The Grazianos filed their suit just a few days before I was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles to start work on the second season of American Gladiators. I had already decided to invite Jennifer to come with me to California, and I couldn’t have been happier when she said yes. It was a big step for such a new relationship, but I felt like there was a reason we met, and I wanted her there every step of the way.
Walking onto that set felt really good that second season. Despite the new pressure of the lawsuit, I was already in a much better place emotionally than I was the season before. I knew that being happy was a choice I could make, and it was definitely the choice I was making.
After all I’d been through, it was real weird to see Laila Ali again—the girl who almost single-handedly saved my life. She was just as friendly as ever, and just as positive as ever. I’m not sure if she picked up on this change I was going through right away or not, but out of the blue she asked me again if I’d like to go to her church with her sometime.
“Where is this church again?” I asked.
“It’s the Agape Church, here in L.A.,” she said. “It was founded by Dr. Michael Beckwith. I could—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Michael Beckwith from The Secret? That Michael Beckwith?”
“Yes!” she said. She seemed surprised that I knew of him.
Michael Beckwith was one of The Secret’s most prominent voices. He was one of the main figures in the DVD that played over and over again in my car.
“Yes!” I said. “I’d love to go!”
The coincidence was too strong to ignore. She had invited me to go to that very church when I was sitting in my bathroom on Willadel Drive with a gun in my hand. Now the teachings of the leader of that church were a major part of my life. Laila had offered me a golden ticket back then, and I mistakenly ignored it. I sure wasn’t ignoring her now. I was floored by it.
That was the second remarkable coincidence that happened right around that same time.
One of the biggest revelations in the Secret DVD, a moment that had truly knocked my socks off, was when author James Arthur Ray asked this really weird question about gaining control over the direction of your life. “When would now be a good time to start?” he asked.
It was such a weird phrase, and it just blew my mind. His point was that you could change your life whenever you decided to do it. You didn’t have to wait for a New Year’s resolution, or put it off until you lost some weight, or until you felt better, or until you finished school. You could change your life right now. You could change everything this instant just by changing your perspective, changing your outlook, and changing how you thought about your life and your circumstances.
I was so blown away by that idea and by the presence James Ray had on screen that I started to think about what it would be like to meet him and talk to him in person.
Not three weeks later, Nick was in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and who did he bump into? James Arthur Ray. Nick called me up, all excited. “Dad, I just ran into that guy from The Secret. Hold on. Let me see if he’ll talk to you!”
Nick approached him, and next thing I know I was on the phone with James Arthur Ray. The two of us started talking pretty regularly after that. He became an adviser and friend to me, and to Nick, as we geared up for Nick’s upcoming court date.
James, it turns out, was also friendly with Michael Beckwith. When I told him I was planning on going to the Agape Church, he put me on the phone with Dr. Beckwith himself. So when Laila and her husband and Jennifer and I got to the church that day, we had a parking spot right up front, and they led us right up near the front of the church for his sermon.
I hadn’t been inside a church for a very long time, and I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the experience. I never thought much about it in all those years. My church was Madison Square Garden, you know?
Now here I was, surrounded by this congregation of people who were all dialed in to this world I knew nothing about just two months earlier. The tradition they have at this church when a new guest comes in is they ask you to stand up, and then every member of that whole congregation points his or her palm right at you, arm outstretched in your direction, while they welcome you into the fold with words like “we love you” and “we’re here to support you.” Now, that’s a powerful experience. Remember how I told you I would tear up just hearing the music on those religious Sunday morning TV shows? There was no way I could avoid the water-works in this place. I wept like a baby.
It’s hard to explain that feeling of suddenly having a whole church full of people vowing to support you and love you. I didn’t feel so alone anymore. It dawned on me that there’s a whole world full of people out there who experience life in a way that I never even knew existed.
It also occurred to me that I had been thinking about church all wrong, ever since I was a kid. You don’t go to church to find God. God is already inside each and every one of us. The reason to go to church is simply to help bring God out of you, and to better help God function through you. I loved that whole concept.
Jennifer and I met with Dr. Beckwith after the service, and we went back again a few times while we were in L.A. Ever since, his assistant has been kind enough to send me CD copies of Michael’s weekly sermons so I can listen to them in my car here in Florida.
Jennifer. Laila. Michael. James. From personal friends to spiritual guides, I suddenly had new people in my life that cared about my spiritual and emotional well-being. For all these years I had agents and accountants who watched out for my money and career. I had doctors who cared for my aches and pains. But this huge, important area of life had been mostly void of contact going all the way back to when I was a teenager.
It’s almost like a set of support beams was added to stabilize this big crooked frame of mine—just in time for the hurricanes that were about to pummel my shore.
Back in Tampa, the media frenzy around Nick’s accident stayed at a fever pitch from the day after the crash straight through that spring of 2008. The news would come and go in the national press, but in Tampa? It never slowed down. Mostly because one DJ on one local radio station decided to boost his career on Nick’s back—a DJ that goes by the name MJ.
Now, here’s where Tampa being such a small town comes into play. MJ, many years earlier, had come to me with a plan to buy the local radio station. He and his partner were the top DJs in the Tampa market, and they thought if they bought the station they could corner that market and keep all the profits. I’m not sure why they thought Hulk Hogan would be the perfect guy to put up the big money to make this happen, but that’s what they thought. I turned them down. It was nothing personal. I just looked at the deal they were offering, and what my return on investment would be, and I didn’t think it was a good business deal. So I passed.
Years go by, and I become really good friends with another DJ in town who goes by the name Bubba the Love Sponge. I would appear on Bubba’s radio show whenever I could just to help him out. Well, as time went by, Bubba became the number-one DJ in Tampa. He just blew MJ right out of the water.
