Remember how I missed out on that whole sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll vibe when I was playing in bands down in Tampa? Let’s just say I was a late bloomer.
The thing is, when wrestling took off in this unstoppable international explosion in the 1980s, Hulk Hogan was as big as any rock band going. The first WrestleMania had a million viewers on closed-circuit TV. A million viewers all paying to watch! We even slammed this thing directly into the music world with the whole MTV/Rock ’n’ Wrestling phenomenon. Before I knew it, I was acting as a personal bodyguard to Cyndi Lauper one night and taking her to the Grammy Awards in my sleeveless tux.
That excitement from the audience fed me in the ring and made the whole thing even bigger and better. I’d keep mixing up the moves and mugging to the crowd, making sure every fan got involved in the show so they felt like they were a part of the match.
It was such a trip, too, because when I’d hit Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, the heads of GM and Ford and Chrysler—the most powerful businessmen in the whole wide world at that time—would jockey to see who got the best seats. Vince used to laugh about that all the time. Or I’d be in L.A. coming out of the ring and I’d see John Travolta and Gene Hackman and Suzanne Somers—some of the biggest stars of the ’70s and ’80s—sittin’ right along the aisle. Going to see Hulk Hogan was like the hot thing to do for a while, you know?
My T-shirts and merchandise were flying off the shelves. We were traveling from town to town, selling out arenas. And forget about the tiny MSG Network—we knocked ourselves onto NBC on Saturday nights. Major network television! Dick Ebersol, who was producing Saturday Night Live at the time, had us filling in on weeks when SNL was off the air, and that opened doors to every party in town.
Hell, going all the way back to my days running in and out of L.A. between trips to Japan there were a bunch of times when a few other guys and I put John Belushi’s ass to bed. That’s the kind of crowd we were running with—sliding right into the craziness of Studio 54 before that wild New York party finally came to a halt in March of 1986.
Linda was right beside me for the ride and loving every minute of it. If she had been an actress or something, maybe playing second fiddle to Hulk Hogan would have been too much to take. As it was, being in that number-two position worked just fine for her. She had a certain respect everywhere she’d go, just because she was my wife, you know? People would want to talk to her and ask her all about what it was like to live with the Hulkster, and the red velvet ropes would part for her at any party. She loved that.
When we hit the road, the party was on. I was the world’s champion and had more money rolling in than I knew what to do with. And Linda was always in charge of that money. For as long as I can remember, whenever I’d get a check, I’d stuff it in my wrestling bag and hand it over to Linda when I saw her. With all the running around I was doing, it was just easier for her to deal with going to the bank. Plus, can you imagine Hulk Hogan walking into a local bank? It would be chaos.
We were never ones to waste money. Especially on the road. Instead of blowing our dough at the Peninsula or the Beverly Hills Hotel, Linda and I would always stay at the Marriotts or Ramadas with all of the other wrestlers. We didn’t want to be separated from the pack. That just wasn’t our mindset back then. It was much more fun to be around everyone.
I was drinkin’ a lot of beer, and Linda would always drink her wine, and all the wrestlers smoked pot, so I would smoke pot, too. But the thing that’s most memorable about partying in the late ’70s and early ’80s was the cocaine.
It first showed up in my personal circles about halfway through my run in Minnesota—right around when Linda and I started dating. I’d go to wrestle in Denver or someplace, and when we’d hit the hotel afterward to drink a few beers, somebody’d break a little gram out.
At first I didn’t know what the fuck it was, but everybody tried it, so I tried it, too. I didn’t know what it was supposed to do. It didn’t seem to have that big an effect on me. I mean, if it wired me up where I could drink an extra beer or five, I don’t remember that, and I don’t remember it like some kind of “Oh my God” epiphany. But it was there, and I did it.
Before long, it was showing up in the locker rooms at the arenas. Then it started showing up in every hotel room, every night. Those hotel rooms would just get wild—and that became the standard routine, almost every night. “Let’s go up to the hotel and do a couple lines and have some drinks.”
