My Life Outside the Ring

by Hogan, Hulk

  “Just read it,” she said. “It may help you.”

  Help me?

  The guy next to me was sick of listening to me anyway, so I thought, What the heck, and I opened it up—and it hit me like a lightning bolt. It was eerie how much this book resonated with me. I get chills just thinking about it.

  I’m an extremely fast reader. I can speed-read a whole script in fifteen minutes. That’s how I do a lot of my reading—knowing that I can always go back and read something slowly, line by line, if I want to study it a little closer.

  So I read this book as fast as I could, just devouring its revelations about “the law of attraction”—this idea that we are personally responsible for attracting everything that happens in our lives. It was such a simple idea.

  I went back and started to read from the beginning again to see if I could get a better handle on it—this whole idea that what you think about, you bring about. That your thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, dictate the reality of your life. This idea that seemed to trace all the way back to a phrase I remember reading in the Bible at the age of fifteen: “Ask and ye shall receive.” Was God really saying that everything we ever wanted or needed was there for the asking? All we had to do was ask?

  Was this book suggesting that I could change this downward spiral I was on just by changing my way of thinking?

  Just as it was starting to click for me, ding! The seat belt sign came on, and we started our initial descent into Tampa. I panicked. There was something about this book. I just kept reading, absorbing the pages as best I could, hoping I would get all the way through it again. We were at the gate with the seat belt sign turned off and I still wasn’t done. I didn’t want to move! The lady who gave it to me got up to get ready to leave, but she took one look at my face and saw how into this thing I was—and she gave me a great big smile.

  “Keep the book,” she said.

  “No, no, I can’t,” I said. She insisted. So I thanked her, and I took it home, and I read it again and again that night.

  I wish I could find that lady to let her know what she did for me by handing me that book. Because that moment right there marked the start of a whole new journey in my life. A journey that would lift me off the treadmill of misery I’d been on for far too long.

  The funny thing is, I had actually started the journey much earlier without even knowing it—in those moments when I started praying for happiness; in that moment when I sat with a gun in my hand thinking life might not be worth living; in the moment I backed away from Linda at the big house before Christmas—but I’d have to get a lot further down this path before I would understand what any of it meant.

  I don’t want to Bible-thump you with a bunch of new age philosophy and religious teachings. I can’t say it half as well as the dozens of preachers and teachers and authors who’ve already spent years explaining the law of attraction and how it fits into every aspect of life. These books may not have all the answers, but I challenge anyone to read books like The Power of Now, A New Earth, or Stillness Speaks and tell me that the ideas that thread through those pages don’t stir some pretty big questions about your own life. Questions you didn’t even know you had.

  I’m not a philosopher. I’m not a preacher. So all I can do is tell you how The Secret and all of these other books I started to read at the beginning of 2008 helped me change my life for the better.

  Let me see if I can sum it up in a way that’s easily understandable. Basically, the whole idea behind all of these books is that it’s up to you to choose your destination in life. You can’t always choose the path. That’s up to God, or the various forces of the universe, or whatever you want to call the higher spirit or energy that ties everything together. But the destination, and especially all of the little destinations along the way that help to get you to your final destination, are something that you can control. And you choose those destinations through the law of attraction—whether you know it or not.

  Think of it like this: Your thoughts are like a magnet. If you worry all the time about not being able to pay your bills, guess what’s going to happen to you? You’re not going to be able to pay your bills. If you worry about never falling in love? Good luck finding someone to fall in love with. If all you think about is how grateful you are to live this amazing life filled with wealth and happiness of every kind? Well, that life of wealth and happiness can be yours. It might take a long time to get there, but it’s coming.

  It seems ridiculously simple, and I know there are people who are thinking right now that Hulk Hogan has lost his marbles. Linda accused me of joining a cult when she heard I was getting into this stuff. But indulge me just a little bit longer here.

  Have you ever known a couple who were frustrated and angry and devastated that they couldn’t get pregnant? So frustrated that they couldn’t have a child, that they finally decided to adopt—then just as the adoption got approved, they got pregnant? Ask around. If you don’t know someone directly, I guarantee that you know someone who knows someone who has gone through that exact scenario.

  That’s the law of attraction at work.

  You might say, “Wait a second? If this law of attraction is real, and they were wishing and praying and hoping for a baby, shouldn’t they have had a baby since that’s all they were thinking about?” No. Wishing and hoping and praying is not the same as actually thinking about and feeling what it is you want to achieve, and if all that hoping and praying is coupled with endless negative thoughts of Why can’t I get pregnant? or Why can’t I achieve whatever it is I want to achieve? then it just won’t cut it.

  Negativity and negative thoughts can kill the whole process of accomplishing whatever it is you want to achieve.

  The fact is, once that couple adopts a child, once they finally think and feel and know in their hearts that they are, in fact, going to be parents, that’s when the law of attraction comes into play and gives them an abundance of children—the very thing they wanted most.

