Muchnick Flashback: When Linda McMahon’s Husband Stole Frank Deford’s Shoes

[Originally published on this blog on January 18, 2010.]

On Sunday’s Face the State, Linda McMahon touted her experience “in a business that is very testosterone-loaded.” I wonder if she had in mind an incident her husband Vince recounted in his December 2007 interview with staff investigators of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Vince had been asked about a National Public Radio commentary in which Frank Deford cited a study of pro wrestling deaths by Dave Meltzer, publisher of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

First, McMahon dismissed Meltzer as “a gossip columnist.” Then he suggested that Deford held a grudge: “[H]e has no sense of humor and he doesn’t like me. We were bowling one night and I borrowed one of his shoes and he never found it. And so he had to walk home in a bowling shoe and one of his others, and he was upset about that I understand.”

As a public service to the citizens of Connecticut, I now provide you the full background of this bizarre episode.

I also am emailing this item to Ed Patru, spokesman for the Linda McMahon campaign, in case he or she cares to comment on it.

In 1991 Deford was editor of the short-lived daily sports newspaper, The National, for which Meltzer wrote a pro wrestling column. (Connecticut resident Deford, the celebrated Sports Illustrated writer and book author, happens to record his NPR segments at WSHU radio at Sacred Heart University, where Linda McMahon is on the board of trustees. Many faculty there were none too happy in May 2007, when Vince McMahon was chosen as the keynote speaker at commencement.)

Meltzer wrote a story for The National that was highly critical of the then World Wrestling Federation’s main “angle,” or storyline, for that spring’s WrestleMania show. The McMahons brought back a wrestler named Sergeant Slaughter, a superpatriot hero of the mid-eighties, to feud with Hulk Hogan. Slaughter was turned into not just a bad guy but a traitor, joining forces with a purported associate of Saddam Hussein and against his own country during the first Gulf War. To promote this shtick, WWF even sent Hogan on a tour of military bases.

Quoting WWF’s competitor promoters, Meltzer’s piece questioned whether this descent into poor taste was a bit much even for wrestling. (In reference to other controversial storylines, Linda McMahon yesterday acknowledged to the Face the State panel that there have been times when WWE “pushed the envelope.”)

In the end, the Sergeant Slaughter angle was both controversial and not as successful as designed: the McMahons originally booked the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for WrestleMania before slow ticket sales prompted them to move the event to the smaller indoor Los Angeles Sports Arena.

A short time later McMahon and Deford found themselves together at a country club bowling alley for a birthday party for John Filippelli, a veteran TV sports producer who at the time was in charge of WWF broadcast operations. After everyone changed into bowling shoes, McMahon and one of his top aides, former wrestler Pat Patterson, made off with one of Frank Deford’s street shoes and one of his wife Carol’s, and never returned them. Vince and Pat found this hilarious.

After the transcript of McMahon’s Congressional interview was published, I verified this story with Deford. “I’m rather amazed that McMahon would bring this up, but it’s a pretty accurate account of him acting like a horse’s ass,” Frank emailed. “Really weird.”

***

Another Vince McMahon-Frank Deford anecdote:

In February 1992 Linda and Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation was fending off death by tabloid torture. For the full background, see this blog’s “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 2 – 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals,” https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-husband-vince-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost-part-2-%E2%80%94-1992-drug-and-sex-scandals/).

In the course of these developments, Frank Deford did an NPR commentary urging Hulk Hogan, whose name was on a brand of children’s vitamins, to come clean about his years of abuse of anabolic steroids.

Vince McMahon called Deford to complain. At one point in their conversation, McMahon screamed, “I have proof I’m not a mobster!”

Which was funny, because Deford had alleged no such thing.

Irv Muchnick

Linda McMahon’s Values ‘Fall Short of Decent’

“McMahon’s values fall short of decent”

http://www.theday.com/article/20101006/OP02/310069853

Linda McMahon, Stop Trying to Bully Your Unpaid Media and Own Up to Your Minimum Wage Gaffe

Linda McMahon stuck her foot in her mouth last week and failed to close the door, absolutely and unambiguously, on any consideration of a decrease in the national minimum wage. The episode is fully documented, by transcript and on videotape. So is her handlers’ immediate scramble to “walk it back.”

By Monday’s televised debate with her Senate opponent Richard Blumenthal, McMahon was trying to put across that the only thing she would want to review about the minimum wage was the size of its increase.

After the debate, Linda’s automated ads on Google flipped the switch to the wishful-thinking headline LINDA WINS.

But McMahon had goofed. We all goof. Her goof was funnier than most because it was in the glare of a political campaign whose communications McMahon’s $50 million of self-funding tightly control. Under the circumstances, I think the goof is fatal.

On the social networks, McMahon henchpeople went right to work trying to smear the reporting of Ted Mann of the New London Day. Unfortunately for them, the documentation of this painfully off-message exchange shows that maybe it wasn’t so off-message at all. For Linda was uttering these lines not only redundantly but also in her very own forum: a press conference announcing her endorsement by the National Federation of Independent Business, which opposes any increase in the minimum wage.

Mann asked McMahon point-black, and in no way that could be interpreted as a trap, if she would “argue for reducing the minimum wage now.” Linda replied: “We have got minimum wages in states, we have got minimum wages in the [federal] government, and I think we ought to look at all of those issues in terms of what mandates are being placed on businesses and can they afford them. I think we should get input from our business community. We should listen to our small business operators and we should hear what it is they have to say and how it’s impacting their businesses and make some of those decisions.”

Rick Green of the Hartford Courant has beaten me to the punch with a blog highlighting the sad shoot-the-messenger mode of Linda McMahon and, more ominously, Linda McMahonism. See “McMahon Channels Agnew: When All Fails, Blame the Media,” http://blogs.courant.com/rick_green/2010/10/mcmahon-channels-agnew-when-al.html.

But Green’s Spiro Agnew comparison, in my view, is trivial and too kind. This is stuff out of Orwell or Kim Jong-il. Or, forgive me, Monday Night Raw.

Voters of Connecticut, take note.

Irv Muchnick