Introducing first, Mark Magnus!
[Narrator] In the early 2000s,
Marc Copani was a young wrestler with a dream.
When I got the phone call that I was gonna be on
the WWE, I knew it was gonna be special.
You see, I'm the future of wrestling.
But when they pitched me the idea,
I was very nervous.
You're looking at the great...
Muhammad Hassan!
[booing & cheering]
What? I said, "But he's Italian, from Syracuse."
"Well, for us, he's gonna be a Middle Easterner."
But Copani's path to stardom
proved extremely controversial,
as WWE cast him as a shocking new villain.
We are three years removed from 9/11.
And it's still a fresh wound.
There was so much discrimination going on,
so it was just instant heat.
We're labeled terrorists! Terrorists!
I'm a terrorist!
He was stoking a lot of prejudices.
America does not wish good will towards all men.
Muhammad Hassan and what he was saying wasn't silly.
What he was saying was right.
And, no one wants to hear that they're wrong.
Those people wanted to ----ing kill him.
But it takes on an entirely different level
once the London bombing occurs.
It's a series of terrorist attacks
in the capital this morning.
That's when things started to go downhill.
It was a ride straight to the top
that ended in sudden disaster.
The character started to become more radicalized.
And suddenly he had a crew of terrorist henchmen.
Oh, my god!
That's what blew everything up.
Choke him.
They underestimated the amount of scrutiny
it was going to receive.
The network was saying, "We're not gonna air
SmackDown if this character is not written off."
Instead of this being a footnote in his career,
it became the last chapter.
Everything that I had worked for was just gone.
It was that quick. The rise, the fall.
No, no, no, no!
And then the rebirth.
♪
[crackling fireworks]
Following WWE's unparalleled success in the late 1990s,
in the early 2000s, the company struggles
to find its footing in a new era.
The WWE was in a transition period.
They had lost Stone Cold Steve Austin
to injury and retirement.
They'd lost the Rock to the movies.
And they were trying to find their next major superstars.
Hello, Kentucky!
And welcome to Ohio Valley Wrestling!
Ohio Valley Wrestling was a local wrestling promotion
and training center here in Louisville, Kentucky,
to serve as a developmental or a training program
for aspiring WWE wrestlers.
That's the trajectory that Brock Lesnar had taken,
and John Cena, and Randy Orton,
and Batista.
If you had the athletic background, the size,
the personality, we could show you how to be
a successful pro wrestler.
I'm Jim Cornette, and I was one of the trainers of the
wrestler that would come to be known as Muhammad Hassan.
[crowd chatter & cheering]
When Marc Copani came in, he's 21 years old.
He was in good shape. He had good looks.
And you could see that he had a great amount of potential.
Boy, this kid's come a long way- Oh, ho, ho!
I was always athletic, and I always played sports,
so wrestling kind of combined all of that for me.
Feast your eyes and fantasize on
this year's model, Mark Magnus.
Mark's character was like, smug, arrogant.
I'm better than you in every category type of thing.
My name is Chris Mordetzky, but you probably know me
better as Chris Masters, The Masterpiece.
This guy is a work of art.
Mark was the OVW champion at one point.
Obviously, the best.
Jim Cornette booked Mark, and they were able to help
give him an opportunity to get signed in WWE.
In two years, he had gone from the lowest guy
on the totem pole...
No, wait a minute. Yes!
...to a main event wrestler in OVW.
[phone ringing]
And all of a sudden, I get a call from the WWE office...
Saying they wanted to make him an Arab.
And I'm...
I said, "But he's Italian, from Syracuse.
How, how is this gonna work?"
Jim Cornette told me what they were looking for.
Didn't really know how I felt about it at the time.
But, this was a big opportunity,
and not many people have a character
that's handed to ‘em.
So, there was no doubt about it,
I was gonna do the character.
My name's Marc Copani, and in 2004 and 2005,
I played the character Muhammad Hassan on WWE.
Marc was very dark complected,
he has the dark hair.
He could look like a stereotypical
Arab villain in a movie.
Oh, yeah, Jimmy, it's gonna be that good.
So now Mark Magnus is no more, and instead,
he is Muhammad Hassan.
Praise Allah.
When I told my family that I was gonna be
an Arab American, they definitely...
were trepidatious about the fact that I was gonna be
portraying another nationality, one,
in this country at the time that was particularly
not trusted and even hated.
