My Life Outside the Ring (25 page)

Well, it turns out Linda’s decision wasn’t off base at all. Nick was real serious about his passion for Supras, even at that age. He spent all kinds of time reading about them and learning about them, and now he wanted to mess around with the engine and learn how to take it apart and put it back together.

The thing with these Supras, and Honda Civics, and some of these other little Japanese four-cylinder cars, is that just by switching a couple of hoses on the turbo you can get a big boost in horsepower out of them. With a fifteen-hundred-dollar conversion the thing can really put out some speed. With a few more modifications, like four or five grand, these vehicles can become full-on race cars.

That’s why there’s a whole cult following for these things. It even crossed over into Hollywood with those Fast and the Furious films. Nick was right in the thick of it from when he was twelve years old—begging me to take him up to Gainesville and all of these other towns for Supra meets on the weekends.

So all of a sudden, Hulk Hogan is standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart with all these car buffs coming up to me going, “What are you doing here?” For a while, that’s how I spent almost every weekend with my son. Heck, even Linda and Brooke got into it.

Before long, Nick knew the names of all the drivers and who owned what car. His enthusiasm was so great that he got the attention of some of those drivers, and started befriending some of the people he would eventually team up with when he got into racing. At fourteen he was becoming friends with guys who were nineteen and twenty. Their mutual love for these cars seemed to erase the age difference, and some of these guys saw a real promise in Nick as a potential driver someday.

As for Brooke, I was able to get her some big-time meetings in her early teens. As soon as it looked like she was serious about pursuing a career in music, I used the leverage of the Hulk Hogan name to get her off on the right foot.

When she was just fourteen, I managed to get her an audition with Lou Pearlman, the guy who had managed the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync. She was really excited. Who wouldn’t be? He didn’t hire her at first, though. In fact, he told her to go and work on her dance moves and learn to sing from her diaphragm—a term that refers to the breathing methods real singers use to support the notes rather than pushing all the sound through their throats the way your average karaoke singer might.

Brooke took it hard. No one ever wants to hear that they’re not good enough. Then she got to work. She was determined to win this guy over, and Brooke—like Nick—definitely has some of that drive to succeed like I did.

Almost a year later, I rented out a club at the Universal CityWalk in Orlando and brought Lou back to see Brooke perform. She won him over that time, and he signed her up.

Brooke was elated. She was living her dream by the age of fifteen. She went into a recording studio to produce her first single, a song called “Everything to Me.” Lou and I were set to become fifty-fifty partners supporting Brooke’s career—we’d both put up half the money to record her first album.

The one thing Lou suggested was that Brooke should look for a TV or film platform that would put her on an even playing field with the hot young female performers of the day. This was right around when Lindsay Lohan was trying to bridge the gap between film and music. Hilary Duff had become a major phenomenon through her tween-oriented TV show. Jessica Simpson, whose career was floundering (at best), found massive success in 2003 after shooting a reality TV show called
Newlyweds
with her husband, Nick Lachey. And by 2004, even Jessica’s little sister Ashlee was getting her own show and a record deal thanks to reality TV. So it definitely seemed the way to go.

Ever since rocker Ozzy Osbourne put his family on display for the world to see on MTV, and
The Osbournes
blew up into a massive overnight hit, a whole slew of producers kept approaching me to do a reality TV show myself. Most of them were pretty obvious ideas: “Let’s see Hulk Hogan make a huge comeback to wrestling, and film all the behind-the-scenes drama!” No thanks. I’d been there and done that with the comeback routine, and I didn’t want to do that again—especially with cameras in my face.

But right as we were trying to launch Brooke, VH1 came around with a different idea: They wanted to film a one-hour special called
(Inside)Out: Hulk Hogan, Stage Dad
. They had done a series of these specials, taking a different look at various celebrities’ lives, and this one would concentrate on my trying to help my daughter break into music.
Perfect,
I thought.

The VH1 crew was only scheduled to come out and follow the family around for three days, but on the second day of filming they asked if they could keep shooting for the next month. Right then and there I had my suspicions that they might offer us our own series. There’s no way they would have spent the money grabbing six hundred hours of footage if they didn’t really like what they saw.

What they wound up capturing on film that month was a side of Hulk Hogan that had never been seen before. They showed me as a dad, as a human being. This was around the time that I was getting my hip surgery, so rather than standing up as the ultimate “strong man,” I was down for the count. Linda was left in charge of everything that happened with Brooke’s career as I lay helpless—but supportive—in bed. All of it was captured for the audience to see.

Linda jumped at the chance to manage her daughter’s career. I think she really enjoyed calling the shots. Suddenly she was the big man in charge, so to speak.

Rather than commute to the recording studio in Orlando, Linda decided to temporarily relocate there with Brooke. She rented a townhouse and filled it up with new furniture. It was only about forty-five minutes away from the big house, but she was so excited about it. Even though Brooke only recorded two or three days a week, Linda would stay there, live there and not bother coming home. Looking back, it was really the first time that Linda took a step toward distancing herself from the life we’d built together.

And then, just as Brooke’s single was about to be released, I got a call from Lou Pearlman—he wanted to pull out of the deal. He said he loved my daughter but he was under pressure and couldn’t do it anymore.

