My Life Outside the Ring (23 page)

Over time, the taunts from the fans went away. As my massive bulk from the steroids went away, too, something really strange happened: I actually started to look better on camera. I didn’t know anything about how cameras and lighting work on a body when I set out to develop my twenty-four-inch guns back in 1976. Nearly twenty years later, I started to notice that it was all about proportions. As my steroid-free waist got a little bit thinner in proportion to my shoulders, I actually looked bigger on-screen. With the water weight gone, my muscles just had a more ripped and powerful-looking appearance than they ever did before. And I put that lean-mean power look to good use.

I blew the roof off of the WCW. The audience exploded. For a long time, we absolutely crushed Vince McMahon in the ratings.

Better still, with the help of Eric Bischoff I started to make far more money than I ever made with Vince and the WWF. I had a bigger cut of every T-shirt and piece of merchandise that was sold, I was sharing in revenues from broadcasts, I had a bigger cut of the gate at the arenas. I could look out at a stadium full of people who were there to see me and know that I was getting my fair share of that massive revenue that was walking in the door every night. That’s a tremendous feeling.

Like I said before: All I wanted to do was to give my family every opportunity to have whatever they desired in life. Ever since that first moment when I held baby Brooke in my arms, this was all for them. To know that I was going to be able to give them more than ever? That was a rush.

Chapter 12

Behind Closed Doors

While the shadow of steroids
hung over my public persona through the mid-1990s, a much darker cloud hung over my personal life.

On Christmas Day 1994, a process server handed me a letter from a woman named Kate Kennedy. In that letter she claimed that I had sexually assaulted her, and she demanded three things: that I write an apology and publish it in
USA Today
; that I complete some sort of sexual rehabilitation class; and that I pay her one million dollars.

Some of this hit the press. A lot of it became all too familiar to radio listeners in the Minneapolis area, where Jesse Ventura had a radio show back then and just beat this whole situation to death over the airwaves. The public humiliation of being charged with something like that wasn’t the worst part, though.

The worst part was the thorn it drove into my marriage.

It went down like this: Kate Kennedy worked for and managed the merchandise at Hulk Hogan’s Pastamania, a fast-food restaurant I had opened at the Mall of America. It was one of many ventures I lent my name to as a way to keep money flowing in without getting hit over the head with a chair. I knew a day would eventually come when I could no longer wrestle. I wanted to be prepared.

After one of the WCW’s big
Monday Nitro
matches in Minneapolis, Kate Kennedy and her fiancé, a local police officer, came out partying with a bunch of us. We went to a bar, and I sat in with a local band and played a few tunes. (I still play guitar and bass now and then.) After a while we turned it into a typical wrestler’s night—hitting the hotel for some beers.

Some time in the wee hours of the morning, Kate and her Minneapolis police officer fiancé called it a night and left. I said good-bye to both of them.

I remember noticing that we only had about three hours to sleep before we had to catch a flight that morning, so I went back to my hotel room to start packing.

That’s when Kate showed up again.

Her lawsuit against me was eventually settled, and part of that settlement involved the signing of confidentiality agreements.

I can’t get into the details of what happened.

All I can tell you about is the fallout.

When I first received that letter from Kate Kennedy’s attorney, I was so scared about how Linda would react that I didn’t tell her. I went for a whole year without telling her. Two Christmases passed. After I went through the second Christmas without smiling, Linda saw how down in the dumps I was and she started pressing me for answers.

A man can only keep something from his wife for so long. So I finally broke down and told her exactly what happened. I didn’t hold anything back. I let her hear it all.

At first, Linda was really, really angry with Kate Kennedy. This was a woman Linda had befriended and personally approved to work for Pastamania. She couldn’t believe she was about to put our family through this ordeal.

Eventually, though, the inevitable happened, and Linda got really angry with me. She threw the word “divorce” around, loud and often, for months on end, and even though Linda didn’t follow through with her threat, not a week went by for the whole rest of our marriage that she didn’t bring up the Kate Kennedy fiasco at least once.

I don’t blame Linda for being angry. There is no excuse for my getting into a situation like that—no matter what happened in that hotel room.

But the problem in Linda’s eyes was much bigger than just that incident. When this happened, Linda finally had the proof she had been after for years: proof, at least in her eyes, that all of her long-standing suspicions about me cheating must be true.

Almost from the
outset of our marriage Linda was sure that I was cheating with some girl or another. It never made any sense to me. I’m just not the cheating kind.

In the early days I met Drew Barrymore in passing at a party once—I think Drew was still a teenager at that point—and Linda accused me of having an affair with her. Can you imagine? Another time in the ’80s, Vince threw a gigantic birthday party for Pat Patterson at the Twin Towers, and right in the middle of dinner someone came up and told me that Cher had sent a limo for me; she was throwing her own big party in Manhattan that night, and she wanted Hulk Hogan to join her. I had never even met Cher, but rather than laughing about how bizarre it was, Linda accused me right then and there of carrying on an affair with Cher.
Cher!

