Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  I went out and told the crowd that nothing was official until I received those calls of concession from my two opponents. Forty-five minutes later, the phone rang twice. At the racetrack, the Rolling Stones were blaring. The people were splashing beer and highfiving and chanting like they do after a touchdown at pro football games: “Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey-hey-yeah, gooooood-bye!”

  In a private room, Terry was curled up in her mother’s lap. She was crying. “I don’t know to handle this,” she said. “I wear leather and jeans. And I’m supposed to be Minnesota’s First Lady? I don’t think I can do it!”

  I stood at a microphone and gazed out at the people. “Thank you for renewing my faith that the American Dream still lives,” I said.

  “I didn’t make a lot of promises,” I told them. “I’m gonna do the best job I can do. I’m human. I’ll probably make mistakes. And let’s remember that we all make ’em. And if they’re mistakes from the heart, then you don’t have to apologize for them.”

  I thanked my wife and kids, who, about a before year ago, had said to me, “Are you NUTS?!” With my voice trembling I thanked my parents, who were buried not far away in the Fort Snelling National Cemetery.

  It was about three in the morning when the state troopers shuttled Terry and me over to a hotel about five hundred yards away. Somehow, Terry had the presence of mind to bring along some champagne. I popped the cork, we each took a swig and smiled at each other. “You’re the governor!” she said.

  I could feel her excitement for me, but I also knew that she was terrified.

  “And you’re the First Lady!” I said, and raised my glass to the woman who still means more to me than anything.

  Headline: THE NATION: NOW, PRESIDENTIAL ‘BODY’ POLITICS; BUT SERIOUSLY, MR. VENTURA

  Neither Vice President Al Gore nor Gov. George W. Bush of Texas is ripping his shirt off and wrapping a feather boa around his neck in the style of Gov. Jesse Ventura of Minnesota. But barely one year after Mr. Ventura’s unlikely election on the Reform Party ticket unnerved Democrats and Republicans, politicians have generally stopped joking about the professional wrestler turned politician.

  Now they are scrutinizing Mr. Ventura’s every pronouncement, assembling focus groups and even making pilgrimages to St. Paul, Minnesota’s capital, searching for clues to a mystery that confounds even the most savvy politicians: How does a candidate excite the electorate and galvanize new voters when the public does not seem to be paying attention to politics?”

  —The New York Times, September 19, 1999

  Now, leaving Minnesota, all the tumult and the shouting seemed almost like another lifetime. The State Capitol dome faded into the skyline as dusk descended over our camper. We were heading south, way south, on a new adventure whose outcome was equally uncertain, equally unpredictable.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Road to the Arena

  “There can hardly have been a weirder sight in this country’s political history: Minnesota governor-elect Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura standing before a whooping crowd at his 1999 inaugural ball, sporting a garish, tasseled jacket, biker’s headscarf, shades, and a psychedelic Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, a pyrotechnical display fizzing behind him. That night, Ventura paraded and pumped his fists as if his prize were not the leadership of the nation’s 32nd state but a WWF smackdown victory, his head thrown back, his enormous mouth bisecting his enormous face, in the midst of a warrior’s cry that would make Howard Dean’s notorious howl look like a lullaby.”

  —Boston Phoenix, March 2004

  When I taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2004, I called my last class “Wrestling, Then Politics: The Perfect Preparation for Serving.” People thought it was a joke but, when the class was over, they realized it hit the nail right on the head. First of all, in wrestling you have to be able to ad-lib and think on your feet. In politics, you’ll have questions fired at you and situations where you can’t run to your handlers. You need to be able to come up with an answer that doesn’t destroy you, and you’re going to learn the hard way that some of them will. Wrestling taught me that, because no matter how much you talk over what you’re going to do in a match, anything that can go wrong usually will.

  The second thing I told the students was about how you had to sell yourself as a wrestler. I had to convince people to pay their hard-earned dollars to see me get my butt kicked, because I was billed as a villain. Well, in politics, you have to sell yourself similarly to convince people to vote for you, allow you to take their tax dollars, and run their government.

