My Life Outside the Ring (12 page)

The thing was, sitting next to me at that point in my life, the guy looked kinda small. That blew Jerry Jarrett away. I got back to the dressing room after the show and Jarrett was like, “Good God, Terry! You were sitting on TV and you were bigger than the Hulk!”

From that moment on, Jerry Jarrett started billing me as Terry “the Hulk” Boulder wherever I wrestled.

Now, I don’t know if you’d call that fate or coincidence. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but what are the odds that Lou Ferrigno would wind up on the same talk show as me, sitting right next to me, in the middle of Tennessee?

It’s weird, right? Because if it weren’t for that moment, there’s a very good chance I never would have acquired the Hulk nickname. And without the Hulk nickname, could “Terry Boulder” (or whatever other name I might have picked up along the way) have conquered the world the way “Hulk” did?

Today I understand a lot more about the law of attraction, and how we have the ability to bring these sorts of powerful “coincidences” into our lives. Back then? I was just rolling along, dreaming of hitting the big time. I had always been a celebrity in my own mind—I had always envisioned a fantasy life with boundless possibilities and had even practiced my way to get there by playing in bands and paying my dues.

But even as I acquired the Hulk nickname, the thought of that dream becoming real kept falling further and further into the back in my mind.

Despite the new name and how popular I was getting on the Memphis circuit, the whole business of wrestling quickly started to become a drag all over again.

Wrestling with Wrestling

Brutus didn’t last very long in the Memphis territory. I guess in some ways there’s only room for one big blond wrestler in any given circuit. So he wound up transferring to Portland, Oregon, where he started to become a star in his own right.

He was fine with the move. Brutus has nomad in his blood or something. He just doesn’t care where he sleeps, and he’d make the best of any situation. He’s up in Oregon for two weeks and I call him and he’s got a girl in bed with him. He’s having the time of his life.

Me? Not so much. Being on the road in the car and in hotels all the time—that whole lifestyle was really draining to me. I missed having a friend on the road. And even at eight hundred a week, it was starting to feel like I was getting ripped off. Again.

The thing is, there’s no security in wrestling. I always knew that. I didn’t think I cared because at least it wasn’t one of those regular jobs with a period at the end of the sentence.

But even at the Memphis level, it was much more of a fly-by-night business than I ever imagined. There were nights when you’d walk into some building to go to work for a promoter, and rather than it being a smart businessman or maybe a former wrestler who wanted to make something of himself, it would just be some guy who owns an electrical supply company who happens to promote wrestling on the side.

Wrestling was my life. I wanted to grow my fan base, sell out bigger arenas, and make more money. I wanted to keep moving forward. How could that happen when I wasn’t in charge of my own destiny? And when the men who were in charge were treating it like a side gig or were too small-minded to see anything above and beyond what they were already doing in whatever tiny little territory they considered their domain?

I kept obsessing over it and complaining—mostly to myself—that things should be better. I didn’t know how to fix it, though, and I didn’t really make any effort to take control. I didn’t know how.

Plus, it was just so weird to walk in every night and know that if you got cut or you got hurt, it was up to you to go to the doctor. There was no insurance. There was no retirement plan. None of the stability that a “normal” job has. There was no structure to it. I started to feel like there was nobody there to back me up if I ever needed help.

To be a wrestler meant that everything you had—your future, your health, your sanity, all of it—was stuffed into this little bag you carried with your boots and your tights. You’d put on this costume to go perform like a dancing monkey. Then you’d take the costume off, get paid, and move on to the next town’s circus.

To look around at this sold-out arena, to hear them roar and chant your name, to know that they’re walking out of there with their buddies reliving every moment of the show you put on—just like Vic and I used to do when we left the armory back in Tampa as kids—and then after all of that, a guy hands you twenty-five bucks and says, “See you next week?” It all seemed like such a letdown.

After a while, the raise up to a hundred bucks or so didn’t make it any better. That was still just the price of a few seats in that whole arena. Was that all I was worth? I knew a good portion of those fans were there to see me. I had built a following. I was the one out doing spots on TV and helping to promote this whole thing. I knew I deserved more. I knew I was worth more. So when it was clear that there were no giant raises in my future, I took a step back and tried to reevaluate this whole situation.

My conclusion? Wrestling for no money sucks.

So that was that. Once again, I decided to quit. I drove back down to Tampa, where I’d always return whenever we had a few days off. This time, I really thought I was quitting for good.

Chapter 7

Just When I Thought I Was Out . . .

In the latter part of
1979, I set myself up in a room at the Expressway Inn for eleven dollars a night, and I put my name back on the books at the longshoremen’s and stevedores’ unions. I was still a member of both. All that time, from Cocoa Beach to Alabama and Memphis, I kept paying dues. I guess in the back of my mind I wanted to have something to fall back on.