I never did large amounts of the stuff, and the most I probably hit it was four days a week. If it was there, it was there; if it wasn’t, I didn’t care.
When it got real heavy I couldn’t handle it. If I bought a gram of cocaine it would last me a whole week. You could buy it anywhere, of course—from other wrestlers, from fans. Or you wouldn’t even have to buy it, you know? It was just there. But if I would hand a gram to Linda and she would get with other wives or girlfriends, it’d be gone instantly.
I’d always ask her, “How can a gram disappear in one night? Where did it all go?!” But she certainly wasn’t alone. It seemed like everybody was doing that. More, more, more. Man, if I did too much coke, though, it made me chew my fingernails.
Sure it made you feel good, like, “Hey, man, I’m awake, and I feel like a genius, and I feel young!” But when it came to functionality? I didn’t want to eat, I couldn’t sleep at all, and I definitely couldn’t get a hard-on. Still, it’s so addictive that you keep doin’ it anyway. It’s like a rat to poison. You just can’t stop.
Almost all the wrestlers loved it, and it was just part of the culture back then. It seems like every big star had a run with cocaine at one point or another. The Saturday Night Live gang was running wild. You’d walk into Studio 54 and shit was everywhere, you know? Right out in the open!
It’s kind of embarrassing to talk about it now, thinking about my kids and what a bad example that is, but that’s just the way it was. It was a different era.
It doesn’t mean my kids should follow my example. Just the opposite. We’re all smarter than we were then. We know more about what drugs can do to you, and how dangerous they can be. I want my kids to learn from my mistakes so they don’t make the same mistakes I made, you know? And I’m certainly not gonna lie about it.
It’s also weird to think about the fact that I was doing all of this—and the steroids—while telling all of my young fans week after week, “Train, say your prayers, and take your vitamins.” That line was like my own Bob Barker catchphrase. I threw that sentiment out into the world day after day after day. Not that there’s anything wrong with that message. It’s a great message. It was just a little bit hypocritical that my activities behind the scenes didn’t match the role-model persona I was putting out there.
I’m glad I did it, though. Putting that kind of positive message out there to millions of kids is one of the least self-centered things I did in all those years. I put it right up there with visiting kids for the Make-A-Wish Foundation and other charity work I did. Throwing that kind of positive vibe out into the universe can only bring positive things in return.
Plus, there was almost no chance that any kid would find out about what I was doing late at night. There weren’t packs of paparazzi everywhere like there are today. There weren’t all these celebrity magazines and entertainment-show videographers stalking you everywhere you went, either. If you partied with fans, they certainly weren’t forwarding embarrassing photos to some Internet blog—that whole culture just didn’t exist. Instead the fans would just brag to their friends about whatever happened that night. Unlike today, it was actually fun for everyone involved—on both sides of the equation.
I can’t even describe to you how much fun it was to wrestle Madison Square Garden and hear that crowd, with those twenty-two thousand people making my jaws water, and to come off of that high and head over to the Ramada on 48th Street with all the other wrestlers and drink in that bar with all these fans going nuts and then head up to a hotel room for more drinks and a couple of lines.
But the side effects and the whole crash of that next day just wasn’t worth it. By late ’85, I threw more coke away than I snorted. It got to the point where I’d buy an eight ball, which is three grams, and I’d do a little bit of it and have a few drinks, and get so wired I’d start grinding my teeth, so I’d drink a little more to take the edge off and then go to bed and wake up feeling like shit. So I’d get up before Linda and I’d flush the rest of that eight ball down the toilet.
Next thing I know I’d have one of the other wrestlers callin’ me up, “Hey, man, you still got that eight ball?”
I’d tell ’em what I did.
“How the fuck could you flush that down the toilet?!”
It was easy. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to keep having that feeling. But flushing it wasn’t enough. There was always more of it around the next night. And even though I never did more than a line or two at a time, and I never did it on a daily basis, I’d find that I kept going back for more.
Like I said, a rat to poison. Until I finally had a wake-up call in ’86.
