You know, boss, we talk about lap serendipity, don't we. Uh
yeah, it's a thing. It's a thing, and if ten years hasn't
proved it to you, then then well you're wrong. Yeah yeah, that's
the evidence says. And we had this notion to cover January twenty third,
nineteen eighty four, forty years since Hulkgan won his first WWF championship, weeks
ago, months ago, even Yeah, yeah, and what do we know.
We're approached by a wonderful author here who's joining us now on the podcast
by the name of Brad Belucian, who's written a book that will be coming
out April second, called The six Pack on the Road in Search of WrestleMania.
Massive iron cheek fan as a kid and channeled that passion into a road
trip where he sat down and interviewed in fascinating detail a lot of the players
that were key to the WWF in nineteen eighty four, and many folks who
are actually on this Madison Square Garden card. Amazing at the least of which,
of course, is the iron Cheek who on the Road in Search of
Wrestlmania. That sounds like most wrestling fanily. Yeah, yeah, we'll be
on the road in search of WrestleMania quite soon. It's exactly correct, and
just you know, that short lived, that tantalizing little taste that the Iron
Sheet god of being the top guy in the business, but just transitional and
as the short lived biographer. As Brad explains in the Book of the Iron
Cheek, he knows him quite well and spent a lot of time with the
man. So we're privileged to have Brad Buluccian joining us. Thanks for being
here, man, Jack and JP, thanks for having me. Really appreciated.
So this is a great piece of business. We've gotten to look at
the advanced copy and just orient our listeners right off the top. You wrote
a book called The Wax Pack, which was about opening a package of baseball
cards in nineteen eighty six and resolving to find out what happened to everybody who
happened to be in that random pack of cards. It was a hit book.
This is sort of the same, a little less memoir, a little
more pursuing. You know, in person interviews, I suppose tell us about
what set you on this mission and what you did to accomplish it. Yeah,
someone asked me recently, you know, as they always do, like
what are your books about? And I you know, there's the easy answer,
right, I guess book wrestling. The other book was about baseball.
But the truth is really that I I've managed to get away now with writing
books about the things that I loved when I was six years old. It's
just kind of childhood passions that most people grow out of, I guess,
but not us, right, And I'm glad that I haven't, because it's
it's been. It's a dream when your job and your and your passion overlap.
And so the wax pack. I grew up collecting baseball cards growing up
in Rhode Island, and I always, I think, I always wanted to
know whether it's baseball players or nineteen eighties WWF wrestlers, Like who are these
people? Right? Like we know them as these larger than life as the
cliche goes over the top characters or baseball players. You know, they seem
like these gods on the field, but they're people, right they you know,
they go to the back from just like all of us do. So
I wanted to understand them now as an adult, like kind of humanize them,
figure out who they are, get to really know them and that's that
was the main motivation for both of these books, and for the six pack
it was kind of twofold one was revisiting this crazy Iron Cheek story from my
youth. I guess you could say, at forty three, I'm no longer
young, and I the first line of the book is the iron I disagree
with that. I disagree with that as a as an almost forty three year
old myself. All right, all right, So the first line of the
book is the Iron Chek just threatened to kill me. And that's set in
two thousand and five, and that's the backstory. It's the prologue for the
book where I had gotten to know him personally and had we had we're working
on a that's basically a biography of him, and it went completely sideway.
And then flash you know, then I go into the y and all that
in the book. But and then flash forward seventeen years, twenty twenty two,
and I get on the road looking for a reunion with him, but
also not just about him, but who were the other people that wrestled on
the card when he won the championship. And then of course a month later,
when Hogan comes in and tracking down other guys that were you know,
six guys that wrestled on that December card plus Hulk plus Vince McMahon and and
it's kind of the road story of that journey, but also their backstories and
kind of a reckoning with myth versus reality. I like to say, the
book's about identity, It's about myth versus reality, It's about who these people
really are. Sounds like a certain podcast, I know, I think I've
heard of that particular podcast. Yeah, that's a stream that resonates around these
parts, Brad, So let's get right at it. You mentioned December.
So the wrestlers you tracked down were on the December nineteen eighty three show where
Iron Cheek de thrones Bob Beckland to become champ. At the time, perhaps
deep in the recesses of Vince Junior's mind, it was clear that the plan
was to transition to Hogan. The plan was always, you know, I
think pretty well understood by the wrestling intelligentsia such as it existed in nineteen eighty
three that the Iron Cheek was not going to be any kind of long term
champion, but who he was going to, you know, hand the mandl
Off to was the subject of some mystery because Hogan himself didn't come in until
the last week of eighty three on the Saint Louis taping, and within a
month he's winning the title in Madison Square Gardens. So let's go right at
it, iron cheek. What did you gather in the time that you spent
with him, which is considerable and actually unique about his feelings and thoughts about
winning the title for such a fleeting amount of time, culminating in him doing
the honors here January twenty third, nineteen eighty four. Yeah's and let's let's
dissect this a little bit. So Chic comes into the WWA in like September
of eighty three, right out of Georgia. He's been down in Georgia for
a while. This is his second run with the WWF. You he came
in in seventy nine, right right at the height of the hostage crisis under
the great Hossein Arab name. Now he's back. He always had a good
relationship with Vince Senior. He always he liked the WWF. It was even
then seen as the big time. And as far as I from my research,
again, I spent many many hours in many different periods of time with
the Iron Cheek, with Kasro Vasiri, and he he didn't know when he
was being brought back that he was going to become champion. In fact,
a lot of I mean, Vince Senior, you know, is sort of
in the background, is making his moves right. He's first, he tries
to buy out Vince Gania, sorry Vern Gania, Vern refuses. Then he
says, okay, well I'm gonna I'm gonna get Hulkgan and he has his
sort of secret meeting with Hulk in Minneapolis in late nineteen eighty three and lays
the groundwork for Hulk coming in. But you know, back then, you
have to remember, you know, there's no Internet, there's no Dave Meltzer
is like twenty one years old and just starting out, so there's not like
the whole Dirt Cheek community, and even the wrestlers didn't really know. The
wrestling community didn't really know that Vince Junior had bought the company in June of
eighty two. That was done in a hotel room in New York, very
quietly. So Vince Senior is effectively still running the show, at least as
far as most people know. He's doing the booking at Madison Square Garden.
