My Life Outside the Ring

by Hogan, Hulk

  Good uniform, bad helmet.

  I was also still portraying a bad guy in the wrestling world, so even wrestling-fan women had this misperception that I was some kind of crazy mean dude. That didn’t exactly get the girls flocking to me, you know? I didn’t get jealous of the other guys who seemed to land a different girl every night, though. That wasn’t my style. After all, I had what I thought was a steady girl back home.

  I met Donna toward the end of my band days down in Tampa, and she was by far the hottest girl I’d ever been with. We made quite the pair: We both had matching long blond hair!

  We started dating and had this thing going on and off for years. She never wanted to come on the road with me. That just wasn’t her style. So I would see her in between road trips while I was in Alabama and Memphis and all the way through my start with the WWWF. I wasn’t real sure, to be honest, whether she was dating other guys in between or not. I didn’t really think about it. Anyway, by 1979, it seemed like the most serious relationship I was probably ever gonna find for myself, so I up and asked Donna to marry me—and she said, “Yes!”

  I gave her a nice engagement ring, the whole deal—but something just wasn’t right. I could feel it, but I never wanted to admit it, you know? In some ways I was still so naive, I don’t think I knew how to have a real relationship.

  Once things started to take off for me in New York, Donna seemed to get more and more distant. Even if she didn’t want to hit the road with me, I thought she’d want to come see me at Madison Square Garden, at least. Something. Nope. She just was not into the whole wrestling lifestyle. She wanted to stay in Tampa.

  I understood that. If it wasn’t for McMahon’s big push, I had planned on staying in Tampa myself.

  I came back on Christmas that year, and Donna basically started a fight with me. (Women have a way of doing that, don’t they?) She told me to not even bother coming back for New Year’s—so, of course, the first thing I did was make sure I showed up for New Year’s. I walked into her apartment and found her sitting on the sofa there with her arm around this guy from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

  A football player! Of all the guys she could’ve picked, right?

  I walked over, took the engagement ring off her finger, and slipped it onto her other hand. “You’re free,” I said. “See you later.” And I walked out the door.

  The whole thing was so weird. I can’t imagine actually being married to Donna, yet I was so naive about love and marriage and sex and relationships, I had put a ring on that girl’s finger even though we were totally incompatible! What was I thinking? I’m just glad it ended when it did.

  On a side note—just to show what a small town Tampa really is—years later Donna worked for the Avis rent-a-car at the Tampa airport. So I would see her every single time I flew in or out of town. Eventually she married the owner of that local Avis spot, they had a kid, and that kid went to the same school as my kids. So I saw Donna almost every day! It was spooky.

  Learning the Ropes

  In some ways, letting go of Donna allowed me to concentrate fully on my wrestling career in New York. I didn’t feel that pull to get back to Florida quite so often—even though I still considered it my home.

  My early career in the WWWF was fast and furious, and it’s all been pretty well documented. You can find Web sites all over the place that list my matches, and who beat whom.

  It seems like most people have even heard the behind-the-scenes stories—about how Vince McMahon Sr. changed my last name to Hogan because he really, really wanted an Irish wrestler in his stable and how he even gave me red dye for my hair, which I refused to put in and just flushed down the toilet.

  The guy was on a big kick for including all ethnicities and nationalities in the ring, so you could draw an audience from all of those various groups. The Italians could root for the Sicilians. The Irish could root for Hulk Hogan, and so on—even though Hulk Hogan was meant to be more of a bad guy.

  So I flushed the red dye, but I kept the name. I don’t even know if most people think of Hogan as an Irish name, do they? It didn’t matter. When McMahon dropped the “Terry,” it sounded good. “Hulk Hogan.” It just had a nice ring to it.

  Again: fate or coincidence?

  McMahon followed through on everything he offered. He put me up in a great apartment in West Haven. He paid me real well. He hooked me up with Tony Altomare to drive me everywhere—but Tony did a lot more than that.

  Tony was the kind of guy who loved to drink and raise hell. As an older guy who’d been in the business forever, he knew the ins and outs of everything—and for some reason he shared it all with me.

