“Vince, the fans will never believe the kid has a chance for the championship. We work to get that reaction. People pop a nut when something unexpected like that happens. This will be a priceless moment, one you can’t buy. Think about it, will you?”
By that time, I just knew when an idea had registered with him — and that day it did. He didn’t change his mind right away, mind you, but the seed was planted and he came to the same conclusion I did. There was no need to fight for it — just wait and let him make the call.
I never told Rey it was my idea, but he was shocked when he finally learned the role I played. He made a point to thank me and he even mentioned it in his book. (Did everyone write a book before me?)
Daniel Bryan: could you imagine if he had not been brought back to WWE? When I tried to get his name back in discussions, Vince resurrected the “dead to me” line. Bryan had choked ring announcer Justin Roberts with his tie, unknowingly breaking company policy of choking anyone on television. I told Vince that many people had done a lot worse than Bryan, and they’d been brought back. Everyone makes mistakes. I thought we should give him another chance and John Cena even agreed with me. That didn’t hurt. Bryan never asked me for anything; I just felt we should give him a second chance.
Just like I’d battled for Shawn, I refused to let go. When Bryan came back, he went over like there was no tomorrow. Because he’s special. Look at all he’s accomplished.
I’ve often told Vince, “It’s hard for me sometimes. And I want you to understand something. I have two hats here: the friend and the colleague. Sometimes, it’s difficult to be both at once. Don’t get mad at me when I need to tell you the stuff you don’t want to hear. Understand also that I will never abuse our friendship and tell you to do something that’s not to better the business.” You just can’t use a man for your own personal gain and call him your friend. I will never do that, and I never have. Business is business and friendship is friendship. When I wasn’t around in-person, Vince was always calling me. I think we needed to be friends to maintain our sanity — I was with him twenty-four hours a day — but business always came first.
Another talent I love is Chris Jericho. A few years back, when NXT first started, they wanted him to compete with one of the rookies from the show. He was a bit upset and he wanted to speak to me about it.
“Pat, you know I respect you. Tell me the truth. What do you think?”
“What’s the problem?”
“I don’t understand . . . It’s not helping me.”
“Chris, when he beats you, you’ll go crazy. He got a lucky win on you . . . It’s not going to kill you, it’s just . . . entertainment.”
The last time he came back to work with a big contract, I teased him.
“I’m so glad you came back. That loss, I guess it didn’t kill your business.”
He never forgot that lesson and he even mentioned the story in his third book. (Three books — I can barely get through one. Kids today . . .)
He’s a hardworking son of a bitch. Guys his size have to be really good and produce every single time they go out there. I feel a real connection to this type of talent. They remind me of my own career; they face the same issues that I faced. Like me, they have something different from larger-than-life characters like Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, or Ultimate Warrior.
What you project as a character is what ultimately sells tickets. Mickey Mouse still sells tickets for Walt Disney. It’s almost as if Vince looked at wrestling years ago and decided to create something similar. He saw wrestling like the world of Disney, with all those characters aiming to be bigger than life. I never asked if that was his intention, and at some point we probably tried to do too much . . . Like making a garbage man a character and stuff like that, where everyone was cartoonish. I think we’ve struck a better balance today; there will always be a need for good characters, which can turn around the career of a good wrestler. Sure, we have hits and misses, but for every Duke “the Dumpster” Droese, there is an Undertaker.
You know, we weren’t sure what to do with Undertaker when he first came to WWE.
“You know how I see him?” I said to Vince. “I’m not sure what is the exact word for it, but he reminds me of characters in old Western movies . . . That guy with the long black coat who would have different roles in town. Like a doctor . . .”
Vince said, “You’re not describing a doctor, Patrick.”
“I don’t know what they are called.”
Someone said, “From your description, I think you mean an undertaker.”
That was a good name — I had the concept in my mind but I didn’t know what to call it. The funny thing after that is when Percy Pringle came in to work for us, he told us he was a licensed mortician. Undertaker and Percy knew each other from Texas — it was a match made in hell. When the man who would became Paul Bearer said mortician, Vince and I started laughing. He was mortified, the poor soul. He was sure he had just blown his interview by saying the wrong thing. We reassured him he had said just the right thing. Isn’t that amazing?
For a long time, it was only me working with Vince. Now, there are something like twenty people working in creative with him. How they get anything done amazes me.
I went years without seeing Hulk Hogan after he left Florida, but you could tell he was already starting to piece things together. He was always a Vince McMahon Jr. guy, part of his vision all along. I told Hulk to call Vince Jr. when we crossed paths working in Montréal for André’s promotion. The rest, as they say, is history.
In this business, if you love what you do, all you have to do is invest in some boots and a pair of tights. That’s what Hogan did, and he became bigger than all of us. His success then trickled down to everyone else in the business.
I believed in Hulk Hogan as “our guy” in the mid-1980s. He was the hero and we depended on him. All that mattered was that he was WWE’s locomotive. When we worked together, it was my job as a producer to make him comfortable and let him know that the company had his back. That didn’t mean, however, I would not poke fun at him.