You know, Vincent, the two Vince's are kind of, I think clashing
a little bit over who's who's in charge. Bill Edie talked to me a
lot about that because he was brought in and over the years people had speculated,
you know, was Bill Edy supposed to be the transitional champion? Yeah,
he says he was talked to about it, and yeah, and you
know, he tells me that that basically Vince Senior said, no, we're
not going to do that because if you if you're if you're a champion for
only a month, it's going to hurt you. And so he's like,
I don't want to do that to you. Right. So I don't think
there was ever It never went that far where Bill Edie was going to be
the guy but chic, you know, he never he he didn't know for
sure until I mean, he had a pretty good idea in the in the
weeks leading up to the December twenty sixth card that he was going to win
the belt because and the way we know that is that he told his wife
Carol to come to the event, which she never did. She had never
been to Madison Square Garden and all of a sudden, he's like insistent that
you need to be there at this show, and you know, then you
have the Bob Backlin factor, right. And originally Bob Becklin there was going
to be a chapter in the book about him, and I actually went to
Princeton, Minnesota. I met with all of his high school classmates. I
spent many hours with his biographer, Rob Miller. You know, Bob allegedly,
from what I can tell, is really suffering from CTE and it is
not really of good mind. So I knew I wasn't going to be able
to really talk to him, and I just didn't. I didn't feel like
that chapter worked. But based on what Rob, his biographer, shared with
me, you know, Bob thought he was going to get the belt back
at the January twenty third card because Vince, I think it was Vince Junior
even had told him, you know, yeah, you know, we're gonna
do a rematch. But all the whole time, you know, Vince Junior
knew that he was bringing in Hulk, right and after so chic you know,
Backland comes up with the finish in the December match so he can save
face to do the towel throwing with Arnold Scoland. You know, Backland is
okay dropping the belt because they have they had to wrestled back in the AWA
in the mid seventies. They knew each other, they liked each other,
they were both amateurs. Chic liked Sheik appreciated Backland so much that he gave
him a set of his Persian clubs. They're called meals me e l sh
at that match that Backland had kept for years. And I think in one
of those WWE Hidden Treasures documentaries they go to Backland's house in Glastonbury, Connecticut,
and they actually were able to get get to see and I think Acchoir
that pair of Persian clubs. Wow. And so so Backland loses to cause
to Chic. But then right after, you know, you know, December
twenty seventh, Hulk Cogan shows up at a at a TV taping in Saint
Louis at the Chase Hotel, and then it's obvious that you know, Backland
realizes that, you know, he's not going to get They tell him we're
not gonna to do the rematch, and I think Backman always felt really betrayed
by that, and you know, Chek told me he didn't know how long
he was going to be the champion, Like they weren't. They weren't laying
that out for him. I think he wanted to be champion as long as
he could be. He The thing about Cause is that he really, even
though intellectually he knew that pro wrestling is a work, it became almost shoot
like for him because he had that shoot background, and becoming the champion was
a big deal, right. It's like he almost he was able to suspend
his own disbelief to really buy into like, I am the WWF champion and
was always and forever super proud of that. I mean so much so that,
as you know, he would just cut promos in his living room basically
with me in two thousand and five talking about how he was like the greatest,
you know, he was the WWF champion. And it's you know,
some of that is the fact that, like so many of these guys that
I wrote about, they became their character in real life. You know,
that the work became a shoot. And so I think that you know,
Chic wanted to hold the belt, but then he realized, what you know,
Hulk, they were gonna switch it and then there's the whole story about
vern Gana threatening to or asking cause to break Hogan's leg, and that whole
things, which I also wrote about in the book. Yeah, yeah,
that's a certainly a wrinkle to it. So do you think do you think
when iron Chek talks about how he should have had a longer run with the
belt, that's just him sort of bitterly realizing how much money WWF was going
to go on to make in the transition, and then at the time he
didn't really have that much of a hang up about it and knew what the
score was in terms of transitional championship run. I always wondered about that,
is that him sort of you know, the iron cheek the character would be
pissed off about the short run, but the iron cheek character also wouldn't acknowledge
that, you know, the matches were worked and that he did the job,
so to speak. I wonder where you I think the you know,
the retrospective element comes into his regret that the title reign wasn't longer, or
if he wanted a long rain from the beginning. I think very few pro
wrestlers look at the business and right rightfully so especially of the era we're talking
about, as in this sort of holistic long term you know what's going to
be best for everyone, you know way, I mean there it was a
completely cutthroat world, right, and so I think even if I mean cause
being a longer champion would not have been good for the business in the WWF,
which ultimately affects everyone in the WWF because you're all getting paid out of
the same pot. So I mean, it was the right call for Hogan
to get the belt in January of eighty four. But yeah, selfishly because
number one, bigger paydays, you know, Kuse wanted to be championed for
longer, and number two pride. You know, the guys had a ton
of pride. He was a very prideful man. And again he really loved
being the champion, and so I think, yeah, he would have loved
to have held it for longer. And his family relished the belt too.
