Wrestling isn’t fake. It’s predetermined. So what?
We live in an era now where that grand revelation doesn’t make any difference to the fans. Is there anyone who goes to a movie today who doesn’t realize there were lots of digital special effects that went into making it? Look at so-called reality TV: It’s still exploding in popularity even though most of the audiences are tuned in to the fact that a lot of what they’re seeing isn’t really “real.” People love the drama and the characters, so they suspend their disbelief and enjoy it.
Some people get real mad at me for pointing out the obvious when it comes to this stuff. The fact is, professional wrestling is called “sports entertainment” for a reason, and at its best, it’s some of the greatest entertainment in the world.
But let’s be real clear about something: The matches may be predetermined; we may not be in there trying to kill each other for real—in fact, the main goal is to come out of that arena just as good as when you went in because you have to wrestle again the next night, and the next—but the blood, the broken bones, the brutal injuries that happen in that ring? Those, my brother, are as real as real gets.
I don’t care how perfectly straight I lay you out, or how perfectly you’ve practiced landing in a way that breaks your fall, if I pick you up and body-slam you to the canvas, I guarantee you it’s gonna hurt like hell.
From the day Matsuda broke my leg until now, not a day’s gone by when I haven’t been in some kind of pain.
I’ve torn through both of my biceps. My triceps are torn in three places. My back is uneven because the muscles never healed properly after I body-slammed André the Giant at WrestleMania III back in 1987. You can see ridges and divots all through my shoulders. I’ve even torn muscles in my butt.
I’ve had other nasty injuries, too. I got a trophy stuck through my chest out in Minnesota—there’s an obvious scar from the hole it punched. I’ve even got bite marks on my thumbs from some of the old-school barbaric guys I faced on the road in the early days.
Yet for some reason people get all squeamish when they hear wrestlers talk about “blade jobs.”
When that Mickey Rourke movie The Wrestler came out in 2008, everyone talked about that first scene in the ring where he pulled a razor blade from the tape on his wrist and made a little cut on his forehead for dramatic effect. Mickey really cut himself for that scene. There were no special effects at all. He totally over-dramatized the moment, though. He made such a big deal of it—cutting real slow, and wincing as he pressed the corner of the blade into his skin and the blood started to flow.
I couldn’t help but laugh a little. In reality, a blade job is probably the least painful part of any match, and if anyone did it as slow as he did, the whole audience would spot it.
Remember Dusty Rhodes and how he rose up from the canvas in that very first match I saw with his whole white afro just a crimson mess? That guy was running a blade all over his head—not just a one-inch spot on his forehead. So how could I do anything less in my own career? Steal from the best, right?
For my own personal blade jobs, I always used an old-fashioned Blue Blade. I’d take time in the locker room to prepare it just right—cutting off a little corner of that blade, taping it up so just the very point was sticking above the tape. The whole thing was just a couple of centimeters wide. Rather than tape it to my wrist, I’d usually hide the blade in my mouth. I can keep it right between my gum and my bottom lip, no problem. It got so comfortable over the years that sometimes I’d be out to dinner after a match before I realized I still had that blade in my mouth.
When it came time to use it, I’d wait for a moment when my opponent hit me in the face and I’d spit the razor blade into my hand. Then in one quick swipe, zip! I’d run it across my forehead. I challenge anyone to go back and catch me doing it on camera. I got real good at hitting the same spot, too—in this crease I have just below my hairline. I’d hit that river in the blink of an eye.
I actually had a problem sometimes because my forehead healed so easily. I’d be walking in the airport the next day and fans would see me and go, “See? He’s not cut. They just use fake blood in the ring!” So I started wearing Band-Aids just for show, even though I didn’t need them.
Blade jobs don’t hurt. It’s like getting a little cut when you’re shaving. It bleeds like crazy, but it’s not painful. If I really wanted to get the blood flowing, I’d press a little harder and zip it all the way across my forehead, from coast to coast. I’d go up in my hair and get the blood dripping down over my ears. Whatever it took to amp up the drama and get the crowd going.
To me, doing a blade job is like lacing up a boot. Easy. The hard stuff was when André would throw me over the top rope. I was never real good at going over the top rope. Way back in ’78, I managed to hook my arm on the rope and swing my body in so my leg crashed right into the metal on the side of the ring. I had a blood clot like a baseball just sticking out of my leg for what seemed like forever.
That was nothing compared to the beating my knees took. The old wrestlers always told me to wear knee pads, but I just refused for the longest time. I thought it looked stupid to be wearing knee pads in the ring. When you lay a knee on an opponent with a knee pad on, how is that gonna look real to the fans? I should have listened, because it only took a couple of years before my knees starting giving me problems, and by 1988 I needed regular surgeries just to keep me walking.
