Vince McMahon's Assassination Conspiracy | Tales From Backstage
'Good Ol JR' shared a shocking story about this very scenario on an edition of his "Grilling JR" podcast. Speaking about one of the times several unnamed promoters put their heads together about some ill-fated collectivism (assorted "SuperClash" cards between 1985 and 1990 were critical and commercial failures featuring all sorts of headaches as the various names and promotions, appropriately, could not co-exist). He needed a comfort break, but it was anything but that when he locked the toilet door. As he put it;
“I make my way to the men’s room. I go into the first available stall. Might have been the only stall in there. And I get down to do my business, and here comes a bunch of guys walking in off of that meeting [I'd been in]. Famous wrestling promoters. Hall-Of-Fame men. Some of the most famous men in pro wrestling history, are in my little bathroom. And I’m sitting there trying to be discreet. You ever try to be discreet when you really need to go? It’s hard, it’s very sad. It’s really sad. Anyway, they start talking about Vince. So one voice, very distinctive voice, says, ‘I could have the motherf*cker killed for $700. Why don’t we just do that?’ Then like I was surrounded by a bunch of little David Copperfields, my feet started elevating off the floor of the bathroom. Because I didn’t want anybody to see there’s anybody in there. They hadn’t noticed, they hadn’t said anything. And so that was kind of where that ended. They washed their hands, and I can’t wait to lower my feet back to the floor because my abdomen was hurting, ’cause I was in bad shape. And they leave.”
When a shocked and shaken Ross was permitted escape from the prison of his own design, he reported what he'd heard back to his boss Bill Watts, who, by virtue of his place in the story, can't have been the one to drop the fatal pitch. The typically brusk 'Cowboy' was unmoved...
“I said, ‘Cowboy, well that was interesting.’ He says, ‘What?’ And so I told him. He says, ‘Aw, sh*t. They’re just flapping their gums, kid. They ain’t gonna do sh*t. They couldn’t agree who’s gonna put the $700 in, if that was what they’re gonna do...We’re going home because they’re done. They’re gonna repeat the same stories this afternoon they did this morning, except they’re gonna be longer and slower. And we’re out of here...So that’s what we did. So the thought of killing Vince McMahon. The thought was not really expounded upon, like ‘Yeah, how do we go about doing that? Where would it be,’ whatever. It was basically a matter of fact, ‘Hey, I got a guy who’ll kill him for $700.’"
McMahon re-told a version of the story, albeit without the specifics, when he was on the Pat McAfee show in 2022. Via tales shared with him by Ross during their time working together, he contextualised the anecdote by noting how aware he was of his pariah status at the time. How could he not be? McMahon's vision for WWE was complete global domination, and being on top meant being across everything else in wrestling if only to try and crush it. He might not have been in or even near the rooms where his downfall was being plotted or discussed, but he was mindful of their presence before he attempted to run them out of business. It's genuinely astonishing he didn't realise the value of pushing himself as the company's top heel sooner - to know, categorically, that you're hated and not monetise it on your sporting soap opera seems wasteful.
He certainly made up for lost time when he got around to it, though this may explain another odd quirk about the life of Vince McMahon and the Mr McMahon character. Or should that be, the death of him?
CONT'D...