My Life Outside the Ring (19 page)

Handing Linda those checks every week meant more than just me and Linda saving money. Now it was me and Linda saving money for our kids, and me and Linda working hard for our kids. Whereas before it was more a self-satisfying type of thing, now we were doing this for someone other than ourselves.

It didn’t make me any more aware as I was out on the road. I didn’t suddenly slow down and take time to smell the roses. In fact, it actually made things worse because all I wanted to do was get home between matches and TV appearances. So that added even more flights to my already crazy schedule.

If I was wrestling in Louisiana one day and had a day off before wrestling at Madison Square Garden, instead of flying in a day early and actually getting a good night’s sleep, maybe catching a workout and regrouping, I’d fly to Florida to spend half a day with Linda and baby Brooke before flying back up to New York.

Vince and the other wrestlers would freak out. “Why are you flying all the way to Florida for a couple of hours?” Sometimes that’s truly all it would be. I’d land in the morning and get home by noon even if I had a flight to the West Coast that left that same night at five or six. Those two or three hours with Brooke and Linda in between trips to and from the airport meant the world to me. I’d do whatever it took to get home to them.

Honestly, those were some of the happiest times I can remember. Having a new baby just seemed to refocus everything in my life. Even as hard as it was to be traveling back and forth all the time, it didn’t bother me. I was just so grateful to have Brooke that I would have done anything to keep our family happy.

After Brooke was
born I went right back on the steroids. It was just a part of what I did. It’s how I kept that big Hulk Hogan look. I smoked a joint now and then, too, and drank a few beers after coming out of the ring. I pretty much got back to the normal routine—as did Linda, who always favored her wine over any other kind of booze.

Linda went back on birth control, but it wasn’t long before we started talking about wanting another child. We wanted Brooke to have a friend—to see her grow up with a little brother or sister.

It was all just talk, of course. We weren’t going to rush into it. It wasn’t a serious plan, and parenting is serious business. If we were gonna try again, I’d go off the steroids, quit smoking pot, quit drinking, the whole nine yards, and I expected Linda would stop drinking. We were both so happy that Brooke was born healthy and that Linda’s pregnancy had gone so smoothly, it only made sense that we would take the same approach when it was time for baby number two.

Shortly after Brooke was born we bought a beautiful house on Belleview Island, just west of Tampa on an actual island in the middle of the Intracoastal Waterway. We were basically pioneers out there and had almost the whole island to ourselves. Over time they’d put in a resort and like thirty other houses—all the construction noise would be one of the reasons we’d eventually move out—but we had one of the first properties there in this stunning location in the middle of the bay.

I loved coming home to that beautiful house, to my beautiful family. Until one day the weirdest thing happened.

I came back from wrestling one day toward the end of 1989 and walked into the house to find Linda’s grandmother Nini was in for a visit.

“Did you hear the news?” Nini asked me.

“No, what news?” I said.

That’s when she hit with me words I never expected to hear. “Linda’s pregnant.”

I laughed and said, “What do you mean Linda’s pregnant?”

“Oh, yeah, Linda didn’t tell you? She’s pregnant.”

I thought she was kidding around or something. “No, no, Linda didn’t tell me she’s pregnant,” I said.

It wasn’t a joke.

“Oh, yeah,” Nini said. “Linda quit taking her birth control pills about six months ago. So she’s pregnant!”

Can you imagine hearing something that important from your wife’s grandmother? Can you imagine how it felt to have your wife just nonchalantly forget to tell you that she’d gone off the pill and was pregnant?

Dude, we had one of the biggest fights that night.

“Linda, why wouldn’t you tell me? We were gonna plan this so I wouldn’t take a shot of steroids. So I wouldn’t smoke a joint. So I could get my system totally cleaned out. Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

Linda started in with this “Oh, well, I thought we agreed.”

“No!” I said. “The word ‘thought’? You
thought
? We didn’t agree. You just
thought
we did, Linda, because you know if you’d told me you were gonna quit taking your pills I wouldn’t have had any alcohol or smoked a joint.”

I mean, me doing something to
me
is one thing, but me doing something to my kid is another deal. Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe steroids don’t make any difference. Even if that were the case, and even if a little pot and a few beers wouldn’t hurt the health of the baby at all, it doesn’t matter. The fact is, it made a difference to me. Linda knew that. I guess she just didn’t care.

For the first time, I felt like Linda had totally betrayed my trust. She had been having those outbursts, getting angry at me for seemingly no reason, but she had never broken my trust before. It took me a long time to get over that.

Nick came into the world on July 27, 1990, and when I held him for the first time I counted all ten of his fingers and all ten of his toes, just like I had done with baby Brooke. He was perfect. He was a perfectly healthy baby, despite my fears.

That pregnancy was definitely a struggle for Linda, though. There was something about how Nick was sitting in her stomach that cut off a lot of the feelings and nerves in Linda’s legs. She always complained that one leg hurt all the time.

She had a real hard go of it during the delivery, too. Nick wound up being delivered by C-section, and the doctors told us we almost lost Linda in the delivery room. It was a real close call.

Did the drugs and alcohol and steroids have anything to do with that? I can’t really say. Either way that pregnancy took a major toll on Linda, and when it was all over she said, “That’s it. No more kids.”

