The Nine Lives of Vince McMahon (2022) Movie Script

1
-Earlier tonight,
my father,
Vince McMahon...
retired from WWE.
-With those nine words,
Stephanie McMahon
stunned the world of
professional wrestling.
-I don't think anybody
would have ever said
that Vince McMahon would
have ever stepped down.
-Everybody figured that he
was gonna do this until he died.
-Welcome to "SmackDown"!
[ Cheering ]
-Over decades, Vince
McMahon faced financial ruin...
-Vince mortgaged
every dime that he had.
- battled ruthless
competition...
-And now WCW is about
to dominate the globe
in professional wrestling.
- and confronted
career-ending scandals.
-Speculation is running wild.
Did steroids play a role, or
is there another explanation?
-He can be a tyrant.
-The whole thing was an
abortive kind of a screwjob.
-So many scandals.
-I-I don't even know if there
would be a wrestling business
by the time all the
investigations were complete.
-Often close to being pinned...
-He was down many times.
- Vince always kicks out.
-In every case, he bounced back.
-That's... I've never
seen anything like that.
-These are the nine
lives of Vince McMahon.
-First of all, I-I
resent your tone.

-The origin story of the rich
and powerful wrestling mogul
Vincent McMahon Jr.
begins in a poor, rundown
North Carolina trailer park,
where a tough,
mouthy, dyslexic kid
named Vinnie Lupton
is living with his mom.
-There was some kind of
a falling out in the marriage,
and then he and his brother Rod
were left to be raised
by their mother, Vicki.
He kind of had a chip on his
shoulder from the beginning.
-All most people know
from this period of Vince's life
comes from his 2001 interview
with Playboy magazine.
-He alludes to his mother
sexually assaulting him.
He alludes to being
molested when he was six
by other teenage kids.
-There's stories of his mother
bringing various different
men into their lives.
There was, in
particular, Leo Lupton,
who was officially
Vince's stepfather.
He apparently was
a very abusive man.
-And despite that abuse,
or perhaps because of it,
Vince develops a ruthlessness
that will come to define him.
-Vince said that he was
upset that Leo Lupton died
before he had a
chance to kill him
and that he would have really
enjoyed being able to do that.
-At 12, Vince finally
meets his biological father,
who happens to
be one of wrestling's
most successful promoters,
Vincent James
McMahon, or Vince Sr.
-Vincent James McMahon
was the most important person
in professional wrestling in
the northeastern United States.
-Here's promoter Vince
McMahon's wrestling lineup
for this arena next week.
-Vince becomes like
that storybook teenager
who runs away from an evil
stepfather to join the circus.
-You know, there's
stories of Vince hanging out
with Dr. Jerry Graham,
who is this very flamboyant
kind of over-the-top
figure in pro wrestling,
where Vince would
ride down the street
in his convertible with him
while he was lighting cigars,
you know, with $100 bills.
-But when Vince starts
stealing cars for joyrides
and getting into fights,
Vince Sr. tries
sending him away.
-Vince went to Fishburne
Military Academy.
Legend has it that he
got into a lot of trouble.
-He claimed that he
was the only student there
to ever have been
court-martialed.
I-I don't know how
much truth there is to that,
but the story goes that
he was an unruly kid
and that the military
school kind of really
had their hands full with him.
-Until his mom finds him a girl,
as Vince explains in
this 1999 TV interview.
-My mom had said, you
know, you have to come meet
this beautiful blue-eyed girl.
She sings in the
choir, and she's pretty,
and you're really
gonna like her.
-Let's see. I think I was 13
years old and Vince was...
-Dare I say that you were
older? Yes. He was 16.
-Vince and Linda married
on August 26, 1966.
After college, Vince
goes looking for a job
at his dad's Capitol
Wrestling Corporation.
But Vince says his father
again turns him away.
-Wanted me to have
a more secure future.
Wanted me to be an accountant
or... or an attorney
or something like that.
And I really wasn't cut out
for... for any of the above.
-He's right.
Out on his own,
Vince stumbles badly.
-He had talked about being a
salesman, selling paper cups,
things that didn't
really thrill him
and... and not
doing very well at it.
-Then, for the
first of many times,
Vince escapes adversity,
this time aided by his dad.
-They had an announcer
named Ray Morgan,
who was kind of
becoming difficult.
So Vince Sr. hired his son
officially as an announcer
and also gave him some
small towns to promote.
-This Monday, a fantastic
card of professional wrestling.
-Vince, a natural-born huckster,
is soon putting those skills
to work on all kinds
of side hustles.
-He was promoting
concerts, rock concerts.
-And a closed-circuit
screening of the infamous bout
between Muhammad Ali and
Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki.
-Just like I thought, I'll
fight him. Right, fans?
[ Cheering ]
-In 1974, Vince even
gets a chance to work
with Evel Knievel,
learning tricks
from that decade's
biggest self-promoter.
-Vince is one of the
promoters of Evel Knievel's
Snake River Canyon jump.
-Vince pays the
daredevil $250,000
for the closed-circuit
rights to the jump.

Knievel's attempt
fails spectacularly,
and so does Vince.
The audience willing
to pay for the event
turns out to be paltry,
and Vince loses the
entire quarter million.
Just a few years later,
he and his wife, Linda,
file for bankruptcy.
Yet, despite his failed
ventures away from wrestling,
Vince is still convinced
that he can expand
his father's business.
-He really wanted to bring
his dad's wrestling company
to the next level.
-But not as an employee... As
the new owner of the company.
-I knew there was just some way
I had to get my hands
on this company.
-June 6, 1982.
It's sort of a red-letter
date in wrestling history.
Vince sat down with his
father and his father's partners.
-The deal was for $1 million.
-Vince mortgaged
everything he had,
every dime that he had.
-He bought it on a balloon loan.
He describes it as,
you pay a little right now
and then you pay a lot later.
-And if he missed payments,
then the ownership would
revert back to the original group.
-They knew Vince
knew the business,
and if he failed, he
failed, you know?
They would get
their money anyway.
-The message was, if
you can't handle this,
if it turns out you blow
it, we're taking it back.
-But there may have
been an even bigger reason
why Vince Sr. was finally
willing to pass the reins.
-He had pancreatic cancer,
and this may have been one
of the motivations for him to sell.
-Vince Sr. had spent
decades as one of the most
revered owners in
professional wrestling.
-The stories that you hear
about Vince Sr. don't revolve
around ruthlessness or
overly competitiveness.
Once he had control
in the Northeast,
he was satisfied to
kind of run that territory
and do really well with it.
-As for Vince Jr., he will
not be so easily satisfied.
-He had a vision to take his
father's territory in New York
and literally make it the
biggest wrestling company,
not only in the United States,
in the world, to make it global.
-Vince Jr. was more willing
to take it all and be ruthless.
-But first, Vince has to take
on his father's old friends,
the mostly men running the
other wrestling companies
across the country.
-Every state had
a wrestling territory.
New York was the WWWF.
There was Memphis.
There was Georgia.
There was Florida.
There was Texas.
-There was the sense
that everybody would
respect each other's territory.
-And, for the most
part, promotions all over
the US and Canada coexisted
and it was a really
thriving industry.
-He thought, "Why do I have
to respect these boundaries?
Why can't I just start
promoting everywhere?"
-Because doing so
threatens the businesses
of Vince Sr.'s fellow
wrestling promoters.
-You had these promoters
now going to Vince Sr.,
they were his old
friends, and saying,
"You have to talk to your
son. He's out of control.
Are you aware
that he's trying to,
you know, run us
out of our towns?"
So Vince Sr. approached
his son at some point,
saying, "Vinny,
you can't do this."
And eventually, Vince Jr. lost
his temper at his dad and said,
"Look, I'm gonna do this
with or without you, Dad.
I mean, you know,
you work for me now.
Are you with me, or
are you against me?"
Vince Sr. kind of took a moment
and... and thought about
it and... and was quiet
and then looked
at his son and said,
"You know what, Vinny?
You're right. Those guys."
-And he did, by taking from
them the thing they needed most.
-The talent... They
all went for Vince.
Your talent's gone, you
can't eat, and that was it.
-Now, either you
got out of the way
or you compete
against an elephant.
-Vince injects some
competition into the industry,
paying wrestlers more
than they can dream off
under the cozy old system.
Then he buys time
from local TV stations
to promote his shows
to sell more tickets.
That helps generate
the cash he needs
to begin buying up
struggling territories.
As his vision of a
national wrestling company
comes into focus,
the master marketer goes
looking for someone to inject
show business into
the wrestling business.
-This man is not a
television illusion.
He is not an
artist's conception.
He is not a figment
of the imagination.
He is the Hulk.

-Making his first
appearance in this arena,
ladies and gentlemen,
Hulk Hogan.
-Vince is looking
for the superhero.
He's going national,
but it's not gonna work
unless he has this
larger-than-life person.
-Hogan was the guy to
choose. He had the great look.
-I mean, to this day,
if you ask somebody
on the street
to name a professional wrestler,
they're probably still
gonna name Hulk Hogan.
-Vince made Hogan
just a perfect offer
that he couldn't turn down.
