My Life Outside the Ring (32 page)

These guys knew everything. They knew how bad things had been with Linda. They’d seen it all. They’d witnessed their share of it firsthand. They also knew this was news I never expected to hear. Not in my wildest dreams. No matter how bad it got, I was married for life. “Till death do us part.”

In my mind, the fact that Linda had moved three thousand miles across the country to get away from me and our life in Florida was nothing but a major bump in the road. We’d fix it, like we’d always fixed it. I believed that. I thought I knew it for a fact.

The fact that something so devastating could happen at this moment was just unimaginable. Henry saw it in my face, and for some reason he knew just what to do. It was like a scene from
Rocky
. He became my Mick—my longtime personal trainer and coach in the corner. “Pull it together, Terry,” he said. He looked me dead in the eye. “Terry! You’ve got to pull it together!”

He was right.
American Gladiators
was too important. I couldn’t cave now. No way. I took a deep breath. I Hulked Up like I was in a title match at Madison Square Garden. I turned around and gave a nod to the crew and stepped back to my spot in front of the camera. The crowd roared. The countdown began. “And five . . . four . . . three . . .”

I stared into that lens as they rolled tape and didn’t even look at the teleprompter. I fired myself into performance mode, and when they gave me the sign, I squeezed that mike tight and held it to my mouth and growled off the top of my head, “Do you wanna live forever?!”

I have no idea where that came from or why I said it. Neither did the crew. So we backed up and they made me do it again. I took a deep breath. The crowd roared. I held that mike. I looked into the lens and I said, “This is
American Gladiators
!”

I managed to get through the first segment of the show without a hitch. Everyone seemed pleased. No one but Eric and Henry had any idea how torn up I was inside. I’ve pushed through wrestling matches with torn muscles and even a shattered kneecap. But this was different. This was a pain that couldn’t be ignored.

As soon as
I got a break I went to my son. I was freaking out. I knew I had to tell him, but I didn’t know how he’d react. So I just said it. “Nick. Your mom just filed for divorce.”

I expected him to be upset, maybe angry, but he didn’t freak out like I did. In fact, when I told him he seemed rational and calm. “Well, Dad, I thought she was gonna do it. She’s been talking about doing it. She’s been meeting with lawyers out here.”

That surprised me. I said, “Oh, really?”

He said, “Yeah, I was just hoping she wouldn’t.”

The way he acted, I think Nick already knew she filed but didn’t want to be the one to break it to me.

My God. How could my wife, his own mother, let him carry that kind of a secret around on top of everything else he had going on in his life? How could she do that to her own son? How could she do this to our family?

Dazed all over again, I went on and finished the show. I went through the motions. I did what everyone expected Hulk Hogan to do. The whole time I was thinking about Linda.

I knew she wasn’t happy. But why now? Why in the middle of everything else we were going through?

My God
. It suddenly hit me.
Now we’re gonna have to go through this whole thing in public
.

Why would she want that? Why?

Chapter 17

The Downward Spiral

From that moment on, things
started spiraling down for me. I had a real hard time getting through the days. I remember being on the set and looking at myself in the monitor and realizing how stressed I looked. I worried everyone could read it in my face, like I had just experienced a tragedy or something.

If you went back and looked at tapes of those shows now, I’m sure you’d see it. It got to where it was like drudgery being on the set. During every break, every moment of downtime, my mind would race. I started to doubt everything in my life.
I’m not a quitter. I don’t fail. How could I fail at marriage?
Then I’d turn it around and keep thinking there must be some way to fix this, something I could do to make it better.

I kept trying to call Linda. She answered my calls for a while. I didn’t know what to say, so I’d go, “Hey, how you doing?” Or I’d say something as simple as “It’s a nice day out today,” and she’d lose it. “It’s not a nice fucking day. It’s blah blah blah.” She was completely over the edge.

As much as I didn’t want to believe it, my wife of nearly twenty-three years had made her mind up that there was no talking or fixing or changing this. That was something new. Something had changed gears. She had changed. I don’t know whether she was hell-bent on starting her life over or if she had already met somebody else. Whatever her mission was, she was planning to accomplish it.

For all those
nights of hearing “Fuck you, Terry” as my head hit the pillow, for all those divorce threats over all those years, it never occurred to me to take the first step and leave my wife, because every new morning would be a new start. She’d show me some little bit of her old self, and it would give me hope. It would give me a reason to keep going.

