Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Vince McMahon, History's Greatest Monster
Aired: 2023-05-18
Duration: 01:15:21


=== Rowdy Roddy Piper's Cash Crisis (15:30) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul Show are geniuses.
[00:00:09]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[00:00:17]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:00:20]  Yes.
[00:00:20]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:00:23]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:00:24]  I got that wrong.
[00:00:25]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[00:00:26]  We're pretty close, though.
[00:00:27]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:35]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:00:43]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:00:52]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:00:56]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
[00:01:00]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:07]  Hey there, folks.
[00:01:08]  Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
[00:01:10]  And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high-profile trials, and what the hell is that Blake Lively thing about anyway?
[00:01:23]  We are on it every day, all day.
[00:01:25]  Follow us, Amy and TJ, for news updates throughout the day.
[00:01:29]  Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
[00:01:40]  Robert Evans here, and we'll get to the Vince McMahon episodes in a second.
[00:01:44]  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.
[00:01:50]  Behind the Bastards supporters have been helping to fund the Portland Diaper Bank since 2020 and bought millions of diapers for people who really need them.
[00:01:58]  So if you go to GoFundMe and type in BTB fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or just type in BTB Fundraiser Diaper Bank, GoFundMe into Google, anything like that, you will find it.
[00:02:09]  So please GoFundMe, BTB fundraiser for Portland Diaper Bank.
[00:02:13]  Help us raise the money that these people need to get diapers to folks who need them desperately.
[00:02:25]  All right, everybody, welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
[00:02:28]  We're gearing up for a really intense match today.
[00:02:32]  In one corner of the room, we have Sean Baby, famous guy on the internet.
[00:02:40]  And on the other corner, by God, it's Tom Ryman with a steel chair.
[00:02:44]  Oh, the cream of the crop.
[00:02:46]  Rising to the top.
[00:02:47]  The cream of the crop.
[00:02:50]  I don't know why I had to pick one of you to be the one with the steel break.
[00:02:56]  Grab the bones of your enemies and use them to power the thrusters that takes the Warriors rocket to the top of the bastards.
[00:03:09]  Well, that was great.
[00:03:11]  This is Behind the Bastards podcast that is inconsistently opened.
[00:03:16]  But I appreciate the edge that you both lent to this.
[00:03:21]  We are coming in hot and part two of the Vince McMahon series, the episode where we finally talk about Vince McMahon.
[00:03:30]  I hope you're all now caught up, all of our people who were not coming in as wrestling fans.
[00:03:35]  And I also hope that our wrestling fans learned a thing or two.
[00:03:39]  In our last episode, before we diverted to talk about the Von Eric family, I kind of left wrestling in the 50s and 60s when the NWA and television had started to turn it into a big business with seriously big money for the first time.
[00:03:54]  Now, today, pro wrestling salaries are pretty pitiful.
[00:03:59]  I think the average is like 52,000 per year, which may sound good for you if you're making like 35 grand a year, but you have to remember your job does not entail getting a head injury every single night.
[00:04:11]  So it's, it's really, you have to cut some dollars off of that salary, which is not wildly, you know, crazy anyway.
[00:04:18]  Yeah.
[00:04:18]  Picture this.
[00:04:19]  You live on a bus.
[00:04:20]  You pay eight grand a month for painkillers and steroids.
[00:04:24]  You get hit in the head with a chair seven times a day.
[00:04:28]  And any tiny mistake will get you fired.
[00:04:30]  Yeah.
[00:04:32]  Making an average American middle-class salary for collecting TBIs like kids in the 90s collected pogs.
[00:04:38]  And by the way, you have no retirement.
[00:04:41]  Zero retirement.
[00:04:42]  Absolutely no benefits whatsoever.
[00:04:45]  Your retirement is dying at 37.
[00:04:49]  Yeah, that's your pension is you're not going to make it to 50.
[00:04:53]  You're secure in the knowledge that you're mad at one of the saddest moments in kind of pro wrestling history is my hero, Rowdy Roddy Piper, when he was like 60 or 61, gave an interview where he was like, look, like I'm out of cash, you know, between the medical bills and everything.
[00:05:11]  Like I don't have any of the money left that I made during all of those years that I was one of the biggest stars in wrestling.
[00:05:18]  You know, I'm Canadian.
[00:05:19]  I have a pension, but it doesn't kick in until I'm 65 and I'm not going to make it to 65.
[00:05:24]  Like it's a bleak, bleak interview to watch.
[00:05:29]  Yeah.
[00:05:30]  Anyway, that's the way things are now.
[00:05:32]  Back in the day, in this kind of period where we're having the first real big height of wrestling and television kind of coming together, wrestlers were paid reasonably well.
[00:05:42]  Now, they're destroying their bodies probably at a faster rate, right?
[00:05:46]  We know less for one thing, like we didn't know what we know now about steroids.
[00:05:49]  So it was kind of impossible to do them without destroying your heart very rapidly.
[00:05:54]  Nowadays, you can't.
[00:05:55]  Like, you know, all these like celebrities who are on steroids for movies and stuff aren't doing the same thing to their bodies that like the Von Ehrich kids were, which is not to say you should do steroids, listeners.
[00:06:07]  It's just it's it's less toxic now.
[00:06:09]  If you are going to do steroids, do them today, not in 1958.
[00:06:12]  Yes, don't do steroids since the 70s.
[00:06:16]  Yeah.
[00:06:17]  Yeah.
[00:06:17]  And also, you know, pick up Jose Conseco's book, Juice.
[00:06:21]  He's got some tips on how to use a steroid.
[00:06:25]  Do it.
[00:06:26]  He probably thinks of that tip in his book, travel to the future and do your steroids.
[00:06:31]  When you do enough steroids, you visit the future.
[00:06:35]  But in those days, in kind of this first big wave in the 60s, most pros were compensated pretty well.
[00:06:42]  That is to say, they were making what people at the time would have considered pretty good money.
[00:06:46]  This is one of the reasons why wrestling never unionized.
[00:06:49]  We'll talk a little bit later about another reason why it didn't unionize, but kind of at the beginning of its rise to prominence, a lot of guys would be like, well, we're making great money.
[00:06:57]  Why do we need to unionize?
[00:06:58]  The answer to that is because Vince McMahon will inevitably come along into your industry.
[00:07:04]  When you said the other reason they didn't unionize, I'm like, he's talking about Vince McMahon.
[00:07:08]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:07:09]  But that comes later.
[00:07:10]  So he's on his way like Thanos.
[00:07:15]  So television caused wrestling to go mainstream.
[00:07:18]  And TV execs during the golden age of TV loved it because wrestling, not only did it get a lot of eyeballs, people are always wanting to watch wrestling, it's incredibly cheap to produce, right?
[00:07:28]  You don't need a ton of blocking.
[00:07:30]  You don't need, you know, special effects people.
[00:07:32]  You don't need the same kind of, you know, stars that you have to have for a drama or something.
[00:07:39]  You need a ring and huge men who are willing to hurt themselves for money, right?
[00:07:43]  It's own like source of profit, like the ticket sales.
[00:07:47]  Yeah.
[00:07:48]  Yeah.
[00:07:48]  And I'm just saying you could theoretically make money on a wrestling broadcast before it even gets on TV.
[00:07:54]  Yeah.
[00:07:54]  And we're getting to that.
[00:07:55]  That is what people eventually figure it out.
[00:07:58]  And one of the first people to realize kind of how profitable television could be for wrestling was Vincent James McMahon, the father of R. Vince.
[00:08:06]  He was born on July 6th, 1914 to a sports promoter named Jess McMahon in West Harlem.
[00:08:12]  Now, over time, Vince, we'll call him Vince Sr. for the purpose of these episodes, and we'll call R. Vince Vince Jr.
[00:08:19]  Otherwise, it's going to get way too complicated.
[00:08:22]  Over time, Vince Sr.'s father and older brother got really into boxing promotion.
[00:08:27]  And, you know, Vince Sr. eventually follows his dad as a promoter.
[00:08:31]  In 1931, his dad noticed that pro wrestling seemed to be a growing concern.
[00:08:36]  People are really getting into this kind of thing a lot more.
[00:08:39]  So he decided to promote a match and he wound up thinking it might be a good business.
[00:08:43]  For the next 15 years, Vince McMahon Sr.'s father worked in both boxing and wrestling, booking matches all throughout the greater New York area.
[00:08:52]  He expanded his business to DC and sent his son to run his office there.
[00:08:56]  Vincent Sr. was on a swell path until, you know, World War II happened, that whole shebang, and he had to go overseas for a couple of years in the military.
[00:09:06]  It was during this period that he met up with a young woman named Vicki Hanner.
[00:09:11]  By 1943, Vicki was pregnant with his child.
[00:09:14]  This is going to be R. Vince McMahon.
[00:09:16]  Vicki was married to another guy at the time.
[00:09:18]  And while they did file for divorce before she got pregnant, or while he filed a divorce petition against her before she got pregnant, she didn't like do anything with it.
[00:09:28]  And so the divorce didn't go through until 1947.
[00:09:32]  She and Vincent Sr., while kind of in a bigamous relationship, moved to New York where they had their first son, Roderick James McMahon, who is Vince McMahon's older brother, out of wedlock on October 12th.
[00:09:45]  The couple were married in 1944, while Vicki is again still legally married to her first husband, which means that Vincent might technically qualify as a literal bastard, although the timing here is a little fuzzy.
[00:09:58]  In August of 19th...
[00:10:00]  How often does that happen?
[00:10:02]  Very rarely.
[00:10:03]  Most of our bastards were born within the bounds of holy matrimony, Tom.
[00:10:06]  Really?
[00:10:07]  Okay.
[00:10:08]  Very nice.
[00:10:10]  Born into ethics is what this is.
[00:10:13]  Exactly.
