by Hogan, Hulk
The stakes were so high that night, every move I made was over the top. Halfway through the match I jumped up in the air real high and dropped a knee in the Iron Sheik’s chest. Even when the mat is perfectly flat it hurts, but that night there was a board in the ring that was out of place—the edge of that board was sticking up into the canvas—and that’s exactly where my left knee landed.
I exploded my kneecap.
Here I was at Madison Square Garden, knowing I was going to win the world title. There’s no way I wasn’t going to finish that match. It was the ultimate high being in that ring, so I just pushed through the pain. A few minutes later when I couldn’t take any more, I started Hulking Up—I hadn’t really perfected that whole thing yet, but I had to do something to end that match quick. So I rallied my strength for everyone to see, and got ready for the finish, and I pulled the crowd right with me. With that kneecap totally blown, I laid the leg drop on the Sheik, and “One . . . Two . . . Three!” I won the title.
If all my teeth were knocked out—hell, if the Sheik had broken my leg—I still would have found a way to finish that match somehow. Even when it was over, there was no way I could let anyone find out what happened. Showing weakness at that point could have meant the end of my career. There’s no way Vince would have let me keep that belt if he knew I was lame. He would have switched up all of our plans and found another way to dominate the wrestling world. I have no doubt about that.
I remember going back to the hotel that night and telling Linda about it. We had only been married a little over a month at that point, but I needed her support. “You’re not gonna believe this. My knee is totally blown.” I’m sure she was scared to death. We’d just left Minnesota and started this whole new life. But I told her, “I’m not telling Vince,” and she was 100 percent behind my decision.
So Vince never knew. I never let on that I was hurt, and I never let it slow me down for a moment.
Today’s wrestlers, the new generation, if they tear a bicep it’s “Whoa!” They go and get cut on (that’s the phrase I use for surgery) immediately and sit out of commission for three, four months. Me? Like I said, I was the main event seven nights a week. There was no one else. So when I got hurt, I just iced it up, took some Motrin or an anti-inflammatory, wrapped it, and kept fighting.
Of course, if I wore a wrap into the ring, my opponent would go straight for that spot—knowing it was a point of weakness that could be easily attacked. The audience would eat that up. How could he not try to exploit it?
It was all a “work”—that term we use for making it look like you’re killing a guy when you’re really not hurting him much at all—but a work can still hurt, especially if it’s not executed correctly. And if you’re working a spot on the body that’s already been hurt, chances are it’s gonna get hurt worse.
After tearing all the muscles in my back at WrestleMania III, I wrestled the very next night in Tokyo. In fact, I wrestled for twenty-nine straight days after that match. No surgery. No therapy. Nothing.
I wasn’t immune to pain. I could feel it as much as the next guy as far as I could tell. So I think my ability to put up with pain and push through it goes right back to that obsessive penchant I have for completing just about anything I set my mind to. Even if I’m dead wrong, once the switch flips and I’ve made up my mind about something, I won’t deviate.
To put it another way: If I say “I’m gonna knock down that lamppost,” I don’t care if I have to keep hitting that pole till I knock it down with my head, that pole will come down.
Oddly enough, the wrestler who nearly put me in the grave was the Undertaker—and it wasn’t even his fault.
In November of 1991, at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, we stepped into the ring for the championship title. It was a brilliant matchup. Good vs. evil. The red-and-yellow hero vs. this dark figure who rolled his eyes into the back of his head and looked like he’d walked straight out of the underworld.
The Undertaker has a big finish he calls the Tombstone—it’s essentially a pile driver where he picks you up and flips you so your face is right in his crotch. He bear-hugs you in that position and then drops to his knees. It looks like your neck snaps. Up until that point, no wrestler had ever stood up after facing the Tombstone.
Well, in the middle of this match, the Undertaker laid that Tombstone on me, but I popped right up from the canvas while his back was turned. The audience went nuts. If you look at the tape, there were little kids in the arena dressed in red and yellow—I still had so much support. The fans desperately wanted to see me win, like always.
