My Life Outside the Ring (13 page)

Once things started to take off for me in New York, Donna seemed to get more and more distant. Even if she didn’t want to hit the road with me, I thought she’d want to come see me at Madison Square Garden, at least. Something. Nope. She just was not into the whole wrestling lifestyle. She wanted to stay in Tampa.

I understood that. If it wasn’t for McMahon’s big push, I had planned on staying in Tampa myself.

I came back on Christmas that year, and Donna basically started a fight with me. (Women have a way of doing that, don’t they?) She told me to not even bother coming back for New Year’s—so, of course, the first thing I did was make sure I showed up for New Year’s. I walked into her apartment and found her sitting on the sofa there with her arm around this guy from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

A football player! Of all the guys she could’ve picked, right?

I walked over, took the engagement ring off her finger, and slipped it onto her other hand. “You’re free,” I said. “See you later.” And I walked out the door.

The whole thing was so weird. I can’t imagine actually being married to Donna, yet I was so naive about love and marriage and sex and relationships, I had put a ring on that girl’s finger even though we were totally incompatible! What was I thinking? I’m just glad it ended when it did.

On a side note—just to show what a small town Tampa really is—years later Donna worked for the Avis rent-a-car at the Tampa airport. So I would see her every single time I flew in or out of town. Eventually she married the owner of that local Avis spot, they had a kid, and that kid went to the same school as
my
kids. So I saw Donna almost every day! It was spooky.

Learning the Ropes

In some ways, letting go of Donna allowed me to concentrate fully on my wrestling career in New York. I didn’t feel that pull to get back to Florida quite so often—even though I still considered it my home.

My early career in the WWWF was fast and furious, and it’s all been pretty well documented. You can find Web sites all over the place that list my matches, and who beat whom.

It seems like most people have even heard the behind-the-scenes stories—about how Vince McMahon Sr. changed my last name to Hogan because he really, really wanted an Irish wrestler in his stable and how he even gave me red dye for my hair, which I refused to put in and just flushed down the toilet.

The guy was on a big kick for including all ethnicities and nationalities in the ring, so you could draw an audience from all of those various groups. The Italians could root for the Sicilians. The Irish could root for Hulk Hogan, and so on—even though Hulk Hogan was meant to be more of a bad guy.

So I flushed the red dye, but I kept the name. I don’t even know if most people think of Hogan as an Irish name, do they? It didn’t matter. When McMahon dropped the “Terry,” it sounded good. “Hulk Hogan.” It just had a nice ring to it.

Again: fate or coincidence?

McMahon followed through on everything he offered. He put me up in a great apartment in West Haven. He paid me real well. He hooked me up with Tony Altomare to drive me everywhere—but Tony did a lot more than that.

Tony was the kind of guy who loved to drink and raise hell. As an older guy who’d been in the business forever, he knew the ins and outs of everything—and for some reason he shared it all with me.

It was almost like that movie
The Sting
, where Robert Redford finally meets a guy who can teach him the ins and outs of the game. Tony taught me all about how the promoters worked, and what percentage of the gate the houses took. He taught me the back doors, which restaurants to hit in each city, which hotel rooms to get. He also taught me how to go head-to-head with some of the old-school barbaric wrestlers who were still on the circuit—the guys who’d bite you just to keep you in your place. (I have a few bite scars to prove it!)

Tony Altomare was my personal crash course in the real business of wrestling, and one of the best gifts McMahon ever gave me.

As for McMahon’s promise to make me a star? He didn’t follow through quite the way I expected, but I made it work regardless.

One thing he used me for was a foil for André the Giant. André needed a real champion-level wrestler, a worthy opponent that he could fight when he went on the road. He just made mincemeat of the little wrestlers in all the other territories. There was no drama to any of the matches because it was so obvious that André was gonna win. So McMahon figured I could go along with him whenever he went out of town, and the two of us could put on a real show for the crowd. (That also meant McMahon would gain more control over what happened in those other territories.)

McMahon didn’t see me as a hero figure. Instead, he kept me in a bad-guy role so an established wrestler like Bob Backlund could come in and defeat me when he needed a boost in popularity.

For those of you who didn’t tune in to the whole Hulk Hogan thing until the mid-1980s, this might be hard for you to believe, but I got booed! Wherever we went, they always wanted the other guy to win. Especially André the Giant. He was a much bigger star than I was, and everyone wanted to see him crush me.

The thing was, even if I got beat, I was the blond-haired muscle-bound perfect prototype of a wrestler—so crowds would still come out to see me.

It got to the point where I was booked in one main event after another, and the crowds kept getting bigger and better. We were selling out stadiums everywhere we went.

But it always came back to Madison Square Garden. I wrestled there almost once a month. And let me tell you, brother: Standing in the ring in the middle of that venue was like no other feeling in the world. The piercing roar of that 22,000-deep sold-out MSG crowd was so loud, it actually made my jaws water.

Hometown Mentality

Somewhere in the middle of this crazy run I had a chance to drive down to Florida. I rolled into town in that green Continental thinking I’d finally made something of myself. There wasn’t a wrestler in town that could hold a candle to what I’d accomplished.