That was it. I couldn’t convince him to stay and Brooke was crushed.

Her single came out and went straight to number one on the Billboard Singles chart. It stayed number one for eight weeks! It even broke into the Billboard Hot 100. I was so proud of her. Without Lou on board, though, the plans to finish an album by fall went right out the window. It was a major setback in her brand-new career.

As for the
(Inside)Out
special? It was the most successful
(Inside)Out
special VH1 had ever seen. Just as I predicted, the powers that be came and asked me if I’d be interested in turning this into a reality show. Not a reality show about Hulk Hogan, the wrestler, but a reality show about my whole family. I knew this could be a huge boost to Brooke’s career. I also knew it could be a huge boost to Nick as he got into racing.

But I had massive trepidations.

By the time
VH1 offered us this reality show, I already felt like the glue that held my family together had started to erode. Even though she moved back after a few months, this thing with Linda moving to Orlando with Brooke freaked me out. The arguing and cussing had gotten much worse in recent years, and it just seemed like Linda was headed in a whole different direction.

For one thing, to me it seemed like she was just tired of being a mom. It wasn’t just the breakfast thing, and sometimes leaving, letting the kids take care of themselves. It’s that she was actually talking to the kids about quitting school.

“Aw, school’s ridiculous,” she would say to them. “You don’t need to go to school today.”

There were lots of days when she’d keep Brooke home just to go shopping. Wow, great life lesson there. In a two-week period she would go to Wal-Mart eight or ten different times, and spend two or three grand each visit!

I guess it was fine. We had the money. But to take your daughter out of school to go with you? Or to go get her nails done? That’s not what a good parent does, is it?

Now, I realize she had to handle all the parenting duties by herself when I was on the road, and I know that parenting is a really, really difficult job. There’s never a day off. I get that. But was it really so bad that she had to try to weasel out of it at this important stage of our children’s lives? It would only be a few more years before the kids moved out, and then she could do whatever she wanted. Unfortunately, Linda hit a point where she no longer wanted to wait. For anything.

Around the time that Brooke’s record deal was heating up, Brooke was suffering some taunting from other girls at her Catholic high school. So Linda took that as a cue to finally convince Brooke to be home-schooled. Of course, once that happened, Nick was asking, “Why can’t I be home-schooled?” Eventually, we pulled him out of regular school, too.

The craziest thing of all started happening in 2004: Linda started disappearing. Just plain disappearing. We’d get in a fight over something, or she’d just blow up and I’d have no idea what set her off, then all of a sudden she’d get in her car and go. Gone. No one had any idea where she was. Not me. Not Brooke. Not Nick.

Sometimes she’d disappear for days.

So all of that was going on as we got offered this show. Plus, beyond all the behind-the-scenes strife, it just made me nervous that my wife and kids might not fully understand what kind of a commitment they were making.

One night, I sat them all down at the dinner table at the big house and I laid it all out for them. “It’s a ton of work,” I warned them, “and there’ll be no more privacy.” I tried to explain the depths of what that could mean, based on some of the bad press and negative things I’d been through in my own life and career—most of which happened when the kids were too young to remember.

“In some ways, doing this show might make you feel like you’re in prison. It might be a nice day outside and you just want to go hit the beach, but you can’t, because you’re stuck in the house filming from sunup till sundown, or later. You might want to run off to the mall, but you can’t, because you’re filming.”

At the end of my speech, I asked who wanted to do it—and everyone in the family raised their hands, enthusiastically.

As for me? I raised my hand, too. The fact that my wife and kids were all sitting there on the same page about something gave me hope. The idea that we would all be working together was heartwarming to me.

I actually remember thinking to myself,
Maybe this show will be the glue that puts my family back together.

Who Knows Best?

I remember when I first watched
The Osbournes
, I assumed that they must’ve had cameras in their house 24/7 and camera people following them everywhere they went just waiting for that magic to happen. How else could they have captured all that crazy material?

Of course, that isn’t the case with reality TV at all. Just like anything else in Hollywood, there are unions and crews and budgets to deal with. A production company (in our case an organization that called itself Pink Sneakers) isn’t going to pay the crew overtime and double time just to sit around when nothing’s happening. That’s why reality TV shows are soft-scripted.

In other words, they give you a scenario—hopefully something close to what you might encounter in your real life, or at least a pumped-up version of your real life—and they tell you the potential outcome, and some possible beats in between, and then you improvise and see what happens.

Sound familiar?

I’d been doing versions of this in the ring my whole career. Now I just had to do it with my Hulk Hogan personality toned down to somewhere just above the real Terry Bollea—so the familiar elements of Hulk Hogan would be there for the viewers, but the “reality” of my off-screen self would shine through.

A lot of people have a hard time with this stuff. It is a form of acting, in a way. As we started the first season, we all had to find our footing.

Brooke was no problem. She was the extrovert, the actress, the singer, from the moment she popped out of the womb. She’d go with the flow and always looked great on camera. The only thing the producers forced on her was to act all boy crazy. Brooke was more of a slow starter, like me, and she wasn’t boy crazy at sixteen at all. They needed that to make the show more interesting, though, and she went along with it.