My Life Outside the Ring (16 page)

He got awful petty about the whole thing. At one point, when he didn’t seem to be getting his way, he went to Vince Sr. and said, “By the way, Hulk Hogan smokes pot.” That led to all these questions in the locker room, and all kind of problems for me.

So when Vince Sr. pulled me aside to say we might not follow the plan I’d been promised by Vince Jr., I basically told him he could forget about having Hulk Hogan stick around. “Look, Vince, if you’re changing your plans, I just burned a huge bridge in Minnesota. I’ll go right back tonight and rebuild that bridge,” I told him.

Vince Jr. stepped in at that point. He pulled his dad aside for a long conversation. I don’t know what he said, but he eventually came back to me and said, “We’re goin’ with things as planned.”

So on January 23, 1984, I climbed into the ring at Madison Square Garden, turned on all the Hulk Hogan charm, and whipped the audience into a frenzy as I won the belt from the Iron Sheik. My very first championship belt.

Verne Gagne, the guys down in Florida, and the wrestlers in Memphis and Alabama might not have agreed with it, but at that moment I became the biggest and best in the world. And it didn’t matter what any of the old-school wrestling guys thought, because audiences were ready to embrace Hulk Hogan like they’d never embraced any other wrestler in the history of the business.

Out with the old. In with the new.

Hulkamania had officially exploded.

Vince-a-mania

A few weeks after winning the belt, I went down to Allentown to tape my first TV match as the champion. I was back in the dressing room getting ready and decided I needed to go to the bathroom. Now, the bathroom in the dressing room of that facility was built real strange. You had to open a door and go up some stairs to get to this platform where the toilet was.

The door was closed, and I didn’t knock. I didn’t think anyone else was around. I just opened it. As I looked up those stairs, I caught a glimpse of Vince Sr. standing over the toilet—I didn’t mean to look, but I didn’t think anyone was in there—and I couldn’t believe what I saw. His legs were spread, and all I could see was this bright red piss shooting down into the bowl. It looked like pure blood.

Holy shit
. I closed the door and walked away.

I ran to Pat Patterson, who’d become a close friend of mine by then, and told him what I’d seen. He served as a close confidant of both McMahons—their voice of reason as far as business savvy. Pat went and gently told Vince Jr. about what I had seen.

Shortly thereafter we got the news that Vince Sr. had cancer. And within a matter of weeks, he was gone. It was shocking, and so sad.

Vince Jr. stepped into his father’s shoes and took the reins of the business, exactly like he told me he would. It just happened in a way that I never saw coming.

Vince was based
in Stamford, and we needed to be close to each other to keep working on all of our big plans. So Linda and I moved up there and bought a house just a few weeks after Vince’s father passed. From that point on, Vince and I were inseparable.

We spent hours and hours talking this thing through from every angle possible. The thing was, for as much as Vince had been around the wrestling business and thought he knew the business inside and out, he really needed to see it through my eyes—the eyes of someone who had lived it in the ring. At that point, Vince had never entered the ring himself. So in a way I became his teacher. I walked him through Wrestling 101: the wrestling psychology, the theory. Both of us were in sync about the fact that this business could be much bigger than the way Vince Sr. saw it. Beyond that, just like Tony Altomare had shown me the ropes and the back doors of the business side a few years earlier, I showed Vince my personal vision for how to raise the bar on everything that happened in the ring.

My view of this was different than any wrestler that came before me, and I wanted him to see that the little things I did in the ring to make the fans feel like they were a part of the match could be done on a much grander scale across the whole spectrum of the WWF. If we sucked these fans in on a personal level, they would live it and breathe it and be fans forever.

Vince knew wrestling was an art form, but I wanted to bring it to life for him. “Yes, you paint a picture,” I explained, “and there’s an arc to the story lines.” He knew that—but there was a bigger way, a more emotional way, to paint those arcs and reach the fans so that the experience would last much longer than a three-hour show at Madison Square Garden. There was a way to make people believe that Hulk Hogan was a real hero, and that if you train and take your vitamins and say your prayers you, too, can be a hero. I wanted people to be absolutely hooked on this stuff so it entered their lives on a daily basis—not just once a month or a few times a year.

I explained how we could get more heat, and how to make the fans go crazy, and how to really make a comeback like no one had ever seen. It was like he needed to hear that from my point of view to awaken the full fire of his grand plan.

And man, were his plans grand. Vince was like the P. T. Barnum of wrestling promoters. He was aggressive—never afraid to make moves. He would rent buildings and put his ass on the line, leverage his house if he had to, in order to make something happen. He was fearless. And by that time, so was I.

The thing about Vince is he could match me to-to-toe the obsession department. If I was in 150 percent, so was he. We could put blinders on and just block out the whole world, the naysayers, the old-time wrestlers who thought the business should stay just the way it was. We’d power our way through any obstacle that hit us, and we pushed each other.

With his aggressiveness and my focus, we were a match made in heaven. Even though we were totally different types of people, our work ethic was hardcore. I used to call him the Terminator. I swear I’ve never met anybody else that can roll with me and keep up with me neck and neck when I get on something.

One example: A few years into the Hulkamania madness, Linda and I relocated to Florida, to a townhouse down on Redington Beach. One time Vince came down and we locked ourselves in a hotel room nearby. For forty-eight hours straight we sat at a table with a pencil and paper and wrote the movie
No Holds Barred
from beginning to end. It was a ridiculous movie, but we wrote it from beginning to end without stopping, without sleeping, for forty-eight hours. It was like three hundred pages before we handed it to a writer to polish up. I’d never met anyone who could hang with me like that.

