Part One: Vince McMahon, History's Greatest Monster

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Robert Evans here and we'll get to the Vince McMahon
episodes in a second. I wanted to let you all
know that for the fourth year in a row, we
are doing our fundraiser for the Portland Diaper Bank. Behind
the Bastards supporters have been helping to fund the Portland
Diaper Bank since twenty twenty and bought millions of diapers
for people who really need them. So if you go
to GoFundMe and type in bTB fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank,

(00:24):
or just type in bTB fundraiser Diaper Bank, go fund
me into Google anything like that, you will find it.
So please go fund me bTB Fundraiser for Portland Diaper Bank.
Help us raise the money that these people need to
get diapers to folks who need them desperately. Hey everyone,
I'm Robert Evans. I'm the host of a podcast called

(00:45):
Behind the Bastards, and like most of you, I was
raised during the nineteen nineties and early two thousands on
a steady diet of World War II movies and History
Channel documentaries about Hitler. I decided as an adult to
kind of make that into a career and just read
weird books about the Nazis and other dictators and talk
about them on podcasts, And for the last five years

(01:08):
or so, that's gone pretty well. You know, every week
I find a new terrible person, I read about him,
I write a script, and the show comes out that
you're all duly familiar with. Well, a couple of weeks ago,
I decided, after a few years of every now and
then getting suggestions from people, to do a bastard who
was kind of from the it's not really a sport,

(01:29):
but we'll call it from the sports world. A guy
you've probably heard of called Vince McMahon. He is the
owner of more or less of the what was once
the WWF is now the WWE, and I kind of
expected it to be like every other episode of Behind
the Bastards. You know, I spend three or four days,
I read a book, maybe two, do some research, put

(01:50):
together a script. Well, to my surprise, a couple of
things happened. One of the things that happened is that
when I posted that I was doing this guy, response
unlike anything I've ever gotten, thousands and thousands of likes
on Twitter and wrestling Twitter lit up over it. There
were news articles about the fact that I was going
to cover this guy, which has literally never happened before.

(02:12):
Authors of books about Vince McMahon, including the book author
of the book Ring Master, which we're going to talk
about a little bit by Abraham Josephine Reisman here after
referred to as Josie Riiseman reached out. People kind of
lost their mind about it, and I found myself putting
together a script that is currently set to be about

(02:32):
as long as the script on Henry Kissinger. And that
may seem insane for a guy whose primary claim to
fame is running a wrestling company, but I assure you
it's not. He deserves everything we're writing about him. And
to kind of help me wrestle this monster.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Can I just say I told you so? First of all?
You did? You did?

Speaker 1 (02:51):
You tried to warn me, Sophie, and for like several years. Yeah,
So we're doing this, and the old only people I
thought could possibly help me wrestle this thing into a
manageable form are two of the people I respect most
when it comes to talking about.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Shit like this.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Sean Riley aka Sean Baby, who you will all well
remember from the the legendary episodes that we did on
Famous Karate Monster. Fucking yeah yeah, Sean. Hey, how are
you doing.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Oh it's good to be back. I've missed you.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
I have. I have missed you too, Sean. And this
is this is going to be a special one. And
I also want to introduce Tom Ryman to the program.
Tom's been on a number of episodes. Tom, you're also
a big wrestling fan.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
Yeah, yeah, very excited to be talking about Vince sick Mann.
I thought I knew everything there was to know about
vincemick mahn. But the fact that you have such a
volume prepared for us is making me think, like.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Did I not know how much of a ghoul he was?
I thought I did? Well, figure technically a business goblin.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah, he's a business gossling. Yeah, he's a business monster.
There's a lot going for a business gool One of
the problems with covering Vince McMahon. Weirdly enough, the thing
that this episode is most similar to is writing about
European royalty in the eighteen hundreds and nineteen hundreds, Because
all of those like kings like Napoleon the Third or

(04:22):
Leopold or Victoria, there was like somebody writing about every
single second of their life and every decision that they made. Right,
So there's just this there's so much shit to go through.
There's so much detail on everything they ever did, and
weirdly enough, it's exactly the same with wrestling, Like wrestling.
Covering wrestling is a lot like covering English or European royalty.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
Oh that's the king Leopold had like a Dave Meltzer
and a wrestling observer and stuff just track in his
every movie.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Yeah, so that's part of what's going on here. And
the other part of what's going on is that, like,
as I started learning about Vince, there are all these
other wrestlers, Like wrestling probably has the highest density of
like monsters of of any like entertainment industry sport out there,
at least interesting monsters, right, Like, there's just so many

(05:11):
fascinating weirdos.

Speaker 4 (05:13):
Like a casual wrestling story is like, oh, yeah, my
friend was cranky. Story tour guy's eyeball out backstage.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
Yeah, it's because they're carnies. It's it's a carnival thing.
And so there's this it's way more hardcore than I
think the more casual person realizes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
So every probably every episode, all of the first couple
so far, we're going to be going on log aggressions
where we just talk about other crazy ass stories from wrestling,
because like I felt like I was doing a disservice
if I didn't, I wanted.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
To get and the Giant poop stories.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
We are talking a lot about Andre. Yes, I love Andre.
The Giants not a master to a hero. By the way,
just so we're clear.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
For sure, I wouldn't let an indecipherable Ultimate Warrior monologues.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, oh god, I have been watching quite a bit
of wrestling. I wanted to start by asking, what is
y'all's background, uh with with pro wrestling?

Speaker 2 (06:08):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (06:09):
Okay, uh, longtime fan since I was a kid, I
grew up. I actually trained in pro wrestling for about
half a year and did WOW three three live shows
as a character named Captain Party. I was a superpowered
frat boy. I did here in Portland at the Ash
Street Saloon.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Oh shit.

Speaker 4 (06:27):
Yeah, and let's see, I wrote three video games about wrestling,
three w WE video games.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
Gosh, I feel like that's enough. That's yeah, No, that's
that's so much expertise. Yeah, I can live up to that.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah, Tom, now you're on and now you're.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
I mean, fucking I'll try so. I also grew up
watching wrestling, loved it since I was a kid. I
was always more at a w W F or w
W E than WCW. I was a backyard wrestler for
several years. Hell yeah, and I definitely filmed one of

(07:10):
my friends throwing another one of my friends off the
roof of their house, and then that friend doing a
flying elbow drop off of the house onto that friend.
I never went off the house, but I had some
some some fun bumps in a backyard done to me
as well. I'm my friend back home books a local promotion.
It's actually how I met my wife. I met my wife.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
At a wrestling show. Yeah, and your wife for so long?

Speaker 3 (07:36):
Okay, so so so my my buddy Jerry Stephanie's books.
Independent wrestling promotion called Vanguard Championship Wrestling BCW in Virginia
and many years ago they put on a show where
they brought in Rick Flair. He was like a big
mail bringing him for the show as a baby. By
the way, I know, I remember that episode.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
That's nuts. And so she was.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
Marina was there set up because one of the wrestlers
his mom ran this like new age sort of healing
a store studio, and she had a massage parlor in there.
Marina's a massage therapist. So Marina had a massage chair
set up at this wrestling show, and that's how I
met her. I met my wife at a Rick Flair appearance. Now,

(08:21):
my friend put on that.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Is that is a happier Rick Flair story than we've
gotten late. Yeah, I mean Rick Flair Press recently.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
Flair spent the whole day drinking and then tried to
stiff somebody else with the bill. That's that's what I
heard from that specific appearance.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
But I have so I will.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
I will come in and say I have far less
experience than all of you, and I think my experience
kind of lines up broadly with like most kids in
the nineties were like. I was never like a huge
wrestling guy. I played a bunch of different wrestling video
games in the late nineties early two thousands, when like
frendshould come over for birthdays, Robert.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
I also own AWF Superstars Stand Up Arcade Unit.

Speaker 4 (09:02):
I should have included that that is AWERS.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah, I definitely played a bunch of that. I was
I kind of I had about a maybe two years
where I watched wrestling semi regularly. This was kind of
I think it's you'd call it the Attitude era, right
when Stone Cold Steve Austin was just one of the
big names and the yeah and I was brought in again.
It was one of those things. It wasn't I didn't
it wasn't kind of like it did. Like I made

(09:30):
friends with a kid and he was like one of
the few kids weird enough to want to hang out
with me after school when I moved to this new town,
and he loved wrestling and old Star Trek, right, and
so he introduced me to both of those things. Obviously,
the love of Star Trek stuck around longer, but I
watched wrestling like off and on for a couple of years,
and you know, for years afterwards, i'd play games when
you know, we were having a birthday party or something

(09:51):
with my friends. From what I have kind of read,
you know, I didn't know this at the time. Obviously
wrestling was just wrestling, but ninety seven and ninety eight,
which was sort of more or less I think when
I was watching wrestling was kind of smack dab in
the middle of depending on how you count it, the
third or fourth big American surge of interest in wrestling,
and the second of those to happen under the watchful

(10:13):
eye of Vince. Vince McMahon, I don't remember a whole
lot about that time except for that my favorite wrestler
was the Undertaker. I'm not sure what like where that
puts me, although people say he was a great kind
of like a technical, you know, wrestler, good at back
and people up, good at the good at the you know,
kind of pinch hitter for storylines and stuff.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Zombie, yeah, zombie and Vince McMahon.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
I think for most of us who are kind of
on the periphery of wrestling, who just sort of know it,
you know, as a in broad terms, is one of
those figures in American pop culture who's just kind of
always been there. Like I couldn't tell you when I
first heard his name, right, He's like Michael Jackson or
Arnold Schwarzenegger in that he's just someone who's always been
kind of part of the foundation of pop culture for

(11:01):
basically my whole life. And in the decades since I,
you know, was kind of into wrestling, he's become a
major Republican donor, one of the few close friends of
former President Trump. People will say that he was one
of the only people Trump would take his phone calls
and push other people out of the room when he
called while he was president. His wife is also a

