La Mancha Screwjob
58:02 Share

WNYC Studios is supported by Zuckerman Spader. Through nearly five decades of taking on high-stakes legal matters, Zuckerman Spader is recognized nationally as a premier litigation and investigations firm. Their lawyers routinely represent individuals, organizations, and law firms in business disputes, government, and internal investigations and at trial. When the lawyer you choose matters most. Online at Zuckerman.com.

Radiolab is supported by Progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now, you're driving, exercising, cleaning.

What if you could also be saving money by switching to Progressive? Drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average, and auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Multitask right now. Quote today at Progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023.

Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. At Amika Insurance, we know it's more than a life policy. It's about the promise and the responsibility that comes with being a new parent. Being there day and night and building a plan for tomorrow, today. For the ones you'll always look out for. Trust Amika Life Insurance. Amika.com.

Empathy is our best policy. When raising a Pacifico beer with friends you just met turns into hitting up their friends' local art show, getting inspired to create something together, and painting your first mural, you found what was waiting for you. Pacifico. Life's waiting. 21 plus only. Discover responsibly. Pacifico Clara Beer. Imported by Crown Imports Chicago, Illinois. ♪♪

Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yeah. Hey, it's Latif. This is Radiolab. A few nights ago, I was watching television. Not going to tell you what show.

Fine, I will tell you what show. It was Station Eleven on HBO. It's a great show. It's a show about a fictional global pandemic. And there's this scene in the first episode where it's not even a major scene or anything, but there's like a there's a doctor, an ER doctor. She like exits a room and goes into a hall in the hospital and she takes off her mask and then she starts coughing. She has like a coughing fit. And just for like a split second, she's like,

I got very mad because I was like a doctor in a hospital, like not wearing a mask, coughing. And then I just got confused because I was like, wait, wait a second. When did they shoot this? Was this shot during the actual global pandemic? I just got...

confused in a way like my brain short circuited and the place it took me to exactly to this old radio lab episode from 2015 called La Mancha Screwjob which is about this very thing the way that kind of reality sort of pokes into fiction and changes the way we see it which is like I feel like COVID has completely changed the way that I see characters relate to each other in space on a screen um

Anyway, this episode is from before all that, but I think, yeah, I could not help but think about it, and I wanted to play it for all of you. So, enjoy.

Hello. Is this Jonathan? Yes, it is. Hello, this is Jad from New York, and Robert, my co-host, is here as well. Yes, hi. Hi, Jad. Hi, Robert. How are you doing? Good. Doing okay. How are you doing? Very good, thank you. Very good. So this is Jonathan. My name is Jonathan Goodwin. And Jonathan... We've been watching your harrowing videos all morning. Oh, dear. I'm so sorry. He's an escape artist. You all right? Sort of. No. No.

Jonathan had a show for a while on the Discovery Channel. It was called One Way Out. Yeah. But he actually started out... The very first thing that I did... Just doing these home videos that you can see on YouTube. Hello and welcome to Jonathan's Escapes. And they are nothing like any escape artist video we have ever seen. We'll be trying an escape here.

Just as an example, the first one we saw, he's in his bedroom, he's wearing jeans, no shirt, the room is messy, the whole thing is super awkward.

And then... Dad! He calls in his dad... Oh, well, you know, I'm going to escape from here. ...who walks in looking, by the way, totally confused. Can we tie my wrist to there? Jonathan then convinces him to tie his wrists to the frame of his bed. And I'm tied to the bed, bare-chested. Wrap that around. And...

And I tied a bed sheet above my bed, about sort of three feet above my bed, spread out. Then he has his dad grab a hot iron and he puts it on the bed sheet, which is hovering just a few feet above his bare chest. And I have to escape before it burns through and hits me in the chest. Here, this one, this one, because the iron's going through.

Now, the thing about Jonathan's escapes is he doesn't have a knife up his sleeve, a trick rope. This is real. And because it's real, sometimes I escape and sometimes I don't. And in that instance...

I didn't, actually. You didn't? No. Wait, so you did not escape, meaning you were on the bed, bare chested, and the iron fell through the sheet above you onto your chest? Onto my chest. What? How bad was it? It was a very healthy second-degree burn. I had to go to the emergency room. The doctor thought I had some sort of weird fetish.

And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm an escape artist, honestly. I think you do. I think you have a very weird fetish. And I think your father should also be brought there for a close and careful examination. Well, in that instance, I think he genuinely believed that I was going to escape. I'm always wondering about your dad when watching these videos. Does he know? I am more than wondering. How prepped is your dad at what's about to unfold? Not at all.

Not at all. I will bring him in and say it on camera for the first time. And then douse my legs with petrol as well. You really want to do this? All right, Dad, this is what we're going to do. And in half the time, Jonathan will fail to escape from the elaborate situation he's put himself into and he will have his eyebrows torn off. Or land in a bathtub full of thumbtacks. No!

Or a scorpion will sting the inside of his mouth. Yeah. Maybe your problem is that you would like to experience what everybody else wants to avoid experiencing. Like, I wonder what it would like to be burned alive. I wonder what it would like to have my nipples ripped off. I mean, these are not...

things that I wake up myself. Is it a I wonder? But here's the thing, though. I think that we do want to know those things. I think that's the reason why we go to movies and watch action films, because we do have a fascination with stuff like that. No, I'm happy to have you have the... I do not wake up thinking, I want to have the experience. I want to watch...