[00:10:13]  Yeah.
[00:10:15]  So in August of 1945, Vincent Sr. was honorably discharged.
[00:10:19]  And a few days later, their second son, Vincent Kennedy McMahon, that's R. Vince McMahon, was born in North Carolina.
[00:10:25]  I'm sorry.
[00:10:26]  Vince McMahon's here.
[00:10:27]  It is a little complex at this point.
[00:10:30]  I don't buy it.
[00:10:31]  They found him in the forest.
[00:10:34]  They pulled him out of a bush.
[00:10:36]  Yeah.
[00:10:37]  Yeah.
[00:10:37]  He was a tuber.
[00:10:38]  He was in a pod.
[00:10:41]  Yeah.
[00:10:41]  He's in a tuber with like, I don't know, the guy who owns the Knicks currently.
[00:10:45]  They pulled them both up at the same time.
[00:10:48]  So Vince McMahon, R. Vince McMahon, Vince Jr. was baptized in a local Catholic church, which Reisman notes would be the only real influence that Vincent Sr. had on his son for more than a decade, right?
[00:11:00]  Because his family's Catholic, he makes sure the kid gets baptized in a Catholic church.
[00:11:05]  And then he and Vicki split the fuck up.
[00:11:07]  And we don't really know why, but Vicki has a lot of husbands.
[00:11:12]  So this is like not a not an uncommon thing for her to like get married to a guy and then for them to split up for a while.
[00:11:20]  Given what we know happens in the future, we could blame this on Vince McMahon.
[00:11:26]  Yes.
[00:11:27]  And I think it is generally fair to blame the child in incidents of divorce.
[00:11:31]  I think we can all usually, yeah.
[00:11:33]  Yeah.
[00:11:34]  Um, that's the official stance of this podcast.
[00:11:37]  So Vicki gets together after Vincent Sr. leaves with a guy named Leo Lupton Jr.
[00:11:44]  Leo is a high school dropout and an electrician who had already abandoned one family before he got married to this family in 19.
[00:11:53]  Again, these are, honestly, these are my people, right?
[00:11:56]  This is the American, the heartland.
[00:11:59]  Classic American dirtbag.
[00:12:01]  Listening to the Allman brothers, always leaving his family in the rearview mirror.
[00:12:06]  That's his hobby is leaving families.
[00:12:08]  It's an art form for some.
[00:12:10]  Abandoning his family.
[00:12:13]  Good stuff.
[00:12:14]  So he abandons his first family in 1940.
[00:12:17]  And it's very funny.
[00:12:19]  So before he meets Vicki, he abandons this first family, a wife and a daughter.
[00:12:22]  And he gets charged and convicted for this.
[00:12:26]  And his sentence for abandoning his family, he is sentenced to, quote, two years on the roads.
[00:12:34]  What does that mean?
[00:12:35]  You're exiled from the cities.
[00:12:39]  I don't know.
[00:12:39]  My guess is like realistically, probably some sort of like hard labor on the highway system, but that is a Cormac McCarthy ass sounding punishment.
[00:12:52]  Two years on the roads.
[00:12:58]  God, the 40s were funny.
[00:13:00]  I mean, I guess some unfunny stuff happened, but it was mostly a laugh.
[00:13:03]  So the earth would be your pillow and the sky shall be your blanket.
[00:13:09]  Sentenced to hobo.
[00:13:11]  Honestly, we ought to be doing that now.
[00:13:15]  Like when we had the big financial crash in 2008, all those bankers, you got to be a hobo now.
[00:13:20]  You got to go wander with a bindle.
[00:13:21]  No more than two nights in the same city.
[00:13:23]  Go running.
[00:13:27]  God, what a cool sounding punishment.
[00:13:29]  So he finishes his time on the roads and gets together with Vicki after she breaks up with Vincent Sr.
[00:13:37]  They get married in 1947.
[00:13:39]  This is her third marriage in six years, which is honestly pretty impressive for now.
[00:13:45]  Those are some numbers.
[00:13:46]  I'll give it to her.
[00:13:47]  So Vince McMahon, our Vince McMahon, Vince Jr., is a professional liar and a fabulous.
[00:13:53]  In another era, he would have been a carnival barker.
[00:13:56]  And this is a problem for us because he's been pretty good over the years at doing his own PR.
[00:14:03]  In this era, he's a carnival barker.
[00:14:05]  He is a carnival barker, yes.
[00:14:08]  He's the most carny son of a bitch liberalist.
[00:14:10]  He does have strong carny energy.
[00:14:14]  He's been doing his own PR for quite a while, and he's given a couple of remarkable interviews where he goes into honestly startling detail about his father and his own childhood.
[00:14:24]  Although you can't ever trust anything he says entirely.
[00:14:27]  Like you have to go over this kind of stuff because number one, even if he's lying, it's fascinating that he would say some of these things.
[00:14:34]  But you always take it with a grain of salt.
[00:14:36]  So one of the two really good interviews we have where he talks about his early life is a feature with New York magazine titled Beyond Fake and written by veteran journalist Nancy Joe Sales.
[00:14:47]  The other is an interview in Playboy Magazine with an unnamed reporter who sounds like the kind of dude you'd expect to find wrestling, interviewing wrestling promoters for Playboy Magazine.
[00:14:57]  And unfortunately, the Playboy interview is the one where he gives us the most detail about his childhood.
[00:15:02]  It is worth noting that this interview was conducted as part of a promotional campaign Vince was doing for the XFL, which was supposed to be an ultra-violent football league with no rules and wound up collapsing inside of a year because all of the athletes were hoping to get hired by the NFL and none of them wanted to suffer life-altering energies, injuries in the XFL.
[00:15:22]  So Vince is very much in macho mode while he's doing this piece.
[00:15:26]  You know, he's trying to sell himself in order to sell the XFL.

=== Playboy Interview Details (15:27) ===

[00:15:30]  You know, as a result, for example, he starts this interview by talking about how he doesn't feel pain, which is why he's so good at taking hits in the ring.
[00:15:38]  Later in the interview, he calls his stepfather, Leo Lupton, a real asshole who, quote, enjoyed kicking people around.
[00:15:45]  Playboy asks him, your stepfather beat you?
[00:15:48]  And Vince nods yes.
[00:15:49]  Quote, it's unfortunate that he died before I could kill him.
[00:15:52]  I would have enjoyed that.
[00:15:53]  Not that he didn't have some redeeming qualities.
[00:15:56]  He was an athlete, great at any sport, sport, which I admired.
[00:15:59]  And I remember watching the Jackie Gleason show with him.
[00:16:01]  We used to laugh together at Jackie Gleason.
[00:16:04]  Jesus.
[00:16:05]  I like the idea of going through, masturbating to a magazine and getting to the story and being like, hmm.
[00:16:11]  It only makes it hotter for me, if I'm being honest.
[00:16:14]  You gradually stop masturbating as you're eating.
[00:16:17]  After a solid hour with a solid hour with this ball-draining cum mag, I was happy to see Vince McMahon's face.
[00:16:26]  Let me know I could rehydrate.
[00:16:28]  A very alluring story, Mr. McMahon.
[00:16:30]  Thank you.
[00:16:33]  So this interview fucking.
[00:16:36]  I wish I could have killed my dad.
[00:16:38]  Say it slower.
[00:16:39]  Say it slower while you choke me.
[00:16:42]  Everyone gripping their dick really appreciates it.
[00:16:47]  So one of the great things about this, like, that's an objectively insane thing to say.
[00:16:52]  Like, it's unfortunate he died before I could kill him, but at least we used to listen to laugh at Jackie Gleason together.
[00:16:58]  Like, that's nice, right?
[00:17:00]  That's a crazy thing to tell, Playboy.
[00:17:02]  Yeah, there's a lot.
[00:17:04]  There's a lot there.
[00:17:05]  And the interview, like, honestly, low-key, the interviewer here, is also a bastard because after he says we used to laugh together at Jackie Gleason, the Playboy journalist says, Lupton was an electrician.
[00:17:16]  He hit you with his tools, didn't he?
[00:17:18]  A pipe wrench?
[00:17:19]  What?
[00:17:20]  Jesus.
[00:17:21]  What?
[00:17:22]  What the fuck?
[00:17:25]  Vince says, sure.
[00:17:27]  Sure.
[00:17:28]  And then the Playboy guy says, he hit your brother too.
[00:17:31]  And Vince says, no, I was the only one of the kids who would speak up.
[00:17:35]  And that's what provoked the attacks.
[00:17:37]  You would think that after being on the receiving end of numerous attacks, I would wise up, but I couldn't.
[00:17:41]  I refused to.
[00:17:41]  I felt I should say something, even though I knew what the result would be.
[00:17:46]  And that's like, you know, again, obviously he's, he's, he's in part doing this to like mythologize.
[00:17:52]  Like this, I'm like, he, this is like in context, he starts with being like, I'm tough.
[00:17:56]  I don't feel pain.
[00:17:58]  I learned how to not feel pain because my dad beat me.
[00:18:01]  He beat me because I wouldn't stop mouthing off, right?
[00:18:04]  Like this is both possibly parts of this are, I'm sure parts of this are true.
[00:18:09]  And also he's telling you this because he thinks it makes him look cool, which is this like just an undeniable aspect of this Playboy interview.
[00:18:17]  And then his story is just getting completely poisoned by this interviewer who is a piece of shit.
[00:18:22]  You don't want to say no to this, but like he hit you with a wrench.
[00:18:24]  He's hit with his tools, right?
[00:18:26]  Maybe he hits you with a wrench.
[00:18:27]  Is that right?
[00:18:29]  So Vince claims the physical abuse started when he was six and continued for the next half decade or so, at least.
[00:18:35]  When the Playboy guy tells him, that's an awful way to learn how a man behaves, Vince gives this line.
