Death Clutch

by Brock Lesnar

  I had no problem laying down for Bill Goldberg for my final match, even though I had been told I was set up to squash him in thirty seconds. I guess they were more pissed at me for leaving than they were pissed at Bill for doing the same thing.

  Bill wasn’t Vince’s guy. To Vince, Bill was a WCW creation, a carpetbagger. So Bill got to spear me and beat me at WrestleMania. But no one in the Garden cared. They were too busy booing us both out of the building because they knew we were leaving. The best part of the match was Austin stunning us.

  Bill’s my kind of guy. Neither of us wanted to be in the ring that last night—we just wanted to collect our checks and be done. It wouldn’t have mattered if we had been buddies and had hung out together in WWE, because you’re so numb there anyway, you have to take everything with a grain of salt. It’s better that we got to know each other away from there, because that’s when we both realized we could have a friendship. In WWE, we were just two big miserable SOBs. Once we were both outside of the company, we realized we had a lot in common.

  Bill is a straight-up guy who got in to get out. I respect that. He wants to do a job he enjoys. You know that Bill could be sitting in the TNA locker room right now, milking every paycheck he can get out of them just like the other so-called “legends.” But that’s not Bill. He wanted to play with his son, work on his cars, and do a few TV spots for cash. Bill was the ringside commentator for my first MMA fight, and we’ve been good friends ever since.

  It’s funny that we were both “seek and destroy” behemoths in pro wrestling, and wrapped it up together at WrestleMania. I never spent any time with Bill before that last day, but because he was so cool, I was open to us becoming friends once we got out.

  So, I did WrestleMania, and I went home in March 2004—no longer a champion, and no longer a pro wrestler. I was about to try my hand at the NFL.

  PART III

  THE SWORD AT MY THROAT

  MY BRIEF NFL EXPERIENCE

  After getting out of WWE in the spring of 2004, I started chasing after a career in the NFL. But it didn’t matter what sport I was going after. I was escaping the WWE lifestyle. The NFL made sense to me. It was legitimate competition, and I wanted to compete.

  I went shopping for a football agent, and the first person I called was a guy by the name of Mike Morris, who was a longtime long-snapper for the Minnesota Vikings. Back when I was wrestling for the Gophers, I met Mike through the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I was invited out to his MILO gym to lift some weights. That gym got a lot of notoriety, because Mike would talk about it all the time on KFAN radio in Minneapolis. In case you’re wondering, MILO stands for “Mike’s Insane Lifting Order.”

  Mike Morris and I hit it off pretty good because we were both guys who just loved to crank up the music in the gym and do squats until we were bleeding out of our noses. My weight-training routine at the University of Minnesota was my own program, and I started training with Mike in between my junior and senior year. I looked up to Mike because he was successful, had a good family, nice kids, nice wife, a very decent life.

  The MILO Gym was in Mike’s basement. His whole basement was a gym. Since I knew Mike, he knew he could be honest with me. In that first phone call, he couldn’t believe I was getting out of WWE. “You must be nuts!” he said. “You want to walk away from a sure thing, guaranteed millions of dollars for ten years, so you can go after something that has maybe a five percent chance for you to make the transition? You haven’t played football since high school!”

  I appreciated his honesty.

  I told Mike I was serious. I had jumped off the train and I was done with WWE. I wanted to pursue this goal, and I was going to give it my all. Mike accepted everything I told him, and told me he would be 100 percent behind me. He proved that to be a truthful statement because he introduced me to John Wolf, who used to represent a few NBA players and a few NFL players, but was now kind of out of the mix. He referred me to Ed Hitchcock.

  Ed was a Minnesota boy, a University of Minnesota grad, and a sports agent. I liked him, so we went to work right away. Ed put this game plan together. “You gotta get in football shape,” he told me, “so we need to get you down to Arizona as soon as possible. There’s a facility down there called Athlete’s Performance, where all of the top NFL players, and top athletes from all over the world, go.”

  I took Ed’s advice and headed south. When I got down there, one of the first guys I met was a midwestern boy named Luke Richesson. He grew up on the Kansas-Missouri border, and was one of the trainers. Luke did a little wrestling and had played some college football, but he just lacked size. Luke more than made up for that, though, because he was a stick of dynamite.

  Today, Luke is the head strength coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars, and he’s also my strength and conditioning coach. I consider Luke one of the vital members of Team DeathClutch.

  When I got down to Phoenix, I stayed at the Marriott for a little while, but that got old fast. It was like being in the wrestling business that I had just escaped, sleeping in a hotel every night. So I rented a condo and started getting my head into the game.

  I got up every day, ate breakfast, and put everything I had into Luke’s conditioning program. My whole life was about working out. In the meantime, Rena was still on the road with WWE, and she was flying into Phoenix to be with me. I didn’t like the fact that she was in that environment anymore. I already knew she was the woman that I wanted to be with for the rest of my life, but she wasn’t ready to let go of her career yet.

  I guess I can’t really blame Rena for not walking out when I did. We weren’t married, I had just made myself unemployed, and the odds of a guy who never played college football making an NFL roster were not good. But none of that stopped me from trying to get her to quit.

