20 years ago WWE went through the worst week of its existence. While the tragedies of Owen Hart and Chris Benoit may have attracted more attention, the media firestorm unleashed in the second week of March 1992 brought the most profound sense that Vince McMahon’s company could come tumbling down. And it all hinged upon a lie from the biggest star in the business.
The events of that week were set in motion the previous summer with the conviction of Pennsylvania doctor George Zahorian for distributing steroids without medical cause, a federal offense since 1988 for which his was the first major test case. Zahorian was well known to WWE, having being appointed as the official state athletic commission physician for wrestling shows in Pennsylvania, the home base for the company’s TV tapings until 1986.
On camera, Zahorian was occasionally used to give credibility to injury angles. Backstage he performed a less official function: prescribing and handing out steroids to the wrestlers.
While this was an open secret in the wrestling business, confirmation in the outside world came with Zahorian’s arrest: as officers seized him, he was shredding documents and held in his hand fragments of courier receipts for deliveries to the men known on camera as Roddy Piper and Lord Alfred Hayes. A search of Zahorian’s office found 43 professional wrestlers among his customers, of which 37 were WWE performers at the time they received shipments.
The raid came as little surprise to Zahorian thanks to a chance meeting that would eventually be both a potential death blow to, and the saving grace of, WWE. In late 1989, a Pennsylvania official started chatting to WWE lawyer Jack Krill at a fundraising event and, as the discussion turned to Krill’s pro wrestling client, the official happened to mention that the state was planning to investigate illegal steroid distribution.
Krill shared the news with Linda McMahon who, after discussing the issue with her husband, sent a memo to company executive Pat Patterson, ordering him to call Zahorian and tell him he should not attend any future company shows. She noted that “although you and I discussed before about continuing to have Zahorian at our events as the doctor on call, I think that is now not a good idea.”
Five pro wrestlers were ordered by the court to give evidence at Zahorian’s trial. Four men — Piper, Brian Blair, Dan Spivey and Rick Martel — did so, each confirming that Zahorian had issued them steroids without either performing a medical examination or checking up on their medical history. WWE’s chief lawyer Jerry McDevitt successfully argued that the fifth potential witness, Hulk Hogan, be exempt from the demand, claiming that giving testimony would be an invasion of his privacy and would threaten his livelihood. At the time it was arguably McDevitt’s most successful performance, a feat he would surpass three years later.
But while Hogan’s name would not appear on the legal record, word of his involvement soon spread among the media. As interest mounted, he agreed to appear on the Arsenio Hall show, a lightweight chat affair arguably closer to Partridge than Paxman. The show’s producers assumed they would get a tell-all account from a regretful Hogan, perhaps with a feel good message at the end. They were to be disappointed.
After falsely claiming to have only used steroids briefly in 1983 to treat an injury, Hogan insisted “I trained 20 years, two hours a day to look like I do. But there’s two things I’m not. I’m not a steroid abuser and I do not use steroids.”
Writing in his autobiography over a decade later, Hogan conceded that “You could just tell I was full of it…. it was the biggest mistake I ever made. I should have just been man enough to ‘fess up.” Yet even then he was stuck in a wrestling mindset, explaining that “I was worried about destroying all the good I had done with the Hulk Hogan character. Because of me, kids were living by the code of training, prayer and vitamins and I didn’t want them to think that I’d given them bad advice.”
With WWE having just announced it would institute comprehensive drug testing (having already quietly tested for cocaine for several years), a full and frank concession by Hogan at this stage would likely have dealt with the issue. Instead his flagrant falsehood both infuriated some of his former colleagues and attracted continuing media attention. Over the next few months, former WWE champion Billy Graham and controversial grappler David Shultz made repeated claims that drug use, both performance-enhancing and recreational, had been widespread in the company during their runs.
Steroids continued to be an issue into the start of 1992, with the WWE’s first round of testing finding a positive result for 50% of wrestlers. There were no suspensions at this stage, which designed solely to establish a baseline. A few months later the proportion testing positive had dropped to 15%, though again nobody was punished, this time the loophole being that only those whose testosterone levels had not fallen since the first test were considered to have failed.