I mean, if I took you spoke at link with his wife, who
we sort of saw on camera for the first time in the A and E
biography that came out in the last batch of shows they did with WWE last
year, and she's fascinating. She's just a Minnesota gal who who met this
guy and just started a family with him. And she was there when he
won the belt from Bob Backland. And I think she told you that she
was shocked when he actually got the nod and got the belt. That she's
sitting there at ringside while she knew something was about to happen, because like
you said, she was invited to come along for the first time. She's
she did not expect until that towel hit the ring for Arnold Scoland that her
husband was going to win the belt, right, Yeah, I mean so
much. So in the you know, I write about how like she's like
she's popping, right, she's like cheering, she's she's all all happy.
But she's at ring by ringside. So you got to think about this,
this you know, attractive, young blonde woman so excited about the Iron Chic
in nineteen eighty three winning the championship. At a certain point, that's not
good for your own self preservation, right, So I think you know,
she because the fans, the fans were in shock, the fans were livid.
I mean, there was no there's no nuance in nineteen eighty three about
the evil Iranian character, right, I mean, this is a straight stereotype,
and the fans, the fans are you know, you got we forget
that in that era. I mean the Iron Sheet told his daughters, don't
tell your friends at school who I am because they might hurt you. You
know, people slashed his tires, they put sugar in his gas tank,
they threatened to call it in death threats where he had to be held off
of the show. It was no joke to live that character twenty four to
seven. And that's the thing that I mean, imagine if in nineteen eighty
Harrison Ford had to go into the safe way being Han solo, right right,
Like, it's just it's just crazy. So yeah, Carol was and
I I can't say enough good things about Carol in terms of like her keeping
the family together. She didn't give a shit about wrestling, you know,
she thought it was this weird, gruesome thing. But but she's right,
by the way, Yeah, she loved her husband and she was the one
that kept it all together all those years. That's remarkable. So we have
a situation here where Bob Eckland is kind of, you know, reaching the
expiration of his shelf life, and you know, he's just not obviously not
the guy for Vince Junior's vision, and that's taking shape before we can appreciate
necessarily what's happening. She is the in between guy, and he would go
on to sort of make a I'm not a career that's the wrong word.
But we know his reputation to the two thousands, you know, bombed High,
Howard Stern, other people tweeting for him, people gathering around him and
trying to make him do funny things like a jukebox or something, and he
goes off on Hogan, goes off on Hogan, just totally like scorched earth
rhetoric about Hogan the whole time. Do you think his personal animis towards Hogan
that we saw expressed when he was being sort of paraded around like that for
a decade, was true animus against Tulkogan or do you think it was him
working? I think it was eighty percent working twenty percent. Shoot, think
think about like, let's say that you have issues with JP, right,
I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure you don't not at all. No,
yes, but if you had issues with JP, but imagine your whole
life and career is about cutting promos and being in a character right, not
not not the real Jack, but this exaggerated character Jack. And then you
have issues with JP, and then someone is over and over again putting a
microphone in your face and asking you to be entertaining and talk about talk about
JP. You may even if you have a little bit of issue with JP,
you're gonna you're going to exaggerate, You're going to launch into you know,
this over the time criticism of JP. Right, that's kind of what
it's like for the Iron Chic, Like he was pissed at Terry Boleya because
in eighty four when he didn't break his leg, Terry Bolea came back to
the locker room after the match and said, Chiki, baby, I owe
you one. And you have to remember the Iron sheet. Cosro Vasii is
from a small town in Iran, born in the forties, where there's this
thing called javan mardi in Persian culture. It's a Farsi word which basically means
honor, integrity, being a man of your word. And despite all the
drugs and all the craziness that muddled kasro Vaziri's brain, you know, you
always are kind of the person you were when you were ten or twelve years
old. And he never really that was always inside of him. And so
when Terry Bolea told him, I owe you one, kasro Vaziri believed that.
And so years later, when now Cause is coming off his colonel Mustafa
run in nineteen ninety two, he's over. He's fifty years old, his
body is breaking down. He doesn't didn't really save his money well enough,
still addicted to drugs. He needs a job, he can still go a
little bit. He he apparently calls Terry at w CW and looking for a
job, and Terry never returns his call. Now I've tried to fact check
this. I didn't get to talk with Terry for the book. And Eric
Bischoff, who's one of his best friends, I asked him a bit about
this. He had no recollection of Cause ever calling the w w CW office
or asking Terry for a job. It doesn't mean it didn't happenwy five years
ago. He doesn't remember anything that happened twenty years ago. But but you
know, I think Cause was hurt by that, and so he had beef
with Terry. But again, when you're on Howard Stern and you know,
and you know that everyone loves when you go on these these obscenity filled rants.
He's gonna, he's gonna, you know, choose it up. Were
you were you there with him for any of those? No, that was
after the book fell apart, so okay, okay, part when it became
obvious that Couse was not in a state to be able to work on it,
and that's good. Right after that was when he went on his whole
you know, media blitz of all that. I don't know if we've talked
much about it, JP, I mean, how familiar are you with the
story around Ganya offering money for Chic to break Hogan's leg? No? I
just I always think about who someone else did that? Didn't they someone else?
Didn't Vince have someone to do that, want someone to do that?
Well, there was the offer that Brody was going to end bush WrestleMania one.
There was talk that Vince tried to get Harley to not too starcade right
right, right right, It's all part of this, this sort of I
vaguely remember the breaking of the leg because I feel like I feel like we
talked about that when we did the aw A series. Yeah, we also
did Colisseum collection, which includes a Colossum video where Sheic beats Backland and we
talked a lot about the backdrop. Yeah, I wonder Brad about that story,
and of course Greg ganya denies it. His His qualification though, is
always that you know, if it did happen, it doesn't sound like something
Burned would do. I didn't know about it and never never told me about
it, and he kind of leaves it there. But you know, Sheik
says it like it's sworn fact. Hogan's gone back and forth. Hogan will
go on a podcast now and you know, Joe Rogan and just offer it
as part of his lore, whereas in the past he was on the Michael
Schiavello Show and when he did a sit down and interview with him and he
said, that's that's iron Chic, that's his story. I don't know.