Was it fate or a big coincidence that Studio 54 got shut down for good in the spring of 1986? I think the collective party in this country had just gone on for far too long and got far too crazy. I mean, life has a way of slapping you in the face when things go too far, and I think that can happen on a grand scale as easily as it can happen in any one man’s life. We had all been on this party train since the ’70s, and all of a sudden it was running out of track.
Early that year, something terrible happened to my brother Alan’s ex-wife, Martha Alfonso. While he had gone on his odyssey—through Texas, and riding with the Hell’s Angels up in Frisco—and had remarried this lady named Marsha and started a new life in L.A., Martha stayed back in Tampa and raised their three kids on her own.
Martha was making a decent living managing a hotel by the Tampa airport. For a while she was dating a guy who had a whole lot of money, yet who never seemed to have a real job. Read into that what you will, knowing what kind of characters and families were running in and out of Tampa in those days. The kind that would be played by Pacinos and De Niros in the movies.
Well, one day Martha and her boyfriend got in a real big fight, and after work she went into the hotel bar and wound up dancing with one of the employees there. Her boyfriend walked in and shot her twice—killed her right there on the dance floor.
So all of a sudden I have two nieces and a nephew who lost their mom. (My nephew is Michael Bollea, who would eventually wrestle as Horace Hogan in the National Wrestling Alliance and over in Japan. He grew up thick and strong, like Alan.)
So these three kids started bouncing around between Martha’s side of the family, the Cuban side, and my parents. I did whatever I could to send money back to try to help them out. But just a few months later we were knocked out by another wave of bad news.
Alan started showing up to my matches in L.A., the same way he used to show up in San Francisco and Oakland a year or two earlier. Only now, instead of having the Hell’s Angels in tow, he’d bring his new wife, Marsha.
I remember one time after I wrestled at the Olympic Auditorium, I went to meet the two of them outside of the building and Alan and I couldn’t find her. She’d disappeared. We looked around for a really long time, and we were starting to freak out a little bit when one of the maintenance guys came out of the building and told us he found her—passed out in one of the bathrooms.
So I knew that drugs were still a big part of Alan’s life. He hadn’t turned his life around as much as I thought.
It wasn’t long before my brother came right out in the open with it. “I need pain pills, man. Can you help me out?” He knew that I knew a doctor named George Zahorian back in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—this doc that would hook me and all the other wrestlers up with steroids and just about anything else we ever wanted or needed. It wasn’t like I was giving him LSD, so I probably didn’t think much about sharing a few pain pills with my brother.
This one day in 1986, though, I went back to L.A. and met up with Alan and Marsha, and something had shifted—like someone had pulled the rug out from under their whole world. The two of them started giving me this crazy fuckin’ story. “We can’t pay the rent on the house. We’re behind on the van payment. Our carpet company’s goin’ under.” They were late on Alan’s motorcycle payment, they were out of groceries, they were desperate and needed my help. It was this, that, and the other, nonstop.
So I wrote ’em a check. I can’t remember if it was for five grand or ten grand. I was making enough money that it didn’t make a difference at that point. Anyway, as soon as I wrote that check, the two of them just started arguing like hell in this restaurant we were in.
I finally pulled my brother aside and said, “Alan, look. Why don’t you just come with me to San Francisco tonight?” He looked real stressed out, and I told him it was only an hour flight up there. I was scheduled to wrestle at the Cow Palace. “We can just hang out and talk and, you know, maybe we can see some of your old friends. Then we’ll just fly back. We’ll be back by midnight tonight.” The last flight out of San Francisco airport’s an eleven o’clock. I was happy to pay for it. It was no big deal.
“No,” he said. “I can’t, I can’t. I gotta stay here. I wanna do this, I wanna do that.”
I really thought he should get away from the craziness. Catch a break for a night. But he needed to go pay those bills right away and get everything taken care of, he said. So I gave up. “Okay. I’ll call you when I get back.”
That night I flew up to San Francisco and wrestled as the main event at the Cow Palace as planned. As I came out of the ring, Blackjack Lanza, this old-time wrestler who worked as the on-site agent, who always stayed in back and dictated who would win or lose the matches, came up to me looking real serious and handed me a note. “It’s an emergency,” he said.
