411’s The Nine Lives of Vince McMahon Report

-Vice is closing out their Tuesday wrestling run for this season with this special 2 hour documentary on Vince McMahon. Funny how timing works as a new story was out today that Vince has new allegations against him and apparently, he felt was given wrong advice to step down and he wants back in the WWE. Let’s get to it before more news breaks on this story!

-“Vince McMahon declined to participate in the documentary you are about to watch.”

-We start with Stephanie McMahon announcing that her father has retired from WWE. Talking heads all mention they figured would do this until he died. Vince faced down threats of bankruptcy, wars with Ted Turner, and scandal after scandal after scandal and survived. These are the Nine Lives of Vince McMahon!

-Vince was born in a born, run-down trailer park in North Carolina. He was raised by his mother Vicki and all people know is what he told Playboy Magazine. This includes Vince claiming he was sexually abused by his mother and molested by teenage kids. His step-father was apparently an abusive man and it helped develop a ruthlessness in Vince. He wished he could have killed his step-father.

-At age 12 he meets his father, Vincent J. McMahon, who was one of the most influential wrestling promoters in the country. Vince would hang over with Dr. Jerry Graham. He also started stealing cars for joyrides, so Vince Jr sent him to a military academy. Meltzer says that legend has it that Vince got into a lot of trouble and Vince claims he was the only student to ever be court marshalled.

-Vince’s mom finds a girl that helps settle her son down, and of course that is Linda. There is an interview where Vince and Linda talk to a host about their relationship. Linda was 13 and Vince was 16 when they met. They married on Aug 26, 1966. Vince left college and looked for a job with his father’s business, but Vince Sr wants his son to be an accountant or lawyer. Vince struggled and became a salesman selling paper cups of all things.

-Vince gets his break as his dad hires him as an announcer to replace the one they have and gives him a few towns to promote and run the territory. Vince is a natural and starts promoting concerns and even the Ali/Inoki fight. In 1974 he works with Evil Knivel’s jump over Snake River Canyon and learns more to self promotion. That failed and Vince lost over 250,000 dollars and has to file for bankruptcy. Vince thinks he can take the business to a higher place than his dad and knows he needs to get his hands on the keys to the castle.

-June 6, 1982: Vince buys the promotion for $1,000,000 and had to take out loans. If he missed one payment the business would default back to Vince Sr and his partners. They bring up that Vince Sr had pancreatic cancer and could have been part of the reason he wanted to sell.

-Vince Sr was satisfied with just running the Northeast and didn’t have the ruthlessness and visions of grandeur like his son. Vince, from an old interview, believes his dad would not have sold him the business had he known what he was going to do with it.

-They talk about the territories days and show a map of all the different territories. Everyone basically respected each other’s territory and they made it work. Vince said hell with that and wanted to promote and run everywhere. All these promoters are pissed and go to Vince Sr to complain. Vince Sr told his son that he can’t do this and Vince Jr blew his top at his dad. He told him he was going to do this and now that his dad worked for him, he was either with him or against him. Vince Sr took a moment and then told Vince, “you’re right. Fuck these guys.”

-Vince starts paying wrestlers higher salaries to get them to New York and then buys time from TV stations to promote his shows to buy more tickets. He still needs his top star and there is one person out there that is everything Vince wants in a pro-wrestler: HULK HOGAN!

-Vince needs a superhero to go national and everyone notes Hogan was the perfect choice. Bryan Alvarez notes that if you ask someone today to name a pro-wrestler and most likely they will stay name Hulk Hogan. Hogan comes to New York and immediately wins the WWF Title. It was Vince and Hogan and neither could have done what they did with out the other one.

-As a note they do highlight in the upper corner each time they use footage from their Dark Side of the Ring Library. In this case they talk about kayfabe and how it was still kept even in Vince’s early days as the owner. That leads to John Stossel talking about how he was annoyed that people believe wrestling is real. Dude has a mental issue with that as why does that matter to him? He annoyed 30-40% of people surveyed felt it was real. Stossel finds Eddie Mansfield who has an ax to grind and spills the beans on wrestling in an effort to show people that these guys and girls need a union. Stossel didn’t care about the plight of the wrestler though and just needed someone to expose the secrets.

-Stossel felt he needed to let WWF give their side, so he is allowed to come to a WWF show at MSG. Vince tells David Schultz to stay in character according to Schultz, but Vince has always denied it. We see the footage of The Slap Heard Round the World as Stossel tells Schultz that wrestling is fake. “I was always taught if a man gets up, you knock him back down.” Another slap!

