by Dave Meltzer
This latest chapter of the story goes back a few weeks. Mushnick has written a few columns of late, mainly anti-WCW, about wrestling. In one of them, he criticized the management of Madison Square Garden for firing Marv Albert for a sex crime but not canceling WWF shows at Madison Square Garden when it was proven in court that the WWF was built on steroids, or words to that effect as I don’t have the column in front of me and the fact is a slight semantic difference in the wording could make a big difference in the points either side could make on whether or not the statement was fair.
WWF was furious, using the 1994 U.S. Government v. McMahon not guilty verdict as saying the exact opposite was true. Cornette made that point in his interview. As far as the decision making process at Madison Square Garden regarding either Marv Albert or pro wrestling, that’s another issue and I don’t think the two things are comparable to begin with. But to use the not guilty verdict (Cornette’s saying the McMahon was declared “totally innocent” of all charges was technically incorrect, as the verdict was not guilty, although that may be nothing but a semantic argument) as a defense when virtually all the testimony in that trial confirmed everything Mushnick had written and that Titan had denied years earlier on the quantity of the steroid use in the company (Hulk Hogan testified to 75, 80 percent maybe more of the WWF wrestlers as steroid users, Jim Hellwig testified to 90 percent) is a bad can of worms for Titan Sports to try and re-open, let alone to try and defend themselves against Mushnick with.
Titan has attempted to use the trial verdict as proof that there was never a steroid problem, but the trial was only about two points—did Vince McMahon distribute steroids to Hulk Hogan, and did Vince McMahon and George Zahorian enter into a legal conspiracy to distribute steroids to the wrestlers. The first issue was thrown out because it was being tried in the incorrect venue (and truthfully, given the evidence at the trial there is no way there could have been a conviction) and McMahon was declared not guilty on the second point. If the trial was to decide whether the WWF had a steroid problem, or were most of the WWF wrestlers on steroids, or even was the WWF itself built on the back of steroids, based on virtually all the testimony, the result would have been different.
Additionally, it was PROVEN, in court, that the WWF had many top wrestlers on steroids. Dr. George Zahorian III was declared guilty and spent a few years in jail for, among other things, illegally distributing steroids to several WWF wrestlers. The fact is, for the WWF to try and argue about the past and the steroid subject with Mushnick is an argument they have little logic and only a misinterpretation of the end result of a trial and not the testimony of the trial to stand on. It’s an old story. The business has changed tremendous since that time.
But there were three basic viewpoints that people had within the industry who called here on Monday and Tuesday had on the Cornette interview. One, that Cornette was right in almost everything he said. Another, was that it was a great delivery and a fantastic promo, but in the long run would explode in the WWF’s face. I believe, in fact know, Cornette was every bit if not more sincere in what he said than in his promo the previous week on Hall and Nash because of his delivery.
However, my gut reaction, basically shared by many who called since the promo, was that it was a preemptive strike by the WWF to attempt to turn the focus of a potential story that could be negative to the company in regard to the death of Brian Pillman into a personal issue against Mushnick and get the personal vendetta angle out to the public and its fans, to try and rally wrestling fans to their side and make the company the babyface against the heel Mushnick, for fear of what a close examination into the Pillman death could reveal.
In hindsight, people who want to point a finger of blame at WWF have a lot of points to draw on. Should he have been put back on the road full-time in his condition? Well, in hindsight, No, but remember that Pillman tried to publicly downplay the level of pain he was in because it was very important to him to earn his keep and not be someone who is under contract and sits around and collects his money with a dubious injury as some have done, not to mention that even though there were aspects of wrestling that he hated, he did live for other aspects of the business.
Should the WWF have tried to put him in rehab? Well, in hindsight, Yes. But he probably would have quit the promotion before going. It’s easy today to say he should have been a heel manager, or a heel commentator rather than put in a position to wrestle several times per week. Unfortunately, hindsight is 20/20, and some of the people in decision making positions knew his past history too well, of being someone who athletically had defied the odds, literally from childbirth. While people may not have known all the details, they knew the basic story and wanted to give him another chance to beat the odds again—or, as some critics might say, extract their pound of flesh from him.
Pillman’s life was well documented from newspaper clippings that covered his athletic accomplishments from his youth. He should have died at the age of two, and again at the age of four when his heart stopped both times due to complications from cancer. He played the defensive line in high school as a 5-foot-7, 147 pound junior and regularly blew by the 200 pound offensive lineman. He led the city in tackles and sacks as a senior, yet was the only member of the All-City team to not get even one college offer because the idea of a 5’9”, 180 pound defensive lineman in college ball is on the surface ludicrous.
When he was a teenager, he was actually even better at ice hockey than he was at football, starting as a 15-year-old on mens teams every Saturday. He walked on and was placed on the seventh team as cannon fodder at Miami of Ohio and told since his attitude was so good that if he played his cards right for four years, by the time he was a senior he could get a jersey and make the traveling squad. He wound up as the back-up nose guard midway through his freshman year and was actually by all accounts at the time a better player than the starting senior.