Dropping down on an opponent to land my right knee to his chest or his neck or his head meant catching all of my body weight on my left knee. Bang! I had to support my weight so the knee that was hitting him wouldn’t actually kill the guy, you know? So I blew that left knee out all the time.
Eventually I smartened up and put the knee pads on, but the closest I came to a career-ender was right when Hulkamania first blew up—on the night I won the belt from the Iron Sheik in 1984.
The stakes were so high that night, every move I made was over the top. Halfway through the match I jumped up in the air real high and dropped a knee in the Iron Sheik’s chest. Even when the mat is perfectly flat it hurts, but that night there was a board in the ring that was out of place—the edge of that board was sticking up into the canvas—and that’s exactly where my left knee landed.
I exploded my kneecap.
Here I was at Madison Square Garden, knowing I was going to win the world title. There’s no way I wasn’t going to finish that match. It was the ultimate high being in that ring, so I just pushed through the pain. A few minutes later when I couldn’t take any more, I started Hulking Up—I hadn’t really perfected that whole thing yet, but I had to do something to end that match quick. So I rallied my strength for everyone to see, and got ready for the finish, and I pulled the crowd right with me. With that kneecap totally blown, I laid the leg drop on the Sheik, and “One . . . Two . . . Three!” I won the title.
If all my teeth were knocked out—hell, if the Sheik had broken my leg like he was gonna get paid to do—I still would have found a way to finish that match somehow. Even when it was over, there was no way I could let anyone find out what happened. Showing weakness at that point could have meant the end of my career. There’s no way Vince would have let me keep that belt if he knew I was lame. He would have switched up all of our plans and found another way to dominate the wrestling world. I have no doubt about that.
I remember going back to the hotel that night and telling Linda about it. We had only been married a little over a month at that point, but I needed her support. “You’re not gonna believe this. My knee is totally blown.” I’m sure she was scared to death. We’d just left Minnesota and started this whole new life. But I told her, “I’m not telling Vince,” and she was 100 percent behind my decision.
So Vince never knew. I never let on that I was hurt, and I never let it slow me down for a moment.
Today’s wrestlers, the new generation, if they tear a bicep it’s “Whoa!” They go and get cut on (that’s the phrase I use for surgery) immediately and sit out of commission for three, four months. Me? Like I said, I was the main event seven nights a week. There was no one else. So when I got hurt, I just iced it up, took some Motrin or an anti-inflammatory, wrapped it, and kept fighting.
Of course, if I wore a wrap into the ring, my opponent would go straight for that spot—knowing it was a point of weakness that could be easily attacked. The audience would eat that up. How could he not try to exploit it?
It was all a “work”—that term we use for making it look like you’re killing a guy when you’re really not hurting him much at all—but a work can still hurt, especially if it’s not executed correctly. And if you’re working a spot on the body that’s already been hurt, chances are it’s gonna get hurt worse.
After tearing all the muscles in my back at WrestleMania III, I wrestled the very next night in Tokyo. In fact, I wrestled for twenty-nine straight days after that match. No surgery. No therapy. Nothing.
I wasn’t immune to pain. I could feel it as much as the next guy as far as I could tell. So I think my ability to put up with pain and push through it goes right back to that obsessive penchant I have for completing just about anything I set my mind to. Even if I’m dead wrong, once the switch flips and I’ve made up my mind about something, I won’t deviate.
To put it another way: If I say “I’m gonna knock down that lamppost,” I don’t care if I have to keep hitting that pole till I knock it down with my head, that pole will come down.
Oddly enough, the wrestler who nearly put me in the grave was the Undertaker—and it wasn’t even his fault.
In November of 1991, at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, we stepped into the ring for the championship title. It was a brilliant matchup. Good vs. evil. The red-and-yellow hero vs. this dark figure who rolled his eyes into the back of his head and looked like he’d walked straight out of the underworld.
The Undertaker has a big finish he calls the Tombstone—it’s essentially a pile driver where he picks you up and flips you so your face is right in his crotch. He bear-hugs you in that position and then drops to his knees. It looks like your neck snaps. Up until that point, no wrestler had ever stood up after facing the Tombstone.
Well, in the middle of this match, the Undertaker laid that Tombstone on me, but I popped right up from the canvas while his back was turned. The audience went nuts. If you look at the tape, there were little kids in the arena dressed in red and yellow—I still had so much support. The fans desperately wanted to see me win, like always.
But I wasn’t destined to win that night. We went in there knowing the Undertaker would walk away with the belt, and that he’d finish me off with yet another Tombstone—this time with a dirty twist.
The thing that made the Tombstone work was that the Undertaker stopped your head about a half inch above the canvas. There wasn’t much room for error, but that was true of a lot of the moves we performed in the ring.
