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Former ring boy Tom Cole commits suicide.


IANdrewDiceClay

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28 minutes ago, stewdogg said:

Apart from the Mel Phillips feet fondling is any of it really that bad? I get the feeling from that entire interview if it had been Sherri or Miss Elizabeth wanting to suck his cock and then renege on a job offer he wouldn’t have said anything. I bet he is (was) a massive Christian Trumper 

I'm speechless! Is this a wind up?

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30 minutes ago, stewdogg said:

Apart from the Mel Phillips feet fondling is any of it really that bad? I get the feeling from that entire interview if it had been Sherri or Miss Elizabeth wanting to suck his cock and then renege on a job offer he wouldn’t have said anything. I bet he is (was) a massive Christian Trumper 

Yes.

It's all bad actually. From Phillips targeting boys from broken homes, Garvin getting off on "breaking guys" and the McMahons offering Cole a job solely to keep him quiet, with no intention of keeping him on once things died down. There's also the obvious implication that Cole wasn't an isolated case.

His political beliefs, or whether he'd have been okay if a beautiful woman wanted to suck his cock, has fuck all to do with it.

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Nope. I’m not denying the Mel Phillips thing is bad. Mel Phillips and Terry Garvin were fired, he got a pay off irrespective of whether Vince has accepted liability or not.

Some of it is bat shit crazy, Linda wants to be at his wedding? Linda wants to watch him graduate? I mean it’s his word against theirs but the basis of the interview is that he didn’t like the product at the time of the interview, he didn’t like Pat Patterson ‘being gay’, and he didn’t like Terry Garvin trying it on with false pretences as an adult. If it wasn’t the ‘gay stuff’ he wouldn’t have mentioned anything other than Mel Phillips

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4 minutes ago, unfitfinlay said:

Yes.

It's all bad actually. From Phillips targeting boys from broken homes, Garvin getting off on "breaking guys" and the McMahons offering Cole a job solely to keep him quiet, with no intention of keeping him on once things died down. There's also the obvious implication that Cole wasn't an isolated case.

His political beliefs, or whether he'd have been okay if a beautiful woman wanted to suck his cock, has fuck all to do with it.

Regarding the job to keep him quiet, welcome to the real world. Of course it’s bad but how do people really think these people are so rich. I’m sure Vince won’t be losing any sleep 

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1 hour ago, stewdogg said:

Apart from the Mel Phillips feet fondling is any of it really that bad? I get the feeling from that entire interview if it had been Sherri or Miss Elizabeth wanting to suck his cock and then renege on a job offer he wouldn’t have said anything. I bet he is (was) a massive Christian Trumper 

 

17 minutes ago, stewdogg said:

Regarding the job to keep him quiet, welcome to the real world. Of course it’s bad but how do people really think these people are so rich. I’m sure Vince won’t be losing any sleep 

I'm genuinely struggling to understand your point here. None of it is really that bad, except the stuff that IS bad, but that's just how thing are?

I doubt Vince is going to lose any sleep over it. In fact, I doubt he cared about it at all, aside from when he thought it was going to cost him money. That isn't a good thing though.

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4 hours ago, stewdogg said:

Apart from the Mel Phillips feet fondling is any of it really that bad? I get the feeling from that entire interview if it had been Sherri or Miss Elizabeth wanting to suck his cock and then renege on a job offer he wouldn’t have said anything. I bet he is (was) a massive Christian Trumper 

It's really quite an amazing effort on your part that you have found ways to be more objectionable and awful than your old Rapey Eyes username was. Just stop posting.

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9 hours ago, stewdogg said:

Apart from the Mel Phillips feet fondling is any of it really that bad? I get the feeling from that entire interview if it had been Sherri or Miss Elizabeth wanting to suck his cock and then renege on a job offer he wouldn’t have said anything. I bet he is (was) a massive Christian Trumper 

This says concerning things about what you class as 'that bad'.