We were a great team. There’s no other way to put it. I wasn’t his “employee.” He wasn’t my “boss.” He needed me as much as I needed him. Hulkamania got started when I was working in Minnesota, but it never would have blown up the way it did without Vince and the WWF. Likewise, there’s no way the WWF would have broken down all the old territorial boundaries and taken over the world if Vince didn’t have Hulk Hogan.

From the moment this whole thing took off in ’84, we were partners in the best sense of the word. We both had this vision and this manic drive. Nothing was gonna stop us.

Chapter 9

Livin’ the High Life

Remember how I missed out
on that whole sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll vibe when I was playing in bands down in Tampa? Let’s just say I was a late bloomer.

The thing is, when wrestling took off in this unstoppable international explosion in the 1980s, Hulk Hogan was as big as any rock band going. The first WrestleMania had a million viewers on closed-circuit TV. A million viewers all paying to watch! We even slammed this thing directly into the music world with the whole MTV/
Rock ’n’ Wrestling
phenomenon. Before I knew it, I was acting as a personal bodyguard to Cyndi Lauper one night and taking her to the Grammy Awards in my sleeveless tux.

That excitement from the audience fed me in the ring and made the whole thing even bigger and better. I’d keep mixing up the moves and mugging to the crowd, making sure every fan got involved in the show so they felt like they were a part of the match.

It was such a trip, too, because when I’d hit Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, the heads of GM and Ford and Chrysler—the most powerful businessmen in the whole wide world at that time—would jockey to see who got the best seats. Vince used to laugh about that all the time. Or I’d be in L.A. coming out of the ring and I’d see John Travolta and Gene Hackman and Suzanne Somers—some of the biggest stars of the ’70s and ’80s—sittin’ right along the aisle. Going to see Hulk Hogan was like the hot thing to do for a while, you know?

My T-shirts and merchandise were flying off the shelves. We were traveling from town to town, selling out arenas. And forget about the tiny MSG Network—we knocked ourselves onto NBC on Saturday nights. Major network television! Dick Ebersol, who was producing
Saturday Night Live
at the time, had us filling in on weeks when SNL was off the air, and that opened doors to every party in town.

Hell, going all the way back to my days running in and out of L.A. between trips to Japan there were a bunch of times when a few other guys and I put John Belushi’s ass to bed. That’s the kind of crowd we were running with—sliding right into the craziness of Studio 54 before that wild New York party finally came to a halt in March of 1986.

Linda was right beside me for the ride and loving every minute of it. If she had been an actress or something, maybe playing second fiddle to Hulk Hogan would have been too much to take. As it was, being in that number-two position worked just fine for her. She had a certain respect everywhere she’d go, just because she was my wife, you know? People would want to talk to her and ask her all about what it was like to live with the Hulkster, and the red velvet ropes would part for her at any party. She loved that.

When we hit the road, the party was on. I was the world’s champion and had more money rolling in than I knew what to do with. And Linda was always in charge of that money. For as long as I can remember, whenever I’d get a check, I’d stuff it in my wrestling bag and hand it over to Linda when I saw her. With all the running around I was doing, it was just easier for her to deal with going to the bank. Plus, can you imagine Hulk Hogan walking into a local bank? It would be chaos.

We were never ones to waste money. Especially on the road. Instead of blowing our dough at the Peninsula or the Beverly Hills Hotel, Linda and I would always stay at the Marriotts or Ramadas with all of the other wrestlers. We didn’t want to be separated from the pack. That just wasn’t our mindset back then. It was much more fun to be around everyone.

I was drinkin’ a lot of beer, and Linda would always drink her wine, and all the wrestlers smoked pot, so I would smoke pot, too. But the thing that’s most memorable about partying in the late ’70s and early ’80s was the cocaine.

It first showed up in my personal circles about halfway through my run in Minnesota—right around when Linda and I started dating. I’d go to wrestle in Denver or someplace, and when we’d hit the hotel afterward to drink a few beers, somebody’d break a little gram out.

At first I didn’t know what the fuck it was, but everybody tried it, so I tried it, too. I didn’t know what it was supposed to do. It didn’t seem to have that big an effect on me. I mean, if it wired me up where I could drink an extra beer or five, I don’t remember that, and I don’t remember it like some kind of “Oh my God” epiphany. But it was there, and I did it.

Before long, it was showing up in the locker rooms at the arenas. Then it started showing up in every hotel room, every night. Those hotel rooms would just get wild—and that became the standard routine, almost every night. “Let’s go up to the hotel and do a couple lines and have some drinks.”

I never did large amounts of the stuff, and the most I probably hit it was four days a week. If it was there, it was there; if it wasn’t, I didn’t care.

When it got real heavy I couldn’t handle it. If I bought a gram of cocaine it would last me a whole week. You could buy it anywhere, of course—from other wrestlers, from fans. Or you wouldn’t even have to buy it, you know? It was just there. But everyone seemed to be doing it more and more.

Man, if I did too much coke, though, it made me chew my fingernails.

Sure it made you feel good, like, “Hey, man, I’m awake, and I feel like a genius, and I feel young!” But when it came to functionality? I didn’t want to eat, I couldn’t sleep at all, and I definitely couldn’t get a hard-on. Still, it’s so addictive that you keep doin’ it anyway. It’s like a rat to poison. You just can’t stop.

Almost all the wrestlers loved it, and it was just part of the culture back then. It seems like every big star had a run with cocaine at one point or another. The
Saturday Night Live
gang was running wild. You’d walk into Studio 54 and shit was everywhere, you know? Right out in the open!