(11:23):
massive influence, Linda, huge influence on the direction of wrestling,
and also moderately influential person in American politics. She was
kind of the only member of Trump's cabinet who didn't
have a huge scandal during his president See, like she
was just kind of in there for a while and
then bounced, but there was no like she didn't do
a mooch right, Like, there was no big blow up,

(11:46):
which I'm not saying is like praise for her. She
is a terrible person, but like she's savvier than a
lot of the other people he brought in.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
Do you remember when the mooch went on like a
following spree and followed like everyone at cracked. Yeah, that
was a fun day. That was a weird d what
a wild presidency. We just all blew right past it.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
But Vince is not just and kind of the reason
why we're doing so much focus on Vince is not
just like a guy who is influential in wrestling. He
helped create the foundations in a lot of ways of
not just modern right wing media, but like modern American culture.
You know, there's a strong argument that we may not
get Donald Trump as president without Vince McMahon, and specifically

(12:28):
without Trump's time in wrestling, where a lot of people
will argue he learned quite a bit.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
The best book about the life.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Of Vince McMahon is the recently published Tome Ring Master
by Abraham Josephine Riceman, again hereafter referred to as Josie Risman.
Early on in the book, she makes the point that
wrestling is more or less inextricable from human civilization. I
didn't know this when I started researching, but the Biblical
Jacob got the name Israel after a wrestling match, and

(12:57):
the word Israel means wrestling with God, at least in
one translation, So that we that's kind of sweet, Yeah,
romming a macho man elbow on God. Hell, Yes, that's
exactly how I d God. Palestine does translate the laydrop.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
So virtually every culture has some form of wrestling, and generally,
you know, up until the modern era, these were like
actual competitions right in which you know, athletes were, you know,
the the end was in doubt. Obviously, like all sports people,
you know, falling on matches for betting purposes has happened
for forever. But generally speaking, it was supposed to be
an actual competition. And while you know that was always

(13:40):
a part of wrestling, it also relied heavily on spectacle, right,
This has always been a part of it. Now, if
we're tracing back the origins of modern pro wrestling, the
most direct place to do so is the French Revolution
of eighteen thirty, better known as the July Revolution. This
is the revolution that led to the overthrow of the
Bourbon monarchy and its replacement by the House of Orleon.

(14:01):
But that's you know, boring history, nerd shit, So I'm
just going to quote from wrestling reporter Kyle Dunning.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Here.

Speaker 1 (14:07):
It is said that during this time wrestlers were first
given nicknames. Also, the tradition of an open challenge being
issued to the general public was born. There was commonly
a reward of five hundred francs to anyone who could
knock a wrestler down to the ground. This is where
Circus has got the idea from. I wish we still
had that.

Speaker 4 (14:24):
This happened organically on me Once. I was at a
Mexican video game convention and there was a wrestling ring
in this booth that I was near, just a weird
little wrestling ring, don't know why it was there, and
someone asked me to get up and say something, and
within two minutes, I just sort of organically offered to
body slam the biggest person they could find. And then

(14:47):
I just did that for like ten minutes, and then
one kid got in and it was like, okay, cool,
put your phone down, I'll body slam you.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
And then he.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
Attacked me and I was like, Oh, this must be
how shoot fighting got it start.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
How did that go? Uh?

Speaker 4 (15:04):
He tried to take me down and then we wrestled
for a bit and I kind of gave him like
half a body slam, which he did not want, so
he didn't take it very well, and I realized, we
got to stop doing this.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
This is escalating too quickly. Yeah, this could go really badly.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
I always there were back in the day kind of
One of the seminal moments in early internet culture was
the uh there was this director of horrible video game
movies named Uva Bowl you. I think everyone is here
is familiar with this story. Who got made fun of
by comedy writers on the internet a lot, and so
challenged them to a fight, like a televised fight. And

(15:43):
he had been he had some sort of semi pro experience, right,
he's like an amateur box Yeah, but he's legitimately like
a more built dude than the average internet comedy writer
in the late nineties early two thousands. For sure, he
did not. If I'm not mistaken, Sean, you put your
hat into the ring and he did not want anything
to do with that.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
I did.

Speaker 4 (16:03):
It's gonna take like three or four minutes to tell
this full story. I want to be said, you know,
but like I used to host a show called Attack
the Show back in the.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
Day on G four. Yeah, yeah, and yeah recently came
back but uh and then left again.

Speaker 4 (16:16):
But uh we wanted to come on and fight Kevin Pereira,
and Kevin pere Is like, dude, that's crazy.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
But wait, wait, wait, I bet Sean Dabey'd fight you.
And so they called me.

Speaker 4 (16:24):
I'm like fuck yes today, tomorrow, I don't care when,
and uh and.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Then zero, I don't need to prepare.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
I've been preparing for this fight my whole life, my
whole life.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
When I got the call, I did jump some rope.
I'm like, all right, all right, let's let's get drank
some raw eggs.

Speaker 5 (16:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (16:43):
I had a few eggs, and so us people like
called me to get my stats, and I was like,
I gave him my stats. I was, uh, six y three.
I'm like two hundred ten pounds. This is not good
news for UE Bowl. They're like, do you know how
to fight? I'm like, yeah, I kind of know how
to fight, like you know what, you know what, maybe
we're not going to do this. And I found out

(17:04):
later that he basically I don't think he was like scared,
but he was like he's kind of a bully.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
He just wants to beat up on little nerds.

Speaker 4 (17:09):
He'd wear like film Rocky for So he's like, no,
I don't I want to like just beat up your
smallest toast. I don't want to like stand toe to
toe with a real man.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
I want to beat up Richard Kanka. Yeah, he beat
the share that guy. And it's included as DVD extras
on one of his movies. So I've watched all the
fights and it's you know we we have since learned
afterwards that low Tax had it coming.

Speaker 4 (17:36):
Yes, yeah, he was uh uh you know that's will
be here. So anyway, he did offer me a spot
in that They're like, well, we'll fly to Canada and
we'll do it there, and like suspiciously, they never followed
up on that. But but anyway, that's the story of
but we ball and then people say like, oh, he
ducked me, and I guess he technically did, but uh

(17:57):
I did go to the premiere postal and I was like,
I think it's only fair that I give him the
chance to kick my ass. So I went up because
I had already like made fun of him in the magazines. Yeah,
and I went up and he's like, yeah, I know
who you are. And I'm like okay, so like so, like,
are you like pissed and he's like no. And then
he just very uh carefully explained all of my jokes

(18:18):
back to me and how they weren't like real, and I'm.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
Like, yeah, they're they're fucking jokes.

Speaker 4 (18:23):
Like he did, I don't think he understood even a
beginning of what I was trying to do there was
making fun of you.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
The movies are bad. What the heck are we doing here?

Speaker 3 (18:33):
I think the way they framed it on the DVD
extras that I saw was that, oh, he's he's fighting critics.
So maybe he thought it was like all film criticism
and not just like jokes. I yes, I mean I
was criticizing his films. He was just like, you know,
like like in Blood Rain there's a love scene. I
was like, this is obviously directed by a man who's

(18:54):
never fucked. And he's like, you know, I had this
ex before, Like he's like clinically explaining. Does seem like
the type of dude that would need to clarify?

Speaker 1 (19:07):
No?

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Wait, wait, wait, wait wait, I.

Speaker 4 (19:08):
Have had six right, it doesn't translate into my work,
but I have touched a Wilma.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
I have.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
I have seen the boobies.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
I do like to think about him like getting in
a cage with Ebert and then Ebert like pulling out
like the baracco weapons from Mortal Kombat, just.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
Kind of just sucking swords erupting from his risky Yeah,
that's how I imagine him fighting. Never jump in got
too much anti air face, So send you Beyond the
Valley of the Dolls.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
This, uh, this kind of evolution in wrestling where it
starts to become something that like, yeah, people like you're
doing it out in public. People are like drinking heavily.
You've got random folks locally kind of like showing up
to fight, try to knock these wrestlers down. It becomes
this circus act. This is what marks kind of the
first really clear permanent separation from the various forms of

(20:03):
competitive wrestling that had obviously been around for forever to
modern wrestling as entertainment. Because obviously, when you've got like
random local drunks like queuing up to be suplexed, the
point is very clearly not measuring grappling skill in a
traditional way.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
Right.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
By eighteen forty eight, Circus troops had adopted a new
style of wrestling known as first hand wrestling all better
known as Greco Roman wrestling, which is not the way
that the ancient Greeks or Romans wrestled, right, It's just
called that it pants on for one, Yeah, they had
pants on for one, a lot less abusive in a
number of ways. It banned a number of holds below

(20:40):
the waist. It also banned a number of holds that
had kept killing people, so they were trying to like
reduce the body count. Circus troops in Europe quickly adopted
this new style, but not eliminate the body. Can know
they never get rid of the body count. Let's be
very clear about this. I've been again, I've benus watching
old wrestling, like from the eighties and early nineties with

(21:03):
like my young friend Garrison, and one of the things
we'll do in every match is like google the names
and see kind of who made it the longest. Yeah,
a lot of forty nine year olds, you know, tapping
out of life in this sport.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
Unfortunately, Oh yeah, that's all a joke. It was just
a sad reality.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah, football is not wildly different. So one of the
things that's kind of going on here is they transition
to Greco Roman wrestling, is that a lot of things
like leg hooks are restricted, which were some of the
most effective holds, and so because they can't do a
lot of the holes they used to be doing, wrestlers
adopted the tactic of throwing each other around the room

(21:42):
or around the the you know, the whatever the square,
which is obviously like another link you know, in the
chain to modern pro wrestling. The nicknames fan challenges and
increasingly elaborate throws that evolved over this period of time
made wrestling more fun to watch than it had been before.
By the end of the eighteen hundreds, the new sport
had first real champion, a guy named Paul Ponds. He

(22:03):
was a Frenchman. His stage name was Colossus, and he became,
by some counts, the world Champion of Greco Roman wrestling.
That's what Wikipedia calls him. At least the reality is
he won a match sponsored by a magazine and then
like another match sponsored in Russia, neither of which were
really world championships. But he just started calling himself the
world champion because like, who's gonna argue with you?

