It’s pretty wild to imagine a kid from Port Tampa moving to the Far East, but that’s exactly what I did in 1981. I basically decided to go where I was wanted most. Stallone wanted me more than Vince McMahon Sr., so I went to L.A. and shot his film. The Japanese promoters wanted me more than the American promoters, so I went to Japan.
It’s an awesome thing to feel wanted. But the thing that made my time in Japan really memorable was I met and dated this gorgeous Japanese girl. She ran a modeling agency called Folio that was on the level of a Ford Agency or any of the other big modeling agencies here in the States. She spoke perfect English, which definitely helped in the finding-my-way-around department, and because of her business she had hookups for everything.
When the big rock ’n’ roll acts came through, from Rod Stewart to the Rolling Stones, she always had backstage passes. And when it came to partying in a country where getting caught with a few ounces of marijuana could mean a lifetime in jail, she had access to every drug under the sun. I even dabbled in a few other substances besides the steroids, and I’ll tell you a little more about that later.
The long and short of it is, I was real happy hanging out with her in Japan.
With no exaggeration, I was like Brad Pitt in that country. Everywhere I went was a mob scene. I towered over almost everyone, and the people there worshipped me. Most of all, they were nice to me. That’s what I really loved. There was just a respect and sincerity among the people there that I’d never experienced back home.
But it wasn’t home.
As some of the American wrestlers came through, they started telling me about this guy named Verne Gagne, a promoter in Minnesota. He apparently wanted to talk to me. So one day when I was feeling a little homesick for the good ol’ U.S. of A., I called him up.
“I want you to come wrestle here,” Gagne told me. “I’ve got this guy named Jesse Ventura who I want to put you in the ring with.
We’ve got a real small territory here, which means you’ll only have to wrestle four days a week—but I want to pay you a lot of money.”
Like I said, at this point I just wanted to go wherever I was wanted the most, and from the numbers he was throwing at me, Verne Gagne wanted me bad.
So I said okay. Just like that, in early 1982, I left Japan, that girl, and that crazy fame, and I went back to wrestle in this tiny Minnesota territory.
There was just one problem. I was supposed to be the bad guy. That always worked before, but after Rocky III hit theaters that spring, every time I would step foot in an arena the place would explode. The crowds cheered for me instead of booing. It started to become real clear that my playing the heel wouldn’t cut it anymore. That basically ruined all of Verne Gagne’s plans to make me the challenger to Jesse Ventura.
In a way, that was the start of Hulkamania right there. It was the audience that made that happen, the crowds that decided Hulk Hogan was someone they wanted to cheer for rather than boo. So I embraced it. I wouldn’t fold with one punch. It would take three or four punches to make me fold. I would really play it up, combining bad-guy and good-guy elements all in one: I’d get hit in the head with a chair (which, not surprisingly, hurts like hell), or swiped by a pair of brass knuckles, and it’d just get me mad and I’d shake it off. There was a whole different aura to everything I did, and the audience just started eating from the palm of my hand.
It was in those arenas that I started playing Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” as my theme music whenever I walked in. Wrestlers never used theme music before that. You can’t imagine how loud the crowds roared when they heard that song from Rocky III.
I was the main attraction at every arena. Hulk Hogan was the star. No question. Everyone in the wrestling business knew it, too. I could feel the world opening up to me.
During my years in Minnesota, I was still flying back and forth to Japan all the time. The four-day schedule made it pretty easy to do that, and the Japanese audience just couldn’t go long without their fix of Hulk Hogan in the ring.
What I’d usually do on my way there or my way back was stop over in Los Angeles. I had become friends with Stallone at this point, and we’d occasionally hit the town together—just stirring up everything and making the girls go wild at the clubs. I also reconnected with an old high school pal of mine named Nelson Kidwell.
One night Nelson took me to this place called the Red Onion, up in the Valley. The place was just swimming with Valley Girls. Blond hair and long pink fingernails everywhere. But this one girl really stood out. Her name was Linda Claridge, and she actually asked me to dance. I still wasn’t much on dancing, so I said no, and Nelson went out and danced with her instead.
It was there on that dance floor that I really started to notice her. She was just gorgeous. Built like a racehorse with these muscular legs, and that ass of hers—that’s my weakness right there.
When she came back over I bought her a drink, and we just started talking. That was the start of everything.
Linda’s personality was so over-the-top. She was real bubbly and happy. I was drawn to that immediately. She didn’t have that hard edge to her the way a lot of Florida girls did. After that initial meeting at the Red Onion, she played hard to get and that drove me wild. I kept calling her and calling her.
