Episode 361: Jim Reviews Mr. McMahon

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Hello again, friends.

And you are our friends.

And welcome back to another edition of Jim Cornette's Drive-Thru.

This a special edition.

We're only going to be talking about one thing, one subject, one person, one docuseries 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 Cornet, Mr.

Jim Cornette.

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 docuseries.

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,

from we're in Kentucky.

And apparently, Florida and Georgia and the Carolinas, 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 winds.

So while, and I've already lost power once today, so while we've got it, we're, we're, uh, 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 Steve and P.

News,

to be new, steady news, to renew the

If you need to see Steve Renew, Steve Renews, to renew, steal, stay new, steady news,

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 newlawoffice.com 87750-STEV.

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 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.

To the stroke of 3.

To see the Dump Matsumoto documentary series.

Have you watched it?

What did you think?

Oh, come on.

Don't be swerving these people around here, Brian.

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 docuseries 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 Junior 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 don't say belt and don't say wrestling and don't sneeze and all the other,

you know, famous Vince Piccadillos 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 the, and all of Vince's seniors,

business associates, called him Vinny.

And that was almost as bad as Junior.

I like to think whenever he hears or whenever he sees those words, he thinks of Albano yelling it because he would combine the two.

Vinny Jr.

Yeah, it's Vinny 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.

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 Gawart said that there's the biggest names in the wrestling business that they teased us with from Cena, 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 plumper she always looked a little gaunt to me

like she wasn'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 74 or five she's 96 years old oh come on now 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 get in the ring.

They're doing his sit-down in a ring in a warehouse, you know, the

motif there, the look.

But when they showed him getting in the ring, stepping through the ropes and sitting down,

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.

Yeah.

You 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.

Iretha 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

Minnie Mouse when they're teenagers, and then they sound like Vince when they're 35 or whatever.

And then, you know, and 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 of 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, shape, or form, show any

feebleness, feebility.

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.

Like, 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.

Is I haven't quite figured out who I am yet.

But with

a lot of early quotes there that because of everything that came out 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 and 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 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, you know, 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 wouldn't get a speck on the outside of his jacket.

It would be on the lining, and then he would lay it like a

carrying a newlywed across the threshold over the top of everybody else's bags and stuff, so it was right on top in a trunk and close the 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, you would see him sweat when he was on television, right?

But god damn it, when he was just being a normal person,

you wouldn't 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

production meeting.

And I'm sitting there.

My 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 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 a 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 have liked 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 it would primarily be about all the women and all these stories.

Well, but did they know that at this point?

I'm saying, 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 he said, Oh, fuck it, 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 documentary 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.

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 about a last interview with Vince,

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 a 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 territories.

I remember that.

Well, he just didn't know what he was saying.

He didn't even say a touring heel.

He just didn't know what he was talking about.

He said he had to go 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 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 dyed 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 to do that.

Well, and you, you know, you have people and

we'll see old Phil Mushnik 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 that's kind of halfway in the middle.

But again, some of the comments, you know, Vince saying, I 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 happened.

And

I think that, did you hear what Brett said?

Well, I was a true artist.

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.

Yeah.

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, and the thing is, he was an artist, but it's just so funny to hear somebody actually call themselves 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?

That's wrestling at the chase.

But also, he made the point, I think, in 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 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?

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, you know, he was okay until he got brain damaged 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 of 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 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 what it.

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.

He hate, 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 what 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.

Well, and he never talked with his father about why he wasn't there.

All those 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 senior wasn't there was vince senior and the mother it didn't work out and vince moved on and he moved away 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 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 a 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 does 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 real banger main

is

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 to be sent to 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,

you know, 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.

That was

automatically, what was that, 1972, three?

1972, I think.

72 cake.

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, was around that was around.

But when Ray Morgan was the unnamed previous television announcer that wanted more money, and Vince Sr.

said, ah, fuck it, you're done.

And that was ballsy because Ray Morgan

at the time had been doing that program for what, 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 Kosell-like announcer on those episodes.

He's so milk toast.

It's amazing.

At least he didn't have to wear a toupee like Kosell.

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 looked fake.

And that was the thing I was going to mention also, besides glossing over, well, his father had 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 knievel, the Snake River Canyon jump, which was closed-circuit television.

And Muhammad Ali Anoki.

That was Vince Jr.

who got that together.

Well, because Ali and Anoki,

Evil Knievel was 74, 1974.

Ali and Anoki was 1976.

There was still no pay-per-view television technology, but

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

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 Hansen in the grudge match, and they did 35,000 people at Shea Stadium.

It wasn't because of Ollie and Anoki.

It was because of Bruno and Hansen.

And again, the deal was Vince Jr.

and Bob Aram, right?

Weren't they the guys who played?

Yes,

yeah.

And so she 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 and 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 Sabisco,

that footage,

I don't remember them just throwing it out every goddamn week, do you?

Well, that footage is actually popular.

That was like 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 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.

He's with 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 Sr.

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 just finished writing it.

Yes.

It'll be out next year.

And I was about to say it wasn't really as simple as that Vince 2 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 that it needed to be.

And then the other partners were all paid and all went away.

I mean, Arnold Skolin hung around for a lot of years, but he wasn't a partner anymore.

Well, no, well, no, but

they were all paid, but they continued to get paid.

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 Sr.

on that deal.

He was making tens of thousands of dollars a week in the 80s

to not wrestle anymore.

And that's why we, 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 glasses on and the pocket protector and a nerd from college in the early 60s.

And he saved his money and figured all that that stuff out and had a piece of the company and got paid for that plus paid till

pretty much the day he died for a variety of other things.

But Arnold Skolin still went to some of the towns.

White Plains, that was Artie'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 Skolin.

Joe Zacho fucked off right away.

He said, I'll see you.

Yeah, he said, fuck it.

Yeah.

Well, he didn't like hanging around the boys as much.

But that was the thing, Vince Sr., there's people that Jack Lanza had a job until he didn't want a job anymore.

People that 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 the 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, made a ton 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 TNT

Tuesday Night Titans talk show.

The guys at that point, they didn't want to be doing that shit, but the guy was 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 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?

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Well, the other thing, too, about Vince Sr.

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 at the NWA meeting in whatever, September, I think, 193.

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 LA.

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 the St.

Louis TV,

makes the moves into Minneapolis, gets their talent, and starts growing.

Vince dies, Vince Sr.

died in what, May of 84?

I think so.

So, I mean, it happened pretty quick for, you know, everyone's like, oh, Vince Sr.

was against it and he had problems with it.

But then he said, it you know screw them or whatever when when did he say that

yeah see that's vince said well you know my

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 ole anderson Because Ole 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 i think that

all of these things can be true vince jr does remember that vince senior congratulated him once and said i'm proud of you one time because he probably beat somebody at some 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, 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 he him and andre sold out shea stadium news to bruno and zabisco who didn't sell out shea stadium

still drew a record crowd and hogan and andre were underneath that uh

main event

uh and vince vent vince Vince and Vince, I said to Vince,

Vince Sr.

didn't want Hogan in Rocky III, 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

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.

He'd burn the house down.

Exactly.