-Vince told him, "We're
gonna put the belt on you,
and you're gonna be
our number-one guy."
-He came in at the
beginning of January 1984,
and by the end of the month,
he was the WWF World
Heavyweight Champion.
-History being made tonight.
Hulk Hogan crowned the new
WWF Heavyweight Champion.
-And, really, the linchpin
to that national expansion.
It was Vince and it was Hogan.
Neither one of those
guys could have done it
without the other one.
-While Vince is modernizing
the wrestling industry,
some things in wrestling
remain the same.
Most territories still practice
what's called kayfabe,
maintaining the
illusion everything's real.
- Oh!
- What a move.
-Karate kick right to
the side of the head.
-But what's not an illusion
is the very real threat to
Vince's emerging empire,
when news magazine
"20/20's" John Stossel
begins investigating kayfabe
and whether it's a
fraud on wrestling fans.
-I was a wrestler
in high school.
I was always a little annoyed
that people, some people believe
that pro wrestling was real
rather than a scripted event
where the winner is
preordained and people dress up
in funny clothes and pretend
anger and... and bullshit.
-It had leaked out that
"20/20" was gonna do a piece.
And obviously, if it's
ABC network news,
it's gonna be an expos.
-I just thought it
was interesting
that this big, growing,
successful business
was based on bullshit.
I mean, cleverly done,
athletic bullshit, but lies.
-Stossel's story could
lead to a significant exodus
of disillusioned fans,
just as Vince
has all his capital
committed to building the
WWF into a national brand.
-We either did a
survey or found a survey
that about a third of the people
who attended the
events thought it was real.
- This is real?
- Yeah, I think so, yes.
-You couldn't do a story
unless we could find
some insider who would say,
"Yeah, here's how
we fake this and that"
and was willing to go into
a ring and demonstrate.
And eventually we
found Eddy Mansfield.
-Mansfield is a
wrestler with a cause,
publicizing the vulnerability
of WWF wrestlers
who have no health
benefits or pensions.
He hopes a story on
"20/20" will raise awareness
to the plight of
fellow pro wrestlers.
So he agrees to
spill some secrets.
-Is this real wrestling?
-No. It's not real.
No. Not at all.
I mean, if somebody would
believe that, they'd be stupid.
-Nobody wanted fake blood,
so everybody bled for real.
There's two ways to do that...
The easy way and the hard way.
The easy way is with a blade.
-You go just like that.
-And then gradually,
during the match,
it would drip around
over your face?
-That's it. See, if I
was sweating, it'd pour.
-I thought, "Well, we need
to have the usual person
from the professional
organization saying,
'Oh, this isn't fake.
This is all real.'"
So we went to
Madison Square Garden
and I guess Vince
McMahon okayed it
or we wouldn't have been there.
-Vince wants to send
Stossel a message,
so he tells wrestler
David Schultz
to maintain kayfabe and treat
Stossel like any other opponent.
-Vince said, "Listen,
we got a guy out here
making a joke out
of the business."
Vince wanted me
to tear his ass up,
wanted me to blast
him, stay in character.
-Vince denies telling
Schultz to assault Stossel
and disowns any involvement
in what happened next.
-And then Schultz came out.
He was a little frightening.
- Is this a good business?
- Yeah, it's a good business.
I wouldn't be
in it if it wasn't.
- Why is it a good business?
- Because only the tough survive.
That's why you ain't in it,
and this punk holding the
camera... why he ain't in it,
reason these rednecks
out here ain't in it.
Because it's a tough business.
-I think this is fake.
- "I think it's fake."
Now I'm thinking, "Vince
wanted me to stay in character."
Doctor D would slap the hell
out of somebody who'd say that.
-You think it's fake?
What's that? Is that fake?
-Holy shit. What the
hell just happened here?
And then I stupidly
got up again.
-Huh? What the
hell's wrong with you?
That's an open-hand slap, huh?
I was always taught, man get up,
you got to knock him back down.
You think it's fake, you...
-He whacked me in the other ear.
-My ears were ringing.
-What do you mean fake?
-I was stunned, a little scared.
And that's why I crawled off.
I didn't want to get hit again.
-Two months later,
Stossel's report airs.
Now it's his turn to slap
the wrestling community.
-"You little pissant,
John Stossel."
That's what all the
wrestlers thought about him.
-Then Stossel
delivers a second blow,
hitting Vince where it can
really do some damage.
-I thought that McMahon and his
group should be taught a lesson
that they can't go
beating up reporters.
And I sued for damages.
-After what became known as
the slap heard 'round the world,
Vince fires Schultz to save
the WWE from a PR black eye.
But it's not enough.
In response, Vince delivers
what will become his closer...
Throwing money at the problem.
Stossel is bought off
for a reported $420,000.
-I wanted some
compensation for my pain.
-And while Vince also suffers
some pain over the allegations
his wrestlers are
faking it in the ring,
that proves fleeting
compared to the misery
he's suffering over their
behavior out in the real world,
beginning with WWF star
Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka.
[ Cheers and applause ]

-Jimmy Snuka was Vince's
number-one drawing card
at the time.
-Holy mackerel! Nailed
him right on the head!
And Muraco went down heavy!
-In 1983, Snuka is dating
23-year-old Nancy Argentino.
-She ended up
dead in a hotel room
they were sharing an
Allentown, Pennsylvania.
-Vince calls wrestler Don Muraco
to find out what happened.
-Vince, he says, "Have
you heard anything
about Snuka and his girlfriend?"
I said, "As a matter of fact,
here I am with
Lieutenant So-and-so,"
and I put him on
the phone to Vince.
-Snuka claims that Nancy fell,
then she went back to their
hotel room and went to sleep.
But the autopsy
report raises doubts
about Snuka's explanation.
-It says, "The
pattern of her injuries
is not consistent with
a single, simple fall.
The magnitude of the injuries
may even be suggestive
of mate abuse.
I believe that the case
should be investigated
as a homicide until
proven otherwise."
-Vince McMahon would have
great reason to defend Jimmy Snuka.
Let's say, at the time, he is
charged with murder in 1983.
That would be a terrible
thing for the WWF.
-If one of your top employees
is being investigated for murder,
that's bad for business.
-So Vince rushes to Allentown.
After he meets with police,
Snuka is released
without charges.
-Jimmy said to me, "Vince
came down with his briefcase
and said to him, 'It's over.
Don't worry
about it. It's done.'"
-Unlike all of the
other interviews
that were done in this case,
there is no detailed transcript
of what was said over an hour.
And after that meeting, the
case effectively went cold.
-Vince insists that the meeting
was entirely above board
and that local
officials told him
that the circumstances
of Nancy's death
were consistent
with an accidental fall.
But three decades later, in
2015, Jimmy Snuka is arrested
and charged with Nancy
Argentino's murder.
-He was a legend
in the wrestling ring.
Tonight, he's accused of murder.
-The rules and the regulations
and the morals that exist
in the real world don't
exist in the wrestling bubble.
They've got their own
way of doing things.
-The Jimmy Snuka
story is a foreshadow
of the string of controversies
that will confront Vince,
many of his own making.
-Because nobody's
gonna say no to him.
Nobody's going to say no.

-After buying out his
father's wrestling business
for $1 million,
Vince McMahon's driving
ambition is to transform
the once regional Worldwide
Wrestling Federation
into the national
wrestling brand.
-He has not one, but he has...
-To do it, he needs a way
to reach audiences
across the country.
One solution is to air
matches on the TV station TBS.
-From Turner
Broadcasting System,
you're watching
SuperStation WTBS Atlanta.
-SuperStation, because it
has coast-to-coast distribution.
It's owned by media giant
and longtime wrestling
fan Ted Turner.
-Hello, everybody, and welcome
to World Championship Wrestling.
-But TBS is already home to
World Championship Wrestling,
which airs Saturday nights.
WCW is owned by
Vince Sr.'s longtime friend,
promoter Jim Barnett.
-Here's the man
that absolutely has
the strength of 10 men.
-But in 1984, Vince Jr. muscles
the lucrative TBS time slot
away from Barnett's WCW,
introducing the WWF
to a brand-new audience.
- Here's Vince McMahon. Vince?
- Thank you very much, Freddie.
- Welcome aboard.
- Thank you.
It is indeed a pleasure to
be associated with WTBS.
And we promise to bring
you the greatest in professional
wrestling entertainment
in the world today.
-To the rope now.
Coming up. Double elbow.
-The audiences rejected it.
They were used to the more
Southern brand of wrestling
that they came to love,
which Vince didn't bank on,
and it was what became
known as Black Saturday.
-Black Saturday for the WWF,
because week after week,
fans just don't tune in.
-Ted Turner is losing patience
and he starts entertaining
offers from other promoters.
-Under pressure,
Vince throws in the towel
and sells out to his
biggest competitor,
Jim Crockett's mid-Atlantic
Championship Wrestling.
-The figure was $1
million that they paid for it.
And Vince, supposedly, who was,
you know, very
bitter about this...
It was a defeat because
being national on TBS
was... was a very big deal.
-It's also a wake-up call.
Vince needs to
modernize the WWF.
-He decided to take the
money that he was paid
and turn it against the
people that had paid it to him
and use it to... to fund
his ambitions even further.
