My Life Outside the Ring (20 page)

I actually had a problem sometimes because my forehead healed so easily. I’d be walking in the airport the next day and fans would see me and go, “See? He’s not cut. They just use fake blood in the ring!” So I started wearing Band-Aids just for show, even though I didn’t need them.

Blade jobs don’t hurt. It’s like getting a little cut when you’re shaving. It bleeds like crazy, but it’s not painful. If I really wanted to get the blood flowing, I’d press a little harder and zip it all the way across my forehead, from coast to coast. I’d go up in my hair and get the blood dripping down over my ears. Whatever it took to amp up the drama and get the crowd going.

To me, doing a blade job is like lacing up a boot. Easy. The hard stuff was when André would throw me over the top rope. I was never real good at going over the top rope. Way back in ’78, I managed to hook my arm on the rope and swing my body in so my leg crashed right into the metal on the side of the ring. I had a blood clot like a baseball just sticking out of my leg for what seemed like forever.

That was nothing compared to the beating my knees took. The old wrestlers always told me to wear knee pads, but I just refused for the longest time. I thought it looked stupid to be wearing knee pads in the ring. When you lay a knee on an opponent with a knee pad on, how is that gonna look real to the fans? I should have listened, because it only took a couple of years before my knees starting giving me problems, and by 1988 I needed regular surgeries just to keep me walking.

Dropping down on an opponent to land my right knee to his chest or his neck or his head meant catching all of my body weight on my left knee.
Bang!
I had to support my weight so the knee that was hitting him wouldn’t actually kill the guy, you know? So I blew that left knee out all the time.

Eventually I smartened up and put the knee pads on, but the closest I came to a career-ender was right when Hulkamania first blew up—on the night I won the belt from the Iron Sheik in 1984.

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.