My Life Outside the Ring (21 page)

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 to 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.

Brother, I could not have been more wrong. Filming one of those shows is just a nonstop series of eighteen-hour days. That’s no exaggeration. It was compounded by the fact that I was an active executive producer on this thing, so I had to deal with key grips coming in from L.A. and problems with the catering and every little thing under the sun. All of that was in addition to trying to memorize ten to fifteen pages of dialogue per day. My brain couldn’t take it. My head was spinning. I had to put cheat sheets all over the set.

In the meantime, something really fascinating was happening in the wrestling world: Vince McMahon’s WWF was facing its first major competitor.

Media mogul Ted Turner and a real smart guy named Eric Bischoff had launched a televised wrestling program called the WCW—World Championship Wrestling—and with Vince mixed up in a federal investigation, they exploited the whole fiasco. They stole some of the WWF’s best wrestlers—and they stole some of the WWF’s big audience.

All they needed was a Hulk Hogan, and there was no doubt they could knock McMahon’s socks off.

Strangely enough, the WCW filmed their matches on the very same Disney lot as
Thunder in Paradise
. I was in Studio A. They were in Studio B. Small world, right? It wasn’t long before Eric Bischoff and his buddy, former WWF superstar Ric Flair, started paying me visits.

“Hey, Hulk, we have all these tourists coming through on the Disney tours, and they see the wrestling ring, and the first thing they ask is if they might get a glimpse of Hulk Hogan!” they said.

They started giving me the sales pitch, about how big the WCW was getting, and how we could walk right over Vince McMahon if we all worked together.

The thing was, I really thought I was done with wrestling. My reputation was so damaged, and I was just so hurt and tired. I basically ignored them and kept plugging away at this TV show—until a little situation with Linda forced me to rethink my current career choices entirely.

Home Sweet Homes

As if my career meltdown and the stress of working on
Thunder in Paradise
weren’t enough, it was right in the middle of those years when Linda first started complaining about living in Florida. I’m not sure if she was suddenly homesick in her mid-thirties or if she thought she’d get more help raising the kids being close to her mom in L.A., but she kept insisting that we needed to move to California.

It’s a theme that Linda would never let go of for the rest of our marriage.

We had this beautiful home on Belleview Island, but Linda insisted we needed to at least give it a try. Her mother was always dabbling in real estate and actually had a house not far from her own that she offered to rent to us. I wanted Linda to be happy, so I said yes, and we wound up bouncing the whole family back and forth between these houses in Florida and L.A. (The kids weren’t in school yet, which made it easy to do.)

Apart from the hassle of constantly traveling, the fact was, my wrestling business—and even
Thunder in Paradise
—was based on the East Coast. Linda knew that. Living in California only meant more traveling and longer plane rides than I had already endured all those years trying to get back to be with her and the kids. She didn’t care. And her mother was there backing her up all the time. “I don’t understand why you don’t sell that place in Florida and just move here?”

Whenever we were in that rented house in L.A., the moment I would come downstairs I’d be hit with Linda’s mother or grandmother or someone telling me about all these things I should be doing. All I’d want to do was get to the gym and have some sort of a normal routine, but Linda’s family was always in the house.

The bickering with Linda and her sudden tantrums turned a corner in those years for some reason, too. Even way back then she started throwing out the word “divorce” when she was yelling at me about something. “Well, why don’t we get divorced and then you can stay in Florida all you want!”

There were times when it seemed like nothing I did would make her happy. She seemed to complain all the time, about everything. I remember one day we went to the beach and it was a little bit windy, and she said, “I hate the fucking wind.”

How does somebody hate the wind?

I was a complainer, too, don’t get me wrong. I was complaining about wrestling, complaining about money, complaining about the Feds, complaining about the rift with Vince, complaining about the eighteen-hour days on the TV show, complaining about how the fans had turned on me. It’s real easy when two people are in a marriage to start bolstering the worst aspects of each other’s personalities instead of fostering the best part of the two people who got into this bond in the first place. Before you know it, you’re complaining about your significant other and all of their faults to your friends and family and anyone who’ll listen.