-Jim Cornette calls Stossel a pissant. Stossel wanted to teach Vince a lesson and sued for damages. Vince fires Schultz in a PR move and then buys off Stossel for a reported $420,000.

-Next we jump to The Jimmy Snuka scandal. We go back a bit as Dave tells us that Snuka is Vince’s biggest drawing star (before Hogan). In 1983 Snuka is dating Nancy Argentino and she ends up dead in a hotel room they are sharing in Allentown, PA. Vince has Muraco find out what happened. Snuka’s claim is Nany fell and went back to the room to sleep. The autopsy shows that it wasn’t from a single fall and points towards abuse. Vince meets with police in Allentown and Snuka goes free. There is no transcript of what Vince said to the police but word is he showed up with a briefcase full of money. Vince has always maintained the police told him the death was due to an accidental fall. In 2015 Snuka gets arrested and is charged with Nancy’s murder. Russo: “Nobody is going to say no to him (Vince)…nobody.”

-Commercials!

-Black Saturday: TBS runs the forerunner to WCW on Saturday Night at 6:05 PM. Vince strongarms his way into the coveted TBS time-slot from Barnett. The fans are pissed as they are used to their Southern Wrestling and not the more cartoon stuff that Vince is offering. Vince sells the time-slot to Crockett for 1 million dollars, but is bitter about it. He realized he needed to modernize the WWF and used the money he got from Crockett to build his empire.

-Cable starts spreading and Vince decides to work with this new fangled station called MTV. Being the NY Territory meant a lot of celebrities grew up on WWF. One of those was Cindy Lauper and next thing you know she is partnering with Lou Albano and WWF is on MTV across the country. This all leads to WrestleMania!

-WrestleMania: This was an over the top closed circuit show that had celebrities and wasn’t the wrestling everyone was used to seeing. The talking heads all agree that the vision was Walk Disney. They also hooked up with Mr. T and Meltzer notes that people forget how massive of a star Mr. T was in the 80s. It also helped that Mr. T looked like a pro-wrestler. Vince puts a ton of his own cash into WrestleMania and that made it a huge gamble. The advances were so bad that people felt this was going to blow up in Vince’s face. If the show failed, Vince was done.

-Vince got a miracle though as Hulk Hogan and Mr. T were last minute replacements on Saturday Night Live the night before WrestleMania. It gave the show a much needed shot of promotion. Dave Meltzer notes that if there was no Hulk Hogan, the first WrestleMania would have flopped and Vince would have gone down with it. Instead the show sets records on PPV and closed-circuit for pro-wrestling. Now network TV is ready to pay Vince and we get NBC airing Saturday Night’s Main Event.

-Commercials!

-The success of Mania vindicates Vince’s vision, but no everyone in the WWF family is celebrating. That leads to discussion of Rita Chatteron (who as we know is in the news today). She was the first female ref in WWF and wasn’t getting booked as much so she had a meeting with Vince in a limo and her claim is Vince basically raped her. She told Andre The Giant about it and told wrestler, Mario Mancini. Mario talks about it on a podcast as he Rita broke down in tears talking to him about it. She tells her story a few years later on a TV Talk Show. She was forced into oral sex and when she couldn’t finish what he wanted, he tore off her clothes and forced her to have sex with him, if she wanted a million dollar contract. By the time she tells her story the statue of limitations keeps it from getting to Vince. As for Vince he has always denied and even sued Rita for defamation.

-The next scandal is about to come though, so his lawyers back off as they have a steroid scandal to defend Vince against. The WWF in the mid to late 80s started seeing guys with massive physiques and there was a guess that around 90% of the roster was on steroids. Dave: “Everyone was on steroids. That’s what they were marketing.” They mention that Vince was even taking steroids.

-Dr Zaharian: He was the ringside physician in PA for all the TV tapings in Allentown. He had a bag with all kinds of pain pills and steroids. Guys would line up and get what they needed. In 1991 delivering steroids without a script becomes illegal and they were treated the same as someone trafficking cocaine.

-Bill Dunn gets caught with steroids so he flips and becomes a government witness and agrees to wear a wire. They used the tape of a meeting with Zahorian to get a warrant to search his office and find the famous picture on the wall of the good Doc standing between Vince and Hogan.