  In both wrestling and politics, you travel a lot—especially to small towns. Wrestling is the only pro sport that goes to those places. We call them spot shows. It lets you get the message right out to the people. Because so much of it is visual today, wrestling makes you learn how to be very comfortable in front of a television camera. In that way, too, it’s a great stepping-stone to politics.

  Finally, the wrestler is often not in public the same person he is in private, and I think it’s the same with the politician. Was I really Jesse “The Body” Ventura, a guy who struts around with bleached blond hair, six earrings, and feather boas around his neck? Of course not. That’s a total creation. So was the politically fabricated life of Mark Foley, the now-disgraced Republican Congressman from Florida who railed against gay marriage at the same time he was writing lurid e-mails to page boys.

  Interstate 35, where I maneuvered our camper straight south out of Minneapolis on a gray, cold winter’s evening, was the identical road I’d driven thirty years earlier to begin my wrestling career. Back then, I’d been sending out pictures to different promoters around the country. One day I got a call from Bob Geigel in Kansas City, which was then one of the twenty-six wrestling territories in the U.S. He said my trainer had told him I had great potential and did I want to come for a tryout? Terry and I had started dating, and we were already pretty crazy about each other. But how could I pass up this opportunity? I hopped into my old Chevy, carrying a couple hundred bucks in my wallet, and took off.

  “I missed you so bad,” I recall, glancing over at Terry as she jots a few notes into her travel journal. “I remember when you came to visit me once, after I’d been in Kansas City for a couple months, you cried when you saw how I was living.”

  “Well,” Terry says, not looking up, “you were staying in basically a flophouse.”

  “Twenty-three dollars a week,” I marvel, and shake my head. “But I’d seen worse in the service. Didn’t bother me.”

  Pro wrestling had heroes and villains, and I’d already decided I was going to be a “bad guy” like “Superstar” Billy Graham. That’s why I grew the blond mane, to look like a California beach bum. I knew people in the Midwest would hate that. In a sport where Gorgeous George, Gorilla Monsoon, and The Crusher were some of the big names, I knew that plain old Jim Janos wasn’t going to cut the mustard. I’d always liked the name Jesse, maybe because of Jesse James. I looked on a map of California and my eyes landed on a highway that ran north of L.A. called Ventura. Jesse Ventura, the Surfer. Now that had a ring to it.

  Besides Kansas City, on this trip we’d be passing right through Wichita, Kansas, where I made my debut against a “good guy” called Omar Atlas. Beforehand, Bob Geigel called us together and sketched out the plan. If the match was going well, I was to pick Omar up and throw him over the top rope. In those days, that was cause for automatic disqualification. So I went strutting out there, bragging and making fun of Omar, climbing up on the ropes and insulting the crowd when they booed me. And when I tossed Omar at them, and he landed with a thud and came up, I paraded around while the people got what they came for: They hated my guts. I spent two months around Kansas City earning peanuts for my matches, between thirty-five and sixty-five dollars per night.

  “I knew then that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you,” I said, turning again to Terry. “But I was still your typical noncommittal bachelor. Remember what you told me over the ph
one?”

  “I said, I ain’t leavin’ up here unless I get a bigger commitment than ‘come on down and live with me.’”

  “And I said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll just have to say ‘Will you marry me?’ You started crying, and said yes.”

  By the time we got married that summer of 1975, I was moving on to Oregon, where the money was a little better. I traveled to towns all over the state for the next two years, at one point wrestling for sixty-three consecutive nights. I put 128,000 miles on the first car I ever owned, a ’75 Mercury Cougar, and often I was carpooling! For a while I billed myself as The Great Ventura and wore a mask—“to hide my good looks”—so tearing it off became a new gimmick. I fought a “battle royal” one time, where the promoters told everybody that the winner would get $50,000. I won all right, and probably got a little over a hundred bucks for my trouble. That’s the un-glorious part of the sport.

  Other wrestlers went out carousing after their matches, while I went back to my hotel room alone and called Terry. This was tough on both of us, until she moved up.

