Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the possessor of grapefruits, the genetic jackhammer, the Colonel Sanders of crazy meat, the prime minister of silly walks, the patron saint of hilarious nonsense, the eternal barnacle on the patience of the impatient, the biggest troll in the known universe, the worlds least convincing alien, what you would get if you committed billions of dollars to scientifically engineer the most republican, the ghost of ludicrous masculinity past, present and future, the lovechild of a ninja turtles villain and the sheer distillation of horniness, a million grampas screaming out in madness and never silenced, the chairman of the board, and the Donald’s favorite demon.
He’s mad, basically, is what I’m trying to say, an incredibly famous captain of industry, sailing a ship made of cruelty through the high seas of our neverending nightmares, and gosh look how weird he is.
This week we’re talking purely about Vince and Vince alone, casting a spotlight on all the times that Vince has lost his freakin’ mind whilst also having recording equipment pointed in his direction.
Some of these will be kayfabe, just for a bit of mad flavor to show just how silly his legacy is, but most will be real-life incidents of the mask slipping, and the times we stumbled across actual moments of madness in amidst all the storytelling, nuggets of gold in a storm of insanity. It’ll be fun.
I’m Adam hailing from partsFUNknown and here are 10 Times Vince Lost His Shit on Camera
10. DX Breaks Vince’s Limo – Raw (August 21, 2006)
Ok, we’ll start with kayfabe and one of Vince’s lesser-known freakouts, but also possibly his funniest.
The 2006 reunion of DX was moderately bad, it had some fun moments, like when Quadruple H-BK dressed up as Vince and Shane like they were on their way to the world’s sweatiest convention, but most of it was an overreliance on how funny the word cock was, some stuff featuring poop and just a whole lot of The Big Show’s whole ass, but this moment is wonderful.
On the August 21 episode of Raw, DX daubed their logo on Titan Towers, which already made Vince a very sad corporate panda indeed.
However, right at the end of the episode, DX rigged the chairman’s limo to fall apart, the back wheels snapping off as they drove away, leading to a gut-busting full minutes of Vince grabbing his head and just wailing into the night air.
Waaaahh, WAAAAAAH, like the Penguin, but slightly less in touch with the common man.
He almost kills his limo driver, kicks the car over and over, all while yelling and yelling, I love it.
9. Vince McMahon Shoves Titus – After Raw (February 8, 2016)
Ok that our bit of fun out of the way, lets look at some real-life lack of composure now, and one of the most awkward wrestling moments in recent memory.
February 8, 2016’s episode of Raw should have gone down in history as a somber and bittersweet celebration of Daniel Bryan, where he shoot retired over health concerns, shedding tears, swelling emotions and driving the word grateful right into our collective hearts.
It should have been, but instead, wrestling fans remember it as the episode where Vince and Titus O’Neil come to blows LIVE on camera over the world’s silliest argument.
It makes zero sense from anyone’s perspective. Vince and his family are walking to the back through a sea of emotional wrestlers when Titus O’Neil reached out and grabs Vince by the arm, with the reason being, so the story goes, so that Vince could let Stephanie go first, chivalry and all that.
Vince is an emotional chap, more so than most, and the grab snaps him out of a maudlin fugue state and right into his fight or flight response, and Vince has no flight response.
He shoves Titus with all his might in front of an arena full of fans and promptly suspends him for 30 days, it’s ALL SO WEIRD, WHY DID ANY OF THIS HAPPEN. Don’t cross the boss, I guess.
8. Vince Loses His S**t On David Schultz – Tuesday Night Titans
Another moment of worked craziness from Vince, and another one lost in people’s memories, primarily because it comes from a time before the character of Mr. McMahon and Vince’s rapid plummet into the depths of wicked panto chicken.
Instead, this is a moment from way back in 1985 on an episode of Tuesday Night Titans, WWE’s incredibly silly talk show, full of cartoonish character segments and Vince interviewing wrestlers with the help of Lord Alfred Hayes, what would have happened if Bobby Heenan had been raised in Downton Abbey.
