My Life Outside the Ring

by Hogan, Hulk

  For some reason, right before junior high, I suddenly got really interested in guitar, and I remember asking my parents if I could take lessons.

  Even though we didn’t have much money, my parents were always real supportive of stuff like that. So they hooked me up with a teacher, and as soon as I showed some talent my dad bought me my first guitar. Not a cheap department store guitar, either. It was a Guild, and it cost like three or four hundred bucks. Looking back on it now, I have no idea how they afforded it. It was a real nice electric guitar, and I certainly got every penny’s worth out of it.

  Music just made sense to me for some reason. I was always real good at math, and music was kind of like math to me. So I picked it up pretty quick, and had several guitar teachers, and before long I started playing in bands.

  My very first band was called the Plastic Pleasure Palace. Very ’60s, right? We never played anywhere, but it was good practice. We had a drummer named Chet and a guitarist named Danny. Danny and I both had such big egos that neither one of us wanted to give up the guitar to play bass. So the band was just two guitars and drums. We were the greatest garage band that never got out of the garage.

  Just a few months after joining up with those guys, I stepped out on my own and joined a real band, with real gigs.

  Infinity’s End looked like a professional group, but we were all just a bunch of kids. (I was still in junior high!) Still, we were a pretty slick organization. The keyboard player was named Gary Barris, and his father, Bob Barris, would drive us all around in this station wagon with a trailer off the back to haul all of our equipment. Mrs. Barris used to paint peace signs and daisies on our pants with black-light paint that would glow onstage. She also made us wear socks with our penny loafers, and if we didn’t we’d get fined five dollars. It was a big deal to her for some reason.

  I remember Mr. Barris was a real stiff kind of guy and took the whole thing real seriously. Whatever the gig was, we would play forty minutes, then take a twenty-minute break. We couldn’t be late; we couldn’t break too early. He kind of took some of the fun out of it with all that discipline, but the thing was, we were junior high kids and we were actually making money at this on the weekends. We played all the local rec centers and a lot of high school dances, and we’d drive up to Gainesville or wherever to play fraternity parties at colleges. We even had gigs in the clubs attached to some of the Big Daddy liquor stores down here, which was a real big deal.

  I don’t remember what those gigs paid, but I do know that every once in a while we’d play a private party or some corporate gig and we’d pull in like five hundred dollars. It wasn’t much after you split it all up and took out the expenses, but it was still good money in junior high.

  I guess it was right around this time when I first started to notice that my family didn’t have as much money as some other families. Even my friend Vic Pettit—his parents had a big color TV in their living room and always seemed to be getting new cars every few years. Other kids seemed to have cooler clothes or newer clothes than I ever did. They certainly had more clothes. I remember wearing the same pair of pants to school over and over. Maybe it was because I was a teenager now and hyperaware of peer acceptance, but it really started to bother me thinking that other kids would notice.

  So having that extra money coming in from the band was a godsend. It allowed me to go out and buy a new shirt or a new pair of pants, to help me feel like I fit in a little better, you know? I loved having the freedom to do that with my own money instead of always having to ask my parents for something.

  Don’t get the wrong impression and think I was turning into some cool rocker dude just because I was in a band playing gigs so young. It’s kind of like how I wasn’t a jock even though I could play baseball. Infinity’s End was just a bunch of nerds. We were these totally nerdy guys in our black-light pants and penny loafers doing synchronized dance moves with our guitars while we played Iron Butterfly and Steppenwolf songs. We were like a live jukebox. People loved the music. But we didn’t get any attention from young girls.

  So that whole notion of “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” didn’t really exist for me. If we looked like hippies with our long hair, trust me—we were hippies who didn’t smoke pot. I didn’t so much as see a joint back then. I don’t even think I saw one in high school. I was oblivious to that stuff. Even with my older brother, Alan, I didn’t understand what he was into at the time. I just thought he was crazy. Years would go by before I realized what kind of drugs he was taking. I’m sure everybody else was doing it, but I didn’t know anything about drugs. I didn’t know anything about sex, either.