I liked the fact that she seemed to be successful in her own right, too. She told me she owned this nail salon she worked in, and she drove this brand-new Corvette. She was cool!
Whether I had my blinders on again or Linda hid it all from me, there didn’t seem to be any negative side to Linda Claridge at all. She was the most positive, upbeat, happy girl I’d ever met. That over-the-top, fun personality of hers drew me in like a moth to the flame.
I think I was also drawn to the fact that she didn’t really know anything about wrestling. Or at least that’s what she let on. I think it was two weeks after we’d met that she and her mom went to see E.T. at a movie theater near their house. As the story goes, the lines were so long they skipped it and went to see Rocky III instead. Once she saw me pop up in that movie she started to connect the dots on how famous I was.
My boy Nelson couldn’t understand what the hell I saw in Linda. “There’s a million girls out there. She’s just a Valley Girl! They’re all the same,” he said.
She certainly wasn’t “the same” to me. Everything about Linda seemed a million light-years ahead of the hard-edged Florida girls I’d dated. To me, she was a blond California dream. I was completely hooked from day one.
In the early days of our relationship, finding time to see Linda was tough because of my schedule. We’d talk on the phone every day, but I’d only be able to catch her in person for a day or two at a time when I hit L.A. between flights back and forth to Japan. I’d asked her to come live with me in Minnesota, but she just wasn’t into the whole idea of up and leaving her California lifestyle behind.
The funny thing is, if she had said yes and gone with me to Minnesota, then I probably never would have reconnected with my brother Alan, whom I hadn’t seen since he split Port Tampa after getting shot in the back.
Linda and I had only been dating a little while when he suddenly showed up outside of the Gold’s Gym on Sherman Way, the gritty main thoroughfare that cuts east to west across the Valley. I’m always kinda slow getting out of the gym—it takes me a little longer than everyone else to quit sweating, get dressed, and come out of the building—but I was finally on my way out that day when Linda came running in with her eyes as big as saucers.
“Terry, there’s this real big guy outside. He’s bigger than you are! I can’t even see his skin he’s got so many tattoos,” she said. “He’s sitting on the hood of the car. He’s got a big, black beard and long black hair. He says he’s your brother!”
“Yeah, that’s my brother,” I told her. “Tell him I’ll be out in a minute.”
I hadn’t talked to Alan in years—since he was living in Houston under an assumed name. During that period I heard that he beat a guy real bad and threw him in a dumpster. When I asked him about it over the phone, he said, “Oh yeah, he was cheatin’ playing pool!” As if that was a good excuse. It was just ridiculous to me that he was still doing crazy shit like that, so I said, “I don’t ever wanna talk to you again.” And that was that.
Now all of a sudden he’s sitting out on my car. I have no idea how he knew that I was working out at that gym that day. I don’t even want to know. But the only reason he stopped by was to say hello, and I have to say: It was great to see my brother again.
Alan was riding with the Hell’s Angels at that point. He became vice president of the San Francisco chapter, and after our Gold’s Gym hello he started to show up with like twenty or thirty Hell’s Angels in tow every time I’d wrestle at the Cow Palace or the Oakland Coliseum.
I can’t even tell you how much that would freak the other wrestlers out. These Hell’s Angels were huge wrestling fans, but they all treated it like it was real and they wanted to come in and kill the bad guys! Mr. Wonderful and some of the other wrestlers would all hide whenever my brother and his Hell’s Angels buddies came around. I think some of them were just as scared of a real confrontation as I’d always been.
Whenever all these Hell’s Angels came around and I’d hug them hello, I could feel the metal on them. They were packing guns everywhere. The other wrestlers had a right to be scared. But it was also kind of cool, you know—it was such a macho thing to have a brother who was a powerhouse with the baddest biker gang around. It brought me that old sort of “SOG” respect from some of the other wrestlers. They just assumed that they’d better not mess with me.
Still, it scared me to death. I could tell my brother was high as a kite every time he came to visit me at those arenas—and to think of him riding around like that with these guys and all these guns? It just scared me.
I never really spent much time with him at all. I’d always say hi and then tell him I had to get ready for the match, and once the match was over I’d start saying I had to get ready to go to the next city, you know?
Over the next couple of years he met a lady named Marsha, and they got married and moved to L.A. He had another child with Marsha, David Bollea—who’s actually a mixed martial arts fighter now—and they opened a carpet-cleaning business. It really seemed to me like he was getting his life a little bit more on track.
Even though I didn’t spend much time with him, it was nice to feel like I had a brother again.
