of this they're starting to get into now about Shane.
He started out really the same way only earlier than Vince did by meeting Vince Senior.
Because Shane always wanted to be into business.
but he also wanted to be in the business of the business, as he mentioned.
I mean, you know, when he was wrestling, which he started late in life,
but, you know, the daredevil stuff, and they get into it toward the end of the series also,
he was trying to get his father's acceptance.
Well, if you think about it, he could actually say he's been around it his entire life,
because from his first memories, his father was doing something,
and everything Vince was doing
was building up.
I mean, he was never like,
okay, we're good here.
He wanted more, he wanted more.
He could say he saw his dad and mom sit there at the kitchen table
and figure out how they're going to do things
before he got too big.
So, I mean, he has seen everything
and you could understand why the business,
but the family business.
I mean, to go to the name of the thing,
his grandfather, his great-grandfather,
his grandfather, his father,
his mom, and it's all his dad does.
No outside hobbies or anything.
You could understand how he expected
and why he had a desire to be there.
And, you know, we've talked about
Shane a bunch here on the program
as far as his early time in the office.
And, you know, he,
they kind of bore this out in the documentary
is in that Shane is the nice one.
Shane's the one that most everybody likes.
But Stephanie had more aptitude for thinking about the wrestling business.
And maybe part of that was, you know, because of the Triple H influence to point her in some right.
Because I was there when they both showed up.
Shane was, as I've said, had the office down the hall, dribble the basketball with one hand on the phone with the other hand, energy for fucking miles.
and Stephanie out of college, she was interning at the studio
and then started on TV where they showed some of those clips
and within a few months after that it'd become the head of creative
and they were starting to audition Hollywood writers.
So it wasn't like they had to go on the Chitlin circuit
and do the tank towns and pay their dues.
but at the same time, you know, they kind of started,
I've said before they started at a deficit
because who was ever going to tell the boss's kids what was wrong, right?
They knew what their dad was doing,
but nobody was ever telling them the other side of it.
So they didn't have a clear picture from above, shall we say.
Yeah, we've seen that in another McMahon family documentary.
in the past where Shane says stuff about how
they were getting, you know, record high ratings on TBS,
but just because Ted Turner wanted to buy them, they had to go.
Not that.
The ratings are going down.
Bill Watts was beating him.
And Ted Turner was going to kick him off the network.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, but...
You know, it's what he grew up hearing.
It's the version of history he heard growing up.
Yeah, Vince wasn't going to come home and say, well, shit, they hate us in Atlanta.
But anyway, and the footage of Stephanie doing the
risque things on television, again, with modern eyes and with the allegations, accusations,
and assimilations that have been made, you know, boy, howdy.
Vince encouraged her and Triple H.
Was he trying to breed like a perfect wrestling executive grandchildren?
Because normally you hear the promoter, I don't, my daughter ain't going to go out with no wrestlers,
but he was trying to get them together,
and then life imitated art when they were already together on television.
But Vince is like, well, it made sense for Stephanie to marry Triff.
It's like, maybe they should have asked Linda about how romantic Vince is.
Well, it makes sense for my daughter to breed with the wrestling stud.
It makes sense for me to marry this woman who wants to be a lawyer
and is willing to pay for all the bills while I struggle with this wrestling shit.
and Vince did want to put the wedding on on pay-per-view by the way
Ed course booked himself against Stephanie in a street fight match
six days before the wedding
I forgot all about that until they showed that and talked about it here
I forgot about the match I never realized it was right before the wedding I guess
now here's a thing when J.J. Dylan went in and quit that time
well not that time there was only one time he quit but
he went in and quit
and Vince immediately he told Bruce
because Bruce told me and I didn't know the whole story
until quite later on when I heard it from JJ
but
JJ had quit like the day or two
days before Shane's wedding when Shane married
Marissa his wife
but that didn't have it
who ended up working there too
well yes
and they also the heir to the
Mazola fortune that was her maiden
named Marissa Mazzola, the corn oil folks.
But JJ went in and quit because that's when he was finally able to sell the house that he had up there in Connecticut
to get out of there because he was upset when they had cut everybody's money during all those
financial issues in 95 where they didn't cut everybody's money.
They cut the wrestling people's money and left the executives and the business office's money
alone. And so
JJ had put his house on the market
quietly. And when he
finally
sold it, that's when he
gave his notice and said he was leaving.
That happened to be
before Shane's wedding,
but which is worse?
Because that's what Vince and Bruce
were both like, well, he's doing this
to try to ruin Shane's wedding.
What would be worse? You've ruined
Shane's wedding because you quit your
job that you work for my company.
or I've ruined Stephanie's wedding because I potatoed her in a street fight and she's got a black eye.
There was, you know, anyway, they went into Linda.
And it all goes back to control.
Didn't he want Shane and Marissa to live on his property?
Or did he have a house built for them?
What was the story?
No, well, no, there was a, he didn't have it built.
He had it renovated.
There was a building building.
down the hill from his property,
I don't know how many acres he had.
Did he have 10 acres, 12 acres,
whatever the fuck it was,
but a big wooded area behind his house in Greenwich.
And there was another building down the hill
that the lower level was like a two or three car garage.
And then there was like an apartment up above.
And I think maybe his live-in couple,
the maid and cook or whatever,
may have been there at one time.
but he had the whole thing renovated,
spent like $150,000 on a renovation again in 1996 or whatever it was,
so that he gave that to him as a wedding present.
But then they've moved on to bigger and better things since then.
That's a move, though.
Here's your present.
You get to live near me.
You get to live next door to me.
That's, you know, I don't know how to me.
Right down the hill so you could look up the hill
and there's this big house where Papa's living.
but anyway, as I said, and Linda too, and I'm glad they acknowledged that,
and Linda acknowledged that she hated being a TV performer and knew she wasn't any good at it,
because we did too.
Everybody did.
But as we've mentioned, you know, especially after all the scandals and everything,
as the business end CEO and real world representative, she was great,
because she was the normal one.
She's the reason they were so well connected in Connecticut.
She's the reason they found that about the Zahorian investigation.
Because she was schmoozing with, you know, whoever was.
Was that in Pennsylvania?
Was that in Connecticut?
I forget.
Well, they had all those dinners and fundraisers before she was running for office,
just society things where you would meet people that were connected to people.
Right.
Yeah.
And she looked normal.
well, here's this, you know,
a reasonably attractive middle-aged woman
who's not bat-shit crazy.
Yeah, that's the thing.
How crazy could the wrestling stuff be
if she's the one in charge,
if she's the one speaking on their behalf?
But then they saw her in a wheelchair on raw drugged
and thought, well, what the fuck is happening here?
It's been a while since I watched that stuff too.
Oh, yes, and also, I mean, they did the angle with Trish
and Vince more on.
that later, but that
you know, Linda's
drugged and Trish has taken advantage of her
and Shane was not,
I don't think a fan for real, because Vince
said Shane is a bit more conservative
than Stephanie and I
the way he thinks about these things.
I'll say it now. Shane McMahon came away from this looking like
a really good guy. Honestly,
you come away, I came away from this, I came
away from this thinking, man,
I really like Shane McMahon a lot.
That's what I've been telling you.
nobody ever believes me until it's too late
and speaking of being too late.
And his father was a dick to him for no reason.
Well, yes.
And see, nobody believes me until it's too late.
But speaking of being a dick for no reason,
God damn.
The clip with Vince and Trish Stratus
stripping and barking like a dog.
He...
I have not seen...
I've mentioned De Niro and Pacino here lately.
I've not seen either De Niro or Pacino,
get that worked up into a fucking scene.
Because remember, this is one of those big gaps.
I'd heard about it, and I think I saw the clip a while back years ago,
but watching it now with everything that's been said,
what the fuck?
And if anybody had tried to do that on his television that wasn't him,
he would have had a fucking epileptic seizure over it.
I mean, I don't even know what to say.
I mean, the intensity of the performance was on another level from him.
Yes.
The crowd reactions and feeding into everything.
I mean, there's so many problems with the whole thing.
Now, with that said, Tristratus has the attitude.
That was the gig.
That was, my job was to make them hate me.
so that when I finally turned,
they'll like me.