  Roll your eyes at me. It’s okay. I never would have believed any of this stuff just a few years ago. Heck, I never would have believed it just a few months before I started reading about it. By the way, you don’t have to believe in it in order for it to work. It’s like gravity. It’s just there, whether you want to believe in it or not. But opening my eyes to the possibility that we can control our own destiny just by how we think about things and approach things in our lives was one of the most exciting concepts I’ve ever read.

  In that beginning of 2008, I devoured book after book, and reread those books over and over. I also bought the DVD film version of The Secret and watched it again and again. I loved seeing these spiritual leaders and life coaches (Life coaches! What a concept!) from the book suddenly come to life on-screen. People like Michael Beckwith and James Arthur Ray. I got so obsessed, I started to put the DVD on repeat on the DVD player in my black Mercedes—so every time I got in that car it would play on the little pop-up TV screen in the dashboard.

  The more I read and the more I listened, the more I started to connect the dots in my life going all the way back to my childhood. I pulled out a Bible again. I thought about what it meant to walk in the spirit of Christ. I thought about the teachings of Rev. Lindstrom at the Christian Youth Ranch. I thought about that old moral code that I used to live by—that simple, instinctive code about wanting to be good and not bad. It started to change my perspective on every single thing that had ever happened in my life. Right then and there. Almost overnight.

  For far too long my thoughts had been consumed with the problems in my marriage, the pain in my body, the horror of Nick’s accident and John Graziano’s condition. All I thought about were the problems in my life.

  Maybe I’ve just been hit in the head one too many times, but I’m telling you, brother, as soon as I started paying attention to the law of attraction, as soon as I started not just praying for happiness, but believing that happiness was possible again, happiness started to find me.

  M
y Light

  One day in January, with all this new perspective fresh on my mind, I walked into the Good Earth, a health food store in Clearwater. Now, it’s not unusual for me to strike up conversations with people wherever I go. People feel like they know me—from wrestling, from the show, from just circling around Tampa for the last fifty years. Whatever it is, people talk to me, and I usually talk to them.

  On this day, for some reason, I struck up a conversation with this statuesque blonde. There was something about her that was just so appealing. Her eyes were so clear—not all bloodshot and tired-looking like mine had been for so long. She just had this real positive energy about her. Not to mention she was seriously attractive. Mostly, though, it was the clarity of those eyes. There was a light in those eyes that I was drawn to.

  Her name was Jennifer McDaniel, and apparently she had met me before. She worked for Delta Air Lines and used to see my whole family going in and out of the airport. I don’t know how it’s possible that I didn’t remember her. She was so striking. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to notice her before that moment in the Good Earth.

  Two weeks later I ran into her at that very same health food store. This time, I couldn’t resist. I asked her out. And from that night on we’ve been inseparable.

  Jennifer, it turns out, was completely dialed in to the law of attraction, along with the whole idea of living positively, taking care of your body and mind, and living life for a higher purpose. All of these things I had been reading about, that were so new to me, she had been following for most of her adult life. She was only thirty-four, but she was light-years ahead of me.

  Another thing I really liked about Jennifer was she barely knew anything about me. She had never seen Rocky III, she had never watched wrestling. I’m recognizable enough that I think you’d have to live on Mars not to have ever heard the name Hulk Hogan, or not to have caught a glimpse of this Fu Manchu mustache on TV at one point or another, but Jennifer isn’t one to watch the news or pay attention to gossip pages or any of that stuff. So the only baggage I brought to the relationship as far as she was concerned was the baggage I used to heft to the airport.

  We both got to know each other with a clean slate, and that felt pretty amazing.

  As we spent more time together, hanging by the ocean, driving around—simple stuff—a strange thing started to happen. I started smiling again.

  That may not seem like much to the average person, but I was so down for so long that it was a noticeable, double-take moment for me just to catch myself smiling for no reason at all.

  Jennifer became my constant companion, and in many ways, my constant coach.

  It’s hard to describe what it’s like to spend time with someone who stays positive all the time. Especially after what I had lived with for so long. From the very beginning, it’s like Jennifer was there to help talk me through whatever negative influence came my way. When my back starts aching and I start complaining, she’s quick to remind me to envision my back not hurting at all. To live like I’m not in pain. To be grateful to God for giving me the strength to heal my back.

  I’m still new to this stuff. It’s hard for me not to bitch and moan about everything. Like any great coach, though, she keeps me in line—and I’m not so easy to keep in line!

  That whole idea of being grateful for possibilities, grateful for things you don’t even have yet—let alone being grateful for the gifts we have in our lives, and the gift of simply being alive—that was the second part of this spiritual awakening of mine. Being grateful is one of the big keys to leading a happy life. I should have realized that all on my own. Whenever I was grateful in my life, I was happy. After Brooke and Nick were born, I was as grateful as I’d ever been, and my life was filled with happiness—but I was never consciously aware of that fact.

  Now Jennifer was there to help me understand that, and to embrace it, consciously, so I could bring about that kind of happiness in my life more often.

