The Hardcore Truth

by Bob Holly

  Some people think that if you take steroids, you’ll automatically get huge. That’s not the case. Steroids help you heal faster. Given the nature of what we do and all the bumps involved, they help a lot. They allow you to work out harder and recover faster, and that is where you see the growth. If you don’t work out, you’re not going to see a damn change beyond looking bulkier because steroids increase water retention too. In the ’80s, some of the guys were just bulky because they took a lot of steroids. Then there were guys who were big and shredded because they took steroids and did everything else properly too. You’ve got to diet, eat right, and work out, otherwise you might as well not bother. The steroids just help you along. Because I wasn’t really overdoing it, I never had any side effects that were noticeable. Taking a synthetic testosterone stops your body from producing its own testosterone naturally. Deca is one of the cleanest steroids you can use and you can stay on it all year. I cycled on and off the Test but once I was on the Deca I stayed on it until I came off for good.

  When they brought in the Wellness policy, we were told by management that tests were going to be random and regular, everybody was eligible to be tested, and anybody who tested positive for any banned substance would be suspended unless they had a valid prescription. We were also told that the office had no say in who would be suspended; that would be down to the company running our testing. But the whole program was a joke. Certain guys started losing weight and muscle mass, but other guys stayed the same size. Go back and look and you’ll see who was on and who was off.

  Right away, I started phasing out the Deca. I got a prescription for the testosterone, because I still needed that and it was medically authorized and all above-board. I kept working out hard and I don’t think coming off made that much difference. I lost about 10 pounds or so but I didn’t lose much size. It was more difficult for a lot of the other guys. Some probably lost their jobs because of the testing. Rob Conway, for example, was a guy who needed a little chemical assistance to present the expected image. They used him quite a bit because he looked great but once they started drug testing, Rob didn’t know what he was going to do. He told me, “If I can’t be on the gas, I can’t wrestle.” He was going to be like a stick figure without the steroids. He got smaller, he got less TV time, he wasn’t over, he ended up getting released. I felt bad for him.

  Wrestling is an image industry. WWE marketing has always exaggerated the stats on their guys to make them seem more impressive — telling people they’re taller or heavier than they are. I’m legit 6'1" like I was billed, and I’m taller than a lot of guys who were billed at 6'3". Likewise, when I was at 228 pounds for real, they were billing Christian as heavier than me, and he’s about 180 pounds soaking wet! A while ago, Vince insisted that he wanted people announced at their legit weights but that didn’t last long. Having Rey Mysterio at 150 pounds wrestling for the World Heavyweight title didn’t look too good, so they went back to billing him heavier — it’s all about image. There is a lot of pressure in that company about image and people get let go over it all the time.

  It became clear to me that something was not right with the policy when Ken Kennedy got suspended for steroids. Around that time, Ken was riding with another guy who was on the gas. Ken would call the guy in Florida he got his stuff from and would then hand the phone over so his buddy could put in his order. They ordered at the exact same time, got tested at the same time, but only Ken got suspended. Ken was floating around in the mid-card. The other guy was being groomed for the top. That right there told me that it wasn’t the lab that was handing out the suspensions.

  The policy is there so that WWE can show Congress that they’re doing it, but there’s a huge double standard when it comes to the results. The guys who don’t draw money are the ones who get suspended and made examples of. If any of the top guys get caught violating the policy, they get off light because they make money for the company. Undertaker and Flair refused point blank to take the test. They wouldn’t do it — they told management that they would sooner walk out. Triple H, John Cena, and Batista all got tested. I can guarantee that because I stood in line with them, but I’ve got to question their results, since they were the only ones who didn’t shrink in size. Look at Chris Masters — he shrank to about half his size when they brought steroid testing in. It didn’t help that Hunter kept bringing attention to how much Chris had shrunk and fucking with his head about it. That was pretty low, if you ask me.