But it's really uncomfortable to watch that stuff, though, yeah.
Her quote was, when we did that scene,
we knew it would all play out at WrestleMania,
and I would get my revenge.
But when we did that scene,
she's convinced herself that she's an actress,
and that's probably the way that they got a lot of those
fucking guys and girls to do a lot.
it's just entertainment.
You're playing a character.
It's acting.
Vince wasn't playing a fucking character.
Vince was working some shit.
It sounded like maybe Vince had either heard some of that shit before
or had gone over it in his mind as something he would say if he got the chance.
Yes.
I agree with that.
No, I completely agree with that.
But again, you look at all this stuff now.
And Vince McMahon's performance in any of the women segments,
knowing that later on at least there were women that he was sleeping with who were talent
and then he would do these things the Ashley Massaro example I don't know if it was this episode or the next one
all of these things and now you hear the allegations you know it's definitely some kind of deep
seated weird thing he has with women you know going back to we don't know exactly what happened
in the trailer with his mom blame his mother because of she is the one who brought the step
father into his life. They didn't talk about it here, but one of his favorite things to yell was
bastard. You know, you talk about things that he may have heard growing up. You have to wonder about
a lot of these things now, just because he's so fucked up on a cosmic level. You know, how many
of these things that he acted out were things he witnessed? Hmm, well, anyway. That'll be in my
documentary, ladies and gentlemen. The real-
Mr. McMahon.
All right, Mr. Tarantino or Ken Burns over there.
Here's one that I've referred to earlier, but this is where it came up.
Shane told the story of when he was a teenager or whatever wrestling Vince,
and Vince grabbed his fucking rib skin and fucking did something else and cheat,
pulled his hair back or whatever.
And Shane said, that's not fair.
You cheated.
And Vince said, that's what I do.
I cheat and I win.
Jesus Christ
Shane is
basically so my father taught me
when I was a child I should cheat
and that's why I'm just thinking
that's why I said earlier I'm so glad
that I had actual
parents and not
Vince McMahon
because what the fuck
I've said it before
but my father would have a
coneption fit as
as Mama Cornette used to say
if I went to
him and said, I think I ought to cheat it something, much less teach it to me.
Yeah, again, I came away from this, I see Shane as a sympathetic figure.
Yeah.
I see him as a good guy as a sympathetic figure and someone who, you know, his ideas may not
have always been the best, but he was never really given a chance to, his dad wanted him
under his thumb, but then he would, like, dare him to do something while keeping him under
his thumb.
Yeah.
and you know
and they say it in another
it may be the final
segment we've watched and recorded
and watched and recorded
but another one of Vince's
favorite expressions
that he gave to me
one time
you gotta learn to eat shit
and like the taste of it
in business
it's all better
you gotta learn to eat shit and like the
I cannot imagine
you know
I didn't get to, he didn't live long enough where I got adult fatherly advice, so the word
shit was not bandied around when I was a kid by my dad, but I can't imagine him giving me that
piece of advice.
And again, where did he hear that?
Who gave him that advice?
Probably Vince Sr.
Who didn't bother to check in with Vince Jr. for the first 12 years he was around.
But anywho, and then Shane and Vince wrestle at WrestleMania.
beat the shit out of each other.
And then
they get to Sable
where there's all kinds of footage of Vince
hitting on Sable, and I've
again reported the times that I had to sit in the room
with the two Vinces talking about Sable
and what she might look like wearing white cotton panties
and how gorgeous she was.
But Vince made her a star,
and then she sued them,
which, you know,
I think it was a bad example there
because she wouldn't have made 15 cents
in Chinese money doing anything else in the world in life.
What other talent did she possess
that wouldn't be paid by the hour as a cashier?
So I think it's a poor example
when they hold her up,
well, she sued them because they, you know,
didn't want to do this.
or didn't want to do that.
She made a fucking million dollars one year off at Playboy deal.
So I have no sympathy for the people who sued
that would have never been able to smell that much money
anywhere else in any other endeavor.
But if she was suing because Vince was trying to fuck her,
that's a different story.
Well, at first, she wasn't suing at first for attempted fucking.
She got mad first because they wouldn't give her
the goddamn big fucking multimillion dollar contract she wanted.
But there was enough to be settled.
And she thought she could go to fucking Hollywood
and be a major motion picture star.
See, this is one of those things where I wish we knew
the parts of the story we don't know
because she ends up suing saying that there was sexual harassment.
They settle.
And then she comes back.
What the fuck?
And then Stephanie cuts a promo on Vince on TV
with Sable sitting there about how she sued them all
for sexual harassment.
But did you see one
a key revelation that nobody would have known otherwise
about Vince McMahon's interview with these people for this.
I'm not sure.
It was during that part on his sit-down
that we found out that Paul Heyman was off-camera for Vince's sit-down.
Oh, that's right, because you hear Heyman chime in.
That's right.
Yes, and they had to close caption it.
So apparently, Vince asked for Paul to help produce him
just so he didn't fucking go too far off the deep end.
Yeah, and then a couple months later, Vince was watching the Hall of Fame
to see Paul Hamon yell, it's the Paul of that era!
I'm so proud of the Paul of that era!
It's a Game of Thrones!
And Hamon is the goddamn is the wizard, the Merlin and magician.
Lord Varies.
Whichever one.
They got into the obsession that Vince has with business
and the IPO selling the stock, Wall Street.
And Vince said that allowed us to go into different businesses.
They showed the Debbie Reynolds Casino.
They were negotiating on the Debbie Reynolds Casino
when I was still on a creative team.
So that was what, two years, three years for the stock deal.
And it was always a flop.
It never went anywhere.
They didn't even get into development.
They didn't even get to develop the property.
They bought it and it sat there until they got rid of it.
The restaurant flopped in Times Square.
The XFL turned out to be horseshit.
Vince, Vince's quote was, this can't fail.
And Bob Costas's quote was, it was stupid and crude.
They didn't even bring up WWE films.
Remember that?
I forgot about that.
That's right.
they had a movie studio and a record label.
And Vince was trying to always break,
and we'd already talked about the bodybuilding company.
He was trying to break the perception.
He could only have success at wrestling.
And did he ever?
No.
I'm thinking.
What else?
And he should have embraced that.
Because you know what?
A sick demented perverty may be.
He was the best that's ever done it.
Even if you don't like his style and the kind of wrestling he did,
no one promoted it better or marketed it better than him.
But meanwhile, the XFL drew the lowest prime time rating ever on network television for any program.
Apparently, according to Bob Costas, at that time.
Hence Dick Ebersol doesn't talk to him anymore.
And, you know, they talked about how Vince brings everybody back.
Hulk, Brett, Sable, all the people.
you know, they didn't mention the unmentionable.
They didn't mention Randy Savage or go into any of that at any point.
Nails.
No mention of nails.
Didn't mention nails.
They didn't mention that David Schultz was not welcomed back after he was the one to answer Vince's net that he cast out in the locker room.
Boy, I wish somebody would.
But then after WCW went under and was bought by Vince, business.
slumped.
And Austin got disgruntled and had the bad neck.
And Rock went to Hollywood.
And Vince decided that he wanted some goddamn ruthless aggression.
And that's when they started leading into the next era,
which would become known as the ruthless aggression era,
but it started with John Cena's promo to Kurt Angle and that whole deal.
But again, it was because Vince just decides this phrase,
in his head is what the attitude he wants everybody to have and he just keeps repeating it
and perception becomes reality.
What about Vince's, some of his over-the-top ideas?
Stephanie didn't want to admit the one where he was the one that got her pregnant.
But then they, they,
I can't even imagine pitching that to your own daughter.
But it would only be the characters.
You know, again, it goes back to what he,
described as his childhood, the incest,
that he won't actually say exactly what it was, but that it was there.
If you had a problem with that, if you had that happen,
why would you write that back into your life?
It's almost like, what do the kids call it projection?
When you say something that you're actually doing,
say somebody else is doing something that you're actually doing,
Trump does it all the time.
Maybe that's another reason he and Vince get along.
Maybe Vince's version is,
he wants to say the shit out loud
so that people will think it's part of the act
and then he's free to do it as a person
and it's, I don't know,
I don't know what's going on here.