Speaker 2 (22:26):
Right, right, this is before the internet. You can just
say things.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
This is before the internet and your giant you know, right,
So this may sport.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
I'm in favor of that.

Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah, it's fine. This made him famous, and he opened
a gym for wrestlers and for strongmen, right, And this
is again all kind of very highly tied to the circus. Still,
the reality of the situation is that a couple of
different countries had wrestling tournaments and winning basically any one
of them would qualify you to call yourself world champion
if you wanted, because like there was no body that

(22:59):
was sort of determining who was what was the real
world championship in the early nineteen hundreds. This is kind
of the first time that we start to have what
you could call a credible world championship. And the guy
who wins it for the first time is a dude
named George Hackenschmidt, who is legitimately one of the hardest
motherfuckers to ever walk the face of the earth, basically

(23:21):
unbeatable from nineteen oh one to nineteen oh eight.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
How lucky is that name? Then, hacken Schmidt. Hackenschmidt it is.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
And like, I'm gonna have Sophie show you a picture
of this dude in the second here.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
Pons I'm interesting, expecting a real granite faced son of
a bitch.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
He is actually kind of in a pre steroid era.
He looks like he's on steroids. He's no, no, no,
he is. He is smooth as a fucking waxed dolphin.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
Oh no.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
He's also he's interesting because he's kind of an old guy.
When he becomes he's thirty four, which is like today
even that's kind of like pushing it you know, by
the standard of athletes in the late eighteen hundred, that's
like hundred and three.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yeah, back then he might as well have been ninety seven. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
Hackenschmidt is a one of the first really shredded guys,
as I said, in the modern sense, to ever be photographed.
And again it kind of says a lot that he
still looks jacked by today's standards, even though there's there's
no steroids in this period. There's not even like a
great understanding of muscle building.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Why do you think they took his picture?

Speaker 3 (24:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (24:27):
It's also he is credited as the inventor of the
bench press and the hack Squad, at least according to
a website called Barbend that repeatedly tried to sell me creatine.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
I feel like somebody figured out the bench press before that.
It's not exactly weird.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
I found another website that says he definitely didn't create
the bench press, although I will say that website also
tried to sell me creatine.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
So how much so how much creating you get?

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Clearly not enough according to these two websites, did you
did you buy enough creatine to invent the bench bench? Us? Uh?

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Not not yet.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
But I'm hoping I bought enough creatine to determine which
website is more credible. Like whatever, whichever creatine pushes my
bench up more and like a three week period, that's
the website I'll choose to believe.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
This is how we will measure, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
I want you to show them like hacken Schmidt looks
like a crude discount discount action figure from a grocery
store toy isle. Hell yeah, he looks awesome. Yeah, totally natty.
You have to assume because it's nineteen oh eight. Nick, Yeah, absolutely,
no neck his necklace. He cannot put his arms down

(25:37):
at his side, put his arms down to his socks.
He looks like a man. Yeah, like, look at those thighs.
This motherfucker never skipped a leg day. We can say
that with a degree of certainty. It's interesting. Look over
black socks. Yeah, incredible. Yeah, he's got the socks pulled up.
It looks like it doesn't look amazing. Yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
This dude.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
It's like reminding me of like the difference between like
when like Christopher Reeve or like Michael Keaton played superheroes
and then like what people who play superheroes look like nowadays, Like,
this guy's definitely jacked, but like he's not Hugh Jackman
and the Wolverine Jack. No, no, no, no no, Like
it's huge X Men Jack.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
Although he is a wide shouldered man, he's so wide,
he is a fascinating looking fellow. So again, basically, none
of the creatine websites disagree that he invented the hack squat,
so I guess we have to give him that. A
different website that tried to sell me work out Powders
did argue that he didn't invent the bench press, and

(26:39):
that article was written by a guy named Roger rock Lockridge,
So I do think we have to trust it because
that's quite a name, sweet name.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
So Hack and Schmidt racked up he invented something, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yeah, yeah. The rock is in quotes absolutely, I hope
you do. Could hear them? So Hack and Schmidt rack
up more than three thousand victories during his career. A
lot of them were during He has a there's a
forty day wrestling tournament that he wins in nineteen hundred. Yeah,
so this guy, you have to assume pretty good endurrets.

(27:13):
But he doesn't really earn a pace of a place
of promise in the history books until nineteen oh five
when he travels to the United States. Now, in the
US and the UK, obviously, like in Europe, as we've
been talking about, Greco Roman wrestling is the big thing
in the US and the UK. It's still a thing,
but it's kind of less favored than something called catches

(27:33):
catch can wrestling, which is a combination of several smaller
variants of wrestling rules that allows leg hooks but also
emphasizes submissions and matt wrestling. This goes viral in the
US because it made it particularly easy to allow challenges
for members of the public at big outdoor events. Americans
are drunk and love to fight, so you can't not
have that. But also you don't want either to kill

(27:55):
these guys or for them to seriously hurt your wrestlers,
and so submission hold or something that wrestlers can train
on and can kind of guarantee that they can win
without like murdering a suburban dad by shattering his spine.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
Yeah, I'm just trying to picture the first poor son
of a bitch that got put into like a figure four.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, you have no context for that.

Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah, what is this a spell? No, it's like a
medieval peasant eating cheetos. It just blows your mind. You
would just you would just have a stroke and die, like.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
You wouldn't be able to wrap your mind around whatever
devilry was being done to absolute.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
No, No, this was still a point.

Speaker 4 (28:34):
Times I've gone back to my date after losing to
a figure four leg lock.

Speaker 2 (28:38):
Like, sorry, honey, I just I thought I had him
that time.

Speaker 4 (28:42):
That would have been my whole life back then, just
going out on dates like oh, sorry, I'm gonna go
to my ass kicked honey, Like, stop it, come back
to our date.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
You promised me you wouldn't do this anymore, my whole life.
The evil you know, he's just gonna wrap your legs
up again. I turn them over if I can slip them,
so we're on our bellies. You never listened to me.
You think my ideas are stupid.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
I'm imagining like early oss men, watching like a wrestling
match and going, we have to we have to figure
this out.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
We have to put money into this. This is how
we beat the crowds. We gotta crack this nut.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
Yeah, they've got like a stone cold stunner locked up
underneath the pentagon, like we can't let this out, and
it's like the plague in the stand. This gets out,
anything could happen.

Speaker 4 (29:27):
I've always thought you could measure how good a lover
a man is by how well he takes a stunner,
like how giving he is is a lover by how
much he gets obliterated by the stone cold stunner, which
means that the Rock does like a full backflip. I'm
saying on record, I think the Rock is a fairy
giving level. It's yeah, I mean, honestly, Sean, it's the
Rock or Vince. Yeah, So that does like how weird

(29:49):
Like Quiver, he used to do it better. He used
to do it better before he blew his knees up.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
So hacken Schmidt's style and size made him pretty unstopped
pppable in the US for a time.

Speaker 2 (30:01):
He very quickly.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
Defeated the American Champion of the Day guy named Tom
Jenkins and what was not a particularly hard match. Hackenschmidt
was so dominant that a wrestling promoter named Charles Cochran
took him aside and was like, hey man, you make
a lot more money if you like fuck around with
your opponents a little like tauntum toy with them. Give
people a show instead of just like beating the absolute
piss out of them. In an article for E Wrestling News,

(30:25):
Kyle dunning Wright's in other words, he wanted to fake
the contests to make them more competitive, because the marks
would keep coming back if they thought he was beatable.
With this business philosophy, catch wrestling soon transitioned to become
professional wrestling, and many other countries adopted the same, knowing
there was more money to be made predetermining bouts for
entertainment value. It all relied on keeping to k fabe
that wrestling remained a sport in the eyes of the public.

(30:47):
Now again, it's not as this is kind of like
flattening it a little bit. Obviously, other people, other promoters
had been doing wrestling matches where the ending was sort
of settled ahead of time, but that was not always
the case. And it was also a thing where like
a lot of time in this day, even if you
were supposed to be setting up who's going to win
ahead of time, it would still like either egos would

(31:09):
get her in the way or something, and like people
would actually just wind up fighting right like this was
a lot more common back then. I should also note
that the idea in this period that a major sporting
event might be determined by something other than legitimate contest
was not unique to wrestling. In early nineteen nineteen, the
Chicago White Sox conspired to lose that year's Fall Classic

(31:29):
to the Cincinnati Reds. Members of the White Sox approached
a group of gamblers and presented them with an opportunity
to make a shitload of money. This did not go well.
There's a huge grand jury investigation, there's a trial, and
major league sports gambling is banned until we realized that
it was stopping a lot of terrible people from making money.
This took about one hundred years, so the fallout from

(31:51):
this is significant. Anyway, Hack and Schmidt basically unstoppable in
the US until he winds up wrestling a guy named
Frank Gotch. Gotch is an American who just was famous
for having pretty incredible endurance. It's unclear to me if
their big match is fixed in one way, but from
what I've read, neither man is able to force the

(32:12):
other into a clear submission for more than two hours,
and that's that is a huge. So for some perspective
in modern wrestling, one of the most famous matches of
all time is an hour long match between Shawn Michaels
and Brett Hart. These are two of like the best
technical wrestlers of their day. They're obviously this is not
they're not competing in the traditional sense, but if you
watch what they're doing, it's amazing that they kept up

(32:34):
that level of.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Energy for now.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
It's an incredible match. Yeah, they are doing they are going.
It is insane.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Shit.

Speaker 4 (32:40):
It was one of the may matches that went ninety minutes. Yeah,
the year two thousand. That was because soccer Roba versus
Hoyst Grace. Yeah, so, oh, I love soccer.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
It's the best. Yeah, the freaking Gracie Hunter.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
I think the point I'm making is that Hackenschmidt and
Gotch must have been something to see. Two hours is
still a significant fucking mesch.