But 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 the belt on Hulk from the Iron Sheik and Iran versus USA.

But well, 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 Rhodes, something we have 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.

Cause he, 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 is.

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 and 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's strengths, which was strong heat on heels, right?

So that the hero could overcome, but it was,

it wasn't as kid-friendly and as simple and good and 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 wrestling.

Yeah.

So it was a natural xenophobia.

Whoever we're in a war with, whoever there's strife with around the world with the United States, that's 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 Backlund, 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 Cheek.

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 Backlund as fast as he could.

Yeah, and

the Backlund 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 Backlund 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 Backlund 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 Snooker had murdered his girlfriend a year earlier before the sale of the company to Vince Jr., would Vince Sr.

have 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, it's a couple of 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, would he have 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 Sr.

put up with shit like that of that level for any length of time?

They didn't need to.

Like I said, in those days, everything was selling out.

They had an incredible run going in the 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, Snuka would have not been the choice as champion because he couldn't say Sue if the hogs had him.

But what an attraction he was just to see him 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 III.

And give Hogan credit.

That's a pretty brave movie.

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 Vernagha.

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 Gaijin and the AWA at the same time.

And he was just, what, six months off of, or so at that point, was it off of knocking Inoki out with the Axe Bomber clothesline?

That was 83.

That was 83.

So

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 Funks booked NWA talent to BABA.

That got Vince another million dollars to use on

the first WrestleMania right when he needed it.

Anyway,

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 it.

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.

Well, he just did it like this, and he'd just say it flat out.

But the story,

they get into Cindy Lauper 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 Owl Li and Anoki.

He had done Evil Knievel Snake River Canyon.

He knew what clothes 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 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, an oldies fan, or whatever, Beatlemania, Hokamania, WrestleMania.

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.

Yeah, how about those pics on the boat?

Vince was jacked.

Holy shit.

I know.

It's ridiculous.

That's 85.

Yes, 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, bug it admit to anything.

But did you notice, first of all, that Hulk 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?

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 you're just trying to expose the business, but I think the offensive part to a lot of people was the smugness

and the attitude from Stossel.

No, he was a complete fucking dick 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 Hulk said, Stossel asked him, hey, do you guys really cut yourselves with a razor blade?

So he said, I made a beeline to vents.

And then remember, we've talked about this before.

He didn't need to go to anybody.

and say, you specify, 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 pistedness.

But Schultz

was a whole new level of fucking,

that's what Stossel deserved it, in my opinion, if for nothing else than

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 down there at Hall because they said 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 Atlas said, we all celebrated, all of us, and they did.

And then the Richard Belzer 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 is 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 of cinched up, and that put Belzer under.

And that's because I guarantee you

he had half of Bolivia or Colombia 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, his wrist, you know, cross.

Yes.

You're like, oh man, Hogan's got a really good grip on this thing.

Well, yeah.

And 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 Belzer'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're getting a bad vibe from the whole thing yeah and then hogan does this and they left at 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 is 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 when I punched him as hard as I could in the face, it would hurt him.

But with Hogan's, oh, let me just do it because T didn't know any wrestling moves or any wrestling holes.

T can say, well, let me just show you what, or Hogan could 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 still got sued and still, you know,

Belzer got money to buy a house, right?

Yeah, but again, that was not necessarily something you would want to happen.

The David Schultz-John Sossel 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 that.

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.

That's all I cared about.

That's the, that's the thing.

Even 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

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 thing, you want to talk about an 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.

Like, 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 Hulk said.

We didn't have the cigar smoke and beer drinkers anymore in the audience.

We had families.

We always had families.

There's a goddamn family of people in the Louisville Gardens.

There was four different generations sitting ringside the same seats every week before Hulk Hogan stepped into 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

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, 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 and 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,

you know, 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, Junior.

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 of 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 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 to hear it 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.

Yeah, 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.

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Well, you know, Jim, that was episode one of the Vince McMahon BioSuit Bio Series docu series on Netflix.

We're doing so well here, ladies and gentlemen.

Mr.

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They didn't really talk about that in this, but what he would eat, what he would drink, what he tried to invent with IcoPro.

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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 Gardners, and there's 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 docuseries that he once cooperated with, and then he didn't.

That 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 elsewhere 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 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?

Austin Idol and Eddie Gilbert?

Yes.

Eddie Gilbert was booking Continental for David Woods, and he burned Austin Idol with a fireball in like

wherever they did TV, you know, in Birmingham one night, in Dothan one night.

And then the next night, he comes into a town like 40 miles away.

goes into the babyface locker room Austin Idol does with no fucking burn mark on his face, no bandage, no nothing.

And immediately the stooges run over and tell Eddie, hey, goddamn, he's got no fucking

scar, bandage, or anything.

And then Eddie comes into the locker room, and Ida 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.

Hey, what did you think?

Real quick, I'll ask you here at the top.

We talked in the review of part one 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.

Well, I know, but why do I care?

Again, who is this guy?

He's the Brian Gewertz 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 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 she saw it from a different or she explained it from a different angle from like above and i thought she 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.

Alrighty.

well, they started talking about the hard road schedule and the injuries and guys getting on painkillers because of the grind and the travel.

Yeah, right there, I have a problem.

That was one of the David Shoemaker Schumacher, whatever the 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.

Well, they're, they're, again, they're all over the place.

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, or 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, depositions in what the early 90s

it 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, 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 going to do, brother?

Wait a minute, I've got the quote again.

Hold on.

I went straight to Vince.

I made a B-line, brother.

Hogan's, the way Hogan told it,

Jesse was trying to undermine Vince.

So I went straight to Vince because he deserved it.

And then they had like five or six guys say, yeah, Hogan ratted him out.

Hogan was a rat.

Hogan stooged 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 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

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 in 1986?

As cool as anyone ever.

He got fired.

He left.

He went to do Predator.

And NBC, Dick Ebersoll, 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 might have made off a lot of Austin Idol shit.

Yeah.

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 thinks very little of him, 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 it 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

by locationed 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 than

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 86, too.

Same thing, Atlanta and Greensboro.

But nevertheless, so then what do you do, Brian, for WrestleMania 3?

Well, you got to go to the Silverdome.

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, it 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, we're 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 that's how Bruce used to get a rise out of Vince was imitating him introducing a the queen I've sold hurry the 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 Hulk said this was a quote I didn't know whether I was going to win the 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 the 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, goddammit.

I guarantee goddamn T you.

When I had the Knight 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 Bride, convinced him to have the back surgery, which he then did and then wrestled WrestleMania.

That's wrong.

He didn't have the back surgery.

He already 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, the commentary, they didn't have as big of celebrities as they used to, but Bob Euchre 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 Vince's mind what was going to happen that day or otherwise 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, then, the quotes, it was actually the way they edited this was funny also because,

you know, they had people say, and Vince would say, well, Andre 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 drawing 78,000 people.

So

it was great regardless, but just

the way that they put that together with the fact-checking, I thought 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 into 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

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,

no, 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 DBS 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 enjoy that they actually admitted that the movie No Holes Barred 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 at a theater where my mother could not drop me off and leave me alone.