You have no I don't even want to watch you. No, I well I watch and I'm completely riveted and I'm wondering why which I think is connected to why you would do it in the first place. Yeah, because it just flies in the face of everything that you've ever seen an escape artist do Jonathan says take someone like David Blaine, you know there you've got a guy who's standing on a post the surrounded by flames the flames are getting higher and higher. It's super dramatic and

But in those kind of situations... They always escape and just in the nick of time. And they take what should be an incredibly dramatic art form and make it kind of a cliche. But because Jonathan's escapes are totally real, you really have no idea what's going to happen. And the reason why I want to do it is because I think I would enjoy watching it because I think it's entertaining.

And unfortunately, I'm the guy who had the idea for it. Do you know what I mean? It's like nobody else is going to do this, so I better do it so it happens. I'm Jed Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. And today on Radio Lab, we're going to take a cue from Jonathan. We are going to, in our own way, get real. And we're going to start with a story that's about pretty much

The least real thing I can think of. All right, hey guys, sorry. We're here now. Peter, I'm Simon. Good to meet you. Simon, how are you, man? I'm doing well, and yourself? Good. Okay, who's who? Peter is a DJ, Peter Rosenberg from Hot 97, Simon Adler is a journalist, our pal Andrew Morantz from The New Yorker is also in the room, and Robert and I are in the back. Good. Well, we have all gathered here today to talk about the wonderful world of professional wrestling. My favorite world.

Double sledge right off the top. So, yes, we're going to talk about professional wrestling for the first half of the show. And we realize there's probably a lot of you out there listening right now who are like, seriously, guys? There are people like, you're 35 years old. You love wrestling. It's, you know, I get this a lot. If I'm tweeting about it a lot, I get tweets that go, you know, it's fake, right? It's like, well, do I write you that when you tweet about your favorite movie?

It's entertainment. The awesome thing about wrestling is, is that there are these random things that are a little bit real. And sometimes those moments of realness can just be like, boom. They can change everything. Hold! Hold on!

Now, if you're like me and you grew up in the 80s, you might remember wrestling as like, you know, Hulk Hogan versus Andre the Giant, these epic matchups that were kind of great, but also sort of ridiculous and cartoonish. Well, according to Peter Rosenberg, there was a moment where wrestling started to sort of tinker with reality in a much more nuanced way.

and fascinating way. In fact, you could argue that pro wrestling became a reinstantiation of the Baroque movement of the 16th century with a postmodern twist. I know people who would. You're going to meet them. I'm Jad. I'm Robert. This is Radio Lab. And according to Peter, this whole thing, where we're going to start, this whole thing

goes back to this moment called the Montreal Screwjob. The Montreal Screwjob was above anything else that had ever happened or that will probably ever happen again because it was utter reality transpiring right there in the ring. I mean, it was when real life just came and tore a hole in the fiction.

That guy you just heard is David Shoemaker. I write about professional wrestling for Grantland. And the guy you're about to hear is journalist Simon Adler. He will take the story from here. Okay, so the moment in question really centers around this one guy named Brett the Hitman Hart. ♪

Bret Hart is seen by many to be the greatest in-ring performer of all time. He was one of the good guys. I am the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be. In the business, they call him a baby face. Is that what you call the good guys? A good guy in wrestling is a baby face. He was my favorite wrestler as a kid. I didn't understand why at the time, but now I do. It's because he did everything so well.

And in that era, the mid to late 80s when I fell in love with him, so many guys were just big and hulking and a little bit clumsy. But Bret did the kind of work that you could show to someone who's never watched wrestling. I think they could see the art in it. And I think they could see how it's like ballet or a million other art forms.

What he means, and you can kind of see this when you watch old Bret Hart matches on YouTube. He's gliding through the air, bouncing off the mat, off the ropes. He tells stories brilliantly within the way he plays.

So wrestling is scripted, but there's a lot of improv going on. There are these set beats. He knew how to take those moments and in that improv make you think, oh shoot, he's about to lose. And then... He was a natural born wrestler. You know, his father was a legendary wrestler. His brother Owen. Legendary wrestler.

He comes from this Canadian wrestling royalty. Me as a kid growing up, I had the ability to watch the, or had the fortune to watch these varied wrestling styles and techniques and stuff. That's Bret Hart in an interview in 2000 on Fresh Air. And he says that some of his earliest memories as a kid were...

were these massive dudes showing up to his house and hanging out in his basement with his dad. You know, even then my dad was, you know, say 60. Who was teaching them how to be wrestlers. He would pull on these old woe-y tights and then he would wrestle with these guys and he would literally put them in wrestling holds, these submission wrestling holds, which is his obsession and...

He would torture these big, huge football players for hours, and they would scream, literally these high-pitched screams. It was terrifying. I'd be upstairs in the room above it. And as I got older, I would go down and actually venture into the room and sit on the bench and watch. Sometimes these wrestlers would run out loud

when my dad finally let them go, they'd actually run out, tear out of the, out the doorway and out the outside, sometimes in the snow and run out in their bare feet. And you wouldn't even see them again. I mean, there's a legendary, so many legendary stories about the Hart family, but you, you know, my favorite among many is, uh,

the bear that lived in their backyard during summers, because at the time wrestling a bear was a thing that would actually happen from time to time. No, really. And, uh, Brett tells a story in his, his book, um, about, you know, just sitting there and letting the bear lick his toes. I mean, like this, this is a life that they, that he lived and he was, he was so in, it was so ingrained in him. So in the early eighties, Brett was working for his dad's company up in Canada and

And while that's going on in Canada, there's this guy Vince McMahon, back in the U.S., who is building kind of this wrestling empire. And basically he's buying up all of these small promoters from across the country and eventually goes up into Canada and buys out Brett's dad's company. He bought it in 1984. They paid him a certain amount of money to stop running.