Speaker 3 (32:59):
If Gotcha's finishing move wasn't called the Gotcha, I don't
know what he's doing in the carnie business.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, I feel like I don't know what we're doing
as a culture if that wasn't the case. But I
haven't found evidence of it. Tom So I apologize on
behalf of America. No, yeah, so wrestling's chairman right along,
early nineteen hundreds. But then you get that whole World
War thing. It disrupts the industry. Obviously, the kind of

(33:29):
wrestling you know, age men eventually do come back afterwards,
but the age that follows World War One is a
little more jaded. And one of the things this means
is that a larger and larger number of wrestling fans
start to doubt whether or not wrestling is real. The
sport languished and a shady as a kind of shady
side show entertainment for drunks and people from New Jersey
until the nineteen twenties. In the early twenties, a wrestler

(33:52):
named Ed Lewis is hooked up by his trainer who'd
also trained Frank Gotch with a fella named Toots Mond.
Now Tootsmond comes from a names Toots Mob. These all
sounds like old time, Sophie. Will you look up a
picture of tootsman. They need to see him. But second,

(34:13):
I need to describe this man to you. Tootsmond is
in the early nineteen twenties considered one of the most
out of control gamblers in the entire country in the twenties, like, hell,
he is a mobbed up dude who other mobbed up
dudes are like, This motherfucker gambles too much and number
two Toots mon competition Smeland is a dude who other

(34:36):
men in the twenties are like. This guy drinks quite
a lot.

Speaker 5 (34:39):
Like it is.

Speaker 1 (34:41):
It's probable no one on earth could drink with this
guy today.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
I'm really excited to Yeah, you gotta show. You got
to show, Toots. I can't wait to see this. I
can't wait to see this hero.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yeah, you're ready ready, This guy who other mobsters were like,
God damn, this man holy looks like a giant baby.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
Yeah, this is an unfinished clone. Yeah he's dummy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
They paint those nipples on him every morning so people
don't get suspicious.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
He looks, he looks.

Speaker 4 (35:17):
Yeah to sixty yeah, six from He.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
Is a slab of meat.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
Look, this dude a profoundly unsettling man. And I'm only
saying that because he's been dead for decades, because I
would be frightened to make these comments if he were alive.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
You know, he looks like in the face, not so
much as build but in the face he looks like
Brian Urlocker. Oh yeah, like a cabbage patch kid.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
But yeah, looks like he does have yeah, resting cabbage
patch energy.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
So Toots is in adition to me, let me call
him because of his train conductor hat.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, Toots is also a wrestler, and so he acted
Ed Lewis's sparring partner, trainer and security man. Together the
two worked out a series of new holds and innovative
wrestling tactics. They also would wrestle each other in the
ring sometime during matches these were you know, obviously they
had set these matches ahead of time. Both of these

(36:16):
guys are pretty technically skilled. So Toots is the kind
of guy that like Ed, can trust, and they can
trust each other to do a lot of these kind
of like throws and tosses and not murder each other
and put together a few poreographed spectacle Right.

Speaker 3 (36:29):
If you can't trust Toots, you can't trust Toots. Who
can't trust who wants to stay in this world? If
you can't trust the hard drink and gambling, out of
control mobster wrestler.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
So Toots and Lewis overtime develop a new style of wrestling,
and it's a hybrid of Greco Roman catches, catch can
and kind of circus shit which they call slam bang
Western style wrestling. And this is kind of the most
direct precursor to modern pro wrestling. In a different article
for e Wrestling News, Kyle Don rights the newly formed

(37:01):
Trio used their connections to persuade wrestlers from around the
country to join their new promotions, so they no longer
had to be controlled by others. Toots began forming what
we would later know as sports entertainment, but the wrestlers
had to be in on keeping it secret from the public.
This new style of wrestling would incorporate elements from boxing,
Greco Roman, freestyle, lumber camp fighting, and theater. As traditional

(37:21):
wrestling could go on for several hours, they implemented time
limits to ensure matches would not bore the audience. They
also introduced the concept of tag team wrestling, which had
seldom been used before. Within six months, they had taken
over the wrestling scene and were taking bookings and major
sports venues instead of back alley halls and other small places.

Speaker 4 (37:40):
Sounds like making love, lumber camp brawls. Excuse me, lumber
Camp brawls.

Speaker 1 (37:48):
Yeah, this is a major book, specifically up in the
Pacific Northwest, a major form of entertainment where like you
just go out and watch lumber camp guys beat the
piss out of each other there. They are very jacked
and they have no money. They are all alcoholics. They
will fight for hard liquor. Maybe they'll fight a bear,
maybe a tree.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
I don't know. They don't care.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
They don't even know the deck out and you know,
danger will fight for your amusement to the death. If
you want, you know, you slip them a twenty Products
and services that support this content. Huge fans of blood sports, Yeah,
they don't give a shit. Ah, we're back. So you know,

(38:38):
lumber camp fighting, all this kind of stuff fuses together
to make a slam bang western style wrestling with which
Toots and Ed create.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
Just I love that somebody saw lumber camp fighting and
was like, this is close.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
America needs this. But it would not just it's just
said shiny panties, a.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
Couple of cas and really throwing each other, weird, wild distances,
surprising air. That's what we need here. And I got
a fancy guy with a monocle.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
Yeah. More guys in suits.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, there's not nearly enough racist caricatures. No one's dressed
as a shake. So for one thing, we're gonna have
to fix that. We got to fix that quoit right now.
It is worth noting that around the same time, the
late nineteen twenties and early thirties, other people were innovating
wrestling too, obviously, like this is not a two person thing.
Among other innovations in this time, the flying tackle and

(39:37):
the dropkick are invented, which I love to think of
the first man like the right brothers of drop kicks.
They keep failing at it like they're about to leave
for the day, and then one more time, just let
me try one more time.

Speaker 3 (39:50):
I know I can deal with both see and give
both legs. Can you imagine seeing that for the first
it's like for the.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
First oh my god, oh shit, yeah is hes Yeah yeah.
I think the next thing that will be like that
is when they finally clone a mammoth.

Speaker 3 (40:07):
Like, my god, look at it, right, the timeline of
human history is split at the drop.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Drop kick it mammoth right now, fucking snail washing drop pick.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Now I have become death destroyer of worlds.

Speaker 3 (40:24):
That's all that's all. That's all the bomb is. It's
all fission is. It's it's Adams drop kicking each other. Yeah,
it's a it's a it's an evolution of the drop kick.
So Billy Sandow would test new recruits for kind of
this wrestling business that they're building in his own private ring. Well,
Toots would work with them on their finishing sequences. This
kind of period is when they invent the concept of

(40:45):
wrestling having a go home sequence, which is a commonplace today,
but back then it was new and exciting defans. Toots
also introduced the concept of the no contest and double
count out, which moves wrestling away from kind of the
old school competitive roots and creates a lot of possibilities
for like storytelling, right, for ways that you can kind
of end matches and stuff without people getting beat up

(41:08):
too bad, and that you know, opens up possibilities for
all sorts of storylines, a whole bunch of stuff, And
it's kind of worth noting just in terms of how
innovative these guys are. Modern wrestling is still a very
similar to what Toots and his buddies create, and these
three guys become known as the gold Dust Trio, I
think because of how much fucking money they make, and

(41:29):
they basically are kind of the most direct progenitors of
the modern pro wrestling industry. They do a lot of
fights in burlesque theaters, side shows, and they kind of
move on in really a fairly short span of time
because of how much interest there is to stadiums and
other massive like respectable venues, and wrestling for the first
time spreads across the United States, not as just like

(41:50):
a thing people did, but as a semi organized business
in which there's quite a lot of money.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
Now.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Toots is the enforcer. In addition to training people and stuff.
He and another guy, John Pisseck, would beat the shit
out of any wrestlers who tried to go into business
for themselves. This earned them the nickname hookers. That's what
they're called for doing this. I'm not really certain why,
but but yeah, that's that's the old, that old hooker Toots.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
I love that.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
I love that Toots just applied his mob training to this.
It's like somebody else trying to mustle in air territory
fucking break his legs.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
There's not a problem that Toots cannot solve with a
fucking dropkick yees.

Speaker 4 (42:32):
So that's the glomber brawl double threat. When you can
get a guy in a ring and beat a guy
out of the ring. That's that's the total package.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
Just Toots walking into work. He's got like a briefcase
and inside of it is just like a stump. So
the trio eventually broke apart due to a power struggle,
but wrestling was here to stay, and for a time,
its shady reputation kept it down. Madison Square Garden initially
refused to host wrestling events through the nineteen forties. What

(42:59):
finally changes this is that Toots teams up with Bastard's
Pod alumni Bernard McFadden, who kind of invented physical culture
in the United States. He was a big magazine baron,
one of the guys who sort of started the modern
like health and supplement industry. And he provides Toots with
the financial backing to expand this business, and because he's
got connections, he convinces Madison Square Garden to start hosting

(43:21):
wrestling events. In nineteen forty eight, the first Garden wrestling
exhibition was held. It basically always sells out. It is
a huge business for them in that first match, a
guy named Gorgeous George defeats a guy named Ernie Dusk.
That same year sees another seminal moment in pro wrestling history.
By that point, wrestling has grown from being the business
of a number of shady carnee promoters and disgrace boxers

(43:44):
to a network of promoters and what you might call
like cartel leaders who ran wrestling in different cities and
regions and generally hated each other, but inly. On July fourteenth,
nineteen forty eight, several of these dudes gathered together at
a hotel and Water, lou Iowa to talk and I'm
gonna quote now from a book called Sex, Lies and Headlocks.

(44:05):
Right around the room were pl Pinky You're gonna love
these nicknames. Tom p L Pinky George, a former bantamweighte
fighter who ran all the shows out of Des Moines
a'l have to like to book big games names in Columbus,
but couldn't keep them for long because he was notoriously cheap.
Orville Brown, a two hundred and fifty pounds brawler from
Kansas City. Max Clayton, a genial Omaha businessman who played

(44:26):
only twenty five dollars for a main event, but made
up for it by buying his favorite wrestlers straight whiskey
and steaks. And Tony Stetcher, who ran the Minneapolis territory
while managing his brother Joe, a three time world champion
who could dent a sack of grain with his thighs.
Hell yeah, what an amazing.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Dentist.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
We must be missing something metric. I feel like most
people could, but maybe grain was different than brain.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
Sixty sixty percent of those guys have killed somebody with
the wrench.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
Oh yeah, absolutely, but only of them remember it, right.