[00:18:41]  I learned how not to be.
[00:18:43]  One thing I loathe is a man who will strike a woman.
[00:18:45]  There's never an excuse for that.
[00:18:47]  Now, hold on to that for a moment, folks, because we'll be talking about this a little later.
[00:18:53]  Oh, boy.
[00:18:54]  Yeah.
[00:18:55]  Leo went on to have a son later in life, Leo Lupton, his stepdad.
[00:19:00]  And this son, when interviewered, I believe it was Josie Reisman who interviewed his son, who is like Vincent, our Vincent's half-brother.
[00:19:08]  This guy says, I didn't experience any abuse.
[00:19:10]  Like our dad, you know, didn't hit me.
[00:19:13]  Obviously, that doesn't mean Vince isn't telling the truth.
[00:19:15]  This kind of thing happens all the time.
[00:19:18]  That said, like, it's also, I'm trying both not to deny, because it's entirely possible that Vince, and in fact, probably pretty likely that he received something we would consider physical child abuse.
[00:19:30]  And also, every word, nearly every word out of Vince McMahon's mouth is a lie and has been for like 50 years.
[00:19:36]  This is a complicated thing to keep in your head ethically, but I think both of those things need to be acknowledged.
[00:19:42]  Now, I don't doubt that this was a difficult period in his childhood.
[00:19:47]  He certainly reports that.
[00:19:49]  And Leo Lupton is a bit of a dirtbag.
[00:19:51]  So again, all of this, all of these things can be true.
[00:19:55]  And while his biological dad was, while this was all going on, his biological dad, Vincent Sr., was reaping the sweet rewards of abandoning both of his children to focus on his wrestling career.
[00:20:06]  When Jess McMahon, R. Vince's grandfather, died in 1954, Vincent Sr. took over what had become a sizable family business, one of the larger wrestling concerns in the United States.
[00:20:18]  Syndicate is probably a better thing to call it.
[00:20:20]  So Vincent Sr. was known to his wrestlers as a nice guy in a world of promoters that were mostly unhinged psychopaths, right?
[00:20:29]  Most wrestling promoters, most syndicate leaders are like, you know, Von Eric, right?
[00:20:34]  They are like just a slight step away from just being a straight up gang boss.
[00:20:40]  And some of them are literally gang bosses.
[00:20:43]  Yeah, these people are like wild men.
[00:20:46]  And by the way, Vincent Sr. does work pretty closely with toots.
[00:20:50]  Vincent Sr. is generally known as like, he's a relatively honest one.
[00:20:54]  He's reasonably good to work for.
[00:20:56]  Now, this is what a lot of his wrestlers will say.
[00:20:59]  I'm not sure if that's actually true or if he was just really good at being likable while he fucked people over.
[00:21:06]  And he just kind of was able to differentiate himself from the other leaders because he dressed better and he was kind of nicer to his employees to their faces.
[00:21:15]  There's some interviews that make me suspect that his reputation for being a decent guy was largely the result of kind of his marketing.
[00:21:24]  One of these is a quote from Jesse the Body Ventura: quote, you could be angry at Vince Sr. for a payoff.
[00:21:30]  You'd walk in, you'd voice your complaint, you'd walk out and you'd feel great, and yet you got no more money.
[00:21:35]  When he was sticking it to you, he always made you feel good while he was doing it.
[00:21:40]  And Jesse the Body Ventura is somebody we're going to be hearing from a little bit later as well.
[00:21:44]  Fascinating man.
[00:21:46]  So Vince Sr. was a ruthless businessman, but he was also a team player.
[00:21:52]  When the Justice Department cracked down on the NWA for being an illegal cartel and threatening independent promoters, Vincent Sr. tampered with a witness threatening one of his wrestlers to change their testimony before a deposition.
[00:22:05]  He's not in the NWA, but he's an affiliate.
[00:22:07]  And when they come to him being like, hey, one of your guys is going to, you know, basically testify to the government that we're operating as an illegal cartel in order to like keep the prices low for paying our wrestlers.
[00:22:20]  Vince sits down with this guy and he's like, hey, man, this is the end of your career if you do this shit.
[00:22:26]  You know, he's that guy.
[00:22:28]  He is willing to go to bat for his industry, for the owners in his industry.
[00:22:32]  Good for him.
[00:22:33]  Good for him.
[00:22:34]  Yeah.
[00:22:35]  Or maybe I'm confused.
[00:22:36]  This might be terribly unethical and evil.
[00:22:41]  So as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like little kid Vince was particularly into wrestling during the years when he didn't know his biological father.
[00:22:51]  In fairness, he seems to have had a lot on his mind besides the fact that his stepdad was a violent guy.
[00:22:56]  In that Playboy interview, he mentions having been the victim of some kind of sex abuse as a child.
[00:23:02]  The interviewer asks him for details.
[00:23:04]  And this journalist is the worst person to interview somebody about potentially being victim of a sex crime.
[00:23:12]  Vince's first response when the interviewer asks for details is actually pretty reasonable.
[00:23:16]  He says, that's not anything I would like to embellish just because it was weird.
[00:23:22]  The interviewer kind of assumes he's talking about being sexually abused by a male adult.
[00:23:27]  And Vincent tells him, no, it was not from a man.
[00:23:31]  And then the Playboy interviewer asks, it's well known that you're estranged from your mother.
[00:23:35]  Have we found the reason?
[00:23:38]  Now, I might rather die than ask that question of anyone without an excuse.
[00:23:43]  Extremely good reason.
[00:23:45]  But are you fishing for trauma, dude?
[00:23:48]  Like, that is, I part of me, and maybe I'm just kind of being hopeful.
[00:23:53]  Part of me wonders if, like, maybe he and Vince cleared some stuff ahead of time and plan.
[00:23:58]  Vince is again a Kayfabe guy, right?
[00:24:00]  Like, he is, he does this.
[00:24:01]  So, maybe, because it is weird.
[00:24:04]  It's wild to ask a guy that question and not get fucking cold cocked.
[00:24:08]  Um, like, but maybe they were, I don't know.
[00:24:11]  I like, I really don't know.
[00:24:12]  Um, yeah.
[00:24:14]  Uh, so anyway, Vince answers and says, you know, after this guy says, it's weird, you know, you're estranged from your mom, and we found basically insinuating, did your mom sexually like abuse you?
[00:24:24]  Uh, Vince asks, answers, I'd say that's pretty close.
[00:24:28]  So, for quite a while, everyone took that as like Vince confirming that his mom sexually abused him.
[00:24:34]  That's what he wants us to believe, yeah.
[00:24:36]  Yeah, it's hard to interpret that any other way, yeah, yeah.
[00:24:41]  Every Vince's man, I mean, it's just what you were saying earlier.
[00:24:45]  Every interview I've ever seen of Vince seems like it's at least partially a work, exactly.
[00:24:50]  Regardless of what he's talking about, it always seems like he's performing to an extent, so it's really hard to it's it is it is extremely hard to tell with Vince McMahon because he's Vince McMahon.
[00:25:00]  Um, now I did some weird sex stuff with my mom, watch the XFL, and it's like you know, obviously, some people will bring up, well, he took care of his mom, he like gave her money and stuff for the rest of her life, which doesn't necessarily mean she didn't sexually abuse him, right?
[00:25:14]  Like, family, this, all this stuff's all complicated.
[00:25:17]  Um, around the same time as this Playboy interview, I think a little bit afterwards, he winds up, definitely afterwards, he winds up on the Howard Stern show to promote a pay-per-view wrestling event and also to promote the XFL.
[00:25:31]  Howard Stern is Howard Stern, if you're not aware.
[00:25:33]  So, of course, he brings up these allegations of like child molestation, saying he'd read that Vince had been molested by his mother.
[00:25:41]  Now, I'm going to read a quote from Jodi Reisman's book, Ringmaster, relating the rest of that conversation.
[00:25:47]  I didn't say that, Vince countered in a tone that suggested a rising shield.
[00:25:52]  That was the inference.
[00:25:53]  Stern's co-host, Robin Quivers, asked, What did she do?
[00:25:56]  Vince didn't answer.
[00:25:58]  Stern posited, I don't know, but whatever it was, it was not good.
[00:26:01]  Vince blurted out and obviously forced laughed.
[00:26:04]  Vince, you get all choked up when you talk about it, right? Stern asked.
[00:26:07]  I'd rather not talk about that stuff, Vince replied.
[00:26:09]  Quivers, your mother is around and you don't talk to her.
[00:26:12]  Vince, not a lot.
[00:26:13]  Stern, boy, did she blow it?
[00:26:15]  Because, man, you're a billionaire.
[00:26:16]  Does she get any money from the WWF? Quivers asked, referring to WWE by its then-current name.
[00:26:22]  Stern interrupted the question to add, I just realized when I said, did she blow it?
[00:26:26]  That's the question.
[00:26:27]  Everyone in the studience yelled out a mock, disapproving, oh, at the host's dick joke.
[00:26:32]  Well, everyone other than Vince, Vince, I apologize, Stern said.
[00:26:35]  That would be traumatic.
[00:26:37]  That would be traumatic, Vince said.
[00:26:39]  Right.
[00:26:40]  Now, that is again fucking insane.
[00:26:44]  What?
[00:26:44]  That is like Howard Stern.
[00:26:47]  You don't make a blowjob joke about somebody being sexually abused when they were like six.
[00:26:54]  You just, you don't do that.
[00:26:56]  That's that's really bad, Howard.
[00:26:59]  That's so fucked up.
[00:27:00]  Yeah.
[00:27:01]  Like, I don't know what to say about that.
[00:27:06]  I'm in the unusual position of feeling bad for Vince.
[00:27:09]  I do kind of feel bad for Vince there.
[00:27:12]  Yeah.
[00:27:13]  That's brutal.