TNT was like Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge, but for wrestling, all the way down to a moment of a gun misfiring.
The episode we’re talking about is the TNT that aired February 28, 1985, and it’s already a weird show, Vince interviews female referee Rita Marie, the woman who would later leave the company and make very serious allegations about Vince himself.
Later in the ep, Vince would then interview Dr. D. David Schultz about the infamous moment he slapped John Stossel, before another segment, where Schultz shows Vince his collection of guns, one of which goes off and Vince absolutely loses his mind, shouting you stupid idiot over and over.
7. Yelling At Bob Costas – On The Record 2001
You know what Vince is super good at, taking criticism. He’s an absolute master of just letting his tension and frustration roll right off his back, and creating a calm and peaceful environment for calm and reasoned debate.
Not a single word of that is true of course, as you’d know if you’ve ever seen Vince get grilled in an interview, and we have a perfect trilogy for you here today.
First up, Vince’s appearance on Bob Costas’ On The Record in 2001 and fist in the mouth, bum clenchingly awkward interview where Bob talks to Vince about the failure of the XFL and the controversial Trish barks like a dog segment.
Bob interrupts Vince a few times, which is up there with flicking a lion in the eye in terms of good ideas and Vince gets noticeably pissed, leaning forward in his chair, jabbing a finger in Bob’s face, even doing a not at all veiled standup routine about how this was the Bob Costas Interrupt program.
A thick vein of tension runs throughout the entire segment with Vince upping the ante and professing to be having fun, all while staying right up in Bob’s grill, ending on a handshake with so much macho squeezing behind it that Bob Costas actually briefly stops speaking mid-sentence, that’s how much Vince is trying to break his hand. Big old weirdo.
6. Vince McMahon Mocks Jim Ross – Raw (June 11, 2012)
Why does Vince hate Jim Ross so much? Maybe he doesn’t hate him, maybe he actually loves him and this is how Vince shows his love, like a big daddy psycho.
From shifting JR’s brand live on TV without telling him, to the Dr. Heiney nonsense, to just straight up repeatedly firing the man, it’s such a weird relationship the two men have, where one will just do his job, and the other will repeatedly be a massive wang to him at each and every opportunity, the worst of which being a segment Vince shared with Hornswoggle, his former son, on an episode of Raw on June 11, 2012.
I guess ‘losing his s**t’ would be a fairly generous term for what happens next, but it’s certainly a bizarre glimpse into the real-life psyche of a corporate manager who’s in total control of what his company broadcasts actually choosing to broadcast this.
It’s almost as baffling as Vince choosing to broadcast himself saying the n-word back in 2005, except this moment can still be found on the network.
Vince puts a Jim Ross-style cowboy hat on, shouts Stone Cold Stone Cold in the trademark JR way, but not before pulling his face into a rictus grimace specifically designed to mock Ross’s bells palsy.
Again, not so much a blowup, but WHAT AN INSANE THING TO PUT ON A TV SHOW IN 2012.
5. Don’t Put Words In Vince’s Mouth – Inside Edition 1998
Part two of the Vince McMahon has absolutely no chill when it comes to interviewers trilogy, this time for a segment back in 1998.
1998 was the year that wrestling truly returned to the mainstream, with the Attitude Era becoming insanely popular with teens and young adults especially.
The flipside of that new popularity was a string of worried thought pieces from new stations wondering what this meant for the nation’s youth, including this one from Inside Edition.
During the interview, Vince performs a bit more of the clearly very rattled and annoyed but playing it off as overly-jovial routine that Bob Costas took both barrels off.
When the interview suggests ‘you’re telling people this is kind of behavior is ok’ he shouts, with a genuinely unsettling smile on his face, “don’t tell me what I’m saying, you want to ask me, I’ll tell you what I’m saying,” before leaning forward and saying one more time, insane grin intact “don’t tell me what I’m saying”.