I think that caused more than a little bad blood. So when this accident happened, MJ started hammering away at Nick, nonstop, every morning, for months on end. He put a call out to listeners. “Did anyone see Nick Hogan racing that night? Did anyone see Nick Hogan drinking that night? Who out there has embarrassing stories to tell about Nick Hogan. Call in now!” He inspired all these anonymous idiots to call in with crazy stories about Nick and John and Danny and Barry—the whole bunch of them—and he did his best to hammer me, too. MJ was the guy who stirred up the whole ridiculous controversy over whether or not Nick went into the liquor store with me that Sunday in August to buy beer.
Now, you may think the words of a local DJ aren’t anything to worry about. In this case? The words of a local DJ kept heat on Nick’s case. It seemed the whole Tampa metro area turned against my son. All of a sudden it was a lynch-mob mentality. MJ’s listeners were whipped into a frenzy thinking Nick was at fault for this accident and he should burn at the stake.
My friend Bubba did everything he could to make the counterargument. He would go on the air and talk about the fact that John was the adult in this situation, that John was the one drinking that day, that John was a marine and was certainly responsible for his own behavior. None of us wanted to say bad things about John, though, and no matter what was said it was difficult to undo the damage that MJ’s listeners did to my son.
No matter how blind justice is supposed to be, it is impossible for judges to sit on a bench and not be influenced by the mob mentality and media frenzy of a case like Nick’s. Think of Judge Ito displaying mugs on his desk during the O.J. trial. Think of that teary-eyed judge in the Anna Nicole Smith case. Cameras change everything. So does the sway of the local community.
It didn’t help that Nick’s case came up in the middle of an election year. Do you think the mob mentality shared by tens of thousands of MJ’s local listeners every morning didn’t have any sway? Anyone who’s ever watched an episode of Law & Order knows better than that.
There was more. When Nick finally received a hearing date on his case, we were assigned a female judge. My lawyers were excited. They said she was one of the most reasonable, fair-minded judges around. A woman who was unlikely to be swayed by the morning DJs or the celebrity factor of this case. As soon as my attorneys walked in the room for a prehearing conference, though, that judge removed herself from the case. Turns out many years ago my attorney, Lee Fugate, was responsible for putting that judge’s brother in jail for life. It was a conflict of interest.
My attorney said he forgot.
Welcome to the hillbilly circus of the Greater Tampa justice system.
Knowing how this whole thing turned out, I can’t help but wonder if I should have objected to her replacement judge as well: Judge Philip J. Federico.
Years earlier, I actually helped Judge Federico’s brother, Rick, break into the wrestling business. I changed his name from Rick to Rico Federico and helped launch his career. He did quite well as a wrestler, so I didn’t think of it as a conflict of interest, but could there be some kind of bad blood I’m not even aware of? It’s easy to drive yourself crazy second-guessing these things. Still, I can’t help but think it was impossible for Nick to receive fair and impartial treatment in the small-town circus of the Tampa-Clearwater region. Unfortunately, it was the only circus in town. All of us would have to learn to accept that.
The last thing any of us wanted was a long, drawn-out trial. Nick was driving the Supra that night in August, and while he wasn’t driving crazy or racing the way the media still insists he was to this day, he agreed with our lawyers that the right thing to do was to stand up and take responsibility.
He wasn’t “guilty.” So he wouldn’t plead “guilty.” He would plead “no contest.” In other words, without admitting any guilt, he would simply stand up and face the charges. It’s an option the legal system offers, and for Nick, it seemed like the best option we had.
Our lawyers were very clear about the possibilities Nick would face. A charge of reckless driving with serious bodily injury could carry jail time. Any judge would have that option in this case. However, the legal precedent made the possibility of jail time extremely remote. According to my attorneys, no minor in the state of Florida had ever gone to jail for that charge. Ever. In fact, the standard sentence for that charge was six months’ probation.
We knew Nick’s sentence would be harsher than that—the case was way too high-profile to think Nick would get off easy. A longer probation, a suspended license, community service—there was a whole arsenal the judge could throw at him if he wanted. We even had conversations with the lawyers about what kind of a jail he would be sent to if this judge decided to really, really make an example of him, and they told us: a minimum-security facility, where Nick could go out in the yard and play basketball, and watch TV, and spend time reading in a library. It would not be a hotel. It would not be pretty. It would not be easy. But it would not be dangerous, and he would not be mingling with hardened criminals.
I told Nick not to worry about going to jail at all. “What you think about, you bring about,” I reminded him. Unfortunately, in the days leading up to that trial, Nick spent most of his time with Linda and her family, and it was a depressing environment—even his grandparents kept on him about the possibility of it. Jail, jail, jail. “You’re going to jail. You’d better get ready!” Nick told me about all of this talk that surrounded him, and it just scared me to death.
The thing was, the law of attraction had been in play throughout this ordeal. As he started to understand it himself, Nick confessed to me that the night before the accident he and John had been watching videos of car crashes on the Internet. Car crash after car crash after car crash. Call it a coincidence. Call it what you want. Whatever you call it, thoughts and actions are interconnected.
I kept focused as best I could. The lawyers insisted no judge would want to set a new precedent. So I put the possibility of jail completely out of my mind.
It wouldn’t be enough.
On May 9, 2008, we all made our way over to the Pinellas County courthouse. Through Brooke and Nick, Linda and I had communicated enough to agree to sit together as a family in that courtroom as Nick stood up and entered his plea. It was the least we could do to put our differences aside for one day.
We did it, too. Linda and I didn’t really talk. We said hello, but that was pretty much it. It was strange to see her, especially sitting in the front row, and watching her new attorney, A. J. Barranco, holding her hand, and rubbing her hand, throughout the whole court proceeding. That was something I felt I should have been doing, even with all the problems. That was my wife. It was creepy, although the distance between us was just as big as it had been in the final months of our marriage. Being in her presence again didn’t change that.
