Court Bauer is the CEO and founder of Major League Wrestling, where he currently devotes a lot of his time. However, in the past, Bauer used to work backstage as a writer for WWE and thus has some interesting stories from his time with the company.
A couple of years back, Bauer was a guest on the ‘Talk Is Jericho’ podcast and told Chris Jericho the story of Vince McMahon getting angry about Donald Trump wearing a padded jacket in the build-up to their ‘Battle of the Billionaires’ contest at WrestleMania 23.
According to Bauer, McMahon felt as though Trump was trying to look bigger than him by padding the shoulders of his jacket. Court Bauer has once again been reminiscing about his time in WWE and recalled a time when the company once spent $30,000 on an unusual prop.
WWE Once Forked Out $30,000 On Worms For A Boogeyman Segment
Speaking as a guest on the ‘Wrestling Perspective Podcast’, Court Bauer spoke about Vince McMahon’s tendency to spend large sums of money on a whim:
“There are times when Vince will try something and spend a significant amount of money, and it doesn’t work, and he just says, ‘Alright, well, we tried it.’ You’re like, ‘Wow, that could have funded half a year for my company back in the day.’”
Bauer then recalled a segment during JBL’s feud with The Boogeyman where the company spent an eye-watering amount of money on worms, seemingly unbeknownst to the WWE Chairman:
“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 of the arena. JBL is rolling around in them because of course the heel is terrified of the worms, and Vince is laughing like, ‘Ah, that’s great.’ It’s raining worms in the arena. He turns to us and he goes, ‘How much were those worms? That’s a lot of worms.’ We get the writer’s assistant and [asked], ‘How much was that?’ He goes, ‘Well, sir, that was 30,000 dollars.’”
Bauer continued:
“Vince’s jaw drops. ‘30,000 thousand dollars for worms?’ Well, they were out of normal worms, so we had to go organic. He just looks shocked. He’s like, ‘I can’t believe we just blew 30,000 dollars.’ 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, just for a gag, to spend that kind of money, it’s excessive. At WWE, it’s on a totally different level,”
H/t to Fightful for the transcription.