[00:27:15]  That is out of its fucking mind.
[00:27:18]  This is what that is.
[00:27:19]  That is bananas.
[00:27:21]  That happened.
[00:27:22]  Yeah.
[00:27:24]  It's something else.
[00:27:25]  So in that Playboy article, Vince went into what I would describe as a baffling degree of detail about his early life, just outside of the stuff we've already talked about.
[00:27:34]  At one point, the interviewer asks him when he lost his virginity, which is at least kind of a normal Playboy question.
[00:27:41]  Although it's weird to ask that after he has talked about being sexually assaulted as a child.
[00:27:49]  Yeah.
[00:27:50]  And it's, I kind of get the feeling that both men do not consider being molested to be the same as losing your virginity, which actually kind of, I mean, I think you could argue makes a degree of sense because they're talking about having a consensual sexual experience.
[00:28:05]  That makes total sense.
[00:28:05]  Yeah, that makes that makes sense.
[00:28:06]  In the spirit of the question, I would not count it, right?
[00:28:09]  Yeah.
[00:28:10]  Right.
[00:28:11]  Anyway, his response here is still one of the most baffling things I have ever seen a man admit to in a public forum.
[00:28:18]  And this is him again talking about losing his virginity.
[00:28:21]  That was at a very young age.
[00:28:22]  I remember probably in the first grade being invited to a matinee film with my stepbrother and his girlfriends.
[00:28:27]  And I remember them playing with me, playing with my penis and giggling.
[00:28:30]  I thought that was pretty cool.
[00:28:31]  That was my initiation into sex.
[00:28:33]  At that age, you don't necessarily achieve an erection, but it was cool.
[00:28:37]  At around the same time, there was a girl my age who was, in essence, my cousin.
[00:28:40]  Later in life, she actually wound up marrying that asshole, Leo Lupton, my stepfather.
[00:28:45]  Boy, this sounds like Tobacco Road.
[00:28:47]  Anyway, I remember the two of us being so curious about each other's bodies and not knowing what the hell to do.
[00:28:51]  We would go into the woods and get naked together.
[00:28:53]  It felt good.
[00:28:54]  And for some reason, I wanted to put crushed leaves into her.
[00:28:57]  Don't know why, but I remember that.
[00:28:59]  I don't remember the first time I had intercourse, believe it or not.
[00:29:02]  Now, if you're counting leaf stuff, if we're counting leaf stuff, then I guess that six against first grade.
[00:29:11]  It's one of those things.
[00:29:13]  Look, I actually can definitely say I have had like friends about stuff for like a scarecrow.
[00:29:23]  I don't think it's uncommon for little kids to like play around with other little kids sometimes.
[00:29:29]  And that's sometimes like talking about it in this way is nuts.
[00:29:34]  That I feel confident saying.
[00:29:36]  If one of them says, I want to stuff leaves inside you, now you've got a problem.
[00:29:40]  Now this is outside the acceptable level of like discovery and weirdness that all kids go through.
[00:29:47]  Yeah.
[00:29:47]  Yeah.
[00:29:48]  This is, and I think, again, the weirdest part is talking about it in the context of losing your virginity to Playboy.
[00:29:53]  Cause honestly, both of those stories, one is like you're with your stepbrother and they like play with your penis for some reason.
[00:30:01]  And one is you're playing with another little kid and like stuff like leaves in their underwear.
[00:30:06]  Neither of those is sex, I don't think.
[00:30:10]  Like neither of those is consensual sex.
[00:30:12]  Neither of those is even intercourse.
[00:30:14]  Like I don't know, I don't know why you bring that up at all in this context.
[00:30:19]  I guess in like Vince's weird brain, he was just like, there's, there's a, okay, it's like in his weird brain, he might have thought like, oh, well, they mean the first time that I, you know, had my, had my penis flicked around.
[00:30:31]  But they also like there's, it reminds me of like the kind of weird boasting kids do when they're just hitting puberty.
[00:30:39]  It's like, oh, no, yeah, I had like, I had sex in second grade or it's all bullshit.
[00:30:45]  So it's like, there's a weird component of that to it as well.
[00:30:48]  Like he's trying to seem cool by saying he had sex as young as possible.
[00:30:54]  Yeah.
[00:30:54]  Yeah.
[00:30:55]  These are like, these are both like stories.
[00:30:57]  I don't know.

=== Weird Childhood Stories (02:42) ===

[00:30:58]  If you were a major figure and decided to write your autobiography, you might, if it was a particularly honest autobiography, tell a story like that when talking about your early childhood.
[00:31:10]  Like saying it in like, I don't know, a fucking Playboy interview as sort of, this is how I lost my virginity is bizarre.
[00:31:19]  If you try to explain away like a leaf fetish or some like really strange thing you got caught doing, then you're like, well, you guys, you got caught fucking a tree.
[00:31:27]  Yeah.
[00:31:28]  Here's why I fuck trees.
[00:31:31]  He talks about leaves.
[00:31:32]  Yeah, they caught me naked in a compost bin, but let me explain why.
[00:31:35]  My stepdad, he got sentenced to two years on the road.
[00:31:38]  He fucked a lot of trees and I think that rubbed off on me.
[00:31:41]  Oh, wait, I didn't mean that.
[00:31:43]  Speaking of rubbing off, you're going to fuck that book.
[00:31:45]  Watch the XFL.
[00:31:48]  Trees and papers, basically trees.
[00:31:50]  Yeah.
[00:31:51]  I think it's fair.
[00:31:52]  That's the other thing.
[00:31:54]  He's doing this interview to promote his weird arena football.
[00:31:56]  Yeah, to promote PXFL.
[00:31:59]  He talks about stuffing leaves in another child's underwear.
[00:32:04]  PXFL really was like this violent, insecure, like man's man version of football.
[00:32:08]  And here he is telling these fucking intimate, like dark sexual stories.
[00:32:13]  Desperately intimate stories.
[00:32:15]  These stories that like these are the kinds of experiences that you do your best to like not.
[00:32:23]  I don't know.
[00:32:23]  It seems like these are the kind of experiences.
[00:32:26]  And like if you have, I mean, I guess there's, I mean, just statistically, some of the people listening will have similar experiences.
[00:32:32]  Nothing wrong with this, but like these are the kind of things you would, you know, a close friend when you're, you know, burying your soul some night, you know, or somebody that you're in a romantic relationship with when you've, you've built up a degree of trust, right?
[00:32:46]  Playboy magazine.
[00:32:48]  Like fucking Gitmo couldn't get me out of this outing for a public forum.
[00:32:53]  This story is probably on the same page as a grotesquely sexual cartoon.
[00:33:00]  Yeah.
[00:33:00]  Or an ad for camel cigarettes.
[00:33:02]  Right.
[00:33:06]  This is funny when it's to a picture of Joe Camel in a fucking leather jacket.
[00:33:10]  Yeah.
[00:33:11]  It's, it's, it's something the fuck else is for what it's for goddamn sure.
[00:33:16]  It is something the fuck else.
[00:33:17]  And you know what else is something else, guys?
[00:33:20]  These products and services.
[00:33:22]  These products and services.
[00:33:23]  Damn it, you beat me to it.
[00:33:24]  Yeah.
[00:33:24]  Yeah.
[00:33:24]  There's nothing ads love more than being featured right after talking about Vince McMahon's bizarre admissions of sexual abuse in Playboy Magazine.
[00:33:33]  So here, buy some shit.
[00:33:38]  What's up, everyone?
[00:33:39]  I'm Ango Moda.

=== Joe Camel and Products (03:09) ===

[00:33:40]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:33:51]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:33:54]  I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:33:59]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:34:02]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:34:06]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:34:11]  Yeah.
[00:34:11]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:34:14]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:34:16]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:34:24]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:34:26]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:34:33]  Just hang in there.
[00:34:34]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:34:36]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:34:37]  There's a lot in life.
[00:34:38]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:34:46]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:34:51]  It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:34:59]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:35:09]  If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:35:13]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:35:17]  They believe everything.
[00:35:18]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:35:21]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:35:24]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:35:28]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:35:31]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:35:32]  They do not have homes.
[00:35:33]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:35:37]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:35:45]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:35:54]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:36:01]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:36:05]  This season of Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken.
[00:36:13]  Take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:36:16]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
[00:36:24]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:36:29]  Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
[00:36:39]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Leo the Stepfather (15:54) ===

[00:36:49]  Ah, we're back, boy.
[00:36:52]  That's going to make life easier for the ad sales team.
[00:36:55]  So, as a rule, when Vince talks about his childhood, his early memories focus around his stepfather, Leo.
[00:37:01]  Even his only young memory of his biological father involves Leo.
[00:37:06]  Vincent Sr., when Vince was a little kid, only visited him once.
[00:37:10]  And Vince Jr.'s memory of the event was just that he was scared of Leo, right?
[00:37:15]  He was scared of how to react in front of his biological father because he was worried about how Leo would react.
[00:37:20]  Again, if Leo's an abusive guy makes total sense.
[00:37:23]  Outside of this moment, Vince was completely separate from his biological father and from the McMahon family until the age of 12.
[00:37:32]  One of his childhood friends recalls that he and his brother did not even know how to pronounce the name McMahon properly.
[00:37:38]  Now, they didn't have a lot of money when they were, you know, living.
[00:37:41]  How many options are there?
[00:37:42]  Like McMahon.
[00:37:45]  I think it was McMahon or something like that is how he said it.
[00:37:49]  Yeah.
[00:37:50]  Now, they didn't have a lot of money, you know, in the time when he was living as Vinny Lupton.
[00:37:56]  And Vince and his family kind of lived in a bad part of town.
[00:37:59]  There were hints of normalcy in their life, though.
[00:38:01]  Vicki volunteered with the local Boy Scout troop that Vince was in and acted in community theater productions.
