by Hogan, Hulk
A couple of months later I was wrestling in Fall River, Massachusetts. As I left the arena at the end of the night, I said good-bye to whoever it was that McMahon had running the show that night. “I’ll see you guys. I’m gonna go do this Rocky movie tomorrow. It should take like ten days, maybe two weeks to shoot, and I’ll call you when I’m done.”
They were shocked. “No. We just called Vince. He said you’re supposed to leave tonight and drive to Charlotte to be on TV by noon tomorrow.”
It made no sense. He knew this film was coming up. So I called McMahon at his home in Boca Raton. There was no way I could make it to Charlotte by noon the next day anyway. It was snowing in Massachusetts that night. So the whole thing was nuts.
“Terry,” McMahon says, “you’re a wrestler, not an actor. If you go do this Rocky movie, you’re fired and you’ll never work here again.”
“Okay, Vince.” I hung up the phone, said good-bye to everyone at the arena, and flew out the next day to do Rocky III. I’d come too far to let anyone, even Vince McMahon Sr., hold me down. I knew the ins and outs of the business now. I also knew that Hulk Hogan was already bigger than anything McMahon could envision—especially in Japan.
So I flew out to Los Angeles and shot my scenes with Stallone, playing this over-the-top character named Thunderlips.
When I was done, I rang up my new pals in Japan. “Guess what?” I told ’em. “I’m free to come wrestle whenever you want me now. And I can stay there as long as you want.”
Chapter 8
Hulking Up
It’s pretty wild to imagine a kid from Port Tampa moving to the Far East, but that’s exactly what I did in 1981. I basically decided to go where I was wanted most. Stallone wanted me more than Vince McMahon Sr., so I went to L.A. and shot his film. The Japanese promoters wanted me more than the American promoters, so I went to Japan.
It’s an awesome thing to feel wanted. But the thing that made my time in Japan really memorable was I met and dated this gorgeous Japanese girl. She spoke perfect English, which definitely helped in the finding-my-way-around department, and her business gave her hookups for everything.
When the big rock ’n’ roll acts came through, from Rod Stewart to the Rolling Stones, she always had backstage passes. And when it came to partying in a country where getting caught with a few ounces of marijuana could mean a lifetime in jail, she had access to every drug under the sun. I even dabbled in a few other substances besides the steroids, and I’ll tell you a little more about that later.
The long and short of it is, I was real happy hanging out with her in Japan.
With no exaggeration, I was like Brad Pitt in that country. Everywhere I went was a mob scene. I towered over almost everyone, and the people there worshipped me. Most of all, they were nice to me. That’s what I really loved. There was just a respect and sincerity among the people there that I’d never experienced back home.
But it wasn’t home.
As some of the American wrestlers came through, they started telling me about this guy named Verne Gagne, a promoter in Minnesota. He apparently wanted to talk to me. So one day when I was feeling a little homesick for the good ol’ U.S. of A., I called him up.
“I want you to come wrestle here,” Gagne told me. “I’ve got this guy named Jesse Ventura who I want to put you in the ring with. We’ve got a real small territory here, which means you’ll only have to wrestle four days a week—but I want to pay you a lot of money.”
Like I said, at this point I just wanted to go wherever I was wanted the most, and from the numbers he was throwing at me, Verne Gagne wanted me bad.
So I said okay. Just like that, in early 1982, I left Japan, that girl, and that crazy fame, and I went back to wrestle in this tiny Minnesota territory.
There was just one problem. I was supposed to be the bad guy. That always worked before, but after Rocky III hit theaters that spring, every time I would step foot in an arena the place would explode. The crowds cheered for me instead of booing. It started to become real clear that my playing the heel wouldn’t cut it anymore. That basically ruined all of Verne Gagne’s plans to make me the challenger to Jesse Ventura.
In a way, that was the start of Hulkamania right there. It was the audience that made that happen, the crowds that decided Hulk Hogan was someone they wanted to cheer for rather than boo. So I embraced it. I wouldn’t fold with one punch. It would take three or four punches to make me fold. I would really play it up, combining bad-guy and good-guy elements all in one: I’d get hit in the head with a chair (which, not surprisingly, hurts like hell), or swiped by a pair of brass knuckles, and it’d just get me mad and I’d shake it off. There was a whole different aura to everything I did, and the audience just started eating from the palm of my hand.
It was in those arenas that I started playing Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” as my theme music whenever I walked in. Wrestlers never used theme music before that. You can’t imagine how loud the crowds roared when they heard that song from Rocky III.
I was the main attraction at every arena. Hulk Hogan was the star. No question. Everyone in the wrestling business knew it, too. I could feel the world opening up to me.
The Linda Factor
During my years in Minnesota, I was still flying back and forth to Japan all the time. The four-day schedule made it pretty easy to do that, and the Japanese audience just couldn’t go long without their fix of Hulk Hogan in the ring.
What I’d usually do on my way there or my way back was stop over in Los Angeles. I had become friends with Stallone at this point, and we’d occasionally hit the town together—just stirring up everything and making the girls go wild at the clubs. I also reconnected with an old high school pal of mine named Nelson Kidwell.