- being one of the
stronger... There we go!
-And that's to build not just
a national wrestling company,
but a multifaceted sports
entertainment empire.
It's the early 1980s,
and cable TV is
introducing audiences
to specialty networks
like ESPN, CNN,
and what will be most important
to Vince McMahon's
immediate future, MTV.
Vince sees an opportunity
to retune the WWF
by getting in bed
with rock stars.
-One advantage that he had
was that a lot of celebrities
had grown up in
the New York area
as fans of wrestling,
and one of those
was Cyndi Lauper.
-Cyndi Lauper was on an
airplane flight with Lou Albano,
and then Lou
Albano tells everyone
that he was managing
Cyndi Lauper.
-Wrestling events were being
shown on the MTV network.
They were getting
specials on MTV.
- Happy New Year!
- MTV!
-It brought the dated
look of wrestling
into the mainstream.
-Whoo! I'm happy!
-Vince decides to spotlight
his redesign of the WWF
with an expensive,
celebrity-filled extravaganza
he calls WrestleMania.
-Vince's concept
for WrestleMania
was the biggest wrestling
event ever held times ten,
an over-the-top, closed-circuit,
globally broadcast extravaganza
that would combine celebrities
and wrestling matches.
-He made it into this sort of
entertainment variety show.
A little bit more
willing to be ridiculous,
a little bit more willing
to push the envelope,
allowing people
to be in on the joke.
-The... The vision
was Barnum & Bailey.
The vision was Walt Disney.
That was the vision
that this company
could compete on that level.
-And then they
linked up with Mr. T.
Mr. T was on "The A-Team"...
absolutely super
popular television show.
-People don't realize today
how big a star Mr. T was
in the mid-'80s.
- You want him?
- No, you take him.
-He had a great
body and a mohawk,
and he wore the chains.
And he looked the part
and he talked the part.
-Gonna teach me how to
pump iron, get my pythons ready,
and I'm glad you
brought me here.
-And he hooked
up with Hulk Hogan
for the first WrestleMania.
Hogan hitching
his wagon to Mr. catapulted Hulk
into the mainstream.
-As the scale of WrestleMania
grows, so did the cost.
Like his youthful failed
promotion of Evel Knievel's
Snake River jump, Vince
pumps in a lot of his own cash.
-Vince could create a spectacle,
and spectacles cost money.
-WrestleMania was a huge gamble.
They were spreading
themselves very thin.
-Vince's entire mentality
was, "I'm banking on myself."
-WrestleMania is scheduled
to air on March 31, 1985.
-As it was getting
closer to WrestleMania,
it was very far
from a sure thing.
-They booked about 200
buildings, and then a week out,
the advances were so
bad they canceled, like,
65, 67 of them.
-It was looked at as almost like
Vince's folly, you know,
within the business.
There was this thought
of like, "Oh, my God.
This is gonna completely
blow up in his face."
-The story is, if
WrestleMania fails, that's it.
He's done.
-But at 11:30 on the
night before the event...
-Mr. T and Hulk Hogan!
[ Cheers and applause ]
-One of the things
at the 11th hour
that really helped was
"Saturday Night Live".
Hulk Hogan and Mr. T, they
were a last-minute replacement.
-Not another lawsuit, T!
Oh, no, T! Oh! Oh! Oh, my God!
Oh, no.
-It wound up leading
to a lot more interest
in WrestleMania the next day,
a lot more interest from
the closed-circuit exhibitors.
-But will it be enough?
-The whole world
knows about this, man.
"Hulk Hogan &
Mr. T start to train..."
-The dream team,
man. The dream team.
-WrestleMania is
a nowhere-to-hide,
life-or-death test
of Vince's strategy
to link non-wrestling
celebrities
to the WWF's biggest star.
-If there was no Hulk
Hogan, the first WrestleMania,
I will tell you 100%,
would have flopped,
and Vince would
have gone down with it.

-Welcome, everyone, to the
World Wrestling Federation
presents the wrestling
extravaganza of all time,
WrestleMania.
Standing in there. Suplex!
-The first
WrestleMania was huge.
-Dropkick by Santana, and
out goes the Executioner!
-It sets sales records for
wrestling pay-per-views
and closed-circuit.
By gambling the
WWF's financial health,
Vince McMahon wins the national
recognition he's been chasing.
Even network television
is now willing to pay
him to air the WWF,
starting with Saturday
night's "Main Event" on NBC.
- That ring champion.
- Oh! Right now...
-But even as he escapes
the financial hazards
surrounding WrestleMania,
Vince finds himself
ensnared in another scandal,
one that could not just
bring down the WWF,
it could land Vince in jail.
-If I wanted a half-a-million-
dollar-a-year contract,
I had to satisfy him.
He just didn't stop.
This man just didn't stop.
-The success of WrestleMania
in the mid-'80s vindicates
Vince McMahon's strategy
to transform WWF wrestlers
into kid-friendly,
larger-than-life superheroes.
-It is my distinct privilege
to present to you Hulk Hogan!
-But not everybody in the
WWF family is celebrating.
-Rita Chatterton,
she was a referee.
She was promoted as the
first female WWF referee.
According to her, she eventually
wasn't getting booked as much
as she wanted to get booked,
and she tried to
have a conversation
with Vince about it.
On a certain night,
he got her in the limo,
and according
to Rita Chatterton,
he coerced her into
sex, essentially raped her.
-It was basically sex
and now you're gone.
-Rita Chatterton
told Andre the Giant
I believe the next day.
She told another wrestler
named Mario Mancini the next day.
-You know, the day
after it happened,
I walked into an arena
and Rita was in the arena
leaning against the ring apron,
and I walked up
to her with a smile,
ready to give her that
brotherly hug, you know,
and she just burst out in tears.
And I said, "What happened?"
-A few years later, Rita tells
her story on a TV talk show.
-Next thing I know,
Vince McMahon
is unzipping his pants.
I was forced into oral
sex with Vince McMahon.
When I couldn't
complete his desires,
he got really angry,
started ripping off
my... My jeans...
pulled me on top of
him, and told me again,
if I wanted a half-a-million-
dollar-a-year contract,
I had to satisfy him.
-I think if...
those allegations had come
to light in more modern times,
you know, after MeToo,
that those would have
been a much bigger deal.
-To avoid upsetting her parents,
Chatterton waits until they're
dead before going public.
But by then, the statute
of limitations has run out.
McMahon not only
denies her allegations,
he sues Chatterton
for defamation
before quietly
letting the suit drop
because he needs his
lawyers to defend him
against the next
looming scandal.
-She did referee
a little bit more
through the New York
State Athletic Commission,
but as far as WWF goes,
her career was pretty
much over at that point.
-As for Vince, his career
is still just getting started.
The WWF's audience
begins growing
as its wrestlers get bigger.
-At that time, the
fans were responding
to cool-looking guys with
these great physiques.
-They were just getting
bigger and bigger and bigger,
and it was becoming
more of a vehicle
to sell merchandise
than anything else.
-Hulkamania will live forever!
-And wrestlers were
expected to look the part,
no matter what it took.
-People do not understand
the pressure that you're under.
Look the best you can to
keep your spot in the business.
It was high pressure.
-It wasn't that Vince
was directly saying,
"We want you to
get on steroids."
People that worked for him
might approach a guy and say,
"We'd like you to put
on maybe 10, 20 pounds
in the next, you
know, few weeks."
They weren't telling
you how to do it.
-There are estimates
that 90% of the wrestlers
in that time period
were all on steroids.
-Everybody was on steroids.
That's what they were marketing.
-If I look this way, I'm
gonna get a better push.
I'm gonna get a
better spot on the card.
I'm gonna... I'm gonna
make more money.
And Vince himself was...
was taking them to get huge.
-We did whatever it took to give
what the people wanted to see.
-That's the why of steroids.
The how is a ringside doctor.
-Dr. George Zahorian
was the ringside physician
for the Pennsylvania
State Athletic Commission,
and he was assigned to ringside
at all of the wrestling matches
in Allentown, Pennsylvania,
for their TV tapings.
-And the doctor is
right there at his side.
-He always had
this big doctor bag,
and he would open it up
afterwards and he would say,
"Is there anything
you would like?"
-Valium, Tylenol 3,
Percocet, Percodan,
Somas, pain pills, steroids.
-He set up shop every taping
and the guys lined up to
purchase their... their candy.
-"And if it isn't there,
I can get it for you
and I can send it to you."
-But starting in 1991,
delivering steroids
without a prescription
becomes illegal.
-This means that trafficking
in steroids will be treated
in much the same manner
as trafficking in cocaine
or methamphetamines.
-Soon after the ban,
a steroid investigation
into weightlifting
coach Bill Dunn
leads the FBI to the
WWF's Dr. George Zahorian.
-Dunn had been, I gather,
caught with a large
amount of steroids,
flipped, became a
government witness,
agreed to wear a wire.
They used that tape of Zahorian
to then get a search warrant.
On the wall of his office,
they saw that famous
picture of him standing there
with Hulk on one side
and Vince on the other side
and thought, "Oh,
what do we have here?"