-[chanting] USA! USA! -Now wait a minute!
The crowd have turned their backs...
That says it all.
...on these three disreputable individuals!
The character of Muhammad Hassan is
a direct response to the horrific
and tragic events of just a few years earlier.
We have a breaking news story to tell you about.
Apparently a plane has just crashed into the
World Trade Center here in New York City.
I remember I was walking home from class,
and I hear people talking, and I'm not really
processing what they're saying.
But I get home, and I turn the TV on,
and I see the devastation.
And then, it hit me, this wasn't an accident,
this was an attack.
And at the time, no one knew what was gonna happen.
It was very uncertain.
And I think one of the things that wrestling
did for me is when they went on the air.
Right after 9/11, and the show must go on.
[chanting] USA! USA!
We will not live our lives in fear.
[cheering]
It was a defining moment that wrestling could have such a
positive impact on me when I was feeling so negative.
♪ [national anthem] ♪
When I was scared, when I didn't know
what was gonna happen,
I put wrestling on and for those few hours...
it didn't matter.
-We'll be back. -[cheering]
The WWE was really rallying behind this patriotism,
and that would embed the country coming out of 9/11.
And, it inevitably was going to seep into its programing.
Osama bin Laden, the exiled terrorist,
is involved, if not totally responsible for,
this coordinated attack.
Post September 11th, there was
so much discrimination going on.
You couldn't really escape it in the United States
around that time.
A lot of people would think terrorist automatically.
We have four basic emotions, anger being one of them.
Transform that into wrestling terms,
you want to open that wound every time you possibly can.
My name's Maven Huffman.
I wrestled in the WWE alongside Muhammad Hassan.
In 2004, 9/11 is still fresh on the minds
of a lot of people.
Once we saw Muhammad come out, we just were like,
"Ugh." [awkward laugh] He's gonna get heat.
We will spread the word of Allah
to all of you despicable infidels.
The times we were in,
we didn't need an arrogant Italian.
We needed someone who could just
garner the hatred of a fan.
Oh, wait a minute! Hold on!
Along with the new Muhammad Hassan
was gonna be Shawn Daivari.
Shawn Daivari is an independent wrestler
that came out of Chicago, and was someone
that was assigned to be
the second to Muhammad Hassan,
and was able to speak Farsi.
[speaking Farsi]
They called me up: "I'd like to offer you a job."
I met Mark Magnus, who was Muhammad.
And like, he told me that
they're gonna be like two Arabs.
Praise...
Allah.
Before being introduced to the WWE audience,
Copani and Daivari test out their new characters in OVW.
And we started trying things out at house shows.
And we didn't know the direction
the character was gonna take.
This was a Vince McMahon idea.
And whenever Vince McMahon had an idea,
you knew it was gonna go farther than
almost anything else.
An illegal war is being waged on an innocent people.
At one point, it was, you know, very stereotypical, like,
we're gonna raise the price of oil.
We were going out there just trying different things to
see how much heat we could generate from the crowd.
You are a traitor to my country!
I grew up in the era with the Hulk Hogan
and Ricky Steamboat and Randy Savage.
It was these larger than life characters.
Wrestling has always skimmed the surface of
political events in the modern world.
USA! Ha! [spitting] Pft!
Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff were cartoony,
with the accents, and I don't think Muhammad Hassan
was any different when we started.
It wasn't until we started filming the vignettes,
and that's when the character took shape.
WWE decides to introduce the character through
pre-recorded segments that will air in anticipation of
his in-ring debut.
My name Is Muhammad Hassan.
Vignettes were a critical part of
storytelling for WWE.
My name is Michael Leonardi.
I am a former writer and producer for
World Wrestling Entertainment.
It was our opportunity to present to the world
this new character, and it played a huge role because
it would really help them get off to a great start.
Don't confuse me with acts of terrorism...
here in America.
That's when it clicked for both Shawn and I
that this wasn't a foreign character.
This was a American character
of Muslim or Arab descent.
9/11 changed everything for me and my people.
Who, rightfully so, is disgruntled.
For Arab Americans, there is no equality.
And discouraged and angry
about what has been going on
with his family and his community since 9/11.
But because we're of Arab descent...
we are singled out.
These were really set up to highlight situations in which
his character would experience
biases or prejudice.
Muhammad Hassan is presented in the light
that just because of my nationality,
does not make me a terrorist.