But it's very bizarre.
Like remember, I mean, I think I brought this up before,
when Andre the Giant, the big angle they did
after they went national, the first one with Andre,
was John Stud,
Kempitara, and Bobby Heenan,
because Andre was foolish enough to team with
SD Jones, and that never did anyone any favors.
They got rid of SD, beat the shit out of Andre, and cut his hair.
That was when Andre's classic fro went away,
and on commentary, the way Vince,
and it's disturbing to hear it back,
over and over again,
rape him of his dignity.
There's something,
there's some shit he has heard somewhere,
that's inside of him that comes out for real
in a lot of this stuff.
Especially when, and
well, it was with him and Shane
and I'm trying to think was it the last
segment or was it the last episode of this one,
but maybe in this one where they were setting up the thing with,
no, it was when Shane came back.
So it's in the next one, but they end with Shane
and Vince's relationship here.
Where in the,
in the middle of him,
and Shane doing a face off Vince
to plug their
WrestleMania match, Vince
loses his
train of thought or train of
promo for a second
and just gets up with the microphone
on and everything in Shane's face.
I'll give you a fucking beating.
What the...
Yeah, what the fuck was that?
Yeah, it was...
It's like a flash
of goddamn, really, it's like a real-life
Wyatt video
where that
instantly the fucking transmission breaks and suddenly,
I'm going to give you a fucking beating.
And he's back to Captain Howdy or whatever.
But Shane wanted to be his dad.
He wanted to buy the UFC.
He wanted to run the WWE one day.
He wanted to be a promoter.
He wanted to, you know, have it run in the family.
Vince didn't want to...
Vince didn't get shoots at all because he couldn't control.
and he didn't think that the
talent, as they say, the fighters
looked like stars and he didn't
like not being
able to own all the characters, all the
intellectual property.
Shane was more of a real sports
fan so he
could see and he could see the
element of coolness that
mixed martial arts had and was going to
have with people, but he couldn't
get Vince to go for it.
And even Bonnie Hammer said,
I never knew Shane's status or what their relationship was really like.
And finally, they left this episode with Shane seeing that Vince was never going to step down, step aside,
or even give him a boost up to be like number two.
And that's when he gave notice and left to go out and do some of his own things.
And at the time, Shane was the heir apparent.
Remember there was that cauliflower alley on the East Coast.
And Lou Thess,
Lou Thess gives Vince an award
that says,
to Shane,
I work for your grandfather,
I work for your father,
I hope one day I get to work for you.
Yeah.
I mean, he expected it,
and you can understand why
Vince didn't do anything to help him break out.
And even, I guess it was the next episode,
we'll talk about it in that review.
The story that Paul Heyman told,
you know about Vince taking the knife and you know go do what I did buy out my dad yeah you forget once
again Vince didn't buy out his dad it was a sweetheart deal it's not like I had to go raise all the
money and do it that wasn't what it was but in Vince's mind it was hardship and sacrifice
his dad did him a favor and hooked him up and got his dad his dad was dying of cancer and
say okay what do I give a shit here if he can
fulfill the basic requirements
that I've set forth
and pay me four payments
out of the company that I've already set up
then he will own it
and if he
doesn't care enough to make those payments
then I'll keep his money and I'll sell it to Gino
but that's not exactly a guy
oh I've got to move heaven and earth to make this work
but that's the thing
but I guess Shane
Shane needed a little bit of help
from his dad both in terms of encouragement
in any way.
Yes.
Or in terms of some, you know, financial backing
or just some kind of backing to get something going.
Well, and also Stephanie wasn't any smarter
to the wrestling business than Shane was,
but Stephanie was living with or traveling with
or being with in whatever biblical fashion,
a guy that really knew the wrestling business,
Triple H, that had studied everything
and had learned politicking from some of the best also.
So she had an advantage.
that Shane didn't have,
but that Vince didn't have to provide either.
Otherwise,
then Vince,
in Curry,
oh, yeah,
you ought to go out with a guy like Triple H.
That's my kind of guy.
Does it be best for business?
So,
so yeah,
and that's the thing is that Shane didn't get,
I think Vince maybe thinks in his mind that he's,
you know,
tough love motivating these guys to,
and his kids to,
you know,
go out and do what he did and take some risks and everything.
But it's what's in his mind, sometimes not necessarily transferable or applicable to the real world.
And it also seems that Stephanie, not to say that she didn't have disagreements with her dad before the end,
Stephanie played the game, and Shane was always looking for a way not to play the game, but to have his own game.
And Stephanie rose up pretty quickly.
And then Stephanie got her own game.
You know, once again, suck it!
But, yeah, wherever we were going, that's the big ending.
That's the big ending, suck it.
Any closing thoughts on family business.
You know, Shane McMahon's been in the news lately as we are recording because of the photo of him with Tony Khan.
We'll talk about it on the next show, a photo of him now with the Young Bucks.
People thinking about, people talking about the idea of Shane McMan.
man appearing again on the national wrestling stage.
I think he came across in this
as a figure that everyone would kind of want is their friend.
Yeah. And again, I'm
telling you, he was the nicest one, which probably, because
I mean, even Linda, Linda is a very pleasant
woman, but I'm not saying she's
you know, friendly like fucking Shirley Booth
or whatever.
Linda was probably as cutthroat as
the rest of them in terms of business
or making deals or signing a contract.
And look, she worked for fucking Trump.
So her morals are suspect
or...
Still does. And still does on his behalf.
So her morals are either suspect or for sale,
but you could believe that she was, you know,
again, a normal person
and a respectable looking person
so she could stab you in the back.
You wouldn't expect it.
With Shane, he's a nice guy.
and he, for all the right reasons, wanted to be involved in the family business,
but he's got, you know, the wonderful kids and the nice wife and the whole thing.
And he doesn't need to put up with all this bullshit.
See, the problem, too, is as a Vince McMahon docu series,
where we're supposed to learn about Vince McMahon, Mr. McMahon,
we learn more about the Shane Vince relationship than anything else.
We really have no insight into everything with him and Linda.
It's not a secret.
they've been living separate lives for a very long time.
She's in Florida.
He's in Connecticut.
And you would never know that they've spent a minute apart from this documentary.
Right.
There's no insight into anything about their relationship at all.
There was four or five pictures of them together when they were younger.
When they were young.
They were shown on screen.
Yeah.
For this 50 year, 50-something year marriage.
There's stuff there, but there's like a lack of deep substance for a
lot. I mean, the Shane stuff was pretty deep. It explains a lot of Shane McMahon. I guess it answers
a lot of questions about things he did and directions he went. And episode six is going to
flesh that out more as we build to the big finale. Well, we will build to that big finale.
Let's get this going. Oh, boy. Right now, we will be back right after this.
Well, there it is, Jim, episode five of Mr. McMahon. And we're
talking about family business, talking about Shane and Stephanie and how they got involved,
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And from there, let's go back or two, because it's a different episode.
Let's go to episode six, the final episode, Mr. McMahon on Netflix.
Well, here we are, Jim, at the end.
The end of whatever the Netflix producers were allowed to make.
the final episode of Mr. McMahon,
the exciting new docu series that's tearing things up,
apparently millions and millions of people are watching it.
Those aren't all wrestling fans.
And the last episode was the one,
I guess you could say, was most damaging to Vince.
Well, when you started getting into the family dynamics
and poor Shane bless his little heart
and everything, and the,
again in
hindsight, in retrospect
a lot of things that
Vince said
that were just odd
or maybe mildly creepy
with whatever
has come to light since then
has gone into creepy overload
right?
But I think that
this one was worse
episode six.
The finish and boy howdy
talk about the
of the road, the end of the line.
I mean, they could have really tried to bury Vince a lot harder than they tried to bury him
if this is supposed to be a burial, and Bruce was highly perturbed about it.
They could have tried a lot harder.
Most of the burial comes from things that he either did as a person did on television
with double meaning produced himself
and in hindsight
said here on a sit-down.
You know, it's really interesting
the things that Vince was saying about himself,
not just here, but all throughout the series,
because it's not like he went to a therapist
and heard these things.