Speaker 4 (45:13):
I love how like some of them are like, Oh,
this guy's the toughest guy in the world, and then
one guy's like, I guess he can kind of you
can tell he's been sitting on grain.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Yeah he does grain. Real brain city, real dubious honors
in the crew, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
So the dude who calls all these guys together in
nineteen forty eight to talk is a man, a forty
two year old guy. He's a former sports writer named
Sam Muchnik. Sam had lost his job as a sports
writer covering baseball because his newspaper collapsed, a thing none
of us can identify with.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
What is that? Like, I can't picture that.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
Yeah, he decided to deal with this trauma by starting
to work for a wrestling baron and then becoming one himself.
He rises to prominence fairly quickly, and you know, he
a little break to do some World War two stuff.
But when he gets back, he finds himself frustrated by
the fact that Rustling is kind of being held back
by this vicious pack of promoters who are They're always

(46:09):
fighting and bribing each other to like steal each other's wrestlers,
and this is getting in the way of both their
profits and expanding the business. So he gets all these
guys together, these real shady motherfuckers, and he's like, what
if we set up rules together as the bosses of
these different kind of syndicates, to set up prices, to
like fix wages, to blacklist wrestlers who go into business

(46:30):
for themselves. Now, this is very illegal. They are violating
the shit out of the Sherman Anti Trust Act. But
these guys are all criminals, right, This is not the
first law these people have brokes.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
This is mobshit. This is classic mobs shita. This is
very classic mob shit.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
And these guys all have a shitload of money, so
they figure they can bribe whoever they need to bribe.
He gets all these guys at the President Hotel to
agree to his idea, which amounts to something like the
only union pro wrestling whatever. See and of course it
is a union of owners. This goes on to come
the National Wrestling Alliance. Interesting fact, there's another NWA that's

(47:04):
like a wrestling kind of alliance that predates this NWA.
But yeah, it's not a kind of big deal in
the history. So anyway, interesting stuff. So they all agree
on this. They form the NWA, this big cartel. The
last holdout to it is Muchnik's former friend in Biddler rival,

(47:25):
a guy named lou Fez. Fez eventually agreed to merge
outfits with Muchnik and join the cartel, and Muchnik is like, okay,
but if we do that, you got to agree to
lose a title match to this wrestler the NWA likes,
called Orville Brown, right, so this match never happens. Brown
and his business partner, another wrestler that he'd fought that night,

(47:47):
were like driving home from the match. They're like friends,
but they're supposed to be enemies. And they happen to
hit an eighteen wheeler. They may have been hammered and
very nearly die. This is a problem for several reasons
because Brown and is Part are supposed to be hated enemies,
and the fact that they're righting together in the same
car creates a scandal. I think they get fired for this.
It threatens to undo the fragile bonds of belief that

(48:10):
made wrestling what it was.

Speaker 3 (48:12):
So yeah, I think later on, a similar thing happens
to Rick Flarey's in a plane crash with a guy
he's feuding with, and they had to pretend like they
weren't traveling together.

Speaker 5 (48:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
I want to actually talk about this a little bit because,
like it's now fairly well known that within the wrestling world,
this kind of mix of lies in theater to create
this illusion of a contest is known.

Speaker 2 (48:31):
As k fabe.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
Right, there's a debate over where the term comes from.
Sex lies in headlocks kind of credits it to Turn
of the century carnivals where these you know, these wrestlers
who would take on random challengers which they called marks
from the crowd and like would wrestle them and stuff.
You know, they can't you know, in that case, they
generally know what they're doing because they have a lot

(48:52):
more experience. But when they're wrestling each other, they can't
go as hard as they otherwise might because one of
them will get hurt if they do. So they rigged
the matches in order to avoid getting seriously and injured,
and they have to be in order to like kind
of set this stuff up. They have to develop a
secret language that lets them kind of plan stuff out
in public without making it clear to others what they're doing,

(49:14):
which is this kind of pig Latin dialect called carnie.
So one theory about where k fabe comes from is
that it's just a term from this little language that
they made up initially to Initially, it's kind of a
term for like, shut the fuck up. There's like Marx
watching right, Like, that's the initial meaning of k fabe.
But over time it just becomes a metaphor for like,

(49:35):
don't let anyone on on what's really happening. Now, we
don't actually know that that's the origin of k fabe.
Nobody is certain where it comes from. But throughout the
middle of the twentieth century, this kind of whole language
grows up around pro wrestling, As Josie Reisman describes, for
nearly a century, this illusion was maintained at all costs
in a kind of industry omerta. A heel in a

(49:55):
face who were sworn at k fabe, enemies couldn't be
seen drinking together in their off hours. A wrestler build
his Iranian couldn't be known to be Italian. Even wrestlers
themselves sometimes had trouble keeping track of what was k
fabe and what was not, so they developed two more terms.
A work was anything that was k fabe, and anything
that was real was a shoot. Now a couple of
other notes here, A heel is a bad guy, right,

(50:17):
Like in wrestling, they're generally the guy, especially in this period,
they're nearly always supposed to lose.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
Meanwhile, a face, which stands for baby face, is like
a good guy.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Right.

Speaker 1 (50:27):
There's generally the people who were supposed to win in
this period. That's going to change a lot over time.
Eventually you get to the point where like heels and
faces kind of move up and down, and there's also
becomes this kind of third category, and a lot of
times the heels win because of the people that like
the fans like the most, but in this period of time,
it's a lot simpler, right, Well.

Speaker 4 (50:46):
There was a Hul Cogan's kind of a notorious liar,
but like in his book he had a story about
like he had a gun that belonged to one of
the Savage Samoans and then they all had to go
to jail because the Savage Samoans wouldn't talk in front
of the police, because the wrestlers supposed to be like
these caveman monsters that didn't speak English, so they could
have like cleared up the misunderstanding about the gun. But abe,

(51:07):
they all went to jail and stand and I'm like,
there's no way any of it's true.

Speaker 3 (51:10):
But like this is what I don't know. I've heard
that story from other sources than Hulk Cogan.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
I don't know that. Like you are, Sean, you are
very correct. Hulk Cogan is a famous liar. There are
stories that crazy that we're about to talk about stuff
on that level, and even wilder does occur.

Speaker 4 (51:28):
I remember reading about how Rick Flair's wife didn't know
it was fake until like deep into the nineties.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
No, no, and there's a lot of that going on.

Speaker 1 (51:36):
I do want to note before we get into some
of these stories, not all wrestling fans are marks. Overtime
professionals split them up into smarts and marks. A smart
is somebody who gets that, like, this is not real, right,
These giant men throwing each other across the room are
engaged in a performance. This is not really fighting. Receman
and other historians of wrestling like kind of traditionally the

(51:57):
assumption was there's only a few smarts, most people are marks.
Receman Increasingly in other historians of wrestling tend to suspect
that actually, like most fans, particularly most adult fans over time,
are smarts. They're all kind of It's sort of like
Santa Claus, right, you know, there's a period of time
where you kind of believe that it's it's a real sport,
and then you get older you see something that breaks
the illusion. Kind of Famously, hulk Ogan, who again take

(52:20):
with a grain of salt, he claims to have been
a believer as a young adult, like to have been
totally bought into it until one day, as he's sort
of like watching a match, he sees two wrestlers strategizing
beforehand and has this like horrifying realization that the game
is rigged.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
I'd be so embarrassed to tell that story.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
Yeah, I might believe it because he's not a smart man.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
Let's be very clear about the Hulkster. Oh what you mean, dude.

Speaker 1 (52:48):
Reisman also notes that while most fans were probably savvy
enough to parse out the truth eventually, wrestlers for decades
lived in mortal fear of breaking k fape because managers
and promoters fuel into their crews that this lie is
the only thing keeping the interest in wrestling and thus
their jobs alive. Right, this is deadly serious to the industry. Right,

(53:09):
Wrestlers are kind of divided into again. You know, you've
got your heels and your baby faces and stuff. One
of the most interesting realities of early wrestling is again,
kind of how seriously this is taken. You know, even
though maybe most fans eventually figure it out, a lot
of fans never do. Some of this is because guys
like Muchnik would demand that their heel and face wrestlers

(53:31):
never travel together and never act friendly together in any way.
You know, if wrestlers suffered injuries in their regular life
or got arrested and charged with crimes, which happened constantly.
This would get worked into storylines on the fly. My
favorite example of this stemmed from the nineteen eighty three
arrest of Kerry Eric. And we will be talking about
the von Eric family in a little bit, but I

(53:51):
want to read a quote from the book wrest Dark Story.
That's what we're ending on, but I want to read
a book. A quote from the book Wrestling Babylon by
IRV right now. Carry and his wife were returning from
their honeymoon in Proto Virta, Mexico, when US customs agents,
during a routine inspection, caught him with eighteen unmarked tablets
in his right front pocket. Inside the crotch of his

(54:12):
pants was a plastic bag containing an assortment of nearly
three hundred other bills, including codeine, diazepam, librium, impossibly perkidan,
ten grams of marijuana, and six and a half grams
of blue and white powder. The von Erics wove the Yeah,
that's that's a pretty good list of shit. Von Erics
wove the ensuing publicity into the World Class TV storyline,

(54:33):
vaguely suggesting that Kerry had been framed by the Freebirds,
their arch rivals. Eighteen months later, after behind the scenes maneuvering.
The charges were dropped by the Tarrant County District Attorney.
Very fun story. So the wrestlers express in this period, Yeah,

(54:53):
what's his name?

Speaker 2 (54:54):
Michael?

Speaker 3 (54:55):
Oh shit, I forget his name, the guy from never Mind.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
So Michael Bolton. You think of Michael Bolton? Yes, I'm
thinking of Michael Bolton, aren't we all? Always? I am?