He was the antithesis of all of the stereotypes.
But the day before Hassan's first appearance,
controversy is stoked.
On an episode of Sunday Night Heat,
you had your broadcasters, Todd Grisham and Ivory,
teeing up Muhammad Hassan's debut.
And right there, the fact that we're gonna make
a flight joke, I think it kind of sets the tone for
what the audience can expect.
With expectations riding high,
Marc Copani prepares to make his entrance
as Muhammad Hassan.
I finally debuted in Huntsville, Alabama
with Mick Foley.
[cheering]
I was nervous.
I felt like I was gonna throw up.
I remember we were really not 100% sure
how they're gonna take this character.
It was very different.
Mick Foley is out there just giving a riveting promo about
the war in Afghanistan and supporting our troops.
Supporting the troops goes way beyond
any kind of political affiliation.
Now I come out.
[indistinct speaking]
♪ [Arabic music] ♪
♪
And as soon as that music hits,
and as soon as you step through that curtain,
it's just, it's go time and it's business.
♪
What the hell is this?
And I interrupt Mick Foley, and I am contradicting
everything he says ‘cause this is my truth.
It's people like us...
that are the real victims of this war!
None of you people are real patriots.
And instantly you are telling the audience,
if there was any confusion from these vignettes,
you are instructed to hate Muhammad Hassan.
I am sick of hearing you express your admiration for
these troops, these gutless cowards.
Now you're pissing me off!
Here was somebody very clearly being presented
as a villain because he was attacking Americans.
I don't think Vince McMahon
was trying to tell a complex story.
Arab-American, disgruntled,
anti-American, "boo," heel.
He may even be justified in what he is saying,
but he is anti-American.
And I feel...
your "patriotism"...
at every airport, and especially right now!
It worked with the fans because they really did not
like somebody coming out and telling them
that America didn't have all the answers.
When I came back for the curtain,
I think a lot of people were very impressed...
and I think a lot of people were very excited about
the potential of this character.
I knew right away they were gonna push him for the moon.
He's got the look, he's got the skill.
He's got the knowledge.
Hi, this is Gene Snitsky,
and I used to work with Muhammad Hassan.
I can't remember anybody getting that much heat
since the Iron Sheik.
The animosity of people.
Like, they literally wanted to grab him and beat him.
It's crazy. Over a wrestling character.
He just had that aura about him
to where people just didn't only hate him,
they wanted to kill.
To all the men and women of the United States
Armed Forces now in the Middle East...
the peace of a troubled world
and the hopes of an oppressed people...
now depend on you.
In 2004, our nation was engulfed in a war
in the Middle East.
We're putting shows on in Iraq.
The WWE has returned to Iraq to celebrate
the holidays with each and every one of you.
[cheering]
Patriotism is huge in every aspect of our lives.
Add wrestling to it, it just amps up the volume tenfold.
WWE has the balls to come to Brassfield-Mora!
Woo!
So then when they heard this guy who might look like
one of the terrorists going out, basically saying,
"I had nothing to do with 9/11"...
I'm portrayed as the bad guy!
I don't deserve this.
You don't really care what he's gonna say.
You people have no idea
what it's like to be me.
They booed because it was showing a mirror to
the face of the American public,
and the hypocrisy and the prejudice.
America has literally ganged up on me!
And our Arab American brothers!
That had really been pushed forward against the
Muslim people in this country at the time,
and people don't like to be shown their own flaws.
Deep down inside your hearts,
every single one of you
is prejudiced.
Growing up, I was always raised to not judge people
by the color of their skin.
My father told me about some of
the struggles that my grandfather had.
Being an Italian American, it made me more aware
and sympathetic to what Arab Americans
were feeling at the time.
These were people who had lived here,
who had assimilated to this country.
The same thing you see with the Japanese in
World War Two, it was completely unfair.
It's disgraceful, and so, when 9/11 happened,
my concern was what's gonna happen next,
and that kind of became my catchphrase, "Since 9/11."
Since 9/11. Since 9/11.
Since... 9/11.
I was the good guy in my own story.
I was the hero.
I was the one fighting for the injustice of my people.
But the irony of that is we were still a heel team.
You know, Shawn would distract the ref.
Shawn would slip a bell in.
Right behind the referee's back.
I know the business side of things.
I knew if I wanted to be there,
That's the card I had to play, and it ----ing worked.