I open the note to see what the hell he’s talking about, and all it says is “Call Marsha, it’s an emergency.”
Fuck, I remember thinking. What now? Who knew what Marsha’s idea of an emergency was? I mean, I don’t know what I expected other than another crazy sob story about how the money I gave them wasn’t enough and how they were in even more trouble or whatever. But she’s my brother’s wife. So I called her.
“They found your brother dead in a hotel room.”
Apparently Alan took all of that money I gave him and rather than paying off bills or getting a handle on all the shit in his life, he went out and bought a boatload of whatever his drug of choice was. Then he overdosed and died.
I guess I’ll never know if it was on purpose or not. Whatever it was, he did it with my money. The bread that I gave him. My big-time wrestling career and big fat wallet made it possible for my brother Alan to die that night.
That’s not what I thought about when I first heard the news. That sorry fact would hit me in the middle of the night sometime later. No. When I hung up with Marsha, all I could think about was my mom and dad. I was so worried about how they would react. I knew they were going to get that phone call, and I knew how crushed they would be.
“One day, we’re gonna get a phone call about your brother,” my mom had been saying for years. Her nightmare had finally come true.
Even with all the problems, all the hell he put them through, Alan was still their favorite son. That’s just my opinion, of course. My mom will totally disagree. Every time I see her she says, “Terry, you’re my number-one son.” I don’t want to seem mean or anything, but there are times when I’ll be sitting there with my mom for an hour, watching TV, and she’ll want some water and she’ll still say, “Alan, get me some water.” She doesn’t even know she does it, and I don’t ever feel the need to correct her.
“Okay, Mom.”
My dad was the same way. It was always “Alan this, and Alan that.” I never had anything against it. I just knew that Alan was his favorite, too. As a younger brother you can just tell.
Even right before my dad passed away, whenever he would talk to me he would always start with “Alan—I mean, Terry.” So I knew this news was gonna crush them. Not to mention those three kids who now had lost both of their parents in the course of six months. Even though they hadn’t lived with Alan since they were little, can you imagine the pain they must’ve gone through, knowing that the possibility of ever seeing their father again was gone?
I quit using cocaine right then and there. After seeing what drugs could do to a person, and do to an entire family like that? I was done. Smoking pot was one thing, and drinking beer was another, but I was done with any kind of hard-core drugs. There was no way I would ever meet an end like Alan’s.
As for how his death made me feel? My emotions? I guess I didn’t really have any.
Emotions were one of the things I didn’t have time for back then.
I don’t know how to explain this really, ’cause I’ve never really talked about it before, but the weirdest thing about wrestling was how numb it kept me.
I worked so much, and worked so hard, there just wasn’t any time for personal feelings.
In those days, there was no Rock. There was no Stone Cold Steve Austin. When this thing took off, I was the main event seven days a week—twice on Saturdays and twice on Wednesdays—and never at the same venue. Even on those double-match days, I would hit the Philadelphia Spectrum for a 1:00 P.M. match and then wrestle up at the Boston Garden that very same night, or wherever.
And it never stopped.
I got on planes an average of three hundred days a year.
I’d hear flight attendants on the old Eastern Airlines complaining endlessly, “Oh, they’ve kept me running for nine days straight.” And I’m sittin’ there thinking, I’ve been going for ninety-one days and I haven’t had a day off yet!
To really blow your mind, think about this: If I say I wrestled four hundred days a year, it’s no exaggeration. My years were actually longer than 365 days.
The American audience had no idea that I was wrestling in Japan during the whole Hulkamania thing. There were times when I’d fly back and forth to Japan twice in a week just to wrestle. I used to complain about driving nine hours between matches in the Memphis territory. Now it was nothing to wrestle in Madison Square Garden one day, then fly all the way to the Egg Dome in Tokyo on the same day, ’cause you’d gain fourteen hours, and then fly back to the West Coast and hit San Francisco or L.A. before getting right back on a plane to fly to Narita International Airport before jumping on another plane to fly back to Boston.