Just to kind of go out of business. And then they took on some of his better wrestlers at the time, which was myself and I had a couple of brother-in-laws. And shortly thereafter, the WWF comes back.

under fire. Hulk Hogan and other World Wrestling Federation stars have taken the offensive against accusations that many have been steroid abusers. McMahon's monster mentality led to widespread steroid abuse in the World Wrestling Federation. So there's this big steroid crisis. Vince has to deal with all of this litigation, and he kind of needs to rebrand his organization. He needs a new good guy, a new champion, a new baby face. And he looks to Bret for that.

for a couple of reasons, according to David Shoemaker. One is that he's a traditionalist. Sort of a throwback to an earlier time. Two, he's not that big, so when you see him, you don't think, that guy's definitely, yeah, right rage. And so he saw all that in Bret Hart. So during the 90s, Vince makes Bret a really big star. He's done it! We've got a new champion!

the new face of the company. I mean, he was on The Simpsons. He was a really, really big star. You know, there are people who criticize Bret for saying he wasn't that fun or he took himself too seriously, but he was a serious worker. He took wrestling very seriously. I found myself really fighting hard to actually survive and come out of it, actually to come out of the wrestling profession someday as a success rather than a wrestling tragedy, which is what so many of them turn out.

Okay, so fast forward to 1995, 1996. At the time, a major rivalry was starting between the WWF. That is Vince McMahon's company. And the WCW, which was Ted Turner's company. Ted Turner, multi-kajillionaire.

And one of his big tactics is, I'm just going to start buying all of the wrestlers from the WWF, from Vince McMahon's organization. So he's offering them more money. He's offering them longer contracts. And he was just like flooding it with money to steal all the stars from WWF. And then in late 1996, Brett got an offer. Turner really went in for the kill. From WCW, that was huge. $2.8 million.

I mean, you have to show some common sense, you know, and first of all, you have to do what's right for your family. But I mean, how much money do you need sometimes? I found myself torn between trying to do the right thing for my family and at the same time show my loyalties. That's a clip of Brett talking in a documentary that was being filmed at the time. Called Wrestling with Shadows, which is fantastic. The filmmaker, Paul Jay, was nice enough to let us play some clips. In any case, Brett gets this offer, and he's got kind of this terrible decision to make.

Because Vince gave him a lot. You know, he really gave him his life. And initially, Brett decides, there's no way I'm going to leave. You know, I think my relationship with Vince McMahon was always sort of like a father. And I sort of saw myself, if I left...

It would have been a little bit like leaving my dad, especially when the chips are down. He really did see Vince as a father figure. So Brett goes to Vince and basically says, convince me to stay. They went back and forth. There was conversation about him signing a long-term deal, a 20-year deal with WWF, not for as much money, but for guaranteed security. Vince said...

I can't afford to pay you that. Just talk to Vince. Did you? In the documentary, Bret and his wife, they're sitting at a kitchen table. What do you say? He goes, nobody wants Bret Hart more than Vince McMahon. Then why is he letting you go? He can't afford to compete with Turner. Turner's hell-bent on trying to put him out of business. I gotta think about everything. I gotta think about everything. Just see what makes sense. I call Eric. Can we cut this off now for a little while? Ultimately...

it became clear that Brett would have to go take the money. I can't help but feel really heartbroken and disappointed that I left this company. So this really gets to the heart of it. Once Brett decides he's going to leave, they have to figure out how. How are they going to make his exit? This is really the pivotal question behind all of this. You know, it's a very, very delicate situation.

That's Vince Russo, and this was sort of his problem to solve, because he worked for Vince McMahon. You know, you could say I was his right-hand man, because I was writing the show. He was part of the team that scripted who would win, who would lose, how it would happen. You know, I mean, I was, you know, literally putting the show on paper, you know, once a week. Wait, why is this a hard question? I mean, can't he just pick up and leave?

Well, because he's the champion. He has the belt. The physical belt. The giant golden belt buckle thing. And that belt is the symbol of the company. And everybody in it. Everybody working behind the scenes. Everybody who was trying to support their family. That belt was a representation of all that. The worst thing that could happen is your champion walking away with the belt. Showing up to the new company. Holding up the championship from the old company. Where they could just defile it if they wanted to.

That was not an option for Vince McMahon. This isn't a perfect comparison, but the closest thing I've come up to in my mind is it would be like LeBron James quitting his contract with Nike and then showing up in an Adidas commercial and taking a piss into a pair of Nikes. So, you know, Vince, at the end of the day, he just had to get that belt off of Brett. So their initial thought, their first plan was,

was probably the simplest option. There was a match coming up, this big event, a pay-per-view event in Montreal. Brett being the champion of the company, he should just lose to the number two guy in the company, Shawn Michaels. Vince loved Shawn. I mean, really thought Shawn was a megastar, which he was right about. Clearly, Shawn was next in line. So they pitched this idea to Brett, and Brett was like, I can't do that. I can't.

For one, he thinks Shawn's an idiot. He's got this prima donna personality. I mean, he thinks he's better than everyone else. There's something very arrogant and obnoxious about him. Because he was a showman. He would hump the ring. Just, like, do ridiculous things. And, like, to Bret, Shawn was the triumph of style over substance. Also, you're asking Bret to wrap up his career in the WWE with a loss in Montreal, in Canada. Where he is a national hero.

