My Life Outside the Ring (18 page)

But the biggest obligation that pushed me forward was the expectation of the fans. I mean, when this Hulkamania thing really took off, I don’t mean to brag and say every night was sold out, but it was! It was like the Beatles or something. Which is crazy to say, but these giant stadiums were just packed every night of the week. There were screaming mobs wherever I went. And when you’re six foot seven, there’s nowhere to hide.

So when Marsha told me that Alan died, there was simply no time to react.
Okay, your brother died. Tomorrow you gotta be in Tokyo ’cause it’s sold out, and the next day you gotta be in Osaka and then Boston Garden and then back in Kumamoto—they’re all sold out.

Instead of taking a month, or a week, or even a couple of days off to mourn and be with my family, I kept wrestling. Nonstop. It was like a fear that they were going to replace me. A blind instinct to just keep going.

Part of that instinct was driven by the fact that I couldn’t believe none of the other wrestlers had caught on to what I was doing.
How come nobody else has figured it out yet?
Junkyard Dog couldn’t figure it out. Rowdy Roddy Piper couldn’t figure it out. Ultimate Warrior couldn’t figure it out. Even André didn’t quite get it—this whole thing of just getting the crowd involved and getting thousands of people to eat out of the palm of your hand. You didn’t have to be a great wrestler. You just had to draw the crowd into the match. You just had to be totally aware, and really in the moment, and paying attention to the mood of the crowd.

For some reason I couldn’t allow myself to be in the moment and totally aware when it came to paying attention to my personal life or my feelings and emotions. In the ring, though, that sense of control and presence came easy to me.

Looking back, I realize that it was much more than just my ability to work a crowd that kept me on top. It was the whole package: the blond hair, the tan body, the red and yellow. Even the fact that I claimed I came from Venice Beach, California—that was all just part of working the show, you know? I’d never even been to Venice Beach when I started using that line on the New York circuit, but I knew that image of California had an effect on people. It represented something. The American dream. Hollywood. All of it. So the whole idea that this bronzed god had emerged from Venice Beach, where all the musclemen lifted weights outdoors by the golden sand and the glistening ocean—it just made sense that crowds would get into that whole thing.

Of course, none of it was rocket science. Back then I was convinced that at any minute some other wrestler would emerge with an even better plan, an even better story, an even better gimmick that would win over the audience and make Hulk Hogan yesterday’s news.

So I just kept going. I kept looking ahead to the next venue, the next match, the next TV spot or interview. I didn’t live life for the present. I just kept living for the future. I stayed numb to my immediate surroundings. I stayed numb to what was happening in the here-and-now of my life.

As a result, it’s not a stretch to say that I don’t really remember half of my career.

People always come up to me with questions about the places I’ve been. Local journalists are notorious for that. “You’ve wrestled in St. Louis every couple of months for the last twenty-five years. Where are your favorite places to go?”

“Well, I’ve been to the Marriott and the arena and the airport.” That was my answer.

People ask me about Paris or London, and it’s the same thing: the airport, the hotel, and the arena.

I barely even stopped to marry my wife. Think about that. Think about how disconnected I was to not even bother slowing down to get married—to treat that commitment, that unbreakable bond, like a blip in an otherwise busy schedule.

That’s what I did. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was married for about ten years before I ever took three days off in a row. It took that much dedication and drive to stay on top.

I just didn’t think about the consequences that might have on my relationship with Linda.

Chapter 10

The Perfect Family

In the early days of
Hulkamania, the thought of having kids didn’t really cross our minds. Linda and I were newlyweds, and we were riding high.

Plus, for me, I knew we didn’t have enough money saved. I still felt wrestling didn’t bring any security. Even at the peak of this I was still scared that it was all gonna disappear at any moment.

So we just kept partying and reveling in all the fame and fortune we could. We were constantly getting on planes, going to the next photo shoot, hitting the next party or awards show or premiere. In fact, the first three years of our marriage we were hardly ever alone.

I remember one time I wrestled in Hawaii, and Linda and I decided to stay on and take a mini vacation at the hotel afterward. It was only a two-day break—but by the second day, Linda was so bored she was crawling out of her skin.

Times like those were when the early cracks in our marriage started to emerge. Especially that third year in.

There were times when Linda would start yelling at me for what seemed like no reason at all. She’d just suddenly start cussing up a storm and freaking out on me over the littlest things—like not being able to find her shoes, or if we forgot to pack something.

When it started happening frequently, I went to Linda’s mother and asked her if she’d ever witnessed any of these anger issues in Linda before—and she acted like it was an everyday occurrence. “
You’re
the one who married her,” she said. She was practically laughing at me.

Thanks a lot, lady.

Those were my first glimpses of the mean streak Linda had in her—this thing that I think she inherited from her father, Joe, an ex-cop.

It was just one of many little secrets I learned about Linda and the Claridge family in the months and years after we married. Little bits of information kept trickling out—all of which were distressing to me, but none of which seemed too big to overcome when I took them on one at a time.

Remember the Corvette that Linda was driving when I met her? Right after we married I learned that she didn’t own it outright. In fact, she was barely making the payments and needed my help. And that nail salon she supposedly owned? She was just a part owner, and the whole place was deep, deep in debt.