Linda and I dated for about a year and a half before I finally asked her to marry me. Having learned a few lessons from my failed engagement to Donna, I knew for sure that this was the real deal. I never felt happier than when I was with Linda, and she seemed to spend every moment with me smiling like I’d never seen a girl smile before. The engagement was enough for her to make the leap, and she moved to Minnesota with me into a brand-new townhouse I’d just bought—the first piece of property I’d owned my whole life.
My schedule didn’t let up, of course, and that didn’t leave much time for a wedding. So we simply made the best of it. On December 18, 1983, I flew back from Japan for one day, we got married in L.A., and I went back to work the very next night. There was no slowing down.
The wedding was great, don’t get me wrong. The party was awesome. The entire crew from Japan flew back with me, and all these wrestlers were there, and it turned into an all-night blowout. As the story goes, I got so drunk that I woke up the next morning still in my tuxedo. So Linda and I never consummated the marriage on our wedding night.
It didn’t matter, of course. Linda knew she had me for life. And I guess for her, the Valley Girl, it was a big, big deal. To catch a guy as famous and quickly-becoming-rich as Hulk Hogan meant she’d caught herself a big fish.
In retrospect, Linda and her whole family probably thought they had caught themselves a sucker fish.
My first clue was right there in front of me that night. Apparently the wedding guests ran up a huge bar tab—like twelve or fourteen thousand dollars. So Linda’s mom came up to me and asked me to pay the bill. And I did.
The parents of the bride usually pay for that kind of thing, right? I didn’t care. I had the money on me, and I was having such a good time, I just handed it over. That’s something I would wind up doing a lot of over the course of my marriage.
For the time being, though, Linda and I were off and running. A blissful husband-and-wife team, out on the road and living large. We didn’t have time for a traditional honeymoon, but as we traveled around for my matches, staying in different hotel rooms and partying every night, those first few years felt like a honeymoon that never ended.
Verne Gagne had big, big plans for me by the time I got married. Nick Bockwinkel had emerged as the champion in the Minnesota territory, and they started booking me in Steel Cage Matches as his primary opponent in every big city from Salt Lake to Chicago. We were also putting our forces together with all these big wrestlers to buy time on Channel 9 in New York. We knew we had the talent to go head-to-head with the WWF, and with TV time setting us up, there was no telling how quickly we could take over the New York territory.
Oddly enough, that’s exactly when I got a surprise phone call from Vince McMahon. Only this time, the call came from a very different Vince McMahon—it was Vince McMahon Jr. on the line.
When I was working for Vince Sr., his son Vince Jr. was acting primarily as a commentator and ring announcer. When André the Giant came out of the ring all bloody from taking a Hulk Hogan beating, Vince was the guy in the suit with the microphone getting the ringside interview. But something sure had changed, because now Vince Jr. was a guy with bigger ambitions than I’d ever encountered in this business.
“Hey, I know my dad fired you,” Vince said, “but my dad’s gonna retire, and I’m takin’ over the business. We’ve been watchin’ how great you’re doin’ in Minnesota. We want to bring you in and make you our champion.”
I was flattered, I guess, but I had also been burned by the McMahons once before.
“Look,” I said, “I’m going on three years here and I’m doing really well, I only work four days a week, and I just bought a townhouse—”
He kept interrupting. He didn’t want to hear my excuses.
“What I’m saying is we want to give you the biggest push of all,” Vince said. “I’m gonna take over this business. I have plans to change the wrestling business and make you the biggest star in the world.” The McMahons only controlled wrestling in that New York– Connecticut–Massachusetts corridor, but he was talking about going everywhere. Worldwide!
Vince recognized how popular I’d made this Hulk Hogan character, and he shared the same vision I had—that I could take this character anywhere.
He insisted on meeting me in person, and a few days later he flew into the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. I had Linda go pick him up. “All I can tell you is you’re gonna see a guy in a plaid tweed suit with big shoulder pads,” I told her. He was a pretty geeky-looking guy back then.
Sure enough, she picked him right out at the airport. Linda brought Vince back to my townhouse, and we sat around drinking wine and eating pizza, talking about his vision. The idea was to take the WWF to venues all across the country and around the world, with Hulk Hogan leading the charge, and to go national with big TV events. I don’t think we talked about it that first night, but Vince Jr. is the guy who spearheaded the whole concept of pay-per-view TV. Before cable was everywhere, he had the idea to simulcast Madison Square Garden events on big screens in stadiums in other markets—instantly doubling, tripling, quadrupling the audiences for every big match.
