Vince McMahon’s Surprising Reaction To Live Raw F-Bomb
Former WWE Superstar D’Lo Brown has revealed Vince McMahon’s surprisingly subdued reaction to him swearing live on air, with the WWE Chairman being more interested in something else he had done.
During the Attitude Era, WWE became more violent and edgy as it aimed its content at an older audience to compete with WCW during the Monday Night Wars.
However, while ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin could flip the bird, and Bra & Panties matches were commonplace, some things were still off-limits including dropping the dreaded F-bomb.
In 1997, D’Lo Brown fell foul of this restriction when he decided to quote his favourite movie at the time – the cult comedy Friday – live on air during an episode of Raw. Speaking to Sports Illustrated, Brown explained that he realised after he said it that Vince McMahon would likely be furious.
“Back in ’97, portable DVD players were just starting to come out. You’d have sleeves of DVDs kind of like you’d have sleeves of CDs. The movie Friday was part of the regular rotation on our road trips. The Rock and I finished a match on a Sunday and we were back at the hotel watching Friday, and there’s a scene where Deebo knocks out a guy and Chris Tucker yells, ‘You just got knocked the f— out!’
“The next night at Raw, we’re getting ready to go to commercial break, and the spot is that Rocky is going to clothesline Ken Shamrock out of the ring and onto the floor, and then we’d go to the commercial. But I knew, if I had that 30 seconds, I was stealing it. So when Ken was knocked out of the ring. I ran up to the ropes, and screamed, ‘You just got knocked the f— out!’ and I’m shaking my head. That’s when it dawned on me that I’d swore on TV. I figured Vince [McMahon] was going to be furious.”
“Vince had two looks. One was when he looked at you and gave a thumbs up. That was good. The other was when he looked up, pulled his glasses down, and waved a finger over to him. That’s what I got that night. And he looked at me and said, ‘That thing you’re doing with your head? Keep doing it.’ So I didn’t get fined for swearing and I did something that piqued Vince’s curiosity. Then I turned the volume up on the head shake, and people still tell me stories to this day about doing it in a hallway or to their mom. It’s incredible.”
D’Lo Brown left Vince McMahon’s WWE in 2009 and since then has become an agent for IMPACT Wrestling, a role he has carried out since 2019.