  The thing about the law of attraction is it doesn’t happen overnight. You reap what you sow in life. Call it karma, call it whatever you want, but the negativity that you put into the world will come back around to bite you one way or the other. That’s exactly what started to happen in February of 2008.

  One day, out of the blue, I got a panicked phone call from Christiane Plante. She and I hadn’t really spoken at all since the summer of 2007, so you can imagine how surprised I was to hear from her. The news she had was not good.

  “I got a message from Brooke,” she told me.

  Apparently, a friend of Brooke’s who worked at the record company with Christiane just casually decided over lunch to inform her that Christiane had been having an affair with her father. Brooke was incensed. So she called Christiane looking for answers.

  I told her, “Christiane, just tell her the truth.”

  I had already come far enough in my new way of thinking to know that lying would only make it worse. Lying would postpone the inevitable: the heartbreak, the pain that was about to be unleashed.

  Christiane was real nervous about it, of course, and she didn’t think she could keep it together and make sense of it all in a phone call. So rather than call Brooke back, Christiane decided to send Brooke a letter—a letter in which she admitted the affair and apologized for letting it happen.

  At this point, Brooke was just about 100 percent in Linda’s camp as far this divorce was concerned. I couldn’t understand why, and I wouldn’t understand until much later. What happened next made the whole situation a lot worse.

  First, Brooke confronted me. She wanted to know if it was true. She wanted to know why I’d done it. I told her the truth. “There’s two sides to every story, Brooke,” is what I said. I tried to explain that her mother and I were so broken, and I was so lonely and hurt, that when this thing with Christiane presented itself, I almost couldn’t help myself. I wasn’t making excuses, I was just trying to explain where I was coming from, and how I found myself in that situation.

  Brooke wouldn’t hear it. “There aren’t two sides, Dad. There’s right and wrong.” My daughter, who had barely been speaking to me anyway for months, suddenly stopped communicating with me at all.

  Two days after Brooke received that letter, a reporter from the National Enquirer knocked on Christiane’s door. Her personal letter to Brooke had somehow found its way into that tabloid’s hands. They cornered Christiane and left her no choice but to respond. So on February 28, my affair became national news. I don’t think there’s a blog or entertainment show in America that didn’t run with the story of Hulk Hogan cheating on his wife.

  I was humiliated. I was angry. I didn’t know what to do. There was no one to sue—the story was true. I couldn’t even figure out who to be angry with, except for myself for letting it happen in the first place.

  Then something remarkable happened. After about a day’s worth of wallowing in all this self-pity and frustration, I stopped. I took a deep breath. I realized nothing positive could possibly come from my being angry about this. And I put it aside.

  I made a choice right then and there to take the high road on this thing. I didn’t want to stoop to the level of whoever gave the Enquirer that letter—so I decided not to respond.

  As far as I was concerned, this was the first volley in what was sure to be a giant battle of a divorce with Linda. There would be many more shots to come, and when it came to talking about my private life to the press, I knew I would have to pick my battles carefully. So I decided not to fire back.

  I’m not sure if Linda was frustrated by my lack of response or what, but months later she hired a publicist and sent out a statement to the media claiming that the Christiane affair was the reason she filed for divorce. But I couldn’t believe she had known about it before she saw that letter. From everything I’ve ever seen, if Linda had known about Christiane, she would’ve gone ballistic. She wouldn’t have kept it quiet for all those months.

  The thing I couldn’t figure out was why Linda would
want to drag this divorce out and turn it into a battle in the first place. Florida is a no-fault state. Even if the affair were the reason she filed for divorce, it wouldn’t have any bearing on a judge’s ruling on how much money or support Linda should get. So why would she want to make a big deal out of it again and drag it all out into the public eye?

  Oddly enough, I would eventually find explanations for all of Linda’s behavior in the middle of all of that spiritual reading I was doing. Answers that would allow me to understand that behavior, and finally learn to move past it.

  I was so excited by the results of all the reading I’d done, and the possibilities of this whole spiritual awakening I was going through, that I started to share it with everyone I could. I bought multiple copies of The Secret and handed them to friends. (Yes, a few of them laughed at me.) I talked about the law of attraction and how important it was to be grateful for everything we have in this life with anyone who would listen. The person I was most grateful to have listening to me was my son.

  It’s hard to explain how broken up Nick was by the fact that he wasn’t allowed to visit John in the hospital anymore. It had been four months since he’d seen him with his own eyes, and as scared as he was to go to that hospital, and as painful as it was for him to see his best friend in that condition, to not see John and to just live with the mystery of whether he was getting better or not was so much worse. He knew the reason he couldn’t see John—because the Grazianos were preparing to sue us—but he couldn’t make sense of it.

  On top of it all he worried about what might happen with these criminal charges, and he was real down about the situation between Linda and me. I’m sure he blamed his accident, in part, for causing the stress that led to the divorce. Even though he was wrong, the thought that he was laying that additional guilt on himself just killed me.