Speaker 1 (55:08):
So wrestlers didn't just kind of keep the fans, you know,
try to keep this shit up for the fans. Then
Michael help their own family in the dark, maintaining the
lie that the matches they were in were real competitions
and that their fights with other wrestlers were real. This
sometimes caused dangerous situations. An early heel named Mario Galinto

(55:28):
was so hated and that his wife feared for his life,
and so she started showing up at matches with a
loaded handgun to protect him from his rivals, and she
would pull it on them and stuff like. She would
threaten them with it during matches, and eventually promoters had
to sit down with Mario when were like, you have
to tell your wife the truth. She is going to
murder someone on television like this is a serious problem

(55:50):
for us.

Speaker 2 (55:51):
Don't need to stop marrying six year olds. She was
last Paul Bearer some shit, right, do him on fucking
thirty eight already?

Speaker 1 (56:06):
She didn't when he tells her to the truth. Allegedly,
she doesn't speak to him for three days. Oh my god,
just destroys there.

Speaker 4 (56:14):
That's because he's humiliating, but also he's infuriating, like you like.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
Me, you like me? Oh stupid about wrestling?

Speaker 3 (56:23):
Well, I mean she was in such fear for him
that she was carrying a loaded gun to his matches,
and he was letting her continue to do this.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
He was like, yeah, honey, I get it. You're doing
a reasonable thing. The boss. Yeah, yeah, Maybe.

Speaker 1 (56:37):
Communication wasn't their strong suit as a couple. You know
that's possible, it is, to be fair to her. It
was super common for wrestlers to get assaulted and injured
by fans. Women in particular habit had a habit of
jabbing heels with hatpins on like their way up to
the ring and stuff. Men meanwhile, tended to throw rocks

(56:57):
and bottles at them. In one set South Carolina match,
a seventy eight year old man with a knife stabbed
al Rogowski so bad that he needed more than one
hundred stitches. Now, god Al is a hard son of
a bitch, so he refuses to go to a hospital.
He drives himself back to his house, he finds someone
there to sew him up, and then he wrestles the

(57:19):
very next day. I because I tell you why, I
wrestlers don't have any health insurance. They sure don't tell
them they are better paid back then.

Speaker 3 (57:27):
If he doesn't get any sick time either. So if
he doesn't wrestle the next day, he doesn't make money.
So it's like fucking glue me up. I'm going out there.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
I should note it is generally agreed upon by the historians.
I'm reading the money's better back then than it is
now by comparison, like these guys are making better livings
than like modern wrestlers often tend to, which is kind
of interesting to me. Obviously, that does you know. It's
it's different around the country. That's not everywhere, But broadly speaking,
it's easier to make an okay living then as a

(57:56):
wrestler than it is today. A lot of people will argue, YEA.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
You got stabbed more often.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
You did get stabbed more often. For an example of that,
Sean Rowdy Roddy Piper claims to have been stabbed three
times by fans who thought he was an actual bat guy.

Speaker 2 (58:12):
I don't doubt it.

Speaker 1 (58:13):
Man, he used to drive people crazy. No, they were
he was because he's he was.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
He's a genius.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
He's an incredible actors, very very very talented at what
he did. But also, like just looking at Rowdy Roddy Piper,
you have to be either ready to die or the
drunkest eye anyone has ever been to be willing to
attempt to stab that man, because he was a fucking monster.

Speaker 2 (58:38):
Also, his whole gimmick was that he was insane.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, God, I love Roddy Piper, you know
enough to stab him.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
Yeah, I would. I would.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
I would stab him if he was back again, if
we got one more episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia
with him playing the mania. What an absolutely hero. You
know what, during this next ad break, go watch the
movie They Live starring Rowdy Roddy Piper, just a champion.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
We're back the entire They Live. We did. We did
Always Sunny episode and.

Speaker 1 (59:18):
Then Always Sunny Episode, both works of incredible art. So
given all of this. It probably won't surprise you to
hear that even in the pre steroid days, wrestlers often
lived difficult lives. One of the first great modern wrestlers
was a guy named Gorgeous George. He was the son
of a house painter. He played a narcissistic healer heel

(59:41):
who was one of the first big popular TV wrestlers.
He would prance around the ring in a fur robe.
He was kind of a little light, queer coded kind
of bad guy thing. Right, this is you know, the sixties.
He gouged eyes, he flirted with audience members, and he
just like chewed the fuck out of the scenery. George
is a huge hit in like the fifties, in kind
of early sixties. But by the time he retires in

(01:00:03):
nineteen sixty two, the heavy drinking that came with his
career field, because I mean it's part of just what
these guys do to deal with the pain, because you know,
it's not easy on your body, had destroyed his health.
When he retires, he uses the money he has to
start a bar in Van NY's, but his medical bills
quickly force him to sell it. In nineteen sixty three,

(01:00:23):
after a night of bumming drinks from the bartender in
the bar he used to own. He dropped dead from
a heart attack. He was forty eight years old. In
sects lies in headlocks. The author's note. The wrestlers he'd
once work with pass around a hat to help bury
him in an orchid colored casket, beside which his last girlfriend,
a stripper, collapsed crying. It is a very wrestling funeral.

(01:00:46):
He is not the only guy with a story like this.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
That's a bummer. That yeah dark.

Speaker 1 (01:00:52):
I mean, not that his girlfriend is a stripper, that's whatever,
But just like this is like, his story is not uncommon.

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
No, I mean it's dark that they had to pass
around a hat to pay for his cast and he
collapsed bump begging for drinks in the bar he used
to own.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
That's dark.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
It is dark. It is And again, a lot of
these promoters are just straight up monsters. There are more
of them who are kind of decent guys in this period.
There are a number of like regional promoters who will
do shit like when their wrestlers have health problems after retirement,
divert funds from their business to pay for their healthcare.

(01:01:25):
I'm not saying that's the norm, but it does happen,
and it's also there is strong solidarity with kind of
wrestlers where stuff like this is not the taking up
collections to help old and injured wrestlers pay for medical
treatment or pay for funerals. That stuff happens with a
significant degree of frequency in this period of time. There
is kind of this understanding that, like, you know, this

(01:01:45):
is a tough job, we're all kind of going to
destroy ourselves doing it, and we have to have each
other's back, you know. So, given the cultural values of
the time, good guys and bad guys in wrestling had
to be very easy to separate. On black and white
TV in the nineteen fifties and sixties, this often meant
that your bad guys are going to be either Communists
or Nazis, right, very easy way to make it clear, Yeah, exactly.

(01:02:09):
An early Russian wrestler Boris Malenko was actually a Jew
from Jersey named Larry. But you know he could do
an accent, right. That's also an extremely common wrestling story. Yes, yes.
For example, the Shake of Araby, who prayed to Allah
before each fight, was a Detroit native named Ed and
one of the first great Nazi wrestlers was Jack Adkisson,

(01:02:33):
better known as Fritz Vaughan Eric now but he was
a real Nazi, right. Well, the focus of this series
is Vince McMahon obviously, you know, but wrestling is always
traded on brutality and mortgaging human bodies for entertainment, and
I don't want to just focus on the ways Vince
did that because that's going to give people this attitude

(01:02:54):
which is sometimes gets put across by like wrestling fans
that like before Vince, things were all better, you know,
some stuff was, but this has always been a pretty
brutal business. So we're going to talk for the rest
of this episode about Fritz and the Vaughan Eeric family.
You guys both had a reaction when I brought them up,
so I think you might know this story.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
There's a lot of story.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
It's really tragic. It is a nightmare. Yeah. So Fritz
slash Jack and we're just gonna call him Fritz from
now on had been trained by the founder of one
of the first great wrestling dynasties, Stu Hart, a Canadian
from Edmonton whose dungeon, that's what it's called the dungeon,
was the most celebrated training center for wrestlers of its

(01:03:39):
day and for like generations to come. This is like
they remain very big. Brett Hart we talked about a
little bit earlier, is like one of his kids and
you know, trains there Heart trained Fritz and gave him
his stage name. And you might think that having your
like mentor be like, hey, you've got serious Nazi vibes
to me, why don't you wear a fucking swastika into

(01:04:00):
the ring, would make you reconsider aspects of your life.

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
But Fritz is like, yeah, man, for sure, that sounds great.
He would wrestle me how much? Yeah? Yeah, fifty dollars
a night? For sure, Bro.

Speaker 1 (01:04:14):
Fritz would wrestle wearing Nazi regalia. His trademark move was
the iron claw. And he has the distinction of having
been wrestling Lou Theez. We've talked about before. He's kind
of one of the big great, big early champions. He
and Theez are wrestling the day that JFK gets assassinated.
There's not as much great footage of him in the
ring as I like, Yeah, yeah, yes, definitely a causal relation.

(01:04:39):
There's not as much great footage of him as I'd
like but I found a clip of his brother Waldov
on Eric. Waldo's not his real brother. This is a
kfabe thing, right They Waldo is another guy who trains
at the Dungeon and they're like, you know, match brothers,
and Waldo was also a Nazi. This clip is from
a match in nineteen seventy five and it is remarkable.
I should note before before we start that his opponent

(01:05:01):
here is Jay Strongbow, who is a Native American wrestler
who wrestles in a full headdress. He's actually an Italian. Yeah,
not an uncommon story. So here's a here's here's Waldo
von Eric being a Nazi and as he comes in
the ring, he is wearing a stall helm.

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
I should note, boy, he sure is, Yeah he is.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
He is wearing a Nazi helmet and a sleepless shirt.
He's got a writing crop in his hands, and he's
got in the front of his shirt.

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
Is there's a Nazi logo like.

Speaker 4 (01:05:39):
Here comes the Italian man in the native Headdress's the
Italian man dress.

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
Chief Ja strong Bow from from Tuscany.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
Old timey wrestlers.

Speaker 4 (01:05:58):
I do love the gay coated fancy man and the
Indian chief are like my two favorite like problematic.

