I am rarely speechless when it comes to thumbing through back issues of the official WWF Magazine, but this one has me close. From January 1995, we get this spectacular piece of work where the company is full on damage control mode following the steroid trials. And no less than Vince McMahon himself is front and center!
So if you weren’t around before say 1995 and you only followed the WWF through television, it is possible you thought Vince was just some geek in Zubaz and a bow tie. Don’t you fret, NEWS BEAT is here to clear all that up for you!
“Each week, millions of World Wrestling Federation fans are privileged (!!!!!!!) to see and hear Vince McMahon on the Federation Television Network – a network that current reaches over 50 countries and is available in seven different languages, with more to come in 1995. However, most fans don’t know of Vince’s other duties within the structure of the Federation. All that changed when he appeared on NewSporTalk (????) with its host, Chet Coppock (sounds like a guy from Ron Burgandy’s anchor team) on SportsChannel, a national sports talk forum.”
You would think it would be impossible to follow that up, but baby, we are just getting started! Vince tells us that he actually DID try steroids, but he was just experimenting and knew little about them. Thankfully, the WWF’s own drug testing unit has educated him in how they work!! Also, he was by his own account “COAXED” into doing them with Hulk Hogan in Atlanta. I am literally in tears laughing as I am typing – you cannot make this up.
We learn more about the trial next, that cost millions of dollars and lost opportunities. One in which the government “discovered absolutely no evidence in terms of alleged steroid distribution”, an event Vince clarifies to rubes as “the Larry, Curly and Moe of the judicial system…we were investigated more than the Warren Commission investigated the assassination of the president of the United States!”
A. MAZ. ING.
Further, we learn that Hulk Hogan did not, per Vince, have a “magnificently sculpted physique” because, and again, I am just quoting here, “HE HAD NO ABS.”
NO ABS!!!!!!! No wonder Vince let him go to WCW!!!!!
But the best is saved for last.
“I’d like to be perceived as an upstanding member of the corporate community,” he said. “I’d like to leave that to (son) Shane and my daughter Stephanie.”
And I am…done. Nothing I can say could ever possibly top this.