-On June 28, 1991,
Dr. Zahorian is
convicted of eight counts
of distributing steroids
and four counts
of illegally distributing
prescription painkillers.
-And Vince McMahon
was aware of it.
Everybody was.
If it was an overt agreement,
"I can get you steroids,"
that's Vince McMahon being
a drug dealer to his top star.
-But Dr. Zahorian
is just the undercard
in the government's battle
against the illegal
use of steroids
in pro wrestling.
The main event is the
prosecution of Vince McMahon.
-They wanted to have a big,
high-profile trial at that time
to sort of get it out there
that the law is different
now with respect to steroids.
-Vince McMahon and the
World Wrestling Federation
have been indicted on
charges of providing steroids
to WWF entertainers.
-The indictment says
that McMahon and a doctor
conspired to distribute
steroids to the wrestlers
to enhance their size
and muscle development.
-Vince McMahon
denies he facilitated
any illegal drug activity.
But with the trial looming,
he decides to retool
the WWF once again,
this time to help
protect himself.
-Because of the steroid scandal,
Vince McMahon couldn't
keep Hogan around.
Vince McMahon had to shift
his focus to smaller wrestlers
who were more athletic.
-In 1993, the one-time
WWF savior is gone.
-You can have everything
you want out of life,
and I'm not ashamed
of anything I've done.
-As Hogan begins performing
in Ted Turner's WCW,
Vince puts on his own show
as an anti-steroid crusader.
-I promise that the World
Wrestling Federation
will be the standard bearer
for drug-free sports
and entertainment.
-But in July 1994, the steroid
trial of Vince McMahon begins.
-There were
wrestling fans there.
There were
newsletter writers there.
Vince's family that would show
up every day in the courtroom.
Vince shows up
wearing this neck brace,
and, you know, everyone
is kind of laughing at it.
-People are like, "You've
got to be kidding me.
You're actually
playing on the jury
for sympathy in a neck brace?"
-Here we go. It's
a wrestling angle.
-The prosecution's star witness
is none other than Hulk Hogan.
-And there were expectations
that Hogan was gonna go in
there and kind of bury Vince.
-Hulk Hogan testifying
could seal the deal
for the prosecution
and send Vince
to prison for years.
He is the person
the prosecution said
bought drugs from Vince McMahon.
-Hulk Hogan is finally here.
What is he gonna say?
-After convicting
a ringside doctor
who worked WWF matches
of illegally distributing steroids,
the government
turns its attention
to the man running the WWF,
Vince McMahon.
-If convicted, McMahon
faces eight years in prison
and half a million
dollars in fines.
-And there's one wrestler
the government hopes
will help secure
that conviction.
But Hogan has other ideas.
-And on three
different occasions,
I had the same type
of muscle injuries.
That is the extent of
Hulk Hogan's steroid use.
-And he's like, "I took steroids
three times back in 1983.
I tore my bicep. I
used it for rehab."
And it was just
like, "Oh, my God."
It was just a
complete, utter lie.
-Hogan framed it to the
shock of the prosecutors
and to people gasping
in the courtroom quietly.
"We were gym buddies.
We were friends.
Sometimes I had extra
steroids. I gave them to Vince.
Sometimes Vince had extra
steroids. He gave them to me.
That doesn't make
him a drug dealer."
-There goes their case.
-He kind of just like
exonerated Vince
for any implication of
his involvement at all.
-But not everyone viewed
Hogan as Vince's savior.
-Vince didn't see it that way.
Vince was furious Hogan
testified against him.
-Yeah, I think they didn't want
any part of each
other towards the end.
It was kind of like, "You
go your way, I go my way,
and nice knowing you, pal."
-But Hogan's testimony
is only the first blow
to the prosecution's case.
Other witnesses took the stand
and downplayed Vince's role.
-You know, maybe
I'm an optimist,
but I didn't spend one minute
of my time thinking about losing.
They took the verdict
first against Vince.
They said not guilty.
-And when it was not guilty,
it was almost like, you know,
Hulk Hogan had just won a
match at Madison Square Garden.
It was like people just popped.
-This one is my
favorite one up here.
The jury announced its verdict.
That's Linda, me,
and Vince hugging.
And what I always
thought was interesting is
the hands clapping, 'cause
that is what happened.
The jury verdict
was very popular.
-You got a lot of money, you
can get out of a lot of things,
which really is the
story of his downfall.
Got a great attorney and he
bought his way out of trouble.
No consequences.
What do you learn?
You learn that
you're bulletproof.
-As we say in the World
Wrestling Federation,
and it could very well
be that the hunters
soon will be the hunted.
-What does that mean, Vince?
-Stay tuned, Rosanna.
-Rosanna won't
have to wait long.
Soon after surviving
the steroid trial,
Vince begins scanning his
roster for his next big superstar,
turning his gaze north to
Canada and the Hart family.
-Bret "The Hitman" Hart!
-The Hart Family is one
of the most famous families
in the history of our business.
The sons were all wrestlers,
the daughters all
married wrestlers.
-And Stu began the Stampede
Wrestling promotion in Alberta
and had a very successful
company there for a long time.
-Back when Vince first came
sniffing around his territory,
Stu's business was on the ropes.
So he agreed to
Vince buying him out.
-When he bought
out our promotion,
I believe it was supposed
to be for $1 million fee.
-My dad didn't get paid
and the whole thing
was an abortive screwjob.
-He knew my dad
wasn't going to contest
the legality of their agreement.
He got all of our rings,
a lot of our top talent.
-McMahon, for his part, claims
to have paid the Harts in full.
-He took Bret Hart
and Jim Neidhart,
who was the son-in-law, as
a team, the Hart Foundation.
-Internationally, we're getting
reports back that we've got
a megastar on our hands
in the form of Bret Hart.
-So, Vince bestows on
Bret the WWF championship.
-When you were chosen to be
a champion of a major company,
it meant that the
promoter thought
that you were the best talent,
that you were the best draw,
that you would make
him the most money,
that you were the guy.
-But at the same time, remember
that someone made you champion.
-Bret is soon approached
by WCW's Eric Bischoff,
who waves a multi-million-dollar
offer in front of him.
Vince feels he can't
afford to lose Bret
to his number-one competitor,
so the WWF don makes Bret
an offer he thinks he can't refuse.
-Vince heard about
them giving me an offer
and I remember Vince said,
he goes, "I'll make you an offer,"
and we worked out a contract.
It was $1.5 million
for 20 years, I think.
-But before Bret can sign his
new contract with the WWF,
Vince has second thoughts,
not about Bret's talents,
but about his own finances.
WCW has peeled off TV
viewers and Vince is short on cash.
-Vince comes back and
looks at the commitment
that he had made to Bret Hart.
It was a drain on the company
from what we were
bringing in at the time.
-Bret learns a valuable lesson
about doing business
with Vince McMahon...
When there's a question about
who should suffer financially,
you or Vince, it's usually you.
-Vince told me that
basically he couldn't afford
to pay me the contract
that he'd given me.
Kind of broke my heart.
Like, it's like, okay, I get it.
And I remember I got off
the phone from him and I said,
"I guess I'm done."
I hung up with Vince and I
signed my WCW contract.
-Tradition says championship
wrestlers give up their belt
or drop it before they
leave for the competition.
And despite
reneging on his deal,
that's what Vince expects
Bret to do in his last WWF match
against his nemesis,
Shawn Michaels.
-Here's the problem.
Bret didn't want to
lose the championship.
It's your last night
in the company.
We need to crown a new champion.
You know what? We'll
just take it from him.
-As a consequence,
they orchestrated this
limp-dick, half-assed abortion,
a bunch of bullshit.
-But that "bullshit" sells out.
On November 9, 1997,
Hart and Michaels battle it out
in Montreal's Molson Centre.
-The match lasted
10, 15 minutes.
-But it's the last 30 seconds
that everyone is
still arguing about.
-I could see Vince McMahon,
and Vince snaps at
him to ring the... bell.
Oh, they're screwing
me right now.
And I remember reaching back
and showing that I
wasn't submitting,
and I grabbed Shawn's
leg and started to reverse.
But you could hear the
bell. Ding-ding-ding-ding.
-If I hadn't rung the bell,
Vince McMahon was
gonna ring that bell.
-I wanted to just kill Vince.
I wanted to jump through the
ropes and just punch him out.
I couldn't believe he did
it to me, after all the years
that I gave him and all the
matches and all the hard work
and he'd disrespect
me like that.
You son of a bitch.
I remember I had a
nice, good gobber of spit,
and I remember I just
leaned over the top rope.

Cameras were off,
show's over. I got screwed.
And Vince said something
to me along the lines of,
"This is the first
time I ever had to lie
to one of my talent,"
which is such a lie.
And I remember when I
got tying my last shoelace,
I started to tie it, and
I go, "Well, this is it.
I'm gonna punch
out Vince McMahon.
I can't believe I'm doing this."
And then we walked
towards each other,
end up tying up, just
like a pro wrestling match.
And I remember just
sinking down and kind of
just turning my whole
body and thinking,
14 years, and coming
up right between our arms.
And I hit Vince McMahon
with the most beautiful
Mike Tyson uppercut.