Linda didn’t just have minor problems with her father, either—she had tremendous problems. They fought like cats and dogs when she was young. It got so bad, Linda left home when she was just a teenager and led a wild, rebellious life.

I didn’t learn any of this crazy stuff until after she had that ring on her finger. By then, of course, I thought it was too late to do anything about it. So I figured I’d just have to live with it.

It got so bad, I remember having conversations with buddies of mine—like maybe it was time to leave her. Maybe this married life wasn’t for me. My pal Ed Leslie (Brutus Beefcake) was in the middle of divorcing his first wife around the same time. He had joined the WWF, and we were even tag-team partners again at this point, and I remember wondering out loud with him if getting married was the wrong thing to do. “Linda and I always had so much fun just hanging out on the road together,” I remember saying. “Maybe it should have stayed that way. Maybe getting married put a damper on things.” All I knew was that she kept showing this angry side, and I couldn’t figure out what on earth was making her so unhappy.

As the anger progressed over the years, there would be a few times when I wished I had done with Linda what I did with Donna—just taken the ring off her finger and told her she was free—but I always stopped myself. The thing is, if that had happened, then I wouldn’t have Brooke and Nick in my life, and those kids are my whole world. So you can’t second-guess these things. Everything happens for a reason, right?

It’s funny, though—and I never really put this together until recently—those cracks in the marriage first started to show the same year that I lost my brother Alan.

More precisely, they started the same year that I stepped back from the fast lane—and Linda didn’t.

It’s more dramatic in retrospect than it was at that time in some ways. I mean, whenever we had a fight I would just get over it and move on. In my mind I’d always tell myself that it wasn’t that bad. The fact is, I was proud to be married. I was proud to have my wife with me out on the road instead of a different girlfriend at every port or a bed full of floozy groupies after every match. And as long as we were rolling with it, Linda would constantly rise to the moment—climbing on that next airplane, driving in a hot car, walking into the stadium to the cheers of fans who had lined up for hours to catch a glimpse of me. We still had lots of fun in those moments. The high of that would get her—and me—through most of the next couple of years.

But that was it. Once we were five years into this marriage, I noticed a real change in Linda. Traveling with Hulk Hogan was a blast for a while. I guess it got old.

I don’t know. I’ve never been Hulk Hogan’s wife. I’ve tried to put myself in Linda’s shoes, though. When the arena’s emptying out at eleven at night, and your husband’s still in the shower ’cause he wrestled the very last match, and you’re the last one there waiting, all by yourself? That shit
has
to get old after a while.

I understand why someone would get sick of seeing me tear my shirt off for the thousandth time, and there are only so many nights you can watch your husband drop a leg drop on an opponent and still get a kick out of it.

So we fought about it for a little bit, and we talked about it like two reasonable adults. Linda finally decided she just didn’t want to be on the road anymore.

It made sense. We had some money in the bank. We had bought that nice townhouse down on Redington Beach and had relocated to Florida. We both agreed that not only was it the perfect time for Linda to stop following me around, it was time for us to start a family.

It felt good to be in sync about something like that. It’s kind of how I always envisioned a marriage should work, you know? You go through changes in your life together, and adjust to new situations together, and make decisions together as a unit—and there were a lot of decisions to be made.

When Linda decided
to stop taking birth control, I decided to stop taking steroids. I didn’t know for sure if that would have any effect on a child or a pregnancy, but I didn’t want to take that risk. With the whole thought of bringing a child into the world, I just wanted my body to be clean, you know? It just made common sense to me. Linda wanted the same thing. I quit smoking pot for a while. I had already quit the cocaine a couple of years earlier. Linda even quit drinking in order to start a family. We just wanted our bodies to be the best they could be, to give every chance to our child to be as healthy as he or she could be.

I guess it worked. Almost as soon as we started trying, we got very fortunate and Linda got pregnant with Brooke. We were both so excited. We felt so blessed, you know?

On May 5, 1988, on one of my rare days off, I was getting ready to go out for a ride in my boat when I got the call from Linda that she was on her way to the hospital. For Christmas Linda had bought me a phone for the boat—one of these big clunky cellular phones that you had to hang up on the wall of the boat like you’d hang a regular phone in your house. So right as I’m getting ready to put the boat in the water at the marina I get this call, and I rush back and meet her at the hospital.

It was seven, eight hours later when she delivered Brooke, who popped into the world weighing ten pounds. She was a big healthy baby. And when I held her for the first time, I found myself counting her fingers and toes. I just couldn’t believe how perfect she was. She was our little girl.

Right then and there, life as I knew it ceased to exist.

All my priorities switched in an instant. Yes, I had to keep the Hulk Hogan persona happening, but now my number-one priority was to spend as much time with Brooke as I could. It’s all I wanted to do. Somehow having a daughter made everything make sense.

When I say that I was running so hard I can’t remember half of my career, I think part of the reason was that I didn’t have a child in my life. Sometimes I sit back and wonder,
What the hell was I doing before Brooke came along?
It’s like none of it meant anything, you know? All of a sudden, in 1988, my career actually
meant
something.