While the occasional media coverage continued to sting a little, the company had two narrow escapes on the drugs front as 1992 continued rolling. Florida’s state athletic commission narrowly rejected proposals to not only regulate pro wrestling but to carry out drug testing at shows. Meanwhile a police raid of a WWE show in St Louis on St Valentine’s Day came up empty-handed. Thankfully for the company a tip-off meant wrestlers were warned of the police presence before arriving at the arena; one wrestler on the show told the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that without this notice, an estimated eight to ten grapplers would have been found with some form of illegal substance in their bags.
Fortunate as these incidents were for WWE, the company’s luck had already run out. Reading coverage of the steroid issue in the New York Post reminded a man named Lee Cole that his younger brother Tom had previously worked for McMahon’s wrestling promotion and that he’d never asked why he had left the job. When he now did so, the response was so shocking that he contacted Post writer Phil Mushnick, unleashing a second front in WWE’s public relations nightmare.
Tom Cole began working for the promotion before he was even a teenager, after meeting and receiving free tickets from ring announce Mel Phillips. He soon became a regular at shows in the New York area, helping set up the ring and collecting the wrestler’s jackets after their entrance. Aged around 14 he became part of a regular ring crew of youngsters who would travel from show to show each weekend with Phillips. According to Cole, Phillips preferred using younger boys and would stop using them so regularly once they grew older.
Cole also claimed the ring crew was subjected to varying degrees of sexual harassment. He noted Phillips would regularly satisfy a fetish by playing with the bare feet of the boys, and accused Pat Patterson of lewd gestures. His most serious allegation was aimed at fellow WWE official Terry Garvin, whose homosexuality was a frequent target for in-jokes during TV commentary. Cole said that when he was 19, Garvin offered to perform sexual acts upon him. Cole refused and was informed by Phillips the following day that his services were no longer required.
The initial coverage of Cole’s accusations by the New York Post unleashed the floodgates. As is often the case, newspapers, radio and television shows each followed their rivals lead, with day after day of relentless coverage and new accusation. Newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to Britain’s own The Sun covered different aspects of the story, while TV crews weren’t short of disgruntled wrestlers ready to tell their side.
On March 2nd, Vince McMahon decided that Garvin, Phillips and Patterson would be removed from their posts, noting that in the case of Garvin and Patterson there was no admission of guilt. Oddly he said their departure was due to media pressure, though at this stage none of the men had been publicly named. While the other two men never worked for the company again, Patterson was officially reinstated six months later, and was widely suspected of having made booking contributions informally during his absence.
Vince also agreed to appear on what would be the most memorable episode of the barrage of TV coverage, the Phil Donahue show. Apparently mistaking himself for a celebrity, McMahon presented a series of demands: he should be allowed to plant 12 supporters in the audience, open the show with an uninterrupted two-minute speech, have a lawyer and doctor by his side, and have the potentially unstable David Shultz be barred from the show. The unimpressed producers granted only the last of these requests.
The panel for the show included Graham, former wrestlers Barry Orton (uncle of Randy) and Bruno Sammartino, and wrestling reporters Dave Meltzer and John Arezzi. But the panel was most notable for one man’s absence. Tom Cole was indeed at the studios, but had secretly settled his claims against the company, receiving compensation and damages estimated between $70,000 and $150,000, reinstatement to his old job, and a guarantee that Garvin and Phillips never be rehired.
Cole later told the Wrestling Perspective newsletter of an insightful exchange with Vince McMahon just before his appearance on the show: “I said to him, ‘Why don’t you come out and, like, be truthful. [Say] something happened in your company that you’re trying to fix,’ and he just looked at me like I had five heads. ”
Meltzer too has clear memories of McMahon’s appearance, noting at the time that “The tension was incredible in the room when McMahon walked in. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in a room where an aura of mutual hatred so filled the air. I believe I was the only one who even acknowledged McMahon and I don’t think he made eye contact with anyone else in the room, nor vice versa.”
