Vince McMahon really let Todd Grisham know how strongly he feels about gym etiquette.
Former WWE announcer Todd Grisham recently spoke with Chris Van Vliet about his history in pro wrestling. During the conversation, Grisham reflected on Vince McMahon’s reaction to his biggest “blunder” during his tenure.
According to Grisham, McMahon flipped out on him because he said John Morrison, a heel at the time, loved poetry. As Grisham explained it, WWE’s magazine had recently changed its format to be more in line with a men’s lifestyle publication like Maxim. John Morrison’s feature mentioned a poem called ‘Starship Pain,’ which was also the name of his finisher. McMahon, however, was not happy about the on-air reference that followed.
“So he’s in the ring and I go, ‘John Morrison, Starship Pain, he’s a big fan of poetry, and wrote a poem about the finisher Starship Pain.’ Vince goes insane in my ear. ‘Did you just say that our number one heel is an effing poet, you stupid F! What the f*ck! Shut up. Just shut up. Don’t say anything else! Jim Ross, you call the rest of this fight. I don’t wanna hear another effing word out of you.’
“So literally, the match starts and I don’t say a single word for like five minutes, and then the match ends, and we gotta do a promo going to the next fight, and he goes, ‘Okay, you can talk now.’ I’m like, ‘Coming up next Shelton Benjamin goes one-on-one with The Heartbreak Kid, Shawn Michaels.’ But he was so angry at me over that.”
That wasn’t the angriest that Vince McMahon ever got with Todd Grisham
Grisham started working out at WWE Headquarters and had been with the company for a few months. He says that on one Monday, he was getting ready to interview Edge and Christian when McMahon walked up to him and called him “his boy.” McMahon took issue with Grisham apparently not re-racking his weights in the weight room and lost it on him.
“He says, ‘I’m your boy, right?’ He starts walking a little closer, and he’s like, ‘I saw you going into the weight room the other day.’ I said, Yes, sir. [Vince] goes, ‘You were lifting those weights, weren’t you?’ I said, Yeah. He goes, ‘You put the weights on the bar, right?’ I said, Yeah. He goes, ‘But you forgot to take them off.’ I said, Oh. He goes, ‘No, no, no, it’s okay. It’s okay. I did it for you, which [yells] makes me your f*cking boy!’ He’s like, this close to my face, screaming, I’ve only been there three months. Everyone’s like, backing up. I feel like I’m pissing my pants at this point, he’s turning beet red, and then he just stops and just walks away. And I look over and Edge looks at me, and he goes, ‘That’s pretty cool. Vince is your boy.’
The other issue, besides the racist undertones of McMahon’s remarks? Grisham wasn’t responsible and got blamed for it anyway. According to former WWE producer John ‘Big’ Gaburick, Vince thought it was Grisham and had rehearsed how he’d handle the situation all weekend.
“[Gaburick] said that Vince thought about how to approach me about that all weekend. [Vince said] ‘I can’t call him the N word. I’m not his N word. What can I call him? I’ll call him boy, yeah, okay.’ He planned it. He looks psychotic. That’s the maddest he’s been. But to be fair, later that night, I did the show, walked backstage, and he gave me the nod, he’s on to the next subject. Almost I felt like, you know, every once in a while, the mafia boss himself has to kill somebody just to be like, Oh, he’s capable I was the guinea pig. Do not do anything to piss this man off.”
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