I popped him literally
off... Right off the ground.
He went straight down, out cold.
Everybody was stunned.
No one could believe it.
-It's like, I remember
when I was a kid
exactly where I was standing
when John F. Kennedy
had been assassinated,
and I remember just
as precisely where I was
when I found out about
the Montreal Screwjob.
-Vince immediately
goes on the offensive,
appearing on TV
with the black eye
he got from Bret
Hart's uppercut.
-Did you or did you
not screw Bret Hart?
-There's a
time-honored tradition
in the wrestling business
that when someone is leaving,
that they show the
right amount of respect.
Bret Hart didn't want
to honor that tradition.
-Vince was really giving
Bret Hart all kinds of shit.
-Vince, in this interview,
just came across very cold,
calculated, and
very, very heelish.
-I truly believe that Bret
Hart screwed Bret Hart.
-The Montreal Screwjob is a
seminal moment in wrestling.
The event pulls back the curtain
to reveal Vince's true nature
as the win-at-all-costs
owner of the WWF.
-And then once the word got out
that he actually
owns the company
and he's the power behind
the throne and this and that,
Vince ran with it.

-But soon, Vince will embrace
his on-screen
character's evil spirit.
-I will never, ever
forgive your mother
for giving birth to you!

-Barely a decade after
buying the WWF from his dad,
Vince McMahon's
career is a whiplash
of career-threatening scandals
inside and outside the ring.
-In the early-to-mid-'90s,
Vince was so distracted.
So he's fighting
on all these fronts,
these scandals and things
breaking all around him.
-There was a former referee
that was hiring young ring boys
and he had some
type of a toe fetish.
I mean, really,
really weird stuff
was coming out to the extent of,
"Oh, bro, that's
so unbelievable.
It's wrestling.
That can't be true."
-And he's perhaps not
able to put as much attention
and care into the product,
and it was showing.
-With the WWF's TV
ratings now in a nosedive,
Vince McMahon is
facing his worst fear...
No longer running the country's
most successful wrestling
That title could soon
belong to a media mogul
with exceptionally deep pockets.
-Ted Turner bought out
Jim Crockett Promotions,
and it became WCW.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Eric Bischoff had been
given control of WCW.
He decided that he wanted to go
head-to-head with Vince McMahon,
and he talked
Ted Turner into it.
-We just want to be as
successful as Vince is,
and then we'd like to,
you know, kick his butt.
-And according to Vince,
Ted Turner calls Vince
and... and says that, "I'm
in the wrestling business."
-And he goes, "Well,
that's great, Ted.
I'm in the sports
entertainment business."
-And those are two completely
different philosophies.
-World Championship
Wrestling has always been
one of our most
popular programs,
and now WCW is about
to dominate the globe
in professional wrestling.
-Bischoff immediately
gets to work
running Vince McMahon's playbook
by stealing away WWF talent.
-You had Hulk Hogan, you had
the Macho Man, Randy Savage.
You had all of these
big stars of the '80s,
and Vince slowly began
taking them off television.
And so Eric Bischoff believed
that these guys still
had the ability to draw.
-Hogan went over,
Piper went over,
Rick Rude, Curt Hennig.
One by one, they started
signing WWE talent.
-I think Vince was
having a very difficult time
when the tactics that he
used to win the first war
were being used on
him and he was behind.
-Vince McMahon calls a
company-wide meeting,
and he says, "Well,
they've taken everybody,"
and I'm sitting
there and I'm like,
"Wait a minute.
You're the victim now?"
-It was funny to me
because he was going like,
"They're stealing my talent."
And I go, "Vince, that's
how you built your company.
You stole everybody's talent."
-Eric Bischoff put
"Monday Nitro"
opposite "Monday Night Raw".
And what happened was
you had a nostalgia effect.
You had these kids who
were like, "Oh, my God.
Hulk Hogan is... You
know, he's on WCW.
Macho Man Randy Savage."
And then Eric, he brought
in wrestlers from Japan,
wrestlers from Mexico
that worked a
very different style.
They were high fliers.
It was very, very
fast, very colorful.
And Vince's
product felt slow, old.
-Papa Shango
striking sheer terror
in the hearts of
this capacity crowd.
-I think it was '95, '96, that
he was losing $6 million a year,
and WCW ended up
winning the ratings war
for a straight year and a
half every single Monday.
-Ted Turner, WCW beating him
for 83 weeks at his own game.
That set a fire underneath
Vince McMahon.
-So the man who once drew
inspiration from Walt Disney
dramatically changes course,
rebranding the
WWF as more adult,
meaning more violent
and a lot more sexual.
-We've embarked upon
a far more innovative
and contemporary
creative campaign.
It is far more invigorating and
extemporaneous than ever before.
-Vince stole all sorts of stuff.
He stole a lot of the concepts
that Eric Bischoff
had come up with.
He stole the hardcore
and the violence.
-It was almost like
Vince's own inner self
kind of exploding
into the WWF product,
you know, violence
and class warfare
and just different kinds of
sexual content and edginess.
It was a play to win this war.
-The WWF's graphic story
lines target the WCW audience...
Angsty teens and 20-somethings.
-Vince McMahon's
got the Midas touch.
He's the guy who knows
how to reach those teenagers.
-Including with this guy,
"Stone Cold" Steve Austin.
-I do what I want, when I want,
and if I don't want to answer
no questions, I ain't got to.
What I do ain't none
of your business.
I don't give a rat's ass if
you own the WWF or not.
-Steve Austin... huge star.
If you were a kid
in high school,
middle school in the '90s,
you could go to school,
there'd be Austin
3:16 shirts everywhere.
Everybody knew "Stone
Cold" Steve Austin.
-Vince goes on air and justifies
the WWF's edgier rebrand
after getting some pushback
from parents and the press.
-So when we hear some
people squawking and whatever,
I think that's a good
sign because it says
that we are going up to
a certain edge creatively.
We don't want to go
over that edge and fall off.
That's not good, either.
But I think you have to
open the creative envelope.
-WWF slowly started
kind of chipping away
and getting people interested
in watching their show again.
-"Raw" and "Nitro"
were on at the same time,
Monday night on
two different networks,
so you already had a lot of fans
who would switch back and forth.
But then as it started getting
better, then they started going,
"Well, well, hold on.
Put the remote down.
We're not going back to 'Nitro'.
I want to see Austin kicking
Vince McMahon's
ass on television.
This has never happened before."
-Austin stuns Mr. McMahon!
-And I don't think there's
any subject matter,
by the way, that's off
bounds, that's off limits.
-That includes writing
himself into the show
as the amoral Mr. McMahon,
the power-hungry,
take-no-prisoners owner
of the WWF.
Some see it as typecasting.
-I enjoy destroying lives.
-Mr. McMahon takes on
every top-billed star of WWF,
from The Rock to Triple H,
and an infamous
head-to-butt match
with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.
-You said you could
beat Vince McMahon
with one arm tied
behind your back.
-Stone Cold is...
Stone Cold's laying
Mr. McMahon's bare ass out
with a leather belt!
-Even Vince's family isn't safe
from the wrath of Mr. McMahon.
-I will never, ever forgive your
mother for giving birth to you!
-Your mother had a
certain... reputation.
A good-time-girl
reputation, if you get my drift.
-The father-daughter
feud culminated
in the "I quit" match,
where Vince chokes out his
own child with a steel pipe.
-Mr. McMahon is
one of the greatest
heel characters
of all time. Yes.
-Critics say the World
Wrestling Federation
blows away the
envelope of good taste
with a parade of raunchy
characters like a pimp
who struts into the
ring with prostitutes.
-And I want you to roll a
fatty for this pimp daddy.
Light that blunt up and say...
-Pimpin' ain't easy!
-The WWF fan
never saw this before.
The numbers got higher and
higher and higher and higher.
We turned it into must-see TV.
-A lot of the women, you know,
that started coming up
wanted to be wrestlers
and they didn't really want
the women to be wrestlers.
They thought, "People don't
want to watch women wrestle.
They want to see T&A
disguised as wrestling."
Basically, the idea
was hire people
who could pose in Playboy,
and many of them
did pose in Playboy,
and go out there and
wear as little as possible
and rip clothes
off and all this.
And that's when the TV
ratings with the teenagers,
the teenage boys...
Through the roof.
-After 83 straight weeks
of losing out to WCW,
there's finally cause
for Vince to celebrate.
-McMahon said
there's only one group
that he pays attention
to, and that's his audience.
And he will bend
in any direction
that they tell him to.
-Forget the morality,
forget the ethics.
Strictly from a
business standpoint,
you go too far,
then what's next?
A chainsaw? You can't go there.
- Are you approaching that?
- I don't know.
I think the audience
is gonna tell us.
- Or he will tell the audience.
- Don't go in there!
Don't go in there! [ Gunshot ]
-On behalf of the World
Wrestling Federation,
for those of you
who were offended,
those viewers, we
humbly apologize
for the incident that took place
last Monday night on "Raw".
-By the late '90s, what's
dubbed the Attitude Era,
puts Vince McMahon back on top.
But to stay there, he resorts to
more and more drastic theatrics,
including a home invasion on
a controversial 1996 episode
of "Monday Night Raw".