I described to Vince, I just assumed blow my brains out would be the same what you're asking me to do. From a character standpoint, that's what I would be doing. Brett the Hitman Hart would blow his brains out. The whole thing's been hard. Day of the match, still nothing has been decided as to how the match is going to end. Brett is backstage and eventually he goes to Vince to have a conversation. All right, I gotta just talk.

The documentary crew is filming all of this. And at this point, Vince says, no, I don't want any cameras in here. Get those out of here. And so Brett actually ends up wearing a wire to document the conversation that's about to happen.

I never ever wanted to leave here with any kind of bad feeling. But this week has been a bad week for me. I feel kind of betrayed a little bit. Well, I do too a little bit. And again, all we're talking about really is Ted Turner. That's what's coming between you and me. That's all. I can't tell you how appreciative I will always be for everything you've done. I didn't want to leave with any problems. I actually didn't want to leave at all. And then there's a point where there was no other choice but to go. The way this whole thing has been depicted, it's really hard for me as a hero here to come up short this weekend. Um...

What would you want to do today then? I'm opening you guys.

I think what I'd like to do is get through today. I think tomorrow I should just go in and do my speech. So Brett suggests that this ends in a disqualification, and usually what that means is something called a schmoz. Typically in a schmoz, the ring is just flooded with a bunch of wrestlers and chaos ensues. The referee usually is thrown out of the ring. And it ends in some sort of draw. Brett would then appear on Monday Night Raw the next day and turn over the belt. That's what he would do.

That is what he planned on doing. So that way he could turn over the belt but not lose? Exactly. And eventually Vince says, okay, fine. No, hang on. I'm opening you. Like I said before, I'm determined this is going to wind up quite well. Coming up, it all goes wrong. Radiolab will continue in a moment. ♪

Hey, folks, this is Simon Adler. I'm a senior producer here at Radiolab. But back when we initially made this episode, you're listening to I was actually an intern here. Anyhow, I was just coming here to say thank you.

Our team and the show honestly could not exist without listener support. Each episode requires time and work from so many people. For the La Mancha Screwjob here, we worked with radio DJs, wrestling historians, Cervantes scholars, New Yorker writers, fact-checkers...

And then, of course, there are all the folks who work behind the scenes to bring this to you, like David Gable, our administrative assistant, who you hear on the show from time to time, or Ariane Wack, our technical producer who does the mixing to make sure everything sounds just right. There are so many of us, and all of us are always pitching in to bring the absolute best stories we can to you. And again, thank you.

Because without you, we would not exist. Which brings me to maybe the actual reason I'm talking to you. Because we have this new membership program called The Lab. And when you sign up as a member for it, you allow us to continue to work hard over long periods of time, sometimes more than a year, to do extensive reporting on things both important and, in the case of professional wrestling, maybe not so important. But then also, of course, make it sound fun.

And the cool thing about the lab is you get stuff in exchange, like exclusive merchandise or invitations to spend time with us or these little audio tidbits that don't make it into the show. It's a cool sort of extra way for us to say thank you and to bring you behind the scenes of the work that you make possible here. Now, if you're already a lab member, we can't thank you enough. If you're not a member, you can join at radiolab.org slash join.

Alright folks, can't wait to meet you all. Thanks for listening.

This is Radiolab. Let's get back to Simon Adler's story of the moment that changed wrestling forever. You'll also hear Peter Rosenberg from Hot 97 in just a moment as well. He's the first voice we'll hear. But we'll pick up the action with the big match, the moment we've all been waiting for. And now, Milton Bradley's Electronic Karate Fighters presents the 1997 Survivor Series. Okay, here we go. So, Survivor Series, 1997, Montreal.

Oh, the drama. So around 9.20 p.m., 20,000 people in the stands, countless television screens across the country, Shawn Michaels comes out.

And he comes out singing his own theme song. I think I'm cute. I know I'm sexy. Singing karaoke style? It's pre-recorded of him singing. That's an approach. Yeah. He's got his hair in a ponytail. He's wearing his trademark black spandex pants with hearts all over them. Like, he is the manifestation of everything that Bret despises. And then out comes Bret Hart waving a Canadian flag.

And he walks into the ring, he gets in, takes off the championship belt, hands it to the ref, and before the match even officially begins. Look out! And Shawn Michaels is in. And Shawn Michaels is not going to waste any time. Shawn flies at Bret and just starts wailing. And Bret Hart fighting back with one hand. Bret Hart will win.

Sean and Brett, they're going at each other with a sort of real ferocity. Pretty quick, they're outside the ring. Brett picks up Sean, chucks him over the security railing into the crowd. Sean Martin, no man's land!

Then there's this moment where Brett picks Sean up so that Sean's legs are straight up in the air and then Brett just slams him on his back.

And all of this is scripted. Yeah, everything I know about it is like they're following the narrative arc, but they know, okay, we're going to fight outside the ring for a while, and then X, Y, Z will happen. And so eventually, Brett throws Shawn back into the ring. Get this over with!