He probably discovered steroids between his sophomore and junior year, as he went from, according to local newspaper reports, in one summer from a 195 pounder with no muscle definition, although by this point he was already a starter and a good player as a defensive lineman, to a 225-pounder described as having the physique of the Incredible Hulk, and bench pressing 425 pounds and squatting 600, attributed to palling around with a local contest winning bodybuilder.
During his junior year in 1982, he was a Division I-AA first team All-American middle guard. As a senior, he was the Mid-American conference defensive player of the year, leading the conference in both sacks and tackles, and the only member of the 1983 AP All-American team to not be drafted by the pros, yet still made the Bengals despite his size. He came back from a shoulder injury suffered early in his wrestling career that was at first considered to be a career ender.
I probably know the situation better than all but a few people, and I can’t in any good conscience point fingers at the WWF when it comes to blame or culpability in the death nor did I sense others equally close or closer to the situation coming to a different conclusion. I could also see where an outsider investigating but not truly understanding the situation could come up with a lot of evidence to come to a different conclusion.
On 10/7, the WWF’s General Counsel sent letters out to several doctors known to both management and the wrestlers as being so-called mark doctors that the boys go to. The basic letter was to reiterate company policy, which has been largely not enforced, banning physicians backstage with the wrestlers except in the case of an emergency. The only physicians allowed backstage under other circumstances would be those assigned by state athletic commissions (ironically the most famous mark doctor, the famed Dr. Zahorian, fell under this umbrella) or those sent by the WWF itself to compile medical information needed by the company. The WWF also said that any writing of prescriptions or dispensing of medicine to wrestlers should only be performed through an individual appointment at the physician’s office in a traditional doctor/patient relationship.
Listing all Pillman’s past accompli
shments isn’t meant to forget that his practical jokes were legendary or to ignore that there was a dark side to him, largely the drugs and wild behavior, that caused good friends to become estranged from him and put his marriage in jeopardy and may have played a role in his death.
The stories from college and his early days in Calgary were incredible. Pillman at one time was the hero of Mark Coleman, who was a freshman at Miami of Ohio when Pillman was a senior and the star of the football team, for an incident in the dorms where he had sex with a woman, who was hanging upside down from a pull-up bar wearing gravity boots, while the other jocks watched. The joke before people who knew Pillman knew him, is that they figured the letters in Penthouse were all a work. But once they knew him, they knew they were real and that Pillman wrote most of them from personal experience.
Another time in Calgary, Pillman and Bill Kazmaier, who Pillman nicknamed “Quagmire,” who at the time was probably not only the strongest man in the world but probably the strongest man who ever lived, who Pillman routinely would torture unmercifully to the amusement of all the other wrestlers on the circuit, were about to get into a fight once the bus was about to stop. By the time Pillman was done telling made-up stories, about how he beat up Lawrence Taylor, Mike Webster and Mike Tyson in street fights, and Kazmaier heard and evidently believed them, Kazmaier ran away from Pillman, which was a hilarious sight seeing the world’s strongest man running from fight against a guy half his size.
As far as the cause itself, the toxicology reports had not been completed at press time so his death certificate at this point still doesn’t list a cause of death.
Pillman’s funeral took place on 10/10 in Walton, KY, a suburb of Cincinnati. There were about 150 people there. Most were family and friends, only a few from the industry, basically limited to Bruce Hart, his original trainer, Joey Maggs, the WCW jobber who was like his little brother, Pollack, WCW Executive Vice President Eric Bischoff, former area wrestler Les Thatcher and a few of his students.
There was speeches by his high school football coach, who thought someone was playing a rib on him when he first saw 147-pound Pillman as a junior going out for the defensive line; by local radio talk personality Bill Cunningham who frequently had Pillman as a guest; by Bruce Hart, who was so moved he couldn’t continue his speech several times; to his college football roommate who noted that Pillman was a genius as a student in college (“He could get a book and within 20 minutes know everything in the book”) and related how they both nearly got kicked out of college when he was about to fail a class which would have made him ineligible for football, and Brian, who was a great student, let him copy off him except they ended up getting caught; his best friend from high school and a few others. Vince McMahon and Jim Ross attended a private wake the previous evening limited to family and a few close friends.
NOVEMBER 10
The official cause of death of Brian Pillman will apparently be listed as a heart attack due to natural causes. At press time, the Hennepin County Medical Examiners Office had not released an official press statement on Pillman, but family sources said such a statement would be released later in the week.
Pillman was found dead at the age of 35 in a Bloomington, MN motel room at 1:09 p.m. on 10/5, the night after wrestling his final match at the St. Paul Civic Center and just hours before the WWF was about to go on the air with a PPV show.
Reports from those close to the situation indicate that after nearly one month of tests, the coroners reported on 11/3 that they were stumped for a cause of the heart attack, although his heart showed an unusual amount of damage for someone of his age. This could have been partially hereditary given his family history, and also due to the amount of stress he had placed on his heart. Either steroids and/or cocaine have been known to cause heart damage which over the years can have a cumulative effect. It was no secret Pillman had used steroids dating back to his college and pro football days and through the early part of his wrestling career for obvious reasons, being that in all the aforementioned professions use was plentiful during the 80s and his own lack of natural body size was really the only thing holding him back from stardom.