  Go look at the guys who didn’t shrink once they brought in the testing — top guys earning top money. Like many things, if you’re able to throw money at a problem, you can usually find a way around it. The WWE’s Wellness Policy has blood tests every six months for specific things; the blood goes off to a lab and gets tested for HIV, hepatitis, and conditions like that. It does not get tested for steroids. The drug testing is done by urinalysis and by a completely different lab. Urine testing can show testosterone, Deca, and a host of other steroids, but my understanding is that it can’t show human growth hormone. If you’ve got a legal prescription for your testosterone and combine it with HGH, that’s a great combination for building muscle and getting around the Wellness policy but it costs. HGH runs to a couple of grand a month, so only top guys can afford it. Deca was $150 for a 10cc bottle that would last a few months. That’s the sort of thing that the underneath guys can afford. When I was there, it was hard to get to be a top guy without being on something, so a lot of people had to take their chances with the cheaper stuff and hope they didn’t get caught.

  It was different with smoking dope. Vince told us that we would not get suspended if our test results showed marijuana in our systems, but we would get fined. It was $1,000 when I was there. I believe it’s gone up to $2,500 since. That puzzles me because marijuana is just as illegal as steroids. If you get pulled over by the police and they find you’ve got pot in your car, you’re gonna be in trouble. I thought it was strange that they’d suspend you for steroids but only fine you for pot. Then I figured it out — most of the top guys smoked pot and had no intention of stopping. If Vince had to suspend everybody who tested positive for marijuana, his roster would have basically been me, C.M. Punk, and a handful of others. In any other form of athletics, if you’re caught smoking pot, you’re gone. WWE basically gave you a slap on the wrist for pot and a kick out the door for steroids. That strikes me as a huge double standard.

  Personally, I’d much rather be in the ring with a guy who is gassed to the gills than a guy who is high as a kite. Trevor Murdoch and Lance Cade were two of the biggest repeat offenders for pot; they were constantly being fined. I had to work with them a lot and I did not like it one bit. They would smoke on the way to the arena and fly high through our match — they could have seriously hurt me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no problem with a person if they want to smoke pot; I just don’t think they should smoke it right before they go in the ring with me and I put my life in their hands!

  I got suspended for steroids one time. I had a call from Dr. Black, the man they had in charge of the whole Wellness program. He told me that they had found Deca in my system and asked me for my prescription. Even though I gave it to them and everything was in order, they suspended me a month without pay. I asked him who was making the call on the suspension and he flat-out told me it was Vince. WWE had told us all that the decisions on suspensions were out of their hands but Dr. Black told me that everything went through Vince. I asked him about the pot fines too and he said those were also Vince’s call. Dr. Black told me that if he had it his way, all of the pot smokers would be suspended too. I guess I was just another underneath guy set up as a scapegoat so the top guys could get away with it . . . it pisses me off, because if Congress decided to investigate WWE’s policy and tested properly across the board, they’d get very different results.

  People always make a big deal about steroids. I never understood the judgmental attitude. Drinking alcohol is far worse for you than doing st
eroids and almost everybody drinks. I don’t judge people if they want to do that. You do your thing and I’ll do mine. How many people do you hear about who die from steroid abuse each year? Very few. How many people die from alcohol abuse? Many, many more. If you watch those reality jail shows, most of the people are drunk off their asses. People make stupid, fatal decisions when drunk and not in the right state of mind. People die every day from drunk drivers. And consider the effect alcohol has elsewhere on the body. Sure, steroids can weaken the heart when taken in excess. Alcohol in excess weakens the heart, the liver, and the kidneys, on top of hugely affecting the brain. People die of alcohol poisoning, cirrhosis of the liver, and so on. Alcohol is far more easily available than steroids and more socially acceptable, so people drink it every day without a second thought. They look in the mirror and say, “Yes, I have a drink but I don’t abuse it.” That’s the same as me saying, “Yes, I took some steroids but I didn’t abuse it.” People don’t see it that way though. The way I see it, it’s my body, I’ll put whatever I want in it. I don’t drink alcohol but if you want to put that in your body, it’s your call. I’m not going to look down on you for making that decision.

