Vince McMahon’s Stunned Reaction To WWE’s Bizarre $30,000 Purchase
A former WWE writer has recalled Vince McMahon’s jaw dropping when he found out WWE dropped a five-figure sum for a very odd reason.
In the mid-2000s The Boogeyman warned the rest of the WWE locker room that he was coming to get them. For Booker T, this meant more than one unpleasant encounter with the nightmarish star.
The Boogeyman’s apparent favourite snack and the thing he liked to stuff in his foe’s mouths were worms. Speaking on The Wrestling Perspective podcast, former WWE writer and MLW boss Court Bauer, explained why a special kind of worm ended up costing Vince McMahon and the company thirty grand:
“There are times when Vince [McMahon] will try something and spend a significant amount of money. It doesn’t work and he just says, ‘All right. Well we tried it’, and you’re like, wow, that could have funded a half-a-year for my company back in the day.
“One time we had a thing where The Boogeyman, who loved to eat worms – not really but it was part of the gimmick and we had these worms fall from the ceiling in the arena and JBL’s rolling around in them because, of course, the heel’s terrified of the worms and Vince is laughing, going, ‘Oh, that’s great’ and it’s raining worms in the arena and he turns to us and goes, ‘How much were those worms? That’s a lot of worms’, and we go over and get the production assistant or the writer’s assistant.”
“‘How much was it?’. He goes, ‘Well sir, that was $30,000’, and Vince’s jaw drops. He was like, ‘$30,000 for worms?’. ‘Well they were out of normal worms so we had to go organic’, and he just looked shocked. He’s like, I can’t believe we just blew $30,000 and there’s John Layfield rolling in the worms and he’s crying and everyone’s laughing but, it’s like, he was shocked and I think that assistant was fired soon thereafter but the show went on. You think about a lot of companies are gagged to spend that kind of money, it’s excessive. At WWE, it’s on a totally different level.”
$30,000 worms might seem extravagant but that sum of money is a drop in the ocean compared to the sums Vince McMahon is alleged to have paid out as ‘hush money’ to former female employees of the company.