So I could wrestle in Japan today and then fly back across the international date line and land in another town yesterday. I was constantly adding days to my years!
The thing was, in my mind, I couldn’t slow down. Just like when I was working for peanuts back in Memphis, this job still had no security. There was no retirement plan or medical benefits. More than that, I was the top of the food chain, and every wrestler coming up wanted to dethrone the king. If I broke my leg tonight in Madison Square Garden, not only would I be left to tend to it at my own expense—and simply be out of a job until I could get myself back in the ring—but someone would try to replace me as America’s big hero the next day.
But the biggest obligation that pushed me forward was the expectation of the fans. I mean, when this Hulkamania thing really took off, I don’t mean to brag and say every night was sold out, but it was! It was like the Beatles or something. Which is crazy to say, but these giant stadiums were just packed every night of the week. There were screaming mobs wherever I went. And when you’re six foot seven, there’s nowhere to hide.
So when Marsha told me that Alan died, there was simply no time to react. Okay, your brother died. Tomorrow you gotta be in Tokyo ’cause it’s sold out, and the next day you gotta be in Osaka and then Boston Garden and then back in Kumamoto—they’re all sold out.
Instead of taking a month, or a week, or even a couple of days off to mourn and be with my family, I kept wrestling. Nonstop. It was like a fear that they were going to replace me. A blind instinct to just keep going.
Part of that instinct was driven by the fact that I couldn’t believe none of the other wrestlers had caught on to what I was doing. How come nobody else has figured it out yet? Junkyard Dog couldn’t figure it out. Rowdy Roddy Piper couldn’t figure it out. Ultimate Warrior couldn’t figure it out. Even André didn’t quite get it—this whole thing of just getting the crowd involved and getting thousands of people to eat out of the palm of your hand. You didn’t have to be a great wrestler. You just had to draw the crowd into the match. You just had to be totally aware, and really in the moment, and paying attention to the mood of the crowd.
For some reason I couldn’t allow myself to be in the moment and totally aware when it came to paying attention to my personal life or my feelings and emotions. In the ring, though, that sense of control and presence came easy to me.
Looking back, I realize that it was much more than just my ability to work a crowd that kept me on top. It was the whole package: the blond hair, the tan body, the red and yellow. Even the fact that I claimed I came from Venice Beach, California—that was all just part of working the show, you know? I’d never even been to Venice Beach when I started using that line on the New York circuit, but I knew that image of California had an effect on people. It represented something. The American dream. Hollywood. All of it. So the whole idea that this bronzed god had emerged from Venice Beach, where all the musclemen lifted weights outdoors by the golden sand and the glistening ocean—it just made sense that crowds would get into that whole thing.
Of course, none of it was rocket science. Back then I was convinced that at any minute some other wrestler would emerge with an even better plan, an even better story, an even better gimmick that would win over the audience and make Hulk Hogan yesterday’s news.
So I just kept going. I kept looking ahead to the next venue, the next match, the next TV spot or interview. I didn’t live life for the present. I just kept living for the future. I stayed numb to my immediate surroundings. I stayed numb to what was happening in the here-and-now of my life.
As a result, it’s not a stretch to say that I don’t really remember half of my career.
People always come up to me with questions about the places I’ve been. Local journalists are notorious for that. “You’ve wrestled in St. Louis every couple of months for the last twenty-five years. Where are your favorite places to go?”
“Well, I’ve been to the Marriott and the arena and the airport.” That was my answer.
People ask me about Paris or London, and it’s the same thing: the airport, the hotel, and the arena.
I barely even stopped to marry my wife. Think about that. Think about how disconnected I was to not even bother slowing down to get married—to treat that commitment, that unbreakable bond, like a blip in an otherwise busy schedule.
That’s what I did. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was married for about ten years before I ever took three days off in a row. It took that much dedication and drive to stay on top.
I just didn’t think about the consequences that might have on my relationship with Linda.