And then here Sheik saying that Hulk knew enough about it to say thank you,
Sheiky baby afterwards. I think this one could be a case of truth
and fiction and one it's sixty forty one way or the other. But I'm
not sure we'll ever know. I think it's true, and I'll tell you
why. The two people that had said said consistently their story hasn't changed are
Cause and Bob reimis Sergent Slaughter. I don't think Terry Belea knows. I
don't think Hogan knows. I think it's the second or third. And I
don't you know, Greg Gania, I don't think he really knows, you
know, And I don't really I don't know. Never I've never interviewed Greg
Gania about it. But the thing is like that story was making the round
way back in the mid eighties, and it's consistently when something when someone doesn't
change, you know. It's like Tony Outlass told me in the book when
he talks about the Bruiser Brodie situation. He's like, because people have questioned
at the veracity of that, and Tony said, look, and I think
Tony told me his mom told him this. Right. If if you're telling
the same story and your story never changes, it's probably true, right.
I mean, it's hard to maintain a lie for all those years if you
know and tell the same story with consistency, And you know, Tony Outlists,
as far as I can tell, has always been consistent about what happened
to Bruiser Brody that day cosro VASII. Since the mid eighties, that story
from him has always been consistent, and I don't see the knowing what kusro
Vasia was like in nineteen eighty four, I don't see the motivation really for
him making that up. And part of the story is him going to Sergeant
Slaughter's hotel room a couple of days prior and asking him what he should do.
Bob Sargent Slaughter has also always told that story in a consistent basis.
So why would both Bob Riemers lie about that and cos ROBASII? Right?
I mean, are they gonna it's a I'm more of a parsimony fan,
you know, Ockham's razor. The simplest explanation is usually the one that's true
versus a conspiracy theorist. And so I think it's true. That's great,
that's great. Did you come down so definitively? Did you have something there?
JP? Sorry no, no, I was just agreeing. Sorry,
no, not at all with Slaughter. He is on the show. I'm
getting some echo guys. Yeah, I hear that. Did you change your
settings? Zea Brad? Okay, no, no, all right, that
was weird. Just one second when I marked that for edit. Well,
I hear it again too. All right, that's okay, I think we're
good. Okay, So you mentioned Bob Remis Sargent Slaughter. He's on this
January twenty third, nineteen eighty four card in MSG against Ivan Putski doing all
of his you know, he was a heel still at the time. They
had yet to do the big baby face turn where he stepped up to Iron
Cheek after Sheik lost to Hogan and became, you know, the flag waving
guy defending America from the you know, the slander of the things that Iron
Cheek was saying about his proud nation. It's fascinating in the book, you
actually make tracks to find where bob Remis is at. You know, his
agent keeps him at a distance from people that you know clearly know that he
ca fabe the whole Marine thing and that that came out in recent years.
So that was the first thing that came to my mind when you were saying
that, you know, Bob Remis has never changed a story about Chic.
He's also never changed a story about serving in the Marine Corps. Excellent point.
So tell me about actually trying to do what I think in somewhere in
the recesses of our hearts we kind of wish we could do is just walk
up to the guy and ask him the question you actually had the nuts to
do it. Tell me what happened. Are we talking about when I went
up to Sergeant Slaughter, or well, when you went up to his house?
I mean, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So,
Bob Remis, Sergeant Slaughter was one of the people that refused to talk
to me for the book. And you know this happened in the wax pac
too, where not all the people I want to interview want to talk to
me. So then it's the question as a writer, you know, what
do you do? And my answer is usually I'm going to do whatever I
can to try to get the story and talk to somebody, even if it
means some pretty, you know, outlandish things. So I, after having
gone to his hometown in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, found his high school football
coach, who's remarkably still alive and doing really well, found one of his
childhood friends, went and tracked down his high scho year books and kind of
told his whole backstory as best I could from other reporting. I said,
Okay, well, now I have to go and not literally knock on the
guy's door. So I went to Burlington, North Carolina and tried to see
if he would be home and hopefully not get arrested. And he ended up
not being there, but a couple of things. One I got to I
talked to his neighbor for a while, I got to see where he lived,
I got to, you know, share that story, and I actually
did, you know, talk about serendipity. I did end up face to
face with Bob Remis at the end of the book at the Iron Cheek's funeral,
which was crazy, like he's the one guy. So I spend all
this time tracking down these guys. You know, I don't I don't ever
get to see Sergeant Slaughter. I've given up by chance. A week after
I finished writing the book, Iron Cheek dies Causuro of Vizieri dies like I
don't you know, I was not expect that. And then I got invited
to his private funeral by his daughters and I show up there. The only
person from the wrestling community, I mean, of the actual wrestlers or promoters
who is there is actually Sergeant Slaughter. Bob Remis, so funny how that
worked out. Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. So that's the that's the
reamis part of it. We also have the Bill I'd part of it.
We've mentioned him already, of course, the Future Demolition Acts. He's in
his masked Superstar at the time, and as you mentioned, has talked about
over the years and talked to you about the notion that he may have been
under consideration for this Backland to Hogan transition at one point. Now he's fascinating
in the book because he comes with a kind of like a history of litigation
against WWF that that really allowed him a glimpse, a unique glimpse perhaps into
the ways Vince Junior was changing the way WWF was doing business, you know,
suddenly, and I'd love for you to talk to our listeners about this.