Nick got dressed up in a suit and tie. He felt it was important to show the court that he took this matter seriously. And he did take this matter seriously. He had done nothing but take this matter seriously since day one.
Before we went into that courtroom, I looked Nick in the eye and said, “Just be grateful for whatever happens. We will definitely get through it.”
I carried a copy of the book The Power of Now into the courtroom with me that day. I needed all the positive energy I could get. So did my son.
Not only were we placing ourselves at the mercy of the court, but the gossip Web site TMZ had somehow arranged to put a camera in that courtroom and stream the whole event live over the World Wide Web. So whatever was said that day would be broadcast for the whole world to see. The fact that the court allowed that to happen already meant that Nick’s case was being treated differently than any normal, noncelebrity case. That was not a good sign.
This was just a hearing, not a trial. It was a chance for my son to enter a plea, and he did that. A plea of no contest. He placed his fate in the hands of the judge. The judge accepted Nick’s plea and then moved on to the sentencing portion of the proceedings. He could have put off sentencing to some other day, but he didn’t. It was all going down right now. In front of that TMZ camera.
Judge Federico opened the floor to both sides—the Hogans and the Grazianos—to speak out and make a case for why Nick should be sentenced one way or another. This was a chance for us to speak about the punishment Nick had already endured, seeing his friend in a hospital, and dealing with the guilt and shame of knowing he was behind the wheel when it happened. It was our chance to ask the judge for mercy, to talk about Nick’s character, and to ask the judge to simply allow Nick to be rehabilitated and reeducated just like any other minor who makes a terrible mistake. I personally begged the judge not to let my fame or the celebrity nature of this case influence his decision on my son.
When we stood up to speak, my family spoke the truth. Brooke made a tearful plea for her wonderful brother, reminding the judge and the Grazianos how sorry we all were about what happened to John, and how close we all were to John. Linda and I both agreed that John was like a son to us. Our family was suffering, too.
Nick spoke as well, turning to face the Grazianos as he apologized to them for what happened to John. I can’t imagine how difficult that moment was for him. It wasn’t difficult to say he was sorry. He had said he was sorry a hundred times as we gathered at the hospital in the wake of the accident. But to do it in front of a camera? And a judge? And a room full of strangers? It made me real proud that he had the strength to do that.
We then sat and listened as the Grazianos put on a united front and told the judge how their family was shattered by the accident. Ed Graziano talked about how he spent ten-hour days visiting John in the hospital, which sounded like an awful big strech of the truth to me. John’s former girlfriend stood up and went on about how she and John were still engaged, describing how Nick’s recklessness had cost her and John the future they were about to embark upon. The whole thing was just weird. As far as I knew, John wouldn’t even answer this girl’s calls in the months before this accident happened. He would laugh about it. Then Debbie got up there and pulled the party line with her family as well—saying that Nick had never even apologized to her for what he had done to their son.
To the outside world, and especially to a judge who knew nothing about the truth of what had gone on in this family, I’m sure it was heart wrenching. And the sadness of John’s condition is immense. Still, what the Grazianos did and said in that courtroom was not exactly honest. To make matters worse, because it was a hearing and not a trial, there was no possibility of refuting their statements. We simply had to sit there and take it, and pray that the judge would show Nick some mercy.
Once they were through, it was finally Judge Federico’s turn to speak. My stomach clenched up like a fist. I listened closely to every word.
At first he talked about the circumstances of the accident, and Nick’s age, and what the law allowed for punishment for the various charges. He talked about his duty to give a minor a chance at rehabilitation. Then he said something that shook me to my bones: He used the phrase “because of who you are.” He said to Nick, more than once, that he was making the decision based in part on “who you are.”
Did he really just say that he’s going to treat my son differently because he’s on TV? Is my son going to suffer now because of who I am?
With that, Judge Federico sent my boy to jail for eight months. A completely unprecedented ruling. He also suspended his license for three full years and gave him five years’ probation and five hundred hours of community service.
I was floored. By any stretch of the imagination, this was an extremely harsh and precedent-setting ruling for a minor in the state of Florida. It made no sense.
I watched as court officers led my son to a little table to be fingerprinted. I watched as they removed his necktie and belt. I watched as they put him in handcuffs and led him through a side door off to the right of the judge’s bench. Just like that, he was gone.
As I stood there flabbergasted, I expected Nick to look at me for support. I expected him to come over and hug his family before they took him into custody. But Nick didn’t look back. He stood there and took the weight of that ruling on his shoulders, all on his own. Nick didn’t break down. He didn’t look to me for help. He didn’t whine or complain about the ruling—even though in my mind he certainly had a right to. Instead, he stayed strong. As crushed as I was by the judge’s ruling, I was equally proud of my son for taking it like a man and staying strong throughout that entire proceeding.
I held my head up and walked out of that courtroom and ignored the press who wanted me to comment. I also ignored the taunts from some of the members of the extended Graziano family, who wound up ranting and raving to the cameras in that parking lot.
What could I say? I wanted to stay positive. I was choosing to be a better person. I was choosing to walk on the high road. Sharing my real thoughts on that judge’s decision would have been anything but positive, believe me.
Instead I kept reminding myself that Nick’s a good kid. He’s strong. He’ll get through this. We need to be grateful for this. There’s a reason for it. I know it. Nick will learn from this. In the end, it will somehow make Nick a better person. A better man. I just know it.
I had to believe that. There had to be something to be grateful for in this horrible ordeal.
Back at my apartment later that evening, I kept pacing the floor trying to wrap my head around everything that had happened. My attorneys told me Nick would have access to a phone at a minimum-security jail, so he should be able to make a phone call as soon as he was settled. I had no idea when that might be, so I went a little out of my skull just waiting to get word that Nick was okay. I just wanted to hear my son’s voice, you know?