It's almost like what he has convinced himself
are the rules of his life.
Or he's diagnosed himself.
You know, my doctor I used to have
till he got so fucking old that
I didn't trust it anymore.
I have two computers in my head.
Well, let's say...
An apple and an egg.
An apple in a fucking orange, I think.
But he had a sign on his wall said,
do not confuse your Google search with my medical degree.
And I think Vince has done...
Because he opened up talking about, you know,
describing him the way he thinks somehow.
I can't remember how they led to it.
But he's like, I've got to it.
two computers running in my head and maybe a third I could access if I wanted to. And it's like
two brains. And it's hard for me to pay attention. Now bingo, he's got something right there.
And one day I'll get all the Batman. Like what kind of, he's talking like a super villain in a
DC comic. Well, yeah, like he has the, the professor X powers or whatever. But then the thing
that he said, and I wrote it down in capital letters, they said, well, what is your other brain
thinking about right now.
And he said, oh, it's something sexual.
And again, in hindsight, boy, howdy,
but that wasn't the only time there was another time
in the close of this show or later on in the program,
where they were asking him to describe himself or his qualities or whatever.
And he said, you know, one thing and the second thing.
and then he said sexually active.
It, out of,
he's almost, he's almost 80.
Was it even on anyone's mind?
He has to have people know that he can still do it.
He's the genetic jackhammer.
And it was like if you interviewed some author
on a fucking television show,
well, I like to play tennis.
I'm active in charitable causes
and I finger Dalmatians.
What, it just, no, what, it didn't belong in that, right?
Nobody was thinking in that direction.
He's got to interject that subject into the conversation.
And by the way, because he doesn't come out in the interview and go,
and by the way, I'm fucking around, we're supposed to believe he's sleeping with Linda?
Right?
Because I mean, they weren't even ever in the same room together for the documentary on his fucking life.
Yeah.
They weren't even in the same house, in the same, he was in a,
warehouse in a ring, which apparently he was getting to those fucking shoots at midnight
now from what's come out. From what you remember, when was Janelle Grant working there for
WWF? What time was it? Well, the lawsuit indicated, I think, that didn't she get hired on in
2019 and things blew up in 2021? And that's when she signed the deal or whatever. Was that
When was this interview with Vince?
God damn it was after that, they started shooting stuff.
The earliest date I saw was 2020 or 2021.
Right.
So if they interviewed Vince, if that was one of the first things they shot,
and I don't know, I don't know the order of things.
In 2020 or 2021, that shit was active.
So when he's saying, I'm thinking about sexual things,
based on his text messages that we've seen,
it could all be tied to this.
We don't know the time.
timeline. And, you know, you would almost think it's earlier, too, because they never actually
say anything about the plastic surgery and the dye job and the mustache. But again, at a certain
point, he completely changed his look. So there's like a break point right there. Well, yes, because you
you see that, you know, he at one point looked like an older guy with the shorter grayish hair and
blah, blah, blah. And his face was starting to droop a bit. And then he comes. And he comes
out looking like Snidly Whiplash out of nowhere,
but also when he was doing the sit down,
apparently he was putting him off,
putting him off, talking about the rock being late.
He would make him wait for these interviews all day.
He'd show up at like 11 o'clock at night.
He'd go to get his hair and makeup done
and come out in the exact same suit.
So all those interviews,
that looks like he's in the same ring,
in the same room,
in the same suit on the same day.
It was different interviews,
but he looks exactly the same.
Like, there's an evil genius to that.
You know, you almost admire the commitment,
but there needs to be some sort of commitment.
But what is an 80-year-old man doing until 11 o'clock at night
when he's supposed to show up at noon or whatever the fuck?
Again, I don't know the timeline, but we know who he was hanging out with.
It was that physical therapist.
Trainer person.
A doctor, the shone.
chef?
Remember the chef?
Remember the chef?
Yeah, I wonder what the chef is cooking up these days.
And those two brothers.
I mean, they're real brothers.
I'm not trying to say anything else.
What?
Oh, God damn it.
But anyway, that's the way this episode started out.
My other brain is thinking about sex.
And then they pick up with WrestleMania 2007, the build and the
the whole nine yards, the hair versus hair match
Battle of the Billionaires with
Vince McMahon and Donald P. Trump.
The P stands for pig shit.
And they make the point that, again, you know,
a lot of people, not just us, have been talking about.
Bob Costa said Trump's persona is closer to wrestler than statesman.
And the lady's name you were looking for is Sharon Mazer.
Yes.
Yes, you are correct.
I thought she was great.
I thought she actually brought a seriousness
and everything she said was intelligent and right.
And she said Trump is an example
of the pro wrestlingification of American politics.
And they were showing the clips.
And Uncle Dave mentioned similarities
between Trump and Vince,
as I have.
Except that, you know, Vince
until he went mad as more polished and groomed and articulate.
Hearing some of the stories in this documentary,
it lends to more comparisons,
just the idea that Vince could never lose.
He'll cheat no matter what, even with his son wrestling.
You know, he'll tell him, I'll cheat.
I'm going to win.
And what was it that Mary Trump,
President Pig Schitt's niece,
she's a clinical psychologist,
and she's been campaigning to tell the world
not to fucking trust this,
lunatic with anything. She said a lot of this
strife that the country and the world has gone through
with my uncle could have been averted if his father had ever been able to bring
himself to tell him he loved him. And what's the theme here? And they both
went to military school. And again, Trump won't accept losing
Vince, in his own words, unless I'm dead, I win.
Yeah. Like that's his attitude. And
you know, when you really think about it, you didn't get a
lot, but the little bit you got from Vince about Vince was illuminating.
Especially this, again, for no reason at all.
And again, they didn't know how they were going to edit it.
They didn't know that this big thing was going to break wide open and send Vince into
the nether.
But they open it with this comment about him thinking about sexual things.
So it certainly sets the tone.
And then they went past the WrestleMania.
hair versus hair, blah, blah, blah,
to go into, and I had forgotten about this.
It was 2007, right?
Where they pitched Vince some kind of idea,
and he said, no, no, no.
What about if somebody kills me?
And they blew him up in the fucking limousine.
I had forgotten about that
because of what happened less than a week later
where they had to come out
and he came out and said,
well, last week, that was phony,
I'm okay, that's all, but Chris Benoit's dead.
And here we go with that.
And then he gets a whole other chance to
look like an asshole in front of every
news and sports interviewer in the world.
And I guess the rumor was if the Benoit murder,
suicide hadn't happened,
they were going to do a whole thing.
And Rod McMahon was actually going to appear on
TV, the real guy, the real brother of Vince McMahon. Yeah. And it never happened. And that episode was one of the more
surreal episodes of Raw ever. For the William Regal statement, which stood out at the time because
he didn't say much, but it made it sound like it was a lot darker than we were led to believe. And then
the graphic at the bottom with the three of them when it just went away. It was like the whole thing,
it was a crazy night. That was a crazy night. And obviously that's been
documented
with what happened there
but the point was
that they did that show
and where was it
either just
practically at the same time
that the show was rolling
they were starting to find out
whatever the fuck was going on
and there was chaos
but that's when
everybody started talking about
steroids and roid rage
and
bringing that whole thing back
up and Vince immediately, you know, starts going on the defensive and blah, blah, blah.
But when Chris Nguinsky got involved, it because remember, well, don't remember because
we weren't doing this then.
But at the time, I said, Royd rage makes no, Royd rage doesn't last for days or hours or, you
know, the whole thing as we started
get details.
But then Nguinsky stepped in with
CTE and
Vince was here today
kind of scoffing at
CTE at brain damage.
And what he may have.
Yeah, it probably what is
you would, nobody will ever
examine that brain. I'm sure the family
won't allow it. But you've got to think
that there's something fucking going on at this point
with his age and the late in life trauma.
Bumps after 50.
All of his bumps are after the age of 50, right?
Yes, yes.
And chair shots.
And I would say stunners, but he never took a good stunner.
And then Steve Austin, that was a surprise, too,
to hear that he doesn't believe in CTE.
I guess that's the way to say it.
He doesn't believe that CTE is a real thing.