First off, someone accepting sexual advances from one person and not another isn't hypocritical. In a workplace, it's possibly hypocritical to class one as acceptable and the other not, but your argument is rather close to some red pill arguments about how women respond to harrassment - 'Oh, if a Chad does it, it's just flirting, but if a beta guy does it, it's harrassment! It's all the same!". If the guy was kicking off because 'another wrestler made a pass at me', that'd be a different thing. But the argument of 'it's just hypocrisy to be happy to be sucked off by this person but not this person' is bullshit - wanting to have sex with one person but not another is not hypocrisy. 

So, secondly, the power dynamics. Garvin made clear that he and Phillips had the say over whether this guy had a job or not. And then he took him somewhere remote, where it was difficult to leave, and then, when rejected, fired him. If you want to make the link to 'Sherri or Miss Elizabeth wanting to suck his cock', then it might be more accurate to suggest, say, Linda McMahon. Power dynamics are a HUGE thing with harrassment, because it's all about making it more difficult for the target to be able to say 'no'.

And thirdly, there's the element of how endemic it clearly was at the time. Reading the interview (http://wrestlingperspective.com/issue/78/cole1.html), he's not coming across as that negative to Pat Patterson, although it's clear that Patterson's conduct was unprofessional. And that's the context in which it's brought up - that it's unprofessional. So he didn't really make that connection between Patterson's behaviour and Garvin and Phillip's. You know who did, though? Vince McMahon. 

The second it became clear that there was an issue here, they fired multiple people involved, which hugely suggests they were already aware of it - because otherwise, why would they fire Pat? The only real other option is that they fired everyone who they thought was gay and active. However, it suggests far more that they thought Pat's behaviour was unprofessional, and fired him, while waiting to see if anything came out about it. Linda going to the hearing is important too - with the benefit of hindsight, it was clear they were looking out for worse coming out elsewhere.

So, you have people targeting young people (with the power dynamics that brings into it), taking them somewhere where they're in charge of whether they can leave or not (the kid slept in the fucking van), and can give or take rewards based on whether they let them suck them off or not. And clearly this wasn't all a one-off either.

What about this would lead you to 'is any of it really that bad?' 

Edited by Chris B
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I wasn’t gonna respond anymore as per Devon’s request. I saw this link just now about the case which is a lot easier to understand than the other interview, it’s set out a lot better and fills in a lot of gaps about the behaviour of Phillips, Garvin and particularly the McMahons. Just to clarify I may have trivialised some of what was said but I certainly don’t condone it  

https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/wwe-cofounder-linda-mcmahon-who-runs-trumps-biggest-super-pac-once-hired-a-suspected-child-molester-on-the-condition-that-he-stop-chasing-after-kids-he-didnt-/amp_articleshow/78938854.cms

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In a massive coincidence, the March 2004 Observer that was reposted this week had this in it.

 

Quote

The bomb dropped in March, just as the company was preparing for Wrestlemania. The Tom Cole story broke in the San Diego Union-Tribune. While no names were mentioned in the story, or in later stories by Mushnick, days later Pat Patterson, Terry Garvin and Mel Phillips tendered their resignations. McMahon at the time was very defensive of Patterson and Garvin at first (although as time went on, he only claimed Patterson as an innocent man caught up in a witch-hunt against homosexuals), and how both had been wronged and they did what they did because of extreme loyalty to the company. That was strange since the first connection anyone made with any of the names charged were when the WWF released the names, saying they had resigned. Neither Garvin nor Phillips were ever welcomed back to the company. McMahon claimed at the time that even though Patterson had done nothing wrong, he would never work for the company again. In hindsight, most question whether Patterson was ever even gone from the company, but he was back in an official capacity within a few months.