  I hated it when Rena was on the road. There is a lot of testosterone in the business, and I was worried about what some jackass might do or say to her. But Rena is a remarkable woman, and she can take care of herself. She did finally leave the WWE, but not because they were treating her wrong or anything like that. She didn’t do it because they disrespected her. She left for me. My wife is an amazing woman.

  Training for a football career I didn’t yet have was a little weird for me. My whole life was in limbo, but everything was looking good. I was getting in football shape, and my workout numbers were off the charts for speed, strength, and agility. In head-to-head tests, I was blowing NFL players away, and I was getting noticed.

  I was right on track for my pro-day, where teams were scheduled to come in and watch me work out. I planned to finish my six-week program, do my pro-day, then fly home and see my daughter. Everything was going great—until April 19, 2004.

  I had left my motorcycle in my buddy “Crazy’s” custom bike shop in Minneapolis. It was a Harley chopper, and he was tricking it out and making it into one badass bike. I was getting it all beefed up. I must have put $70,000 into that machine.

  When I got home, it started out to be a great day. Mya was with me, and I was playing with her on the couch. My old college roommate, Jesse Sabot, and his brother were visiting, and my brother was staying in my basement. I liked having all these good people around me.

  Then I decided to go pick up my bike and see what Crazy had done to it. I was blown away. I was the King of the Road on that thing.

  I ripped out of Crazy’s parking lot on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, and headed home. My whole agenda for the weekend was to relax, recover from the training week, and spend time with Mya. A nice bike ride on a beautiful day seemed like the perfect prescription for me.

  Jesse and his brother, my brother, and the rest of the crew had all come down to see the bike, and they were following me home. When I was showing off as we left the parking lot, the rear tire kicked out on me, and I realized this bike had some serious juice to it.

  I blew through the intersection, and saw the light
at the next turning from red to green as I sped down the street. Up ahead I see this car, and it looked like it was going straight, and there was a van ahead of the car pulling over into the turn lane in front of me. I planned to get behind the van and make the same turn. But then, all of a sudden, the woman driving the minivan who almost killed me decided she was going to cut me off and beat me to the turn, which left me nowhere to go. She was right beside me and moving closer, the van was in front of me blocking the turn lane, there was traffic coming toward me from the other direction, and there was traffic behind me. I had nowhere to go, and when I hit the brakes, it didn’t do much good. It all seemed like it was happening in slow motion. I was going forty-five in a twenty-five. By the time I hit the van, I had only slowed to thirty-nine miles an hour.

  I went face-first into that minivan, then up and over the top. My bike went underneath. Torn into three pieces.

  After I landed on the street and stopped rolling, I jumped up to my feet and ran to the sidewalk. I was full of adrenaline, and was thinking that I had got really lucky. I remember feeling a sharp pain in my abdomen area when I hit the van, but I had no idea my jaw was broken, along with eight bones in my left hand. I also didn’t know that the sharp pain I felt was my groin muscles being ripped from the bone. The pain didn’t start to set in until the ambulance and the cops showed up. I figured out later that the handlebars of my motorcycle had gone right into my pubic bone at thirty-nine miles an hour.

  My brother was telling the EMTs, “He’s fine, everything’s okay!,” but as soon as I sat down, I figured out I had not only totaled my bike, but had wrecked my body, too. Still, I didn’t want to get in the ambulance to go to the hospital, so Jesse drove me.

  They told me at the hospital I didn’t have any internal bleeding, but they ran down the list of injuries I did have. Broken jaw. Broken left hand. Bruised pelvis. Pulled my groin so severely, it’s painful for me to even list it here six years later. I had just gone through six or seven weeks at Athlete’s Performance to get into top physical condition. I was 298 pounds, doing high-impact weight training. I pissed it all away in about three seconds.

  The first call I made was to Luke, and then to my football agent.

  The only thing that held me together through that crash was the fact my body was rigid as hell. That weight training I had done with Luke saved my life. I could still talk because even though I broke my jaw, I refused to have it wired shut. My hand was in a small cast, which would stop my progress somewhat, but the worst thing was my groin injury. That was going to take forever to heal. There is no cast for that, no quick fix.

  If I had any hope of making an NFL roster, and more importantly, if I was going to escape WWE, I knew there was only one choice. Injuries or not, I had to train.

  I was pretty happy with my progress in the gym before the crash. I was bench-pressing 405, sets of eight; safety-squatting 860 pounds; and even though I weighed almost three hundred pounds, I was running a 4.67-second forty-yard dash. That was nearly running-back speed. I had NFL scouts interested in me.

  But now, with my pro-day only two weeks away, I was all busted up. I was thinking maybe God wanted me to slow my ass down. I had just left pro wrestling, which I thought was smart; but then I jumped on my chopper and took off like there was no tomorrow, which was really a dumb-ass thing for me to do. Yes, I wanted to be a football player. First, though, I needed to get everything in perspective. It was a time for me to be looking at the more important things in life.

  I went back to Phoenix and started recovery training. Lots of rehab—massage work, lifting weights, all sorts of exercises.