And then you get to a point in the match which feels very early in the match. Where Brett climbs onto the turnbuckle, which is the corner post of the ring. He gets up on top of that, catapults himself off the turnbuckle, through the air towards Shawn Michaels. Super dramatic. He's kind of floating in the air there for a moment. And then... Oh! Michaels just pulled a referee right in front of the hitman! What Shawn does right before Brett is about to come and hit him, he pulls the referee...

in between Brett and Sean, a human shield of sorts. Brett hits the referee, the referee hits Sean, and all three men are lying on the mat. Is that a disqualification? It might be if he could get up and call it. Oh, here we are. Right, this could be the moment. But no, before the referee can get up, Sean gets up.

walks over to Brett, and then Sean puts Brett in the sharpshooter, which is Brett's signature finishing move. Basically, Sean pretzels up Brett's legs and sits him. And within seconds, the bell rings. Sean slides out of the ring, grabs the belt, runs to the back, takes off.

Things work a certain way in wrestling matches, right? Like, no one gets the first pin the second a match starts, and no one puts someone in a submission hold, and they instantly submit. Especially not Bret Hart. It just did not appear like the time the match was supposed to end. The crowd is kind of shocked. It's strangely quiet. And there's this one moment where the camera zooms in on Bret's face while he's lying chest down on the mat looking up.

And there is just this bizarre, amazing look on his face. Confusion is an emotion that almost never exists in pro wrestling. There's the cartoon confusion of like, everything's crazy and your arms are going like wild, your eyeballs pop out of your head. But real confusion is one of the most compelling emotions of all. That's what you see on his face in its most pure form. Genuine confusion.

And then anger. Brett gets up, puts his arms on the rope, looks down, sees Vince McMahon, and spits right in Vince's face. He then proceeds to get out of the ring and basically destroy everything in sight. He goes over to the announcer's table, starts ripping it apart. He destroys the monitors. Throws the headphones out into the crowd. He goes pretty nuts.

And in maybe the moment that truly made you go, what is happening? Brett gets back into the ring. He takes his hand in the air and draws with his finger in the air as big as he can. W C W, which is where he was going to be leaving to go work. W C W and keeps doing that. Walking across the ring, just signaling W C W to the crowd.

After the match, Brett heads back into the locker room looking for Vince. Brett tells the cameras to shut off. And then, to make a long story short, he clocks Vince in the face. Knocks him out.

Now the WWF has a real problem on their hands. Vince has a black eye and the fourth wall has just been torn down and they need to figure out how or if they're going to build it back up. And the next day... This again was the head writer at the time, Vince Rousseau. We had a television taping right after the, you know, you have Roar on Monday. You know, you do your pay-per-view on Sunday, you have Roar on Monday. So they all huddle in a room to discuss their options.

And Vince says that everybody in that room... Their first knee-jerk reaction is, well, we're going to sweep this under the rug and not even talk about it. I mean, that was almost just assumed. Because you have to understand there's this old principle in wrestling called kefe. And basically what this is, is this law of the wrestling gods passed down since time eternal that says you don't talk about the fact that it's fake. Everyone knows that it's scripted and that it's fake.

But you damn well better not mention that ever. Why? Because everybody has a better time when everyone is under the spell of it. And I was like, wait a minute.

Vince is walking around with a black eye. The boss has a black eye and one of the boys punched him in the face. Rousseau is saying, I understand kayfabe, but we have to address this. We can't not acknowledge this. And that doesn't have to be a problem. That can be an opportunity for us. I mean, it like, I hate to say this, but like, it doesn't get any better than this. Rousseau says this discussion got very heated. It was passion filled.

And in the end, nobody really knew what Vince McMahon was going to do.

By the time Bret Hart steps center stage for his matchup with Shawn Michaels... And eventually, Vince McMahon decides, I'm going to break with kayfabe. Now, keep in mind, he's always been the owner of the organization, but very few people actually knew that. To most fans of professional wrestling, he was just an announcer. That night, on his own TV show, he comes out, not as Vince McMahon, the ringside announcer, but as Vince McMahon, the owner of the company. Let's cut right to the chase.

Seven days ago at the Survivor Series, did you or did you not screw Bret Hart? Some would say I screwed Bret Hart. Bret Hart would definitely tell you I screwed him. I look at it from a different standpoint. I look at it from the standpoint of the referee did not screw Bret Hart. Shawn Michaels certainly did not screw Bret Hart. Nor did Vince McMahon screw Bret Hart. I truly believe that Bret Hart...

Screwed Bret Hart and you can look in the mirror and know that I'm sure in some parts of the country right now there's a collective groan that you orchestrated the situation and the fact that People are not going to understand what you mean by Bret Hart screwed Bret Hart So what do you mean by that? There's a time-honored tradition in the wrestling business when someone is leaving they show the right amount of respect and

to the WWF superstars in this case, who helped make you that superstar. You show the proper respect to the organization that helped you become who you are today. It's a time-honored tradition, and Bret Hart didn't want to honor that tradition. Nonetheless, that was Bret's decision. Bret screwed Bret. And everything changed from that point on.

And according to Peter, after the Montreal Screwjob and after this speech, the writers of the WWF started blurring the lines. On a different level, Vince McMahon, the chairman of the WWE. Ladies and gentlemen. He became Mr. McMahon. Mr. McMahon, the character, the number one villain in the company. You're fired!

There were no more ridiculous, you know, stupid, unbelievable, childish, ignorant, immature characters. Every character we had was basically an extension of themselves. Because Stone Cold sets up. You know, Stone Cold Steve Austin was Steve Austin 1,000 times magnified. Who just smiled?

You know, the rock was Rocky Maivia 100 times magnified. And as a result...