On one occasion, he was in a big meeting with Vince in one of the boardrooms, so I went to the top of the tower in Stamford and hung a Hogan wrestling buddy from the roof so that it would dangle just in front of the window. We all had a good laugh, and that’s all that mattered. You need to laugh in this business if you want to make it. Too bad it’s not always fun. It can be very hard and there is often not enough time to enjoy success.
And when tragedy strikes there is even less time to pick yourself up.
GOODBYE, MY FRIEND
“But through it all, when there was doubt,
I ate it up and spit it out”
It wasn’t always fun and I wasn’t always laughing, though I tried. I fired someone once after a particularly bad screwup, and he called me an no-good Irish motherfucker. There might have been a gay slur thrown in there somewhere as well. I went to Vince’s office and blew a gasket. “It’s not true, Vince, and it really pisses me off. I’m not Irish.”
But, seriously, I had to go through some dark times. There was absolutely no laughter associated with the sexual harassment scandal. In the wake of other individuals’ misconduct within the company, I was wrongly accused of being involved in their inappropriate conduct. The fact that I was gay certainly played a part in me being targeted like that. Out of loyalty, I decided to make life easy on Vince: I quit the company. In my mind, that was it; I was done. I was out of the business and I needed a new job. I even went to school to become a bartender. I figured that if I was good enough, I could work in an airport or something and still meet people from all over the world. It was weird being out of the business completely. I really don’t want to go into the details, or give publicity to people who don’t deserve it, but this is my book and I need to make this statement to clarify things forever.
I understand that no matter what I say about th
e situation, people are going to believe what they’ll believe. (And that’s why I’ve decided not to labor over the details.) I could spend page after page on the whole story of going to civil court against that no-good son of a bitch . . . To this day, I honestly don’t know why he picked on me. I talked to him twice while he worked for WWE.
I said hello to him and welcomed him to the company shortly after he was hired, and I told him he would have a good time working with us. I didn’t see him for quite a while after that. He worked in our studio facility and I was at the tower. We were in two different buildings.
I remember the only other time I met him was when Vince had asked me to come to his office. Before you enter, there’s a waiting room. He was there, waiting to see Vince as well. I said hi to him and went in to speak with Vince. I spoke with Vince for maybe five minutes at most. Then, right after seeing me, Vince fired the guy. I honestly didn’t know that’s why he was waiting. In fact, I only found out he had been let go two weeks later. I had not even seen his work on television. It took him six months after being fired to bring the allegations forward, and it was coincidence that that’s when everything else hit the media. It was fucking awful.
Quitting WWE over all of that was the worst time for me professionally. It was horrible. I was loyal, but I was also heartbroken because there was really nothing I could do but wait for my name to be cleared. I was at the mercy of one man’s lies just because I was gay. Worse, some people I considered friends, whom I had helped in the business, went on television and blatantly lied about me.
I later learned that Vince hired an outside agency, the Fairfax Group, to perform an independent internal investigation to determine if I had been guilty of anything. I understood why the company needed to do that. I had quit not because I was guilty, but because I didn’t want to put the company through an ordeal. The investigators talked to everyone: from referees to production crew, from the talent to the office staff. Anyone and everyone who might have had to deal with me in any capacity.
Finally, Vince asked me to come to his office. And this is what he said, “Pat, you could run for President of the United States and you’d be elected. Not one person that we interviewed had a bad word to say about you. Please come back to work.”
I was ecstatic. I returned to the company for SummerSlam 1992 in England; I was not secretly working for the company as some have suggested. And, as I just told you, I really was planning to become a bartender. It was such a relief when I got back to work. Everyone was happy to see me — I can’t even count how many hugs I received. It felt very good to be back, but still the whole experience was just horrible, and it hurt.
If I had wanted it, I could have pursued a big offer to go to WCW. I received word that they wanted to speak with me. I let them know through the same channels that there was no point in talking, as I would never even entertain the idea. It never crossed my mind to work elsewhere in the business, even after I resigned. I was loyal to the company and Vince as if I were his father. It was never about money or glory.
Another thing I want to say is that I’ve never given steroids to anyone. I resent that anyone would say that about me. There is one Montreal journalist that went on the radio and said I distribute steroids out of my suitcase or something like that. My brothers and sisters heard that, and it hurt them. It didn’t bother me the same way; I was not living in Montréal. But I had to go through all of that bullshit with my family for no good reason because of these gratuitous accusations.
When I decided to resign, Louie was disgusted that I’d been dragged through all of this mud. He was behind me 100 percent and he knew I was innocent. He was my rock.
I’ve never been accused of breaking any law in court, never been found guilty of anything. But still those allegations haunt me because they’re repeated by people who don’t bother to check the facts. Through it all, three decades later, nobody has ever come forward or even insinuated that I did something wrong to them at any point in time. It was just crazy shit people made up because they were mad at the company. I am gay, and because of that I became an easy target.