Speaker 3 (01:06:04):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, you get some I love I
love that Waldo's swastika.

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):
You can tell they weren't into drawing it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:12):
I also love you.

Speaker 1 (01:06:13):
Steroids are starting to be a thing in the seventies,
but they haven't figured him out. Great, So these guys
are just huge dudes with beer bellies. Oh he's doing
Nazi Nazi.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
There was the iron claw.

Speaker 4 (01:06:25):
If the audience doesn't know, is kind of like a
Nazi salute on the human face. You just grab the
front of their head and you just squeeze it glory.
Impossible to escape. I mean, yeah, palming someone on the face.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
Yeah, just get out of that. Just rough you because
backwards to the side, no thanks to that, No, no whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:06:48):
When you get sighyled right in the forehead, you sort
of like get knocks all thoughts out of your brain.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
What do I do?

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
That's why Hitler adopted it famous, famously great technical wrestler
eight all Hitler.

Speaker 2 (01:07:01):
Everything he knows.

Speaker 3 (01:07:02):
It's actually now he took himself out. He just did
the iron claude to himself.

Speaker 1 (01:07:06):
The match between j Strongbow and Waldo problematic not even
close to the most racist wrestling match. That that you
can find, Like.

Speaker 3 (01:07:15):
It's not even the most it's not even the most
racist wrestling match I've seen recently.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
No, that bounced straight off my brain.

Speaker 4 (01:07:22):
If you hadn't held me, hey we're we're looking at
this and for racism, I would have been like, this
is totally normal, old timey.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
Yeah, they're supposed to be a bad guy. I'm not
seeing an Indian ship. Honestly, they're doing pretty good.

Speaker 1 (01:07:37):
So Fritz himself has a as we've discussed as we're yeah,
just just a nightmare of a life. But because he's
a terrible person, so his you know, his first son,
this is not his fault. Probably Jack Junior dies in
nineteen fifty nine from accidental electrocution that leads to drowning. Obviously,
this has an impact on Fritz and he decides to

(01:07:59):
stop wrestling on the East Coast. As kind of a
result of this, he becomes the godfather of Texas Wrestling,
overseeing a company that runs wrestling in Dallas, Houston, and
San Antonio called World Class Wrestling. Fritz continued to or
reinvested the money that he made from wrestling into real estate.
He's one of the guys in this who's actually like
good with his money and while he's making it as

(01:08:22):
a wrestler, puts it into something that's going to make
him more money. Unfortunately, he's also a giant piece of
shit and kind of a real fascist because one of
his best friends is Pat Robertson. He is a born
again Christian who becomes a major right wing donor in
Texas and a moral crusader. So that's great, sweet, Yeah,
good guy. So he has four sons, three of whom

(01:08:44):
are four more sons, three of whom at least are
groomed to follow in his footsteps, even though several of
them lack the talent or the physique to do so.

Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
Spoilers.

Speaker 1 (01:08:52):
When you said three of whom, I thought you were
going to say something else. Yeah, that's where we're going terribly.

Speaker 5 (01:08:59):
Then electric he drowns the boy so far right, he's
got one out of fives already out of the match.

Speaker 2 (01:09:10):
Did you do a show on Pat Robertson.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
Uh, we've covered him before. We've covered a lot of
aspects of him. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:16):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
His dream was to create a wrestling dynasty and imitation
of Stu Hart, right. Uh, And as Robertson's no no, no, no, no, maybe,
but definitely definitely Fritz and as wrestling nerd Nicholas all
Helm Rights. By the time Kevin, David and Carrie, his
three large adult sons entered their teens, they were put
into grueling workout sessions by their father. Despite time playing

(01:09:40):
a variety of junior high and high school sports. He
would work them out for another three hours after school
every day. Well, the boys grew up in wrestling and
knew wrestling, it was clear that their father wanted to
make it clear they didn't have a choice. Their future
was wrestling, whether they wanted it to be or not.

Speaker 2 (01:09:56):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
Yeah, so you know, he's kind of like the Mic
Jackson of wrestling or Michael Jackson's dad of wrestling. I
always forget that guy Jojoe Jackson, right, Joe Jackson, but
maybe like, honestly, Joe Jackson's a better dad. Which like
that that's a heads up as to where this is going.

Speaker 2 (01:10:16):
His kids are dead.

Speaker 4 (01:10:17):
Yeah, it's in a really dark like two thousands a
joke punchline.

Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
Jo a better dad.

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):
I mean, he's got a better fucking record. So for
a time, the van Eriks are very successful in the
early nineteen eighties, his boys are all actively in the ring.
They are hugely popular in Texas. By this point in
k Fabe, Fritz has been revealed by his nemesis Gary
Hart to have been a normal Texas boy, not a Nazi,

(01:10:43):
allowing him to turn baby face. This made k Fabe
a little easier for his boys because they didn't have
to wear swastikas. But since their dad is the booker
and they're the stars, he gets to run them mercilessly. Right,
the entire company is because these guys are big stars,
their entire company reliant upon them performing basically every night
during parts of the year in order to keep attendance

(01:11:05):
high at the venues that he booked. Because they're such
a necessary part of the business, when they get hurt,
which happens a lot, they can't take the next night off.
So Dad just starts handing them fucking painkillers like their
skittles in order to keep them performing. Another thing that's necessaries.
Look a bandid and we'll go back when we talk
more about Vince, we'll talk about how steroids become a
part of the industry. But steroids are a big part

(01:11:26):
of the industry by the nineteen eighties and so in
order to compete and again to keep crowds butts in seats,
they have to bulk up to Hulk Hogan like levels,
and the drugs that they're taking take a toll on
these boys' bodies. And after a nineteen eighty four match
in Japan, David Vaughan Erik is found dead in his
hotel room at age twenty five. We don't entirely know

(01:11:47):
what happened. His friend Bruiser Brody claimed once that they
flushed a bunch of drugs down the toilet after finding
his body, and basically that he owed deed. I think
the family denies this. It's not really clear what happened
because after he makes this claim, Bruise your Brodie gets
stabbed to death in Puerto Rico.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
He sure does.

Speaker 3 (01:12:04):
We don't get a lot of detailed confirmation either way.

Speaker 4 (01:12:08):
Is there a reasonable like counter explanation. It's like a
bunch of drugs really okay?

Speaker 1 (01:12:15):
Yeah, I mean it's the kind of thing where like, uh, today,
like any leading man and stuff who's doing big action
roles is on something that we can call steroids pretty much.
But also we've gotten a lot better at doing it
without killing people, which is not I'm not saying people
should do steroids, but if you have millions of dollars
and doctors who are constantly monitoring your blood levels and

(01:12:35):
doing tests on you and stuff, it's not as dangerous
like these guys are just kind of shot shooting shit
up their asses and seeing what happens.

Speaker 3 (01:12:42):
You know, it's a combination of things too, you know,
the road, it's all the hard drinking and popping painkillers
you take the counter. You just have to keep going,
like I think they tour something like I don't know,
three hundred days a year.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
Yeah, so it's a it's a combination of all that shit.

Speaker 1 (01:12:57):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's just it's a different time and
it's even again don't don't do steroids, folks, but it's
even much worse for you at this point in time
even And yeah, they're also Coke is as common as
royds are, because I mean, part of what a lot
of wrestlers you say is that like, yeah, you know,
in order to get into the ring and get amped up,
you got to get fucking coked up, and then to

(01:13:17):
calm down and to deal with the pain, you take
pain killers and then often to get to bed you
add alcohol to that. A lot of guys ode as
a result of that ship.

Speaker 3 (01:13:25):
I mean it's I mentioned Ultimate Warrior earlier, but never
has you need cocaine to get hyped up been more
obvious than an Ultimate Warrior entrance.

Speaker 1 (01:13:35):
No, there are there are like cartel warehouses and fucking
Sinala that have less cocaine than was in his bloodstream.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
And he given a night like he was gliding out
there on a board of cocaine like ice man.

Speaker 1 (01:13:48):
Just an incredible man. So very tragic death of he's
fucking twenty five. He'd barely you know, had a life,
very sad. The yellow rows of Texts, as David was known,
was mourned by a crowd of three thousand people at
his memorial service. Fritz, though, made sure to profit from this,
selling color photos of his dead son that had once

(01:14:11):
gone for three dollars for ten dollars at the memorial service.
Right after he set his one of his surviving sons,
Carrie Van Eric, to wrestle Rick Flair for the world
title because kind of everybody's sorry, you know, because David died.
They set it up so that Carrie, you know, wins
this match, right, which is again not uncommon in a
case like this. You've got someone whose brother just died,

(01:14:31):
you give them a belt.

Speaker 3 (01:14:32):
You know, I'm surprised, Like Fritz didn't open up the
casket and let people take pictures with David for.

Speaker 2 (01:14:39):
Like twenty So let me see your money. Let me
see your money. It's barely better than that. It's thumb.

Speaker 4 (01:14:57):
Im get the extra ten bucks.

Speaker 1 (01:15:00):
The next year, in nineteen eighty five, Mike Vaughan Erik
was charged with two counts of misdemeanor assault against an
er doctor he got into a fistfight with during a
trip to the hospital. Shortly thereafter, he goes to Tel
Aviv to wrestle, and he takes a bad bump to
his shoulder that dislocates it bad and badly enough that

(01:15:20):
it requires surgery due to either poor hygiene or bad luck.
After surgery, he contracts toxic shock syndrome, which is very
serious and very uncommon. Just like in general, it's not
something men get off, and it's certainly not a common
side effective shoulder surgery. He gets transferred to a hospital
with one hundred and five degree fever and his kidneys

(01:15:41):
shutting down. The upside of this is that he is
too weak to punch another doctor, so that might have
helped doctor. So the doctor survives, and he does, and
while his son is fighting to survive, Fritz starts like making.
He goes to the press basically, you know, never waste
an opportunity. He tells the media that the number of
from fans to the hospital outnumbers the calls that a

(01:16:03):
neighboring hospital had received when JFK was sent there in
nineteen sixty three, which is an insane flex.

