In the early days of Hulkamania, the thought of having kids didn’t really cross our minds. Linda and I were newlyweds, and we were riding high.
Plus, for me, I knew we didn’t have enough money saved. I still felt wrestling didn’t bring any security. Even at the peak of this I was still scared that it was all gonna disappear at any moment.
So we just kept partying and reveling in all the fame and fortune we could. We were constantly getting on planes, going to the next photo shoot, hitting the next party or awards show or premiere. In fact, the first three years of our marriage we were hardly ever alone.
I remember one time I wrestled in Hawaii, and Linda and I decided to stay on and take a mini vacation at the hotel afterward. It was only a two-day break—but by the second day, Linda was so bored she was crawling out of her skin.
Times like those were when the early cracks in our marriage started to emerge. Especially that third year in.
There were times when Linda would start yelling at me for what seemed like no reason at all. She’d just suddenly start cussing up a storm and freaking out on me over the littlest things—like not being able to find her shoes, or if we forgot to pack something.
When it started happening frequently, I went to Linda’s mother and asked her if she’d ever witnessed any of these anger issues in Linda before—and she acted like it was an everyday occurrence. “You’re the one who married her,” she said. She was practically laughing at me.
Thanks a lot, lady.
Those were my first glimpses of the mean streak Linda had in her—this thing that I think she inherited from her father, Joe, an ex-cop.
It was just one of many little secrets I learned about Linda and the Claridge family in the months and years after we married. Little bits of information kept trickling out—all of which were distressing to me, but none of which seemed too big to overcome when I took them on one at a time.
Remember the Corvette that Linda was driving when I met her? Right after we married I learned that she didn’t own it outright. In fact, she was barely making the payments and needed my help. And that nail salon she supposedly owned? She was just a part owner, and the whole place was deep, deep in debt.
Linda didn’t just have minor problems with her father, either—she had tremendous problems. They fought like cats and dogs when she was young. It got so bad, Linda left home when she was just a teenager and led a wild, rebellious life. One day she told me that she had sex with her PE teacher in high school. I’m not sure it was true, but I think she thought it was funny, or cool or something.
I didn’t learn any of this crazy stuff until after she had that ring on her finger. By then, of course, I thought it was too late to do anything about it. So I figured I’d just have to live with it.
It got so bad, I remember having conversations with buddies of mine—like maybe it was time to leave her. Maybe this married life wasn’t for me. My pal Ed Leslie (Brutus Beefcake) was in the middle of divorcing his first wife around the same time. He had joined the WWF, and we were even tag-team partners again at this point, and I remember wondering out loud with him if getting married was the wrong thing to do. “Linda and I always had so much fun just hanging out on the road together,” I remember saying. “Maybe it should have stayed that way. Maybe getting married put a damper on things.” All I knew was that she kept showing this angry side, and I couldn’t figure out what on earth was making her so unhappy.
As the anger progressed over the years, there would be a few times when I wished I had done with Linda what I did with Donna—just taken the ring off her finger and told her she was free—but I always stopped myself. The thing is, if that had happened, then I wouldn’t have Brooke and Nick in my life, and those kids are my whole world. So you can’t second-guess these things. Everything happens for a reason, right?
It’s funny, though—and I never really put this together until recently—those cracks in the marriage first started to show the same year that I lost my brother Alan.
More precisely, they started the same year that I stepped back from the fast lane—and Linda didn’t.
It’s more dramatic in retrospect than it was at that time in some ways. I mean, whenever we had a fight I would just get over it and move on. In my mind I’d always tell myself that it wasn’t that bad. The fact is, I was proud to be married. I was proud to have my wife with me out on the road instead of a different girlfriend at every port or a bed full of floozy groupies after every match. And as long as we were rolling with it, Linda would constantly rise to the moment—climbing on that next airplane, driving in a hot car, walking into the stadium to the cheers of fans who had lined up for hours to catch a glimpse of me. We still had lots of fun in those moments. The high of that would get her—and me—through most of the next couple of years.
But that was it. Once we were five years into this marriage, I noticed a real change in Linda. Traveling with Hulk Hogan was a blast for a while. I guess it got old.
I don’t know. I’ve never been Hulk Hogan’s wife. I’ve tried to put myself in Linda’s shoes, though. When the arena’s emptying out at eleven at night, and your husband’s still in the shower ’cause he wrestled the very last match, and you’re the last one there waiting, all by yourself? That shit has to get old after a while.
I understand why someone would get sick of seeing me tear my shirt off for the thousandth time, and there are only so many nights you can watch your husband drop a leg drop on an opponent and still get a kick out of it.