She had to go in with me because that was

that was the

United Artists Penthouse Theater before they renovated it back to being the Louisville Palace and there was Winos sleeping up there.

Yeah, no Holtz Bart is Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan writing a script to a movie and it's the worst thing ever and Hogan's 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 he 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 saying, hey, 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 fight, didn't he?

And it didn't go well.

It was like the first Sugar 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 um

first they had to gloss over the disaster that was

what number in wrestlemania was 91 the gulf war la coliseum sports arena fiasco seven yeah well they talked about the warrior before then didn't they yeah 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.

And 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 Hulk.

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?

Is it childlike or as someone who has a child wasn't?

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 G.I.

Joe deal.

And you said, no.

You can 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 babyface 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 the previous 15 years building, Sergeant Slaughter.

If he had come back as a friend of the- 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 LA 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 in 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 ended right away.

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 the 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 in 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, 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 quotes 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.

Investigate 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 Luger deal, right?

The way that he got Luger away from

TBS.

Luger had 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 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 Heen are interviewing Lex Luger sitting at home on the couch.

And I remember it because he calls Monsoon Fat Boy.

And Monsoon reacts to that.

Him and Cameo Newer were the host of Body, was it 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 body it was trying to insert the vince mcmahon

brand of entertainment into 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 that weren't they bragging that they were

They were bragging in some way, I can't remember what the phrase was, but 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 these guys from the weeders.

Like Vincent Van went to whatever, the bodybuilding convention and like announced that he was going to do this and started to do it.

And

by the way, now, hold on, you got to pause.

We're not talking about gardeners, kids.

Joe and Ben.

I didn't even think of that.

Joe and Ben Weeder, W-E-I-D-E-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 Farigno, which is a big get.

I mean, that's one of the big gets in bodybuilding, you would think.

And when Vince announced all of a sudden that they're going to be steroid testing, you never saw Farigno ever again.

That was the last time Lou Farigno was aligned with the WBF.

That's right, because

at first there was going be no testing, but then the steroid and the Zahorian shit at the same shit hit at the same time, and then Vince said, well, there's gonna be testing, and then several people, I think Ferigno and some other lesser lights were never seen again.

San Jose's airport is a simple airport to fly through, which is great if you're a business traveler running late, because you never want to be overheard saying.

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But anyway, so then

Hogan lied on our city OHAL.

And then they started backtracking a little bit with the scandals.

Because then they go back 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 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 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 anybody that thinks that he was doing anything wrong

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 drug into that now

again tony atlas tony atlas had an interesting thing to say about that well but the thing is he said yeah he grabbed a pecker in the locker room Now, did Pat Patterson grab somebody's dick playing around in the shower or in the or

touch them up the ass as Adrian Street used to say yeah you see that's not allowed that's that's where

what's on you 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 straighter if you if you see

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 and rum your fucking thumb up his ass.

It said, ha, 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 of, but yeah,

hey,

there's nothing unusual about that.

I don't recall anybody ever being splendid.

There's plenty unusual about that.

That's completely not normal behavior.

Well, then somebody should have said something about 50 or 60 years ago before everybody was doing it.

Everybody was doing it?

A lot of, well, I'm not every single person, but whether you were gay or not, it didn't have anything to do with it.

Whether or not doesn't mean it's not some sort of

sexual battery.

If you got somebody tied up in a hole 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 going, oh, shit.

or checking somebody's oil that's happened

you know this it wasn't like anybody was trying to make anybody mad again none of these things are appropriate not i just i just well

search me i didn't know i will not

I will not, you see, I follow my own rules.

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 got to have something to do before cell phones in a 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 punched him in the face, Vince would have probably given him a raise just because, hi, he would have thought it was funny.

But thing is, again,

but again, that's different.

But I do think whatever that Pat Patterson 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.

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 of 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

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 to finish.

The southern version was, you need to finish, call Eddie Graham.

The northern version, you need to finish, call Pat Patterson.

So they got to say that, at least.

But

again,

if people don't have a goddamn half-assed sense of humor, fucking running around the locker room trying to call themselves 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?

Nah, 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 the, if Alibaba 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.

I'm judging.

If anything happens today, there's a problem because today sucks.

No, I think today's better than weird sneak attack sodomy in the locker room.

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?

Brock Leslie.

Well, 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...

recorded it on the VCR, but I didn't watch it live.

Because that was like devastating.

That 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 Mel Phillips and Ring Boys.

It was George Zaharian and steroids.

It was Hulk Hogan and steroids.

It was then 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, what Vince said 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, he said,

first he said it was consensual.

Then he said, but the statute of limitations has long since run out.

And then they had an addendum at the end, an addendum, 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 when we talked about

Rita Chatterton and that episode when it came back up again a year or two ago.

I feel bad for her.

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 the wrestling business.

She's in a locker room as a referee.

She had been trained at

who is a wrestling school, Mario Mancini?

that would have been tony altimore's tony but the point is

nobody

had a half million dollar a year guaranteed contract at that point in time 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 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, she's like, Well, fuck this.

But, but yeah, that's the only thing about her story that

is remotely unbelievable.

I can believe everything else that she said happened happened.

Except for that, 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.

I mean, no, it must have been episode, 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 center-fold 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 Moolah's stable.

She said that Cindy Lauper called her personally.

Yeah,

I'm sure that sounds good, but

no, Cindy Lauper 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 disappointed her but it wasn't like she was an ongoing member of the the team we had done an angle in mid-south wrestling because she was on tour with other of moolah'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 too, or Pat or whoever was making phone.

Bruce wasn't even there then.

He wasn't even there.

Whoever was in the Brooks office, George Scott, as a matter of 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, relatively so because they had been doing commentary for years and he had been a confidant of Vince's, but he wasn't the number two guy to Vince right away.

There was Jim Barnett, but there was George Scott.

And Pat really wasn't,

you know, it wasn't until what, 87,

87, 88, where Pat really became

the booker.

And

I would say 86, 87-ish, thereabouts.

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'd 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.

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, an 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...

We were talking about there were no women around.

So there's no women

with 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 talking about.

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 so then

that's where the whole steroid indictment comes down, where he's not, he's not indicted because he's been accused of rape.

He's indicted for selling wrestlers 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 you're being a dick doing it,

fuck you.

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 the whole nine yards.

The government had a rotten case.

They didn't have a good case, and they didn't win the case because they didn't have a a good case for Vince being a steroid distributor.

And we pointed out the weaknesses in that.

In Long Island.

They said 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 the thing.

Again, Vince wasn't a steroid distributor.

Anyway, he was a steroid advocate.

He'd, 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 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 Mushnik 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 elsewhere, 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 of 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 WWF because he was convinced that Vince was going to go to jail.

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,

then they told the story: Bischoff met Hogan

at Thunder in Paradise, and Hulk smelled Ted Turner's money and got an

incredible deal for way less work.

Boy, the more things change, 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, wasn't Vince.

Vince didn't see any heel turn.

He admitted, I forget if it was this one or the next episode, and Vince was ready to pass the, he wanted Hogan to pass the torch.

Hogan went home, ran out of 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 hadn't been for National Hall, I don't think he could have pulled 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 in WCW, they lost money.