Speaker 2 (01:16:11):
If anybody wants a bag of bloody stool, seventy bucks.

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):
Right, yeah, yeah, it's real, it's real, it's real. Trump saying,
now I have the tallest building in New York City. Yeah,
it's it's wild stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:16:23):
Mike.

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):
Mike does pull through. He survives this, and his brother
Kevin gives a press conference, calling his arrival a miracle.
Alas he takes he's permanently injured from this.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:16:34):
His weight drops down to just one hundred and forty
five pounds. He is now no longer able to speak
without slurring his voice. He just like he doesn't recover
from this Muchnik writes quote. Fritz lost no time in
repackaging him for the wrestling marks. Mike was nicknamed the
Living Miracle. Fans were promised that he would defeat the
odds wrestle Alyn and claim a championship for God and Family.

(01:16:57):
To give the gimmick momentum, Mike was wheeled out in
a car to wave to the twenty five thousand fans
at the Big October shoal at the show at the
Cotton Bowl. He made his official return to the ring
on July fourth, nineteen eighty six.

Speaker 2 (01:17:08):
By then, he was just killing sixty bucks.

Speaker 1 (01:17:11):
So when he comes back to the ring, he's also
contracted hepatitis, and his dad's just like, get him out there,
get him out there. Yeah, it's so bad.

Speaker 2 (01:17:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:17:24):
So the next year, nineteen eighty six, another prominent wrestler,
Gino Hernandez, dies of a cocaine overdose. Now this happens
right after a TV spot where Hernandez, a heel, had
blinded babyface wrestler Adams, and it says a lot about
wrestling in this period that the announcer Bill Mercer, Fritz's employee,
announced Gino's real life death on television by saying, we

(01:17:47):
have suffered two terrible tragedies in the last week the
blinding of Chris Adams and the death of Gino Hernandez
equally blinding.

Speaker 2 (01:17:57):
And these are e qui tragedy.

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):
Yeah, thanks to k Fabe, they're the same thing. So
the next year, Carrie van Eric wasted as hell, rams
into the back of a police car on his motorcycle.
His foot is like part of his foot. It winds
up eventually getting amputated. It is a nasty wreck. Doctors
spend thirteen hours putting his limb back together, and then
he is immediately whisked away to perform in the fucking ring.

Speaker 2 (01:18:24):
Come. Yeah, it's a nightmare. I'm gonna do.

Speaker 1 (01:18:27):
He wrestles with a fake foot for a while, doesn't he? Yeah,
he sure does, Tom, he sure fucking does. I'm gonna
quote again from Murnik here. Sorry, Fritz is just smashing
these kids.

Speaker 2 (01:18:41):
Like again, Joe Jackson might be the better dad.

Speaker 1 (01:18:45):
I'm quote his opponent. This evening was carefully instructed to
sell for Carrie, for it was clear in advance that
the man who was once among the most agile two
hundred fifty pounders in wrestling would be virtually immobile. Still,
they had to make a good show of it, so
Carrie changed into his trunks. A doctor filled a syringe
with enough novacane to numb Secretariat's hoof. Thus fortified, Carrie

(01:19:06):
discarded his crutches, gritted his teeth, and hobbled into the ring.
The match lasted five minutes, and as planned, Carrie won. Afterwards,
when the novacane wore off, an examination revealed that the
ankle had rebroken. Four months later, in another operation, the
foot was permanently fused into a walking position.

Speaker 2 (01:19:24):
Like bad day.

Speaker 4 (01:19:27):
Don't think of the chronic pain that you must have had,
like his cath must just cramp up twenty times a day.

Speaker 3 (01:19:32):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
Look, I'm not a big giving people parenting advice, but uh,
free parenting advice from Robert here. Don't do this to
your kid. Don't do this. Not good, not good, not
good being a dad.

Speaker 4 (01:19:45):
Yeah, her foot, her first foot torn off. I was like,
we're gonna wait two weeks, be pre you get back.

Speaker 1 (01:19:51):
In that ring, two solid weeks, because you're a good father,
absolutely best. So despite Fritz's cocaine. Yeah, well yeah, of
course kids love cocaine.

Speaker 2 (01:20:01):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:20:01):
You just tell him it's one of those fun fun
bat what do they call that shit?

Speaker 2 (01:20:04):
Fun dip. You know they love that shit.

Speaker 4 (01:20:07):
That'd be good fun dip bag of cocaine that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:10):
This fun dip has my mouth numb. I can't taste
it anymore. That means it's working. Keep taking it good,
fund getting it ring.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
That's probably how it got the name. That probably was
originally cocaine product.

Speaker 1 (01:20:23):
So, despite Fritz's pushing, Mike never recovers his ability to perform.
Obviously interviews with him were deeply uncomfortable affairs. Again, he
is probably takes some damage to his brain from all
this too. He rants a lot on air about obscure
biblical figures. He also like there's one point where he's
there's this documentary or something being made about him, and

(01:20:45):
he and one of his brothers are like talking in
the background and it's like recorded, and you can hear
them talking about a gang bang that they had together.
He just kind of loses his ability to sort of,
you know, filter stuff. He also has in several minor
violent outbursts. He's arrested a handful of times, mostly for drugs.
This kind of all escalates to Mike going back home

(01:21:06):
after an arrest. He hikes out into the woods with
a bottle of sleeping pills, and he takes enough to
kill himself. He is twenty three years old when he dies. Now,
according to some versions of the story, Mike leaves a
bottle of the sleeping pills he'd used to kill himself
for his youngest brother, Chris, with a note that basically says,

(01:21:27):
when you're ready to go, you can use these now.
Chris has not performed yet in the ring, but he
takes to the ring in nineteen ninety, kind of near
the end of his father's time as a wrestling baron.
Nicholas on Helm right are all Helm Rights. Chris grew
up with severe asthma. He took krednizone for the condition
from a young age, and this resulted in a smaller

(01:21:48):
stature than even his brother Mike. His bones were brittle
and he broke them doing simple wrestling moves. He wasn't
built to be a wrestler, but David and Mike were
dead and Carrie had taken a job in WWF. His
family needed him. Already addicted to painkillers and recreational narcotics,
he entered the family business. He is not in there long.
He shoots himself in the head. One year later, God Yeah.

(01:22:11):
In nineteen ninety three, the last survival surviving wrestling von
Eeric Kerrie, is arrested for cocaine possession in Dallas. The
horrific pain from his foot, which had required partial amputation,
pushed him into a semi permanent state of drug abuse.
After being indicted, he drove home to Denton County and
his father's ranch, where he shot himself in the chest
with a forty four caliber revolver. He made it the

(01:22:33):
longest of any of his brothers. He was thirty three.
Fritz Wood in the end outlive five of his or
he has six sons. One of them does survive him.
He dies of lung cancer in nineteen ninety seven. And
good fucking rittance, Jim.

Speaker 3 (01:22:48):
Yeah, that man carved just a path of ruin through
his son's.

Speaker 4 (01:22:55):
And if I'm understanding right, this is all just a frame.
Vince McMahon, here's the guy who's much worse than this.

Speaker 1 (01:23:02):
Yeah, Vince, Vince's overall worse than this. But you do
need to know it's not like he's not rising out
of a crowd of angels.

Speaker 2 (01:23:12):
God.

Speaker 1 (01:23:13):
Yeah, tragedies. Yeah, that's a nightmare when you are responsible
for four of your son's deaths all before the age
of forty. Yeah, not a great dad.

Speaker 2 (01:23:25):
And three of them kill themselves. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's dark. Yeah,
it's pretty bleak. You guys got anything to plug you first?

Speaker 3 (01:23:41):
Oh well, for.

Speaker 2 (01:23:46):
Seventy five dollars, you can take some of his hair.
For eighty bucks, I'll let you hold the gun. God like,
how I like how you pause?

Speaker 1 (01:23:59):
You like?

Speaker 2 (01:23:59):
Am I really gonna say this? Yes? Yeah? Absolutely? You
know what Fritz would have done it? Yeah? Done it?

Speaker 3 (01:24:09):
Yeah, you know you can catch me. We're at game
Fly Unemployed. It's a podcast and streaming network I do
with our former crack coworker and great buddy, David Bell.
So check it out patron dot com slash game flun Employed.
You can find us also on anywhere you look for
podcasts and on the social media. So that's that's pretty
much it.

Speaker 2 (01:24:25):
Hell yeah, it is absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 4 (01:24:28):
I'm at one hot dog dot com, featuring monthly columnist
Tom Ryman, who's great and an all star cast to
comedy writers. We do daily jokes, text and pictures like
the old days, and it's fantastic. I work with Robert Brockway,
who's also our dear friend from Cracked and Patreon dot com,
Slash one nine hundred hot Dog excellent.

Speaker 1 (01:24:51):
Definitely check out game fully Unemployed and one nine hundred
hot Dog. I have one other thing to plug. This
is not a product a project of mine, but we
will be talking, you know, Sean. In our In our
episode on steven Sagall, we chat a little bit about
Judo Jean LaBelle, who, according to some versions of the story,
choked Stephen out so badly he pooped his pants. Now
this is debated, but there is a fellow on YouTube

(01:25:14):
named Bobby Fingers. Bobby is an irishman who works does
something in the entertainment industry, like making practical effects and models.
I can't describe his videos better than like, he makes
models of moments from pop culture history. And one of
the things he does, and these you should just watch them.
I can't describe them better. But one of the ones

(01:25:35):
he builds is a diorama of Judo, Jan and Steven
Sagall locked in combat. Go find Bobby Fingers on YouTube
and watch this shit.

Speaker 2 (01:25:45):
It's genius. I love it. Yeah, I'm writing this down.

Speaker 1 (01:25:49):
Yeah that's the fucking episode. Everybody get vinced, not, I
mean a little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:25:55):
Yeah, it's such a it's such a already such a
long rown roads drune with bodies before we even get.

Speaker 1 (01:26:02):
So many men have died, and we've we've only just begun.

Speaker 2 (01:26:13):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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