He never actually came out and said the words,
I do not believe in CTE,
but he said,
concussions,
I don't know,
you know,
if you're getting a lot of concussions
just wrestling,
you're not doing it right.
Yeah,
you still kind of can.
That was disheartening.
But anyway,
so then the problem was
with,
they brought Nguinsky in
to explain what CTE is
and that in 2007,
nobody really knew,
but they were starting to find,
out and Benoit's brain was the worst they'd ever examined.
And then Vince admits, well, we brought Chris in.
He's just scoffed at it.
But we brought Chris in and eliminated headshots and financially supported Chris's research
on something he had just scoffed at.
Did that make a lot of sense to the average person?
remember when
Vince and Linda
separately testified
they gave testimony before
was it Henry Waxman
I think so
it was a committee
congressional committee
and I think Linda talked about
how they cleaned up things
maybe it was Stephanie
but how they cleaned up things
for the betterment of the wrestlers
and then Vince said oh it was all for PR
yeah
he said that
it was like no I think it's all crap
it's all for PR
I'm just doing this for good PR
You know, that's the other thing, too.
If you love steroids and you advocate for them
or at least you're going to do them for yourself,
defend them already.
He never just gave a defense for using them.
Instead, it would be defending people being upset that he used them.
You know what?
They never went into this entire time.
They showed some footage of him working out with,
could that have been the personal trainer?
I think that's who that was, yeah.
But as B-roll, in passing, they never went into his obsession with bodybuilding, with, he, what was he, 72?
He was on the cover of muscle and fitness or some advanced age.
Something like that, yeah.
And for a billionaire, for the head of a major corporation, that's very unusual, for anybody in business to,
still keep that body and that workout regimen at that age is not unique but bordering on that
and they never even went into it.
What is the mindset there?
Is that how he works out more of his mental computers?
I don't, but they didn't go into that, did they?
No, nothing really about his schedule at all.
they were in the middle of his schedule
he's walking in
Vince was always a workaholic when I knew him
and when I worked with him
worked for him whatever
but he was never
11 hours late for anything
and you didn't start shit at midnight
you know you were still doing the shit
you started that fucking late afternoon
but I don't know what's happened to it
was he always on time
yes unless
he was always on time for a production
meeting or a show
or an important meeting
or something that he had called
but you could wait for hours
at his house while he was on the phone
or if you were trying to get in
just for something you needed
he was tied up endlessly
so yes and no
but I never remember
remember anything like, you know, we're waiting for Vince at the studio at noon and he, you know,
he's not there to fucking almost midnight or whatever.
What do you think of, I mean, you mentioned that he did it, but what do you think of the
idea that he every time got in makeup and in the exact same suit so it looked at one endless
session?
Well, I mean, there is, if you're doing television where it's a television program and it's
going to be post-produced. You kind of want
the announcers to be wearing the same thing at the
beginning or the end or the talent to wear, you know,
to match what you're doing. But
it's obvious that this was a
multi-part series
conducted over the course of
well, I guess a couple
years from start to finish. But you know, so
I don't know what he was doing
there. Because at some point, they would want you
to change up, I would think.
I can understand the guys that they did
one long sit down with. Hoke,
Hogan, we'll go to Tampa, we'll sit down and get the, but the, the subject is usually seen
in a variety of different places, right?
Except Dave Meltzer.
He, too, when they brought him back, like in 2024, it was like the same, not his office,
and his hair color was as dark as it was the first time.
Well, I'm thinking that they probably couldn't fucking get a crew into his office from the
pictures we've seen of it, with all the stuff hanging up, or, you know,
know, or sitting around on the floor. But nevertheless...
Nothing in Vince's office. Do you think that's like a vince thing? Like, I want to be shot in a
ring in a, in a dirty room. What was that look there? Again, it was kind of artsy. And I didn't
mind it. You know, the ringmaster of this whole thing being shot in the, you know, but at some
point, yeah, why didn't they go to his office? Why didn't they go to what is his house now? He doesn't
have the old place I used to go to
but his condo
or does he
does he have a billiard room
that he
you know you could shoot a shot of
fucking Vince shooting a goddamn eight ball
I don't you know
he was
it was like
he was being interrogated rather than
interviewed
for a documentary
but that's what did
Triple H say he
you see what he wants you to see, right?
And anyway...
Yeah, again, you know, you go to his philosophy,
don't sell anything. Like, everyone said that about him. His whole thing is don't sell
anything. Yeah. His whole life is a lie.
My whole life is a lie.
Don't do that with a Southern accent. He'll get mad.
Hey, I'm telling you. Um, so where were we in this thing?
What is his accent?
That's never really discussed.
He grew up in North Carolina.
He doesn't sound in any way
Southern.
Is that because he practiced to have like a neutral sounding
Middle America voice?
Like, what is that?
Well, here's another thing.
Even though he...
See, this was not made clear.
He meets his father when he's 12 years old.
And I think the book, Ringmaster,
gone into more detail, but I can't quote a chapter and verse right here and right now.
Yeah, he would visit.
But he would only visit, he was still going back and forth, so he,
do you think when he started being the announcer back in, what, 1972, do you think he
adopted that tone so that it could help hide his twang?
Like, Linda, you could hear a little bit.
You can hear it in her voice.
You don't hear anything in his.
Well, maybe because he has no soul.
Wow.
You've now come to my side.
Welcome to the team, Jim.
But anyway, oh, and then they spotlighted the wrestlers starting to die young
as a natural segue from Benoit.
And, okay, you know, of course, there's Vince say, well,
you know, a lot of these guys, they abuse the pills for fun, you know,
and blah, blah, blah.
But at the same time, they added more testing.
and they added the rehab and they added the medical
and as we've said before.
The drug testing
was not to
a byproduct may have been
saving some guys from themselves
but it was so we don't make investments
in these fucking guys
and either then they can't
fulfill their obligations
or they get on the front page of the paper
and rehab was more of a PR stunt
because they still didn't
provide medical, if you've got cancer, you're on your own.
But if you have a substance issue, they'll send you 17 times.
And they added a lot of the medical testing,
but again, make sure nobody had a fucking stroke or a heart attack
as best they could prevent while they were on the roster.
So a lot of this was best for business in one way or another,
either the business or the PR of the business.
it wasn't just, you know, the beneficent, you know, magnificent McMahon, you know,
deciding to spread the wealth around.
Am I being too cynical?
No.
I think you have to apply a lot of cynicism to Vince McMahon.
And, and then.
He's a wrestling promoter.
Well, I'm true.
But then, here.
was the thing again at Undertaker.
Undertaker
who's at one point in the series that I would
take a bullet for that man talking about
Vince.
And I was surprised they covered it, but
it was kind of a big
deal that Vince walked
into WrestleMania 2014 and
decided, well, we're going to end the streak.
And remember everybody
was up in arms about that and that was quite
the topic. But that's also
where Taker said he got to concussion.
He said to this day, I can't remember.
the rest of that match.
And Undertaker is not Hulk Hogan.
Undertaker is not going to just make shit up out of his ass to tell you
because it's a good story for whoever he's talking to.
If he tells you,
he got his bell rung and can't remember the match,
he can't remember the fucking match.
Because he's not usually one to admit weakness.
And then Vince said,
maybe he can't remember it because he was upset over doing the job.
How the fuck?
Couldn't Vince come out and you say, oh, my way, Tager really gutted through it that day,
but he's going, he is upset about doing the job.
What?
He's done jobs before he remembers the match.
Because that's how Vince McMahon in real life treats a real life job.
It never happened.
I didn't lose.
It never happened.
He can't even fathom what it would be.
It would be like getting concussed to admit you lost the broccoli.
I don't know what the hell that argument was.
And again, it all goes back to, I mean, the one thing never really explored anywhere,
not in this documentary, not anywhere, is the Vince McMahon Brockler has no relationship.
Like now you really have to question what was their friendship?
Well, yeah, again, you know, and they revealed in one of the graphics updated here later on when they get into that,
that
Brock was the
unnamed person in the lawsuit
that had come out a while back
when we talked about it when it came out.
But how did that
how would
how would you start that
fucking
Brock is such a grumpy
anti-social fuck to begin with
and Vince is this old
goddamn silent movie villain
looking motherfucker
and I'm just
I'm just trying to think in the rooms.