So we fought about it for a little bit, and we talked about it like two reasonable adults. Linda finally decided she just didn’t want to be on the road anymore.
It made sense. We had some money in the bank. We had bought that nice townhouse down on Redington Beach and had relocated to Florida. We both agreed that not only was it the perfect time for Linda to stop following me around, it was time for us to start a family.
It felt good to be in sync about something like that. It’s kind of how I always envisioned a marriage should work, you know? You go through changes in your life together, and adjust to new situations together, and make decisions together as a unit—and there were a lot of decisions to be made.
When Linda decided to stop taking birth control, I decided to stop taking steroids. I didn’t know for sure if that would have any effect on a child or a pregnancy, but I didn’t want to take that risk. With the whole thought of bringing a child into the world, I just wanted my body to be clean, you know? It just made common sense to me. Linda wanted the same thing. I quit smoking pot for a while. I had already quit the cocaine a couple of years earlier. Linda even quit drinking in order to start a family. We just wanted our bodies to be the best they could be, to give every chance to our child to be as healthy as he or she could be.
I guess it worked. Almost as soon as we started trying, we got very fortunate and Linda got pregnant with Brooke. We were both so excited. We felt so blessed, you know?
On May 5, 1988, on one of my rare days off, I was getting ready to go out for a ride in my boat when I got the call from Linda that she was on her way to the hospital. For Christmas Linda had bought me a phone for the boat—one of these big clunky cellular phones that you had to hang up on the wall of the boat like you’d hang a regular phone in your house. So right as I’m getting ready to put the boat in the water at the marina I get this call, and I rush back and meet her at the hospital.
It was seven, eight hours later when she delivered Brooke, who popped into the world weighing ten pounds. She was a big healthy baby. And when I held her for the first time, I found myself counting her fingers and toes. I just couldn’t believe how perfect she was. She was our little girl.
Right then and there, life as I knew it ceased to exist.
All my priorities switched in an instant. Yes, I had to keep the Hulk Hogan persona happening, but now my number-one priority was to spend as much time with Brooke as I could. It’s all I wanted to do. Somehow having a daughter made everything make sense.
When I say that I was running so hard I can’t remember half of my career, I think part of the reason was that I didn’t have a child in my life. Sometimes I sit back and wonder, What the hell was I doing before Brooke came along? It’s like none of it meant anything, you know? All of a sudden, in 1988, my career actually meant something.
Handing Linda those checks every week meant more than just me and Linda saving money. Now it was me and Linda saving money for our kids, and me and Linda working hard for our kids. Whereas before it was more a self-satisfying type of thing, now we were doing this for someone other than ourselves.
It didn’t make me any more aware as I was out on the road. I didn’t suddenly slow down and take time to smell the roses. In fact, it actually made things worse because all I wanted to do was get home between matches and TV appearances. So that added even more flights to my already crazy schedule.
If I was wrestling in Louisiana one day and had a day off before wrestling at Madison Square Garden, instead of flying in a day early and actually getting a good night’s sleep, maybe catching a workout and regrouping, I’d fly to Florida to spend half a day with Linda and baby Brooke before flying back up to New York.
Vince and the other wrestlers would freak out. “Why are you flying all the way to Florida for a couple of hours?” Sometimes that’s truly all it would be. I’d land in the morning and get home by noon even if I had a flight to the West Coast that left that same night at five or six. Those two or three hours with Brooke and Linda in between trips to and from the airport meant the world to me. I’d do whatever it took to get home to them.
Honestly, those were some of the happiest times I can remember. Having a new baby just seemed to refocus everything in my life. Even as hard as it was to be traveling back and forth all the time, it didn’t bother me. I was just so grateful to have Brooke that I would have done anything to keep our family happy.
After Brooke was born I went right back on the steroids. It was just a part of what I did. It’s how I kept that big Hulk Hogan look. I smoked a joint now and then, too, and drank a few beers after coming out of the ring. I pretty much got back to the normal routine—as did Linda, who always favored her wine over any other kind of booze.
Linda went back on birth control, but it wasn’t long before we started talking about wanting another child. We wanted Brooke to have a friend—to see her grow up with a little brother or sister.
It was all just talk, of course. We weren’t going to rush into it. It wasn’t a serious plan, and parenting is serious business. If we were gonna try again, I’d go off the steroids, quit smoking pot, quit drinking, the whole nine yards, and I expected Linda would stop drinking. We were both so happy that Brooke was born healthy and that Linda’s pregnancy had gone so smoothly, it only made sense that we would take the same approach when it was time for baby number two.
