My Life Outside the Ring (40 page)

It worked fine once or twice. Then there was a Friday when Linda didn’t show up at all. Nick had spoken to her over the phone, and she said she was out on the boat and was going to skip her visit that day.

She was out on the boat, she said, with Charlie.

Just as I was starting to feel better about my son’s condition in jail, I got hit with the news that Linda was dating a guy named Charlie Hill. A kid who went to school a year behind Brooke, and a year ahead of Nick.

My wife was dating a teenager.

Nick told me how she met this guy on the sand one day out in front of our beach house. How he started hanging around all the time before Nick’s sentencing. How Linda tried to push Brooke to hook up with him before she ever did.

Brooke found out Charlie and Linda were dating by accident. She walked into the big house on Willadel one day expecting to meet Linda for lunch, and all of a sudden as she walked up to her bedroom, she noticed Nick’s TV was on. Nick was in jail. Why was his TV on? She saw clothes all over the bed in his room, and three of Linda’s little dogs were there staring at the bathroom door, like they were waiting for somebody to come out. So she opened the bathroom door and found Charlie and some guy hiding from her in the bathroom. She recognized Charlie right away, but thought they had broken in or something—until Charlie told her he was actually living there and had been dating Linda.

Brooke was shocked. She didn’t believe him. She forced Charlie and his friend to leave the house and then called me all panicky, so I hopped in my car and went racing over there. At this point Linda was headed back to the house, too, and when she saw me driving by she called the cops. She then followed me while she was on the phone with the 911 operator, accusing me of stalking her and threatening her life and claiming that she had an injunction against me! I wound up getting pulled over—which wound up all over the TV and gossip Web sites. It was just a mess. The police apologized to me in the end. Linda didn’t have any injunction against me. But the damage was done.

Apparently Linda was embarrassed to be dating a nineteen-year-old, because even after that incident, even after Charlie admitted the situation to Brooke, Linda kept insisting that Charlie was only a friend. She even said they were “just friends” in an interview with a national magazine.

A few weeks down the road she finally admitted it to Nick. Her rationale? “Don’t you want me to be happy, Nick?” I can’t believe she made our son respond to that question. From jail. Of course he wanted his mother to be happy—but was this really what it took to make her happy?

Linda even started bringing Charlie along for her jailhouse visits. That really freaked Nick out. I just couldn’t believe the audacity of that.

People started telling me about seeing Linda on the beach, Linda on the boat, Linda hanging out with all these dock rats and young Clearwater kids at all the local hot spots and bars. It’s like she was a totally different person. She hated going out on the boat. She hated the wind at the beach. She never wanted to go out to bars.

She never wanted to do any of those things with me. I kept questioning,
Why?
Was it just me? Was she trying to go back to the age she was before we met? Was she trying to relive her youth? I didn’t get it, but whatever it was, it sure didn’t seem healthy.

There were times during those visits when I’d take the phone from Linda to do my last ten minutes with Nick, and the handset would reek from the alcohol on her breath. She started missing those visits more often as well, and with no notice at all. Here I was flying in from California for that precious half hour, and she couldn’t make it from fifteen minutes away.

I could have kept getting angry. I could have flipped out on Linda. I could have flipped out on Charlie. I didn’t, though, and I thank God for that. I thank God that I put myself on a new path before any of these situations presented themselves. I think about the alternate course my life could have taken under all that stress and pressure. What if I hadn’t gotten my head on straight? Is it possible that Hulk Hogan could have become just like some of these other wrestlers who’ve taken their own lives in recent years? Could I have turned into something worse?

Many months later I made an unfortunate comment to a magazine about this subject, suggesting that I “understood” what O.J. Simpson did. Out of context, it made me seem like some kind of a monster. All I meant by that statement was that as my life started to unravel at the end of 2007, I peered over the fence of reason and saw what insanity and rage look like. I never came close to jumping that fence. But when your whole world falls apart and you start thinking about taking your own life, there’s a lot of darkness. Without help, it can get real hard to see in the dark. I was lucky enough to find some light—through Laila,
The Secret
, the Bible, Jennifer, and embracing the spirit of Christ once again—I was able to choose an entirely different path. I’ve walked so far down that path now that the fence separating me from any sort of insanity and rage isn’t even visible in the distance anymore.

Starting that summer of 2008, I just prayed that Linda would find happiness. I really did. I started keeping a journal next to my bed that summer, and every morning when I got up I would write down all of the things I was grateful for. The lists I made included plenty of things that weren’t real yet. (That all goes back to the law of attraction again.) I said I was grateful for my back being totally healed. I said I was grateful for Nick getting out of jail stronger than he ever imagined he could be. And every morning I wrote down how grateful I was for Linda finding happiness. I meant that. I still write those words down. Every day. Just for her.

Facing the Fans

As I slowly refocused my life, becoming more aware of every action I took and every thought I had, I neglected one very important area: my public image.

I knew I was choosing to move in a more positive direction by not speaking out to the media throughout the demise of the marriage, and Nick’s ordeal, and the release of those tapes. The problem was nobody else knew it.