[00:38:08]  Unfortunately, one of these was a 1953 production of On Stage America, described by the local paper as a minstrel show with a modern patriotic twist.
[00:38:17]  Vince Jr.'s mother was in the Piccadini chorus.
[00:38:20]  Josie Reisman writes that this was presumably in Blackface, and I suspect she is correct there.
[00:38:26]  Yeah.
[00:38:27]  To the listeners, everyone who knows what that word means is dead, but that's a really racist word.
[00:38:32]  Yeah, don't use it.
[00:38:35]  There's no other assumption you can make based on that word.
[00:38:39]  Yeah.
[00:38:39]  If you see that word written somewhere, it's like, if you see that word written somewhere, whoever wrote it almost certainly has a Confederate flag in their home.
[00:38:49]  Right.
[00:38:49]  It is referencing the most racist thing you've ever seen.
[00:38:52]  If you see it somewhere.
[00:38:54]  Bad stuff.
[00:38:55]  So that said, really common stuff for the day, right?
[00:38:58]  This is not like fringe shit in North Carolina in the period of time in which she's acting in this, which doesn't make it right.
[00:39:04]  I'm just, you know, trying to add context.
[00:39:06]  He grows up in a pretty racist place and time.
[00:39:10]  Vincent's elementary school was segregated to further back up that point.
[00:39:15]  And his sixth grade class had just 32 students.
[00:39:18]  In an interview with Playboy, he describes himself and his friends as the roughest kids in town, constantly getting into fights and scrapes.
[00:39:25]  He claims that he was totally unruly, that he refused to go to school and broke the law constantly without ever getting caught.
[00:39:33]  Worst women and whites.
[00:39:34]  That's what they call me.
[00:39:35]  Again, he's talking about himself when he's like 10.
[00:39:40]  In one interview, he let out a picture.
[00:39:42]  I was cutting necks.
[00:39:44]  In one interview, he let out a potentially revealing statement saying that he felt as a kid that he wasn't as bright as the other kids, and so he defaulted to physicality as a result.
[00:39:55]  That sounds like it might be like an honest admission of insecurity, but there's reason to doubt all of this.
[00:40:01]  Reisman notes, quote, However, the picture that emerges from those who knew him is surprisingly of a kind kid who made friends with ease.
[00:40:08]  He was, from what I can remember, fairly popular, and he was liked by the girls as well as the boys.
[00:40:13]  Recalls classmate Shell Davis, who became the boy's best friend in town.
[00:40:16]  Most everyone knew him, liked him, that sort of thing.
[00:40:19]  Vinny was not a loud or abrasive child.
[00:40:21]  Rod's best friend from the period, James Fletcher, says that despite encountering Vinny at some length, the younger kid didn't make a big impression.
[00:40:28]  That said, as Davis puts it, Vinny was more extroverted than introverted.
[00:40:32]  Not a show-off, but very sociable, very friendly, very outgoing to his peers.
[00:40:36]  So again, he kind of, as a pre-teen and as a teen, he kind of portrays himself as this like violent, unhinged badass.
[00:40:43]  But everyone who knew him was like, he was really nice.
[00:40:45]  Yeah, got along with everybody.
[00:40:47]  Yeah, it's every stage of his life that he's telling a story about to Playboy sounds at least partially made up.
[00:40:55]  Uh-huh.
[00:40:56]  And it is.
[00:40:58]  Maybe he was a 10-year-old badass.
[00:41:00]  Maybe he might have been a man.
[00:41:01]  Maybe a lot of people grew up so scared of little Vinny that they're like, dude, if Playboy interviews me, I'm going to tell him that he wasn't.
[00:41:07]  There's a fucking 10-year-old in town that'll cut your goddamn neck.
[00:41:10]  He was like, if 30 years from now, someone comes up and starts asking you questions about my personality at this point in time.
[00:41:16]  You better tell him I was sweet.
[00:41:20]  Little Vinny's out here smashing people's knuckles with a hammer.
[00:41:24]  So when he's around 12, his stepdad moves Vincent Sr., Vinny Lupton, and the family to Craven County.
[00:41:32]  Now, by this point, Vincent Sr.'s business had expanded to control much of the wrestling in the northeastern United States.
[00:41:39]  He was one of the biggest promoters in the country, regularly booking sold-out events in Madison Square Garden.
[00:41:44]  Vincent Jr. had no idea of any of this until Vincent Sr.'s new wife, Juanita, pushed him to reconnect with his first biological children.
[00:41:54]  So basically, his, I don't know what technically she would be to him.
[00:41:57]  I guess technically nothing, but like his biological dad's wife, it's, you know, when his kids are like 12 and 13 years, his first biological kids are 12 and 13, is like, hey, you should like talk to them.
[00:42:10]  Like you should have some sort of relationship with the, which is a very nice gesture, to be honest.
[00:42:15]  Like that's very sweet of her.
[00:42:17]  So the two finally meet when Vincent is 12 years old.
[00:42:21]  He later told New York Magazine, I saw my dad and I just immediately fell in love with him.
[00:42:27]  He saw his father as big and handsome.
[00:42:29]  And while he says they knew that making up for lost time wasn't possible, both of them put a lot of effort into developing a belated relationship together.
[00:42:38]  And the easiest thing for them to bond over was wrestling.
[00:42:41]  Quote, he would take me to shows at the old Uline Arena in Washington.
[00:42:45]  And I remember the crowd response in those larger and than life individuals.
[00:42:48]  The passion was just so strong.
[00:42:50]  I just knew that I wanted to do that as soon as I saw it.
[00:42:54]  This is the stuff that Vincent has been most consistent about over his childhood, that he just kind of is immediately enthralled by his father, is kind of obsessed with him.
[00:43:03]  And there's also people who are not Vince kind of say this.
[00:43:08]  And Vincent Sr.'s family, like his kids, are like, you know, we were friendly to him.
[00:43:14]  We thought it was good that dad was getting a relationship with him.
[00:43:16]  He was a little odd.
[00:43:18]  And kind of everyone says that about Vince around his bio-dad, that he's kind of peculiar.
[00:43:25]  And for the record, Vince Sr. is going to find his son's obsession with him and with wrestling to be a little strange.
[00:43:32]  And not strange and like it's weird that a kid would want to connect with his bio-dad, but he is super focused on wrestling in particular.
[00:43:42]  Imagine being Vinny at this time, though.
[00:43:44]  It is weird.
[00:43:44]  Like, that's a lot for a kid to deal with.
[00:43:46]  You've got a history of abandoning your families.
[00:43:48]  And then here comes your kid's biological dad, and he's like a billionaire with his own wrestling company.
[00:43:54]  You're like, that rage is going to get internalized.
[00:43:58]  That jealousy.
[00:43:58]  That couldn't have been good for an already weird relationship.
[00:44:04]  So Vincent immediately wanted to be a wrestler.
[00:44:07]  And his bio-dad, Vincent Sr., tries to quash this, right?
[00:44:13]  Like he's very from the beginning, like, no, man, you do not want to be a wrestler.
[00:44:18]  He initially tried, he warns him that, like, wrestling has wild ups and downs.
[00:44:22]  The market's not reliable.
[00:44:23]  You know, sometimes I'm doing well, but sometimes I'm barely floating by.
[00:44:29]  You would do a lot better.
[00:44:30]  You'll be a lot happier if you just find a safe government job that gives you a pension.
[00:44:35]  But Vince listened to that about as well as you would expect a child being told that delivering mail is a better future than wearing spandex and punching dudes dressed as shakes would listen, right?
[00:44:45]  He's like, yeah, having a pension is the smart thing.
[00:44:48]  And he's like, but I want to fight people for a living.
[00:44:50]  You make that choice 10 out of 10 times.
[00:44:52]  Absolutely.
[00:44:53]  Absolutely.
[00:44:54]  Not surprising as a kid that he is so focused on.
[00:44:58]  I want to dropkick someone.
[00:45:01]  So in the summer of 1959, when Vince was 14, he met the man who would become his childhood hero, a wrestler named Dr. Jerry Graham.
[00:45:11]  Vince recalled, he had peroxided hair and wore a red riverboat gambler type shirt.
[00:45:17]  He had a 1959 blood red Cadillac convertible.
[00:45:20]  Washington, D.C., that summer of 59, I'd sneak out of my dad's office and go riding around town with a good doctor.
[00:45:26]  And oh my God, he would light cigars with $100 bills, run red lights, curse anybody he wanted to curse.
[00:45:32]  And I just thought he was the coolest guy.
[00:45:34]  He was a wild man.
[00:45:35]  He would do anything he wanted to do.
[00:45:37]  Robert, this guy is cool.
[00:45:39]  This guy is in fact kind of cool.
[00:45:42]  This guy's cool.
[00:45:44]  Sophie, would you grab us a picture of this guy?
[00:45:47]  But yeah, he is Dr. Graham, pretty cool guy.
[00:45:52]  Now, the story about him lighting $100 bills on fire is one you'll find in every recollection Vince has of his childhood.
[00:46:00]  You know, as with everything Vince says, it may or may not be true.
[00:46:03]  Given things that we know for certain about Dr. Craham, though, I'm going to say that's probably true.
[00:46:09]  That's kind of a bargain to get like everyone who meets you to tell that story your whole life.
[00:46:14]  It's like for $100 to get everyone to think, yeah, that's a deal.
[00:46:17]  I think people should start doing it.
[00:46:19]  So I think it's worth noting that Jerry Graham was an incredible dude in his own right.
[00:46:24]  During World War II, he lied about his age to enlist in the 82nd Airborne and fight Nazis as a paratrooper when he's like 15 years old, something like that.
[00:46:34]  Maybe 16.
[00:46:35]  Like he is too young to be doing that, but he does it.
[00:46:39]  Blood red Cadillac.