As the match progressed, suddenly Ric Flair walked down to ringside. I saw him out there and I taunted him, and when I wasn’t looking—and the ref wasn’t looking—Ric pushed a folding metal chair out onto the canvas.
The Undertaker grabbed me again, and flipped me over, and dropped my head on the metal chair in the nastiest Tombstone of all Tombstones.
That was all part of the plan.
What wasn’t part of the plan was how hot it was in the arena that night. By that point, I was sweating like a pig. So whether my body was too slippery to hold, or I didn’t hang on tight enough, or we both just miscalculated, I’m not sure, but when he dropped that Tombstone on me, my skull made contact with the chair. The jolt of the whole move threw my neck out.
My neck, calves, shoulders, biceps, triceps, forearms—everything went numb. Instantly. My trap muscles went up around my ears. It’s like my body knew I was getting hurt, and responded to protect me.
It took a few minutes of lying there before I could even get my wits about me. Then, with help from some of the officials, I stood up and walked out of the arena—don’t ask me how. It was probably an extremely dangerous thing to do. I wound up in the hospital for days, pressing the morphine button as many times as I could once the numbness subsided and the pain set in. It just ate away at me.
A series of medical consultants came in from the Mayo Clinic on down, and every doctor thought the danger of further paralysis was severe. They wanted to slice me open, but I wouldn’t let them.
I still had that old mentality that getting cut on was the absolute last resort. So Linda finally helped get me out of there and down to see the head of the Florida Chiropractic Association, Doug Price, back in Tampa. Doug set me up with a deep-tissue massage therapist, and even then my shoulders stayed pressed up toward my neck for nearly three months. After about six months of hard work, I finally got back to some sense of normalcy.
The repercussions of that move have never gone away. The backs of my triceps are still a little numb, and I still can’t feel anything in the tips of my fingers. I have trouble tying my bandanas on every day. I have trouble buttoning shirts.
Whenever I have X-rays taken, the doctors recommend that I get my neck fused. The wrestler John Cena had two fingers go numb after an injury and immediately went under the knife to get his neck fused. He’s recommended it to me wholeheartedly. But to me, it’s like, “My fingers are numb. Why on earth would I now want to go and willingly get my neck cut open?” Maybe it’s a generational thing. I’m just one step closer to the old barbaric style of wrestling than all of these guys who’ve become superstars in recent years.
Or maybe I’m just too stubborn to listen. After all, I had a family to support, and any significant break from wrestling meant a significant break from the steady stream of income my wife had become accustomed to.
You always hear the term “’roid rage”—referring to a supposedly unstoppable anger and fury that steroids bring out in their muscle-bound users. It’s something people who’ve never used steroids tend to talk about and laugh about, as if it’s a real phenomenon. The media make it out to be no laughing matter at all. They try to pin it on wrestlers who’ve taken their own lives—and in some cases taken their families’ lives with them—when in fact, I can’t think of one of those cases where the suicide victim didn’t have lots and lots of other drugs in his system as well.
The fact is, I’ve been around more steroid users than the average person in my lifetime, and ’roid rage is something I have never, ever seen. It’s certainly nothing I’ve ever felt.
I almost think it’s some sort of an urban myth.
Anecdotally, all I can think about when I hear people use that term is this one particular wrestler who was 320 pounds of pure pumped-up muscle. Not an ounce of fat on him. He was just ripped. Every day in the locker room, he would pull out three rigs (that’s the slang for needles), at 3 cc’s apiece, and just pull ’em so full that the needles were wobbling. If ever there was a guy that was going to suffer some crazy side effects from steroids, he was that guy. Yet he was the sweetest, most soft-spoken, calm man I have ever met. I ran into him just a couple of years ago. He’s working security now, since he hurt his back and had to leave the ring. He was still the same way. “Oh, hi, Mr. Bollea. Nice to see you.”
The only aggressiveness those shots and pills ever laid on me was a powerful desire to lift weights and eat. Maybe it gave me a sort of “mat mania,” where I was more pumped up than the next guy about getting back into the ring to wrestle. I’ll certainly admit I was addicted to that high of being in the ring. But that’s about it.
Taking testosterone made a lot of guys super horny, where they were chasing girls every night of the week. Not me. Others were rendered completely useless in the bedroom, and that wasn’t me, either.
The worst thing I can say about steroids is they made me sweat a lot, which could be kind of embarrassing. They would occasionally give me killer acne—like I’d get a monster zit on my ass, the kind that’s so tight you felt like you could bend over and shoot it across the room: “Hey, catch this!”
I always developed these ingrown hairs on my neck, too—these crazy welts that you can see in old pictures. It felt like if you squeezed one a whole palm tree would pop out. Even when they weren’t ingrown, sometimes I’d grow hairs that were as thick as ten normal hairs put together. I’d pluck one out with a pair of tweezers and this giant round ball of a root would come out with it. What the hell is that!? I’d look in the mirror and there’d be a gaping bloody hole in my neck.