I felt the same way. My God, we had two beautiful children. We had our dream family, you know? A beautiful boy and a beautiful girl. I was so thankful and we felt so blessed. And there’s no way I would want to risk losing my wife in the delivery room.

So that was it. My family was complete. The four of us would go through this crazy adventure together.

The way I remember it, for years and years and
years
we were happy. Whenever I came home, it was all about those kids. We took vacations and headed over to Disney World and did all that stuff families are supposed to do together.

It’s the little stuff that really sticks with me. Like with Nick, I’ll always remember sitting there playing games with him while trying to feed him his eggs in the morning—putting them on the fork and doing the airplane noise. “Open the hangar!”

He was a real skinny kid, and he never wanted to eat anything. So when he’d eat dinner I’d put his green peas in rows and make smiley faces with them. I would just play games for hours trying to get that kid to eat.

Nick didn’t have a growth spurt until he was eleven or twelve years old. I guess I shouldn’t have worried. There was no need to rush it. Everything happens in its own time, and Nick’s about two hundred pounds now and solid as can be.

I always worried, though. I guess that’s just what fathers do. I worried for my kids. I worried for my family. All I wanted was the best for them, all the time. To make sure they had a life that was better than anything I was even capable of imagining when I was a kid.

And that meant more money.

When I wasn’t home—which was most of the time—I was out chasing every angle I could to bring home more dough so that Linda and the kids could have everything they ever wanted.

But there was something I failed to understand at that point in my life. Something I failed to understand until all these years later: Putting all of your focus on “more, more, more” can wind up costing you, big-time, in the end.

Trials and Tribulations

Chapter 11

Pain

Wrestling isn’t fake. It’s predetermined.
So what?

We live in an era now where that grand revelation doesn’t make any difference to the fans. Is there anyone who goes to a movie today who doesn’t realize there were lots of digital special effects that went into making it? Look at so-called reality TV: It’s still exploding in popularity even though most of the audiences are tuned in to the fact that a lot of what they’re seeing isn’t really “real.” People love the drama and the characters, so they suspend their disbelief and enjoy it.

Some people get real mad at me for pointing out the obvious when it comes to this stuff. The fact is, professional wrestling is called “sports entertainment” for a reason, and at its best, it’s some of the greatest entertainment in the world.

But let’s be real clear about something: The matches may be predetermined; we may not be in there trying to kill each other for real—in fact, the main goal is to come out of that arena just as good as when you went in because you have to wrestle again the next night, and the next—but the blood, the broken bones, the brutal injuries that happen in that ring? Those, my brother, are as real as real gets.

I don’t care how perfectly straight I lay you out, or how perfectly you’ve practiced landing in a way that breaks your fall, if I pick you up and body-slam you to the canvas, I guarantee you it’s gonna hurt like hell.

From the day Matsuda broke my leg until now, not a day’s gone by when I haven’t been in some kind of pain.

I’ve torn through both of my biceps. My triceps are torn in three places. My back is uneven because the muscles never healed properly after I body-slammed André the Giant at WrestleMania III back in 1987. You can see ridges and divots all through my shoulders. I’ve even torn muscles in my butt.

I’ve had other nasty injuries, too. I got a trophy stuck through my chest out in Minnesota—there’s an obvious scar from the hole it punched. I’ve even got bite marks on my thumbs from some of the old-school barbaric guys I faced on the road in the early days.

Yet for some reason people get all squeamish when they hear wrestlers talk about “blade jobs.”

When that Mickey Rourke movie
The Wrestler
came out in 2008, everyone talked about that first scene in the ring where he pulled a razor blade from the tape on his wrist and made a little cut on his forehead for dramatic effect. Mickey really cut himself for that scene. There were no special effects at all. He totally overdramatized the moment, though. He made such a big deal of it—cutting real slow, and wincing as he pressed the corner of the blade into his skin and the blood started to flow.

I couldn’t help but laugh a little. In reality, a blade job is probably the least painful part of any match, and if anyone did it as slow as he did, the whole audience would spot it.

Remember Dusty Rhodes and how he rose up from the canvas in that very first match I saw with his whole white afro just a crimson mess? That guy was running a blade all over his head—not just a one-inch spot on his forehead. So how could I do anything less in my own career? Steal from the best, right?

For my own personal blade jobs, I always used an old-fashioned Blue Blade. I’d take time in the locker room to prepare it just right—cutting off a little corner of that blade, taping it up so just the very point was sticking above the tape. The whole thing was just a couple of centimeters wide. Rather than tape it to my wrist, I’d usually hide the blade in my mouth. I can keep it right between my gum and my bottom lip, no problem. It got so comfortable over the years that sometimes I’d be out to dinner after a match before I realized I still had that blade in my mouth.

When it came time to use it, I’d wait for a moment when my opponent hit me in the face and I’d spit the razor blade into my hand. Then in one quick swipe,
zip!
I’d run it across my forehead. I challenge anyone to go back and catch me doing it on camera. I got real good at hitting the same spot, too—in this crease I have just below my hairline. I’d hit that river in the blink of an eye.