[speaking Farsi]
Though he reflects the politics of the early 2000s,
the concept behind the character goes back to the
earliest days of pro wrestling.
There's such a history of the foreign heel,
that you can go back to Jack Adkisson
as Fritz Von Erich,
evil German heel.
Boy, a blitzer.
Karl von Hess, who served in the US Navy,
that's suddenly portraying a Nazi.
Von Hess wearing a snarl.
One thing that was easy to do is
tap into our tribalism as humans.
Yeah! [cheering]
It was a very easy, very kind of low hanging fruit way to
create a character that Americans could boo.
But the company is playing with fire,
and as history shows, not every attempt to bring
politics into wrestling is enjoyed by the audience.
The last time that Vince had tried to do something
like this, it backfired spectacularly.
In 1991, the idea for WrestleMania was
gonna be Hulk Hogan, the American hero,
defending the WWF and its championship from
Sergeant Slaughter, the former G.I. Joe,
the former American hero
that had become an Iraqi sympathizer.
Soon, Hulk Hogan, it's gonna be your burial!
Vince McMahon believed
they would sell out 100,000 seats,
but a few weeks before the event,
they had barely sold 10,000 tickets.
It bombed.
[thunderous boom]
The problem was the Gulf War was ongoing right
at that time, and the fans didn't want to see it.
But in 2005, Copani and WWE are committed to
making sure that this time the storyline does work,
with the company insisting he stay in character
at all times, even in public.
We always had to maintain, not only the look of
the character, but really the personalities
of the character.
It got a little shady sometimes.
He got to really experience
what it was like being
Arab-American in the United States of America
in 2004 and 2005.
We experienced what a lot of people were experiencing
in America at the time.
When we would travel, Shawn always got stopped
because his last name's Daivari,
which is a Persian name.
Copani never got stopped.
We were on an airplane,
and the look on people's faces, the fear...
people in the back of the plane that were calling their
families to tell them that they love them
in case anything happens.
One time, we were in San Francisco
when a young mother with her child takes her
completely off the path that had plenty of space...
to walk clear around us.
The way that people looked at us,
you just always had this uneasy feeling that there's
potential for something dangerous to happen.
Once he saw what Daivari went through,
once he saw just how people were going to see him...
I think it changed him.
He was speaking from the heart from those promos.
I'm just like each....
and every one of you.
I was born right here in this country.
[booing]
It really made it easy to feel the injustice,
because these people didn't even know us,
and the way that they looked at us and they judged us,
well, when we got out into the ring,
that was how everyone in America looked at us.
[chanting] USA! USA!
There were a few times where
things could have gotten real.
We were in Australia with a bunch of the guys.
Gene Snitsky, Chris Masters...
and a group of young men, who were Arab
or Middle Eastern, approached us.
They knew who we were, and they knew the characters
we were portraying, and they were very angry.
They were saying to us, "You're not really Muslim,
are you?" Like, they were ripping into us,
and it became a heated exchange.
Made me realize that there could be people that took
offense to these characters, the fact that a non-Muslim
was portraying that character.
I remember really thinking to myself,
if something happens, we are so outnumbered
here that it's either gonna take like hitting somebody
with a chair for real or like smashing a glass
over somebody- like I'm thinking
it's gonna get like rough.
It de-escalated quickly
because I'm surrounded by 6'10" giants.
The irony is that those guys were right.
In our minds, we're playing these characters,
we're generating heat, we're finding success.
But it was one of the first times I had
second thoughts about, is this just a character?
And that's when it became too real,
and that's when the lines between wrestling and
reality, ah, no longer existed.
[chanting continues] You suck! You suck!
Tonight I will have the satisfaction
of beating Shawn Michaels!
As Muhammad Hassan rises to the top of the card,
Mark's sudden success doesn't sit well with the
other wrestlers in the locker room.
That era of wrestling was definitely a tough era
to be a new guy. There was a close,
tight knit group of veterans, and...
I remember walking in
and there's just locker room etiquette.
You have to shake everybody's hand.
And, I was 24 years old, very green, and...
I really didn't know how to behave.
Getting that push to the moon,
it was always a bunch of the guys
that felt like you were stealing their spot.
You've had guys who have been on the roster,
who have been working their tails off for years,
and they're not getting pushed.
There was a lot of jealousy and resentment.
Backslide!
They would weed out guys, like,
if they found a weakness in you,
they'd poke at it and poke at it
until you either quit or broke down.