My fans were left to come to their own conclusions about what I had become based only on the words of others. The only message the public heard about Hulk Hogan for almost an entire year had come from Linda and her attorneys, the Grazianos and their attorneys, bloggers, DJs, and Nancy Grace—the CNN
Headline News
personality who took up Hogan-bashing as a full-time job in the wake of Nick’s accident.

By June of 2008, I was operating on such a different plane and acting in such a calmer, more rational fashion than I ever had before, some of my friends in the wrestling business said they didn’t even recognize me. I stopped complaining all the time. I stopped bashing Linda’s antics. It’s like I exhaled all that bad energy and let my shoulders relax for the first time in years. Maybe the first time ever in my adult life.

“You’re like a whole different person,” Eric Bischoff said to me as we started working together on
Celebrity Championship Wrestling
.

“That might be true,” I said, “but this is the real me.”

Brutus Beefcake was so surprised by my change in demeanor that he went out and started reading
The Secret
and all these other books, too.

The public didn’t know any of that. They had no clue. In fact, if you added up all the horrible things that were being said about me, you’d have thought I was nothing more than a cheating husband who stalked Linda, encouraged his kids to drink and drive, and blamed John Graziano for his own condition!

For a long time I didn’t care how the public perceived me. Honestly, I knew I needed to get my head on straight before I could deal with anything outside of my own life and family situation. Then all of a sudden Eric and my publicist Elizabeth Rosenthal and Brutus and every one of my attorneys, including David Houston—all of the people I trust to look after my image, my career, and even my family’s well-being—came at me simultaneously with the very same message: “You need to respond or you won’t have a career to come back to.”

So finally, in early June, I decided it was time to come out of my little spiritual cocoon.

Talking about all of this, especially my son’s accident, would not be easy. This was delicate territory, and the last thing I could afford to do was to make another mistake like I had on Arsenio’s show in 1991. My image had already suffered too much without my direct involvement.

What I said was almost as important as where I said it. I didn’t want anything to seem sensational. I didn’t want to make it seem like I was somehow trying to promote myself, when all I wanted to do at this point was let my fans hear my side of the story firsthand.

I worked closely with Elizabeth, who stuck by me through this entire ordeal and somehow saved me from having to answer every tabloid headline. I also hired a crisis management PR firm in Los Angeles, just as backup in case anything got worse. It cost me a fortune, but I didn’t want to take any risks this time.

In the end, I think the only thing I needed was the biggest weapon I already had in my arsenal: honesty.

I had crossed that bridge in my personal life once and for all. True open honesty was it for me now. With my kids. With my ex. In my business dealings. Everything. I knew it wouldn’t be any different when it came to talking in public.

Within a couple of weeks we decided on two press outlets known for their fairness and journalistic integrity:
People
magazine and Larry King. That was it. I wouldn’t go on a media tour. I wouldn’t appear on late-night talk shows or early-morning broadcasts. I would let my words speak for themselves. I would give my fans the chance to make up their minds who
they
wanted to believe—the naysayers and haters who were trying to burn me at the stake, or me, the man they’d grown up with and watched and embraced both in and out of the ring for the last thirty years.

It actually felt good to talk about it all. It was cathartic in a way to finally speak out and just tell someone outside of my immediate circle what I’d been through, and what I was still going through. Plus, I felt it was so important that I shift some of the focus back to John Graziano, so the public would be thinking about his healing and sending positive thoughts and prayers his way after reading or listening to what I had to say.

I answered Larry King’s questions as honestly as I possibly could. There was no acting or putting on airs. I just spoke to him, from the heart, and I think people could tell. I answered
People
magazine’s questions the same way. Once I had said my piece, I went back to my life. I went back to Jennifer. I went back to making my new TV show. I went back to spending time with Brooke; we finally saw eye to eye after all we’d been through, and she even moved back in with me for a while. I went back to visiting my son every hour I possibly could for the remainder of his time in jail.

It felt good. I somehow felt like I had completed a big step in my journey. It was out of my hands now. I was grateful that those big media outlets still embraced me in a way that allowed me to say what I had to say.

In fact, the only downside to it was the effect it seemed to have on Linda. It put her on the defensive, even though I did my best not to say anything too negative about her at all in those interviews.

Right in the middle of it, her lawyer stood up and proclaimed to the world that this divorce was going to be a war. He was actually quoted saying that to
People
magazine, in a rebuttal quote they included in my story.

A war?
I remember thinking what a terrible thing that was. For the two of us. For our kids. Linda already knew I was willing to give her half of everything at that point. I was happy to give her whatever a judge deemed was her share. She deserved it. We had been married twenty-three years. That wasn’t enough for her. It seemed like she wanted to try to destroy me. And that just made me sad for her.

I kept asking myself,
What kind of a person wants to turn their divorce into a war?

Chapter 20

Revelations

Sometimes, asking a question is
all it takes for the universe to suddenly provide you with answers.

With all of these questions about Linda on my mind, I went back and reread
A New Earth
—and suddenly I saw things I had never seen before. Starting on page 129 I came across a description of something so familiar to me it felt like it was specifically written about my wife.