One night Nelson took me to this place called the Red Onion, up in the Valley. The place was just swimming with Valley Girls. Blond hair and long pink fingernails everywhere. But this one girl really stood out. Her name was Linda Claridge, and she actually asked me to dance. I still wasn’t much on dancing, so I said no, and Nelson went out and danced with her instead.
It was there on that dance floor that I really started to notice her. She was just gorgeous. Built like a racehorse with these muscular legs, and that ass of hers—that’s my weakness right there.
When she came back over I bought her a drink, and we just started talking. That was the start of everything.
Linda’s personality was so over-the-top. She was real bubbly and happy. I was drawn to that immediately. She didn’t have that hard edge to her the way a lot of Florida girls did. After that initial meeting at the Red Onion, she played hard to get and that drove me wild. I kept calling her and calling her.
I liked the fact that she seemed to be successful in her own right, too. She told me she owned this nail salon she worked in, and she drove this brand-new Corvette. She was cool!
Whether I had my blinders on again or Linda hid it all from me, there didn’t seem to be any negative side to Linda Claridge at all. She was the most positive, upbeat, happy girl I’d ever met. That over-the-top, fun personality of hers drew me in like a moth to the flame.
I think I was also drawn to the fact that she didn’t really know anything about wrestling. Or at least that’s what she let on. I think it was two weeks after we’d met that she and her mom went to see E.T. at a movie theater near their house. As the story goes, the lines were so long they skipped it and went to see Rocky III instead. Once she saw me pop up in that movie she started to connect the dots on how famous I was.
My boy Nelson couldn’t understand what the hell I saw in Linda. “There’s a million girls out there. She’s just a Valley Girl! They’re all the same,” he said.
She certainly wasn’t “the same” to me. Everything about Linda seemed a million light-years ahead of the hard-edged Florida girls I’d dated. To me, she was a blond California dream. I was completely hooked from day one.
In the early days of our relationship, finding time to see L
inda was tough because of my schedule. We’d talk on the phone every day, but I’d only be able to catch her in person for a day or two at a time when I hit L.A. between flights back and forth to Japan. I’d asked her to come live with me in Minnesota, but she just wasn’t into the whole idea of up and leaving her California lifestyle behind.
The funny thing is, if she had said yes and gone with me to Minnesota, then I probably never would have reconnected with my brother Alan, whom I hadn’t seen since he split Port Tampa after getting shot in the back.
Linda and I had only been dating a little while when he suddenly showed up outside of the Gold’s Gym on Sherman Way, the gritty main thoroughfare that cuts east to west across the Valley. I’m always kinda slow getting out of the gym—it takes me a little longer than everyone else to quit sweating, get dressed, and come out of the building—but I was finally on my way out that day when Linda came running in with her eyes as big as saucers.
“Terry, there’s this real big guy outside. He’s bigger than you are! I can’t even see his skin he’s got so many tattoos,” she said. “He’s sitting on the hood of the car. He’s got a big, black beard and long black hair. He says he’s your brother!”
“Yeah, that’s my brother,” I told her. “Tell him I’ll be out in a minute.”
I hadn’t talked to Alan in years—since he was living in Houston under an assumed name. During that period I heard that he beat a guy real bad and threw him in a dumpster. When I asked him about it over the phone, he said, “Oh yeah, he was cheatin’ playing pool!” As if that was a good excuse. It was just ridiculous to me that he was still doing crazy shit like that, so I said, “I don’t ever wanna talk to you again.” And that was that.
Now all of a sudden he’s sitting out on my car. I have no idea how he knew that I was working out at that gym that day. I don’t even want to know. But the only reason he stopped by was to say hello, and I have to say: It was great to see my brother again.
Alan was riding with the Hell’s Angels at that point. He became vice president of the San Francisco chapter, and after our Gold’s Gym hello he started to show up with like twenty or thirty Hell’s Angels in tow every time I’d wrestle at the Cow Palace or the Oakland Coliseum.
I can’t even tell you how much that would freak the other wrestlers out. These Hell’s Angels were huge wrestling fans, but they all treated it like it was real and they wanted to come in and kill the bad guys! Mr. Wonderful and some of the other wrestlers would all hide whenever my brother and his Hell’s Angels buddies came around. I think some of them were just as scared of a real confrontation as I’d always been.
Whenever all these Hell’s Angels came around and I’d hug them hello, I could feel the metal on them. They were packing guns everywhere. The other wrestlers had a right to be scared. But it was also kind of cool, you know—it was such a macho thing to have a brother who was a powerhouse with the baddest biker gang around. It brought me that old sort of “SOG” respect from some of the other wrestlers. They just assumed that they’d better not mess with me.
Still, it scared me to death. I could tell my brother was high as a kite every time he came to visit me at those arenas—and to think of him riding around like that with these guys and all these guns? It just scared me.
I never really spent much time with him at all. I’d always say hi and then tell him I had to get ready for the match, and once the match was over I’d start saying I had to get ready to go to the next city, you know?
Over the next couple of years he met a lady named Marsha, and they got married and moved to L.A. He had another child with Marsha, David Bollea—who’s actually a mixed martial arts fighter now—and they opened a carpet-cleaning business. It really seemed to me like he was getting his life a little bit more on track.