  For the most part, I was way too nervous to make a move on a girl. A girl like Sherry Mashburn. Man oh man! I was in love with her all the way back in the sixth grade. I would ride my bike all the way to her house just to see her. She had long dark hair, like Cher, and these long legs like a pony. She was just gorgeous.

  As we got into high school she started to hang out with all the cool kids, you know? She wasn’t a cheerleader because she didn’t have to be. She was more like an Angelina Jolie type. She would play harmonica before school in the mornings, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was so gorgeous. But the idea of ever asking Sherry out was just way beyond anything I could’ve handled back then.

  Sue Clark was another girl who was a little more approachable, and I was crazy about her, too. I totally blew it with her, though, because I tried to kiss her one time, and I had no idea that you were supposed to open your mouth and use your tongue. It was so embarrassing. And this wasn’t in junior high or something—this was high school! I was a slow learner in that department.

  In fact, not a mile away from Sue’s house there was this other girl, I can’t remember her name, but we used to sit on her couch after her parents would go to bed, and we would just kiss and make out for hours and hours. No sex. No nothing. Just kissing. When I stood up to go, I couldn’t figure out why I’d have a wet spot in my underwear. I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know anything about masturbation, none of that shit. There wasn’t any sex ed in those days, and no one ever talked to me about it.

  For some reason my friends figured it out. My buddy Ed Leslie, later known in the wrestling world as Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake, was having sex all the time—and he’s younger than me! But not Terry Bollea.

  I lost my virginity so late, I’m not even gonna reveal it in this book. It’s just too embarrassing.

  What can I say? I was naive. I was just too focused on other things. In those days, baseball and music were just about all I could think about.

  Brother, Brother

  My brother Alan, whom I shared a room with in that little house on Paul Avenue, was about eight years older than me. So he was a big kid, even a teenager, by the time I start having real memories of him. While nothing stood out much in the early years—we were like normal brothers, I guess—the thing I remember most is him putting our parents through so much crap in his teen years.

  Alan was always drinking, and always fighting. It’s nothing to brag about, but he had a reputation in Port Tampa of being a crazy motherfucker. He was a big guy, like me, but he didn’t hide behind the perceived “SOG” persona like I tried to. He was a real tough guy. And while I didn’t do any drugs, Alan and his buddies were into everything.

  I didn’t realize it all at the time, but what they liked to do was drop acid, get drunk, and then fight. That was their deal. Every Friday and Saturday night, that’s what they did: get drunk, drop acid, and go out looking for fights. Alan was always getting put in jail, always getting in trouble. It just drove my parents crazy. It was a nightmare for them.

  At seventeen, Alan up and married this girl named Martha Alfonso, and they moved from Paul Avenue like two streets back and six blocks down to a house on the corner of Ballast Point Boulevard. They ended up having three kids, and even that didn’t slow Alan down. Only now, instead of him bringing his trouble directly to our house, Martha would co
me over to tell us the news: “Well, he’s not home!” “He’s drunk.” “He’s down the road and he’s in a fight and the guy’s eye got knocked out!” So we’d all go down to wherever he was, and it was always just a drunken mess with all kinds of cussin’ and blood. I mean just over and over, every weekend it was something.

  It seemed to me like Alan loved the drama. Like he somehow fed off of that craziness. Like Alan needed that anger in his life to keep living.

  I remember when I was about sixteen years old, he almost sucked me into it. I was at the house, and out of nowhere Alan came crashing through the front door. It looked like a movie scene. His eye was swollen shut and blood was everywhere, and he was really selling it. “Oh, my eye! Look what he did to me. You need to come with me!” I was a real big kid by then, right? So Alan tried to rope me into helping him go fight back. “This guy down here at the Trophy Room hit me in the eye with a cue stick!” he said.