Hey, you know, Brock, I got something for you.
What?
And again, Sable sued Vince for sexual harassment or whatever it was.
And then Brock married Sable.
Yes.
And then Vince and Brock would get together and share nudes on their phone.
I don't know how this worked.
It don't add up.
Should I swipe left or right?
What is that?
He's probably still asking.
asking for polarites.
But anyway, and that's, well, conveniently, next in the program,
they moved to the PG era because of all the salaciousness and salicycity and all that
stuff.
And they got more sponsors, but they got silly and they lost a lot of their fans.
Imagine that.
And that's where they went in a slump as far as viewership and whatever.
because it you know but that's when silly vents was able to come to the four again because now well if it's
PG or whatever that's where we got silly gimmicks and silly vents and half the show also the
women's evolution half the show being women so with what they had said previously in this very
documentary about
the primary audience of
the attitude era. The reason it was hot,
these young men
18 to fucking
who knows what the fuck.
Testosterone driven entertainment.
And then suddenly they give them
PG, kitty
gimmicks, and half the show
is women fighting.
I'm surprised they didn't lose
more than 75% of the fucking
attitude era audience.
And considering the success recently, it goes to the argument that people weren't necessarily sick of WWE.
They were sick of Vince McMahon's WWE.
Yes.
And because now, even though it's not R-rated, I never said during the attitude era.
We didn't need the majority of the language and the boobies and all that stuff.
Let Austin cuss.
Let Austin do the finger.
Let, you know, whatever, a few people, but we didn't need to.
most of it, but now that they're doing the WWE
for at least adults with logical minds
and they don't have to strip down and have the Tijuana
Donkey show. Because it's still, it's adult people, more
contemporary, they're athletes, they're superstars.
But they're not gobbledy gookers.
Anywho,
But they suffered through that, and then the Shane segment.
And again, it goes back to so-and-so, fill-in-the-blank,
could have been averted if only his father had told him he loved him.
There's fucking Shane out there.
And you said that he became your favorite McMahon the way he came off in this thing.
And this was the biggest segment for that is that he got him.
emotional.
When he talked about his big return to the company in 2016,
he got the big ovation,
the crowd cheered for him,
and his match with Undertaker Admania,
his match with Kurt Angle,
where he angled through him through 15 windows or whatever,
the crazy bumps,
the diving off the Titan Tron,
the elbow through the table.
He was trying to prove himself to his dad,
another generation
was repeating
different context,
different time, different people,
but repeating the same
general
fucking motif.
And then they actually get a camera shot
of Vince actually
hugging him and patting him on the back.
He looked as awkward
doing that in some ways as when
Trump held the Bible up and the photo op.
But
Shane was
50 fucking years old there at that point.
And that was a big deal for him to get a hug and a pat on the back from Vince.
And do you hear the sirens in the back, by the way?
We're finishing this, folks, right before the hurricane comes through Kentucky.
I don't hear the sirens, no.
Well, they went by.
I don't know what's going on out there.
You're hearing things, Vince.
What I was going to say is, you know, I think Shane could at least
know that from everything I've ever heard about him, and especially recently, he's a better
guy than his dad. And he is maybe more conscious of all the issues and how not healthy they are
for family. And I'm sure based on, you know, what we hear and what we know that Shane's probably
been a very different kind of dad to his kids. It seems like Shane's got his shit together.
Shane, Shane was terribly impressive here. And someone, you know,
ended up rooting for in this thing.
Yeah, well, you saw he brought his three
boys out on the
rampway when they had the clip of
the WrestleMania thing.
And he had him when I was down there again.
Last time I saw him was the Hall of Fame in 2017.
He had his kids with him.
He was hugging him and they were toddling around.
I don't know how old they were, whatever the fuck.
And it's a completely different
I can't see Vince doing that with it with it I don't I'm trying to think when have I ever seen Vince
around a child because I left Connecticut right about the time that I think Shane was
Shane was the first one to have a grandson wasn't he before Stephanie I believe so
did anyone ever bring kids to the office not in the family but just people who worked in the office
I don't remember that
I don't remember ever seeing a child in the office
I don't ever remember seeing a child in the room with Vince McMahon
I don't know how he would have reacted just to a random child
would he go to oh hey how you doing pal or would he well
what's that we're not talking much shame at random people
we're talking about his actual kids so we were talking about Vince and kids
yeah but no I'm just talking about Vince McMahon and a child
I'm trying to think of like would Vince have ever played Santa
clause at the office Christmas party or the kid.
No, I do, you know, just Vince McMahon interacting with a child.
I don't think I've ever seen anything like that happen.
And obviously we didn't get too much about Grandpa Vince in this.
That's another area of his personal life.
We didn't find out one thing, one way or another here.
Well, yeah, as a matter of fact, they, beside, they had footage of Vince working out
and working, and then the sit-down interview.
And they be rolled a few pictures of, like, what, three vacations he's taken in his life.
And so you got no interaction with any of his family, actually a shot just for this.
And then, but speaking of family, then they had the lineup of all the guys talking about how Vince was like a father figure.
And advisor, mentor, I can buy.
you know, but no, not father figure.
I mean, that's the other thing.
Or any of these guys that didn't have, I've seen some of their biographies before.
Steve Austin's dad was around, I think, the Undertaker's, like, it wasn't like they didn't
have dads.
Like, you know, there was no one, and all of a sudden there was this nice, benevolent daddy
war bucks throwing money around it, they'd bumps.
I didn't.
Have a father figure and didn't see Vince as a father figure.
I do. It's so weird.
And I mean, that's not say you can't learn from him, but.
But is that something he called? Like I said, I learned business stuff, but I didn't learn any of the life lessons. I didn't like the life lessons that he tried to learn you.
Is it something you think Vince tried to cultivate? He wanted that sort of relationship, not two friends, but, you know, think of me as a father figure.
Probably because that would make it easier, you know, not only to to work with a family.
them as your main event guys on a daily and weekly basis,
but also for negotiations over finishes or anything else.
I'm, you know, I'm sure it was, but
I wonder how Shane feels like when, you know,
when he sees all these other guys, well, I feel like he's a father figure.
And he's the one, he's trying to do all this shit to get Vince's
approval to begin with. And everybody else, oh, we love Vince. He's like a father.
And that's what did Tony Atlas say?
He said the reason why that it went to Stephanie or, you know, ultimately with the sale now,
which nobody could have predicted a few years ago, no McMahon is running the company,
but it was going to go to Stephanie rather than Shane because Tony said Shane is too nice of a guy,
but you can't take advantage of Stephanie, which is another way to say, but she's a
a real bitch.
So was that it at the ultimately? Did Vince say,
Shane's too nice of a guy for this. That's Stephanie,
she's a real cutthroat. Well, I think Stephanie was definitely the one we always
heard was more like Vince. And with Shane, I mean, that Paul
Heyman's story kind of spells it out for you. He was very hard on Shane because
I think in Vince's head, he's made everything
where he took over from his dad a lot harder than it ever was.
And, you know, Shane wanted to do anything.
Shane had to step over his dad to do it.
Well, and I mean, allowing...
For no good reason.
But allowing that it's Heyman that told the story.
That was a hell of a story for Hayman to tell in his documentary.
Well, yeah, but...
And I'm saying, allowing it, it's Hayman telling a story.
I'm sure it wasn't delivered,
possibly in as much detail or with the dramatic inflections or whatever.
But I can see Vince doing something like that.
And for those of you who hadn't seen it yet or didn't see it or whatever,
Shane is wanting something.
And Vince is saying no.
And Shane won't give up.
And we all been there.
And finally, Vince says he takes a knife from the table or whatever.
And he says, here, here.
plunge this into my heart
because that's the only way you're ever going to get
if you can make the decision
that's the only way you're ever going to get it over my dead body
if you're not man enough to do it
then I'll take that into consideration too
of course Heyman said it much more
floridly and verbosely and dramatically
but the point is there
you know
at some point you think that
it's like living in goddamn Game of Thrones
and that's what you know it was well it was and it was basically
Vince and Stephanie and Triple H through
what do the kids call it now the 20 teens or the 2010s
or that that era where
you know they were the top three people in charge
and Vince was undoubtedly number one of that
of that three
but it looked like then
they were winding this show up
and they had about 30 minutes left
and I said, oh, apparently
they're going to
give us an update at the end of the program
and that's where they were leaving it
was Vince didn't want to retire.