The suspicion and jealousy even affected my career. She got so crazy over this stuff, I was actually afraid to leave home for four or five months to make a movie. I feared that Linda might be gone when I got back. So I turned down some major stuff: the lead in
Highlander
, the role of Little John in
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
, and through the
Baywatch
guys I had an offer to make a movie with Pamela Anderson, when she was just red-hot. I really messed that one up. I had gone out and bought a copy of the
Playboy
magazine she posed in. Before I even had a chance to look at it, Linda saw that and said, “That’s it! There’s no way you’re goin’ to make that movie!” And she threw the
Playboy
in the trash.

Of course, I really blew it when I took it out of the trash when Linda wasn’t looking. I hid it in my closet like a teenager—and when I finally pulled it out for a look, Linda just happened to walk in. We fought about that forever.

It wasn’t just a celebrity thing, either. Whenever a girl was nice to me Linda would get suspicious. Like with Cory Everson, the professional bodybuilder. Cory is one of those real outgoing, touchy, kissy kinds of people, and I was friendly with her husband, Jeff, the editor in chief of
Muscle & Fitness
magazine. There was absolutely nothing between Cory and me other than friendship—in fact, Cory was friends with Linda, too—but every time we’d see them Linda would go off on me. “You’re screwing her. I know it. You’re having an affair.”

She did the same thing with the wife of one of our neighbors on Willadel Drive—a woman I rarely even spoke to.

And get this: Linda even accused me of carrying on an affair with my pal Brutus Beefcake. I swear to God! From the outset of our marriage she insisted that he and I were lovers. She insists the same thing about me and my friend Bubba the Love Sponge, the radio DJ here in Tampa, too.

I know it sounds funny. It’s completely ridiculous. Not to mention it’s not true! There were plenty of times I tried to brush it off as part of Linda’s weird sense of humor or something. But it wasn’t a joke. None of this was a joke. She thought all of these affairs were real. So I don’t want to make light of it at all.

Linda’s suspicion—scratch that—her
belief
that I was cheating was like a hole way down in the hull of a ship. No matter what I did or said to try to patch that hole, the water would keep breaking through.

As far as I am concerned, until our marriage was almost completely over, I never cheated on Linda. Not once. That’s the God’s honest truth. Unfortunately, the truth was never enough for her.

The past is the past. I can’t change what happened. Still, it’s hard not to second-guess the way we handled our relationship after 1996.

There are times when I think,
If Linda had divorced me right then and there, it could have saved our children so much pain and anguish
. No one should have to live under the stress of their parents’ unhappy marriage.

That’s me talking
now
, of course. Back then I didn’t really think it was all that bad. As far as I was concerned, my family had lots of happy times. We were living a dream life, in Linda’s dream house, with boats and cars and all the toys that money can buy.

So we had a few problems. So what? I loved Linda, and I thought she loved me. Why else would Linda stay if not for love?

Playing the Bad Guy

In the aftermath of the steroid trial, I decided to use the negative sentiment some of the fans felt toward Hulk Hogan to my advantage in the ring. It was time for a New World Order—to flip this whole game on its head. To shed the red and yellow for nothing but black.

Playing the heel was easy. I’d spent the whole first part of my career in the bad-guy role. Only now, just like I took this Hulk Hogan character to a whole new level of heroism, painting broader pictures and wilder story arcs than anyone had ever seen in this business, I decided to make Hollywood Hogan the most powerful antihero to ever step foot in an arena.

It worked. The fans exploded.

When I made that turn in the summer of ’96, determined to take over the WCW with my nWo partners, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash—two top-notch wrestlers who left the WWF at the beginning of that year—the fans in Daytona started throwing shit into the ring. Just picking up and throwing whatever they could find. They were incensed!

I had ’em in the palm of my hand. I knew it would go down as one of the greatest story lines in wrestling history, and that’s exactly what’s happened.

I can’t tell you what a high that is. After all the lows I’d been suffering, that high was addictive. And getting back in that ring week after week was all I wanted to do.

From that point forward, the WCW’s
Monday Nitro
beat out the WWF’s
Monday Night Raw
in the ratings—for eighty-four weeks in a row. I was beating Vince at his own game.

Refocusing the crowds on this new dark character seemed to almost erase the negative publicity I’d suffered. Too bad it couldn’t erase the physical pain I was suffering every time I came out of an arena.

Maybe it’s just what happens when you hit your forties. Or maybe that Tombstone that the Undertaker laid on me was the straw that slaughtered the camel’s back. Either way, the old days of going six, seven years at a time without getting hurt enough to require surgery were completely gone. Now, every time I wrestled I’d wind up getting cut on. At the very least I’d have to get my back shot up with steroids—not the muscle-building kind, but the medical kind.

The pain was so bad in my lower back, I actually had the nerves there burned just to quiet the agony. Doctors would scorch them from about five inches above my belt line all the way down to the crack of my butt—so that whole region would go completely numb. I used to tell people they could hit me with a shovel right there and I wouldn’t feel it.

I had my knees scoped so many times I accumulated a massive collection of crutches that lined the wall of my gym at the big house—right near the high-tech water-massage table that I’d lie in constantly just to get some relief.