The worst side effect of steroids for me, though, wasn’t anything physiological at all.
In 1988, the laws changed. Whether it was some twist in the never-ending War on Drugs or some other agenda, the federal government decided it was time to crack down on the use and distribution of steroids. They went after football players and weightlifters with the same kind of forcefulness the media has laid on professional baseball players in recent years. But that was nothing compared to the target the Feds tacked on professional wrestling.
Their Enemy No. 1 was Vince McMahon Jr.
I’m not sure why they had their sights set on Vince. Maybe it was his cocky attitude they didn’t like. Maybe it’s the way he muscled the WWF over every territory in the country like he was running some old-fashioned monopoly you’d read about from the Industrial Age. There’s no faster way to draw jealousy and rage than to go out and be successful.
Or maybe they just thought Vince and the rest of us were a bunch of marks—that wrestlers were the low-class hicks of the sporting world who’d be too dumb to know how to fight back.
Whatever it was, they seemed intent on bringing Vince and his whole empire down. To do that, they needed Vince’s number-one wrestler: me.
I first caught wind of what was happening in 1989 or 1990. I called up Dr. Zahorian one day—the wrestling world’s go-to doc in Harrisville—and as soon as I said hello he said, “I can’t talk to you,” and he hung up the phone. I called back again, and no one answered.
Dr. Zahorian was a real nice guy. We actually became friends, and used to talk on the phone now and then about things that had nothing to do with what drugs I needed. Just a couple of weeks before this he had been asking my recommendation for the best video camera to buy because his three little girls had a ballet recital coming up.
He was the man who had whatever we needed. He’d show up in the locker rooms with his two little black briefcases full of testosterone, Anavar, growth hormone, pain pills. He’d give us a hundred Valium in a little unmarked matchbox-type container if we needed them. You could always call ahead so he’d have what you needed whenever you blew through town.
A couple of days later I mentioned the hangup to Pat Patterson, who had become Vince McMahon’s agent by then, and he told me, “Don’t talk to Zahorian anymore. He’s in a lot of trouble. There’s an investigation . . .”
I knew right then this gravy train had come to an end.
We had all been real careful. We kept using steroids after the 1988 laws were passed, but strictly under doctor’s orders. Zahorian examined us and kept track of everything for us. There was no more going out with a prescription for one bottle and buying ten more off the street. But even that wouldn’t last for long.
What I couldn’t understand at all was that the Feds wound up going after Vince for something that wasn’t even true: They claimed that he was distributing steroids and forcing every wrestler in the WWF to take them or be fired.
I was Vince’s best friend, his partner in crime. There was no way they could nail him without my help. Vince was freaking out. “You have to disappear, Terry. Now!” So I actually hid out upstairs at Vince’s house for a couple of months while this whole controversy swirled around. I left Linda alone at our house in Stamford, until finally I said, “This is ridiculous,” and I came out and got sucked into the whole tornado.
All of a sudden, the press started calling me a suspected steroid addict. So much for my “prayers and vitamins” reputation.
Trials take a long time. Zahorian’s trial didn’t happen until 1991. So for two years I watched as the Hulk Hogan name was dragged through the mud.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt the need to defend my name, and I thought the best way to do that would be to go on TV. Arsenio Hall had the hottest TV show at the time. It’s the show Bill Clinton went on to show off his saxophone playing—a move that many consider crucial to his winning broad support from a younger generation of voters. So there was no doubt Arsenio was the place to go when you wanted to be heard in those days.
Vince didn’t want me to do it. My lawyers didn’t want me to do it. I guess maybe I should have listened. I didn’t have a publicist in those days. I don’t even think I knew what a publicist was. So I did what I thought was best.
That summer of 1991, in front of millions of viewers—not to mention the millions more who would read about it in the papers the next day—Arsenio asked me if I was using anabolic steroids.
I said, “No, I’m not.”
I told the truth—but I wasn’t being honest. I told the truth in so far as I wasn’t using anabolic steroids right at that moment. I might have been using them three weeks ago, but I wasn’t using them right then.
I was playing with words.
I talked about how big I’d always been. I held up a photo of me from my Little League days. I went on and on about how long and hard I’d worked out to gain this physique. All of that was true! But it wasn’t honest. There’s a big difference.
And it only made my problems worse.
I should have told the whole story. I should have apologized for making a mistake. Instead, I was calculated and deceptive, and it came back to bite me.
In 1992 I quit using steroids entirely. It just wasn’t worth it anymore. The public humiliation, the cover-up—I’d just have to work out hard like I always did and hope that the edge I always felt in the ring didn’t shrink away like my muscle mass.
If I had just owned up to it, I could have moved on.