- We are live.
Austin is outside of
Brian Pillman's home.
-Steve is a dead man walking!
Because when Austin 3:16
meets Pillman 9
millimeter Glock...
- Oh, my God.
- I'm gonna blow his sorry ass
straight to Hell!
-Don't go in there!
Don't go in there!
-The reaction was
pretty negative to it.
I mean, it was
pretty darn negative.
Vince had to actually go
on television and apologize
for that angle 'cause it
got so much negativity.
-We humbly apologize
for the incident
that took place last
Monday night on "Raw".
-I think that's the only angle
Vince ever apologized for.
-Including the ones involving
stunts in which his wrestlers
didn't always
want to participate.
-Vince McMahon wanted
wrestlers to start being actors
at this point, and he
couldn't understand
why they didn't want
to go along with it.
-Surely the era of the superhero
who'd urge you
to say your prayers
and take your vitamins
is definitely pass.
-It was that tipping point
that we reached at that time
between "We're not
gonna use great wrestlers
just 'cause they're
great athletes.
They have to be willing to put
on goofy outfits and do skits."
-But many of these
new gimmicky story lines
don't land with fans.
So Vince is once again forced
to find the next big superstar
to re-energize the WWF.
And like before, it's the
Hart family that delivers.
-Owen Hart. As a rookie,
he was spectacular.
His acrobatics were amazing.
He could flip
backwards off the ropes.
He could land on his
feet from every direction.
-Number one, baby!
-Owen has the athleticism,
but not the
over-the-top personality
of a Hulk Hogan or
"Stone Cold" Steve Austin,
the traits that have always
resonated with Vince.
-In the new
entertainment, Attitude Era,
they didn't know
what to do with Owen.
-They had him doing one
horseshit persona after another.
The Blue Blazer.
The American Eagle.
I was shaking my head.
-Here it comes. It's
Owen Hart! The Blazer!
-Vince can be very spiteful
for his own amusement,
give them very demeaning
characters or roles,
and kind of have
fun at their expense
because he's their boss.
He can be a tyrant.
-Vince tries to write Owen
into edgier story lines,
but Owen refuses,
but perhaps because of
how he treated Owen's brother
Bret in the Montreal Screwjob,
Vince keeps Owen around.
Then Vince decides to put
Owen's athleticism to the test.

On May 23, 1999, Owen
travels to Kansas City's
Kemper Arena for a WWF
event called "Over the Edge."
From eight stories up, Owen
will be lowered into the ring.
-Owen did not want to
come down from the rafters.
They talked him into it.
-He's done the gimmick before.
-The idiot is stuck
in the harness!
-Riggers experiment with
a quick-release harness
so Owen can get back
into the action quicker.
Some claim the WWF
replaced their original riggers
with a cut-rate crew who
say they can make it happen.
But the poorly designed
quick-release mechanism
they use proves deadly.
-I looked at my monitor, and
all of a sudden, I looked up.
I just caught Owen
come into my line of vision.
A blur. Foof.
-But, like, all the
fans are watching,
and at first, they're
thinking, "That's weird.
They dropped a
dummy from the rafters.
-I thought I heard screaming,
and then I felt something brush
against the side of my
head and my shoulder.
And I'm thinking in my head,
"What the heck was that?"
And when I turned and
looked, there was Owen.
He was, like, laying
in the ring, like, faceup.
And I just started
screaming for help.
-I thought he hit the
turnbuckle or the ring post
'cause it really
sounded sick, sick, sick.
-Somebody said,
"Owen just fell."
And I went, "Owen fell?
What?" He goes, "Owen just fell."
-Well, it's one of the most
shocking things I've ever seen.
This is not a... your
typical wrestling story line.
This is a real situation.
-I said, "...never seen
anything like that."
Not on any wrestling program,
not on any television program.
It's never happened before.
-I was just
reiterating to the fans
this is not a part of the show.
We're here to
entertain and have fun.
But this is neither.
-As emergency
workers tend to Owen
and his shocked
colleagues look on,
someone calls Vince to
decide what to do next.
-And they wheeled Owen past
us to go to the ambulance, and...
Mm.
-Vince's decision sends
shockwaves through the WWF.
-They didn't want
to stop the show.
So Jeff Jarrett, who
was real close with Owen,
did a promo, and
he was in tears.
-Owen Hart, I'm
praying for you, buddy.
-The show must go on.
They got to go in
there and do their match
with Owen's blood in the corner.
-Kevin Dunn, the
executive producer,
thought that I had been
told what the deal was.
And I said, "Kevin,
nobody's told us anything.
What is the update?"
And he said..."He's dead.
And you're back in 10, 9..."
-And I have the...
unfortunate responsibility
to let everyone know
that Owen Hart has died.
Owen Hart has tragically died
from that accident here tonight.
-It's only after deciding
to continue the show
that Vince finally
reaches out to Owen's wife
to tell her that there
was an accident.
But he leaves it to the doctor
to deliver the news
that devastates her.
-I miss my husband,
and I'm sad for myself
that I'm a widow at 32
and I have two children
that are fatherless now.
-A police investigation
into Owen Hart's death
begins immediately.
If criminal negligence is found,
Vince's WWF could
very well get shut down.
-I think a lot of fingers
were being pointed.
Did they cut corners? Was
it a cut-rate kind of thing?
-Owen was such a
loyal and dependable
and reliable and safe performer,
and, you know, it's so
upsetting that he needlessly died
just for a silly ring entrance.
-What hurt Vince at the time
and the company, image-wise,
and this can't
really be overstated,
was the decision to
continue the show.
And that's something that has
been second-guessed ever since,
even to this day.
-Should the show go on?
Should we cancel the show?
Come on, man.
Nobody was in their
right mind that day
to make any kind of a decision,
including Vince McMahon.
-Owen Hart's death
makes national news.
When a reporter questions
Vince about his culpability,
she's immediately met
with Vince's first rule
of crisis management...
The best defense is
an obnoxious offense.
-First of all, I
resent your tone.
Um...
No, no. I resent
your tone, lady, okay?
You know, this was
a tragic accident.
-On June 15, 1999, Martha
Hart begins her pursuit for justice.
-My legal counsel filed
a wrongful death lawsuit
against WWF, Vince
McMahon, and all others
I believe are responsible
for my husband's death.
-Vince denies acting
spitefully towards Owen
or any culpability
for this accident
and successfully
sues the manufacturer
of the quick-release device.
Martha Hart eventually settles
with the WWF for $18 million,
using the money to start
The Owen Hart Foundation.
As Martha and her children
try to rebuild their lives,
Vince finds himself
in the middle of yet
another shocking incident,
when a plane full of
his employees travel on
a WWF chartered
transcontinental flight from Europe.
-I remember sitting in
the first-class section.
I think Jim Ross was up there.
-Normally the coaches and
the managers sat up there,
and in this case, the
wrestlers were in the back.
-Wrestlers would behave
badly on the road, on planes,
in hotels, and in bars.
And on this privately chartered
flight, they got out of control.
-As alcohol and
pills flow freely,
a couple of wrestlers
begin assaulting
the flight attendants.
-And I was in the galley.
He had me back
against the back door,
and I couldn't...
I couldn't move.
I couldn't get away from him.
He was spitting around his
penis and he wanted me to touch it.
And he... he took my hand
and... and put it on him.
-After a wrestler intervenes,
another moves in on the
still-shaken stewardess.
-He grabbed my shirt
and pulled me down
and my shirt buttons got ripped.
He told me he was gonna lick me,
and then he proceeded
to try to do that.
It was a moment of great...
violation, discomfort,
to have a person
put their hands on you
without you wanting
them to do that.
And then he passed out.
-Once safely back on the ground,
the two flight attendants sue.
Vince intervenes and
does one of the things
he does best... Throw
money at the problem.
-They offered us a settlement.
Money is... Money is what
ends up on the table, I think,
and... and then it
also buys you silence,
which then can add to another
layer of the guilt of a victim.
Like, it can... it can be a
cycle that's not good, yeah.
Perpetually bad.
-Paying people off becomes
Vince's go-to strategy
to make bad press disappear,
but he'll eventually
learn the danger
in buying people's silence.
It only works until
somebody talks.
-If these stories
from the actual people
inside started coming
out, I-I don't even know
if there would be a
wrestling business by the time
all the investigations
were complete.
-For decades, Vince McMahon
proves to be uniquely skilled
at surviving scandals, from
claims of sexual harassment
to illegal steroid use,
even an accidental death lawsuit
by first unequivocally denying
responsibility for any of them.
So it's business
as usual in 2006,
when he quickly dispenses
with an ugly new allegation.
-That was another
story back in the day,
where he went to a tanning
salon called Tanzabar.
-In the police report,
it says a 22-year-old
tanning salon employee
met Vince McMahon
when he went in to buy
20 minutes of tanning.
He asked her to
take a photo of him
so that he could send it back
to his girlfriend in New York.
And then when she handed
his phone back to him,
he sort of scrolled
through a number of photos
that he had taken of himself.
-He ends up, I believe,
showing pictures of himself,
naked pictures of himself to
the tanning salon attendant.