That was the beginning of the biggest boom in the history of the wrestling business. As far as business goes, this was huge for the WWF and Vince McMahon. They came roaring back in the ratings war. They destroyed Ted Turner and the WCW. They won. And if you ask Vince Russo why this approach, this new aesthetic was so successful, he says simply, The truth is,

That was great TV. Plain and simple. The fans just want something true. Just tell the fans what happened. But Peter says it's way more complicated than that. It's not just about the truth. You still have these writers who are scripting the show and wrestlers who are getting that script and following it. So it's not like it's now a true world. I think it's something more like reality.

There are these tiny injections of truth into this world in really unexpected moments. What that does is it puts everyone on high alert all the time for those moments. And when everyone is on high alert for those moments all the time, every moment has the potential to be true, has the potential to have a little bit of that injection into it. And when you are watching for those injections, it completely changes how you are engaging people.

with the art form, with the entertainment. And that creates an entirely new type of fan. What they call a smart fan, a smart mark, a smark as they're known, people who love the wrestling business but really love the behind the scenes of the business. The what now? The smark mark? Smart mark. Here's where you can get a little lingo crazy. The lingo part of wrestling is a huge, huge part of it. And a mark is someone who doesn't know that wrestling is fake.

or using another piece of jargon here, that it is a work. Yes, a work is anything that's not real. Okay. As opposed to a shoot, which is something that's real. Like the Montreal Screwjob. Yes. Are shoots, by definition, something that's not supposed to happen? In the ring, a shoot should never happen. But then there's something called, of course, a worked shoot. LAUGHTER

And that's something that does happen. Is that where you script it to seem like it's totally unscripted? And it may even be real life that they're injecting into it, but it was planned. It was still all discussed that this is what would happen. And so watching wrestling becomes this game of hunting for the truth.

According to David Shoemaker. And not just any truths, but the authentic truths. The true truths. The true truths. Even if you know that it's fake, there's some point where the guys are really going at it in the ring that you're just like, wow, maybe it's real just right there. And that's what makes wrestling so powerful. It's the never-ending search for the reality within the unreal. The fact that we get to blend these things together, I mean...

Another example that's just fantastic is in the early 2000s, there was Edge, Matt Hardy, and a girl named Lita. Lita and Matt Hardy were legitimately in love, dating for years. Edge and Matt Hardy were legitimately best friends. And then... You bastard! I'm gonna make your life miserable! Edge ended up with Lita, took his best friend's girl...

Something that unfortunately happens in life sometimes. And the WWE can kiss my ass!

And it was turned into a storyline. Men have fought over women since the beginning of time, and we are about to see an epic battle over one right now. I find it incredible that you could go out into the ring and pretend to beat the hell out of someone you want to beat the hell out of. To know that you have to go out there, work really hard against someone you legitimately hate, and also absolutely have to protect...

How can we not find that fascinating? That's awesome. That's incredible. That's like watching Fleetwood Mac go on tour. Exactly. That's what I was going to say next. That,

That's Andrew Morantz, by the way, from The New Yorker. And play all their songs because all their songs, they all had these love quadrangles. They all were married and left each other and wrote songs about I'm so pissed off at you because you left me for the guy who's standing right there. And then they go out on tour and Lindsey Buckingham is standing right next to Stevie Nicks playing the song that he wrote about You Betrayed Me, I Hate You So Much. It's crazy.

Night after night. Super fascinating. Yeah, I just think there's a part of the human brain that wants to be confused between those boundaries, that wants to be slipping in between what's real, what's fake, to feel that confusion. I feel like that's why Jimmy Fallon was so successful on Saturday Night Live, not because he was the greatest sketch comedian, but because he broke a lot. And you can't do that in wrestling because those moments are the best. You have to save them. You have to save them. And when people acknowledge a moment

And you can tell they look around at the crowd and they're acknowledging like this is or someone says one line that everyone kind of knows is like, whoa, that's kind of real. Those moments are special and you have to save them. Hold on one second. Sorry. Hey, what's up?

He's on the way. All right, I'll be leaving shortly. Peace. Sorry, guys. Usher awaits. Come on. Can I ask you one real quick question? Yeah, of course. What happened to Peter Bretthardt after this incident? Did he go off to WCW and have a big career? Well, that's sort of the interesting thing is that after the Montreal screwjob, a few weeks later, Bret showed up on WCW television, and it never really worked out for Bret.

In 1999, just two years into his contract with WCW, during a match, he got kicked in the head and suffered a severe concussion. And it was the beginning of the end. That same year... Ladies and gentlemen, something has gone terribly wrong. Brett's brother, Owen Hart, who was wrestling for the WWF...

during one of his entrances to the match. He was entering from the ceiling and something with the stunt went terribly wrong and he fell 50 feet into the ring and he died. This is not a part of the show. This is real life. Owen Hart is being attended to right now by a host... I went through a

Right away, I said, I could never, I don't think I can ever go back. Brett Hart spoke with Terry Gross about a year after this incident. You think of all these sort of contrived storylines that they have in wrestling. You know, this guy's going to come in and he's going to do that and he's going to say this about you. I just thought anything you can possibly imagine is so pathetically meaningless when you relate to the real-life horror of what happened with my brother. He would retire shortly after saying that.

So thank you to Simon. What did we decide his wrestling name was? Simon. Simon the Growling Gruyere. Adler. Adler. Because he's from Wisconsin. So you have to be like a fierce cheese. Fierce cheese. And thank you also. Very special thanks to Fresh Air for letting us air their Bret Hart interview. And thank you also to Paul Jay for allowing us to play some clips from his documentary Wrestling with Shadows. Radiolab will continue in a moment.