  It was almost like that movie The Sting, where Robert Redford finally meets a guy who can teach him the ins and outs of the game. Tony taught me all about how the promoters worked, and what percentage of the gate the houses took. He taught me the back doors, which restaurants to hit in each city, which hotel rooms to get. He also taught me how to go head-to-head with some of the old-school barbaric wrestlers who were still on the circuit—the guys who’d bite you just to keep you in your place. (I have a few bite scars to prove it!)

  Tony Altomare was my personal crash course in the real business of wrestling, and one of the best gifts McMahon ever gave me.

  As for McMahon’s promise to make me a star? He didn’t follow through quite the way I expected, but I made it work regardless.

  One thing he used me for was a foil for André the Giant. André needed a real champion-level wrestler, a worthy opponent that he could fight when he went on the road. He just made mincemeat of the little wrestlers in all the other territories. There was no drama to any of the matches because it was so obvious that André was gonna win. So McMahon figured I could go along with him whenever he went out of town, and the two of us could put on a real show for the crowd. (That also meant McMahon would gain more control over what happened in those other territories.)

  McMahon didn’t see me as a hero figure. Instead, he kept me in a bad-guy role so an established wrestler like Bob Backlund could come in and defeat me when he needed a boost in popularity.

  For those of you who didn’t tune in to the whole Hulk Hogan thing until the mid-1980s, this might be hard for you to believe, but I got booed! Wherever we went, they always wanted the other guy to win. Especially André the Giant. He was a much bigger star than I was, and everyone wanted to see him crush me.

  The thing was, even if I got beat, I was the blond-haired muscle-bound perfect prototype of a wrestler—so crowds would still come out to see me.

  It got to the point where I was booked in one main event after another, and the crowds kept getting bigger and better. We were selling out stadiums everywhere we went.

  But it always came back to Madison Square Garden. I wrestled there almost once a month. And let me tell you, brother: Standing in the ring in the middle of that venue was like no other feeling in the world. The piercing roar of that 22,000-deep sold-out MSG crowd was so loud, it actually made my jaws water.

  Hometown Mentality

  Somewhere in the middle of this crazy run I had a chance to drive down to Florida. I rolled into town in that green Continental thinking I’d finally made something of myself. There wasn’t a wrestler in town that could hold a candle to what I’d accomplished.

  In fact, I was feeling so pumped I decided to go find Sherry Mashburn—that beautiful Angelina Jolie–type girl I’d been in love with since the sixth grade.

  I found out that Sherry was working in this really high-end modern furniture store called Scan Design. So I drove over there and walked in real casual like and said, “Hi.”

  Well, so much for my confidence. Seeing her face-to-face I broke out in this massive sweat. I mean, I was drenched. It was pouring down my back, down my neck, off my nose. My shirt was drenched. Even my underwear was drenched.

  We went outside and stood by my car, and Sherry kept asking me, “Are you okay?”

  Finally I fought through this crazy reaction I was ha
ving and asked if she wanted to go out on a date.

  “Oh, I’m already dating somebody,” she said.

  Great.

  Then the conversation started to turn a little bit. “Is this your car?” she asked. “That’s a real nice car.”

  Hmmm. Maybe she’s more interested than she’s letting on.

  She seemed pretty clueless about what I’d been up to, so I told her I was a wrestler now.

  And she said, “Oh, like Mike Graham?”

  Mike Graham?

  “Are you as famous as Mike Graham?” she asked.

  Mike Graham was Eddie Graham’s kid—the guy who talked to me in the van and set me up with Matsuda. As a fan, I couldn’t understand how a guy that small could even get into the business against all these monster wrestlers.

  Mike Graham was a local hero.

  All of a sudden I stopped sweating. Sherry started asking all these questions, like “Have you ever wrestled Steve Kearn?” All these years had passed and Tampa and these high school guys were still her whole world. I was working for Vince McMahon, selling out Madison Square Garden, wrestling the biggest wrestlers in the world—but until that moment, I was still nervous about what Sherry Mashburn thought of me.