Later, when the host is listing all of the content (including the number of times The Godfather brought prostitutes to the ring, Vince says “woah woah, you wanna play here, I’m ready to play, I’ve got no problem playing with ya” and honestly I don’t know what Vince thinks playing is, but I’m guessing he’s not referring to board games.
4. Vince McMahon Calls Brock Lesnar An A**hole – WrestleMania 34
A recent bit of real-life drama, a mere three years ago at WrestleMania 34, everyone’s favorite feud that refuses to go away Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns played out in the main event of the show of shows, and to call it a catastrophe would be to give catastrophe’s a bad name.
The match stank out the joint with fans pelting it with chants of boring, and soundly booing a vast chunk of the action.
You know who doesn’t take kindly to being booed, that would be Brocktopus Q Lesnarpus, who, when faced with a similar about of hostility he’d faced and responded well to at WrestleMania XX, stormed backstage after pinning Reigns and, on camera for the documentary crew to see, threw the belt across the room, landing on Vince’s desk in Gorilla.
Vince, shaken, manages to get out a single scream of A**hole, before Brock’s gone, back to the cave where he keeps his deer carcasses, hunting rifles and Sables.
It’s rare to see a moment when Vince is one of the least crazy people in the room, but still a rare on-camera moment of Vince losing his cool.
3. Losing It On Real Sports
Oh man, and we’re capping off our trilogy of Vince being a nutter to interviewers with a display of hyper-masculine aggression that genuinely wouldn’t look out of place in the most by-the-numbers high school movie ever made.
Maybe not as an excuse, more of an explanation, Vince is being interviewed about Deaths in Pro Wrestling by Real Sports, obviously a much more heated topic than, that Trish thing was weird, and what’s the deal with all the hoes, instead the line of question was more, ‘are you in any way responsible for the premature deaths of wrestlers who wrestled for you at one time’ and Vince is having absolutely none of it.
For the most part, he maintains an incredibly careful and menacing drawl, but once, just once, he breaks.
You can almost see it happen in slow motion, he’s interrupted, closes his eyes, tries to keep it in check, before pulling a comedy boohoo face and no joke, tries to slap the papers out of his interviewer’s hands.
Like a high school jock trying to knock a nerd’s homework from his fans, in the face of scrutiny, vince loses his cool and turns into a macho parody.
2. Vince Is Gonna Give Shane A F**king Beating
If there was one thing Vince used to be relied on for, it was for a good promo.
Genuinely, for a time, he might just have been the best promo in the company, someone on whom you could depend for a larger-than-life performance of chutzpah and villainy.
But we all get older and part of that, as much as Vince might refuse to admit it, is a diminished capacity for skills and talents that once came so easily.
Vince isn’t that great a promo anymore, often he’s a downright bad one, but this was one of the first proper warning signs, where the chairman of the board, the emperor of his company’s message, who dictates all of the words that announcers, wrestlers and commentators are banned from using, lost his cool in a promo to the extent that he dropped an f-bomb into a live mic.
It’s mad, on the February 22 episode of Raw in 2016, shortly after Shane McMahon returned for a super weird feud with the Undertaker, Vince threatened his son, reveling in quotes “one last opportunity to give him a f**king beating”.
Jesus, Vince, you potty mouth. Brad Maddox got canned for calling the fans cocky pricks during a dark segment, but you just raised the stakes.
1. The 2005 Royal Rumble
As yet, the moment you all came to see. Where Vince lost his cool so much that he fired his own legs. It’s an overtold story so we’ll keep it brief.
Cena and Batista botched the finish to the Rumble, went out at the same time, Vince got ticked off, stormed down to the ring, hurling his jacket to the ground, ready for an impromptu bit of in-the-moment crisis management, blew out both of his quads sliding into the ring and had to sit on the ring canvas in a tremendous storm of anger and pain, like a concertgoer who’d just been told that The Eagles were not in fact coming back out for an encore.
The audacity. A total implosion of mind, body and soul from one of the maddest to ever do it. Vince, never change. Unless you can, in which case, maybe can you
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