  TERRY: In Oregon, we lived in an apartment way off the beaten path, alongside an unpaved road that had a strip mall with wooden sidewalks. We only had one car, I didn’t know anybody, and I often just sat in an apartment with our dog for three or four days. I got in trouble with Jesse when I ran up a hundred dollar phone bill calling my mom, because I was so lonely.

  In 1978, when an announcer started referring to me as Jesse “The Body” and the nickname stuck, I joined one of the bigger leagues, the American Wrestling Association, and went home to Minnesota. That’s where Adrian “Golden Boy” Adonis and I first became an unpopular tag team. There’s an old saying in the world of wrestling: “They gotta hate ya before they can love ya.”

  I’ve often referred to pro wrestling as “ballet with violence.” Yes, it’s staged, as far as who’s going to be the winner, but it’s not fake. It’s really an art form, and one that requires careful discipline. When you smash your opponent with a folding chair, you’ve got to know how not to hurt him. When you get body-slammed, it’s painful, no way around it. But you get used to it.

  At my induction into the WWE Hall of Fame a few years ago, I had a conversation with Ric Flair about backdrops. That’s a wrestling term that means getting thrown into the rope, flipping up in the air, and landing flat on your back. Ric would take at least three backdrops a night. He wrestles 300 nights a year, so that’s 900 backdrops. And he’s been wrestling thirty years—so that’s 27,000 backdrops. And that’s a minimal estimate! I find it amazing that Ric is still walking around, but he is.

  In this particular dance, it’s the bad guy who leads—and who gets to be the most creative. I wore a flamboyant costume—starting with the wildly colored sunglasses and the big earrings, on to the bright colored tights, and the feather boas around my neck. I loved riling up the crowds. I’d pose in the ring and shout out things like, “Take a look at this body, all you women out there, and then take a look at that fat guy sitting next to you who’s eating pretzels and drinking beer. Who would you really rather be with? IT’S JESSE THE BODY EVERYWHERE!”

  I developed a move called “The Body-breaker,” where I’d pick the other guy up across my shoulder and shake him relentlessly while I jumped up and down. “The most brutal man in wrestling!” I’d yell at the crowds. “The sickest man in wrestling! Mr. Money! Mr. Charisma! Mr. Show Business! Win if you can! Lose if you must! But always cheat!”

  When the St. Paul Civic Center was sold out for one of my matches in 1980, I looked out upon thousands of fans, all yelling in a neardeafening chorus for a full five minutes: “Jes-SEE SUCKS! Jes-SEE SUCKS! Jes-SEE SUCKS!” I took it as a compliment, meaning I’d mastered my role as a ring villain. When I won the election in 1998, I recalled that night during my acceptance speech and told the celebrating crowd: “And you’re still cheering me!”

  Well, in the eighties, the sport of wrestling became huge. I accepted an offer from Vince McMahon, Jr., to bid farewell to the old regional system and become part of a new World Wrestling Federation. Vince was a brilliant promoter, as well as being a smart and ruthless businessman. Before long, we were accepted by mainstream America. The first WrestleMania, in 1985, sold out Madison Square Garden. Terry and I arrived in a limousine. I was called “wrestling’s Goldilocks” by Sports Illustrated and featured alongside superstars from baseball and basketball. My tag-team events with Adrian were earning $3,000 a match. Adding it to the royalties from a Jesse Ventura action figure, I bought myself a Porsche Carrera.

  One time, I was wrestling Hulk Hogan, and early in the match he kicked me in the jaw. I was supposed to go down first and then he’d wait. Except, as I started to fall, he kicked me a second time—and dislocated my jaw, only four minutes into a thirty-minute match. So we both had to ad-lib our way around this. Fortunately Hogan, being the professional that he was, allowed me to virtually beat him up for the next twenty minutes so he wouldn’t be touching my jaw. Afterward, I went immediately to the hospital so the doctors could yank it back into place.