With all the fly-by-night promoters and even the great promoters I’d worked with in this business, I had never encountered a vision as big as Vince’s. It lined up with all I had in my head about how big this thing could become—the monstrous vision I had when I first realized that wrestling was as much a performance as it was a sporting event, when I knew that I could be great at it.
Vince’s passion got me so fired up, there was no way I could say no to the guy.
Right around four o’clock in the morning, we shook hands.
Two days later, I locked the door of that townhouse and walked away from Minnesota, knowing I’d never be back.
Linda and I settled into an apartment in West Haven, Connecticut, and I immediately started going back and forth to wrestle again for the WWF TV tapings in Allentown.
There was just one problem: Vince Sr. hadn’t retired yet, which meant that he was still calling the shots even as Vince Jr. was starting to step in.
As soon as I arrived I could tell Vince Sr. was a little uncomfortable having me around—partially because of the way things ended between us, I figured, and probably because the other wrestlers were so pissed off about my sudden arrival. They knew this Hulk Hogan thing was about to eclipse whatever fan base they had built for themselves.
Bob Backlund, who was supposed to be my tag-team partner, wouldn’t even get in the ring with me. It was all that sort of smalltime crap that Vince Jr. and I were ready to put behind us.
In fact, our plan for world domination was already in motion. Just a few weeks after my return, we were gearing up for this massive coup in Madison Square Garden.
Not long before that, the Iron Sheik had won the championship belt from Bob. It was all part of a story line that would have Backlund back in the Garden to win that belt back from him on January 23, 1984. That was Vince Sr.’s plan. Vince Jr. decided to put me in that ring against the Iron Sheik instead, to give Hulk Hogan the world championship belt and start building this thing into something much bigger.
There are lots of rumors about what happened that night. Here’s what I know to be true. For one, Verne Gagne, who was furious that I left his Minnesota plans high and dry, called the Iron Sheik and offered him money to punish me in the ring. In one swift move, the Iron Sheik would have landed a lucrative deal to go wrestle in Minnesota while simultaneously eliminating Vince’s new star.
I honestly don’t think that plan would have worked. Even if the Sheik somehow managed to give me hell, there was so much love for Hulk Hogan among the fans that it would have created this massive wave of sympathy for me. I probably would have blown up even bigger, even faster! And the Sheik would have been so hated that he very well might have faded into oblivion in the Midwest. Plus, I think the Sheik was smart enough to see the bigger picture of what Vince Jr. was trying to set up, which would be worth a hell of a lot more than what Gagne was offering if it all worked out.
The obstacle was Vince Sr. A short time before the big match, he took me aside and said, “You know, Terry, we may have to put this off for a while. We may change our plans.”
I couldn’t believe it. I knew he was just caving in to Bob Backlund, who had been whining and complaining ever since he heard that I was gonna win the belt. He didn’t think it was right that somebody who wasn’t a “real athlete” would hold the belt. That was his excuse: that I hadn’t been a real amateur wrestler like he had.
He got awful petty about the whole thing. At one point, when he didn’t seem to be getting his way, he went to Vince Sr. and said, “By the way, Hulk Hogan smokes pot.” That led to all these questions in the locker room, and all kind of problems for me.
So when Vince Sr. pulled me aside to say we might not follow the plan I’d been promised by Vince Jr., I basically told him he could forget about having Hulk Hogan stick around. “Look, Vince, if you’re changing your plans, I just burned a huge bridge in Minnesota. I’ll go right back tonight and rebuild that bridge,” I told him.
Vince Jr. stepped in at that point. He pulled his dad aside for a long conversation. I don’t know what he said, but he eventually came back to me and said, “We’re goin’ with things as planned.”
So on January 23, 1984, I climbed into the ring at Madison Square Garden, turned on all the Hulk Hogan charm, and whipped the audience into a frenzy as I won the belt from the Iron Sheik. My very first championship belt.
Verne Gagne, the guys down in Florida, and the wrestlers in Memphis and Alabama might not have agreed with it, but at that moment I became the biggest and best in the world. And it didn’t matter what any of the old-school wrestling guys thought, because audiences were ready to embrace Hulk Hogan like they’d never embraced any other wrestler in the history of the business.
Out with the old. In with the new.
Hulkamania had officially exploded.
A few weeks after winning the belt, I went down to Allentown to tape my first TV match as the champion. I was back in the dressing room getting ready and decided I needed to go to the bathroom. Now, the bathroom in the dressing room of that facility was built real strange. You had to open a door and go up some stairs to get to this platform where the toilet was.