-He allegedly grabs
her, touches her,
tries to lift up her blouse,
tries to kiss her,
according to her allegations,
and then she rebuffs him,
ends up putting both her hands
on his chest to push him away,
and then he responds
by saying, you know,
"I was only trying
to have a little fun."
-And the woman ran out of
the room yelling and screaming,
"Call the police!"
Found out it was Vince McMahon.
-The police determined
there's probable cause
that McMahon had
committed a crime.
So they refer that to the
local prosecutor's office,
who, in turn,
decline to prosecute
because there's... There's
not enough evidence.
-While Vince's
lawyer fervently denies
that the woman was
paid to drop the charges,
others aren't so sure.
-Well, when you have
that kind of money,
I gue... I guess things go away.
-Any time there's accusations,
no court case, you
presume payoff.
But I don't know that.
These rumors have
been in a wrestling forever.
The tanning salon
story came out,
but whether it's true or not,
these were not
isolated incidents.
-Vince was a known womanizer.
But I don't want to say
it was kind of expected
in the... in that industry
'cause, you know, everybody was.
-But for many wrestling fans,
Vince's alleged abhorrent
personal behavior
proves less concerning
than his apparent willingness
to exploit the tragic
deaths of his wrestlers,
beginning with Eddie Guerrero.
-Wrestling fans, of course, all
know who Eddie Guerrero is.
He's considered as one of
the absolute best wrestlers
of all time.
-When Eddie dies tragically
at 38 from a heart condition,
Vince McMahon immediately
organizes a tribute show.
-Eddie Guerrero has passed away.
-But months later,
Vince sees an opportunity
to generate some
heat off Eddie's death,
and authorizes
wrestler Randy Orton
to trash Eddie's memory.
-Let me tell you something, bro.
Eddie ain't in Heaven.
[ Crowd boos ]
Eddie's down there... in Hell!
-Some fans are
furious at the idea
that Vince would
exploit Eddie's death
in a naked grab for TV ratings.
Nearly two years later, everyone
will be shocked at Vince's
"fire, ready, aim" response
to another tragic event,
one that will leave folks
openly questioning if Vince cares
at all about the health and
safety of wrestlers in the WWE.
-If you're a wrestling fan,
how could you not be a
fan of Chris Benoit's work?
-In June 2007, Benoit is
scheduled to perform in Texas,
but no one's heard from him.
So just hours before the show,
police are dispatched
to Benoit's house,
where they discover
the bodies of Chris,
his wife, Nancy, and
young son, Daniel.
-At this time, no one
knew what happened.
Did someone break in? Did
carbon monoxide happen?
No one has answers.
-Police notify the
extended Benoit family,
while inside the arena,
word spreads quickly
among the wrestlers
about what happened
to Chris and his family.
-Vince McMahon, the
chairman of the board,
couldn't go on the air
and not do anything.
So we went on the air and
did what we thought was right.
-Tonight, this arena here
in Corpus Christi, Texas,
was to have been
filled to capacity...
with enthusiastic WWE fans.
-We tried to honor the guy,
we tried to honor his family,
we tried to honor his fans,
but we didn't have a full story.
-So tonight will be
a three-hour tribute
to one of the greatest
WWE superstars of all time.
-Vince is premature
in the tribute,
because not long after
calling him one of the greatest,
the real story comes out.
-Right now, it's
being investigated
as a murder-suicide.
However, until we get
the crime lab reports,
it's undetermined
exactly what happened.
-On Friday evening,
it appears that there was
some sort of altercation
between Chris and Nancy,
that Chris restrained
Nancy with duct tape
and then utilized a
telephone cord to strangle her
and then placed a
Bible next to her body.
Next morning, on Saturday,
Chris, we assume, gave
his son Daniel Xanax,
and then murdered
him in his room,
being suffocated by his father.
A Bible was then placed
next to Daniel as well.
On Sunday, Chris then
went down to his home gym
with a half drunken
bottle of wine,
he wrapped a towel
around his neck,
and he took the metal cord
from the lat pulldown machine
and put it around his neck.
He adjusted the
weights to 240 pounds,
and then he released it.
-We did not know
all the information.
That's our fault.
We were trying to
serve the audience.
It was a major story,
it was hitting all
the news sources,
and we had a TV show.
-Vince attempts damage
control for his decision
to publicly canonize Benoit.
-Last night on
"Monday Night Raw",
the WWE presented
a special tribute show
recognizing the
career of Chris Benoit.
However, now,
some 26 hours later,
the facts of this horrific
tragedy are now apparent.
Therefore, other
than my comments,
there will be no mention of
Mr. Benoit's name tonight.
-But soon, the story
shifts away from Vince's
ill-advised statement
following the murder-suicide
and to the more damning
question of the role wrestling itself
played in the deaths
of the Benoit family.
-Speculation is running wild.
Did steroids play a role, or
is there another explanation?
We have an exclusive interview
with WWE chairman Vince McMahon.
-WWE did everything they
could to combat any coverage
in the news media that indicated
that drug abuse or steroid abuse
was the cause of the homicides.
-And obviously, this
was not an act of rage.
It's an act of deliberation.
When you do something
like this over three days,
it's not an act of rage, be
it steroid rage or roid rage,
whatever it's called,
or any other rage.
-In his autopsy, Chris
Benoit was shown
to have enormous amounts
of testosterone in his body.
Testosterone is still a
steroid that's banned
in all major sports.
-Despite a wellness program
Vince set up to monitor
his wrestlers for drugs,
critics say the system
he created too often failed.
-Preposterously, Chris Benoit
passed the wellness checks
leading up to the murder,
despite the irrefutable fact
he was taking enormous
amounts of steroids.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-But neuroscientist and
former wrestler Chris Nowinski
has a hunch that Chris's
behavior was informed
by a little understood condition
that is also adversely affecting
some football players... CTE.
-Chronic traumatic
encephalopathy, or CTE,
is a progressive,
degenerative brain disease
that appears to be
started by hits to the head.
-Oh, my God!
-With Chris, he actually
had what would be defined as
a severe case of
CTE at 40 years old.
-Three years after
the shocking murders,
Vince is finally forced to
address the appalling policy
surrounding his wrestlers'
health and safety.
After a thorough review,
the WWF permanently bans
all chair shots to the head.
But like the NFL,
violence in pro wrestling
has never been a
bug, but a feature.
So, it's a problem
Vince McMahon has never been
anxious to move center stage,
especially back when his
company embarked on a move
that would transform the WWF
while helping set the stage
for Vince's ultimate demise.
-The seeds of Vince
McMahon's downfall
were planted back
in the late '90s.
Despite being rocked
by a series of personal
and professional scandals
that might have taken
down other businesses,
Vince McMahon's World
Wrestling Federation
was a cash-printing
financial juggernaut,
so Vince decided his company
needed to go to the place
where that kind of
success is rewarded...
Wall Street.
[ Cheering ]
-[ Yelling indistinctly ]
-WWF in 1999 was having its
hottest period of business ever,
even hotter than the
hot run with Hogan
in the mid-'80s.
Vince liked the idea of being
a stock that you could trade
in the New York Stock Exchange.
-With an eye towards
this initial public offering,
from 1998 to 1999,
Vince went to work,
doubling the WWF's revenue
to over $250 million.
-He made huge money.
And so, just like that,
Vince is a billionaire.
-But with great power
comes great responsibility,
or maybe just greater oversight.
-The WWF... It had to
be more above board.
It couldn't be the secret
company with the secret moneys
and the, you know, payoff.
Your finances had to
be a lot more transparent.
-The IPO for WWF
put the final nail
in the coffin of defeating WCW.
-WCW was still
relying on Hulk Hogan
and Randy Savage
and Roddy Piper,
and didn't realized
that in wrestling,
everybody has a shelf life.
There was nothing they
could do to stop Steve Austin
and The Rock from getting
this young audience back in.
-From 1997 to 2000,
WCW went from making
$125 million a year
to losing $65 million a year.
That's a lot of mistakes.
-Vince blew them
away very quickly.
-The major concern was just
putting them out of business,
was just eliminating
them from competition.
-And at the end of the day,
Vince bought World
Championship Wrestling
for essentially, you know,
$2.5 million, $4 million.
It's inconceivable.
- "Nitro" had its last
episode in March 2001.
-Here I am on WCW Television.
-When Vince bought WCW,
they kicked it off by
this almost surreal angle.
-It was just a matter of time
before I, Vince McMahon,
bought my competition.
-And actually, he
appeared on "Nitro".
-That's right.
I own WCW.
-I don't know if anybody
else could have done
what Vince did without
being as cutthroat as he was.
He was tunnel vision
on "I will build this.
I will see success."
-He wasn't going to
allow himself to fail.
-By the early 2000s,
Vince essentially owns
all professional wrestling,
or at least the kind of
professional wrestling
you can watch on mainstream TV.
While that will be
good for his investors,
it will leave many fans
wondering what happened
to the WWF they
loved in the '90s.
-There were a lot
of people internally,
particularly marketing people,
they wanted to have a
family friendly product again
that was more maybe advertising
friendly, sponsor friendly.