Instead, the humiliation of being called a steroid addict would follow me through most of the decade.
The federal investigation got so heavy between 1991 and Vince’s indictment in 1993, it tore Vince and me apart. It tore the entire WWF apart. Nobody has enough money to fight the federal government.
It felt like everything I knew about the business was crumbling at my feet as this investigation kept getting bigger. Everyone was so nervous and scared, it started to feel dangerous. Vince was distancing himself from me, which I understood—he didn’t need any additional heat from the Feds because of the heat I had taken in the press after my Arsenio lies—but I had this real weird feeling that Vince might do more than that. I felt like I was a lamb being led to slaughter.
My fear seemed almost irrational at first. I just had this instinct that Vince might try to deflect the charges and flip the whole focus of the investigation on me. As if I were the one distributing steroids to everyone in the WWF.
At the same time, the pain I was in from all those injuries had really started to catch up to me. I was hobbling more and more on my left knee, and my hip was hurting. It reached a point where I had no choice but to get cut on, and once you start down that road, it seems like one surgery just leads to another, and another.
I had some additional pain from outside the ring, too—like when I was out Jet-Skiing with some buddies and I fell in the water and got slammed by one of those massive machines right in the face. The impact broke both of my eye sockets, but I was out there wrestling just a few days later with a hundred stitches and my face all swollen up.
How long can a guy do that?
Combine all that fear and instinct and pain with my damaged reputation, and it just seemed to me like the universe was telling me it was time to stop wrestling and try something new.
I bowed out of the WWF as gracefully as I could in 1993. At that point, I didn’t think I ever wanted to come back. I wanted to find a way to stay in one place. I wanted to spend more time at home with my wife and kids. And the perfect opportunity to do that landed right in my lap.
The creators of Baywatch, which was a huge franchise at the time, had asked me to coproduce and star in a new TV show called Thunder in Paradise, to be shot at the Disney Studios in Orlando. I had a bit more acting experience under my belt by then—starring in No Holds Barred, Suburban Commando, and Mr. Nanny—and I enjoyed the process of movie-making. So I figured I’d enjoy making a weekly one-hour drama.
Brother, I could not have been more wrong. Filming one of those shows is just a nonstop series of eighteen-hour days. That’s no exaggeration. It was compounded by the fact that I was an active executive producer on this thing, so I had to deal with key grips coming in from L.A. and problems with the catering and every little thing under the sun. All of that was in addition to trying to memorize ten to fifteen pages of dialogue per day. My brain couldn’t take it. My head was spinning. I had to put cheat sheets all over the set.
In the meantime, something really fascinating was happening in the wrestling world: Vince McMahon’s WWF was facing its first major competitor.
Media mogul Ted Turner and a real smart guy named Eric Bischoff had launched a televised wrestling program called the WCW—World Championship Wrestling—and with Vince mixed up in a federal investigation, they exploited the whole fiasco. They stole some of the WWF’s best wrestlers—and they stole some of the WWF’s big audience.
All they needed was a Hulk Hogan, and there was no doubt they could knock McMahon’s socks off.
Strangely enough, the WCW filmed their matches on the very same Disney lot as Thunder in Paradise. I was in Studio A. They were in Studio B. Small world, right? It wasn’t long before Eric Bischoff and his buddy, former WWF superstar Ric Flair, started paying me visits.
“Hey, Hulk, we have all these tourists coming through on the Disney tours, and they see the wrestling ring, and the first thing they ask is if they might get a glimpse of Hulk Hogan!” they said.
They started giving me the sales pitch, about how big the WCW was getting, and how we could walk right over Vince McMahon if we all worked together.
The thing was, I really thought I was done with wrestling. My reputation was so damaged, and I was just so hurt and tired. I basically ignored them and kept plugging away at this TV show—until a little situation with Linda forced me to rethink my current career choices entirely.
As if my career meltdown and the stress of working on Thunder in Paradise weren’t enough, it was right in the middle of those years when Linda first started complaining about living in Florida. I’m not sure if she was suddenly homesick in her mid-thirties or if she thought she’d get more help raising the kids being close to her mom in L.A., but she kept insisting that we needed to move to California.
It’s a theme that Linda would never let go of for the rest of our marriage.
We had this beautiful home on Belleview Island, but Linda insisted we needed to at least give it a try. Her mother was always dabbling in real estate and actually had a house not far from her own that she offered to rent to us. I wanted Linda to be happy, so I said yes, and we wound up bouncing the whole family back and forth between these houses in Florida and L.A. (The kids weren’t in school yet, which made it easy to do.)
I wound up paying like eight or nine grand a month for this house we rented from Linda’s mom in this gated community called Ridgegate—only to find out later that her mother’s mortgage payment was less than half of what we were being charged for rent.