  The fact is, I was still nervous about what everyone in Tampa thought of me. It was crazy. By this point in my career, I was a main-event wrestler at the biggest venues in the world. When Dusty Rhodes came up to wrestle in New York, they put him in the opening match—before half of the crowd had even filtered into the arena—and here I was, the main event that had everyone up on their seats at Madison Square Garden going wild at the end of the night.

  I never went out with Sherry Mashburn. Honestly, even at that age, I still barely would have known what to do with her if I had her in my arms. I found some peace in that moment, though. A peace that had been a long time coming.

  Back in New York, the rise of Hulk Hogan just couldn’t be stopped. The match people loved to watch most seemed to be the one that Vince always put me on: Hulk Hogan vs. André the Giant, the five-hundred-pound behemoth of the wrestling world.

  A lot of people think WrestleMania III was the first time I ever bodyslammed André, but that was just the first time it happened on national television. On August 9, 1980, at a completely sold-out Shea Stadium in front of almost sixty thousand people—that’s when I bodyslammed André for the very first time.

  It wasn’t seen widely on American TV, but it aired in Japan, where wrestling was about the biggest sport in the world. After that, the legend of the power of Hulk Hogan started spreading all over the globe like wildfire.

  I’d settled in on the red and yellow colors. I’d perfected the Atomic Leg Drop. I’d just about mastered my sense of crowd control—that ability to time and finesse my movements so all I’d have to do is put my arms out and look at the crowd and I’d incite the loudest roars of “boo” you ever heard.

  I also developed a move where I’d pick up three guys in the ring at the same time. I’d get one guy on my shoulders and bear-hug the other two and lift all three of ’em at once and then “Raaaah!” I’d throw them all down.

  It wasn’t easy. I’d say I probably failed to pull that move off about 50 percent of the times that I tried it.

  It only took one time to change my life forever.

  My Guy Sly

  The greatest thing about working in New York was being on TV. Every three weeks we’d film down in Allentown, and the matches were broadcast on the MSG Network—MSG standing for Madison Square Garden. This channel hit homes all over the tri-state area and down into Pennsylvania, and you just never knew who was watching.

  One night, I think it was early 1980, Rocky mastermind Sylvester Stallone tuned in. He was on the lookout for a wrestler to cast in a role in Rocky III, and he saw me on a night when I happened to pull off that crazy move—lifting three wrestlers at once and just hurling them to the canvas.

  Stallone didn’t know how to get a hold of me himself, so he turned to his casting director, Rhonda Young. She didn’t know anything about wrestling, or who the heck this wrestler was that Stallone was talking about. So she called her brother, Peter.

  “Peter,” she said, “Sly’s gotta have this wrestler, this guy he saw on MSG. He’s a bad guy, and he’s done this and that,” and Peter knew right off the bat. “Oh, that’s Hulk Hogan.” (Peter Young became my agent shortly after that and has been my agent ever since.)

  So I’m coming out of the ring one night when I get a message that Sylvester Stallone wants me to call him. I thought it was a joke! I had seen Rocky I and II, and in the late ’70s and early ’80s there was no one as big as Stallone. He was this all-American hero figure. There was no way he was calling me. It must be one of the guys pulling a rib, I thought, and I blew it off.

  Around this same time, McMahon sent me over to Japan to wrestle for seven weeks. Now, that was an amazing experience. All these Japanese fans worshipped me like some sort of god. It was really unbelievable to be over there and feel that kind of idolization—even if I couldn’t understand a word anybody was saying. The Japanese promoters didn’t want me to leave. They were begging me to stay longer. Wherever I went the arenas were packed to the rafters.

  I came back to Allentown after that to find a Western Union telegram waiting for me—a certified letter that I had to sign for.

  Please call Sylvester Stallone. It’s an emergency.

  It was getting closer and closer to when they would actually be shooting this film, and Peter and Rhonda were starting to panic that they weren’t going to be able to deliver the one guy Sly wanted.