Finally, as the sun set out over the Gulf, my cell phone rang. It was Nick. He was anything but okay.
“Dad, you’re not gonna believe this. I’m in the mental ward.”
I had never heard Nick’s voice shake like it was shaking on the other end of that phone.
“What are you talking about, Nick?”
“They walked me in past all these other inmates and into this medical facility and they put me in a padded cell. It’s like three by seven. I can touch both walls when I put my hands out. The whole length of the room is barely taller than me!”
“Wait, wait, wait. Nick, slow down. Did they say why you’re there? Is this temporary?”
“No! They said I’m not allowed to mingle with the adult prisoners ’cause of my age.”
“But you have access to a courtyard and everything, right? Like the lawyers said.”
“No! They have to keep my door closed the whole time. They’re saying this is the only cell they have available. That I’m stuck here. Dad, I can’t be locked up in here like that. There’s no windows, nothing. You’ve gotta help me.”
I promised my son I’d get to the bottom of this. “Just stay strong. We’ll get this fixed.”
I hung up that phone with my heart pounding out of my chest. As a parent, there’s hardly anything worse than getting a panicked phone call from your child. I had to help him. No matter what it took, I had to figure out what the hell was going on.
I called my attorneys, and they called the courthouse, the judge, and the jail. The best they could tell me is that this was some kind of a catch-22. Nick was sentenced in adult court, and he was sent to an adult prison, but because he was under eighteen they were required to keep him separated from the general population. This facility wasn’t built to house minors like that, so the only choice they had was to isolate him in the medical ward.
“That’s not what the judge ordered. He was supposed to serve eight months in minimum security,” I said. But Nick fell between the cracks—and guess what? It was Friday. Everyone was headed home. There would be no way to get this fixed over the weekend.
I can’t describe to you how hard my heart sank in my chest when they told me that. I was so angry and hurt, and once again totally helpless.
I had promised my son I would get this fixed. Now I wouldn’t be able to. He would be stuck in that situation for most of the next seventy-two hours.
Nick called back that night, and I told him the situation. It was a finite amount of time. I told him to just stay positive. To be grateful that he wasn’t mingled with the rest of the prisoners. Maybe that meant he would be safe. Maybe it was meant to be. I reminded him we had to find reasons to be grateful for all of this, no matter how hard it might be.
Nick seemed to calm down. It was only till Monday. He would be able to call me a few times a day. They would let him out of his cell and supervise him to make calls. I promised him that I would always be there to pick up those calls. Always.
It was a 100 percent commitment on my part. I would not miss a call—not because I was driving and my cell-phone service was sketchy, or because I was in the bathroom. I simply wouldn’t leave that apartment or step away from that phone until Nick’s situation was fixed.
I just never imagined it would take twenty-eight days for that to happen.
______
From that day forward, I sat in a straight-back chair at the glass dining room table in that bachelor pad of mine. I laid out three cell phones: the one Nick would call me on, and two others that I could jump back and forth on to lawyers and family and friends. I called everyone I could think of that weekend. Lawyers I had dealt with through the years. Friends who were prominent in the area, who might be able to call in a favor. Anyone I could think of who might be able to get my son out of that situation.
It might not seem like much to think that he would be locked up from Friday till Monday, but my lawyers made me realize what a grave situation Nick was in.
Solitary confinement is meant for prisoners who are uncontrollable. Rapists and murderers who act out against guards or other prisoners get thrown in solitary as a last-resort punishment because it’s the most brutal punishment there is.
Isolation plays tricks on the human mind. After as little as forty-eight to seventy-two hours, many prisoners in solitary confinement have been known to crack. In extreme cases people have been known to start hurting themselves, scratching their eyes out, eating their own feces. True isolation is something human beings hardly ever experience in life. In the confines of a tiny cell, it’s considered one of the most brutal punishments known to man.
So how on earth did this judgment against my son transform from a minimum-security sentence to the most brutal punishment in the American justice system? How is that possible?
As I promised, I was there every time Nick called. Right from the outset I tried to be calm and positive with him in every conversation. I read to him from the Bible, just trying to make sense of what he was enduring and how it would help him grow as a human being. I read to him from The New Earth and The Secret. I read to him from James Ray’s books.
Monday came and went with no improvement in the situation. I was scheduled to start a media tour to promote American Gladiators. I was supposed to fly to New York to do Regis and Kelly, Letterman, every talk show you could think of. For the first time in my entire career, I canceled them all.
NBC was pissed. They were relying on the power of Hulk Hogan to go out and sell this show to the audience, but there was no Hulk Hogan as far as I was concerned. Right then, I was Nick’s father. That was it. I had only one obligation to fulfill.
It’s hard for people who don’t know me to understand that I’m not just talking here. I’m not exaggerating. I did not move for twenty-eight days. Jennifer was real weirded out by how focused and obsessed I was, just sitting in that chair at that table making phone call after phone call, trying to get this thing resolved. She had never experienced this extreme side of my personality. If she brought me food, I would eat. If friends stopped in to check on me, I would talk to them about what was happening to my son. But the only time I would get up is when I had to go to the bathroom. Then once every four or five days I would take a quick shower—always with the cell phone right there on the sink where I could reach it the moment it rang. I was determined to take every phone call, and make every phone call, from that solitary spot until my boy was out of that cell.
This was the resolve of coming back to the ring after Matsuda broke my leg. This was the resolve of exploding my kneecap as I won the belt from the Iron Sheik. This was the resolve of tearing my back by bodyslamming André the Giant but continuing to wrestle for twenty-nine days with no break, no rest, and no surgery. I knew I could do this, no matter how long it took. “If I have to sit in this chair for the next eight months, Nick, I will sit right here for you,” I told him. “No question.”