At the same time, David Shults joined Graham in speaking out on a few television shows about Hogan and steroids, as well as more allegations against McMahon. Shults had been bitter against McMahon for years after being fired, and had collected info and rumors and was planning on writing a book. He claimed that not only had Hogan done steroids his entire career, but was selling the drugs to other wrestlers when he first started in the Gulf Coast circuit. He claimed an affidavit from a wrestler who would say that. As it turned out, he had a written statement from a wrestler, signed, “The Assassin.” I figured that was as bogus as it could get. As it turned out, Irv Muchnick, no relation to Phil, but the nephew of Sam, in a People Magazine article on the destruction of Hogan’s rep, believed it to be real. He found out that Randy Culley worked as The Assassin on the circuit when Hogan was there. He tracked down Culley, who confirmed he sent the affidavit to Shults and repeated those claims. It wasn’t hard to get wrestlers to talk about Hogan and steroids, including former running buddies Billy Jack Haynes, another person with credibility issues, except when it came to Hogan and steroids, he was telling the truth, and Ken Patera. A major piece in the Los Angeles Times linked Hogan with both steroids and cocaine,, which was picked up by numerous newspapers around the country, McMahon made the decision that Hogan was a lightning rod of bad publicity, and he and Hogan agreed that Hogan would wrestle through Wrestlemania, and then take a hiatus to let everything cool down. A front page story in the London Daily Mirror headlined “Hulk quits in cocaine shame.” During that week, according to Hogan’s friends, the pressure had gotten to where he had decided to retire from wrestling after Wrestlemania, except for working major Japan shots, and was wanting to move out of Tampa to Hawaii to get away from it all, the latter of which he didn’t end up doing. On television, McMahon came up with a storyline for Mania that this may be Hogan’s retirement and that after his match with Sid Justice, he was likely to make the announcement. With a lot of negativity toward Hogan, McMahon’s angle made him a sympathetic character to wrestling fans. Even with all the hype that Hogan’s decision would be at the show, Hogan must have had other plans. Since he was leaving, it was apparent they wanted the retirement. But at the show, Hogan never acknowledged the angle, nor said anything about retirement.

But it got even uglier. Shults produced referee Mike Clark, who told a similar story to Cole’s, regarding Garvin’s behavior. Clark’s story disappeared rather quickly, and for years I had just assumed it was one of a dozen stories that we were hearing of questionable credibility, as people were coming out of the woodwork at this point. However, Elio Zarlenga, who worked for Jack Tunney in the WWF’s Canadian office, has claimed he was there when the incident happened, and it was real. Tom Hankins, a prelim wrestler and long-time reader of this newsletter, wrote a letter talking about an incident in a bar with Patterson, where he claimed sexual favors were suggested, which landed him on the Phil Donahue show. Randall Barry Orton (who wrestled as Barry O and is the uncle of the current WWE star), a fairly talented prelim wrestler who had since been let go, claimed on the Wrestling Insiders radio show hosted by Mike Tenay, that Garvin had sexually harassed him. This was on a long trip when he was 19 years old, back in 1978, when he was working in the Amarillo territory. He questioned whether him turning Garvin down, with Patterson in the back seat with him. He questioned whether, with Garvin now in a power position, that may have been a reason for his career in WWF never advancing. Murray Hodgson, who briefly worked as an announcer before being fired, claimed Patterson had made a remark to him, saying “How do you taste,” around the time he was fired. And worse, Rita Chatterton, who worked as ref Rita Marie, came forward with a claim against McMahon himself. Geraldo Rivera, who produced a show called “Now It Can Be Told,” did a particularly damaging episode on McMahon. The show took kernels of what may have been true, but left out details that were important. For example, Orton’s story was edited to make it seem like it happened very recently when he was working in WWF, and Patterson and Garvin were executives. McMahon was well aware Chatterton would go on television and talk about a sexual dalliance the two had in the mid-80s in the back seat of McMahon’s limo, which he wasn’t thrilled about, feeling it had nothing to do with business. This was before McMahon admitted publicly in interviews his numerous affairs. He was more shocked when he saw the piece and she more than implied it wasn’t consensual.