The door was closed, and I didn’t knock. I didn’t think anyone else was around. I just opened it. As I looked up those stairs, I caught a glimpse of Vince Sr. standing over the toilet—I didn’t mean to look, but I didn’t think anyone was in there—and I couldn’t believe what I saw. His legs were spread, and all I could see was this bright red piss shooting down into the bowl. It looked like pure blood.
Holy shit. I closed the door and walked away.
I ran to Pat Patterson, who’d become a close friend of mine by then, and told him what I’d seen. He served as a close confidant of both McMahons—their voice of reason as far as business savvy. Pat went and gently told Vince Jr. about what I had seen.
Shortly thereafter we got the news that Vince Sr. had cancer. And within a matter of weeks, he was gone. It was shocking, and so sad.
Vince Jr. stepped into his father’s shoes and took the reins of the business, exactly like he told me he would. It just happened in a way that I never saw coming.
Vince was based in Stamford, and we needed to be close to each other to keep working on all of our big plans. So Linda and I moved up there and bought a house just a few weeks after Vince’s father passed. From that point on, Vince and I were inseparable.
We spent hours and hours talking this thing through from every angle possible. The thing was, for as much as Vince had been around the wrestling business and thought he knew the business inside and out, he really needed to see it through my eyes—the eyes of someone who had lived it in the ring. At that point, Vince had never entered the ring himself. So in a way I became his teacher. I walked him through Wrestling 101: the wrestling psychology, the theory. Both of us were in sync about the fact that this business could be much bigger than the way Vince Sr. saw it. Beyond that, just like Tony Altomare had shown me the ropes and the back doors of the business side a few years earlier, I showed Vince my personal vision for how to raise the bar on everything that happened in the ring.
My view of this was different than any wrestler that came before me, and I wanted him to see that the little things I did in the ring to make the fans feel like they were a part of the match could be done on a much grander scale across the whole spectrum of the WWF. If we sucked these fans in on a personal level, they would live it and breathe it and be fans forever.
Vince knew wrestling was an art form, but I wanted to bring it to life for him. “Yes, you paint a picture,” I explained, “and there’s an arc to the story lines.” He knew that—but there was a bigger way, a more emotional way, to paint those arcs and reach the fans so that the experience would last much longer than a three-hour show at Madison Square Garden. There was a way to make people believe that Hulk Hogan was a real hero, and that if you train and take your vitamins and say your prayers you, too, can be a hero. I wanted people to be absolutely hooked on this stuff so it entered their lives on a daily basis—not just once a month or a few times a year.
I explained how we could get more heat, and how to make the fans go crazy, and how to really make a comeback like no one had ever seen. It was like he needed to hear that from my point of view to awaken the full fire of his grand plan.
And man, were his plans grand. Vince was like the P. T. Barnum of wrestling promoters. He was aggressive—never afraid to make moves. He would rent buildings and put his ass on the line, leverage his house if he had to, in order to make something happen. He was fearless. And by that time, so was I.
The thing about Vince is he could match me toe-to-toe in the obsession department. If I was in 150 percent, so was he. We could put blinders on and just block out the whole world, the naysayers, the old-time wrestlers who thought the business should stay just the way it was. We’d power our way through any obstacle that hit us, and we pushed each other.
With his aggressiveness and my focus, we were a match made in heaven. Even though we were totally different types of people, our work ethic was hardcore. I used to call him the Terminator. I swear I’ve never met anybody else that can roll with me and keep up with me neck and neck when I get on something.
One example: A few years into the Hulkamania madness, Linda and I relocated to Florida, to a townhouse down on Redington Beach. One time Vince came down and we locked ourselves in a hotel room nearby. For forty-eight hours straight we sat at a table with a pencil and paper and wrote the movie No Holds Barred from beginning to end. It was a ridiculous movie, but we wrote it from beginning to end without stopping, without sleeping, for forty-eight hours. It was like three hundred pages before we handed it to a writer to polish up. I’d never met anyone who could hang with me like that.
We were a great team. There’s no other way to put it. I wasn’t his “employee.” He wasn’t my “boss.” He needed me as much as I needed him. Hulkamania got started when I was working in Minnesota, but it never would have blown up the way it did without Vince and the WWF. Likewise, there’s no way the WWF would have broken down all the old territorial boundaries and taken over the world if Vince didn’t have Hulk Hogan.
From the moment this whole thing took off in ’84, we were partners in the best sense of the word. We both had this vision and this manic drive. Nothing was gonna stop us.