Toxicology reports did not reveal any intake of drugs that could have caused the death. The reports revealed the expected prescription pain killers, although not at dangerous levels. There were no traces of steroids or any other illegal drug found in his system. The steroid decadurabolin was the only illegal drug found in his system when he was drug tested by the WWF on 8/28, although the low levels and the fact that drug can stay in the system and show up in tests longer after usage than any other steroid, in rare occasions for more than one year after its last usage (although usually it won’t longer than a few months), was the reason he wasn’t suspended for what could have technically been ruled a failed drug test. There wasn’t even any trace of alcohol in his system. There was an empty beer bottle found in his room along with several bottles, none empty, of prescription pain pills, when the police opened the door. Later reports indicated that while the bottle of beer was empty, the cap was still on the bottle and this it had broken and the contents of the bottle apparently spilled onto his clothes so it appeared he had never even drank the beer.
The only strange drug found in his system, a prescription drug that he apparently did not have a prescription for was medication used to combat high blood pressure. This would not have been something he would have been taking medication for. Later reports have indicated that when he went on the road trip to Minneapolis for his first match of the weekend, he had run out of a certain pain killer and theoretically he had either asked for one from another wrestler or a hanger-on, and was given something that was actually not a pain killer. However, the amount in his system wasn’t ruled dangerous and that was also ruled out as being a potential cause of death.
The toxicology report showing no traces of cocaine put tremendous heat on Gene Okerlund in WCW who had claimed to have the inside scoop directly from the doctor that Pillman died of a cocaine overdose. On 10/27, on a WCW Internet audio show with Mark Madden, Okerlund discussed this fact as his lead scoop. This naturally led to rumors running rampant as the week went on of that being the actual cause of death. Okerlund had all along privately claimed to have inside connections with the police and the doctors since Pillman’s death occurred in the Twin Cities, where Okerlund lived for decades and regaled people with sordid tales, which apparently greatly differed at least from police reports of the scene at the motel room, and of what would be the final report from the corner. Okerlund nor any other WCW personnel never discussed this information publicly anywhere except on the audio show and not on the hotline.
32 – Randy Couture Beats Vitor Belfort
OCTOBER 27
Vitor Belfort, the reputed 20-year-old (as in some circles it’s believed he’s actually older than what he’s claiming) Brazilian sensation that many pegged as the young, charismatic and scarily effective performer that would become the superstar that the Ultimate Fighting Championship would be built around for years to come, was derailed in brutal fashion by U.S. national Greco-roman champion Randy Couture as just one of the feature events of the latest UFC PPV on 10/17 from Bay St. Louis, MS.
The win by Couture, generally regarded as a stunning upset, puts him in the title picture, earning a shot at UFC heavyweight champion Maurice Smith, who retained his title with a win over last-week replacement David “Tank” Abbott in the main event, on the “Ultimate Japan” PPV show on 12/21 from the 17,000-seat Yokohama Arena.
In both superfights, the Belfort vs. Couture and Smith vs. Abbott, it was conditioning more than skill or overall strength and toughness that was the deciding factor. Both matches went just past the 8:00 mark, and in each case, the loser was totally out of gas and either being, or about to be, hammered unmercifully. Belfort took a terrible beating and was hospitalized for several hours after the show, likely as much from exhaustion as from the punishment Couture dished out. Abbott simply quit when he ran out of gas, again
putting his future in UFC’s in question. He attempted after the match to get his heat back by doing a f--- this and f--- that interview, saying that he didn’t care about winning or losing and that he didn’t train at all for the fight.
The show itself, before a sellout crowd estimated at around 1,500 in the small Casino Magic tent, had to be considered above all as the night where American amateur wrestling stars once again took the spotlight over from the Brazilians.
Not only was Belfort, who the feeling from most ahead of time would be able to hammer Couture early as he had all his four previous NHB opponents, upset, but so was Carlson Gracie stablemate Carlao “Carlos” Barreto, the 6-4, 253-pound Brazilian who came into the match undefeated with victories over top American wrestles like Daniel Bobish and Kevin Randelman. Barreto lost a very close fight, although the decision was unanimous, to David Beneteau in one of the most evenly-fought and exciting matches in UFC history. Barreto, who didn’t protest the decision after the match, said that he came into the fight overtrained and couldn’t get his body to do anything he wanted it to.
However, Beneteau, like Abbott in the main event, came off of the biggest win of his NHB career with something of a negative aura since he refused to go out for his tournament championship match against Mark Kerr. Beneteau, who had a grueling 15:00 first round match with Barreto, hinted in his interview after the win that he wouldn’t be coming out for his match with Kerr, who won his first round match in just 22 seconds. Later in the show he officially stated he’d made the decision to leave on a positive note after his upset win, and not ruin the night, saying he thought even-up he could beat Kerr, but, basically said the difference in energy expenditure in each’s first round match resulted in his decision.