They wanted to test you.
Unless you've paid your dues, you're going to have heat.
You do not want heat.
Muhammed Hassan found this out.
Ooh! [laughing] [indistinct commentary]
Marc's finishing maneuver was a move called the
"Camel Clutch," a move that the Iron Sheik
made famous in the 80s.
I've never seen anyone get out of this hold.
It made sense for Marc to utilize it 20 years later.
Oh!
Muhammad Hassan with the Camel Clutch!
I remember, we're in Japan...
It's our final night in Japan!
And, Kurt Angle, who I admired and respected,
made a comment that Eddie Guerrero
is using the Camel Clutch. Well, that's my finisher.
And he was saying, you know, "It's bad for the business
that two guys on the same show are using the same move,
and it's your finisher. It looks weak
when Eddie puts it on and someone gets out of it."
It's like, "You should say something."
If you use a guy's move in wrestling without their
permission, it's worse than if you date their wives.
So of course, this is one of those moments
where I should have kept my mouth shut.
But I went up to Eddie, and I said,
"Should you be using the Camel Clutch?
Because I'm using it as a finisher," and he looked
at me and he kind of smiled, he's like,
"I've always used the Camel Clutch."
He's like, "My father invented it."
[laughing] I was like, of course he did.
So of course the boys get a hold of this,
and it turns into nuclear heat.
It's disrespectful, and how dare I?
I mean, I was mortified, and I just really felt like
I made a mistake that I'm not gonna come back from.
I remember calling my father,
and I'm just like, I just want to fly home.
He was like, you're gonna go out there
and you're gonna face this.
And so, I had to go to wrestling court.
Wrestler's court is kind of a reason to put somebody
on blast and kind of shame them in front of everybody.
Undertaker's the judge, jury and executioner.
I mean, it sounds like kind of ridiculous,
but you never want your whole roster
kind of coming down on you.
My consequence for that was buying over
$1,000 worth of drinks.
There were certain wrestlers that were pouring the drinks
on the floor after I bought 'em...
pouring high quality alcohol in Japan on the floor
seems pretty stupid, looking back on it now.
But after that, Eddie Guerrero came up to me
and very kindly put his hand on my shoulder, and said,
"I know you didn't mean anything by it."
And he gave me a hug and we moved on.
As Muhammad Hassan's notoriety grows,
Copani lands his biggest opportunity yet,
sharing the ring with wrestling's most iconic star.
My character was upset that
he wasn't given a match at WrestleMania.
And still I am excluded
from the biggest show of the year!
And I remembered finding out that we were gonna
do something with Hulk Hogan.
The red, white and blue!
And it was a dream come true moment,
and I probably called everybody I'd ever met
in my entire life to tell them,
"I'm gonna be at WrestleMania
in the ring with Hulk Hogan."
WrestleMania.
That's like playing baseball against Babe Ruth.
Like, who gets to freakin' wrestle Hogan at WrestleMania?
Oh, my god! Ha-ha!
It's Hulk Hogan!
Standing in the center of that ring with Daivari
when his music hit, and just watching him
work his way down towards the ring...
you could just feel the noise from the crowd
of like lifting you off of the mat.
I had never experienced anything like it.
Look at this! And the Hulkster!
[indistinct commentary]
Imagine being a kid who loves wrestling.
Your dream is to become a wrestler.
Yeah! Oh, baby!
And then you find yourself,
not only working with Hulk Hogan...
but working with Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania.
That's a dream.
This crowd is going crazy!
Until it becomes a nightmare.
With Hassan established as a top name,
management decides to take the character
in a shocking new direction.
With every character,
you know there's gonna be evolution.
You don't want your character to be stuck in
the mud because eventually gimmicks run their course.
You got that stupid towel.
Your stupid gimmick beard.
I think you're a piece of garbage.
Vince and the team decided to
lean towards more of this
stereotypical way and become more radicalized.
Let's take this a step further.
These people think he's a terrorist.
Let's make him that.
You're looking at the new icon,
the great Muhammad Hassan!
As the months wore on, we started doing things
that were much more focused on Islam,
as opposed to Middle Eastern heritage.
You will be a sacrifice.
And then I feel like that character became insensitive,
and it was a complete departure from
what we had originally set out to do.
Whoa whoa whoa, wait a minute, look at this.
Wow, what the hell?
