Sex, Lies, and Headlocks Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hogan away from Gagne, he’d lure away another three dozen of his stars, tearing the heart out of the AWA. The telegram was just the start. It was the first strike by the man with bullets in his eyes.
    1. Thesz also hated McMahon’s aging partner, the old vaudevillian promoter Toots Mondt. “You could give Toots a million dollars, then come back a week later and he’d be broke,” Thesz says. “He’d go through wrestlers’ envelopes in the office and take out fives, tens, and twenties, saying, Ah, that’s too much for this guy or that one. You couldn’t trust him with a dog’s dinner. The whole operation was being controlled by a thief.”
    2. An old friend of Rogers named Tim Woods insists the story was a fabrication, designed to give the tired star a sympathetic way to exit the stage after helping launch the WWWF.

TWO
    IN THE MID-1940S , the armed forces condemned tens of thousands of acres in North Carolina to build bases that would help gird the U.S. war effort. In just a few years, Fort Bragg was built for the army, with the Pope Air Force Base attached so the soldiers had a way to fly in and out. Ninety-five miles away, the Marine Corps put Camp Lejeune on forty-five thousand acres and placed the Cherry Point Air Station in a tiny town nearby called Havelock. At the time, it was so small that the U.S. Census Bureau listed its population at just over a hundred people.
    That census included the family of Leo Lupton, an electrician with a son and daughter of his own and two other sons by his wife, Vicki’s, first marriage. No one in town knew about the boys’ biological father or what he did for a living. No one asked.
    The boys lived in a manner far different from the way their absent father had grown up. Vincent James McMahon was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens, a stable, middle-class New York City neighborhood that was about as distant as his father, Jess, could get from the Commonwealth Sporting Club on 135th Street in the Bronx, where he put on fights, and still get home in time for dinner.
    In 1925, when Vincent was just ten, Jess received a prestigious invitation to come to work at Madison Square Garden for Tex Rickard, a legendary gambler who’d promoted all of Jack Dempsey’s fights and at his height built a new Garden on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street to replace the old one on Madison Square. Needing someone to help him find fighters, Rickard gave the matchmaking job to Jess, a graduate of Manhattan College who knew how to run a tidy nine-to-five office.
    The pair worked together for three years, during which time young Vincent James got to explore the catacombs beneath the Garden. It was the golden age of sports, and the eleven-year-old boy had a box seat to it all—at least until a scandal led his father to be suspended by the state athletic commission. It involved a deal between two managers to cheat a fighter out of about $5,000 and a bogus set of contracts that were placed on file with the commission. Jess, who winked at the shady deal but appeared not to take an active part in it, took the fall.
    In 1935, Jess helped his son set up a small office that booked fights and concerts in an arena in Hempstead, Long Island, and Vincent worked there until the United States entered World War II, in which he served in the Coast Guard. Though he never publicly discussed how he met Vicki, their brief marriage didn’t survive the war. While Vicki was left in North Carolina, Vincent moved to Washington, where he opened a company called Capitol Wrestling and spent a few thousand dollars to wire for television a dingy theater on W and 14th Streets. At the time, the top wrestling show in the nation was Live from the Marigold Theater in Chicago, which aired Saturday nights on the DuMont Network. In 1956, when DuMont went down, Vincent’s gamble paid off. Since Live no longer had a national outlet, he convinced the DuMont affiliate in Washington to carry his matches. Since its owners had a sister station