By the time they paid for the shirt and paid for the people to sell the shirt and paid for the shirt to be transported to the arenas and then paid Hogan the 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 was 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 cut, but Vince was never going to allow him to, Vince was never going to give him a cut of the pay-per-views.

Like, 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 Hulk-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 the 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?

For people being 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 fuck put Vince away.

So

anyway, Hulk'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.

Remember the original steroid trial for Zahorian, not for Vince, for Zahorian, a ton of wrestlers had to testify.

Roddy Piper and I think maybe Brian Blair, just all sorts 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.

And 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 other.

So 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'd 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 tells 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 any smarter than the marks were.

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.

But 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 docuseries, 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.

Doby Gray, maybe.

He could have sat on the and drifted away.

And avoided all these things, couldn't he?

He could have.

Wouldn't you just like to drift away sometimes?

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How many points do you connect to?

One, but you know, I'm not exactly sure.

I don't have my Raycons in front of me.

So as I'm listening to you describe it, sometimes holding them in your hands is a better way to understand.

Yes, well, you can listen to

plug these things in and you can plug things into them and you can tie yourself up in these things, but they're wireless.

No, you can't do that.

Well, if you're plugging things into them, nevertheless, let's skip over the multi-point connectivity.

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No.

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Well, nevertheless, but you'll hear quadraphonic sound.

Well, let's go back to the quadraphonic sounds that are in the head of Vince McMahon, episode three of Mr.

McMahon.

Well, Jim, we return to the land of McMahon, episode three of the Netflix docuser.

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.

It's a bigger conspiracy.

There's a whole fucking worldwide conglomeration joining 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, Screwjob.

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.

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 the 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 Darkseid did something, I don't think it was that recent.

And that would have been something that would have prompted that kind of discussion, but I can't.

Well, maybe it was, no, they did the show on Moolah, and maybe it was just longer ago.

But basically,

they start out with Wendy Richter as the champion, and she's done the Cindy Lauper 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

like before she went out, right?

Vince's, that was the 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 in being any other Hulk Hogan but the Hulk Hogan Hulk 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 Moolah.

Yeah, and that's part of the story I think needs to be said.

The idea that Wendy Richter didn't know it was Moolah is ridiculous because she was trained by Moolah.

And once you got in there with Moolah, 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, oh, 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 Moolah.

She was under a mask, even though that Moolah's fucking satchel ass alone

was somewhat of of a giveaway.

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?

What is that?

That was the guy that refereed the midget matches at the garden.

You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, 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 Matsuna commentary was like, what was that?

Well, yeah, but it was a last-minute dissent.

Probably Vince told Moolah, I said, well, if she doesn't sign this thing, just, you know, take it back, right?

But at the same time,

there's Moolah, 50-something years old, even if she was 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 Moolah 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

Moolah 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 gold 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.

It 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 heel 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 Sr.'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 did it to the Warrior.

Remember, he did it to the Warriors.

He 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, he's

okay when the bell is about to ring.

And once the bell has rung to end it, fuck you, you're fired.

And by the way, when you hear stuff like this, you can't blame Jeff Jarick for holding him up for money before he dropped the belt to China.

Well, exactly.

And because Jeff knew what the fuck was going on and because he'd been around for a while in his family.

And that's 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, the testimony, blah, blah, blah.

And they told a story of Hulk.

The government apparently thought that he was going to corroborate all this stuff.

It was they gave him immunity.

Then he testified and he was with Vince 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...

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 Hulk Hogan.

The immune Hulk 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, you know, he told him, oh, yeah, you know, 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, we said, oh shit, this guy's bodybuilding.

He looks better than we do.

We got to do something about this.

No, that's the thing is that, and I've said this for the 30 years or however long it's been.

He wasn't telling guys individually, you know, sitting them down, okay, you got to get on this and that and the other thing and do this.

You know, again, there would might be the illusion to, oh, you know, work out.

Look at your body.

You look like shit, whatever.

But you could see who who was getting the jobs, who was being pushed, what the look was.

And so you'd have to be an idiot.

And even, and then there were still some idiots that still figured it out, not 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

uh but then

remember he's didn't he sign the fucking crusher or am i just imagining he got mad dog he signed anyone he could to hurt verngania Yeah, I mean, anyone, anyone who got signed to be a commentator, signed, anyone who got a gig to be a commentator on AWA TV got signed by Vince.

but that's that's the thing is that you know

some of those guys

crusher team crusher teamed at hogan at one point in wf yeah in milwaukee

and that's what he needed but crusher nationwide

because he was almost 60 and mad dog was almost 60 and

uh wrestling too 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.

They didn't have time.

If I only had time.

But

with a lot of the guys that he kept,

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.

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 wasn't part of my collection.

I think it was gravy he was talking about with you instead of that's I got the gravy memo.

Well, I think that one of the issues with the trial wasn't a memo.

Wasn't there a quote from like Pat Patterson to someone, like the boys need their candy?

The boys need their candy.

Oh, was that in a memo?

Was it in a memo to Linda or something?

The boys need their candy.

Somebody refer.

He didn't write it in a memo, but somebody referred to him saying that in a memo.

I believe it was.

Anyway.

Do Do you think enough people talk about the fact that Dr.

Zahorian looks like Mark David Chapman?

No, you know what?

He doesn't he?

I swear to God, I hadn't seen him in so long and literally paid any attention that

now that

you look back in hindsight, yes, he kind of did.

I wonder where, where he was a few years earlier.

I don't know.

Maybe they got the wrong guy.

We have an interview on 605 way back with Mike Mittman, who worked for the Athletic Commission.

He's the one who brought Dr.

Zahorian.

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, but back to Vince.

Speaking of older man, 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 in the tubes.

It was okay in 93 when I got there.

I'm not saying anything had to, 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 ringboys and the Donahues 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 and that Lisa Wolf and the human relations department.

Human, why can't I ever say it?

Human resources.

And

who was that Osber de Arce?

Some fucking.

Con man that they had hired that supposedly was going to try to help them 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, 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 to 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, say 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, when 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 meetings and everything now, but Linda was the most normal, boring,

you know, lady.

Perfect for something like that, because you got this fucking madman that's liable to say or do anything, depending on obviously, you know, what the situation is.

And he's just gotten off of a federal trial.

So hey, 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 in the business end of it and all is, they ended up either getting fired, being screwy, or

stealing from them, and I think potentially going to jail.

I think that was that the merchandise guy.

What was his name?

God damn it.

Well, 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, then 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 talked about, well, they tried to replace Hulk Hogan with Lex Luger, 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

Bret Hart is fucking great.

He said,

the guy that pulled the sword out of the stone was Bret 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 Davey Boy were suspended,

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 him right after Yokozuna beat Brett.

And then, surprise, surprise, Hogan goes away again, and

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 to 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 the wrestling business, the 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 Bret Hart and Shawn 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, what?

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, he was established first as a singles, but secondly, when Brett lost the belt in between,

I guess Yokozuna'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 there already weren't a lot of problems with Sean.

Yeah.

So,

but anyway,

because they start talking about how, you know, Turner began

taking the talent or Turner, Turner Entertainment, TBS.

We don't want to 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 is 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.