Let me just say to end this: if you didn’t get to WWE, or didn’t succeed, it was because you were not good enough. And not because of anything I did, or didn’t do.
* * *
When you first start wrestling, you don’t make money. And when you finally start making some, you want to improve your life with the big house and the big car. Then one day, maybe, you realize that you don’t need all that shit. You start making smart choices, like getting a smaller place and taking care of your money. Louie and I bought a humongous house in Connecticut: 5,000 square feet and 171 windows (and not one of them was identical). Then one day I woke up and realized I needed that as much as I needed another hole in my head. When I tried to hire someone to wash all of those windows, I was quoted $8,000. Seriously. It was in a neighborhood with big houses and people with a lot of money, so that’s the price everyone was paying. It was crazy to me. I’m not paying $8,000 to have you wash my windows even if there are 171 of them. You know what he said? “It’s 171, outside and inside.”
I still said no and I realized I needed to sell that place. I found a handyman who did the job for $150, proving that it was a completely ridiculous price the specialist had quoted me. You always think you can afford the big house, but it makes no sense. Once you have it, you don’t want it anymore. The best two days I had with that place were the day we bought it and the day we sold it.
Through it all, Louie and I were together. We were a couple for forty years. When the AIDS epidemic hit, we decided to be completely exclusive. We were aware of the dangers of the spread of the disease and we didn’t waste time making that decision. I trusted him and he trusted me. We were smart and we wanted to enjoy life. We could travel and go anywhere — why risk that?
And that’s part of why I was so devastated when I lost him.
I was working in Pittsburgh at the King of the Ring PPV on June 28, 1998. It was a night made famous for the Hell in a Cell match between Mick Foley and Undertaker. Louie was at his sister’s place, just outside of Boston. I was supposed to go back to Montréal after the show. Louie was going to join me, and we were going to spend a week at home with my family.
I got the emergency call while in a meeting at the arena.
When I was told that Louie had passed away, it was like I’d been shot. A part of me died that day, too.
Linda McMahon sat with me; she held me and gave me a handkerchief. She took care of me and led me to a small room, so I could be in private. “Just sit here and relax, Pat,” she said. Then Vince came in, and even in the midst of the craziness that is a WWE PPV day, he stopped to be with me and say, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Pat. We’ll take care of everything.”
About an hour after I’d gotten the news, a limousine was waiting to take me back to the hotel. Linda said, “Take your time at the hotel, pack your bag, and compose yourself. We will have a jet ready for you to go to be with Louie’s family.”
She joined me at the hotel and brought me some vodka. I had a drink or two. Then they had me driven to the airport. When I got to Boston, another limo was waiting. I got there at 3 a.m. and all of Louie’s family was there for me.
It was his second heart attack. This one came very suddenly, out of nowhere. I was surprised since he seemed like he was in such good shape. He played golf all the time. I told him that eighteen holes were more than enough in one day, but some days he played thirty-six. As always, he told me not to tell him what to do.
I was lost without him. I wanted to let his family decide everything, but they insisted I make all the decisions. The worst part was seeing him in the casket.
Holy shit, that was tough.
Later on, after the close family had been by ourselves for a while, we started receiving friends and other family members. Then it hit us: there was a lineup outside. He came from a well-
known family in his neighborhood; a lot of people wanted to pay their respects. And he was so well liked — he had made so many friends through the years. Everybody from the WWE office came. The priest said to his sister, “What did your brother do to draw all of these people?”
“He was just a good person,” she said. And that was true.
I took very little time off. I was in shock, I guess. Vince said, “Best thing for you might just be to come back to work right away. Get your mind off it.” I’ve never told that to anybody. But he was probably right.
The hard part came when I was alone at night in a hotel room. My reflex before going to bed had always been to call Louie. I’d reach for the phone. Then it would hit me all over again. He was gone. And I would cry like a baby. So I’d pick myself up quickly and go right back to the bar for a few more drinks with the guys before heading straight back up to bed. I’m used to it now, and after a little while, things became a bit easier. Still, it is the most difficult thing I ever lived through.
Louie had worked for WWE, in the merchandising department, for a little while, and he did very well at first. But the head of the department was not an easy fellow to get along with. Vince and Louie were very tight by that point, and one day they had a conversation where it was decided that it was probably better for Louie to stop working for the company. They never had any issues after that, and they always had fun together. Louie told him that the only thing he needed to change was that he should thank people more often.
“What the hell for? It’s their job,” Vince said.
“I know, Vince, but it never hurts to add a thank-you.”
That was my Louie.
Vince has never forgotten it, to this day.
When my mother and father died, I was not the one in charge of making the important decisions. For Louie, I had to do everything, and I think it just made things even more difficult. I gave all of his jewelry, his clothes, and his golf clubs to his brothers. I didn’t keep anything — I have my memories. In my wallet, I still have a small picture of Louie. I’ve had it since forever. I have another picture in my house in Florida and some on my phone. That’s it.
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