Her mom also asked me if I could front her the money to put a pool in back of that house. She said she would pay me back after we moved out and she sold the place. So I forked over about fifty to sixty thousand dollars to build this unbelievable pool, with hot and cold running waterfalls. Just gorgeous. Of course, I never got anything in return.
Money matters aside, the fact was, my wrestling business—and even Thunder in Paradise—was based on the East Coast. Linda knew that. Living in California only meant more traveling and longer plane rides than I had already endured all those years trying to get back to be with her and the kids. She didn’t care. And her mother was there backing her up all the time. “I don’t understand why you don’t sell that place in Florida and just move here?”
Whenever we were in that rented house in L.A., the moment I would come downstairs I’d be hit with Linda’s mother or grandmother or someone telling me about all these things I should be doing. All I’d want to do was get to the gym and have some sort of a normal routine, but Linda’s family was always in the house.
The bickering with Linda and her sudden tantrums turned a corner in those years for some reason, too. Even way back then she started throwing out the word “divorce” when she was yelling at me about something. “Well, why don’t we get divorced and then you can stay in Florida all you want!”
There were times when it seemed like nothing I did would make her happy. She seemed to complain all the time, about everything. I remember one day we went to the beach and it was a little bit windy, and she said, “I hate the fucking wind.”
How does somebody hate the wind?
I was a complainer, too, don’t get me wrong. I was complaining about wrestling, complaining about money, complaining about the Feds, complaining about the rift with Vince, complaining about the eighteen-hour days on the TV show, complaining about how the fans had turned on me. It’s real easy when two people are in a marriage to start bolstering the worst aspects of each other’s personalities instead of fostering the best part of the two people who got into this bond in the first place. Before you know it, you’re complaining about your significant other and all of their faults to your friends and family and anyone who’ll listen.
That is not a good way to live.
Marriage for me was a lifelong bond, though. Even though I barely took a day off from wrestling to get married to Linda, I loved her. In fact, I was crazy about her. And despite all the problems I just wanted to do whatever I could to make her happy. I wanted to find some way to bring back that old bubbly, shiny personality that had blown me away the first time we spoke at the Red Onion.
Right after I left the WWF, just as I was getting ready to start Thunder in Paradise, the thing that Linda said would make her more happy than anything else—the thing that would allow her to live in Florida, which would allow me to spend more time at home, which is what I really wanted more than anything else in the world—was if she could have the money to build her dream house.
Fine. Done. If it would make Linda happy, that sounded like a great deal to me.
So we bought a piece of property on Willadel Drive, in the Belleair neighborhood of Clearwater—the town’s poshest spot. It’s a neighborhood where Lisa Marie Presley had lived, and where Kirstie Alley had a place, and where John Travolta and Kelly Preston lived before they moved to that spot in Ocala where he lands jumbo jets in his own front yard. (On a side note: Yes, those names are all associated with Scientology. Clearwater’s the big center for the Church of Scientology. I’ve never been pulled in that direction at all. They’ve tried. Representatives of that church have been after me for years, but I just never went down that road. There were no other reasons behind our selection of that neighborhood than the fact that it was absolutely beautiful.)
In the end, we spent $2 million on a house just to tear it down. It was a stunning location, right on the corner of this cove with a private boat dock exclusively for the neighborhood’s residents. The plan was to build Linda’s seven-thousand-foot dream on the footprint of that big old house.
One contractor started the job but was on the job for only six months before another contractor took over. And the contractor who took over? Linda’s brother.
I would wind up putting millions and millions into the Claridge family’s pockets before I was through with this marriage.
Just before construction was set to start, I paced the footers and did the math in my head, and I couldn’t figure out what had gone awry. The way I figured it, this house that was laid out in the dirt there wasn’t seven or eight thousand square feet—it was more like twenty thousand!
I asked Linda what was up, and she said, “Oh, I talked to my mom, and my mom said, well, if we’re building a house and making all the rooms, why not make each room four, five feet longer. It won’t make a difference anyway.”
Well, it did make a difference. The next time I showed up at the work site, instead of seeing a wooden frame going up, I saw I-beams—the same steel beams that you’d use to build a skyscraper.
The whole look of the home was like a Tudor style, French country house kind of a look. Which is interesting, since Linda’s parents’ house was a Tudor-style home. Linda decided she needed to go 100 percent authentic, so she started flying in these four-hundred-year-old roof tiles from France.
She tore down three French châlets to get this authentic French farmhouse-style roof, when at the end of the day you could’ve bought a tile roof here that looked exactly the same for a quarter of the price. Not good enough. This was Linda’s dream. She even flew over extra tiles, so we have crates and crates of them in storage just in case, God forbid, a hurricane ever blows that roof off.