You know, 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 in Vince's 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 Luger walks out on the first Nitro.

In hindsight, it does look a little cheesy for people not aware of 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 what he said about luger walking out on the first nitro

i don't remember the exact quote what was it he said i had handshakes with these guys oh that's right yes yes all those years i had handshakes and no not for the previous 10 fucking years you hadn't see and that's the thing part of it is he remembers the way things were at one time he might not have a great

spatial ability to put them in chronological order.

But But Luger 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 WCW after Luger had a car wreck.

And then

the reason why Luger was able to walk out

was because his contract had expired and they were still talking.

And Vince was so

sure of himself that Luger 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 Luger 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's,

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 believe that, whatever.

But, you know, that's what happened.

Luger, that's why Luger 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 him 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 was the thing with Luger.

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 for his business.

Lex Luger's business was Lex Luger.

He did the right thing for himself.

And at 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.

And then in one of these other episodes, we've been going back and forth, watch, record, 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 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 phrase kind of takes a bad rap because

our friend Shitstain, Mr.

Russo, 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 wanting to open up and admit that everything's a work and a show, but what's real and what's not, to blah, blah, blah.

But I told Vince the same thing when I started on the creative team in February 1996,

right?

My first week.

I said, reality-based as far as what is believable in your

they want to call it a WWE 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?

I use cops as an example.

And so, 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 is what WCW had

over

WWF at the time because of Vince's insistence on still being,

you know, the land of the gobbledygooker.

Do you see what I'm trying to say?

I do.

And, you know, if you think about the Hogan turn in 96,

that happened in Florida on the 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 uh but no there was no oomph to it there was no goddamn that you know the the Bret Hart Steve Austin kind of thing you'd get in 97 there was none of that in 95

so anyway that's what real

or reality based is 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 a Vince was always,

you know,

you would pitch himself that it'd sound like old southern wrestling

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 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 Koplovitz.

Where do they get these fucking names?

She should have changed her name before she got in show business.

But Kay Koplovitz made him stop the network executive because

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's about goddamn time then, wasn't it?

Anyway, I like the billionaire Ted stuff.

You know, it was goofy.

Horrible.

Horrible stuff.

I know.

I know.

How much did they cost?

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 TNA, which in no way, shape, or form had the finances of the WWF.

They made Shark Boy a goddamn fish tank he could live in.

Remember?

That's right.

I remember you told me about it.

I never saw it, thankfully.

Yeah, well, he didn't have you over.

Guess not.

Or maybe it would have, he didn't have you under?

I didn't watch TNA.

I was smart.

Well, you know, 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, said, okay, both Hall and Nash are staying.

All right, so they're staying.

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 fact 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.

Except would he.

That's a lot of bullshit.

How could Vince even believe that?

Would you have believed that?

Well, it was kind of true.

He was fucking

underneath preliminary fucking musclehead in wcw before

vince had him be razor

yeah they were going to let him be razor because they hadn't thought of 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

he believed vince believed it i wasn't in the conversation i didn't I didn't believe Hall or Nash as far as I could throw their respective fucking houses.

And I'm going to the Luger 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 it.

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 a guy on the phone when he's just landed back from another fucking country when he's at 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, Undertaker hated it, and Bret 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 starved and entertainers

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 upset about it afterwards,

until everybody else got upset.

He wasn't really pissed off about it afterwards, isn't it?

Jerry Briscoe, I remember, threw his fucking, wasn't a suitcase, but a big old satchel bag halfway down the

alley at, or the allway, the hallway at Madison Square Garden.

I was kicking mine,

you fucking imbeciles.

But anyway,

that's where they tried to explain Kayfabe 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 his 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 does 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, Kayfabe is 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 Kayfabe was so important, and he's the one teaching 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 sought in half to explain to the audience how her intestines remained unharmed and they really enjoyed working together on that illusion?

Or could he just let the 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 Kfabe.

Kayfabe 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 Kfabe.

The world of Kayfabe can exist in the real world, but this specific show, this hour, two hours, is in the world of Kayfabe.

And then there's Kayfabe 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 snap photos.

This was combining the two areas of Kayfabe and destroying both.

And it was unknown.

And Kayfabe 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 the one whose 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 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.

And so that he'd eventually open up, oh, and

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.

And the next five years or so, anything after that,

it's few and far between that it has not only the

aggression in the ring and the the appearance of

chaos and mayhem but that the people

are not going as bat 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 Ted 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 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 if he'd have done it, it'd have been the biggest popcorn fart in the 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 flare country.

So he had a base of 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 mentioned earlier.

Vince could be, in his mind at least, if not in maybe his fans' minds, the sympathetic babyface 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 rivalry with a

fucking major league celebrity and business person,

but also that way he could be the sympathetic babyface 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 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.

In the AWA, he was fine as an interviewer, but as a commentator, he wasn't good.

In WCW, he wasn't good.

When he took over and when he had Nitro and he made himself a commentator, he 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 getting, you know, all the,

you you know, 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 you can 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

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, as an MC, no way.

Someone who needs needs to bring the excitement.

No way.

He can't do it.

He doesn't seem natural.

John Davidson seemed natural.

Bischoff doesn't.

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.

else brett couldn't debut on wcw the next day with the belt i mean there were 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 to get the belt because otherwise wendy richter will run into a cab like it wasn't that it was i'm gonna 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 had asked 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, God is my witness.

I didn't know.

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 this whole thing.

Yeah.

But it may have have been petty theft in this episode.

He's so blunt at everything.

And honestly, again, that's what it.

I think Vince somehow

was.

See, I can't psychoanalyze people like Heyman.

It's almost like he's spent a lot of time on the couch and heard

the psychoanalysts psychoanalyze.

You know, everyone always said that Heyman's like the northern you and you were the southern Heyman.

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, Heyman's glorious.

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, you know, go and be a man about it so that he could actually go in 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 behind my back.

Right.

Well, no,

from the people in the room at the time,

they suddenly, Brett charged toward him and they locked up.

Like Brett said,

they, you know, not in a full referee's position, collar and elbow, but they locked up like two people about to have a fight.

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 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 here's what I'm talking about.

Well, 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, know, taken some of his, utilized his family members and taken 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...

You see a picture of Vince once having taken a vacation

but there's nobody from his life that's like yeah

me and vince we used to

go down and go fishing because there is nobody well but there are some people like you know brad beluccian who did the six-pack he interview jim troy and other people jim troy worked with with uh 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, no, the most recent one is probably that personal trainer that he hangs out with.

Oh, boy.

I'm serious, though.

I mean, I know.

Where did he go?

His name's in the lawsuit, but that's who he hangs out with.

His handlers.

They had to say hang out.

He hangs out with his handlers and also that.

And handlers.

See, every word you say.

And the physical therapist guy or 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 unindicted co-conspirators or whatever they're fucking called.

But yeah, you know, 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

what what is what has 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

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 Weeder barbell set from the time he was four.

You know,

formulative things in his life, you were around for some of them.

What?

Anything.

When they went bankrupt in the 70s, did we hear anything about that?

Bruce could have told the story about he was on his way to the bankruptcy fucking court proceeding and he went and spent $50 for a fucking manicure.