[00:46:42]  If you know much about the 82nd Airborne, he's the best.
[00:46:47]  The 82nd Airborne unit is awesome.
[00:46:51]  Yeah, he looks fucking cool as hell.
[00:46:54]  It's just astounding.
[00:46:57]  And Dr. Jerry Graham exits World War II, basically a pile of muscles and trauma.
[00:47:03]  He's got so much mass.
[00:47:05]  There's so much mass.
[00:47:06]  He is a huge dude.
[00:47:08]  He has the body type of like a fucking beach ball made of steel.
[00:47:14]  I don't know how else to describe it.
[00:47:17]  Very, you wouldn't want to get into a fight with this fella.
[00:47:20]  You're not knocking him over.
[00:47:22]  I don't even know what he'd grab.
[00:47:24]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:47:25]  Like he's just stout.
[00:47:27]  Yeah, his body type is a fucking Hesco barricade.
[00:47:32]  So he leaves the war traumatized as all hell.
[00:47:35]  And a lot of the behavior Vince witnessed was not just a result of him being a cool dude, but a result of chronic alcoholism, which was itself self-medication for lifelong depression.
[00:47:46]  Now, the highlight by his own admission of Dr. Graham's career occurred two years before he met Vince in 1957, when he was scheduled for a big exhibition match in Madison Square Garden.
[00:47:57]  And this is maybe the greatest riot in pro wrestling history.
[00:48:01]  Have you guys heard this story, the 57 riot at Madison Square Garden?
[00:48:05]  No, oh man.
[00:48:06]  Oh, this, you're going to love this one.
[00:48:10]  So Dr. Graham is a heel, right?
[00:48:13]  I mean, look at that guy.
[00:48:14]  That's a fucking heel.
[00:48:16]  Yeah.
[00:48:16]  Because he's cool.
[00:48:17]  Because he's fucking cool as hell.
[00:48:19]  Now, actually, we are about to talk about some racism, but you know, whatever.
[00:48:23]  So Graham is paired up in a double match alongside his fellow heel, Dick the Bruiser, and against some Canadian guy and his partner, who is a Puerto Rican wrestler named Roka.
[00:48:34]  The garden is packed with almost 13,000 fans.
[00:48:38]  Thousands more are turned away at the door.
[00:48:40]  The crowd gets amped up, and you have to assume they're also drunker than any group of people today could possibly get.
[00:48:46]  In an interview that he gave later in life, Dr. Graham said this about how the night went from a normal wrestling match to something decidedly less K-faby.
[00:48:56]  He claimed he could smell the riot coming.
[00:48:58]  Quote, I knew the timing was right.
[00:49:00]  The Puerto Rican people had never seen blood on Roka, and I hit him in the eye, split his eye, and they went insane.
[00:49:07]  So this was not something that they had planned before.
[00:49:10]  Him like busting that guy's eye open was not planned.
[00:49:14]  And this makes Roka very angry, understandably.
[00:49:18]  And they start fighting for real and actually beating the shit out of each other for real.
[00:49:22]  Now, the match had been meant to end in two straight falls, but Graham charged Roka when he wasn't supposed to because Roka had been hitting him.
[00:49:31]  And Roka did that because he had split his eye anyway.
[00:49:34]  The fight between them keeps going on.
[00:49:36]  Like it doesn't end when it's supposed to.
[00:49:38]  And there's a curfew on wrestling matches in New York at this point at 11 p.m.
[00:49:42]  But 11 p.m. rolls around and these guys are still beating the absolute shit out of each other.
[00:49:47]  So the ref calls the game for the baby faces for Roka and his partner, but this just makes the crowd angrier.
[00:49:54]  Graham and the Bruiser continue beating the piss out of Roka, even though the match is well past where it was supposed to have ended by this point.
[00:50:01]  In a write-up for Life magazine by Herbert Bream, who was there, noted, quote, as the crowd roared, Roka seized Graham and began bashing his head against the ring post.
[00:50:11]  This also produced real blood.
[00:50:13]  Garden police tried to come to Graham's aid, but they could not cope with the mastodons.
[00:50:18]  And I'm going to show you a fucking picture of this because it's one of the most insane examples of in-ring violence I've ever seen.
[00:50:25]  This is him.
[00:50:26]  This is Dr. Jerry Graham getting his head smashed in against the steel-like pillar of the fucking ring.
[00:50:32]  Sophie?
[00:50:35]  Fantastic.
[00:50:35]  Oh, man.
[00:50:36]  He is bleeding a lot.
[00:50:39]  But these guys are clearly in on it.
[00:50:41]  Like, he's letting him bash his head into the ring.
[00:50:43]  Like, they're I think there's a mix of that.
[00:50:46]  Yeah.
[00:50:47]  Yeah.
[00:50:47]  It's, it's a little hard to tell.
[00:50:49]  There's definitely points at which, like, this is not how they planned it initially, too.
[00:50:54]  Right.
[00:50:56]  So it is like.
[00:50:56]  Like, I would get the idea that, like, you know, when he busted his eye open, he lost his temper, but then, you know, they, they're still, you know, wrestling.
[00:51:04]  They're not.
[00:51:05]  It's hard to see.
[00:51:06]  Yeah.
[00:51:06]  It's like the lines here are blurry.
[00:51:08]  Right.
[00:51:09]  He's got him from the inside of the turnbuckle.
[00:51:13]  He's got his head against the ring and he's pushing it.
[00:51:14]  And his hands are like not guarding his face or not trying to get away.
[00:51:18]  It's very much like you'd expect a wrestling spot to go.
[00:51:21]  But also that next picture is he is bleeding quite a lot.
[00:51:24]  He's sleeking out the front of his face in the next picture.
[00:51:27]  It's worth relating what Graham later said about that moment.
[00:51:31]  Of course he retaliated, ran my head into the post, and blood was flowing like water, an old-time jubilee right there in Madison Square Garden.
[00:51:38]  So after Graham gets his face bashed in, Bream's coverage for Life magazine continues, quote, the crowd had been lively, throwing paper cups into the ring, but not abnormally demonstrative.
[00:51:47]  Now stimulated by what was probably the first honest competition they had ever seen, some hundreds surged forth towards the ring.
[00:51:54]  So Roka keeps beating Graham while fans broke down chairs and gathered bottles, hucking some at the wrestlers and using others to charge the wrestlers and attack.
[00:52:04]  Unfortunately for them, and this is mostly like Roka's fans who are like charging into the ring to attack Graham and his partner, Dick the Bruiser.
[00:52:12]  Now, unfortunately for these random wrestling fans who are charging with pieces of chairs and bottles, Dick the Bruiser, before being a pro wrestler, had been a lineman for the Green Bay Packers.
[00:52:23]  Now, I am sure somewhere there exists a kind of dude you want to fight less than a linebacker turned pro wrestler, but I don't know what that kind of dude might be.
[00:52:34]  Dr. Graham describes what came next.
[00:52:37]  My partner, Dick the Bruiser, was picking up and throwing Puerto Ricans outside the ring like a farmer picking potatoes.

=== Dick the Bruiser Brawl (03:54) ===

[00:52:44]  Then New York's finest at the move-ins and brought in the cavalry to close the fans down.
[00:52:50]  And that dolly was the biggest thing I ever experienced in my career.
[00:52:54]  I was fined $3,000 for inciting a riot, but it was the first time they ever saw blood on the Latin Roka.
[00:53:02]  So that's the same thing.
[00:53:06]  He was throwing Puerto Ricans like potatoes.
[00:53:12]  What a wild thing to say.
[00:53:14]  I love how credulous he was too.
[00:53:16]  Like, there went the first real brawl.
[00:53:18]  This was no longer a...
[00:53:20]  It is such a 50s moment.
[00:53:27]  What's up, everyone?
[00:53:28]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:53:29]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:53:40]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:53:44]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:53:49]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:53:51]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:53:53]  I know it's a place to come.
[00:53:54]  Look for up and coming talent.
[00:53:55]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:54:00]  Yeah.
[00:54:01]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:54:03]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:54:05]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:54:13]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:54:16]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:54:22]  Just hang in there.
[00:54:23]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:54:25]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:54:26]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:54:28]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:54:36]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:54:41]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:54:49]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:54:58]  If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:55:03]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:55:06]  They believe everything.
[00:55:07]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:55:11]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:55:14]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:55:18]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:55:20]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:55:21]  They do not have homes.
[00:55:22]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:55:26]  Listen to Eating Wallbrook from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:55:35]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:55:43]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:55:50]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:55:54]  This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken.
[00:56:02]  Take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:56:05]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
[00:56:13]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:56:19]  Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
[00:56:28]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Military School Choice (15:02) ===

[00:56:38]  Ah, we're back.
[00:56:40]  So the riot of 57 at Madison Square Garden only ended because Roka addressed his fans in Spanish and begged them to stop.
[00:56:51]  At the end of it, two officers were injured, 300 chairs were destroyed, and Dr. Jerry Graham's $500 sequined purple robe was stolen, which is the real tragedy to this whole event.
[00:57:04]  Plus, all those chairs.
[00:57:05]  Now 300 people will go seatless.
[00:57:07]  Yeah, I want all those Puerto Ricans he threw like a filthy Irishman picking potatoes.
[00:57:13]  I want a photoshop of like the crocodile hunter at the Twin Towers and Dr. Jerry Graham's sequined purple robe that just says never forget.
[00:57:24]  That's what we're fighting for then.
[00:57:25]  That's what we're fighting for.
[00:57:26]  I'm wearing one right now.
[00:57:29]  So the riot caused such shock among the great and good of Manhattan that there were calls to ban wrestling in the entire state.
[00:57:36]  Instead, they just decided to ban kids under 14 from attending live shows, which held for 20 years.
[00:57:42]  I don't think kids under 14 were particularly a part of this, but...