But I wasn’t destined to win that night. We went in there knowing the Undertaker would walk away with the belt, and that he’d finish me off with yet another Tombstone—this time with a dirty twist.
The thing that made the Tombstone work was that the Undertaker stopped your head about a half inch above the canvas. There wasn’t much room for error, but that was true of a lot of the moves we performed in the ring.
As the match progressed, suddenly Ric Flair walked down to ringside. I saw him out there and I taunted him, and when I wasn’t looking—and the ref wasn’t looking—Ric pushed a folding metal chair out onto the canvas.
The Undertaker grabbed me again, and flipped me over, and dropped my head on the metal chair in the nastiest Tombstone of all Tombstones.
That was all part of the plan.
What wasn’t part of the plan was how hot it was in the arena that night. By that point, I was sweating like a pig. So whether my body was too slippery to hold, or I didn’t hang on tight enough, or we both just miscalculated, I’m not sure, but when he dropped that Tombstone on me, my skull made contact with the chair. The jolt of the whole move threw my neck out.
My neck, calves, shoulders, biceps, triceps, forearms—everything went numb. Instantly. My trap muscles went up around my ears. It’s like my body knew I was getting hurt, and responded to protect me.
It took a few minutes of lying there before I could even get my wits about me. Then, with help from some of the officials, I stood up and walked out of the arena—don’t ask me how. It was probably an extremely dangerous thing to do. I wound up in the hospital for days, pressing the morphine button as many times as I could once the numbness subsided and the pain set in. It just ate away at me.
A series of medical consultants came in from the Mayo Clinic on down, and every doctor thought the danger of further paralysis was severe. They wanted to slice me open, but I wouldn’t let them.
I still had that old mentality that getting cut on was the absolute last resort. So Linda finally helped get me out of there and down to see the head of the Florida Chiropractic Association, Doug Price, back in Tampa. Doug set me up with a deep-tissue massage therapist, and even then my shoulders stayed pressed up toward my neck for nearly three months. After about six months of hard work, I finally got back to some sense of normalcy.
The repercussions of that move have never gone away. The backs of my triceps are still a little numb, and I still can’t feel anything in the tips of my fingers. I have trouble tying my bandanas on every day. I have trouble buttoning shirts.
Whenever I have X-rays taken, the doctors recommend that I get my neck fused. The wrestler John Cena had two fingers go numb after an injury and immediately went under the knife to get his neck fused. He’s recommended it to me wholeheartedly. But to me, it’s like, “My fingers are numb. Why on earth would I now want to go and willingly get my neck cut open?” Maybe it’s a generational thing. I’m just one step closer to the old barbaric style of wrestling than all of these guys who’ve become superstars in recent years.
Or maybe I’m just too stubborn to listen. After all, I had a family to support, and any significant break from wrestling meant a significant break from the steady stream of income my wife had become accustomed to.
’Roid Rage
You always hear the term “ ’roid rage”—referring to a supposedly unstoppable anger and fury that steroids bring out
in their muscle-bound users. It’s something people who’ve never used steroids tend to talk about and laugh about, as if it’s a real phenomenon. The media make it out to be no laughing matter at all. They try to pin it on wrestlers who’ve taken their own lives—and in some cases taken their families’ lives with them—when in fact, I can’t think of one of those cases where the suicide victim didn’t have lots and lots of other drugs in his system as well.
The fact is, I’ve been around more steroid users than the average person in my lifetime, and ’roid rage is something I have never, ever seen. It’s certainly nothing I’ve ever felt.
I almost think it’s some sort of an urban myth.
Anecdotally, all I can think about when I hear people use that term is this one particular wrestler who was 320 pounds of pure pumped-up muscle. Not an ounce of fat on him. He was just ripped. Every day in the locker room, he would pull out three rigs (that’s the slang for needles), at 3 cc’s apiece, and just pull ’em so full that the needles were wobbling. If ever there was a guy that was going to suffer some crazy side effects from steroids, he was that guy. Yet he was the sweetest, most soft-spoken, calm man I have ever met. I ran into him just a couple of years ago. He’s working security now, since he hurt his back and had to leave the ring. He was still the same way. “Oh, hi, Mr. Bollea. Nice to see you.”
