Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (14 page)

IN THE
summer of 1990, Vince stunned his aides with a decision to enter the business of competitive bodybuilding. It wasn’t that the idea struck them as narcissistic. They knew Vince was using steroids. His frame, normally stocky, had widened considerably, and his neck and shoulders had ballooned. The boyish look that he’d kept throughout his thirties was giving way to a ruddier one. Age lines had started to creep across his forehead.

What troubled them was that two California brothers named Joe and Ben Weider controlled the business. Why would they want to pick that kind of a fight in a business they had no idea how to market?

The Weider brothers grew up in Montreal in the 1920s and 1930s, where their experiences with anti-Semitism caused them to transform themselves from ninety-pound weaklings into musclemen. They went on to create a multimillion dollar empire that controlled everything from the sport’s top magazines to the International Federation of BodyBuilders, which hosts the Mr. Olympia contest, the Super Bowl of the sport.

After Arnold Schwarzenegger retired in 1979, a parade of southern Californians started posing in Weider events with odd-looking bodies built around superdeveloped, almost freakish, parts. One of the biggest names of the post-Arnold eighties was Tom Platz, a Venice Beach native who was famous for monster thirty-six-inch thighs. Platz made a small fortune promoting supplements, posing for magazines, and giving speeches as far away as Sweden. By 1986, the year he retired, he’d become one of the most recognizable faces in his business.

But the business was going through another sea change by then. Uneven, asymmetrically developed bodies like Platz’s were being replaced by superbodies, in which every part was as proportionately big as the legs. Muscles rippled out of muscles, bulging through shrink-wrapped skin, all helped by a new generation of growth hormones that were undetectable because they were masked by the body’s natural chemicals.

During the summer of 1990, Vince’s presence at IFBB competitions created quite a stir, and Platz was among those who assumed he was up to something. When the promoter called Platz to ask if he’d be interested helping launch a new league, he leaped at the chance. By January 1991, Platz had assembled a list of thirteen of the most photogenic and personable bodybuilders he could find. Most had been making less than fifty grand a year competing in the Weiders’ events. The McMahons offered them contracts worth at least five times that. After all thirteen signed, they turned themselves over to the image makers at the parent company that Vince and Linda created for the WWF, Titan Sports.

As Platz watched them turned into cartoon characters—like the Rock & Roll Wild Child, the Iron Warrior, and the Flying Dutchman—he quietly thought to himself, “Vince has to know what he’s doing, doesn’t he?”

Platz didn’t want to hear the answer that Nelson Sweglar, Vince’s television general manager, had come up with. As Sweglar staged rehearsals for the maiden event of the newly christened World Bodybuilding Federation in June 1991 in Atlantic City, he decided Vince hadn’t just misjudged this. Running through the musical numbers (yes, there were musical numbers), he decided that Vince was radically wrong. No one would ever watch bodybuilding the way they did wrestling, no matter how much of a spectacle he tried to turn it into. The average sports fan would think what Sweglar and most of the WWF’s hierarchy thought: Watching thirteen oiled-up freaks on steroids posing for two hours was, well, creepy.

THEODORE SMITH
III had been a federal prosecutor for just eight months when Bill Dunn’s case file was dropped on his desk. A stout thirty-five-year-old with a gut that showed his love for Philly cheese steaks and the pinot noir that he made from the grapes he grew in his backyard, Smith had spent most of his career doing drug cases for the local district attorney’s office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. When Congress started toughening the federal drug laws and more narcotics cases began flowing into the federal courts, U.S. attorney offices nationwide hired additional staff. Ted Smith was swept into his federal job with that tide. One of the new laws that he was charged with enforcing was the 1988 measure that criminalized the distribution of anabolic steroids. It also moved dozens of drugs—including Tylenol 4 and Valium—onto the Food and Drug Administration’s list of controlled substances.

In October 1989, Smith finished listening to the tapes that Dunn had made during his drug buy in Zahorian’s medical office and concluded it was one of the stronger hands he’d been dealt. As he’d say later, “It was an unremarkable case with the most remarkable characters I’ve ever seen.” But Smith wasn’t about to get cocky, especially when dealing with a doctor. So he waited for investigators from the FBI to slowly build a case.