[00:57:47]  Were they the hammered ones breaking the chairs?
[00:57:49]  I don't think they were the hammered people charging that linebacker.
[00:57:58]  Dick the Bruiser.
[00:57:59]  Hucking shit, hucking kids across the room.
[00:58:02]  So anyway.
[00:58:03]  Dick Bruiser.
[00:58:05]  The guy who described what Dick the Bruiser is doing as hucking Puerto Ricans like a farmer throwing potatoes was the primary childhood role model for teenaged Vince McMahon outside of his biological dad.
[00:58:19]  Now, for his part, Vince Sr. was concerned about this, right?
[00:58:23]  He knows wrestlers.
[00:58:25]  He knows Dr. Graham.
[00:58:26]  And he's like, boy, my son probably shouldn't be hanging out with this guy.
[00:58:31]  So he attempted to restrict Vince Jr. from hanging out with Dr. Graham.
[00:58:35]  So Vince Jr. developed a habit of sneaking out whenever he was in town to say that.
[00:58:40]  That's how you get a kid to think something isn't cool.
[00:58:42]  You say you're not allowed to do it.
[00:58:43]  Don't do this.
[00:58:44]  So whenever Vince Jr. is like in DC to hang with his bio dad, he would sneak out at night so he could party with a drunk, traumatized, racist giant, which probably explains a lot.
[00:58:57]  Vince told New York Magazine, that same summer at a place outside of Atlantic City while my dad was away, I talked my step's mom into peroxiding my hair.
[00:59:05]  And of course, when my dad got back, he blew his stack.
[00:59:08]  That same summer, Dr. Jerry Graham gave me my first set of weights called Healthways.
[00:59:12]  I had the red shirt, red pants.
[00:59:14]  I also bought the red shoes.
[00:59:15]  I think my dad was probably a little afraid.
[00:59:18]  Now, among other things, Vince definitely...
[00:59:21]  I'm afraid of my red costumes.
[00:59:24]  Dressing in red.
[00:59:26]  Now, among other things, Vince idolized Jerry's toughness and his willingness to get into fist fights at literally no provocation.
[00:59:33]  His own father is not like Vince McMahon, and this we'll talk about this later because he does stuff in the ring quite a bit.
[00:59:40]  He's a legitimately jacked dude.
[00:59:42]  Like he's very muscular.
[00:59:43]  And this is the case.
[00:59:44]  I mean, now he's like 90, but for most of his like career, he's like a pretty shredded fellow.
[00:59:50]  His dad, Vince Sr., is not a particularly muscular guy.
[00:59:54]  He's not an athlete.
[00:59:55]  He doesn't look like an athlete, which is nothing to get.
[00:59:58]  He's just like, he's very different from how Vince is going to wind up looking.
[01:00:02]  He's a hard-nosed businessman, but no one's going to particularly fear Vince Sr. for his ability to like beat people up.
[01:00:08]  Vince Jr. seems to have desired to set himself apart from his biological dad by developing the physical trappings of being a badass, that is, big muscles.
[01:00:17]  But since doing that is hard, he also just opted to lie about having been a badass as a kid to interviewers years later.
[01:00:24]  When talking about his teenaged years, he told Playboy, quote, Havelock, where he lived, is right outside the Marine base at Cherry Point.
[01:00:32]  There was a place called the Jet Drive-In.
[01:00:34]  Real creative, the Jet, because of all the military jets at the base.
[01:00:37]  On Friday and Saturday nights, it was time to get it on with the Marines.
[01:00:41]  It was a challenge.
[01:00:42]  Most of them were in great condition, but they didn't know how to fight.
[01:00:44]  I'm not saying they were easy pickings.
[01:00:46]  They got their testosterone going and they were all liquored up.
[01:00:48]  Some of them are real tough, but me and my guys were street fighters.
[01:00:52]  Oh my God.
[01:00:54]  I like that he took the time to pause this story that absolutely totally happened to like dunk on the drive-in theater's name.
[01:01:04]  I used to go to a Marine-funded kumite every weekend.
[01:01:08]  But like, I have some notes on the name.
[01:01:11]  Yeah.
[01:01:12]  It's also funny that he's like, yeah, you know, you know what everyone knows about Marines, but they don't know how to fight.
[01:01:17]  That's what they're famous for, the Marines.
[01:01:20]  Oh my God.
[01:01:20]  When my brother came back from basic training, he spent probably the better part of a year just pointing at objects near people and being like, I could kill you with that thing.
[01:01:28]  Yeah.
[01:01:30]  It's just thinking they put it in their head like fighting is the only thing in your entire world and you need to kill everybody.
[01:01:37]  You can't say he's a great fighter.
[01:01:38]  Like you can only teach someone so much in basic training, but I guarantee Vince McMahon than 16 year old Vince McMahon.
[01:01:48]  Vince continues his absolutely not true claims.
[01:01:52]  I mean, maybe you've been through, I'm sorry, I mean, maybe you've been through basic training and you know how to operate a bayonet.
[01:01:57]  That's different from sticking your finger in somebody's eye or hitting a guy in the throat, which comes naturally to a street fighter.
[01:02:05]  And they can't both.
[01:02:06]  They do not teach soldiers to be ruthless fighters.
[01:02:08]  They teach them to follow the Queensbury rules when they're out there fighting.
[01:02:12]  Vince McMahon has never stuck his finger in somebody's eye.
[01:02:16]  Like, I just don't believe it.
[01:02:19]  And they can't believe you're not fighting fair.
[01:02:22]  Suddenly, they can't breathe and or see and they realize, oh my God, am I in for an ass kicking?
[01:02:27]  Oh my God.
[01:02:28]  Playboy, he's such a liar.
[01:02:30]  Playboy asks, ever come close to killing one of them?
[01:02:34]  McMahon, I would like to think not very close.
[01:02:36]  That's not what I wanted to do.
[01:02:38]  You want to incapacitate the guy.
[01:02:40]  Once you get someone down, you don't want him getting back up.
[01:02:42]  You don't want him moving.
[01:02:43]  So you make sure he doesn't.
[01:02:44]  It's not pretty, but it was challenging and fun.
[01:02:48]  Can we corroborate this?
[01:02:48]  Can we Google, I was a Marine and I got my ass kicked by Vince McMahon when I was...
[01:02:54]  Do you think if a townie beat the shit out of a bunch of Air Force or Marine dudes at a drive-in movie theater, that would be in the newspaper.
[01:03:02]  I will believe, and again, it's so easy to make a believable version of this lie.
[01:03:06]  Say they were Air Force guys.
[01:03:07]  Nobody's going to question that you were able to beat up Air Force dudes.
[01:03:10]  I could take nine National Guardsmen when I was 11.
[01:03:13]  Yeah, easy.
[01:03:15]  So, look, Thankfully, we do have a good journalist who likes looked into his life, Josie Reisman, author of the again excellent book Ringmaster.
[01:03:26]  Um, and her research, pretty comprehensive here.
[01:03:29]  It is true that locals of Havelock often taunted and sometimes fought Marines, which is a time-honored tradition of people who are drunk in towns near military bases, right?
[01:03:39]  Soldiers get into all sorts of fights.
[01:03:41]  But Josie's investigation churned up numerous claims by locals that Vince McMahon was never a part of any of this.
[01:03:48]  This is yeah, Doug Franks, who went to high school with Vince, admitted to getting into fights with Marines on occasion, but said Vince was simply too young to participate.
[01:03:57]  From Ringmaster, Vince was not a part of it, but he grouped up with a bunch of wannabes, and we just considered him a little punk at the time.
[01:04:04]  That's the best way I know to describe him.
[01:04:05]  I ask if Vince and his wannabes ever got into any fights or if they just hung around.
[01:04:09]  They were hanging around in their own group, trying to be tough guys, Franks recalls.
[01:04:13]  The only time I knew we ever got into anything was when he broke his hand or his wrist in a fight with a boy named Harvey Helms.
[01:04:19]  Neither Franks nor McClees recalls what the fight was over, just that it was a very isolated incident.
[01:04:24]  Vinny walked around with a cast on his hand and his wrist for three or four months, Frank said.
[01:04:27]  It was his claim to fame.
[01:04:30]  Yeah.
[01:04:31]  Yeah.
[01:04:32]  See, he knew he was going to get his ass kicked when he couldn't breathe.
[01:04:35]  Like, I broke my wrist on his neck and broke my wrist on his throat.
[01:04:39]  This is it for me.
[01:04:40]  Yeah.
[01:04:42]  So, uh, adult Vince would also claim decades later to have engaged in serious criminal activity as a teenager.
[01:04:49]  Playboy, did you ever steal McMahon automobiles?
[01:04:53]  But I always brought him back.
[01:04:55]  I just borrowed him, really.
[01:04:56]  There were other thefts too.
[01:04:57]  I ran a load of moonshine in Harlow, North Carolina, in a 1952 Ford V8.
[01:05:02]  That was a badass car at the time.
[01:05:05]  Damn, this is all very cool.
[01:05:07]  Yeah, absolutely, definitely true.
[01:05:10]  We just over a bridge in the middle of this freeze.
[01:05:13]  And then I said, How's Vince McMahon gonna get out of this one?
[01:05:17]  And then after the commercial break, I landed it.
[01:05:20]  The fucking cops didn't raid in the fucking water.
[01:05:22]  And, anyways, I lassoed the two mountains together, and that's how we made the Mississippi River.
[01:05:27]  Yeah, the cops had a nickname for me, called me Smokey.
[01:05:30]  My partner was the bandit.
[01:05:31]  That's what that movie's based on.
[01:05:33]  Except in real life, there was more karate, more eyeball karate.
[01:05:36]  Hell of a lot more eyeball poking.
[01:05:40]  So, Vince says that the cops eventually caught up to him for all his bootlegging, and that's why he was forced to attend a military school.