He said, when you stop growing, you die.
Well, okay, I don't understand people
I want to do that. Well, go die then.
That's his attitude.
If you've dug a ditch for 50 fucking years,
you want to stop digging the fucking
ditch. No, fuck you.
So everybody
in the whole thing said, oh, no, he won't
retire. He'll never retire.
It'll be a nuclear bomb when he
retires. Hulk Hogan said there would be
no WWE without Vince McMahon.
Yeah. And
then they cut to
in June of 2022, Vince McMahon
stepping down. Hush money,
anonymous email to the board of directors.
And the whole cover-up
was exposed. And
then at that point the story that we've covered
from then to date began unfolding
and Vince canceled all future interviews
with these fine representatives of Netflix.
So then they went back
and since I guess he wouldn't talk to him
in modern times they showed many, many clips
of Mr. McMahon being a dirty pervert on Raw.
Holy fuck
I mean he
you know
at the time he was doing it
and I'm
being from being around him
even though I wasn't around at that point in time
where he was doing a lot of that stuff
I was safely home in Louisville
mine of my own business literally
I always took it because he
wanted everybody to know
that he was
genetically
potent or whatever.
He's a man's man.
But again, with hindsight,
going back and looking at all that stuff,
you're like, oh, Christ.
And they talked about the tanning salon.
And then more
NDAs and payments being uncovered
and Vince retiring,
and in Vince coming back.
And Stephanie quitting.
and Vince wanting to sell.
And that's when they brought Bruce back in.
Again, we alluded to it, I think, earlier.
But what was that?
First of all, what did Bruce see?
We'll talk about it.
Bruce reacts to whatever they have sent him, whatever he has seen.
So we don't know what cut that is.
And we don't know what that includes.
Is it everything up until this point?
we don't know.
Well, and also he said,
I don't know what,
because they brought up what Meltzer
had to say with Shoemaker,
well,
I don't know what happened,
anything with Shoemaker and Meltzer
and their lies and blah, blah, blah.
But this was in January,
2024, I believe,
they identified.
And they asked him,
well, what did you think of the,
the rough cut or the early drafts
or however they phrased it,
whatever they showed him?
Well, I think they sucked.
I think they sucked.
It wasn't fair and balanced.
He says like he's on Fox News.
It was a gotcha piece.
How?
And that, well, hold on.
He said,
you sat down to think,
how can we make Vincent K. McMahon look shitty, right?
Missing the human side.
No shit.
Because is there a human side of him if he would shit?
to someone, we'd know it was there.
Now,
I have to, in all
fairness, and Bruce
told a story, and it does mean a lot
to him, and I'm not, I'm not
jacking around here, I'm not
making fun of anything or whatever.
Bruce's wife, Stephanie,
did get cancer years and years
ago, like, I think
almost 25 years ago.
And Vince helped
him out there and made sure that she had
the best care, and he told that story.
And that is true.
And it means a lot to him as it would to anybody.
I've told in the past, when I first moved up there to work in the office,
my credit was not the best from Smoggy Mountain Wrestling.
And the only house that I could find within a 40-mile radius of the office
with air conditioning in it, that I could afford to rent,
laughingly afford to rent
was $2,000 a month in 1996
because Connecticut, need I say more.
And we basically found the one
that I wanted, but I couldn't
the landlord, another issue, it was a pain in the ass.
But anyway, Vince said, how's the house thing coming?
I found one, but, you know, she doesn't like my credit.
Well, just pay the rest of it.
in advance.
Fuck it's $2,000 a month.
He advanced me $25 grand
to pay for the house in advance so I could live
in a house and one to live in.
Took it out every week,
but with no interest.
But he's not a complete,
absolute asshole to everybody.
Vince McMahon is capable
of doing good things for people.
However...
If they benefit his business.
Well, that's the thing.
There has to be some
you know, a connection there.
But having said that,
Bruce said it was, you know,
how can we make Vince look shitty?
Phil Mushnick can figure out ways to sit down
and try to make Vince McMahon look shitty.
This was not, this series was not it.
This was a lot of this was,
the shit Vince has done,
making Vince look shitty.
Yeah, and up to that,
point, what would Bruce be reacting to? Dave Meltzer, revealing that Vince had been lying about
the WrestleMania 3 stats, that Hulk Hogan had ratted out Jesse Ventura, the Vince and Shane stuff,
mentioning the Ben Law stuff, mentioning the Owen stuff, these things can't be ignored. In what way
has this been a hit piece in any way? In what way in any way, has this been a hit piece?
I didn't. I didn't see it. And because nobody can't.
out and flat out said in this entire series that the time period that Vince and a few people
have said this to me privately, the time period that Vince started becoming more and more
willing to act out on some of his stranger instincts was when he became a billionaire after the
stock sale and they got a plane and boy howdy they ain't no stopping us now.
Yeah, and there's still stories that we've heard about that plane that have not gone out
in public. So you've got to think there's still a lot more stories out there.
Well, I think probably a couple of the miscellaneous NDAs had the airplane involved.
That's why we don't hear a lot about that either.
That's the sad unspoken thing about women's wrestling in North America.
we went from not having it really at all except for a novelty match
or if there was a champion,
there was a champion in one challenger, not a division,
to the shows being loaded up with women.
And maybe the largest reason for that was Vince McMahon just wanted a lot of women around.
And he was sexually harassing some of them.
Like that's the hard reality of the evolution of women's wrestling
up until Vince McMahon left.
You know, I think a lot of people have to face up to facts about that
because we have an overabundance of women's wrestling now
and it's a lot more serious than it was,
but it's still too much because the floodgates were opened at some point
by Vince.
Well, speaking of the floodgates of Vince,
they were opened up when the Grant lawsuit was revealed
and then all the gory details start coming out
and Vince resigned from everything
because he had come back,
they covered that he came back,
didn't really,
kind of glossed over,
basically, he came back to sell it,
and he did sell it, right?
There was a lot more there,
but again,
fucking thing was already pretty long.
Hey,
when Bruce was talking,
do you think those were Bruce's words?
Or was Bruce speaking on behalf of Vince?
Because everyone knows it's not a secret
Bruce's Vince's mouthpiece.
Avatar?
Avatar.
Ronda said Avatar.
That's not far off.
I mean, even still, I know he's there and playing nice,
but that's why you can never completely count out the idea that Vince has any influence.
Bruce being there, Bruce is Vince's guy.
And Bruce defended what was...
He was in the golf cart when they were running around in the back of the arena.
He's in a golf cart behind Vince.
But he's the one defending vociferously what wasn't really a hit piece.
Whose words do you think those were his or Vince's?
Well, it's hard to tell.
because Bruce has been around Vince for so long,
and I'm not even saying this is a joke.
Bruce uses a lot of the terminology,
phrases of speech,
patterns of speech,
whatever that Vince uses,
because he's been around him for so long.
So that sounds like,
you know,
not being fair and balanced,
a gotcha piece.
How can we make Vince look shitty?
That sounds like something that Vince would describe
or would say in his own words,
but it also sounds like
something Bruce would say
in his own words
because his own words
often sound a lot like Vincis.
Where was the gotcha part, though?
I don't know,
because we knew all this shit.
It just...
Yeah, you couldn't ignore it.
The gotcha part was seeing it all
A, B, C, D, E, F,
and together in a close period of time
where you're like, boy, howdy,
he's been in a lot of fucking...
various strife in his life.
That was the only gotcha.
There was no other gotcha.
We already got it.
We remember it now, more vividly, that you reminded us, but we already knew.
And again, Bruce Pritchard doing that interview in 2024, having a problem with how Vince
McMahon was portrayed in this documentary.
That was Bruce as a WWE executive.
That wasn't Bruce the citizen.
That's Bruce as an executive.
Bruce the citizen.
Citizen Bruce.