One of the things the feds did was subpoena the complete records of Zahorian’s Federal Express account, and in so doing discovered a regular pattern of shipments to Vince McMahon, Terry Bollea, Roddy Piper, and dozens of other wrestlers on Vince’s payroll. Many of the packages were shipped to hotels in cities where the WWF was touring. A dozen more were brazenly sent directly to Titan Tower in Stamford. What was in those packages? Smith subpoenaed a parade of wrestlers, including Piper and Hogan, to answer that question before a federal grand jury. On March 27, 1990, the grand jurors had heard enough to indict Zahorian on fifteen counts of distributing controlled substances, the main one being steroids.

Fortunately for McMahon, the indictment of a pill-pushing doctor in Harrisburg was minor news, and the identities of patients he was accused of supplying were cloaked with John Doe references. The connection between Zahorian and the WWF went entirely unnoticed. It might have stayed that way had Zahorian’s attorney not tipped reporters off to the fact that two of those John Does were Hogan and Piper.” The use of steroids isn’t limited to these wrestlers, “the attorney said on the eve of his client’s June 1991 trial. “They’re used throughout the WWF. Wrestlers either use them or they don’t participate.”

That quote, intended to show that Zahorian was simply helping famous athletes get through their taxing work, turned the unassuming little prosecution into a national story overnight. When Zahorian was first indicted, a wave of concern swept through Titan Tower. Vince took the supply of steroids and needles he kept in his office and threw them away. But there was nowhere near the panic that ensued when, on the eve of Zahorian’s trial,
USA Today
ran a headline on its front page asking, “Hulk: Bulk from a Bottle?”

Vince told his lawyer, a bulldog ex-U.S. attorney named Jerry McDevitt, to get Hogan out of testifying. McDevitt appeared before a federal judge named William Caldwell and argued that Smith didn’t need Hogan to make his case. He was only listed six times on the FedEx logs, McDevitt argued, far less than Piper. The collateral damage that would be done to the company by unnecessarily singling out Hogan would be immense. Caldwell bought the argument, and McDevitt rushed to his office to dictate a press release that was sent to any reporter who called. “Hulk Hogan did nothing illegal and is not charged with any illegality,” it said. “He has no place in this trial, and will not appear there. Instead the focal point of the trial will now return to its proper place, the alleged illegal activities of a physician.”

On Monday, June 24, the trial of Dr. George Zahorian began in a small Harrisburg courtroom overrun by reporters. Smith called just nine witnesses, among them Piper, who seemed to have stayed up late the night before because, much to Smith’s aggravation, he had a hard time focusing. Fortunately, Smith only needed him on the stand for fifteen minutes, just long enough for this exchange:

“Did you have occasion to call Dr. Zahorian on March 23 of 1990 and ask him for anabolic steroids?”

“Yes,” Piper replied. “I did.”

“And what did you ask him for?”

“I asked him for some Winstrol, and I believe some Deca-Durabolin, and I’m not sure, maybe an anti-inflammatory, too.”

“Did you receive the anabolic steroids you ordered from Dr. Zahorian in California?”

In a low voice, Piper answered. “Yes, sir.”

After lunch, Smith rested, confident that it hadn’t blown up in his face and his jury had been handed enough evidence to convict. Then, as he sat through a parade of character witnesses who took the stand for Zahorian, he prepared for the doctor to face the jury himself. If Smith had one worry, it was that physicians were skilled persuaders who jurors intuitively wanted to trust. If Zahorian did a good job portraying himself as a physician who felt compelled to help wrestlers in pain, that could hurt Smith’s case.

“I knew these individuals,” the bow-tied doctor began calmly. “I treated these individuals. I had carried out physicals and histories on them. They were taking minimal amounts of medication that was given to them in minimal doses. I knew it wasn’t going to harm them. Over the ten years that I knew most of the individuals, not one was sick, not one developed anything that stopped them from wrestling.”

Smith worried about the last point. It was the doctor’s one reasonable claim. He prayed the jury would not get sidetracked on it. It was a legal blind alley.