Orton had gotten wind of the settlemtn and suggested that the panel not mention Cole; had they done so, he was sat beside Linda McMahon in the audience ready to defend the company. But while Vince McMahon had this angle covered, and while he was able to portray himself almost as a sympathetic victim as the rest of the panel appeared to gang up against him, there was one man who truly spoilt his night.
Murray Hodgson was a radio broadcaster who’d been hired to present WWE television segments as well as announcing for McMahon’s World Bodybuilding Federation. He claimed to have been fired from his job after rejecting the advances of Pat Patterson, a claim he repeated in a head-to-head debate with McMahon at the start of the show, before the rest of the panel arrived. McMahon’s counter that Hodgson had actually been fired because he was unable to transfer his radio skills to television appeared particularly unconvincing as, in TV debating terms at least, the smooth talking Hodgson wiped the floor with the normally unflappable McMahon.
Hodgson’s subsequent lawsuit took a bizarre twist when it emerged that on April 27th, just a few weeks after the Donahue show, he asked if he could be rehired to work on the WBF’s upcoming pay-per-view event. Meanwhile his lawyer Ed Nusbaum began to get suspicious about the number of claims Hodgson had made against previous employers. After watching Hodgson record a video testimony for the lawsuit, Nusbaum immediately ditched him as a client (which led to the case collapsing), apologized to WWE staff, and commented that “I was absolutely convinced by the evidence that emerged establishing that Hodgson was a lifelong con man.”
That’s not to say McMahon was a model of rationality or honesty himself. As well as reportedly telling Meltzer that the entire scandal was a conspiracy dreamt up by WCW owner Ted Turner and bodybuilding supremo Joe Weider, McMahon appeared on Larry King Live where to many viewers he appeared to out-debate Sammartino, a task made easier by some truly audacious lies, half-truths and misdirection.
He claimed Phillips had never been a WWE employee, an argument that relied on the hugely debatable “independent contractor” classification. He said no WWE wrestlers were using steroids, a claim that only held up if you believed that all of the 15% flagged in the most recent testing were merely showing traces of use from months in the past. He claimed Hodgson had never worked for the WBF, despite him having announced on the video of the group’s first event. And he outright denied being in negotiations for a settlement with Cole; the two sides in fact signed the deal just two days later.
That deal was enough to secure an injunction preventing another major TV show, Geraldo Rivera’s Now It Can Be Told, from using footage of an interview it filmed with Cole, though it did quote from his now-abandoned lawsuit. The show also presented fresh claims, with former female referee Rita Chatterton accusing McMahon himself of a serious sexual assault, and a male referee making claims of sexual harassment by Garvin.
Neither accusation was proven in either civil or criminal courts, but that was little help at the time. Despite some shameless attempts to win over public opinion, including a full-page newspaper ad touting its previous charity work with more than 100,000 handicapped children, WWE’s name was mud.
The company took drastic measures, many of which hurt in the short term. Hulk Hogan, who’d already planned to take the summer off, decided to leave the ring indefinitely, with WrestleMania 8 promoted as if it might be his retirement show. Steroid testing became more serious, with many performers whose talents lay more in their physiques than their grappling disappearing from the roster, with remaining stars such as the returning Ultimate Warrior noticeably slimming down. (The company quietly dropped the testing in 1996, concluding that it needed a “fair” shot at competing with WCW, which had a more relaxed attitude to steroids.)
Between the scandal, Hogan’s departure, and some questionable booking decisions, the company’s business fell off a cliff. In the space of a month, its average house show attendance dropped by almost half; it would be almost five years before it recovered to the same level and another year before it did so regularly. The boom that began with national expansion in 1984 was well and truly over, and WWE had several money-losing years that may even have threatened its survival.