Vince is handing out pieces of paper to the wrestlers asking them to sign
away under the guise of a booking agreement, basically every right they could ever
have to their intellectual property and everything else. In Bill id you know,
Demolition is in the Hall of Fame for a reason, and it's because he
took Vince to court for years and years and years over who deserves. The
royalty streams from the creation of the idea of demolition. Whether those early contracts
were sufficient to sort of claim the dominion that Vince wanted to claim over every
dollar generated by Bill Id for the rest of his natural life. I'm exaggerating
a bit, but not much. And so by virtue of those of those
lawsuits, he was able to get access to and put into the public record
copies of some of the contracts and agreements that were being handed out right around
the time we're talking about wherehul Commania starts in the WWF. Can you help
orient our listeners a bit to what Bill Id teaches us about how Vince was
trying to let's say, you know, paper up the deal at WWF.
Sure, let me, I'll circle back to the Let me let me ask
you guys in the book, so I write about Cogan, Iron Cheek,
Tito Santana, Tony Atlas, Sergeant Slaughter, Jose Luis Rivera. I think
that's as well, Yeah, Bill bill Edie, Yeah, of those guys,
which would you guess is which which do you think did not in their
lives really become and kind of in real life turn into their character? Oh
boy, I don't know. I mean, Tito didn't have to turn into
a character. I mean, that's him, that's merced Saliz on the mic.
And I would say the same for Jose Luis Rrera though he was just
sort of like, yeah, this is fascinating. You went to Puerto Rico
and saw him in his element, and he's working. You know, he's
working when you talk to him. I don't know, I would say Tito.
I would say, if I met Tito Santana in person, I'd feel
like, that's the guy who had the intercontinental title, right, And I
think that. But I think with Tito, what you have to remember is
that in the book I talk about this the whole issue where he discovered he
illegitimate child, right yeah, yeah, his daughter. That's the kind of
thing you mean, then there's nobody in the business that, right. Well,
I think when I fell with Tito, I think what was interesting was
that he you know, people called it the Tito thing right where he was
like this wholesome, never screwed around, you know, totally clean cut family
man, yea. And he prided himself on that. He wrote about it
in his book, which was kind of the Tito Santana character like this virtuous
babyface all, you know, all virtuous, good guy. And then you
know, very inconveniently to that, to that storyline, he finds out a
few years ago that he had a daughter and you know, and it's his
family's upset, and it really rocked him to the core that like, oh,
actually, I'm human. You know, I'm not Tito Santana. I'm
said Salicice. But I think he even said Salice kind of bought into the
mythology of Tito Santana to some extent, being the exception to the rule.
And what happened was a reminder that everyone's human, right, So I would
say that like Jose Luis is one of them, and the fact that he
is one guy that did not become the gimmick, and part of that is
because he was not a star, right, He was basically a jobber.
And I think one of the cautionary tales of this whole book, along with
the wax Pack, is the baseball players and the wrestlers that were not the
biggest stars are probably the happiest in the long run. You know. The
tortoise and the hair, Oh yeah, totally sure. But the other part
and circling back to your question, I would say Bill Edy is the other
guy. And I think my hypothesis about why Bill Edy never became the mass
superstar, Demolition never became the characters because he was always under a mask,
right, he was always his face was always obscured, so he could go
through his whole life, even at the peak of his fame, and not
get recognized, which is a huge difference versus the other guys that had to
kind of play their character all the time. Yeah, so it's interesting.
So Bill Edy was a guy that stood up to Vince, as you were
saying, always very independent minded. You know, he had gone to college,
He had a career as a high school history teacher and psychology teacher and
coach before he went into wrestling, and he had that to fall back on.
So in the eighties, in the mid eighties, when Vince is starting
his expansion, he starts putting these boilerplate contracts in front of the talent,
saying I need you to sign this, basically intimating that you're gonna you're not
going to have a job if you don't sign this. And the contract makes
these guys basically pledge, you know, all of their they can't work for
anyone else without Vince giving them permission, and even more importantly, they have
to give Vince is not on the hook for any zero dollars in merchandising.
Literally, in these contracts it says the wrestlers have the right to zero.
That's right. That's right. So as an example, I was able to
really pour through the lawsuit that Bill eventually filed in nineteen ninety one against the
WWF and Vince. Here's an example. In one quarter of nineteen ninety one,
Bill's Demolition Acts action figure sold two hundred and twenty five thousand, nine
hundred and twelve units. It's a hell of a lot of demolition acts JP.
How much do you think Billy Edy deserved of that? Okay, the
gross the gross revenue to the WWF was eight hundred and ten thousand, nine
hundred eighty five dollars and eighty four cents eight hundred and ten grand off one
figure. JP. How much how much does Bill deserve? Well, I
mean he wasn't under contract at the time, so deserve anything. That's exactly
right. Brad thoughts, well, I mean even if he was under contract,
he still wouldn't get anything in the contract. They don't have to get
anybody that works. Wow, Wow, the ball the balls to do it
that way. I was one of those people who bought it to I was
one of the two hundred whatever thousand, ninety. Out of the generosity of
his heart, Vince gives Bill eleven three, which is one point four percent
of his own action figure. You know, we used to joke Brad about
how Vern would take ninety percent. Vince joke six percent. That's right,
Yeah, yeah, Well no, Bill, Billy, he's a smart guy.
No wonder he's pissed. Let alone. The most underreported, untold story
of all this era is now granted. Vince McMahon was a genius when it
came to being always at the vanguard of the distribution of content in terms of
he jumped on the cable wagon, then he jumped on the closed circuit wagon,
that he jumped on the pay per view wagon, and when he made
the transition from closed circuit to pay per view around nineteen eighty eight, and
for the next several years where he made a killing, and this was the
crux of Bill's lawsuit was he did not share, he did not give the
talent pay per view revenue or a cut of the pay per view revenue as
those shows were happening. Right, So yes, at WrestleMania six, Bill
got a bigger payday for that fighting that match than he would for a regular
house show. But it wasn't like Vince was looking at all the pay per
view receipts and saying, oh, I'm going to give this percentage to this
wrestler. Yeah. Right, So think about how much profit, how much
money Vince made by not not sharing those pay per view revenues with the talent.