-June 28, 1991: Zahorian gets convicted, but he is just the undercard as the Government wants to nail Vince McMahon so people know that steroids are being treated differently now. The case was that Vince and the Dr conspired to distribute steroids to his wrestlers.

-The trial was coming, so Vince shifted his focus to smaller, more athletic wrestlers and Hulk Hogan is gone from the WWF. Well, I mean it was a little more than that as Vince and Hogan didn’t part just due to the steroid trial. Vince promises the WWF will be the standard bearer of drug free sports and entertainment. Ha!

-The trial begins and it’s basically a circus. Vince shows up wearing a neck brace to get sympathy. The prosecution has Hogan as their star witness and people expect him to roll on Vince.

-Commercials!

-Back to the trial as Vince is facing eight years in prison and $500,000 in fines. Hogan admits to taking steroids three times in 1983 when he tore his bicep. He played it like he and Vince were gym buddies and they would given each other roids to help the other out and the whole case for the Government goes up in smoke. To many Hogan, saved Vince, but Vince didn’t see it that way and he was pissed that Hogan testified against him. They each agreed to go their own separate way. Other witnesses took the stand and they all downplayed Vince’s involvement. McDevitt never once thought he was going to lose the case. The jury verdict of not guilty got a massive pop. Alvarez says that Vince has a great lawyer and it made him bulletproof, but that was probably his downfall.

-Next up Vince is looking for a star to take Hogan’s place and he turns to Bret Hart. Vince raided Stampede and was to pay Stu a million dollars, but according to those around Stu, he was never paid. Stu wasn’t going to argue about it, but Vince has always maintained he paid. Bruce Prichard notes that they were getting reports that Bret was huge over seas and they felt they had a mega-star.

-We jump ahead as Bret is offered a ton of money in 1996 to jump to WCW. Vince is terrified of losing Bret and offers 1.5 million dollars a year for 20 years. WCW is kicking WWF’s ass and Vince tells Bret he can’t afford to pay him anymore and tells him to get a deal with WCW. Bret is out the door, but is still the WWF Champion and Prichard goes on about how Bret didn’t want to lose the Championship, which is a load of horse manure.

-Montreal: We have covered these this for twenty-five years and the ending to Shawn/Bret has been dissected more than any wrestling footage. Vince screws Bret, so Bret spits in his face. They meet backstage and Bret hits an uppercut out of a lock-up. He calls it the “most beautiful Mike Tyson uppercut.” Bischoff says he remembers exactly where he was when he found out about The Montreal Screwjob.

-Vince goes on the offensive and high-lights his black eye to play up sympathy again. In his mind he felt he was the babyface, but instead he is now the biggest heel on the planet. Everyone now knew that Vince was the owner of the WWF and he ran with the idea that everyone hated him. Mr. McMahon was born!

-Commercials!

-“Vince McMahon declined to participate in this documentary.”

-Vince is dealing with so many scandals, he can’t put his focus on his promotion. This leads to WCW taking advantage as Eric Bischoff takes over WCW creative and wants to go head to head with Vince. They cover the phone call from Ted where he tells Vince he is in the pro-wrestling business and Vince spouts back “that’s great, but I am in the entertainment business and that’s different.” WCW started signing older WWF talent to huge deals and Meltzer points out that Vince was pissed that the tactics he used to win in the 80s were now being used against him.

-Russo tells us that Vince had a company wide meeting complaining that they stole his talent and he just stared at Vince who was trying to play the victim. Alvarez points out that it was more than just the stars like Hogan and Savage as Bischoff brought in Cruiserweights and talent from all over the world. WCW was fresh and new and beat WWF in the ratings for 83 straight weeks.

-Vince decides to go in the gutter and Attitude is born. Alvarez says Vince stole a lot of the concepts from Bischoff and added in violence and sex. They are now focused on the teenage audience and his new face of the company is “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Alvarez says that if you were a kid in high school in the 90s you had an Austin 3:16 shirt or knew someone who did.

-Austin vs McMahon helped the WWF turn the tide and snap the winning streak of WCW. They touch on Vince having feuds with his son, daughter, and wife on TV. He even had a match with his daughter, Stephanie, and choked her out with a steel pipe.

-The PTC has had enough of the WWF and aren’t happy with wrestling porn-stars and wrestling pimps. Russo: “We turned it into must see TV.”

-Commercials!