  So I called him, and he picked up the phone, and it really was Sly Stallone. It was so weird to hear that familiar voice on the other end of the line.

  I wasn’t sure how interested I was in being in a movie. I’d never done any kind of acting (outside of the ring, at least). I told him, “Look, I’m going back to Japan for two weeks, but I’ll stop by to see you when I’m back.”

  We met at a gym. I had blue jeans on and cowboy boots, and my nose was all taped up—it got smashed in a match in Japan, and I hadn’t had a chance to fix it yet. I wasn’t prepared at all for some kind of audition.

  Stallone insisted. “I want to see how you move in the ring.” So Stallone starts doing his Rocky thing and starts reaching out to try to punch me.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Well, see if you can stop me,” he said.

  “Stop you?” I laughed out loud. He was maybe 170 pounds, and I was pushing 320 at that point.

  He stayed pretty serious about it. “When I try to punch you, see if you can get ahold of me,” he said.

  So in one move I grabbed him and hooked him and pinned him to the canvas. Over in Japan, I had actually learned some real wrestling moves. The Japanese guys taught me hooks and submissions, all this UFC-type of stuff that you could use to survive if anyone really tried to come at you in a fight.

  Stallone seemed real impressed by how easily I took him down. So he got right up and said, “Hit me as hard as you can.”

  “I don’t think you want that,” I said.

  “Well, hit me like how you would hit somebody when you want it to look good but you don’t want to really hurt ’em.”

  I explained that one way to do that would be for him to bend forward a bit and I would hit him with my forearm between the shoulder blades.

  “Great,” he said. “Do that. Hit me as hard as you can.”

  I refused. He’s not a big guy! I could’ve killed him. But he kept insisting. “Hit me seventy-five percent then,” he said. Finally, “Fifty percent!”

  So I bend him over and “Grrrrrr,” bang! I hit him, and dude, I had no idea he was gonna crumble like he did. The second my forearm hit his back, Sylvester Stallone’s face hit my cowboy boots.

  Amazingly he popped right up again, this time with blood trickling out of his nose. “You got the job,” he said.

  I remember walking out of the ring thin
king, This guy’s fucking nuts!

  Then all of a sudden he put a camera in my face. “You got the job,” he repeated again, all excited and pumped up. “Now tell me how bad you’re gonna kick Rocky Balboa’s ass!”

  I caught on to what he was doing real quick. He wanted to see if I could talk, to maybe cut a promo or something. So I turned on that voice I’d been developing since my first TV appearances back in Memphis. “Okay, Balboa, you’re goin’ down!” I don’t remember exactly what I said. I’d sure love to see that tape. It’s probably in a vault somewhere. Anyway, after a few seconds he turned the camera off and said to me one more time, “You got it.”

  We shook hands. I didn’t have an agent at that point and had no idea what you should get paid to appear in a film, but he said, “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to do the movie.”

  Me, being the smart negotiator I am, thought it sounded a little low. “How about fifteen thousand dollars?” I said.

  “Okay, fourteen,” he countered. Done. I signed a piece of paper right there on the spot. I couldn’t believe that I was going to be in a Rocky movie. Not in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine acting in films, let alone acting with someone as big as Sly Stallone. I knew it would be a huge boost for my career. Heck, a boost to my whole life.

  When I got back to New York I told Vince McMahon Sr. that I would be shooting this movie in a couple of months.

  “No, you’re not,” he said.

  For some reason I didn’t take him seriously. “Okay,” I replied, but I never even gave it a second thought. I knew this would be great not only for my career, but for the whole sport of wrestling. To put one of us up there on the big screen in a Rocky movie, which was sure to be a huge hit seen by millions of people? It was a real no-brainer.

  Like I said before, I was always looking ahead, thinking about making more money, thinking about how I could make this Hulk Hogan thing bigger and bigger. I thought Vince Sr. thought that way, too. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was just like the other promoters. He had control of the number-one territory, his own little kingdom, and maybe that was enough for him. Maybe he just didn’t have the vision for how big this could get.