  I couldn’t do any directional movement, because I could hardly walk due to how badly my groin was pulled. I was in so much pain at the time that I couldn’t even run in a straight line. No pro-day for me.

  Three weeks went by, and my times and weight numbers were picking up, although my groin was healing a lot slower than I would have liked. But just when I was starting to think I had missed my shot at football, the Minnesota Vikings called. They wanted me to come up and work out for them. There was no way I was going to pass up this chance.

  I was up front with the Vikings, and told them about my accident. When I worked out for them, they knew I could have done much better if I hadn’t been hurt, and they decided to give me another month to heal, and then they were going to look at me again right before training camp. My injuries were so severe that there was no way I was going to get through an eight-week NFL training camp, but Luke really helped me get back into the best shape I could be in, all things considered.

  Once I got to the training camp, it was right back to the Vicodin and anti-inflammatories. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true, and I’m not going to sugarcoat or bullshit anyone in this book. I got through that training camp, and I was probably three-quarters of the man I should’ve been and maybe even less than that. Maybe I was only half the man I should have or could have been—but I was still the last guy cut from the squad.

  I was proud of myself. There were guys who trained their whole lives to get to the NFL, and who were superstars for major college football teams, and they got cut. I played a little high school football, jumped on and off the WWE train, worked out with Luke for a few weeks, crashed my bike, busted myself up pretty good, and almost made it.

  I know some people didn’t believe me at the time, but getting cut wasn’t a huge deal for me. I never thought of myself as a football player. I was just trying to do anything but pro wrestling. I just wanted to change everything about my life. I went pretty damn far during my little flirtation with the NFL, but when it didn’t work out for me, I had to come to grips with the fact that I was unemployed, and I had a noncompete agreement that said I couldn’t earn a living by being associated with, or appearing for, any wrestling or fighting organization in the world. Except, of course, the one owned by Vince McMahon.

  I swallowed my pride, and had David Olsen get in touch with WWE for me. They said that Vince didn’t want me back.

  THE SWORD

  All of a sudden my problems were mounting. I missed the NFL by an inch. IRS problems. A legal battle over my visitation rights regarding my daughter, Mya. No money coming in, and not that many options left because I signed that stupid noncompete clause with WWE. I had no one to blame but myself. My lawyers warned me not to sign that noncompete agreement, but I was in such a rush to get out of there, I got impatient and put my signature on that piece of paper.

  That cost me a lot of time and money. I guess this is where I’m supposed to say “you live and learn,” but it still burns me to this day how much money I lost because they knew I was miserable and wanted to break away from their company.

  With all these pressures piling up, one on top of the other, I was depressed. Every day, I was drinking more and more vodka, chasing down more and more Vicodins. This was exactly where I was in WWE, except now I wasn’t pulling in big money anymore. I was quickly burning through what money I had, and I had no clue what I was going to do next. I had walked away from my wrestling career, so that door was shut. Thanks to the noncompete clause, so was every other door, too.

  I was angry. I was drunk. I was pilled up. I was going to do damage to someone or something. My first victim? Myself!

  I ended up at a biker bar in Phoenix, right next door to which—and this may come as a big shock to you—there just so happened to be a tattoo parlor. I felt like life was holding a sword right up against my throat, so I went under the ink gun because I never wanted to forget exactly how I felt at that time.

  The bad times only make you appreciate the good times even more, and if I was ever told that I could only keep one tattoo, this one of the sword pointing right up against my throat is the one I’d keep. I wouldn’t even have to think about the answer. This tattoo on my chest has so much meaning to me. In some ways, it’s funny, because the period of my life that I’m talking about is a time I
so want to forget, but I know I can use this memory as motivation. And just in case I ever start slipping up, I have this sword right across my torso as a constant reminder of all the things that changed my life.

  I look at that sword almost like it was a family crest. It’s my inspiration to fight back, because if there’s one thing I know deep in my heart about myself, it’s that I am not a quitter. I am a warrior, and I will never let anything or anyone—be it the NFL or Vince McMahon—keep me down!

  “RENA, WILL YOU MARRY ME?”

  Everywhere I looked, all I could see was uncertainty. But there was one thing I was sure of: I wanted to marry Rena. However, before I could do this, I needed her to get out of WWE. “If we want a relationship,” I told her, “neither one of us can work for that company. We both know the long-term side effects of everything there.”

  That was my only demand. Nothing else. Just that.

  And so she left World Wrestling Entertainment. She had worked so hard to get back into that company, and now she was leaving it again, except this time she was giving up her career for me. It couldn’t have been an easy decision. I was all stressed out, my future was up in the air, and my daughter was still very young. Like all couples, we had some differences to work through, but Rena was willing to do whatever it would take to make things work. She deserves a lot of credit, because at that time, I was just creating controversy everywhere I turned.

  One day, of course, I pushed things too far, and Rena decided that she’d had enough of my bullshit. She was smart enough to pack her bags and go back to her own house in Florida.

  I knew she was the woman I was going to marry, and I also knew I’d screwed up by driving her away. I started calling her, but she wasn’t going to make it easy for me. I guess I should have taken the hint after a week of her not taking my calls. As things turned out, I’m glad I didn’t take the hint.