Now I have a bunch of men who are carrying out my bidding.
I really pushed back, and I did take that to
Stephanie McMahon, who was really the writer
that I was working with most on SmackDown,
and she kind of put me in my place.
It was, "This is a huge opportunity for you."
Basically, "Shut up. We know what we're doing."
Choke him.
What is that? Oh, no.
[chanting] USA! USA!
Looking back, can I see that it was insensitive?
It definitely became insensitive.
The character changed over the course of a few months,
but I don't ever feel like what we did was
intentionally distasteful, up until the end.
Where things started to go wrong was,
as he started to gain momentum and this character
started becoming part of the main event scene,
they wanted to try and generate more heat.
Despite Marc's objections to the changes to his character,
he knows he has little power to fight it.
I don't know of anybody that's ever said no to
a storyline, of any kind, ‘cause like,
when you get the opportunity,
you're not gonna pass it up.
And that very much was the culture,
and everybody there was like, "Who is this guy to
refuse any of the storyline?"
The change in the character
really took a toll on me.
And I didn't agree with it, and I think I was
pretty vocal about, I didn't like the
direction of the character.
There came to a point with Shawn Michaels...
before I put him in the camel clutch...
I took my thumb...
And...
♪
Undertaker does the same thing,
but the context in which I did it,
it symbolized a beheading, which was a horrific and
tragic thing that was happening in the
Middle East with American citizens.
[booing]
To be honest with you, at the time...
it seemed only natural.
I never saw how his character developed,
and thought, wow, they should not go here,
at the time. Never once.
To me, it was like, oh yeah, that makes sense.
He's gonna get so much heat for this.
I don't really know exactly
whose decision it was to do that.
I know it wasn't mine.
I think one of the reasons why the character started to
change is because they were working up to a program
with Batista and The Undertaker,
who are not only two giant men,
but they're also two giant personas
and characters in the WWE.
At some point, they were planning on putting
one of the World Championships on him.
Vince was gonna push him to the moon.
The day of the dead man
has come and gone-
-[bell chiming] -Oh, look.
-[cheering] -Oh, my, oh!
The angle that we were working with The Undertaker
was gonna build to a number one contender's match.
And so, I was told that the idea was
that I would beat The Undertaker.
I would be the number one contender to face Batista...
and it would be the Arab defeating the
reigning champion, Batista, in Washington, DC.
Kind of like the big "FU" to America.
That was the plan that was ran by me.
Obviously, it didn't turn out that way.
It was Daivari versus The Undertaker.
Shawn got the crap kicked out of him.
Tombstone pile driver!
Talk about a sacrifice.
On the day the episode is set to broadcast,
real world tragedy strikes.
People streaming out of the station covered in blood.
This was a highly sophisticated,
coordinated terrorist attack.
The London terrorist bombing that occurred on July 7th
that led to many, many casualties
broke on a Thursday morning.
So you have a worldwide focus on this terrorist attack.
And SmackDown was set to air later that night
with this very controversial angle.
So, in the immediate aftermath,
WWE decides it's going to run as is,
and they were gonna add a crawl throughout the show,
essentially giving a warning to the audience.
I think they underestimated the amount of scrutiny
it was going to receive.
The realism and the imagery all got tied into
what had happened in London.
It was Daivari versus The Undertaker,
and so Shawn sacrificed himself,
and I had just this evil look on my face,
and I dropped to my knees...
and I raise my hands and say,
"Praise Allah," and suddenly,
men come storming out from behind me.
Hit the ring.
I do this, the beheading symbol...
Choke him. Choke him!
Oh, my god, is that a steel wire?
I don't know what it is.
And then I come up, I get over The Undertaker...
Praise Allah!
[booing]
And then I choke him out in a Camel Clutch.
His eyes rolled back in the back of his head.
And now you started really walking that line of
just like, is this guy a terrorist,
at the end of the day?
Terrorists behead people!
And they had done it to a journalist, Daniel Pearl,
a couple years earlier.
Also, one year prior, this American, Nick Berg,
had been kidnaped and then was beheaded on camera
by five masked men, the same number
that WWE incorporated for this angle.
The masked men, they were almost like my soldiers,
and I was the leader of this Islamic fundamentalist cult.
And then Shawn ended up becoming our martyr.
Look at this, they're holding him up
for sacrifice like he's a martyr or something.