Yeah, it's it's as as Vince Junior modernized the WWF's business infrastructure and
made it, you know, a bona fide television business, he did not
modernize the way the talent was compensated and contracted like the TV business that he
so desperately wanted to be a part of and accepted into. Yet his talent
is working like, you know, sort of like one off basis, sort
of like on a blind basis, being cut these checks. And you know,
you talk about it too, Brad. This is so important to cause
into so many others. That first line of LJA and action figures came before
I think Vince realized that if he doesn't get really really tight with how much
he's giving these guys, the explosion of revenue that's going to come from all
this licensed merchandise is going to be such that these guys are probably gonna have
enough money to just quit. I mean, it's amazing how much that first
generation of LJN payouts fat and wallets at WWF, and it caused so many
talents I think across the country. To look at New York is like,
you absolutely have to go. The influx kind of follows and by the second
line, by the second time those checks are out, they're much smaller,
right right, Yes, Vince, definitely button that up real fast. And
to your point, you know, the other part of the Bill eaed story
is that later on he's part of that group lawsuit against the WWE that had
to do with CTE, right, And that's that's a more contemporary issue in
the sense that I mean I was able to track down the law you're from,
the from their side and kind of dig into the details of of the
CTE issue, and also the fact that these wrestlers to this day are classified
as independent contractors, which is insane. I don't know how you're an independent
contractor when you can only work for one person. Yeah, yeah, well,
JP, what do you think I mean? I I I agree.
I've always thought it's one of the biggest, one of the biggest shams in
a business full of shams, and uh uh that they As a performer myself,
it's like, you know, all all all we want is you know,
all I want is the is the job stability. All I want is
to work for a company. And yet here they are and like kind of
have all the benefits that come with working for a company in a way,
you know, like I'd like to be able to be an actor, you
know, at a place and be like this is this is it all here?
Da da da da. You're you're here for you know, however many
years and you're just gonna work. And but this it's like, no,
you get the stability of being under a company, but you also get you're
also a private contractor, which is just complete. I don't know how they
get I've always wonder how they get away, but I never understand how they
get away with it. They've they've fought back several challenges to it. You
know, in Vince's trial, it comes out the CFO testifies the I R
S looked at it and determined that it was kosher. I mean, I
just don't understand how they can be how they can be exclusive to one person
and be and be one company and be a private contractor you're a free You're
free to work wherever you want pal but will fire you right in fact,
I don't see the problem. There's no problem stand on business, you know,
listen, I mean you know we we we we have we have clauses
in our contracts that dictate exactly how independent you actually are. Sounds right to
me, Man, Brad, you do a great job tracking down a couple
of guys that were involved with Vince at the very formation of WrestleMania and the
television business, going back to when he was leasing the Cape Cod Colisseum and
in fact who came up with the name WrestleMania. Tell me about cracking down
that early. I think it was the CFO right that you were able to
define and talk to. It's just awesome stuff. Yeah, that was I
was amazed at how many of these guys that worked in the front office at
the WWF in the mid eighties had not been had not either been approached or
had not talked about, you know, the history before, because there's been
books and projects that have been written about this era. And I was really
proud that I was able to talk to Bob McMullen, who was the CFO
who basically got the books in order starting in like nineteen eighty three. He
was there through through WrestleMania. I I was able to talk to Jim Troy,
who was like Vince's sidekick from nineteen eighty one eighty two. People don't
know that Vince his you know, really he got going with promoting hockey in
Cape Cod. He was he had the lease on the Cape Cod Coliseum.
That was he and Linda were just in the in a small office there.
That was their business. Well while Vince Senior was still booking Madison Square Garden
and all that. You know, Vince Junior and Linda were just focused on
that building and they needed they needed acts to come through. They got they
needed a regular revenue stream, so they were able to get the Cape Cod
Buccaneers to play there. And then through that they met Jim Troy, who
was a hockey player, and Jim became like a vice president of Titan Sports.