After the first few days and all the calls I made, word spread to lawyers all over the country. All of a sudden some of the top legal minds in the world were reaching out to help me. Robert Shapiro (of O.J. trial fame) called from L.A. at 2:00 A.M. I had Roy Black on the phone from Miami. Brendan Sullivan was calling from Washington, D.C. All of them giving me advice on how to handle this thing. My own lawyers tried to make pleas to the judge and sheriff’s department based on some of that advice. Nothing seemed to work.
The calls would come at any hour, and I felt I couldn’t afford to miss a single one. So sleep was basically not an option. Catnaps with my head on my arms were the best I’d do.
Nick was served breakfast at 4:30 A.M., and that was the only set time when I knew for sure he would call—so I was always right there to pick up that phone on the first ring. I could hear him breaking down. I could hear the sound of his voice. I could hear him start to obsess over the guilt of this accident and what he had done and how badly he was being punished. I needed to get him out of that situation. Fast.
In the middle of that first week, Nick was finally moved from the medical ward. Someone realized that was not an appropriate spot to hold a minor on a reckless driving charge. Rather than improve the situation, though, the move made it worse.
As a minor sentenced in adult court, Nick was still caught in the middle, falling between the cracks. Without some broader resolution, there was only one other solution available that would keep him segregated from the adult population without forcing him to stay in that tiny padded cell: They moved him to solitary confinement at a maximum-security jail.
Now my son was in a building with murderers and rapists. He was locked behind a solid steel door with a slot in the bottom that was big enough to put a tray of food through. Nick would lie down on that floor just to watch the feet of guards going by, just to know that someone else was there. This cell, which was slightly larger than the padded cell, had a window. As if that would somehow appease my complaints. The window was a couple of inches wide. Up high. It let in a sliver of light, that’s all.
I honestly would have rather seen Nick mingle with the murderers and rapists. He’s a big strong kid. I think he would have had a better chance at fending off an attack than he would at fending off the pressure that confinement was laying on his mind.
So I sat in that chair. I did not move. I kept making phone calls. Jennifer brought me food. Friends stopped by to check on me. I refused to move from that spot and those phones. I watched the sunset each night over the water. The sunset that Nick couldn’t see. It broke me down. Again and again.
I wouldn’t let Nick know that. When he called, I stayed as up-beat as possible. I had to. He was unraveling.
Toward the end of that first long week, it looked like there might be a breakthrough. It looked like the judge was ready to agree to step in and allow Nick to be put into the adult population at the minimum-security prison.
Then Linda spoke up. Remember when I let Nick choose who to live with as the divorce proceedings got started? Well, officially that meant that Linda had physical custody of Nick, and therefore, she had more say than I did. So, from what I understand, she had her lawyer call the judge to object to my request to mingle Nick into the general population.
I was baffled by it. I called Linda and asked her why. She told me she did it to protect him. She told me she was taking her mother’s advice that Nick would be in great danger as a minor surrounded by a bunch of adult criminals.
She clearly didn’t understand the danger he was in by staying in that solitary cell. That’s probably because she didn’t talk to Nick as often as I did.
Brooke couldn’t understand what Linda was doing. She couldn’t understand why she would see the jail phone number pop up on her cell phone and decide not to answer. “How could she not answer Nick’s call?” she asked me. I didn’t quite know what to say. She needed to figure it out on her own.
Brooke started talking to me a lot more once Nick was in jail. As awful as the circumstances were, it felt good to have Brooke back in my life. She even revealed to me why she had been so distant since the latter part of 2007: For months, Brooke revealed, Linda had been telling her all the stories of the affairs she always imagined I was having. Brooke was now well on her way to figuring out that her mother might not have been telling her the truth.
The thought of my own daughter thinking the worst of me for all that time still saddens me. No daughter should have to think that about her dad. Thankfully, in the middle of Nick’s ordeal, we started down the path toward setting things right.
Finally, on the Friday of the second week, it looked like Judge Federico was ready to amend his original ruling and allow Nick to move into a juvenile facility until his eighteenth birthday on July 27.
Linda objected to that move, too.
I reached Linda on her cell phone that Friday around dinnertime, and she was out at a steak house with her friend Darci Morrison, drinking and having a good time. She told me Darci visited a juvenile facility about eighteen years ago and said it was the scariest place she had ever been. So Linda decided she didn’t want Nick to go there.
“Linda, there are all kinds of different juvenile facilities! This one’s not for violent offenders! They have Bible programs, and work programs.” She didn’t care. When I berated her friend for giving her such bad advice, she got really angry at me and hung up the phone.
Another weekend. I didn’t move.
Another week of wrangling. I didn’t move.
Now the juvenile facility decided they wouldn’t even take Nick if a judge ordered it, because he wasn’t tried in a juvenile court and they didn’t want to set a precedent. So back to square one.
Nick was so fragile through this whole ordeal that I tried to do anything I could to refocus him on other things. We tried to talk about the good things that could happen when he got out of jail. He was still in talks with the TV execs about that reality show on drifting, and we talked about that. We talked about how much John would love to be a part of that show, and when he’s healed and healthy and walking again how great it would be to have John back on the pit crew and participating in that show.
The guilt of the accident was eating Nick alive, so I kept reading to him from the Bible and the books about the law of attraction and spirituality and strength that I had discovered since January to help him find an explanation for what happened. We talked about the negative things he thought about in his own life, and how that could have drawn negative consequences. We talked about John, and how down he was after coming back from Iraq, how he talked so negatively all the time, how he talked about thinking he was going to die, and I raised the question of whether or not that might have been part of what caused John’s injuries. I did anything and everything I could just to alleviate my son’s suffering. Just to relieve some of the guilt and pressure he was putting on himself. I was willing to say almost anything, no matter what it was, to get him through these seemingly endless days in that solitary cell.