Worse, on February 14th, about a half-dozen uniformed and two plain clothed St. Louis policed offers along with a police dog an a Federal drug agent were sent to The Arena and searched all WWF personnel as they arrived. They found nothing. According to one report, all personnel had been tipped off just before arriving, or else it could have been a different story. It was believed the investigators were there after being tipped off that Kerry Von Erich was carrying drugs, but as it turned out, Von Erich had been pulled from all shows two weeks earlier when his father called the company and said his son needed to get off the road and go to rehab. However, he didn’t, and a few days later, was arrested at a drug store in a Dallas suburb on charges of passing forged drug prescriptions, and at that point the company felt they needed to let him go, and a year later he was dead. Road Warrior Hawk and Jimmy Snuka were suspended the same week for having failed the new tests. This was the first, but hardly the last of the new steroid policy wrecking havoc with storylines. The Legion of Doom held the tag titles, and were ordered to drop them to Money Inc., Ted DiBiase & Mike “IRS” Rotunda at a house show in Denver before Hawk was suspended. The drug raid, Ferrigno’s quitting, the suspensions, and Garvin, Patterson and Phillips quitting all happened within a few week period.

McMahon and Sammartino were guests on “Larry King Live” while McMahon’s empire was about to start crumbling. King, who had done no research on the story, backed McMahon, not understanding how he could have possibly been aware of what was going on. McMahon claimed he had never even heard rumors of any sexual misconduct until they broke in the newspapers. However, Phillips had been fired four years earlier by McMahon, and then brought back. When Sammartino brought Phillips up on the show, McMahon responded that Mel Phillips was never an employee of Titan Sports, and had only worked as “an occasional laborer.” McMahon conceded a few days later that he actually had worked as an independent contractor for the company almost every day. When Sammartino brought up Murray Hodgson, the WBF announcer, McMahon made Sammartino look bad by saying that Hodgson had never worked for the WBF, even though he was the announcer on the WBF’s home video. He claimed Hogan had never denied using steroids on Arsenio Hall and claimed that nobody in the company was on steroids (Sid Eudy failed a steroid test only a few days later, but the company had largely cleaned up by that point). He also claimed not to know about Tom Cole, claiming the media was keeping Cole away from him, when in fact, at that very moment, they were working on a settlement.

Cole settled for roughly $60,000 to $70,000 in cash for two-years back-pay, and was given a multi-year contract to return to his former job as a ring boy, and given the impression, in time, that he could be a ring announcer. The settlement occurred just before McMahon was to appear on the Phil Donahue show.

Exactly what was and wasn’t true is still uncertain. At the time, McMahon said that Patterson, nor anyone, knew who Hankins was and didn’t know how to respond to it. Perhaps Patterson was just joking around in front of an audience at a Southern California bar when Hankins, who was small and didn’t have a good physique, asked him if he could work for the company as a job guy. Hodgson, as it turned out, was a well-spoken con man, although he slammed McMahon in a face-to-face situation on Donahue, which McMahon conceded was quite a promo. It is believed Hodgson saw Patterson and Curt Hennig horsing around doing some sort of joke about Patterson, and after being fired, came up with the idea for a lawsuit. It wasn’t the first time he’d sued an employer after termination. McMahon never denied the dalliance with Chatterton, but claimed to have been shocked beyond belief at her description of it. The night before, many of the same people appeared on John Arezzi’s radio show in New York, a show sponsored by a local video dealer named Vince Russo. Cole was brought to the Donahue tapings and sat with Elizabeth Hulette and Linda McMahon in the audience, perhaps for a Perry Mason final scene when his story would come up and he’d shockingly be there and back McMahon. But his name never came up during the show, partially because Orton thought something was fishy when he couldn’t get ahold of Cole, whom he had befriended.