-We jump back a bit as this is kind of all over the place. They talk about being back on top, but we go back to when they were losing the war to cover Austin invading Pillman’s home. It’s 1996 and Steve Austin invades Brian Pillman’s home while Pillman is brandishing a handgun. I don’t care, I still love Pillman’s “when Austin 3:16 meets Pillman 9 millimeter glock, I am going to blast his sorry ass straight to hell.” Dave notes the angle got so much negative feedback, Vince had to go on TV and apologize.

-Cornette notes Vince wanted his wrestlers to be actors and he didn’t know why they didn’t wang to go along with it. Okay, this is getting kind of out of hand here as now they are claiming that Vince needed to find another big time star to carry the WWF and Vince turned to Owen Hart. I love Owen, but they weren’t turning to him to carry the company at a time when they were already on top with Austin, Rock, etc. They have to cover the Owen tragedy, but it could have been introduced in a better way.

-Cornette puts over Owen and how great he was even as a rookie. Owen doesn’t have the personality of Hogan or Austin, so they weren’t sure what to do with him in The Attitude Era. They had Owen return to The Blue Blazer after he refuses to do edgier storylines. I believe the story was they wanted Owen to have an affair on screen with Debra.

-Over The Edge: Owen is set to drop from the ceiling (like Sting) and doesn’t want to do it, but he is talked into it. The rigging has a quick trigger for Owen to get out of the harness faster. Tragically the rigging falters or Owen nudges the trigger and Owen plummets to his death. JR, The Godfather, and Jimmy Korderas talk about the awful event.

-Vince makes the decision to continue on with the show. Jeff Jarrett cuts a promo in tears and these guys have to perform with Owen’s blood on the mat in the corner. JR gets informed by Kevin Dunn that Owen has dead and then they start counting him back into the show. Damn!

-Vince finally calls Owen’s wife, but lets the doctor inform her that Owen had passed. The police investigate to see if Vince cut corners or anything else that could bring down the WWF. The decision to continue the show is still a black eye on Vince. Russo defends the decision as nobody was in their right mind to make a right or wrong decision. They show highlights of the press conference were Vince talks down to reporters.

-Martha Hart files a wrongful death lawsuit against Vince and The WWF. Vince sues the manufacturer of the quick release device. Martha settles with the WWF for 18 million dollar and starts the Owen Hart Foundation.

-This is basically a mashup of Dark Side of The Ring episodes as now we are up to The Plane Ride from Hell. This wouldn’t help Ric Flair as we cover his helicopter penis and apparently sexually assaulting a stewardess. The two flight attendants sue and Vince throws money at them like he does everything else.

-Commercials!

-We are up to 2006 when Vince is hit with the allegation of sexually assaulting a tanning salon employee. He shows the employee photos of his junk and then grabs her. He tells her he was only trying to have a little fun. The police were called and they referred to the case to local prosecution who don’t go forward with charges as there is not enough evidence. Rumors spread that Vince paid the lady off for her silence. Alvarez notes Vince was a known womanizer and it was kind of expected in the wrestling industry because everyone was.

-Eddie Guerrero dies at 38 of heart disease and then has Randy Orton trash Eddie’s legacy on TV by saying he is in hell. I mean, on the list of things Vince has done that is probably way down the list. Even AEW has hit on that topic with MJK taking about Pillman’s dad being in hell.

-Mentioning Eddie was just a way to segue into the bigger story and that is Chris Benoit and his double murder/suicide. I rewatched some of the Dark Side episode and it’s still so awful to watch and just sucks to think about. The man just needed to take his own life and leave his wife and kid alone. Anyway, Vince puts on a tribute show on RAW to Benoit as the true nature of the what happened hasn’t been revealed.

-We find out Benoit strangled his wife, Nancy, on Friday. On Saturday he sedated his son, and suffocated him. On Sunday he killed himself by hanging with his weight machine. The WWE takes heat for the tribute show, so on Tuesday Night Benoit is mentioned for the last time ever on WWE TV.

-WWE tried to do anything to shut down noise that drugs or roids caused Benoit to murder his family. Benoit was shown to have massive amounts of steroids in his system even with WWE having a Wellness Policy. Benoit was on all the roids, but I am not blaming the roids for what he did. Now, Chris Nowinski feels it was due to Benoit having CTE which comes from hits to the head. Three years later, the WWF bans all chair shots to the head and to this day you have fans complaining about it. Wrestling has been perfectly fine without unprotected chair shots to the head.