They wanted to be able to
sell merchandise to children,
which they had stopped doing.
-They don't want
to sponsor a show
where this dude
hit this other guy
in the head 12
times with a chair,
he's bleeding everywhere,
blah, blah, blah.
-You can't have the
half-naked women.
We can't have story
lines involving porn stars
and that kind of thing.
-There is a sentiment from
the audience, "This is too tame.
It's not wild enough.
Bring back the Attitude Era."
-A lot of fans blamed it for the
declining popularity of WWE.
-WWE sucks.
I have watched
the slow and steady
regression of this company.
-From 2001 to 2022,
the ratings have gone
down every single year.
-Sometimes, you sacrifice
popularity for money,
and... and WWE... WWE's
done that in many decisions
that it's made in recent years.
-Even though the
audience declined,
they have become a
more profitable company
than they ever were before.
They are, at this
stage of the game,
getting the majority of their
revenue from TV rights fees,
where you have Fox or you
have Comcast NBCUniversal
that are paying large
amounts of money,
totaling in billions to get
this programming on the air.
I don't think that
these media giants
would be as quick to do business
if you were back
in the Attitude Era,
where you had an
elderly female wrestler
giving birth to a
hand on television.
-A hand?
-So, despite the grumblings
from longtime WWE fans,
Vince is making
more money than ever,
and that's when,
according to some experts,
he starts getting lazy.
-He had the monopoly.
He's making billions of dollars.
He's got a contract with Fox.
He's got a contract with USA.
He's getting
millions of dollars,
whether the product
is good or bad,
and I-I really think from
that point forward, man,
I think he just coasted.
-Nowadays, it's kind of this
stagnant, stale, sterile style
that's kind of lame
and uninspiring.
The fan base has dwindled.
-And Bruce Hart
attributes that to Vince
getting everything he wanted
when he took over
his father's territory.
-Ultimately, it's been
one of the worst things
that ever happened
to the business.
It's kind of destroyed the
grassroots of the business.
Back in the day, there
was all these different styles.
You know, Calgary
had a unique style,
and San Francisco had a style.
Charlotte, North Carolina,
had certain style varieties,
the spice of life,
and that was the
case with wrestling.
-And fan satisfaction
is at an all-time low.
-Dude, I can't watch the show.
It's too long. It
doesn't make sense.
-Absolute torture for me.
I would rather be watching
ballet, bocce, darts,
anything but this show.
-$2.3 billion television
deal over five years.
You can write the
worst show ever,
you're gonna be fine.
-And in his mind, this
is still the end all, be all,
the greatest show out there.
That... That's how
delusional he is.
-But he's about to get
snapped back to reality.
-The billionaire CEO
and primary shareholder
of World Wrestling Entertainment
stepping back temporarily
from his leadership
roles within the company.
-In July of 2022,
the Houdini of professional
sports finds himself
trapped by past misdeeds
from which he cannot escape.
-The former WWE chief
executive, Vince McMahon,
paid hush money to four
women to cover up allegations
of sexual misconduct
and infidelity.
-Vince McMahon has agreed to
pay four women over $12 million
over the past 16
years to keep quiet
about allegations of
sexual misconduct.
-That's according to
"The Wall Street Journal".
-Vince had a number of payouts
to various women over the years.
-Payouts he expected
to remain secret
by using non-disclosure
agreements, or NDAs.
-There were a total
of at least four NDAs
that "The Wall Street
Journal" reported on.
A former paralegal,
a former contractor,
a former WWE talent,
a former manager.
-Apparently, one agreement
included a 2006 pact,
and that involved
a former manager
who he allegedly initiated
an intimate relationship with,
and paid her $1 million
to keep quiet about it.
-Reportedly, he wired money
from his personal accounts
to pay for the NDAs.
-I think within the
world of wrestling
and certainly within the
company, everybody knew.
Yes. But I mean, as far
as wrestling fans know,
they didn't know.
-And for those in the
audience long entertained
by the evil
Mr. McMahon character,
the new accusations sound like
business as usual in the WWE.
-The first story in "The
Wall Street Journal"
about these
allegations came out,
and next thing you know,
Vince is strutting
out on "SmackDown".
-Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome Mr. McMahon!
[ Cheers and applause ]
-I'm here to simply remind you
of the four words we just saw
and what we call
the WWE signature.
Those four words are
"Then", "Now", "Forever",
and the most important
word is "Together".
-Everybody cheers "Yeah!"
Goes about his day like
nothing had happened.
That was his
response to that first
"Wall Street Journal" story.
-Vince eventually claims that
he never did anything wrong
and points to clauses in
the settlement agreement,
specifically disavowing
any wrongdoing.
But unlike with his other
indiscretions and misdeeds,
McMahon quickly discovers
he can't just turn these charges
into part of the show.
-This is a publicly
traded company.
These are SEC violations.
-And that has apparently led
to the Department of Justice
and the SEC making
their own inquiries.
-The billionaire CEO
and primary shareholder
of World Wrestling Entertainment
stepping back temporarily
from his leadership roles
within the company.
-And then another story broke.
That one was talking
about coercing a woman...
You know, paying a
woman $7.5 million
and coercing her to have
sex through his power.
And then when she stopped
having sex with him, he demoted her.
And I read this
and it was just like,
I don't know that
he can survive this.
-Nobody has said one
time, "I am innocent.
I did not do that."
-If you write something about
Vince that is negative to him,
he goes after you right away.
I thought, "Vince
and his lawyers
are gonna go
after those writers."
He did not touch them.
And I go, "Oh, my
God, it's all true."
-The... The silence is
just absolutely deafening
because that's not Vince,
not when he's not guilty.
-The accumulation
of all the things
that occurred over the years,
whether you want
to call it karma
or whatever you want to call it,
they... they did finally
catch up with him.
-And at least one person
essential to Vince McMahon's
success has jumped ship...
Linda McMahon.
-Well, you have to remember
that Vince and Linda,
they really built it together.
So there was that sense of
even though all these things
are happening to our
marriage and these scandals,
and Vince himself has
admitted many times
that he was certainly a lot
less than faithful to Linda,
they continued on,
and I think part of it was
because of this empire
that they had built together.
-They've been separated
for quite some time.
I-I was told this around 2012,
but again, we get
back to wrestling.
Everything's a secret.
-Well, now it looks
twice as bad for Vince
because now it looks like
he was cheating on his wife
when the reality was
they weren't together.
-But now her involvement
with the company is nil.
-Are you concerned at
all about the investigation,
the hush money?
-Come on. Come on.
I told you I was here
to talk about AFPI.
-And after 40 years
at the helm of WWE,
Vince McMahon steps down,
using those same four words
he delivered defiantly to
his fans just days earlier.
He sent out a tweet.
-Earlier tonight,
my father,
Vince McMahon,
retired from WWE.
[ Crowd booing ]
-I don't think anybody
would have ever said
that Vince McMahon would
have ever stepped down.
-The idea that Vince is gone...
It was bizarre because
everybody figured
that he was gonna
do this until he died.
-The WWE is his life.
-And of course, it's wrestling,
so a lot of fans believed,
eh, he'll be back,
or he's not really gone.
-I'm sure wherever
he's hunkered down,
he is doing as much WWE
work as he can get away with.
-It's a complicated ending
for the most divisive figure
in sports entertainment.
-Obviously, he was
extremely flawed,
but as a businessman,
as a wrestling promoter...
fantastic.
-I think he'll be remembered
as the most dominant
wrestling promoter
there ever was.
-And to his daughter, now
left to manage the WWE,
he remains a man
worthy of admiration.
-Thank you, Vince.
Thank you, Vince.
[ Crowd chanting
"Thank you, Vince" ]
-The bad of Vince McMahon
is what he did to get there,
the bodies that were left in the
wake for one reason or another.
We're slowly cleaning up
this mess that Vince had left,
and the show is
improving dramatically.
There was concern that
stock price was gonna plummet.
Vince McMahon, the only guy
that can make wrestling work
in this country, is gone,
and instead, he is gone and
it's actually doing better now
than it was doing
before he left.
-To me, it's really all
about money and power.
When you reach a certain status
and when you
reach a certain level,
I do believe you believe
you are bulletproof.
How could you have
done these things
without the fear
of it coming out?
You honestly thought these women
were gonna sign a piece of paper
and you were just
gonna get off scot-free?
-When Vince McMahon dies, he
did not want the tombstone to say,
"Vince McMahon, world's
greatest wrestling promoter."
Vince wanted to be that
guy who had a movie studio,
who promoted boxing,
who ran the rival
football league to the NFL.
That's the guy he wanted to be.
And at the end of the day,
he tried in all those places,
and he failed
everywhere, except one.
-Would I call him
an evil person?
I would not.
I would call him a
complicated person
who was enabled by an industry
that allows people
with a dark side
to entertain that dark
side with impunity.
-And in the end, his
legacy is that he was
a... a guy with a lot of money,
and he thought he was
above it all, and he wasn't.
-I really believe it's
the tip of the iceberg.
It's the carny business.
And what happens in
wrestling stays in wrestling,
but all it takes is one person,
and then those floodgates open.
So, I-I... unfortunately, I just
think you're gonna see more.