Shortly after Brooke was born we bought a beautiful house on Belleview Island, just west of Tampa on an actual island in the middle of the Intracoastal Waterway. We were basically pioneers out there and had almost the whole island to ourselves. Over time they’d put in a resort and like thirty other houses—all the construction noise would be one of the reasons we’d eventually move out—but we had one of the first properties there in this stunning location in the middle of the bay.
I loved coming home to that beautiful house, to my beautiful family. Until one day the weirdest thing happened.
I came back from wrestling one day toward the end of 1989 and walked into the house to find Linda’s grandmother Nini was in for a visit.
“Did you hear the news?” Nini asked me.
“No, what news?” I said.
That’s when she hit with me words I never expected to hear. “Linda’s pregnant.”
I laughed and said, “What do you mean Linda’s pregnant?”
“Oh, yeah, Linda didn’t tell you? She’s pregnant.”
I thought she was kidding around or something. “No, no, Linda didn’t tell me she’s pregnant,” I said.
It wasn’t a joke.
“Oh, yeah,” Nini said. “Linda quit taking her birth control pills about six months ago. So she’s pregnant!”
Can you imagine hearing something that important from your wife’s grandmother? Can you imagine how it felt to have your wife just nonchalantly forget to tell you that she’d gone off the pill and was pregnant?
Dude, we had one of the biggest fights that night.
“Linda, why wouldn’t you tell me? We were gonna plan this so I wouldn’t take a shot of steroids. So I wouldn’t smoke a joint. So I could get my system totally cleaned out. Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
Linda started in with this “Oh, well, I thought we agreed.”
“No!” I said. “The word ‘thought’? You thought? We didn’t agree. You just thought we did, Linda, because you know if you’d told me you were gonna quit taking your pills I wouldn’t have had any alcohol or smoked a joint.”
I mean, me doing something to me is one thing, but me doing something to my kid is another deal. Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe steroids don’t make any difference. Even if that were the case, and even if a little pot and a few beers wouldn’t hurt the health of the baby at all, it doesn’t matter. The fact is, it made a difference to me. Linda knew that. I guess she just didn’t care.
For the first time, I felt like Linda had totally betrayed my trust. She had been having those outbursts, getting angry at me for seemingly no reason, but she had never broken my trust before. It took me a long time to get over that.
Nick came into the world on July 27, 1990, and when I held him for the first time I counted all ten of his fingers and all ten of his toes, just like I had done with baby Brooke. He was perfect. He was a perfectly healthy baby, despite my fears.
That pregnancy was definitely a struggle for Linda, though. There was something about how Nick was sitting in her stomach that cut off a lot of the feelings and nerves in Linda’s legs. She had these big blue veins all through her inner thighs that she didn’t have with Brooke, and she always complained that one leg hurt all the time.
She had a real hard go of it during the delivery, too. Nick wound up being delivered by C-section, and the doctors told us we almost lost Linda in the delivery room. It was a real close call.
Did the drugs and alcohol and steroids have anything to do with that? I can’t really say. Either way that pregnancy took a major toll on Linda, and when it was all over she said, “That’s it. No more kids.”
I felt the same way. My God, we had two beautiful children. We had our dream family, you know? A beautiful boy and a beautiful girl. I was so thankful and we felt so blessed. And there’s no way I would want to risk losing my wife in the delivery room.
So that was it. My family was complete. The four of us would go through this crazy adventure together.
The way I remember it, for years and years and years we were happy. Whenever I came home, it was all about those kids. We took vacations and headed over to Disney World and did all that stuff families are supposed to do together.
It’s the little stuff that really sticks with me. Like with Nick, I’ll always remember sitting there playing games with him while trying to feed him his eggs in the morning—putting them on the fork and doing the airplane noise. “Open the hangar!”
He was a real skinny kid, and he never wanted to eat anything. So when he’d eat dinner I’d put his green peas in rows and make smiley faces with them. I would just play games for hours trying to get that kid to eat.
Nick didn’t have a growth spurt until he was eleven or twelve years old. I guess I shouldn’t have worried. There was no need to rush it. Everything happens in its own time, and Nick’s about two hundred pounds now and solid as can be.
I always worried, though. I guess that’s just what fathers do. I worried for my kids. I worried for my family. All I wanted was the best for them, all the time. To make sure they had a life that was better than anything I was even capable of imagining when I was a kid.
And that meant more money.
When I wasn’t home—which was most of the time—I was out chasing every angle I could to bring home more dough so that Linda and the kids could have everything they ever wanted.
But there was something I failed to understand at that point in my life. Something I failed to understand until all these years later: Putting all of your focus on “more, more, more” can wind up costing you, big-time, in the end.