In fact, I was feeling so pumped I decided to go find Sherry Mashburn—that beautiful Angelina Jolie–type girl I’d been in love with since the sixth grade.

I found out that Sherry was working in this really high-end modern furniture store called Scan Design. So I drove over there and walked in real casual like and said, “Hi.”

Well, so much for my confidence. Seeing her face-to-face I broke out in this massive sweat. I mean, I was drenched. It was pouring down my back, down my neck, off my nose. My shirt was drenched. Even my underwear was drenched.

We went outside and stood by my car, and Sherry kept asking me, “Are you okay?”

Finally I fought through this crazy reaction I was having and asked if she wanted to go out on a date.

“Oh, I’m already dating somebody,” she said.

Great
.

Then the conversation started to turn a little bit. “Is this your car?” she asked. “That’s a real nice car.”

Hmmm. Maybe she’s more interested than she’s letting on.

She seemed pretty clueless about what I’d been up to, so I told her I was a wrestler now.

And she said, “Oh, like Mike Graham?”

Mike Graham?

“Are you as famous as Mike Graham?” she asked.

Mike Graham was Eddie Graham’s kid—the guy who talked to me in the van and set me up with Matsuda. As a fan, I couldn’t understand how a guy that small could even get into the business against all these monster wrestlers.

Mike Graham was a
local
hero.

All of a sudden I stopped sweating. Sherry started asking all these questions, like “Have you ever wrestled Steve Kearn?” All these years had passed and Tampa and these high school guys were still her whole world. I was working for Vince McMahon, selling out Madison Square Garden, wrestling the biggest wrestlers in the world—but until that moment, I was still nervous about what Sherry Mashburn thought of me.

The fact is, I was still nervous about what everyone in Tampa thought of me. It was crazy. By this point in my career, I was a main-event wrestler at the biggest venues in the world. When Dusty Rhodes came up to wrestle in New York, they put him in the opening match—before half of the crowd had even filtered into the arena—and here I was, the main event that had everyone up on their seats at Madison Square Garden going wild at the end of the night.

I never went out with Sherry Mashburn. Honestly, even at that age, I still barely would have known what to do with her if I had her in my arms. I found some peace in that moment, though. A peace that had been a long time coming.

Back in New York,
the rise of Hulk Hogan just couldn’t be stopped. The match people loved to watch most seemed to be the one that Vince always put me on: Hulk Hogan vs. André the Giant, the five-hundred-pound behemoth of the wrestling world.

A lot of people think WrestleMania III was the first time I ever bodyslammed André, but that was just the first time it happened on national television. On August 9, 1980, at a completely sold-out Shea Stadium in front of almost sixty thousand people—that’s when I bodyslammed André for the very first time.

It wasn’t seen widely on American TV, but it aired in Japan, where wrestling was about the biggest sport in the world. After that, the legend of the power of Hulk Hogan started spreading all over the globe like wildfire.

I’d settled in on the red and yellow colors. I’d perfected the Atomic Leg Drop. I’d just about mastered my sense of crowd control—that ability to time and finesse my movements so all I’d have to do is put my arms out and look at the crowd and I’d incite the loudest roars of “boo” you ever heard.

I also developed a move where I’d pick up three guys in the ring at the same time. I’d get one guy on my shoulders and bear-hug the other two and lift all three of ’em at once and then “Raaaah!” I’d throw them all down.

It wasn’t easy. I’d say I probably failed to pull that move off about 50 percent of the times that I tried it.

It only took one time to change my life forever.

My Guy Sly

The greatest thing about working in New York was being on TV. Every three weeks we’d film down in Allentown, and the matches were broadcast on the MSG Network—MSG standing for Madison Square Garden. This channel hit homes all over the tri-state area and down into Pennsylvania, and you just never knew who was watching.

One night, I think it was early 1980,
Rocky
mastermind Sylvester Stallone tuned in. He was on the lookout for a wrestler to cast in a role in
Rocky III
, and he saw me on a night when I happened to pull off that crazy move—lifting three wrestlers at once and just hurling them to the canvas.

Stallone didn’t know how to get a hold of me himself, so he turned to his casting director, Rhonda Young. She didn’t know anything about wrestling, or who the heck this wrestler was that Stallone was talking about. So she called her brother, Peter.

“Peter,” she said, “Sly’s gotta have this wrestler, this guy he saw on MSG. He’s a bad guy, and he’s done this and that,” and Peter knew right off the bat. “Oh, that’s Hulk Hogan.” (Peter Young became my agent shortly after that and has been my agent ever since.)

So I’m coming out of the ring one night when I get a message that Sylvester Stallone wants me to call him. I thought it was a joke! I had seen
Rocky I
and
II
, and in the late ’70s and early ’80s there was no one as big as Stallone. He was this all-American hero figure. There was no way he was calling me.
It must be one of the guys pulling a rib,
I thought, and I blew it off.

Around this same time, McMahon sent me over to Japan to wrestle for seven weeks. Now, that was an amazing experience. All these Japanese fans worshipped me like some sort of god. It was really unbelievable to be over there and feel that kind of idolization—even if I couldn’t understand a word anybody was saying. The Japanese promoters didn’t want me to leave. They were begging me to stay longer. Wherever I went the arenas were packed to the rafters.