  Because he’s my brother, and I didn’t know any better, I hopped in the car and drove down there. The two Bollea brothers go power-walking into this bar with our chests all pumped up. I’m sixteen looking for some guy that hit my brother in the eye with a cue stick at a bar!

  By the time we got there, the guy and his buddies had all taken off. Thank God. But it was stuff like that all the time.

  Somehow we all just knew that it would end real bad for Alan someday.

  It almost happened before I was out of high school.

  One night, I’m pulling into my parents’ driveway in this Dodge Mopar Road Runner I had at the time. It must have been near midnight. Before I even turned off the ignition someone comes pulling up in a car and starts shouting at me. “Your brother’s just been shot! Your brother’s just been shot at the MacDill Tavern!”

  I couldn’t believe it. I backed the car out of the driveway and hauled ass down MacDill Avenue goin’ eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour. I got there within two or three minutes—and I could see all the cops standing outside. I thought that was it for my brother, you know?

  But my brother was nowhere to be found.

  From what I could piece together, Alan had been down at the Silver Dollar, one of these real hard-core bars by the docks. He had gotten in a fight, like usual, and beat up a couple of people real bad. He and his buddies were high as kites, doing that LSD and drinking thing they always did. As soon as they left, someone at the Silver Dollar called the MacDill Tavern and warned, “Alan Bollea’s headed your way, and he’s really, really messed up.”

  When Alan walked into that bar and asked for a drink, the barmaid refused to serve him. So he grabbed her by the back of the head and threatened her. And when she told him to get out of the bar, he pushed her head down on the counter. Now, I don’t know if he “pushed it” or “slammed it” down. There were different accounts of what happened—there are always different accounts in heated situations like that—but everybody that I talked to agreed that her face hit the bar.

  So the barmaid pulled a gun from under that counter and shot Alan.

  My brother, tough guy that he was, took two bullets, fell down in the dirt, picked himself up, brushed himself off, and drove himself to the hospital before the cops even arrived.

  Like I said, Alan was one crazy motherfucker.

  The doctors managed to get one of the bullets out, but they couldn’t remove the second one. It was too close to his spine. So it stayed in Alan’s back the rest of his life.

  That didn’t slow him down, though. A few months later, right when he was getting ready to go to trial, Alan disappeared. I found out later that he’d moved to Houston, Texas, where he hung out for a while and held down different jobs. He changed his name, but he didn’t change his attitude. He got in all kinds of trouble there, too.

  The fighting just never stopped. He kept in touch with my parents, and I’d hear from him every now and then, but I never really saw Alan again until my wrestling career was in high gear.

  I didn’t see my other brother, Kenny, until my wrestling career took off, either. I realize I haven’t mentioned Kenny until this moment. I guess it’s because I barely ever knew him.

  Kenny is my much older half brother. My mom was married once before she married my dad. By the time I was born, I guess her Kenny had moved out or was living with his father or something, because I don’t remember him living in that house on Paul Avenue at all. I heard about him from time to time, though.

  My mom was real proud of Kenny. He got into the air force and went to the Virginia Military Institute—if I’m remembering this right—and he graduated as a lieutenant. By the time I started wrestling with the WWF in late ’78, ’79, he was working in the budgeting department at the Pentagon, and he was a full-blown major, or a colonel, or whatever his rank was—he’d done real well in the air force.

  When things really got going with the WWF, I wound up wrestling at the Capital Centre in Maryland about once a month, not far from his place up there, and we started to get in touch with each other. I’d even stay at his house when I was in town. This went on for about two years. It was nice having some other family to connect with in another part of the country like that. It was a nice break to staying in hotels night after night, too.

  Then this one time Kenny asked to borrow some money from me. I don’t remember what he needed it for, but it was something pretty urgent, as I recall. He came down to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa on a government plane, and the amount he wanted to borrow was five thousand dollars.