  Because of what steroids are and the sort of people who usually take them, the deaths that can be connected with steroid use tend to be of high-profile guys. You don’t get laymen dying from steroid abuse but you damn sure get them dying from alcohol misuse. Look at the statistics — alcohol is one of the biggest killers in the world. Not steroids. It’s just so easy to point at steroids whenever anything goes wrong and claim “’roid rage” but I’ll tell you this — I never got mad because I’d taken steroids. I got mad because I’m human and I get mad sometimes! Everybody gets mad. If an old guy is driving down the highway and gets pissed off because somebody cuts him off, does that mean Grandpa is on the gas?! Everybody blows a gasket from time to time; if the guy happens to be on steroids, it’s just an easy excuse.

  PART 14: WORKING OUT AND EATING RIGHT

  When I started going to the gym, I kind of skipped around and didn’t have a routine. It didn’t get me very far. If you’re going to spend time in the gym, you need to learn how to work out properly. I learned this when I started working out with Sid. I still do the workouts now that I did back then. I’ve never lifted particularly heavy weights; I’ve focussed more on reps. I used to bench over 400 pounds but it made no sense to me, so I cut back to 225. A wrestler’s body gets abused night after night — heavy lifting puts pressure on your joints, so why abuse your joints more than you have to? You can still grow and look big lifting lighter. You’ve just got to make sure you are pushing yourself to the point of struggling on the last rep.

  I lift for 45 minutes to an hour, maximum. I work out fast and superset everything. I do one exercise, then go straight into another one. So, for example, on chest day I would do 15 reps with 185 pounds on the bench press, jump off, grab some dumbbells, and do a set of 15 flies right away. Rest for 45 seconds and do it all over again. Four or five sets of that will wear you out. Then I would superset incline dumbbell presses and dips, and finish up with cable crossovers into push-ups. That’s a damn good chest workout. Some days, I’ll change it up to shock the muscles into growth. You’ve got to try different things to find out what works best.

  I’ll work out five days a week and split my week so Wednesday and Sunday are rest days. I focus on one main area per day in my lifting. I do chest one day, then back, then shoulders, then arms (biceps and triceps together), and then legs. When I’m done lifting, I do 45 minutes to an hour of cardio on a stepmill.

  It’s all about what you eat. You can work out as much as you want but if you don’t eat correctly, you’re going to look bad regardless. You’ve got to eat regularly to keep your metabolism going. If you don’t eat, your body shuts down and starts storing fat, so you need to eat small meals regularly. I’m lucky — my metabolism is fast, even now that I’m 50 years old. I can eat almost anything I want and stay lean. It’s crazy. I eat every three hours or so. If you eat squeaky clean, you can lose weight without working out. Alcohol is one of the worst things you can consume; it’ll put weight on you in a heartbeat.

  Camping in Iowa, 2012.

  Generally, I eat a lot of chicken, fish, turkey, red meat, eggs (including the yolks), quinoa, couscous, brown rice, roasted asparagus, sweet potatoes, spinach, and protein shakes. To lean out quickly, I don’t eat carbs. No pasta, no white rice, and no bread. If you are not taking in any carbs, the only thing to burn is fat. Your body always burns carbs before fat, therefore if there are no carbs to burn, you will burn off fat. If you follow a high-protein, high-fat, no-carb diet for a few weeks, your body will burn fat and lean you out. This should only be done for short intervals at a time.

  The best time to work out is in the morning, but you should always fuel your body before you go. It’s like a car — if you don’t put gas in, you can’t go. If you go to the gym with no fuel, you’re going to peter out. You need something that gives you energy. I’ll eat turkey and eggs in a wholewheat tortilla, then have some oatmeal with protein powder and I’m good to go. There are enough slow-burning carbs in there to get me through my workout. I also recommend drinking plenty of water and having some coffee in the morning — that helps with metabolism too.

  Above all else, don’t overcomplicate things. People think getting in shape is complicated but it really isn’t. You’ve just got to be smart. The truth is that you are what you eat. If you eat bad, you’ll look bad. End of story. Eat sensibly and work out, and you’ll look and feel better.