Meanwhile the pressure over steroids spelled doom for the WBF. McMahon breaking the news that the upcoming pay per view contest would genuinely be drug free was poorly greeted by the bodybuilders, with newly acquired superstar Lou Ferrigno suspiciously pulling out. The bad news continued before the event with Lex Luger (who was supposed to be the flagship crossover star) unable to appear because of a motorcycle crash; on the night, when attempts to switch to drug-free body-sculpting proved a mix success to say the least; and after the event when it transpired that an estimated 13,000 people had bought the show, at that stage by far the lowest audience in pay-per-view history. The company closed shortly afterwards, with one wag calculating it would have been cheaper simply to post cash to each of the viewers.
There wasn’t a happy ending for Tom Cole either. After 18 months in his post, his employment was terminated, with WWE claiming his work had suffered while he put himself through college. Cole suspected the firing was more to do with his giving evidence to federal prosecutors exploring the scandals, a view seemingly shared by several tribunals that concluded he was not at fault for his departure and was thus entitled to receive unemployment benefits.
A few months after Cole left the company, those prosecutor explorations led to action. Vince McMahon was formally charged on a series of counts relating to illegal distribution of steroids, with a trial set for July 1994. A guilty verdict would have almost certainly meant McMahon being jailed for several years and, while he joked about conducting booking meetings in a prison visiting room, he took precautions by hiring Memphis mastermind Jerry Jarrett as a potential replacement. At the same time, Linda McMahon took on the role of WWE President, ready for a smooth transition of corporate power if it were needed.
What happened in a New York courtroom that summer has been grossly oversimplified in later accounts. The trial was not about whether professional wrestlers used steroids, whether Vince McMahon used steroids, or whether Vince McMahon knew, encouraged or forced wrestlers to use steroids. Instead it was about whether he was guilty of the very specific charges against him.
Two of those charges related to McMahon distributing steroids to Hulk Hogan on two occasions by receiving them from Zahorian and mailing them from WWE offices for him to collect at the arena during live events. These were both thrown out before the jury could consider them. In one case the charge was simply impossible as the stated Nassau house show took place four days before McMahon’s office received the steroids; in the other, the arena was Madison Square Garden, which was outside the court’s jurisdiction.
The remaining charge was that Zahorian and McMahon had conspired to distribute steroids to wrestlers for a financial advantage, namely increased company revenue. While the prosecution called a variety of witnesses with varying degrees of credibility, none would go on record saying they were directly told to use steroids.
That left the main evidence being Linda McMahon’s memo to Patterson, billed as the prosecution’s smoking gun. The irony is that while its existence and the testimony in the trial clearly implied the company had been well aware of Zahorian’s activity and even encouraged it, the memo not only failed to prove a crime, but it contained the order that kept Vince McMahon from jail. In July 1989, five months before the memo, Pennsylvania had stopped regulating professional wrestling and assigning medical staff. If at any stage after this WWE had formally requested that Zahorian attended a show, it would have been considered to have directly hired him despite knowing of his steroid activity, which would almost certainly have been a strong enough link to prove conspiracy. Without such evidence, Vince McMahon was acquitted.
Perhaps predictably McMahon’s response was far from humble, despite a self-mocking appearance on the following edition of Monday Night Raw dressed in a prison uniform. He immediately attempted to recover the money he’d spent on legal fees by cutting some executive salaries by between 25 and 40 percent, apparently specifically targeting those who’d formerly worked as pro wrestlers and were thus considered most likely to accept the indignity without protest. Ironically the only man to (albeit briefly) call McMahon’s bluff and quit rather than take the pay cut was Alfred Hayes, the man whose name had first appeared on a scrumpled receipt as George Zahorian was caught red-handed.
Hulk Hogan, meanwhile, debuted for WCW three days after his. He’d admitted in court that his comments three years earlier on Arsenio Hall had been untrue. Only Hogan knows whether what the entirety of his testimony, made under oath, was itself true. But whether it would have been fact or fiction, Hogan telling the court he’d been given steroids by McMahon or ordered to use them would likely have brought a guilty verdict. In 1991, Hulk Hogan’s words nearly brought Vince McMahon down; in 1994 they would help save him.