All the doors are thick and hand-carved. Everything is custom. The pool is gorgeous. My gym was perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I love that house, and I miss it every single day. But we were about midway through construction with bills mounting up to our ears when Eric Bischoff and Ric Flair came poking around the Thunder set.
The thing is, once I left the WWF I really thought I was through with wrestling. Even though the one-hour TV drama was too grueling a schedule for me to take, I would have found some other way to make a living had we just kept the home on Belleview Island.
I knew that nothing could bring me income the way wrestling did. Movies, TV shows, endorsements, none of them were nearly as lucrative as selling out Madison Square Garden in a pay-per-view special. Not even close.
So I took a look around at this massive house, and I remember saying to myself, “You know what? I better go back to work.”
If it hadn’t been for that house, I honestly believe I would’ve retired from wrestling completely.
In the end, I forked over somewhere around $14 million to get that house completed, the vast majority of which went to Linda’s brother.
Fast-forwarding a bit, a few years later Linda still insisted that she needed a home in California. She wanted to live there in the summers, and go back and forth whenever she had time. So I forked over another $4.5 million for a gorgeous place in Thousand Oaks—right next to where Heather Locklear lives.
After that Linda wanted a little retreat on the sand, away from the big house, but somewhere nearby in Florida as well so she could try out a whole different decorating scheme. So we bought a house on Clearwater Beach with nothing but sand between us and the ocean, and she filled it with tartan-plaid carpet and paisley wallpaper on the ceilings.
Of course, Gail Claridge Interiors—the home furnishings and furniture store that’s owned by none other than Linda’s mother—furnished all of these homes. Guess who’s always been her best customer? Moi.
From the early 1990s through the end of our marriage, Linda kept jonesing for real estate. It was just so weird. We’d stop in Vegas and she’d suddenly be out looking at properties to buy, saying how great it would be to own a home in that desert. We’d blow through Atlanta and she’d suddenly be out looking at properties in Atlanta’s posh suburbs. I swear if we had gone to Alaska she would have spent a day driving around looking to buy a high-end igloo. It just never stopped.
Anyway, it was Linda’s dream house that made me change my mind and start talking seriously with the WCW.
At a time in my career when even Ted Turner himself thought the Hulk Hogan name had been too tarnished by the steroid scandal to transfer over to his organization, Eric Bischoff, Ric Flair, and a guy named Bill Shaw stood up for me. As the dark cloud of Vince McMahon Jr.’s federal trial loomed in early 1994, they truly believed in me and fought for me. “We’re fans,” they said to the powers that be, “and we think the rest of Hulk Hogan’s fans are more loyal than to let this controversy keep him from the ring.”
I certainly hoped they were right.
Once Vince’s trial finally began at the U.S. District Court in Uniondale, New York, in the summer of 1994, I was set to be called as the prosecution’s star witness. When I found out what the charges against him were the year before, I told him, “We’ve got nothing to hide!” I honestly didn’t think he had anything to be scared about. He just couldn’t believe I would go up there as a witness for the prosecution, though. I had no choice! But he was so angry. I guess he thought I was gonna make up lies to hurt him, which wasn’t the case at all. Vince was my hero. He’s the guy who opened up this whole universe for me. Why would I do anything to hurt him?
I made sure I had full immunity in exchange for my testimony, of course. I wasn’t a fool. Then all I did was tell the truth—a truth the federal prosecutors didn’t want to hear.
The night before the trial I got a taste of why Vince was so nervous. I was sound asleep at the Marriott across from the Nassau Civic Center—right by the courthouse—when someone started pounding at my door. I woke up in a start and rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 2:00 A.M.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
It was two of the federal prosecutors on the case. They seemed worried about how the case was going. They wanted to go over my testimony and were hoping to get some control over the situation, so they walked me through what they expected I would say: about buying steroids from Vince, and how he shot me up, and how he sold steroids to all the other wrestlers, and how steroids were a job requirement in the WWF. The gist of the conversation was that they had spent millions on this case, and they needed me to hit the ball out of the park for them. Maybe I was just nervous, or overthinking the situation, but the whole scene in the middle of the night seemed like something out of The Godfather to me. I was scared to death. So I yessed them as much as I could just to get them to leave, even though the things they seemed to be counting on me saying didn’t match the whole truth that I knew and expected to share in that courtroom.
As they left, they said they would pick me up in the morning to make sure I got to the courtroom on time. The moment they were gone I called my entertainment attorney, Henry Holmes, and his response was simple, “Bullshit!” He came to my hotel before sunrise and made sure I was out of there before the prosecutors could come back.
Outside the courthouse that day, it looked like a scene from the O.J. trial. The parking lot was just a sea of satellite news trucks. I had never encountered anything like it.
I still had this instinct that Vince was somehow going to try to flip the whole case and blame it on me. I had no idea how he would do that, but I just thought it would be an easy way out if he pointed a finger at Hulk Hogan and let the media run wild.