-We jump back as in 1999, The WWF goes public as Vince liked the idea of the company being a stock you could trade. Vince becomes a billionaire as this show quotes Spiderman as “with great power comes great responsibility.”

-We get back to The Monday Night War as WCW gets buried by The Rock and Steve Austin and Vince buys WCW in March of 2001. It’s still crazy to watch and if you weren’t around during The Monday Night War you have no idea. Alvarez talks about Vince’s tunnel vision and Russo notes Vince would not allow himself to fail.

-Now that Vince had no competition and the company was public, The Attitude Era had to end as they had new advertisers. Russo is all over the idea that the WWF sucks and the ratings have gone down year after year. Thankfully, someone notes that even though ratings have declined the WWF is making more money than ever before and the reason is because of TV contracts. Yes, WWF ratings are down, but outside of the NFL everything is going down. Russo thinks Vince is just coasting because the money is coming in no matter what and Bruce Hart says the same thing. He feels Vince taking over is the worst thing for the business as now there is no variety. Alvarez says he can’t watch the show as it is too long and doesn’t make sense. Russo agrees and says in Vince’s mind it is still the greatest show out there. I hated this section as it was just a way for people to rail on the WWF for not being The Attitude Era anymore basically.

-Commercials!

-We are up to the present as Vince gets hammered for paying women hush money in regards to affairs and sexual misconduct. There were 4 NDAs signed and yet, things still leaked. Vince used money from his personal accounts to pay for the NDAs. Meltzer notes people in the industry knew, but the fans didn’t know.

-The news breaks in the Wallstreet Journal and Vince decides to show up on TV to soak in the cheers of the fans. Vince claims he never did anything wrong, but now he can’t sweep this under the rug. The SEC and DOJ make inquiries into the WWE. This leads to Vince stepping back from his duties and then more stories break about women being paid hush money. Russo and Meltzer note that Vince will fight to the death and yet, silence this time. That’s not Vince and to Melzter that has him thinking it’s all true.

-Linda McMahon: Vince has admitted to not being faithful, but they remain married because of the empire they built. Russo says he was told Linda and Vince have been separated since 2012. Now it looks like he was on cheating on his wife, when the truth is they haven’t been together for a decade. Vince finally steps down and announces it on Twitter. The wrestling world was rocked and then the machine kept rolling because that’s what happens.

-Alvarez notes everyone felt Vince would do this until he died. Russo thinks that wherever Vince is hunkered down he is doing as much WWE work as he can. Doesn’t seem that way, but apparently he wants back in and really, they can’t let that happen.

-The bad of Vince McMahon is what he did to get there and Alvarez says that the show has gotten better without him. The stock price has gone up. Russo says to him it is about money and power. When you reach a certain status you believe you are bulletproof. “You honestly thought these women would sign a piece of paper and this stuff wouldn’t come out.”

-Dave says that when Vince dies he doesn’t want his tombstone to say greatest wrestling promoter. He wants to be the guy with the movie studio and football league, but he failed at everything other than wrestling. Vince is called a complicated person that was enabled by an industry that allows people with a dark side to work unchecked. Russo believes what we have seen is the tip of the iceberg and the floodgates will open.

-There is obviously a lot to unpack here. The first being that Vince not being part of this or anyone currently with WWE takes away from it. Also, this was like a greatest hits episode of Dark Side of the Ring as they clipped most of the talking head stuff from those episodes outside of new stuff from Russo, Alvarez, Meltzer, and Solomon. If you watched all the episodes of Dark Side of The Ring then you saw 90% of this documentary already. I was very interested in what this show would be and in the end I was disappointed. Nothing new was covered and I don’t know if this is going to do anything to Vince like it did to Flair (or even Dreamer). The whole section with Russo dumping on the WWE product was annoying as we know he is a fan of what he did and while that’s fine, we all know he isn’t a fan of what is being presented today. The Attitude Era has passed and we aren’t even going back there no matter how many people my age complain. I am sure people will have their thoughts on what was presented here, but I was expecting more. The last big time documentary they did was the one on Chyna and that made me feel sorry for her and had me angry at the people that used her. This was just a longer episode of Dark Side of The Ring with recycled content. Now, with new allegations out and Vince wanting to return to WWE perhaps they will have more content for another episode down the line. Thanks for reading!