As we entered the third week of this nonstop struggle, my third week sitting in that chair, I suddenly received a flurry of worried calls from attorneys and friends describing something I just couldn’t believe was real.
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department released tapes of Nick’s jailhouse phone conversations to the media. His conversations with me. His conversations with his mother. Even conversations with his grandmother, my mom, Ruth Bollea. Private conversations that were recorded in my son’s darkest hours.
That tabloid trash Web site TMZ sifted through these twenty-six hours of tapes, found the most potentially inflammatory ten-second sound bites, cut them out of context, and pasted them on the Internet for the whole world to hear.
I knew all of our conversations were monitored and recorded. There was a reminder that came on and told me so every two minutes we were on that phone. I interpreted that the same way every other person with a family member in jail interprets that message. You can’t have murderers and thieves having conversations about planning their escape or putting hits on people. The reason to monitor jailhouse conversations is safety. We all get that. Nowhere is it ever said or written or even implied that these tapes could be released for public consumption.
Have you ever heard Charles Manson’s jailhouse tapes? Have you ever heard Ted Bundy’s jailhouse tapes? Have you heard O.J.’s jailhouse tapes? A lot of people would find it pretty fascinating to hear those tapes, but they’ve never been made available. Come to think of it, have you even heard Paris Hilton’s jailhouse tapes? Or any other celebrity’s jailhouse tapes? No! Never before, to my knowledge, have anyone’s jailhouse tapes been released to the media except ours down here in the hillbilly circus. It is a violation of privacy at someone’s most vulnerable point, and I pray that no other parent with a child in jail is ever forced to go through something like this. The release of those tapes was unconscionable. Now all of us would have to face the music when it came to the things we said.
The most inflammatory statement of all of those sound bites was one that came out of my mouth. I was talking about the law of attraction, and I made the suggestion that God laid some “heavy shit” on John. Then Nick responded, in the spirit of talking about the law of attraction and the idea that there could be some explanation for why this accident happened to both of them that night, that John was a “negative person.” We weren’t just talking about the accident, of course. The “heavy shit” that was laid on John was also the horrible situation in his home life.
I’ve apologized for making that statement, and I’ll apologize again here. Even in complete privacy, it is not for me to judge how John lived his life. I shouldn’t have said it, and I’m sorry. I hope that after reading this book, people will understand that my words weren’t said with any kind of malice.
Before and after that moment on that tape, we spent all kinds of time talking about the good things about John, and how much we were praying for his complete recovery. Those twenty-six hours of tapes are filled with positive, life-affirming messages that were meant to help my son survive his ordeal, but the media didn’t play them, or the long passages I read from the Bible. That’s just the way the media works. I accept that.
You want to know what? After we had a chance to digest it and talk about it, Nick and I were both grateful that those tapes were released. We were grateful because it woke us up. It made us realize that even as we discussed our spirituality in private, it was important to be mindful of our words.
Words are powerful things. The words I used to distract Nick from his misery, combined with the motivational words and spiritual words I used in those phone calls, helped my son to survive the cruel and unusual punishment of his confinement.
We stayed on the path of positivity—and something good actually came out of that whole ordeal. At the end of May, my friend Duane “Dog” Chapman read what I was going through with Nick and those tapes, and he had his lawyer, David Houston, give me a call. The last thing I wanted to do was explain Nick’s case to yet another lawyer, but David heard me out and did something none of those other lawyers did: He hopped on a plane and flew into Tampa to take care of this thing firsthand.
First he filed a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office for releasing those jailhouse tapes, asking a judge to bar them from releasing any more tapes in the future. Then David Houston came up with a way to file a motion that even Linda wouldn’t object to: We asked that Nick be removed from solitary and allowed to serve his jail sentence at home with an ankle bracelet until he turned eighteen, at which time he would go back into the adult minimum-security jail as expected. It was less than two months that Nick would be on house arrest. It seemed like a very reasonable solution.
On June 3, Judge Federico held a hearing and denied the request.
After all the press attention, I think he simply didn’t want to lose face. He didn’t want to look like he was giving in to the Hogans. That’s my opinion. He also must have realized that it was time to do the right thing, though, because two days later, in what sources at the jail told the press was a “routine review,” Nick was suddenly moved out of solitary and allowed to mingle with two other juveniles who were brought into a segregated area of the adult minimum-security prison. Nick suddenly had some human contact. He had access to a television. He had access to an outdoor courtyard.
“Dad, I can even go outside at night and see the stars!” he said. My son was elated. My son was grateful beyond belief. His voice finally regained some sense of normalcy.
I knew he would survive now. I knew he would make it.
After twenty-eight days, I finally got out of that chair and walked into my bedroom. With eyes full of tears—the best kind of tears—I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.
During that twenty-eight-day nightmare, I disregarded everything else in the world. Nothing else mattered to me. In fact, had Nick stayed in solitary any longer, I actually would have given up a tremendous opportunity to move forward in a new direction with my career.
Back when American Gladiators first started, my old WCW pal Eric Bischoff and I started pushing an idea for a show called Celebrity Championship Wrestling—sort of like Dancing with the Stars but with body slams and choke holds. We wanted to take some well-known TV stars and teach them how to wrestle—give them the moves, the attitude, the character development, really teach them how to work a match and whip a crowd into a frenzy.
It was a chance for me to continue a wrestling-centric career without continuing to bust up my back. I would act as a judge and mentor, and I’d bring my friends in, people like “Mouth of the South” Jimmy Hart and Brutus Beefcake, to really show these celebrities the ropes.
Just as I wrapped season two of Gladiators and dealt with Nick’s going to jail, this idea became a reality. CMT, the country music cable network, picked it up. Filming was slated to start in early June—coincidentally within a couple of days of Nick being taken out of solitary.