He's given what had been recognized as a
Islamic martyr's funeral, in a sense that the
men in masks are carrying him overhead,
sacrificing his life for me.
That was really the scene that started that controversy.
It was across the line.
This was really happening at that moment,
to Americans and American allies,
and people didn't want to see that kind of shit
on the wrestling program.
♪
And so this set off a firestorm of backlash.
UPN wanted nothing to do with this character,
in light of the controversy.
We had heat with sponsors, with Arab groups.
Everybody just said enough's enough.
And it was framed in how insensitive the WWE is
using real life, tragic situations to sell a story.
I didn't agree with what we were doing at that time.
I felt like we needed to scale back.
In this particular instance, I told my boss that
I think this was the wrong way to go.
and I didn't want to have anything to do with it.
I was demoted, I was stripped of almost
all my responsibilities, all because I spoke up
and said that I think this was wrong.
As an American, I thought it was wrong.
And then, what happened was pressure started to
come down from the network,
and eventually UPN put enough pressure on WWE,
and they realized that they needed to
kill the character altogether.
This could indeed be
Muhammad Hassan's last match.
With the media and fans in an uproar,
Muhammad Hassan draws the wrong kind of attention.
The network was really worried about it and they
said ----ing take these characters off of SmackDown.
I think with the sponsors and the threats
that they had made,
it slowly deteriorated into something that I had
realized was probably gonna ed my career.
Chef Boyardee doesn't want to air an ad
right after you martyr a wrestler.
If there was no London bombing,
the direction we were headed,
it would have become tasteless.
Muhammad Hassan went from this real life portrayal of
an upset American...
Judge me for me.
...to now relying more on his Islamic background
to get heat.
I assure you that that sacrifice will not go without
its reward, but is sacrifice for the greater good.
I thought it was ironic that now we're stereotyping
Middle Easterners, when we started off the character
as being against that stereotype and
trying really hard to make Muhammad Hassan
a real character, someone who was
born here, went to school here,
has a family here.
I, for one, will not embrace...
a racist nation.
Right around that time, I wanted to buy a house.
And so, I walk into a room off of catering,
and it's just me, and there's Johnny Ace,
the head of talent relations at the time.
And I remember going and saying, "Johnny," you know,
"I'm just about to put an offer in on a house back home.
What's gonna happen?"
And he looked me dead in the eye,
and he said, "Don't buy the house."
And, that's when I knew that we're not
gonna be fighting this thing.
We were done.
With sponsors and the network
pressuring the company to drop the character,
Muhammad Hassan's fate is sealed.
We weren't allowed to be on TV.
We weren't allowed to be on SmackDown or Raw.
The only thing we were allowed to do
was a Pay Per View.
[cheering]
My family was sitting in the front row in
Buffalo, New York, where I went to school,
where I first got the bug to want to be a wrestler.
Everything kind of came full circle.
And that was the last time I was gonna
be in a WWE ring.
♪
I mean, if anybody was gonna take me out,
having it be The Undertaker was an honor.
[bell chiming]
[cheering]
My character was...
beat brutally.
And another big boot by the Undertaker!
And then I was power -bombed through the stage.
Walked into the hand of the Undertaker!
This move called The Last Ride,
and he launches me.
And when he drops me, I'm coming down
at a much steeper angle than I anticipated.
Stop this! Oh, no, no, no, no, no!
Hit so hard on that single crash pad on my neck,
that I flipped over and landed clean on my feet,
like an acrobat. So they put me down.
They cover me with cable wires, put blood out.
I don't know how often that's happened
where a character has been murdered
on national television, brutally.
And with that, Muhammad Hassan
was never seen again.
[snaps]
That was it and, you know,
the weird thing about that was...
typically, after a show, you go back to the hotel.
I was in Buffalo, and I was home...
so I got in my car and when the show was over,
I drove home, and it was...
I couldn't even begin to tell you the thoughts
that I was feeling.
I don't know if it was relief...
sadness...
disappointment.
♪
I definitely was...
heartbroken by what had happened,
and heartbroken that everything that I had spent
so much time and energy, and, and dreamed, and-
everything that I had worked for was just gone.
It made no sense. He did what he was told
because he was being paid money,
and he had a dream job that he wanted to fulfill.
And what they told him to do backfired.
They threw the baby and the bath water out the window
and continued on, rather than tell Vince McMahon,
"You ----ed this guy up,
you ought to make it up to him."
He did everything he was told.