My instinct was right. As I walked into that courtroom, I looked over and saw my mule—the guy who used to carry drugs and steroids for me on the road—sitting right next to Vince and Vince’s attorney. Why is he here? I wondered. If my testimony hurt Vince, I have no doubt that they would have used my mule to tell every tall tale in the book about my steroid use and how I was running them all over the country, or selling them, or forcing them on my opponents. This mule must have been there as a backup to crush my credibility. That would have meant the end of my career. Forever.
Vince truly had nothing to worry about. On the witness stand the Feds asked me if Vince had ever sold me steroids. I answered, “No.” They asked me if he had ever injected me with steroids. “No.” I even explained to them how I wouldn’t trust anyone else to stick a needle in me because I’d stuck myself a thousand times and knew how to do it without hitting any nerves. I would never trust Vince to stick a needle in me!
They asked me about every angle of their entire case, from Zahorian’s role to Vince’s secretary’s role. I answered honestly about everything. The fact was, I had introduced Vince to steroids during the filming of No Holds Barred, the movie we wrote together in a forty-eight-hour run down in Florida, and I testified to that fact. I also spoke about how I shared steroids with Vince, and Vince shared steroids with me—the same way two buddies might share cigarettes. That’s as far as it ever went.
Vince hadn’t done anything differently than any of the rest of us. He wasn’t distributing steroids. If they were gonna put him in jail, then they needed to put every single wrestler in jail along with him. I said that on the witness stand.
The prosecutors were dumbfounded. And dude, the moment the judge dismissed me I slipped out of that courtroom through a side door, hopped in a cab to Teterboro Airport, and chartered a plane down to Florida as fast as I possibly could. I didn’t go back to New York for five years. I was scared to death that those Feds would find a way to arrest me or put a hit on me, or something. Even when I was with the WCW, no one in New York had a chance to see me wrestle in the flesh—I wouldn’t show up at those New York arenas. I was just too scared.
It was worth it, though. There is no better feeling than telling the truth, no matter how much it hurts and what terrible repercussions it might bring.
The truth I told on that witness stand that day was the reason that Vince McMahon Jr. walked away a free man, and that’s all I ever wanted to see.
How did Vince thank me in return? He stood on the steps of that courthouse, in front of all of those microphones and cameras and satellite trucks, and he buried me. “I’m happy with the verdict,” he said, “but I wish Hulk Hogan had told the truth.” What did he mean by that? I had told the truth.
It only further proved to me that my instincts were right: If it came down to it, Vince was willing to throw Hulk Hogan under a bus to clear his own name. When he didn’t get a chance to do it in the courtroom, he did it in the court of public opinion.
By then, Vince knew I was going over to wrestle for his competition. “It was just business,” Vince would say years later when I asked him why he did that to me.
Well, I guess my taking the Hulk Hogan phenomenon over to the WCW was just business, too, Vince.
Just business.
Three days after testifying in New York, I wrestled Ric Flair for the WCW championship belt. The Bash on the Beach was a massive success—even though fans held up signs saying HOGAN, DID YOU TAKE YOUR SHOTS TODAY? and DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT YOUR STEROIDS!
Like I said, I had stopped using steroids by 1992—but that’s the lesson I learned the hardest way possible about the media, and how a trickle of a lie can snowball into an avalanche. Once that trickle gets started, the way it did with my Arsenio comments, there’s no way to stop it. All you can do is ride it out and hope you don’t get buried so deep that you’re lost forever.
Over time, the taunts from the fans went away. As my massive bulk from the steroids went away, too, something really strange happened: I actually started to look better on camera. I didn’t know anything about how cameras and lighting work on a body when I set out to develop my twenty-four-inch guns back in 1976. Nearly twenty years later, I started to notice that it was all about proportions. As my steroid-free waist got a little bit thinner in proportion to my shoulders, I actually looked bigger on-screen. With the water weight gone, my muscles just had a more ripped and powerful-looking appearance than they ever did before. And I put that lean-mean power look to good use.
I blew the roof off of the WCW. The audience exploded. For a long time, we absolutely crushed Vince McMahon in the ratings.
Better still, with the help of Eric Bischoff I started to make far more money than I ever made with Vince and the WWF. I had a bigger cut of every T-shirt and piece of merchandise that was sold, I was sharing in revenues from broadcasts, I had a bigger cut of the gate at the arenas. For the first time in my whole career, I could finally look out at a stadium full of people who were there to see me and know that I was getting my fair share of that massive revenue that was walking in the door every night. That’s a tremendous feeling.
Like I said before: All I wanted to do was to give my family every opportunity to have whatever they desired in life. Ever since that first moment when I held baby Brooke in my arms, this was all for them. To know that I was going to be able to give them more than ever? That was a rush.