The only aggressiveness those shots and pills ever laid on me was a powerful desire to lift weights and eat. Maybe it gave me a sort of “mat mania,” where I was more pumped up than the next guy about getting back into the ring to wrestle. I’ll certainly admit I was addicted to that high of being in the ring. But that’s about it.
Taking testosterone made a lot of guys super horny, where they were chasing girls every night of the week. Not me. Others were rendered completely useless in the bedroom, and that wasn’t me, either.
The worst thing I can say about steroids is they made me sweat a lot, which could be kind of embarrassing. They would occasionally give me killer acne—like I’d get a monster zit on my ass, the kind that’s so tight you felt like you could bend over and shoot it across the room: “Hey, catch this!”
I always developed these ingrown hairs on my neck, too—these crazy welts that you can see in old pictures. It felt like if you squeezed one a whole palm tree would pop out. Even when they weren’t ingrown, sometimes I’d grow hairs that were as thick as ten normal hairs put together. I’d pluck one out with a pair of tweezers and this giant round ball of a root would come out with it. What the hell is that!? I’d look in the mirror and there’d be a gaping bloody hole in my neck.
The worst side effect of steroids for me, though, wasn’t anything physiological at all.
In 1988, the laws changed. Whether it was some twist in the never-ending War on Drugs or some other agenda, the federal government decided it was time to crack down on the use and distribution of steroids. They went after football players and weightlifters with the same kind of forcefulness the media has laid on professional baseball players in recent years. But that was nothing compared to the target the Feds tacked on professional wrestling.
Their Enemy No. 1 was Vince McMahon Jr.
I’m not sure why they had their sights set on Vince. Maybe it was his cocky attitude they didn’t like. Maybe it was the way he managed to expand WWF over every territory in the country. There’s no faster way to draw jealousy and rage than to go out and be successful.
Or maybe they just thought Vince and the rest of us were a bunch of marks—that wrestlers were the low-class hicks of the sporting world who’d be too dumb to know how to fight back.
Whatever it was, they seemed intent on bringing Vince and his whole empire down. To do that, they needed Vince’s number-one wrestler: me.
I first caught wind of what was happening in 1989 or 1990. I called up Dr. Zahorian one day—the wrestling world’s go-to doc in Harrisville—and as soon as I said hello he said, “I can’t talk to you,” and he hung up the phone. I called back again, and no one answered.
Dr. Zahorian was a real nice guy. We actually became friends, and used to talk on the phone now and then about things that had nothing to do with what drugs I needed. Just a couple of weeks before this he had been asking my recommendation for the best video camera to buy because his three little girls had a ballet recital coming up.
He was the man who had whatever we needed. He’d show up in the locker rooms with his two little black briefcases full of testosterone, Anavar, growth hormone, pain pills. He’d give us a hundred Valium in a little unmarked matchbox-type container if we needed them. You could always call ahead so he’d have what you needed whenever you blew through town.
A couple of days later I mentioned the hangup to Pat Patterson, who had become Vince McMahon’s agent by then, and he told me, “Don’t talk to Zahorian anymore. He’s in a lot of trouble. There’s an investigation . . .”
I knew right then this gravy train had come to an end.
We had all been real careful. We kept using steroids after the 1988 laws were passed, but strictly under doctor’s orders. Zahorian examined us and kept track of everything for us. There was no more going out with a prescription for one bottle and buying ten more off the street. But even that wouldn’t last for long.
What I couldn’t understand at all was that the Feds wound up going after Vince for something that wasn’t even true: They claimed that he was distributing steroids and forcing every wrestler in the WWF to take them or be fired.
