On May 23, 1999, Owen Hart — a k a the Blue Blazer — was preparing for a heroic moment.
The beloved skilled wrestler was to descend 70 feet from the rafters of a jam-packed Kansas City arena and into the ring — for a pay-per-view, World Wrestling Federation matchup against the Godfather.
But as an alternative of triumph, there was tragedy.
An equipment malfunction resulted in Hart plummeting to the bottom — leaving him with a severed aorta.
Paramedics rushed onto the sector floor and the audience first assumed it was all a part of the show.
Nevertheless it wasn’t.
Moments later, Hart stopped respiratory, and would soon be pronounced dead.
But Vince McMahon, WWF’s already scandal-plagued CEO who declined to supply comment on the allegations on this piece, allegedly couldn’t stomach the concept of putting a stop to the lucrative proceedings.
“Vince decreed that they need to keep going,” Abraham Josephine Riesman, writer of the brand new book “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America,” told The Post.
“So the remaining of the wrestlers needed to perform knowing their friend was gravely injured, probably dead, after which [later] knowing he was dead,” said Riesman, who interviewed greater than 150 people — a lot of them quite near McMahon — while researching the tell-all tome.
Riesman examines McMahon’s rise from an allegedly abusive childhood in impoverished Southern Pines, North Carolina, to a tycoon overseeing a $6 billion industry — with some very dark moments along the best way.
Within the book, Riesman claims than on that fateful night in Kansas City, McMahon had settled for a technician who hadn’t worked with WWF before and who had “significantly less” experience with the stunt than the technician who’d overseen similar entrances up to now.
Just moments after the fatal accident, McMahon had the group back within the palm of his hand, Riesman writes — chants of “Vince! Vince! Vince!” might be heard as he entered the ring, desperate for the show to go on.
“Before the printed cut out, you could possibly see Vince standing there, in his capability as a personality, heaving his breath, attempting to act. He was making a face of theatrical determination,” writes Riesman.
The writer’s research led him back to McMahon’s own origin story, starting in an allegedly toxic household with mother Vicki Askew (then Lupton) and stepfather Leo Lupton.
In an archived interview with Playboy in 2000, McMahon said that his stepfather was often physically abusive to the purpose that McMahon expresses regret that “he died before I could kill him.”
McMahon’s ticket out of a troubled childhood got here when he finally met his biological father, wrestling pioneer Vince McMahon Sr., at age 12 within the late Nineteen Fifties.
“Vince principally learned the dark art of being a wrestling promoter from his father,” Riesman said of McMahon Sr., who had previously abandoned their family for one more one.
“That basically set him down a path where he realized he could take all of those resentments, all of those frustrations, a lot of them together with his own father, and check out to make use of them as leverage to claim himself or no less than use them as motivation to claim himself.”
After years of coaching under his father, McMahon was finally able to take over the macho empire — acquired for roughly $1 million, paid in 4 installments — within the early Eighties.
However the younger McMahon’s reign proved controversial from before day one.
As early as 1983, for instance, there have been allegations, based on a police report, that McMahon was entangled in — after which attempted to cover up — the death of Nancy Argentino, alleged to have been murdered by her WWF superstar partner Jimmy Snuka.
“There does appear to be heavy evidence that a previous domestic violence incident between Nancy Argentino and Jimmy Snuka had been [suppressed] by Vince in that he told Nancy to drop the case,” Riesman said.
Particularly, a police report from this time stated that “Vince McMahon tried to speak [Argentino] out of constructing the criticism against Snuka.”
Just a few months later, when Argentino was found dead, McMahon was reportedly on the phone with cops soon after, Riesman claimed, citing a conversation with Snuka’s wrestling competitor. McMahon has previously denied any involvement within the investigation of Snuka.
“The coroner really useful that or not it’s investigated as a homicide. But long story short, the case just kind of went away. Nothing got here of it,” Riesman said.
“There’s a story Jimmy Snuka told — it’s very vague in his memoir — about Vince coming to a gathering with some authorities and bringing a briefcase, which was not the standard M.O., to have a briefcase with him. And [Snuka] doesn’t know what was within the case, nevertheless it should have helped because he got off the fees right after,” Riesman said.
Upon a 2015 reinvestigation, Snuka was finally charged with murder and involuntary manslaughter.
He was found unfit for trial and died two years after in Pompano Beach, Florida.
Just a number of years after Argentino’s death, close associates of McMahon were involved in an alleged child molestation scandal, centered on WWF’s “ring boy” program, which took kids with difficult home lives and offered them apprenticeships doing miscellaneous tasks inside the organization.
Tom Cole, a former ring boy, got here forward within the early Nineties with allegations, based on a police report, of sexual misconduct against Mel Phillips, a hoop announcer and head of the youthful crew, in addition to Terry Garvin, one other ring boy manager, who allegedly propositioned Cole in exchange for a promotion.
Cole alleged that when he declined, he was fired.
The accusations wound up splashed across front pages — The Post’s included — in 1992. Phillips and Garvin, along with their superior and McMahon’s “right hand man” Pat Patterson, resigned that spring.
Cole, along together with his brother Lee, ultimately sued WWF for $750,000 in damages. In the long run, Tom won little greater than his job back, plus $55,000.
McMahon was already battling an onslaught of nightmare press, a grand jury investigation into the corporate’s dealings and allegations of rape against McMahon himself from WWF’s first female referee, Rita Chatterton, who first went public with those claims on the Geraldo Rivera show in 1992 and settled out of court earlier this 12 months.
McMahon continues to disclaim Chatterton’s allegations.
The situation with the Cole brothers, he seemingly surmised, was one he could easily charm his way out of.
Lee Cole told Riesman in an interview that McMahon wined and dined him and Tom and put them up in a flowery hotel room — even arranging for a supposedly impromptu meeting with WWF wrestlers and managers within the hotel lobby.
The next day, at WWF headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, Tom signed papers stating that the then-disgraced Pat Patterson had nothing to do with the alleged instances of molestation.
Patterson would quickly be reinstated.
Tom Cole took his own life years later, in 2021.
Despite McMahon’s public embarrassments, the lord of Titan Towers stays beloved by fans all over the world — and many industry journalists.
Within the years to follow, plenty more allegedly shady dealings would come to light, a lot of them detailed in the Wall Street Journal’s 2022 report that McMahon paid out $12 million over the past 16 years to cover alleged accounts of sexual misconduct and infidelity — a bombshell that resulted in McMahon temporarily stepping away from the organization.
“I even have pledged my complete cooperation to the investigation by the Special Committee, and I’ll do all the things possible to support the investigation. I even have also pledged to just accept the findings and end result of the investigation, whatever they’re,” McMahon said on the time.
McMahon, now 77, currently serves as World Wrestling Entertainment’s executive chairman — a change from his former titles of CEO and chairman.
He’s now said to be actively shopping the corporate for as much as $9 billion.
Through all of it, he stays undefeated.
“The wrestling news outlets still write deferentially, sometimes even lovingly, about Vince,” writes Riesman. “His legacy is secure within the industry he remade. Mr. McMahon is an armor that virtue cannot destroy.”