We're back. Well, tell us who you are. I am Bruce Burningham. And where do you teach? I teach at Illinois State University. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad. I'm Robert. So Bruce, he's a scholar, a language professor, and I called him up because Jad and I were having a little disagreement. Friendly one. Hmm. Okay. We're having an argument here. I said...

That when you get the hip-hop and the wrestling and the novels and all that, you're getting a sort of a moment, a contemporary moment, where people are fascinated by authenticity. And then Jad, my partner, said, I don't know, maybe people have always been interested in authenticity, and this just comes with being a human.

It's nothing about now. It's just about us. I mean, it's new in the sense that this generation of which we belong has become very interested in these kind of questions. But Bruce told me this preoccupation, it's not really new. In fact, at least in book form, it goes back way longer than you'd think. 1605.

Whoa. Before wrestling and before Fleetwood Mac and before Jimmy Fallon began laughing at his own jokes, there was Miguel Cervantes' book, Don Quixote. Yeah, so the first book really is about authenticity from the get-go. You open this book. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. And right away, the narrator says, I'm going to tell you a story which I actually gathered from other authors, from a bunch of different authors.

historical documents, so I'm not really the author. He says things like, well, some books say the first...

was this, and some say it was that. So even from the start, you have a very unreliable narrator. Who then proceeds to tell the story of a very unreliable, if not completely crazy, character. Don Quixote, who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else. So Don Quixote believes that he has been set on Earth to rescue widows, princesses, and be kind to orphans. He's like a delusional guy.

totally delusional. He's essentially a guy who's read too many Zane Grey novels and decides he needs to be a cowboy. He thinks herds of sheep are attacking armies. He thinks windmills are giants. At the same time, he has this savvy assistant, Sancho Panza, who seems to know what's really going on, and they're constantly arguing about what's real and what's not. And then in Chapter 8...

something really strange happens. One day, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are traveling down the road and they see a carriage with a woman inside. Just an ordinary woman going, you know, to meet her husband. Don Quixote, however, for no reason at all,

decides that she is a woman in distress, needs to be rescued, and he spies this man standing right next to the carriage. He's a Basque guy. He sees this guy, and he decides that he's an enemy who needs to be confronted, and so they start fighting. Don Quixote was charging the wary Basque with his sword on high, determined to cut him in half. And the Basque was waiting for him, his sword also raised. And in mid-swing, when both swords are in the air, the narrator stops and says...

And I don't know where this goes from there. I've run out of material. And he just sort of stops narrating. And this is what, 16-0 something? 16-05. And the book stops? It just stops. You mean that's the end of the book? Well, no. So you turn the page and you're in a new chapter. And now the narrator is telling you how, as luck would have it, he found this manuscript. One day when I was in the Alcanar market in Toledo. Crazily enough, he's at a bazaar, like a sort of a shopping kind of place. And he sees this pile of old papers and books together in a basket. And he's rifling through it.

And he sees a picture of Don Quixote de la Mancha. I was astounded and filled with anticipation. There it was. Apparently a real historical account. In which the stupendous battle between the gallant Basque and the valiant Manchegan is concluded. The problem was, it was in Arabic. And so then he hires a local morisco who is a Christianized moor.

to translate it for him. Alright, so you now got a guy who's writing a book from historical sources. He's run out of one, he's found another, but now that one has to be translated and on top of that... He frequently inserts commentary about the translation and will say stuff like, "Well, Siriamete says this

But we all know that Arabs can't be trusted. So, you know, take that for what that's worth. And as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, wait a second, this was written in 1605. What did people make of a book that didn't seem to have any author? It had author upon author upon author. Like, were they...

Horrifying? What? I mean, the book was a bestseller. It was hugely popular. Apparently, people found all these layers and these ambiguities a laugh riot. Oh, yeah. They gobbled it up and they laughed as hard as they could. This is Howard Mansing, a Cervantes scholar at Purdue. And Don Quixote was translated into English in 1612, into French in 1614, into Italian in 1622. Everybody read it, including in the New World, by the way. Many copies of the first edition of Don Quixote were shipped

to the colonies. Wow. So the book is a worldwide bestseller, maybe the first of its kind. And then 10 years later, 10 years later, Cervantes writes a sequel, which kicks up this narrative weirdness to a completely new level. In part two, part two, Don Quixote of La Mancha, he introduces a new character named Samson Carrasco. He actually visits Don Quixote and Sancho to tell them that part one exists, it's a bestseller, and

And so in the very early chapters of Part II, Don Quixote... This would be like walking up to Huckleberry Finn and saying, oh, by the way, you're living here in Hannibal, Missouri, but you're now a famous boy. That's exactly what happened. Everybody he meets knows who he is because they've read Part I. And now it gets even stranger because in real life, during that 10 years that it took Cervantes to write his second book... A person who goes by the pseudonym of Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda published his own second part of Don Quixote before...

Cervantes could get his own second part out. Wait, so this is an unofficial part two? Yeah. Today we'd recognize it as sort of fan fiction or somebody attempting to steal George Lucas' idea and come up with their own Star Wars installment. So there's this unauthorized part two floating around. Miguel Cervantes is very annoyed by it, I'm assuming.

So in his official sequel to Don Quixote? There is this scene where Don Quixote is at an inn and he overhears a character talking about his relationship with this supposed Don Quixote. Wait, so this guy – That's Simon Adler who sat in on the interview with me. This guy existed in the fake Quixote number two. Is a character in that and is now appearing in the real Quixote number two? Cervantes steals him.