[01:05:46]  Now, the bootlegging, and I have a cousin who got in trouble for stealing cars and was made to attend a military school.
[01:05:53]  Stuff like this still happens, at least, I mean, it happened 20 years ago.
[01:05:56]  I don't know if it still happens today.
[01:05:59]  But for Vince, I don't believe this is true.
[01:06:01]  Vince's claim is that the cops gave him a choice between like military school in jail.
[01:06:05]  And since his mom was broke, Vincent Sr. paid for him to go to military school.
[01:06:10]  This is again a lie.
[01:06:11]  In other interviews that he gave earlier, his story is a lot more realistic.
[01:06:15]  He claims that his school had to integrate while he was in 10th grade.
[01:06:19]  This caused tumult, and perhaps due in part to being racist, Vince no longer liked it at his school once it was integrated.
[01:06:25]  His grades and behavior were bad enough that the administration decided to kick him out.
[01:06:29]  So, military school was one of his only options.
[01:06:32]  This wound up being what ultimately made him.
[01:06:35]  He later recalled, I had no reputation, so it was a new beginning, a great chance to start over and create a new reputation.
[01:06:42]  And so, when Fishburne Military School in Waynesboro, Virginia started its 1962 school year, a new student entered its 11th grade class.
[01:06:51]  The previous year, Vince had been known as Vinny Lupton, but at Fishburne, for the very first time, he started to go by a new name, Vince McMahon.
[01:07:02]  So, this is Tough Guy Laserduck.
[01:07:06]  Yeah, so many better names than Vince McMahon.
[01:07:09]  You could have been Dick the Bruiser.
[01:07:11]  Come on, man.
[01:07:14]  Now, that is Ninja Karate had lots of sex.
[01:07:20]  Yeah, they call me the eye gouger for short, though.
[01:07:23]  Marine Bane is my other nickname.
[01:07:27]  My nickname is Doesn't Put Leaves in His Cousin.
[01:07:31]  All hyphenated.
[01:07:34]  So this would be a good, this is a pretty good breaking point to end on this episode.
[01:07:40]  But I feel like I'd be doing everyone a disservice if I did not provide a coda for the epic story of Dr. Jerry Graham.
[01:07:48]  And I'm going to ask you guys to strap yourselves in for this one because we're about to go on quite a ride.
[01:07:55]  So despite being a wild man in public, Jerry Graham was also a mama's boy.
[01:08:00]  And in 1969, his mother was admitted to a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona.
[01:08:05]  He called the doctor immediately as soon as she was admitted and told him he would hurt or kill the man if his mother died there.
[01:08:12]  Now, this next book comes from a book by another wrestler, superstar Billy Graham.
[01:08:16]  And I'm going to quote from it now.
[01:08:18]  When she died later that day, Graham showed up at the hospital with his 12-year-old son, wielding a hunting knife and a sawed-off shotgun.
[01:08:26]  A tearful Graham shoved down a nurse and tossed a security guard across a hallway, hoisting his dead mother's body off a gurney and draping it over his shoulder.
[01:08:36]  Another security guard rushed forward and Graham knocked him down and dragged him across the floor while still holding the corpse with his other arm.
[01:08:43]  My brother Vance, a police officer in Phoenix at the time, vividly recalled how squad cars were called to the hospital surrounding it and blocking off the streets nearby.
[01:08:52]  Eventually, cops stormed the hospital and arrested Graham, who screamed incoherently and pounded on the patrol car doors as he was taken into custody.
[01:09:01]  So that's a hell of a thing.
[01:09:04]  Fucking Christ.
[01:09:06]  That's a hell of a thing.
[01:09:07]  What?
[01:09:08]  Yeah, he stole his mom's body from the hospital.
[01:09:12]  With a shotgun and a hunting knight FN his 12-year-old son.
[01:09:16]  And again, he could have just got her to that discredited veterinarian.
[01:09:20]  They could have brought her back to life.
[01:09:21]  Not the same as she was.
[01:09:22]  No.
[01:09:23]  Something different.
[01:09:25]  These are, these are the kind of stories that make wrestling amazing because you don't get this from the NFL, right?
[01:09:33]  You don't get this for, this is a wrestling story.
[01:09:39]  You were right about that guy being cool.
[01:09:40]  That is a pretty cool thing to do.
[01:09:42]  That's a cool thing to do.
[01:09:44]  Pretty cool.
[01:09:47]  We can only hope to have someone who will break into the hospital when we die and just drag our body into a gunfight.
[01:09:53]  Jack us like fucking Bigfoot trying to reclaim his wife or something.
[01:09:59]  Throwing security guards.
[01:10:01]  Just yeah.
[01:10:02]  Crashing through this hospital.
[01:10:05]  What an amazing man.
[01:10:07]  Pure engine of chaos.
[01:10:09]  I'm taking her to hell myself.
[01:10:12]  I'll see you there, coppers.
[01:10:15]  Now, it is, it is worth noting and sad to note that Graham was broke by this point, possibly as a result of burning all those $100 bills.
[01:10:26]  He had sent his mother.
[01:10:28]  Yeah, well, he had sent his mom money for decades as a savings account.
[01:10:32]  And that's why he needed the body.
[01:10:36]  Unfortunately, when she died, she had about a half a million dollars of his money.
[01:10:41]  But unfortunately, she gave all of it to the Baptist church.
[01:10:46]  Dr. Jerry, when he found out, spent the rest of his life with a vicious hatred of religion and died in 1997 of a stroke at age 68, which is a lot longer than I expected Jerry Graham to live.
[01:10:58]  Yeah, he beat the odds.
[01:10:59]  He beat the odds.
[01:11:00]  Both for wrestlers and just general maniacs.
[01:11:03]  Yeah, both for wrestlers and people who steal a corpse from a hospital at shotgun point.
[01:11:12]  Anyway, that's part two.
[01:11:16]  I'm glad we ended on a happy one.
[01:11:18]  Yeah.
[01:11:21]  What a tale.
[01:11:22]  What an amazing guy.
[01:11:25]  Yeah.
[01:11:27]  You know, some people aren't, you can't qualify them as good or bad.
[01:11:30]  They're just incredible.
[01:11:32]  And Jerry Graham is incredible.
[01:11:34]  They're just, they're just awe-inspiring.
[01:11:36]  Not in a positive or negative connotation of it, just general awe.

=== Ending on a Happy Note (03:40) ===

[01:11:41]  Yeah.
[01:11:41]  I'm glad we don't have more of him, but I'm really glad we have him.
[01:11:44]  Yeah.
[01:11:45]  Yeah.
[01:11:46]  It's like when you see T-Rex's skeleton, you're like, that was cool.
[01:11:48]  I'm glad it's not still here.
[01:11:50]  Yeah.
[01:11:51]  Yeah.
[01:11:51]  You make it through like a really insane thunderstorm and you're like, well, that was amazing, but I don't want to go through that again.
[01:11:59]  I'd like to avoid repeating this experience.
[01:12:02]  Oh, good stuff.
[01:12:04]  This is the end of part two.
[01:12:06]  You guys want to plug your pluggables here?
[01:12:08]  Hell yeah.
[01:12:10]  I'm doing the very last comedy website on the internet with my Robert Brockway.
[01:12:15]  That is sadly close to true.
[01:12:18]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:18]  We started as a joke and we're like, no, this is true.
[01:12:21]  But it's actually true.
[01:12:23]  It's like actually true.
[01:12:24]  Yeah, it's like the golden age of internet jokes.
[01:12:27]  We got text and pictures.
[01:12:28]  Join our Patreon at patreon.com slash 1900 hot dog.
[01:12:34]  It's the best.
[01:12:35]  We're very proud of it.
[01:12:36]  You should be.
[01:12:37]  It's very, very fun and cool.
[01:12:39]  Now, Tom, you also have some fun and cool things to plug.
[01:12:43]  I have a thing to plug anyway.
[01:12:45]  Anyway, I got a podcast network, Gameflow Unemployed, that I started with David Bell, our friend and former craft co-worker.
[01:12:51]  You can check that out at patreon.com slash Gamefly Unemployed.
[01:12:54]  And also, we have free episodes that you can get for free.
[01:12:57]  So check that out.
[01:12:59]  Yeah.
[01:13:00]  Yeah.
[01:13:00]  Hell yeah.
[01:13:01]  Well, check all that out.
[01:13:03]  I have a novel.
[01:13:03]  It's called After the Revolution.
[01:13:05]  Type it into whatever website you buy books from.
[01:13:07]  Or, you know, like Dr. Jerry Graham, grab a 12-year-old, a shotgun, and a hunting knife and find your way into the nearest Barnes and Noble and, you know, steal that book like your mom's core.
[01:13:20]  I don't know where I'm going with this.
[01:13:22]  Sophie, do we have anything else?
[01:13:23]  No, we're done.
[01:13:25]  Okay, the episode's done.
[01:13:26]  Perfect plugs.
[01:13:31]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:13:34]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:13:44]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll Show are geniuses.
[01:13:49]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[01:13:56]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[01:13:59]  Yes.
[01:14:00]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[01:14:03]  I actually, I thought it was.
[01:14:04]  I got that wrong.
[01:14:05]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[01:14:06]  We're pretty close, though.
[01:14:07]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:14:14]  Hey there, folks.
[01:14:15]  Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
[01:14:17]  And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high-profile trials, and what the hell is that Blake Lively thing about anyway?
[01:14:30]  We are on it every day, all day.
[01:14:32]  Follow us, Amy and TJ, for news updates throughout the day.
[01:14:35]  Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
[01:14:45]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[01:14:53]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[01:15:02]  There's an economic component to community thriving.
[01:15:06]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[01:15:10]  Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:15:17]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:15:20]  Guaranteed human.