  CHAPTER 32

  BOB’S BACK . . . NEEDS 25 STITCHES

  I was home for the first half of 2006, recovering from my latest elbow surgery. After the staph infection had cleared up, we’d been able to go through with the surgery. But I needed both of my elbows taken care of and the surgeons wouldn’t do them at the same time. I had to let my left elbow heal before they did my right elbow. Just like the time I broke my arm, I was so limited in what I could do that it was driving me insane. I wasn’t supposed to lift anything. I basically wasn’t supposed to do anything, or so it seemed. My doctor knew I loved riding dirt bikes and specifically said, “No riding.” I told him no problem, but do you think I listened to him for long? I was so tired of lying around, doing absolutely nothing, so as soon as my elbows felt decent, I loaded my dirt bike up and headed out to the motocross track. It was during the week, so I was the only one out there. I was feeling pretty good, going fast and jumping. I came up to a “table top,” which was about a sixty or seventy foot jump. It was designed so that when you hit it, you’d sail through the air and try to land on the downside, avoiding the dirt wall, and then go about your business. The left side of the takeoff had a lip on, which kicked the back tire up. It would make you nose-dive before the landing, and that was an uncomfortable feeling. I moved to the right on the jump to correct that.

  A couple of other guys showed up when I’d been riding for about 45 minutes. One of them started racing me. “All right then — let’s do this,” I thought. After all those months of nothing, it was great to be doing something again. The wind was picking up, I was going faster, and this guy was coming up behind me when I went up the table top jump. I hit the ramp at a good clip but I hit it too far to the right. That big dirt wall was right there, and I knew I was in trouble. I bailed off the bike in mid air — just let it go — and slammed into the side of that dirt wall with the elbow I’d just had surgery on. I tried to push myself up and found I couldn’t do it. I thought I’d broken my collarbone. The guy behind me had almost landed on me. He stopped to help me when he saw that I’d wrecked. My collarbone wasn’t broken but my elbow wasn’t looking too spiffy — my stitches were ripped wide open. My bike wasn’t doing much better — the forks were bent, the handlebars were twisted. They helped me load the bike into my truck because I couldn’t do it by myself. When I got home, I took some sterastrips and closed up the
gashes where the stitches had come out. I wasn’t about to go back to the doctor and admit I’d hurt myself riding! It probably set my recovery back a little bit but WWE never found out about it. I just enjoyed extreme sports, and my return to TV was about to get extreme too . . .

  I got a call from the office in mid 2006, telling me that I was going to be working with the ECW brand from now on. They were, trying to make a buck by resurrecting Paul Heyman’s promotion from the ’90s and running it under the WWE banner. I thought it was a good idea because it would give everybody on the roster a chance to be on a program. Some really talented guys had been sitting in the back doing nothing and I thought this would be a great avenue for them to get regular TV time and be used in storylines. Some WWE guys who were ECW originals got moved across, including Tommy Dreamer and Rob Van Dam, both of whom I liked. They signed some guys from the original ECW roster too — I thought the Sandman was a good choice, even though he couldn’t work worth a damn, because he was still so over from his run in the ’90s ECW. I was a little disappointed in Sabu because he wasn’t who he used to be. Some of that was politics, some of that was age. They brought Andrew Martin — Test — back and I thought he was great. And I guess they figured, since ECW had been an anything-goes sort of environment, it could use a guy like Hardcore Holly.

  Management didn’t ask me if I wanted to be part of ECW — they just told me. I didn’t care. All that mattered to me was that I was on TV again. I’d been off-screen for nearly a year so I wanted to get back in front of an audience. ECW was filmed on the same day as Smackdown was so it didn’t affect my schedule. The biggest difference was that it was live TV rather than taped. That’s one of the reasons why they shifted me onto that show. I’d always been told that I was really good at hitting time cues, and the agents appreciated that. Timing is important even on the taped shows, because although you can edit the footage, it costs a lot of money. It’s better to just get it right the first time. When you’re doing live TV, it’s critical that you have guys who are experienced with tight timescales or it can screw everything up. They knew that they could tell me, “You’ve got seven minutes” and seven minutes later, guaranteed, someone’s hand would be raised and we’d be ready to move on to the next match or segment. They had a lot of guys there who weren’t used to working on live TV and even with the referee constantly telling them how long they had, they still couldn’t figure it out. So having someone like me out there to control the pace of things was useful.