And because he came

and looked like a savage.

I didn't know about this.

Yes,

he wanted to make sure he presented the proper image when he went into bankruptcy court.

But I mean,

that's, yeah, I see what you're saying, but there, how did he

besides that?

How did he get money?

How did he get this way?

How did he get money?

How did he get this way?

Who was his friend?

Who were his friends?

Who was he hanging out with at different points in his life?

Again, Dick Eversall 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 Vince's?

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 different 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.

Huh.

That

So that's why he got a job as a referee and later on as a

ring crew referee and later as a manager slash wrestler fellow.

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 never even thought of it until you said this.

I got to go back down and watch it.

Yeah.

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 wrestled,

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, a 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,

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 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 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.

Oh, we're going with the sleeping, eh?

And if I got a good night's sleep, perhaps I wouldn't be 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 and wonderful mattresses that fit everybody and everything.

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Have you been inside yours?

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Maybe you have to go to a different vendor for that, then is what you're saying.

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Whoop-poop boop to bed.

Let's go back, Mr.

Shapoopy, to Vince McMahon.

Episode 4, it is.

Back to episode 4 of the Mr.

McMahon docuseries on Netflix.

We are back with more.

Yes, there's more.

More of Vince McMahon.

More of this endless Netflix Mr.

McMahon docuseries.

That some people thought maybe 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 Cornette.

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 clips day 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 liked 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.

A 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 toot-toot 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've talked about, did business throughout his

time

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 batshit 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 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 what, 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 heel

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 how to drive.

Yes.

And, 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 hair cut, you know, his personal habits.

Nothing

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 many 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.

And that was, again, he was 12 years old.

So when he met Vince Sr.

and spending that time, you know, the Grahams 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 lighting 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 that's it.

And Vince always wanted 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 do it in his own company.

Well, Robbie, really.

It's true.

I never thought of it that way, but it's true.

He's a billionaire businessman, a millionaire at that time, multi-millionaire businessman

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 past like one sentence that Vince at first thought he was going to be the babyface.

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 babyface

and that he was going to explain the way that Brett just was selfish and 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.

And when I say Montreal was a work, because

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.

You know, he played the wrong hand.

I shouldn't say that, for he thinks he did the right thing, but the hand he played at 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 and i'll say this again and then i'll move on i know we've 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 brett would have to be the one afterwards.

There'd be no acknowledgement of it visually or verbally to the crowd.

And that Bret would have to be the one afterwards.

And 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 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 babyface 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 the Hitman Hart, 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 I've 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 go, oh, Bob, talk to Bonnie Hammer.

I'm like, oh, 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 Khan 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 on the face of the planet as a wrestling fan, that you've never heard of, but that'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 with 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, that, but

again, that was just another example of.

We're telling them shit they don't even need to know.

And it's not,

we're not even, we're opening up about stuff that's not even

germane.

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 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 have had so many problems with people complaining about the television, in my opinion.

But they wouldn't have sold as many suck it shirts.

Well,

that was the most annoying part of the attitude era was people who weren't wrestlers started doing suck it.

It still remains the most annoying part of 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 saying, 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

you 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 rape conviction and all,

what did you think about 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 had he been arrested, happened in like 91.

Yes, and he was, it was, this was what, about six months after he'd bitten Nevander Holafield'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, 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, was it or was it not?

I guess so, yeah.

But Mr.

McMahon and Steve Austin becomes, and Uncle Dave said it, and this is one thing I can't argue with, and I don't think anybody else can argue with.

It was the biggest,

not only the biggest money program rivalry, I should say, for the uninitiated, but probably the best one in the history of wrestling, wasn't it?

You know, it's akin more to Jerry Lawler 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 the end of the whole thing.

I mean, technically, it's his last match.

Austin came the stunner 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 the 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 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 were 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 of t-shirts, the attitude era 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 was in 84.

There were Hulkamania shirts out, but, 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 wealth and think they're better than other people.

And

he drew memories from his childhood.

He hates himself.

Yes.

Well, and he said, I was, 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 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 bit, he has long arms

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 uppercut.

And boy, you gotta watch out for the Bret Hart, they call it.

Yeah, low-key, I'm really enjoying The Undertaker on this, too.

Just the way he sits back and tells these stories.

Like, he was there in the room when 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 Michaels says there's not that much difference between the two.

And Hulk 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 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 figure?

Did he introduce you to the 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 by 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

I remember I was there for a lot of it, but then I left and I was in OVW 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, now, now, come on now, pal.

No one got killed.

And then they have footage of the buried alive match.

And there's a guy like, 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 of here, you rapist.

I forgot about that one.

And then they have Vince saying, well, people didn't use any knives or guns.

And then they have the clip of Pillman drawing the gun on fucking Austin.

And, you know, the bad influence on the kids.

And

the kids are all grabbing toward their peckle areas and telling people to suck things.

Who was he calling out to the ring when he said, come on out here, you rapists?

Who knows?

Who knows?

Who has any fucking idea?

So, and

then there's Michaels.

And by the way, goddamn, I wish that somebody would get Henry Kissinger out of retirement to broker a fucking settlement between Michaels' left eye and his right eye because they're getting further apart all the time.

Yeah, 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 have it.

And then God struck those eyeballs.

Oh,

God said, I'll teach you how to witness here.

Boom.

Right?

Then what happened after that?

His eyes went two different ways and he hurt his back in a casket match and a mysterious injury, almost like it was from above.

From above.

Or below.

But Michaels 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 and er, 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 how are these lingerie models get in the ring and stagger around like fucking baby fucking deer on ice,

I always had the

eating dog shit analogy.

If it became a popular thing to eat dog shit

and people were just everywhere, just down on all fours on the street eating dog shit,

I still don't believe I'd be partaking in the dog shit.

Yeah, by the way, by the way, I was watching TV.

That wasn't everywhere on TV.

It wasn't 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 written, 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 appealed to Vince.

It says a lot about Vince's sensibilities.

Well, 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 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 areolas,

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.

Well, 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 the kind of face men like.

Too bad a man didn't 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 basketballs being held up by your collarbone,

it doesn't, 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.

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 fallout of Montreal and the 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 Nidhart.

Honestly, and I love Jim.

He's a great guy, but Vince wanted to lose Nighthart when he had him.

So,

and Davey

was another issue that 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 $250,000.

That is, the Kai said, I'll tear the existing one up and start you from here on $400,000.

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 vince had promised him also he'd push him as a single

And the natural program was with Michaels.

And Michaels 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,

and then the whole back thing.

And

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 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.

It was something to do with Owen after the Bret 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 haven'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, I can't see my fucking feet.

No,

they saw what happened.

And Vince said, we felt a duty to continue.

And he said, if it was me, if I had fallen, 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 him,

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 be the, she won as far as the court proceeding.

But then they have 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 think about number four attitude?

You know, again, I...

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 them or whatever.

I would like 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 I, you know, 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

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, are moving more slowly because

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.

No, 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 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 hundred thousand dollar car

wonderful guy it's crazy he would have that much triptophan for lunch with his reputation being that he never slept he was always up working he always had work to do well no that that's the thing he would have and they were thick turkey sandwiches.