The jurors got the case at 1:30 in the afternoon on June 25. Three hours later they told the judge they had a verdict. Smith felt a pit opening in his stomach. Quick verdicts were usually acquittals. Juries that were about to send someone to jail generally took longer, if only out of guilt.

So Smith let out a long breath when the foreman announced that the jury had found Zahorian guilty of the first count of illegally dispensing steroids, and then said guilty to eleven more.

The next day, every major newspaper in the country covered the conviction and the trial’s damning disclosures about steroid use in the WWF. As he read the stories, McMahon winced. He was addicted all right, but not to steroids. He was addicted to pay-per-views. And he could imagine what Zahorian’s allegations were going to do to his business.

Since 1985, the WWF had slowly been weaning itself off closed circuit and onto pay-per-view. The $350 it cost to get a satellite feed to a television cable provider was considerably cheaper than the $5,000 it cost to rent a closed-circuit theater, not to mention an arena. Because the profit margins were enormous—the WWF could charge $15 to $25 per airing and keep roughly half after paying off its cable partners—McMahon decided to produce a trinity of new pay-per-views to add to
Wrestlemania: Royal Rumble
would air in January,
Summer Slam
in August, and
Survivor Series
in November.

That decision would earn him the label of visionary in the still nascent world of alternative distribution. By quadrupling his pay-per-view product, he was creating an industry out of the shards of a few boxing matches and his annual
Wrestlemania
show. Before too long, Turner would follow suit, and the two companies would be running pay-per-views every month, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The only thing McMahon’s aides would lament was that he wasn’t more ambitious. If he was, he could have bought out the cable operators that were providing the linkups and become the owner of the industry, instead of its most sought-after content provider.

However, that discussion was still far off. McMahon had other, more immediate things to worry about. Quarterly pay-per-views created a domino effect. Before, he could spend a whole year leading up to
Wrestlemania
. Now he needed to have story arcs that peaked every three months, driving his USA cable television viewers to reach into their pockets to see the climax on pay-per-view. It was a relatively simple strategy, but it required two things: well-thought-out story lines and the stars to sell them.

Unfortunately, just as McMahon was mapping all this out, the steroid allegations were peaking and Hogan was deciding to take a sabbatical from wrestling to explore an acting career.

Needing a new marquee face, Vince started pushing a newcomer, Jim Hellwig. In the era of Rambo, Hellwig wore jungle-combat face paint and tied tassels around his biceps. On stage, he used the name Ultimate Warrior, but behind his back the Boys called him Anabolic Warrior for all the steroids it took to gain him his superhuman frame.

On April 1, 1990, Vince got Hogan to help with an orderly transition by losing his heavyweight belt to Hellwig at
Wrestlemania VI
. More than sixty-four thousand fans turned up at the SkyDome in Toronto to see the two giants square off. Although Hellwig was a poor technical wrestler, Hogan gave him the kind of star send-off that made him look positively daunting. Writing in his
Wrestling Observer
, Dave Meltzer dubbed it Hogan’s finest bout.

But over the rest of the year, Hellwig had difficulty stepping up his profile. His Rambo act wore thin, and he couldn’t seem to connect with the crowds. Thus Vince decided it was time to restore Hogan to the top of his card for
Wrestlemania VII
. But this time, his instincts for what the public wanted had been blunted by the drug investigation. The man who’d produced such insouciant sketch comedy on
Tuesday
Night Titans
was in a darker mood. He ordered Hellwig to lose his title to the square-jawed Sergeant Slaughter, who was ordered to play an Iraqi sympathizer at the height of the Persian Gulf War, at the
Royal Rumble
in January 1991. (Their meeting came four days after the U.N. deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait.) Slaughter’s turnabout act was supposed to give Hogan a pretext to take back the title at
Wrestle-mania
as a superpatriot, much as he had against the Iron Sheik seven years before. But there was none of the earlier innocence of Hogan’s debut in the WWF. Quite the opposite. Slaughter was getting death threats that caused him to fear for his life when McMahon asked him to burn an American flag in the ring. Slaughter refused, not that the stunt would have helped much. The story line was so poorly received that Vince had to move the pay-per-view event from the outdoor Los Angeles Coliseum, where he thought he could sell more than a hundred thousand tickets, to a nearby arena that was a fifth of the size.