  Maybe it was a sign. I was due to wrestle Hogan for the world title in L.A.—the Sports Arena was already sold out—followed by bouts between us all over the country. I was destined to make millions, I was sure. Then, during a match in Phoenix, I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I figured it was probably the hot autumn air of Arizona. But the next night in Oakland, it happened again. After flying on to San Diego the following morning, I went to bed instead of doing my customary workout. When I awoke at about one in the afternoon, I was drenched in sweat and my lungs were absolutely killing me. I thought it must be another bout of the pneumonia I’d suffered a few years earlier.

  I checked myself into a hospital, where they did some preliminary tests. These showed blood clots in my lungs. If one of those broke loose and traveled to my heart or brain, I could have a heart attack or stroke. I was placed in intensive care, on intravenous heparin to try to dissolve the clots. The specialist called Terry and told her she’d better fly out, that I could die at any moment.

  I spent six days in the hospital with Terry at my bedside. They put me on a blood thinner to prevent more clots from forming, but it also makes you a bleeder. I had to be on the medication for sixty days. There was no way I could go back in the ring during that period. My tour with Hogan was canceled.

  I did return to wrestling, but only briefly. My last match was in Winnipeg, Canada, in the spring of 1986. My opponent was Tony Atlas, and I tossed him out of the ring. So I began and ended my career with an Atlas and a disqualification.

  By then, Vince McMahon had called with another idea. “There’s never been a bad guy on the microphone,” he said. “Somebody who will do color commentating and side with the villains. Do you think you can do it?”

  “Sure, I can,” I told him. And so, out of my latest round of adversity, began a new life as a broadcaster.

  On the surface, farm country never seems to change. Driving down through southern Minnesota—where much of the farming takes place in our state—and then on past the endless cornfields of Iowa, it had all looked pretty much the same as a generation ago. Kansas, with its vast wheat fields, was as flat as ever.

  But driving an interstate can be deceiving. Agribusiness keeps the big “factory farms,” livestock operations with thousands of cattle, hogs, and poultry, just far enough off the freeway so you can’t usually see or smell them. In the area closest to the feedlots, you can barely breathe even if you roll up your windows and shut off the outside air.

  TERRY: When I was a kid, I thought the air in southern Minnesota was the most refreshing in the world. Today, the area where I grew up is so full of chemicals that I cannot go down there at certain times of the year (when they spray their fertilizers and weed killers) without getting terrible allergic reactions. When my daughter, Jade, and I were showing our horses, our eyes would water and our noses would run whenever we drove by the feedlots.

  As First Lady I tried hard to work o
n the problems of feedlots because I also think they only produce toxic food. How can something good come from animals living in severe stress, fed nothing but chemicals and antibiotics and who knows what? None of that kind of meat can have the amount of protein, vitamins, and minerals that animals raised humanely on a normal diet could yield.

  We’d bought a thirty-two-acre ranch in Maple Grove in the mid-1990s, because Terry wanted a place where she could have her horses on our own land, instead of boarding them. We hadn’t been living there long when I had to fight the county tax assessors to keep our farm status. They claimed I had another job. Well, many farm families have dual occupations. I remember my uncle farmed and my aunt worked for the county. Now they’re telling me that Terry could only be a housewife? It was she who baled the hay and fed the horses. I was going to sue them over that premise, until the county attorney told the assessor’s office to forget it.

  The truth was, the government wanted to drive us out—because of pressure from developers. Eventually they succeeded.

  TERRY: We sold the farm when it turned out I’d become allergic to everything in the barn, but mostly because of the development going on all around us. We were basically being surrounded, as the small family-owned farms sold off to contractors, because the owners were getting old or had died and the kids did not want the place. At Jade’s graduation party, right after Jesse left office, the farm land directly adjacent to us was being bulldozed, and the dust rolled over our property like a desert storm. We were told by our neighbors that the city council had said they would not look kindly at any farmland owners trying to hold onto their property as this area was being developed. We’d fought so hard to get the farm built and at that point just couldn’t see involving ourselves in another fight to hold onto it. Our home state has never been too kind to us in this regard.