I'm talking an inch-tall stack of turkey on this goddamn sandwich, 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 half and he would eat each half in about three bites because he'd stub it in his face and

he's chewing on his big wad of turkey while he's looking in his book because we're working.

It's a workday.

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.

He says, 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 Mushnik or even a Dave Meltzer.

Again, it's not for us.

But yeah, you know, Eddie, 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, goddamn it.

He fucking pulled up and put it in 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 it.

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's 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.

There's nothing about Vince McMahon off hour.

Like, there's nothing about it.

And, you know, there has to be something.

And you, like I 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 going to say anything.

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 were 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.

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.

Well, like, 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 has 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 that 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 Ebersoll 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 Ebersoll?

Dick Ebersoll was the head of NBC Sports who created Saturday Night's Main Event.

Yeah, it just taught WWE's production team how 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 Nakarado's 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 era 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 of the whole thing.

It 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 what we're talking about.

I'll tell you: Shopify is going to make sure that people are 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.

So, 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 that.

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 see there you go again they're not going to force anything

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 they're going to make sure that these suckers out there buy the that you're selling no matter what they're going to make sure the people because they're on your side

every 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.

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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 lower case.

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 shoes.

You'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 code, Jim?

Well, the promo code is Cornet.

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 docuseries.

He's everywhere.

He's Elkobong.

But once again, we are back with more of more

Vince McMahon, the six-part docuseries the world was clamoring for.

We are now at episode five, a big episode, and here to talk about it, Mr.

Jim Cornett.

Clamor, clamor, 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 paul heyman opened this up by psychoanalyzing 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'd have had to have been a court stenographer to write it down it was so eloquent and the 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 sole control of.

And what have I been saying?

Go back to the childhood.

Examine the childhood.

And

you know, Heyman is the new Orson Welles, 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.

So, I mean, he's seen a lot.

Yeah, and the thing is, again, like I said, he's Orson Welles.

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 any other way?

Get Paul Heyman to do the narration,

just the fucking gravitas 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.

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.

And

what the?

I hate to 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 100 years old, right?

Was wheeled in the wheelchair in the recent past.

And there's this gray-haired old woman visiting.

Dressed very nicely.

Obviously, she has a budget for this.

So, I mean, he's taking 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 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 Sr.

Because Shane always wanted to be in the 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 it 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 her in some right because I was there when they both showed up.

Shane, 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 had 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, you know, 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 other mcmah family documentaries in the past where shane says stuff about how like 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 them and ted turner was going to kick him off the network yeah yeah i mean you know but you know it's it's it's what 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 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 Triple H.

Maybe they should have asked Linda about how romantic Vince is.

Well, it makes sense for my daughter to breed with 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 pay-per-view, by the way.

Ed Corse 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 I guess.

Now, here's the thing.

When J.J.

Dillon 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 happen.

Who ended up working there, too?

Well, yes.

And

also the heir to the Mozzola fortune.

That was her maiden name, Marissa Mozzola, the corn oil folks.

But J.J.

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 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.

It 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 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 with 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 idiot.

That's a move, though.

Here's your present.

You get to live near me.

Well, they're right.

You got to live next door to me.

That's, you know, I don't know how to do it.

Right down the hill, so you can look up the hill, and there's this big house where Papa's living.

But anyway, as I say, 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 out about the Zahorian investigation.

Because she was schmoozing with

whoever it was.

Was that in Pennsylvania or 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 and right yeah

and she looked normal well here's this you know

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

Trish and Vince, more on that later.

But that,

you know, Linda's drugged and Trish is taking 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,

I came away,

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 this, 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 another, 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 that way, 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,

Trish Stratus

has the attitude.

That was the gig.

That was my job was to make them hate me so that when I finally turn, 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.

Well, it's just entertainment.

You're playing a character.

It's acting.

But

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 stuff now

and

Vince McMahon's performance in any of the women's 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.

Does he blame his mother because she is the one who brought the stepfather 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 and how many of these things that he acted out were things he witnessed?

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 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 saying, So, my father taught me when I was a child I should cheat.

And that's what 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 conniption fit, as Mama Cornette used to say,

if I went to him and said, I think I ought to cheat at 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 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 segue 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 got to learn to eat shit and like the taste of it in business.

It's all business.

You got to learn to eat shit and like the taste.

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 and 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 him,

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.

Oh, 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 that 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, she wasn't suing at first for attempted fucking.

She got mad first because they wouldn't give her the goddamn big fucking multi-million dollar contract she wanted.

But there was a there was another thing.

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.

Like, what the fuck?

And then she married 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

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, that a couple months later, Vince was watching the Hall of Fame to see Paul Heyman yell, it's the Paul of Ec era.

I'm so proud of the Paul of Vec era.

It's a Game of Thrones.

And Heyman is the goddamn is the wizard, the Merlin, the 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 the 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

developmental.

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's quote was, this can't fail.

And Bob Costas' 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 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?

No.

And he should have embraced that.

Because you know what?

A sick demented pervert he 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 primetime rating ever on network television for any program, apparently, according to Bob Costas, at that time.

Hence, Dick Eversol 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.

They 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.

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 Jon Studd, Kempatera, 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 No, it may have been 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 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.

And I'm going to give you a fucking beating.

What the?

Yeah, what the fuck was that?

Yeah, it was,

it's like a flash of of goddamn real, it's like a real life Wyatt video

where

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 them, 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 say, and he could see the...

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 Thes, Lou Thes gives Vince an award and 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 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 he was doing.

But in Vince's mind, it was hardship and sacrifice.

His dad did him a favor and hooked him up and got him.

His dad was dying of cancer and said, 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, 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 God.

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 was a

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 encouraged.

Oh, yeah, you ought to go out with a guy like Triple H.

That's my kind of guy.

Because it'd 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 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 McMahon appearing again on the national wrestling stage.

I think he came across in this as a figure that everyone would kind of want as 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 contracts.

And look, she worked for fucking Trump.

So her morals are suspect

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 can 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 docuseries 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.

There's no insight into anything about their relationship at all.

There were four or five pictures of them together when they were younger.

When they were younger.

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.

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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 docuseries 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, 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.

Uh, episode the finish and boy howdy

talk about the end 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 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 until he got so fucking old that I didn't trust it anymore.

He had a

computers in my head.

Well, let's say an apple and an egg.

An apple and 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 the way he thinks somehow, I can't remember how they led to it, but he's like, I've got 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 supervillain in a DC comic.

Well, yeah, like he has 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.

Out of

like anyone needed to know that.

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.

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 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 point of 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 damn it was after it after that they started shooting stuff uh 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 oh christ it could all be tied to this we don't know the timeline and you know you would almost well here's another you would almost think it's earlier, too, because they never actually say anything about the plastic surgery and the die 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 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 out looking like Snaddley Whiplash out of nowhere.

But also when he was doing the sit-down,

apparently he was putting them off, putting them off, talking about the rock being late.

He would make them 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 a lot of people.

Well, 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, the doctor, the chef,

Sancho Doctor.

That was 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.

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

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 Costas 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 has, 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, is 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.

He'll tell him, I'll cheat.