He was Vince's running buddy. He was, you know, his sidekick,
and he's the guy that was going out on the road and negotiating a
lot of those TV syndication deals in eighty four, eighty three, eighty four,
eighty five to get the WWF exclusively on TV in those markets. So
I was able to talk to him. I was able to talk to Nelson
Sweglar, who was the president kind of before Kevin done around. You know,
he was at the head of TV production and he was there for the
origin of the show TNT and primetime wrestling and all those things in the mid
eighties. I was able to talk to Edward Shooty, who was the editor
of WWF magazine, and his predecessor ed Helenski, who was brought in to
start the WWS first proprietary magazine, Tom Emmanuel, who was the publisher of
WWF magazine. So it was really great. I actually talked to I don't
know if I put this in the book, but George Scott, who was
the main booker who passed away his widow. I talked to Jean Scott,
his widow about I'm there. So I think I'm really proud of that that
reporting that I did to really get to those people. And part of that
is also, you know, so in my line of work, you're writing
about people and you may or may not get to interview them themselves. I
really try hard to be accurate and truthful and as objective as I can be,
And ultimately, when you come to a final analysis of somebody, you
have to just look at the you know, I'm also a scientist, I'm
a biologist, and you have to look at the weight of the evidence,
right, And so when you're evaluating someone like Vince McMahon, you know,
it's not enough to just talk to this person or that person. But when
you start to talk to all these people that work for the man and you
look at the weight of the evidence about what kind of person was he,
what kind of businessman was he? You know, the scale the seesaw tilts
a certain way, right, and you know it's never one hundred percent,
but you get a good idea of who these people were like, what these
people were like, and you mentioned, you know, that inner circle that
kind of passed quickly from Vince's orbit in those early days when you needed a
lot of support and help, and these folks, you know, they were
there for us a couple of years when it all was exploding. Bob McMullin
among them, and he adds a new wrinkle to the lore about where the
name russell Mania came from? Can you tell us about that? Yeah,
well, I always from my research, was told that Howard Finkel came up
with it, And Bob McMullen is like, nope, bullshit, it was
not. Yes, wow. He said he was in the room in eighty
one holly Hill Lane, which was the WWF's office, which I went and
visited and actually snuck into as part of the recording for the book. It's
still there. It's a it's a cool looking building. Saw you know,
walk the floor where was Vince's office all that, And Bob was in that
in that building and said they were all in a room. I think George
Scott was there, Vince was there, Linda might have been there, probably
Jim Troy and and they were trying to come up with a name, and
Vince wanted to call it the Colossal tossl Yes, I see no problem with
that name, and George Scott like basically shipped on the name and kind of
Vince was kind of embarrassed apparently, and then it was a guy named Rex
Jones who wasn't able to track down, but who was had a cup of
tea withou Tighten Sports back then and was in marketing, and he said,
well, you know, we got Hulkamania, like would makes sense, Let's
do WrestleMania And according to Bob no hesitation, that was one hundred percent the
origin of the name. I like that one. You know you mentioned Ockham's
razor and stuff. I think when somebody who's relatively anonymous gets the credit for
something, that's the truth. Right. If somebody who like makes their the
rest of their bones in their life being a visionary or being a lifer like
a Howard Finkle, you have to be a little more suspect. But when
you hear just this guy, this totally anonymous guy, with such conviction from
an outsider who could care less about who gets the pat on the back,
it seems like he cares a little bit about the fact that it's been ascribed
to others. Did you get the sense that Bob McMullen knew that people said
someone other than Rex gets the credit or do you think he just had an
ever and asked the question. I don't think he'd been asked me. I
don't think he really he didn't really keep up with all that. I think
he was just, you know, he was I think he was happy to
be able to fact check. Yeah, that's absolutely excellent. So we'll leave
you with this, because we're here to talk about the Sheikh, of course,
but really about Hulk Hogan as well, because he's the guy who's anointed
and crowned on this night, and wrestling really was never going to be the
same. The WWF definitely was never going to be the same. And you
can feel the gravity of that moment when you go back and watch this,
even forty years later. But you did your diligence trying to get in touch
with the Hulkster. And I'd love, Brad for you to conclude taking us
through what it's like these days to try to get audience with Hulk Hogan.
Well, yeah, it is not easy, because I and I had as
good a shot as you can get. I mean, I had interviewed Brian
Blair, good old b Brian Blair in his house, like when I was
in Tampa, who's one of Halt's closest friends now and b Brian Blair went
to bad for me and texted Terry and said, hey, this is a
good guy. He's a good you know, you should talk to him.
I guess Terry wrote back and said, well, I'm under I'm under some
contract from WWE. I need their permission. So I was able to actually
get in touch with WWE, and they gave and they gave me Bruce Pritchard
gave me permission to to talk to him as long as they could could look
at you know, what I was writing. And then I never heard back
from Terry, so, uh, you know, he probably didn't want to
talk to me. But I think, you know, he doesn't do a
lot of interviews anymore. I think he's very media shy. You know,
he's been you know, he's been through a lot with all of his scandals,
so he certainly he doesn't need the money, he doesn't need the publicity.
You know. I don't think he's you know, that interested in talking
to someone like me who he doesn't know at all. So I wasn't able
to talk to him, but I was, you know, I think I
did a good job, you know, knocking on the door or of his
childhood home and talking to people person that lives there now and tracking down his
his bandmates from Ruckus and from his childhood. I was able to fact talking
to Jerry Briscoe, I was able to fact check a couple of stories from
the Hogan mythology around how he you know, whether or not he really had
his leg broken in his first matt first training session, and you know what
his bus his wrestling career, I mean, his music career really was all
about. And then I just went to Hogan's hangout in Clearwater Beach and I
saw I saw him in person, and I briefly flirted with the idea of
going and embarrassing myself on stage by singing some song on karaoke, which would
mean I would get to like take a selfie with him. But I was
like, I don't think I need to do that. You know, I'm
just gonna report on what I'm what I'm seeing here. Yeah, well I
can't. That would have been amazing, that would have been absolutely amazing.
Yeah, I think I would have done that. I would have done it.
But that's I make a selfie, that's about it. I make an
ass out of myself at least ten times a day, So that's you know,
that's just the way it goes. We had a deal years ago,
Brad where we really wanted to get sometime with Brett Hart because we did an
exhaustive, like fifty hour history of WWF in ninety seven in Montreal and Wow.