I was only back in Tampa for about a week when I stopped into the Imperial Room, this bar where all the wrestlers used to wind up after the Tuesday night matches, and I ran into a wrestler named Terry Funk. He was really surprised to see me, and he said he’d been trying to find me. All of a sudden Jack and Jerry Brisco came over, and they were doing the same thing. “What the fuck happened? Where the hell have you been?” they asked.

I told them, “I quit. I’m not doing this shit anymore.”

They didn’t seem to want to hear that. “We’ve been trying to get ahold of you. Where the hell are you living now? Vince McMahon Sr. has been calling us from New York trying to track you down. He heard about what you were doing in Memphis, and how all the arenas were sold out. He wants to see you!”

I was so down on the whole thing, I really didn’t care. I said, “Guys, I’m not interested. I’m going back to work on the docks. I’m just gonna stay here in Tampa.”

The next day, the Briscos pretty much hijacked me and dragged me down to the Sportatorium. When we walked in, Eddie Graham was there. By now I guess we’d all made peace in my absence, which I didn’t quite get. Anyway, they get Vince McMahon Sr. on the phone. Later on his son, Vince McMahon Jr., would take over and help turn the organization into an international phenomenon, but for now, Vince Sr. was still the man, and the New York territory was his.

“You know,” McMahon said, “New York’s a big man’s territory. We’ve been watching you, and we’re real interested in you. We want you to come up here. Why don’t you come up here and wrestle on TV, and we’ll see if you’re as good as everybody says you are, and if the crowds love you as much as everybody says they do.”

I told him I wasn’t interested. When he asked why, I told him about how much money I was making, and how I couldn’t stand driving nine hours just to wrestle three minutes, and that I was pretty much sick of the whole thing.

“You could do so much better,” McMahon said. “You’ve never had the opportunity to make the money you need to make, Terry. This is where you belong. Madison Square Garden. New York. The big time. You belong here!”

And he asked me again: “Just come up here and meet me, face-to-face, and see what you think.”

The guy was a heck of a salesman. Finally I caved. Sort of. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll fly up and I’ll talk to you. But I’m not bringing my wrestling boots.”

So they flew me up north, and I met Vince at a stadium in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where the WWWF shot their TV matches every three weeks. He kept staring at me over the top of his glasses when I walked in, eyeballing me up and down. He couldn’t believe how big I was.

I’d just come off this big steroid run, and I’d been wrestling nonstop. I was in my mid-twenties, at my biological peak. No other wrestler looked like me, and I knew that. It’s like everything else in life: If I’m gonna work out, I work out. I would either get the biggest arms in the world or explode them trying. I was eating everything in sight, too. I decided that the perfect wrestler should have big arms and a big belly. I just thought that’s the way you should look—that a bodybuilder’s six-pack wasn’t the way to go. It was too unrelatable to the crowd.

I really didn’t want to wrestle anymore, but I stuck around that night to watch the match. I was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, kind of like Superstar Billy Graham always wore. Graham was at his peak in popularity at that point. I’ll be honest; I really did try to emulate his look as I was coming up. Like I said, the idea of stealing a little bit from all the best wrestlers was my whole game plan right from the beginning. In fact, at that moment with my hairline receding and everything, I looked just like the guy—or at least a younger version of the guy. So when I stuck my head out from behind that curtain to see what the crowd looked like, all of a sudden a whole bunch of people thought I was him.

“It’s Superstar Billy Graham!” they started yelling.

Vince Sr. saw that and said, “Don’t ever wear tie-dye again.” But I think the reaction made him realize what he could do with me. It was like starting over with a brand-new Superstar Billy Graham, having a new young superstar that he could build and mold in his organization.

That night he took me to dinner. He’d made up his mind. “I’ll set you up in an apartment,” he said—in West Haven, Connecticut, where all the wrestlers lived. “I’m also gonna put you with a guy named Tony Altomare, who’ll drive you everywhere and take care of everything so you don’t have to do that yourself anymore.” Altomare was Capt. Lou Albano’s tag-team partner, and they wrestled as the Sicilians back in the day. “And I’ll give you a guarantee that makes eight hundred a week look like chump change.”

The funny thing is, I don’t even remember what the number was.

“Come up here and I’ll make you a star in New York,” he said.

What struck me more than the money was how McMahon seemed to really be bending over backwards to try to get me to come to New York—the place that was the top of the wrestling food chain.

It sure was a world of difference from Tampa, Alabama, or Memphis. Also, compared to most of the promoters I’d ever met, there was just something about McMahon that inspired confidence. Wrestling wasn’t a side gig to him. It wasn’t just a job. I had a feeling that if I worked with him, the two of us could make great things happen.

I decided to go for it. I shook his hand. I went home and got my wrestling boots. After taping a few matches for the TV cameras in Allentown, I made my debut at Madison Square Garden in December of 1979.

Oh, Donna

Although my wrestling career was starting to take off, my personal life was kind of floundering.

First of all, I was never a girl-magnet type of guy. If I had one of those gorgeous movie-star faces it would have been different, but let’s be honest: My body looked good, but I was balding, and about the best thing I would say about my face is I’m “brutally handsome.”

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.