Even then, I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to risk missing a phone call from my son. It was Nick who encouraged me to follow through with it. “Go, Dad. It’ll be good for you,” he said. “I promise I’ll be okay.”
So I flew off to California and started this new show where I was really calling the shots (along with Eric) for the first time in my TV career.
There was only one problem: visiting days.
For the rest of Nick’s stay, we were allowed to visit with him for an hour on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. They weren’t in-person visits. We weren’t sitting behind a screen or a piece of Plexiglas like you see on TV. The only view we had of Nick was through a video-monitor system, and we spoke to each other on an old-fashioned phone handset.
I wanted to make as many of those visits as I could. I knew how important they were to Nick, and I figured that his mother would potentially flake out on them.
That meant flying back and forth from Celebrity Championship Wrestling’s Los Angeles set to Tampa every chance I got. Suddenly, it occurred to me that those old crazy days of flying back home to Florida in between matches to see the kids had been training sessions for this summer of 2008. There was no way I could make every visiting day and still film this show. So Brooke promised me that she would make it to see Nick every Wednesday, and I arranged the show on a four-day schedule for myself so that I could fly to Tampa first thing every Friday, and fly back to Los Angeles every Sunday night.
The crew on the show called me Yawni, like the musician Yanni, because I yawned my way through that whole experience. I didn’t have the energy I did in my thirties and forties, that’s for sure—but those visits with Nick were worth every single yawn.
In the beginning Linda and I would go together. We would actually lean our heads together against the phone’s earpiece so we could talk to our son and hear him at the same time. Nick just loved seeing us together. It gave him hope. But Linda stopped that after just a few visits. I have a feeling her lawyer told her it was setting a bad precedent for whatever she wanted to win in the divorce. So we decided to split the visits half and half. I would take the first twenty minutes, she would get a straight half hour, and then I would step in for ten minutes to say good-bye at the end.
It worked fine once or twice. Then there was a Friday when Linda didn’t show up at all. Nick had spoken to her over the phone, and she said she was out on the boat and was going to skip her visit that day.
She was out on the boat, she said, with Charlie.
Just as I was starting to feel better about my son’s condition in jail, I got hit with the news that Linda was dating a guy named Charlie Hill. A kid who went to school a year behind Brooke, and a year ahead of Nick.
My wife was dating a teenager.
Nick told me how she met this guy on the sand one day out in front of our beach house. How he started hanging around all the time before Nick’s sentencing. How Linda tried to push Brooke to hook up with him before she ever did.
Brooke found out Charlie and Linda were dating by accident. She walked into the big house on Willadel one day expecting to meet Linda for lunch, and all of a sudden as she walked up to her bedroom, she noticed Nick’s TV was on. Nick was in jail. Why was his TV on? She saw clothes all over the bed in his room, and three of Linda’s little dogs were there staring at the bathroom door, like they were waiting for somebody to come out. So she opened the bathroom door and found Charlie and some guy hiding from her in the bathroom. She recognized Charlie right away, but thought they had broken in or something—until Charlie told her he was actually living there and had been dating Linda.
Brooke was shocked. She didn’t believe him. She forced Charlie and his friend to leave the house and then called me all panicky, so I hopped in my car and went racing over there. At this point Linda was headed back to the house, too, and when she saw me driving by she called the cops. She then followed me while she was on the phone with the 911 operator, accusing me of stalking her and threatening her life and claiming that she had an injunction against me! I wound up getting pulled over—which wound up all over the TV and gossip Web sites. It was just a mess. The police apologized to me in the end. Linda didn’t have any injunction against me. But the damage was done.
Apparently Linda was embarrassed to be dating a nineteen-year-old, because even after that incident, even after Charlie admitted the situation to Brooke, Linda kept insisting that Charlie was only a friend. She even said they were “just friends” in an interview with a national magazine.
A few weeks down the road she finally admitted it to Nick. Her rationale? “Don’t you want me to be happy, Nick?” I can’t believe she made our son respond to that question. From jail. Of course he wanted his mother to be happy—but was this really what it took to make her happy?
Linda even started bringing Charlie along for her jailhouse visits. That really freaked Nick out. I just couldn’t believe the audacity of that.
People started telling me about seeing Linda on the beach, Linda on the boat, Linda hanging out with all these dock rats and young Clearwater kids at all the local hot spots and bars. It’s like she was a totally different person. She hated going out on the boat. She hated the wind at the beach. She never wanted to go out to bars.
She never wanted to do any of those things with me. I kept questioning, Why? Was it just me? Was she trying to go back to the age she was before we met? Was she trying to relive her youth? I didn’t get it, but whatever it was, it sure didn’t seem healthy.
There were times during those visits when I’d take the phone from Linda to do my last ten minutes with Nick, and the handset would reek from the alcohol on her breath. She started missing those visits more often as well, and with no notice at all. Here I was flying in from California for that precious half hour, and she couldn’t make it from fifteen minutes away.
I could have kept getting angry. I could have flipped out on Linda. I could have flipped out on Charlie. I didn’t, though, and I thank God for that. I thank God that I put myself on a new path before any of these situations presented themselves. I think about the alternate course my life could have taken under all that stress and pressure. What if I hadn’t gotten my head on straight? Is it possible that Hulk Hogan could have become just like some of these other wrestlers who’ve taken their own lives in recent years? Could I have turned into something worse?
Many months later I made an unfortunate comment to a magazine about this subject, suggesting that I “understood” what O.J. Simpson did. Out of context, it made me seem like some kind of a monster. All I meant by that statement was that as my life started to unravel at the end of 2007, I peered over the fence of reason and saw what insanity and rage look like. I never came close to jumping that fence. But when your whole world falls apart and you start thinking about taking your own life, there’s a lot of darkness. Without help, it can get real hard to see in the dark. I was lucky enough to find some light—through Laila, The Secret, the Bible, Jennifer, and embracing the spirit of Christ once again—I was able to choose an entirely different path. I’ve walked so far down that path now that the fence separating me from any sort of insanity and rage isn’t even visible in the distance anymore.