The Donahue show saw an aggressive Donahue and a mentally beaten down McMahon, along with guests including Hodgson, Hankins, Orton, Graham, Sammartino, Arezzi and myself, saw a highly rated national broadcast make wrestling appear to be the sleaziest business in the world. Before the show started, the producers had decided to have Sammartino, since he was the local wrestling legend, and McMahon, in the center. Sammartino was seething mad from the King show, furious that he felt McMahon had lied to make it seem like Hodgson and Phillips didn’t work for him, and made Sammartino look ill-informed in the process. On King, Sammartino was in a studio in Pittsburgh while King was with McMahon. This time they would be face-to-face. Sammartino said that if McMahon lied again, he didn’t know if he could help himself from taking a swing at him after what happened days earlier. I ended up being moved next to McMahon. During one commercial break, McMahon whispered to me saying he couldn’t wait for it to end and it was the worst hour of his life. Hodgson, a total con man, had delivered an amazing speech that left McMahon with no comeback, an amazing irony with what happened with McMahon and Sammartino days earlier. When the show was over, McMahon couldn’t wait to get out of the room. Before he left, my last words to him were the thought I couldn’t get out of my head knowing the business was about to go down. Whether this is true or not, I really believed had Hogan told the truth on Arsenio Hall, none of this would have ever happened.

McMahon felt all of this happening at once couldn’t have been coincidence, and it is quite amazing in hindsight to see all those lawsuits and charges come out at the same time, but seeing what has happened recently regarding the University of Colorado football program, or when political campaigns go into their final days, things tend to have an avalanche effect. He insisted at the time he would prove that Ted Turner was behind it, although there was nothing to his belief. As it turned out, Chatterton made an audiotape for Shults with a different story than she was telling, but then made a second tape with a stronger story.

Looking back some 12 years, Cole’s story remains believable. He has done numerous interviews, and remains a fan today of wrestling even with his experiences with McMahon. Cole even wrote a long letter here when the death of Garvin brought this period back up, and more recently, was in a legal battle with the publishers of Bobby Heenan’s book when Heenan told Cole’s story wrong. Graham himself has admitted that he fabricated much of what he was saying (in particular, personal accusations against Patterson and McMahon that he admitted were outright lies), blaming it on drug issues he was going through. Court testimony more than two years later when McMahon was on trial did corroborate what Graham and Sammartino had said about steroid use in the company, and nobody these days denies the vast majority of the wrestlers in the 80s were on the juice. Graham and McMahon have not only made up, but McMahon is publishing his book and inducting him into his Hall of Fame in a few weeks. When Graham came to SummerSlam, his first time in a company dressing room in more than 14 years, most of the wrestlers treated him like baseball players would if Willie Mays showed up to meet players. They talked about watching him as kids, and many watched videos that Spike Dudley had brought for the big occasion. But others, most notably Jack Lanza and Patterson, did not forgive or forget. They hated the idea he was in the dressing room and being treated like a legend of the business. Shults never found a publisher for his book and no-showed Donahue and largely disappeared after legal threats from McMahon, only to return at a fan convention a few weeks ago. McMahon sued both Mushnick and Rivera to major publicity, but quietly dropped both lawsuits. Cole’s relationship when he went back to work in the WWF was predictably rocky. To so many in the company, as business fell off, he was one of the people responsible for so much bad publicity. To many, it probably didn’t matter that he was likely telling the truth about an ugly situation and part of the business that never should have happened. He and his brother Lee had a falling out almost immediately after Tom went back to work for WWF. Lee switched sides for a second time, and went back to speaking about how things were in the WWF, and was mad that all the steroid publicity was getting in the way of what he thought was the real story. Tom Cole eventually felt the company was using him to get back at Mushnick, whom he greatly respected and always defended to other wrestling fans, even when that was a highly unpopular viewpoint. He has said of all the people he encountered during that period, on both sides, that Mushnick was the only one he thought was honest. Cole ended up gone fairly quickly from WWF, and there were plenty of incidents afterwards, such as his family once picketing Titan Towers to some local television publicity, and Linda McMahon personally attending his unemployment hearing, which is amazing for a CEO of a company to do with someone of his stature. When this was all going down, Linda claimed that while at one point she believed Tom’s story, now she wasn’t so sure. While privately he had reservations about Linda, in a letter to the Observer, he said nothing negative about her, thinking she was very different from Vinc

 

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