Citizen Bruce, baby.
I'm telling you, that could be a better gimmick than Brother Love.
If he just came out and did a weekly dissertation on the state of America,
Citizen Bruce.
It would be about as over as Brother Love wasn't.
Well, we can all hope.
So, anyway, the end of this thing finally came.
Vince resigned from everything, sold most of his stock,
and has made $2 billion
and nobody asked what the
$2 billion in cash
that he's got in the last year
or whatever is,
where that currently resides
or what's being done with it.
The Cayman Islands.
I say puppies.
Wasn't that the story that he was going to the Cayman Islands
or he was going to Cancun, wherever it was,
and he was rescuing puppies and kittens
and bringing him back? And then we find out
he just fired his PR firm because that was their strategy.
You know, let's make videos.
The animal saver.
That really didn't work.
It hasn't really done anything
to help his reputation.
The thing is, I don't know
whether he was doing it
or whether he just did it,
whether he was there
and he brought some back.
I don't know whether he was going back
and forth and bringing more.
That would have been a rib
if they'd have talked to me.
Yeah, I just make several trips
down here and back with the puppies.
I've become a smuggler.
You know, he looks like a smuggler now
with the mustache and the black hair.
If he wore like an Indiana Jones hat.
I think he, I swear,
He needs to get the little devil goatee and he'd have it.
But that's it.
Was it, I don't know if it was telling or just, it was funny as fuck to me.
When they asked Undertaker, Trish Stratus, Booker T, John Sina, they all asked the same question.
What is Vince McMahon's legacy?
And it was, uh, uh, uh, that nobody had an answer.
And that was before the skisna.
scandals.
Yes.
Those interviews were predominantly before the scandals.
And Tony Atlas immediately came out with greatest promoter of all time.
Well, you know, and that may be arguable with P.T. Barnum and Don King or whatever,
but at least, you know, he came out with something, but everybody else that knows him even better.
It's like, humana, humana, humana.
And then Vince, they asked him and he didn't, not only didn't he really give an answer,
He gave an answer, but it had nothing to do with his legacy,
and he went off on the point that he'd been making that he put out in the statement
when he had seen the rough cut of this,
that a lot of people confuse me with my character, Mr. McMahon.
But then the more he talked by the time he was finished,
he wanted to, you know, some people become the character.
And they can't tell the difference.
With me, it's a blend.
is exaggerated. I'm not sure which one.
He should have been a weather man because he could do the forecast. It's either going to rain or it's not.
But yeah, so Vince is. A lot of weird quotes for no reason from him, that one, the one about Rita Chatterton saying like, you know, he denied it.
And then he said, even if it did happen, a statute of limitations ran out. So is he is he is Vince
another guy like Trump that his own attorneys would not want him to be deposed?
You know, I think that's a difference between Vince and Trump. Vince seems to listen to his
attorneys. I mean, he only had one and he listened to Jerry McDivitt for years. Yeah.
I mean, he had more than one. He had a team, but Jerry was the main guy. I don't know who he has
now. Things fell apart once Jerry announced that he was going to start retiring, and then all
the shit hit the fan. The big one finally came. He was on the way out.
Ed and probably thought, I ducked that just in the nick of time.
You know, you wonder, there's a lot of unanswered questions about the past.
We've talked about some of those as childhood.
But in terms of the present, it doesn't really clarify Vince has a relationship with everyone in his family.
It alludes to the fact that Stephanie was the one that told him to leave.
You know, there's a lot that we, you come out of this knowing nothing.
Do you think they're going to do more?
Are they going to bring this back once like the trial starts or something?
Bring it back.
The return, the trial of Billy Jack followed by the trial of Vince McMahon.
I don't know that I don't think they can bring it back.
I think they've done it now.
Maybe there's a special one-hour update at some point in the future,
but I don't even know if it would be a part.
It wouldn't be a part of this particular series.
it just be another stand-alone thing they do.
But...
I'd like to see a real good documentary filmmaker
make a documentary about Vince McMahon
and not this.
Nothing with cooperation from anyone.
Just tell the story in two and a half hours.
And what is...
Well, I'd may be asking too much, but what...
Like you said, what is the relationship...
Does he see the grandkids?
What's Christmas like?
Him and Linda.
Now that there's been all this family...
strife. Him and Linda, what's his relationship with Stephanie? What's his relationship with
Triple H? Him and Shane? They never resolve where they are today. Any of the wrestlers
in him today? Like, nothing is really... It was like they rushed. To me, the sixth episode was
like the last season of Game of Thrones. Like, how do we get like three seasons worth of stuff
into one season? And they jammed a bunch of stuff. They didn't have an ending, obviously.
Well, that's why they were winding up with a half an hour to go,
and it looks like they probably would have, you know,
padded 10 minutes and said, fuck it,
but they had all the new news,
so instead they did 30 minutes on what they could have done
another two episodes on.
You know, I guess if you took all the Vince McMahon interview clips
and put them all together,
there was not necessarily new information,
but new insight into how he, at least,
in front of the camera says he thinks about things
and you have to wonder if that's the truth
or he's saying that for some twisted performance, you know?
I think that, well, again, he sees what you want him to see,
he was the quote, and normally he's so careful
when he speaks and, you know, a few times he has gotten pissed
or they showed the clip where he's, I'd forgotten about it again,
where he slapped the clipboard or the notebook out of the reporter's hand
and he jousted with Bob Costas
and whatever.
But in this one, I think him being old
and not being accustomed to this form of long-form sit-down interview
talking about himself as a subject
and knowing that him knowing in his mind
that a lot of people didn't know about a lot of the shit
they didn't know about when he was talking,
that he said a few things that, you know,
like, yeah, I'm thinking about sex
and I'm sexually active and I'm
and the stuff about
he and his father
maybe every once in a while he and Shane
those telling little lines
he may not have said that
if it hadn't been
whatever it was midnight or one in the morning
and all those conditions I just mentioned
had been prevailing
he might not have
opened up in that respect enough
where you could hear that and guess things
because remember
he's never talked about himself
Yeah, you wish there was a project like this around him in the late 90s or something
where he was younger, maybe had more to say, maybe remembered more.
But we get it now and it's old man Vince, it's forgetful Vince, it's late night Vince,
and maybe criminal Vince, we'll find out.
Yeah, and at least criminally creepy Vince.
But that was that series.
Any closing thoughts on the series?
and on the state of Vince McMahon,
the McMan, the McMan's and WWE?
Well, there are none
except for Triple H by marriage,
and I think it's probably going to stay that way.
And I'm glad that
Triple H didn't get too much on him in this series
so that he can continue doing what he's doing
because he's doing a good job.
But, yeah, I don't see
I don't see any of the other
Stephanie got the
introduction at mania
and has waved at the crowd a few times
but I think that's
kind of the extent it's going to be
and does she want to do anymore now
so I think the McMahon
era is pretty much over with
and you know
with Shane McMahon when people talk about the rumors
about him doing something with AEW
with Tony Khan
you could understand from his perspective
how he has unfinished business with professional wrestling.
He still wants to do something.
I don't know what it would be.
And I'm not saying it would be that.
But I am saying that it may not be easy to go back to WWE to do something.
We don't know.
So you can understand why, you know,
no one really could leave wrestling either as a fan
or someone who's in the business,
with the exception of like Mark Lewin or something.
No one ever completely gets away and stops thinking about it.
Jack Briscoe.
Jack Briscoe.
he's my hero
just fuck it
Gerald I'm going back in that terminal
and the next thing headed south
I'm smoking I'm gonna be on it
that's the way to retire
but anyway can we retire
well that's it that's it for the drive-through
a regular drive-thru returns next week
and of course the experience in a few days
you know where to find us
the official Jim Cornett YouTube channel
all these clips will be there
Travis Heckel artwork, the artwork from George, the clips, the full episodes, the omnibus collections, check it out.
The official Jim Cornett YouTube channel, patreon.com slash cornet.
$5 a month gets you access to the archive going back to 2013.
Patreon.com slash cornet.
He's on Twitter, I'm on Twitter.
Stephen P. Neu, 87750. Steve.
For Jim, I'm the great Brian last.
Tally-ho!