I'm going to win.

And what was it that Mary Trump, President Pigshit'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 it was phony.

I'm okay.

That's all.

But Chris Benoit is dead.

And here we go with that.

And then he gets a whole nother 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,

you know, 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 Roy 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 Nowinski got involved,

it becomes, remember, well, I don't remember because we weren't doing this then.

But at the time, I said Roy rage makes no, Royd rage doesn't last for days or hours or, you know, the whole thing as we started to get details.

But then Nowinsky 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 so and then steve austin that was a surprise too to hear that he oh doesn't believe in cte i 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 ah concussions i don't know you know i don't if you're If you're getting a lot of concussions just wrestling, you're not doing it right.

Hey, yeah, you still kind of can.

That was disheartening.

But anyway, so then

the problem was with they brought Nowinsky 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.

A congressional committee.

And I think Linda talked about how they cleaned up things.

Maybe it 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 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 in SB role, in passing, they never went into his obsession

with bodybuilding.

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.

And 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 at that fucking late afternoon, but I don't know what's happened to him.

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, you know, he was tied up endlessly.

So yes and no, but

I never remember anything like,

you know, we're waiting for Vince at the studio at noon and he, you know, he's not there till 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 like 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.

Hulk Hogan, we'll go to Tampa.

We'll sit down and get the, but

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, you know, on the, 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 dirty room?

Like,

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, it was like he was being interrogated rather than

interviewed for a documentary.

But that's what, what did Triple H say?

He,

you see what he wants you to see, right?

And

anyway,

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 anyway

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 to you know and i think the the book ringmaster may have gone into more detail but i can't quote it 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 could 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 wrestler 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

you know, fulfill their obligations or they get on the front page of the paper.

And rehab was a 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, you know, have a substance issue, they'll send you 17 times.

And they added a lot of the medical testing, but again, to make sure nobody had a fucking stroke or a heart attack

as best they could prevent, you know, 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

then

he's a wrestling promoter.

Well, and true.

But then

here was the thing again at Undertaker.

Undertaker, at one point in the series, said 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 well i think maybe he can't remember it because he was upset over doing the job

how the couldn't vince come out and just say oh boy tagger really gutted through it that day but he's well he is upset about the 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 to Broccoles.

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 Brock Lesnar 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,

you know, Brock was the unnamed person in the lawsuit that had, you know, come out a while back when we talked about it when it came out.

But how did that

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 villain-looking motherfucker.

And I'm just in the 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?

He's probably still asking for Polaroids.

But anyway, and that's well, conveniently, next in the program,

they moved to the PG era

because of all the salaciousness and sallicity 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 fore 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,

kiddie 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, 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 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, it's adult people more contemporary, they're they're athletes, they're superstars,

but they're not gobbledygookers,

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 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 at Mania, his match with Kurt Angle, where Angle threw 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.

And 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 was...

terribly impressive here and someone you 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 them when I was down there again.

And last time I saw him was the Hall of Fame in 2017.

He had his kids with him.

He was hugging them, 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.

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 when he go oh hey how you doing pal or would he

yeah by the way we're not that we're not throwing much shame at random people we're talking about his actual kids so we'd be talking about vincent 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 Claus at the office Christmas party with a kid?

No, 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 had footage of Vince working out and working, and then the sit-down interview.

And they b-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, 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, guys that didn't have, I've seen some of their biographies before.

Like 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 Warbucks throwing money around it.

They bumps.

I didn't

have a father figure and didn't see Vince as a father figure.

That's so weird and i mean that's not to say you can't learn from him but but is that something 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

work with him 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

and

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, 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 it, but she's 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 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

that it's Heyman that told the story.

That was a hell of a story for Heyman to tell in his documentary.

Well, yeah, but and I'm saying, allowing it, it's Heyman 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, you know, 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 it.

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 was like living in the 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

era where,

you know, they were the top three people in charge.

And Vince was undoubtedly number one 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.

He'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, know, at the time he was doing it,

and I'm, I, 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, minding my own business, literally.

I always took it because he

wanted everybody to know that he was

genetically potent or whatever, that, you know,

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 then 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, but 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 Mel because they brought up what Meltzer had to say, what Shoemaker had.

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 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 sounds like he's on Fox News.

It was a gotcha piece.

How?

And that, well, hold on.

He said,

you've 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 show it 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 Smogy Mountain Wrestling.

And the only house that I could find

within a 40-mile radius of the office that I could, with air conditioning in it, that I could afford to rent,

laughingly afford to rent, was $2,000 a month in 1996.

Because of 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?

Oh, I found one, but you know, she doesn't like my credit.

Well, just pay the rent in advance.

Fuck, it's $2,000 a month.

He advanced me $25,000 to pay for the house in advance so I could live in a house I wanted 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, they benefit his business.

Well, and it's that's the thing.

There has to be some,

you know,

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 Benois 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?

Yeah, I didn't.

I didn't see it.

And because nobody came 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, ain't no stopping us now.

Yeah, and there's still stories that we've heard about that plane that have not gone out, not been public.

So you 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 and 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 is Vince's mouthpiece.

Avatar?

Rhonda said avatar.

That's not avatar.

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 with the when they were running around in the back of the arena He's in the golf cart behind Vince.

But he's the one defending vociferously what wasn't really a hit piece.

Whose words?

Do you think those are 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 as 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 Vince's.

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, G, and together in a close period of time.

We'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.

Citizen Bruce, baby.

I'm telling you, hey, 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 save 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 it back.

And then we find out he just fired his PR firm because that was their strategy.

You know, let's make Vince 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 him, 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 you 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, but that's it.

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 Cena,

they all asked the same question, what is Vince McMahon's legacy?

And it was, uh, uh.

And that was before.

And that was before the 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 is like, humming a, hummina, humming.

And then Vince,

they asked him, and he didn't,

not only didn't he really give an answer, he went off, 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 went into,

you know, some people become the character

and they can't tell the difference.

With me, it's a blend.

One is exaggerated.

I'm not sure which one.

He should have been a weatherman because he could do the forecast.

It's either going to rain or it's not.

But yeah, so Vince's.

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, the statutory limitations.

Statutations ran out.

So

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, well, he had more than one.

He had a team, but Jerry was the main guy.

I don't know who he is 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.

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 if 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

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

a special one hour update at some point in the future but it i don't even know if it would be a part it wouldn't be a part of this particular series it'd just be another standalone 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 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.

Yeah, 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.

Are we saying that for some twisted performance, you know?

I think that, well, again, he sees what you want him to see, was the quote.

And normally he's so careful when he speaks.

And of course, you know, a few times he has gotten pissed.

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.

And

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 McMahons, 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 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 any more now?

So I think the McMahon era is pretty much over with.

And, you know, know, with Shane McMahon, when people talk about the rumors about him doing something with AEW, with Tony Kahn,

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 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-through returns next week and of course the experience in a few days Uh, you know where to find us.

The official Jim Cornette YouTube channel, all these clips will be there.

Travis Heckle artwork, the artwork from George, the clips, the full episodes, the omnibus collections.

Check it out.

The official Jim Cornette YouTube channel, patreon.com/slash Cornette.

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Tally ho!