He was great at his job, and they let him go for it.
The end of my career with the WWE launched me
to a few years of my life where...
I had no direction, and I was lost,
and I didn't know what I was gonna do,
and I knew I would never get back what I had...
and I couldn't, I couldn't rationalize it,
and I couldn't find reason for it.
I do feel like wrestling turned its back on me,
and I definitely turned my back on wrestling,
and I didn't want to look back at all.
I needed to change and I didn't really know how.
Fired from WWE and living in Los Angeles,
Marc Copani steps away from the world of wrestling.
I was pretty secluded in LA.
In the moment, it was survival mode.
It was living day by day.
It was a level of depression
that I didn't recognize at the time.
I don't want to say hopelessness,
but just being lost...
and nothing was really going my way.
Depressed, upset. Frustrated.
You're on top of the world one week.
The next week, you're without a job.
Once that tide of momentum turns against you,
it's kind of hard to get it to swing the other way.
The character came in so hot, and had so much attention
that nobody thought it was gonna be believable
to bring me back as anybody else.
It's always like that one thing that sticks
in people's mind, you know.
"Oh, that's the terrorist guy."
Sadly. Just a waste of a talent, really,
because he had so much potential
to be like that big star.
One of the defining moments for me with that is I...
had come home for the holidays,
just a bit of a wreck.
You know, I was running low on money.
I remember being exhausted,
and just saying to myself, like...
you need to get some sleep. And...
and then the thought occurred to me...
What if you don't wake up?
What difference would it make?
Like, what difference do you make?
How many days have you wasted?
And...
kind of just confronted with the reality of where I was,
not where I wanted to be.
And that was the moment that I decided I needed to
make a radical change in my life.
And it was a few months later that I was going to college,
working nights at UPS.
And it was very humbling.
And I found that fire, that work ethic,
that dedication, that passion.
And I focused it in another direction.
I got my teaching certification,
and I got my master's degree.
I got a job teaching. Then I became a principal.
I didn't stop, and I haven't stopped since.
So I don't waste days anymore.
♪
It wasn't until later that I realized I was avoiding
the pain and the heartbreak that I had felt
because of what had happened.
With Muhammad Hassan behind him,
Marc has had years to reflect on the experience of being
one of wrestling's most controversial villains.
It probably wasn't until almost a decade later
that I really started to appreciate the journey
that I had had and the career that I had had,
regardless of how it ended, and then at that point,
it didn't matter how it ended.
It's always easy to say, what if?
I think Muhammad Hassan's outcome was set in stone
from his very first promo.
This is no longer the land of the free.
And it has nothing to do with talent, skill,
ability, appearance.
It has to do with the culture we lived in.
I feel bad for Marc because the man was talented,
the man was good. The man was gifted.
I will fulfill my destiny
as the first Arab American
to be champion!
I made the decisions to play that character,
and I've had to live with it, and so
I don't have any ill feelings about it.
I don't hold grudges.
It's just the fact that I got to experience that,
and I got to live that.
And I had dreamed it for so long...
to make that dream a reality,
this is something that I am very proud of.
[match bell]
Either way, that character was not long for TV.
The world was changing around us,
and eventually the world looked like it does today,
where that type of stereotypical,
insensitive portrayal of any nationality in this country
is frowned upon now, and it should be.
♪
Shawn is an agent in the WWE now.
Shawn has a great mind for wrestling,
and he just gets the storytelling aspect
of wrestling. I talk to Shawn all the time,
and he's doing very well
and I couldn't be prouder of him.
To be honest, it worked out better for Marc because
in the intervening 20 years,
he's had a normal job in a normal place.
He's highly thought of in the community.
He's probably been better off in the long run
than all the crazy shit he would have gone through
in 20 years in the wrestling business.
So, I'm happy for him.
If I could go back and do it all again,
I absolutely would do it.
I'm the man I am today
because of those experiences.
Muhammad Hassan didn't define who I am.
That character stays in 2004, 2005.
Everything that's happened since is me.
Now, I'm the Director of Human Resources
in a small city school district.
And, I impact over 3000 kids every day.
And the only way I had gotten to this point is because of
the epic failure that I had had,
and that realization that it doesn't matter
what your dreams were,
it doesn't matter how it ended,
you always have a second chance.
I don't think my best days are behind me.
I think that they're in front of me.
I'm still looking forward to doing some big things.
♪