  At that point it could have been fifty thousand dollars or more and I wouldn’t have said “no.” He’s my brother. He’s family. But he was real insistent. “I’m gonna pay you back in 30 days, don’t worry,” he said.

  I said, “Okay, no problem.” And that was that.

  Well, thirty days went by, then sixty days, then ninety days. I remember my mom asked me if Kenny had paid me back yet. I don’t remember if I told her about the loan. I’m pretty sure he didn’t. Anyhow, one way or another, she knew, and I guess she kinda called him on it. He said to her, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m gonna get the money to Terry.”

  But it never happened. Instead, he quit communicating with me. Just quit. Basically to this day we don’t talk, over that small amount of money. I mean, if we’re not talking anymore he might as well have gone to half a million, you know? That was a cheap lesson for me in the long run. Money does weird things to people.

  If Kenny had told me he couldn’t pay me back, that would have been fine, but I just never heard from him again. I had a real problem with that for a while. As years went by and Hulkamania started taking off, there must have been a dozen occasions when some random fan would come up to me and go, “Hey, you got a brother named Kenny?” I was so freaked out by what happened between us that I’d usually just say no.

  “Oh, you know, your brother—he works in the Pentagon. He says his brother’s Hulk Hogan, the champ!”

  I’d just go, “No, I don’t know him.” I went on with that ridiculous crap for ten or fifteen years before I finally got over it.

  Many years later, when my father was dying, Kenny came down to Tampa with his whole family. We were all gathered at Tampa General, and they took my dad outside in the wheelchair—so he could get out and see the water there—and I remember when I tried to say hi to Kenny’s wife, Susan, she just turned her head. I don’t know what I ever did to her. But the whole thing’s just strange. Except for a few words right after my dad passed away, Kenny and I haven’t spoken at all. He’s based in Dayton, Ohio, now. He must be sixty-seven, sixty-eight years old. And it hasn’t changed.

  I basically learned to let it go. But here I am writing about it. So I guess maybe it still bothers me. I just don’t understand how a little bit of money could rip a hole like that in what’s supposed to be one of life’s strongest bonds—the bond of family.

  Chapter 2

  Finding Faith

  While Alan was getting high and throwing punches, I actually turned my attention in a whole diff
erent direction.

  I had gone to Ballast Point Baptist Church off and on since about the first grade. The church sat catty-corner to the elementary school, and my parents (more likely my mom) would sometimes bring me on Sundays. Now and then I’d go with Vic and his parents—the ones who owned the local bowling alley. Then later on I’d go with these two junior high football buddies of mine, Don and Ron Satterwhite—two brothers who coincidentally enough are both ministers now.

  Church never had much of an impact on me as a little kid. My dad was really hit-or-miss with the whole religion thing, and I think that probably rubbed off on me. We would go on Sunday, then come home and never talk about God or religion during the week at all. I asked about going to Sunday school a few times, mostly because I saw all the other kids going and making things out of clay and painting them, and it looked kinda fun. But my parents were always “No, no, no.” Dedicating an hour a week to church was enough of an inconvenience already.

  Things changed when I was about fifteen. I had just gotten my learner’s permit, and I already had my first car: a 1965 Ford Galaxy. Green with red interior. It looked like a Christmas tree. But instead of the regular shifter it had this three-speed Sparkomatic in it that some previous owner had installed. So it was almost cool! (Almost.)

  I don’t remember if I was still playing football at that point or if I had quit already, but I remember it being just after football practice that the Satterwhite brothers finally convinced me to come with them to the Christian Youth Ranch. They’d talked about it ever since junior high. But they finally suckered me into coming by saying they needed someone to play guitar so everybody could sing along. They knew that music was my sweet spot.

  I had a wooden box guitar and could play your standard three-chord progression, which is all most of those church songs were. So I went. And all the kids sang along. It was just a real nice peaceful environment.