I was Vince’s best friend, his partner in crime. There was no way they could nail him without my help. Vince was freaking out. “You have to disappear, Terry. Now!” So I actually hid out upstairs at Vince’s house for a couple of months while this whole controversy swirled around. I left Linda alone at our house in Stamford, until finally I said, “This is ridiculous,” and I came out and got sucked into the whole tornado.
All of a sudden, the press started calling me a suspected steroid addict. So much for my “prayers and vitamins” reputation.
Trials take a long time. Zahorian’s trial didn’t happen until 1991. So for two years I watched as the Hulk Hogan name was dragged through the mud.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt the need to defend my name, and I thought the best way to do that would be to go on TV. Arsenio Hall had the hottest TV show at the time. It’s the show Bill Clinton went on to show off his saxophone playing—a move that many consider crucial to his winning broad support from a younger generation of voters. So there was no doubt Arsenio was the place to go when you wanted to be heard in those days.
Vince didn’t want me to do it. My lawyers didn’t want me to do it. I guess maybe I should have listened. I didn’t have a publicist in those days. I don’t even think I knew what a publicist was. So I did what I thought was best.
That summer of 1991, in front of millions of viewers—not to mention the millions more who would read about it in the papers the next day—Arsenio asked me if I was using anabolic steroids.
I said, “No, I’m not.”
I told the truth—but I wasn’t being honest. I told the truth in so far as I wasn’t using anabolic steroids right at that moment. I might have been using them three weeks ago, but I wasn’t using them right then.
I was playing with words.
I talked about how big I’d always been. I held up a photo of me from my Little League days. I went on and on about how long and hard I’d worked out to gain this physique. All of that was true! But it wasn’t honest. There’s a big difference.
And it only made my problems worse.
I should have told the whole story. I should have apologized for making a mistake. Instead, I was calculated and deceptive, and it came back to bite me.
In 1992 I quit using steroids entirely. It just wasn’t worth it anymore. The public humiliation, the cover-up—I’d just have to work out hard like I always did and hope that the edge I always felt in the ring didn’t shrink away like my muscle mass.
If I had just owned up t
o it, I could have moved on.
Instead, the humiliation of being called a steroid addict would follow me through most of the decade.
Thunder
The federal investigation got so heavy between 1991 and Vince’s indictment in 1993, it tore Vince and me apart. It tore the entire WWF apart. Nobody has enough money to fight the federal government.
It felt like everything I knew about the business was crumbling at my feet as this investigation kept getting bigger. Everyone was so nervous and scared, it started to feel dangerous. Vince was distancing himself from me, which I understood—he didn’t need any additional heat from the Feds because of the heat I had taken in the press after my Arsenio lies.
At the same time, the pain I was in from all those injuries had really started to catch up to me. I was hobbling more and more on my left knee, and my hip was hurting. It reached a point where I had no choice but to get cut on, and once you start down that road, it seems like one surgery just leads to another, and another.
I had some additional pain from outside the ring, too—like when I was out Jet-Skiing with some buddies and I fell in the water and got slammed by one of those massive machines right in the face. The impact broke both of my eye sockets, but I was out there wrestling just a few days later with a hundred stitches and my face all swollen up.
How long can a guy do that?
Combine all that fear and instinct and pain with my damaged reputation, and it just seemed to me like the universe was telling me it was time to stop wrestling and try something new.
I bowed out of the WWF as gracefully as I could in 1993. At that point, I didn’t think I ever wanted to come back. I wanted to find a way to stay in one place. I wanted to spend more time at home with my wife and kids. And the perfect opportunity to do that landed right in my lap.
The creators of Baywatch, which was a huge franchise at the time, had asked me to coproduce and star in a new TV show called Thunder in Paradise, to be shot at the Disney Studios in Orlando. I had a bit more acting experience under my belt by then—starring in No Holds Barred, Suburban Commando, and Mr. Nanny—and I enjoyed the process of movie-making. So I figured I’d enjoy making a weekly one-hour drama.