Starting that summer of 2008, I just prayed that Linda would find happiness. I really did. I started keeping a journal next to my bed that summer, and every morning when I got up I would write down all of the things I was grateful for. The lists I made included plenty of things that weren’t real yet. (That all goes back to the law of attraction again.) I said I was grateful for my back being totally healed. I said I was grateful for Nick getting out of jail stronger than he ever imagined he could be. And every morning I wrote down how grateful I was for Linda finding happiness. I meant that. I still write those words down. Every day. Just for her.
As I slowly refocused my life, becoming more aware of every action I took and every thought I had, I neglected one very important area: my public image.
I knew I was choosing to move in a more positive direction by not speaking out to the media throughout the demise of the marriage, and Nick’s ordeal, and the release of those tapes. The problem was nobody else knew it.
My fans were left to come to their own conclusions about what I had become based only on the words of others. The only message the public heard about Hulk Hogan for almost an entire year had come from Linda and her attorneys, the Grazianos and their attorneys, bloggers, DJs, and Nancy Grace—the CNN Headline News personality who took up Hogan-bashing as a full-time job in the wake of Nick’s accident.
By June of 2008, I was operating on such a different plane and acting in such a calmer, more rational fashion than I ever had before, some of my friends in the wrestling business said they didn’t even recognize me. I stopped complaining all the time. I stopped bashing Linda’s antics. It’s like I exhaled all that bad energy and let my shoulders relax for the first time in years. Maybe the first time ever in my adult life.
“You’re like a whole different person,” Eric Bischoff said to me as we started working together on Celebrity Championship Wrestling.
“That might be true,” I said, “but this is the real me.”
Brutus Beefcake was so surprised by my change in demeanor that he went out and started reading The Secret and all these other books, too.
The public didn’t know any of that. They had no clue. In fact, if you added up all the horrible things that were being said about me, you’d have thought I was nothing more than a cheating husband who stalked Linda, encouraged his kids to drink and drive, and blamed John Graziano for his own condition!
For a long time I didn’t care how the public perceived me. Honestly, I knew I needed to get my head on straight before I could deal with anything outside of my own life and family situation. Then all of a sudden Eric and my publicist Elizabeth Rosenthal and Brutus and every one of my attorneys, including David Houston—all of the people I trust to look after my image, my career, and even my family’s well-being—came at me simultaneously with the very same message: “You need to respond or you won’t have a career to come back to.”
So finally, in early June, I decided it was time to come out of my little spiritual cocoon.
Talking about all of this, especially my son’s accident, would not be easy. This was delicate territory, and the last thing I could afford to do was to make another mistake like I had on Arsenio’s show in 1991. My image had already suffered too much without my direct involvement.
What I said was almost as important as where I said it. I didn’t want anything to seem sensational. I didn’t want to make it seem like I was somehow trying to promote myself, when all I wanted to do at this point was let my fans hear my side of the story firsthand.
I worked closely with Elizabeth, who stuck by me through this entire ordeal and somehow saved me from having to answer every tabloid headline. I also hired a crisis management PR firm in Los Angeles, just as backup in case anything got worse. It cost me a fortune, but I didn’t want to take any risks this time.
In the end, I think the only thing I needed was the biggest weapon I already had in my arsenal: honesty.
I had crossed that bridge in my personal life once and for all. True open honesty was it for me now. With my kids. With my ex. In my business dealings. Everything. I knew it wouldn’t be any different when it came to talking in public.
Within a couple of weeks we decided on two press outlets known for their fairness and journalistic integrity: People magazine and Larry King. That was it. I wouldn’t go on a media tour. I wouldn’t appear on late-night talk shows or early-morning broadcasts. I would let my words speak for themselves. I would give my fans the chance to make up their minds who they wanted to believe—the naysayers and haters who were trying to burn me at the stake, or me, the man they’d grown up with and watched and embraced both in and out of the ring for the last thirty years.
It actually felt good to talk about it all. It was cathartic in a way to finally speak out and just tell someone outside of my immediate circle what I’d been through, and what I was still going through. Plus, I felt it was so important that I shift some of the focus back to John Graziano, so the public would be thinking about his healing and sending positive thoughts and prayers his way after reading or listening to what I had to say.
I answered Larry King’s questions as honestly as I possibly could. There was no acting or putting on airs. I just spoke to him, from the heart, and I think people could tell. I answered People magazine’s questions the same way. Once I had said my piece, I went back to my life. I went back to Jennifer. I went back to making my new TV show. I went back to spending time with Brooke; we finally saw eye to eye after all we’d been through, and she even moved back in with me for a while. I went back to visiting my son every hour I possibly could for the remainder of his time in jail.
It felt good. I somehow felt like I had completed a big step in my journey. It was out of my hands now. I was grateful that those big media outlets still embraced me in a way that allowed me to say what I had to say.
In fact, the only downside to it was the effect it seemed to have on Linda. It put her on the defensive, even though I did my best not to say anything too negative about her at all in those interviews.
Right in the middle of it, her lawyer stood up and proclaimed to the world that this divorce was going to be a war. He was actually quoted saying that to People magazine, in a rebuttal quote they included in my story.
A war? I remember thinking what a terrible thing that was. For the two of us. For our kids. Linda already knew I was willing to give her half of everything at that point. I was happy to give her whatever a judge deemed was her share. She deserved it. We had been married twenty-three years. That wasn’t enough for her. It seemed like she wanted to try to destroy me. And that just made me sad for her.
I kept asking myself, What kind of a person wants to turn their divorce into a war?