If you're going to steal my character, I'll steal yours back. Right? So now you've got the real Don Quixote. He's bumping into a character stolen from a fake book of Don Quixote. So Don Quixote then decides to confront this person. He marches right up to the guy and he says, I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, the same one who is on the lips of fame and not that unfortunate man who has wanted to usurp my name.

and bring honor to himself with my thoughts. And so, and it's the climax of that scene, which is just wonderful, is he forces this other character who he's stolen from the unauthorized sequel, who Cerrantes has stolen, to admit that the Don Quixote he knows from the unauthorized sequel is not the real one, and that the one he's currently talking to is the real one. I implore your grace, for the sake of what you owe to your being a gentleman.

to please make a statement to the magistrate of this village. And as a matter of fact, he forces him to sign an affidavit to that effect. So he busts him. He busts him. In the novel. In the novel. You got a story about a guy that then becomes, in part two, a story about the story about the guy, including false guys inside the story about the... Well, there's false guys from another book that are... Right. Yeah.

So why even bother trying to figure out what's real? Well, exactly. Right. Has anything like this come before this? No, he's really sort of inventing this whole metanarrative game that is so popular today. But metanarrative, what is... Well, up until that point, most stories are simply, they purport to be what they are. I'm telling you a story. But Don Quixote pretends to be something other than what it is. It really is the start of modernity.

our modern sense of the world. So you agree with Jad, then? This is like, this is not waxed and waned, this particular era. Well, it has waxed and waned. I mean, Don Quixote has been read by different generations for different reasons.

Bruce says he thinks the people who were reading the book originally at the time of Cervantes, they actually... Reveled in the multi-levels of fiction. They loved the meta stuff. But during the Romantic period and well into the early 20th century... People were less interested in all these narrative layers, and they were more just thrilled by the romantic Don Quixote or the dreamer Don Quixote. But this generation of which we belong has become very interested in this terrain that Cervantes charted a long time ago.

You see it in the cinema of the late 90s. In movies like The Matrix and then later Adaptation and then Inception. We're exploring the concept of a dream within a dreamer.

You see it in Seinfeld. What's going on? We're going to shoot the pilot and then it's going to be on TV the following week. Yeah. Now there's this comedian, Jerry Seinfeld, who's playing a character that happens to be called Jerry Seinfeld, who's making a show within the show about a character who's Jerry Seinfeld. And so you have reality nested three times. But I guess I'm interested in this idea of why is... How is this happening again and why is it happening again? Well, my sense of things is that...

Both of these moments are moments of intellectual crisis. Back in Cervantes' time. Coming out of the Renaissance, you have all of this new scientific knowledge that is calling into question the foundation that everybody was building their lives on. So suddenly the Earth is no longer the center of the universe. It's now just one planet among several orbiting the sun. So you have people coming to terms with...

A worldview that they can no longer sustain. And as for us now? In the last hundred years, you have Darwinism, you have relativity, you have quantum physics. I mean, cognitive scientists are telling us that we have no free will because they can sort of chart the chemical reaction that happens milliseconds before we think we decide to do something.

All of these things tell us that the world that we think we see is not what it is. And I think that inspires people to then start asking these questions. If what I'm seeing is not real, what is? Who am I?

And so I think to a great extent, it's a reaction to a moment of intellectual crisis. Wait, but okay, let's say that I like professional wrestling a lot. I don't know anything about any of the research you're telling me about. Why the hell do I like professional wrestling? And why did I like it more when they started blurring these lines? Oh, hard question.

Well, I would say humans are humans. And one of the things that we do is, as opposed to as far as we know what other animals on this planet do, is we are aware of our own contingency. Meaning we can imagine radically different possibilities. We can imagine worlds where we don't exist, or maybe we only think we exist. I can remember being a child four and five years old,

and going to a fabric store with my mother, and there were two mirrors set against opposite walls, and I was just fascinated at standing in between them and watching the infinite regress go in each direction. You know, and I had not even started kindergarten yet. So I think humans have this fascination with infinite regress and with embeddedness. And with the questions that it forces you to consider, like where does everything begin, and where does it all come from?

I mean, the question at the heart of Don Quixote realizing that he's a character in a novel is, who stands above you? The author stands above you. And so that author has a kind of godlike relationship to you. But that very question starts to make you ask, who stands above that author? And if you start asking that question, it goes on forever in every direction. Forever in every direction. Forever in every direction. Forever in every direction. Forever in every direction. Forever in every direction.

Thank you to Rupert Boyd for coming and playing the Spanish guitar for us in this piece on very short notice. And to Recorded Books for giving us permission to use George Guidals' wonderful read of the book, Don Quixote de la Mancha. He's really good. Okay. Well, I guess we should go then. Yes, we should go. We should say goodbye. We should say goodbye. Is this the real thing?

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhun Yana Sambindam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson,

Sarah Khari, Anna Roskwet-Pas, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibill.

Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

When raising a Pacifico beer with friends you just met turns into hitting up their friends, local art show, getting inspired to create something together, and painting your first mural, you found what was waiting for you. Pacifico. Life's waiting. 21 plus only. Discover responsibly. Pacifico Clara Beer. Imported by Crown Imports Chicago, Illinois.

NYC Now delivers the most up-to-date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday, and evening. With three updates a day, listeners get breaking news, top headlines, and in-depth coverage from across New York City. By sponsoring programming like NYC Now, you'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to get in touch and find out more.