I went up to him at a at a you know a convention,
actually, the Rhode Island Comic Con you would know it. And I'm in
line and I get up to the front and I say, Brett, can
you do an interview for the podcast? For a podcast? And yeah,
he's signing a thing in the signing line. He's like, no, no,
no, I listen to that. So I came back around and I
asked the guy who was with him, his handler, if he would do
an interview after the line had died down, and he said, yeah,
fifty bucks. I'm like what, okay, So I go and get the
money. I give it to him, and all of a sudden, yeah,
the guy that's got a running traffic for Brett introduces us to Brett,
and Brett looks at us, like what am I doing this for? And
the only thing I could think to tell him, Brad, was I paid
fifty dollars for it, So maybe that's a tool you can put you and
then yeah that we talked to him for like, you know, six minutes
about Montreal. So yeah, you know, olwould say to mean a lot
to us and all that, you know, so I was like a fan
right in his eyes, looking looking to do a little something for a podcast,
and uh and yeah, he talked to us a little bit. He
shot on Triple H which is great. Yeah, and and that was that
was pretty much that nothing new about Montreal, but you know, something that
we could author there. And it was just just I don't know, maybe
that's maybe carry some more fifties with you when you're on the road with these
boys. Sometimes sometimes sometimes twenties work too. Yeah, we we we approached
Brian Knobs at Wrestle Khan and it was like, you know, he brought
priban, can give us five minutes for a podcast and how much? And
we said, I don't know what. We said whatever cash we had in
our wallet, and he like asked for double We said sorry. He went
to walk away and then he said, okay, I'll do it for that.
So that's what's going on with these guys. That's what's going on in
their house. It's really interesting, right that, I mean you're bringing up
it's funny, but you're also bringing up a bigger point around what the wrestlers
are like in terms and that's something that in the book, like you know,
like Tony Atlis and Tito Santana, they demanded that I pay them,
which which as a journalist I really don't like, right, And so you
know, my my compromise was that, Okay, I'll pay you, but
I'm going to put that in the book. The reader, the reader needs
to know that that. Kudos to you for that, man, that that
is so like because you know, if that's the terms of engagement, like
what what the fuck? What are you supposed to do? Just not write
a book? But that's the key is disclosing it. And there are a
lot of interviews out there with a lot of wrestlers where they appear to be
just shooting up from the hip where that that compensation is not disclosed, and
that's that's a that's a demerit in my book. Yeah, And the thing
is that, so why is it that these wrestlers, you know, and
you just shared two examples, why do they demand to be paid when most
of the baseball players did not do that? Right? Right? Right?
And I think that this circles back to or a conversation earlier about them having
been exploited for so long by the promoters that creates this sort of paranoid and
overly entrepreneurial mentality that you know, everything that they do now they need to
be paid for, which I understand, I'm not I'm not saying that that's
unjustified. Well also though, too, it's because they don't have any any
protection, you know, Like you know, as as an actor, I've
got I've got two unions that that support me and that and that are going
to give me a pension when the time comes when I'm when I'm old enough.
So it's like that's probably problem too, is that there's no real These
guys are just out there and they're completely unprotected unless they protect themselves. And
I don't think when you're in the when you're in the throes of it,
I don't think you have the mentality to know that you know, in in
in twenty years or so, you're not going to want to do this anymore,
and you're not going to have any money because you're just you keep spending
it and you're not being smart with it. That's an excellent point and another
part you just alluded to, which we forget about again writing about whether it's
baseball or wrestling, these how old are you guys again? Forty and forty
three? By forty two, forty almost forty three. I'm forty three.
I don't know about you, guys, but like I'm a hell of a
lot smarter now than I was in my twenties. Yeah, oh yeah,
we forget that. Like these all these guys, these guys that we worship,
these these cultures we create, we will you know, baseball players,
wrestlers, they're in their twenties, basically at the at the peak of their
prime, and like they don't know what I mean, who are you in
your twenties right? Right? And further, who are you with millions of
dollars in your twenties? Exactly? And not just that, but like I
mean the cult you know, back of talking to the eighties on the road,
three hundred and twenty days a year, flying every day, you know,
on a being on a plane every day, and then you get to
the DA and there are women that are throwing themselves at you. There are
fans that worship you. They pay for everything you'd ever buy a drink.
I mean it's insane. Yeah, it's absolutely insane, and the book is
insane, and we can't urge you more to pick it up. It's out
April second, and it is the six Pack on the Road in Search of
WrestleMania. Our guest Brad Balukegan helping getting us oriented to the historic Night January
twenty third, nineteen eighty four, forty years ago, Hulk Hogan pins the
iron cheek to take the title. Brad, tell them how they can follow
you and what you're up to. Yeah, I look forward to listening to
your carverage. This has gotten me. It's exciting to talk about stuff.
It's you know, it's really fun to dig into it. So yeah,
book comes out April second. I'll be on tour in the Northeast and the
Midwest in April and May, so i'll get the word out about where i'll
be. Please come see me in person as you can. My website is
the bradpack dot com and I'm at Bradpacbooks on both Twitter and Instagram. So
yeah, and I'll be doing like also, Oh, one more thing that's
really fun is so when you write these nonfiction books, you only use five
percent of the material that you can come up with, right. I've always
thought like books are missing, especially nonfiction books, are missing an opportunity to
create what's what is essentially like the DVD of books, like a special edition,
bonus materials, deleted scenes. So I'll also be I have all these
documents, internal documents from the WWF from the eighties. I have all these
interviews I interviewed, you know, other wrestlers Ken Petera and Jim Brunzell and
Tony Geria that never made it into the book in any substantial way. So
I'm going to be including all of this bonus content on the website as part
of the package. Do you have the official attendance number for WrestleMania three?
No? Well that no, that wasn't in the mid curial. I don't.
Well, I'll have to go back. I might have the gate and
the number of pay per view buys, but we do know I think again
the weight of evidence suggests it was it was seventy eight to eighty thousand.
I want the exact number, though, be careful what you say about that
one, Brad. There are people who that's their whole personality, is that
attendance numbers. I know, I know, I know that's a big one.
But you know, I make a point whenever I write about it to
not cite I do not put the ninety three thousand number. Yes, yes
you do not. That's definitely a snick test that perhaps one could say you
passed. But yeah, definitely check it out. For no other reason,
then he was kind enough to come on TLF and help give more body to
our coverage of this historic night in wrestling. Brad, Thank you so much.
Thank you. I really appreciate you. Guys,