Even though I didn’t spend much time with him, it was nice to feel like I had a brother again.
Wedded Blip
Linda and I dated for about a year and a half before I finally asked her to marry me. Having learned a few lessons from my failed engagement to Donna, I knew for sure that this was the real deal. I never felt happier than when I was with Linda, and she seemed to spend every moment with me smiling like I’d never seen a girl smile before. The engagement was enough for her to make the leap, and she moved to Minnesota with me into a brand-new townhouse I’d just bought—the first piece of property I’d owned my whole life.
My schedule didn’t let up, of course, and that didn’t leave much time for a wedding. So we simply made the best of it. On December 18, 1983, I flew back from Japan for one day, we got married in L.A., and I went back to work the very next night. There was no slowing down.
The wedding was great, don’t get me wrong. The party was awesome. The entire crew from Japan flew back with me, and all these wrestlers were there, and it turned into an all-night blowout. As the story goes, I got so drunk that I woke up the next morning still in my tuxedo. So Linda and I never consummated the marriage on our wedding night.
It didn’t matter, of course. Linda knew she had me for life. And I guess for her, the Valley Girl, it was a big, big deal. To catch a guy as famous and quickly-becoming-rich as Hulk Hogan meant she’d caught herself a big fish.
In retrospect, Linda and her whole family probably thought they had caught themselves a sucker fish.
My first clue was right there in front of me that night. Apparently the wedding guests ran up a huge bar tab—like twelve or fourteen thousand dollars. So Linda’s mom came up to me and asked me to pay the bill. And I did.
The parents of the bride usually pay for that kind of thing, right? I didn’t care. I had the money on me, and I was having such a good time, I just handed it over. That’s something I would wind up doing a lot of over the course of my marriage.
For the time being, though, Linda and I were off and running. A blissful husband-and-wife team, out on the road and living large. We didn’t have time for a traditional honeymoon, but as we traveled around for my matches, staying in different hotel rooms and partying every night, those first few years felt like a honeymoon that never ended.
The Man in Plaid
Verne Gagne had big, big plans for me by the time I got married. Nick Bockwinkel had emerged as the champion in the Minnesota territory, and they started booking me in Steel Cage Matches as his primary opponent in every big city from Salt Lake to Chicago. We were also putting our forces together with all these big wrestlers to buy time on Channel 9 in New York. We knew we had the talent to go head-to-head with the WWF, and with TV time setting us up, there was no telling how quickly we could take over the New York territory.
Oddly enough, that’s exactly when I got a surprise phone call from Vince McMahon. Only this time, the call came from a very different Vince McMahon—it was Vince McMahon Jr. on the line.
When I was working for Vince Sr., his son Vince Jr. was acting primarily as a commentator and ring announcer. When André the Giant came out of the ring all bloody from taking a Hulk Hogan beating, Vince was the guy in the suit with the microphone getting the ringside interview. But something sure had changed, because now Vince Jr. was a guy with bigger ambitions than I’d ever encountered in this business.
“Hey, I know my dad fired you,” Vince said, “but my dad’s gonna retire, and I’m takin’ over the business. We’ve been watchin’ how great you’re doin’ in Minnesota. We want to bring you in and make you our champion.”
I was flattered, I guess, but I had also been burned by the McMahons once before.
“Look,” I said, “I’m going on three years here and I’m doing really well, I only work four days a week, and I just bought a townhouse—”
He kept interrupting. He didn’t want to hear my excuses.
“What I’m saying is we want to give you the biggest push of all,” Vince said. “I’m gonna take over this business. I have plans to change the wrestling business and make you the biggest star in the world.” The McMahons only controlled wrestling in that New York–Connecticut–Massach
usetts corridor, but he was talking about going everywhere. Worldwide!
Vince recognized how popular I’d made this Hulk Hogan character, and he shared the same vision I had—that I could take this character anywhere.
He insisted on meeting me in person, and a few days later he flew into the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. I had Linda go pick him up. “All I can tell you is you’re gonna see a guy in a plaid tweed suit with big shoulder pads,” I told her. He was a pretty geeky-looking guy back then.
Sure enough, she picked him right out at the airport. Linda brought Vince back to my townhouse, and we sat around drinking wine and eating pizza, talking about his vision. The idea was to take the WWF to venues all across the country and around the world, with Hulk Hogan leading the charge, and to go national with big TV events. I don’t think we talked about it that first night, but Vince Jr. is the guy who spearheaded the whole concept of pay-per-view TV. Before cable was everywhere, he had the idea to simulcast Madison Square Garden events on big screens in stadiums in other markets—instantly doubling, tripling, quadrupling the audiences for every big match.
With all the fly-by-night promoters and even the great promoters I’d worked with in this business, I had never encountered a vision as big as Vince’s. It lined up with all I had in my head about how big this thing could become—the monstrous vision I had when I first realized that wrestling was as much a performance as it was a sporting event, when I knew that I could be great at it.
Vince’s passion got me so fired up, there was no way I could say no to the guy.