Plus, I thought, after twenty-three years of marriage, what would Linda do without me? She’d been Hulk Hogan’s wife for most of her life. I provided for her. I gave her everything she wanted and needed. She depended on me.

Once I realized there was no talking to Linda, there was no changing her mind, I met with a divorce attorney named Ann Kerr. Ann’s been in this business forever and has seen it all—but even she had never seen anything like Linda.

I’ve never been to a shrink, but I think Ann Kerr played that role for me. Once I started telling Ann all the details of the state of my relationship, I just unloaded on her. When I was done talking, Ann said something that really knocked me out. She looked me square in the eyes and she said, “Terry, in my opinion, you were verbally and mentally abused.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. I didn’t even know what that meant.

“Terry, your wife manipulated you,” she said. “It seems to me, for all these years, you’ve been mentally and emotionally abused.”

Here I am, fifty-four years old, and this divorce attorney is telling me that it sounded to her like I’d been browbeaten throughout my entire marriage. Could that be true?

The more I thought about it, the more I thought,
Maybe so.
I mean, look at my actions: always trying to appease Linda, always trying to make her happy. When you think about an abused child, they’re always seeking more affection from the parent that’s abusing them. If there’s one parent who’s good to them and cooks them breakfast and takes care of them, that relationship is fine, but it’s the parent that’s abusive that the child will jump through hoops for, doing whatever he can to win their acceptance. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? Is that what I was doing with Linda? Just going back for more? Trying to appease her no matter how badly she hurt me? For all those years?

Oh, you’re not happy here? Okay, Linda, let’s move to Miami. Here’s a $12 million house.
Is it possible that despite all my physical strength, Linda was capable of beating me up on some mental level?

I’ve been trying to come to grips with that possibility ever since. That’s not easy to do when every time I let someone know what was happening behind closed doors they question why the hell I stayed with her in the first place. I guess it goes back to that obsessive thing: When I’m in, I’m in—150 percent. That’s just how I’ve always been.

When I took that vow “for better or worse, till death do you part,” I meant it. In my opinion, that’s the strongest, most important contract you can ever sign in this lifetime. It’s a vow of total commitment.

Listen to those words: “for better or worse.” There’s no out clause! There’s no walking away if it doesn’t work. If it gets worse? Tough. You deal with it.

There was no doubt we had seen the “worse” part. As a family we were certainly in the thick of it with this whole situation with Nick. For me, though, Nick’s accident was a wake-up call. I was suddenly so grateful that Nick was alive. I was so grateful for Brooke and Linda and this life we had together—as imperfect as it was. Rather than the accident putting everything in perspective for Linda, rather than it showing her what’s important in life and how important it was to pull our family together and to keep our eyes on the blessings we have simply being alive and being healthy, she decided that this was the moment to cut loose and go out on her own.

I couldn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it. I honestly thought that no matter how bad things got, we would always be together.

I love Linda unconditionally. I mean it. It goes far beyond the marriage vows. Far beyond the legal contract. In my mind, love is forever. That’s what I believe, and what this whole terrible situation made me believe more than ever: that once you love someone, if you truly love someone, love never goes away. Am I a hopeless romantic? Am I a numbskull? I don’t know, but if you stop believing in that, then what else is there to believe in?

I mean, even if you argue, even if you separate, even if you can’t live together and decide to get divorced, if you truly love someone you will always,
always
love them.

As soon as I got a chance, I called Brooke to talk to her about the whole situation, and my daughter told me, “Dad, Mom hasn’t loved you for a really long time.” As a husband, as a father, to have your own kids tell you they think it might actually be better if their mother and I don’t live together anymore? It was devastating. It messed with everything I ever thought I knew about life and love and marriage. Marriage was supposed to be forever.

Knowing all of that, knowing what true love is, and knowing that Linda was openly telling her own children that she didn’t love me anymore, I was left with one big question—a mind-blowing question that I’ve been wrestling with ever since that phone call on the
Gladiators
set kicked me in the chest.
Did Linda ever really love me?

Facing the Mirror

A week and a half after I got that call,
Gladiators
went on break and I flew home to Tampa. Alone. Nick stayed at his mom’s house there in L.A., and Brooke had found her own apartment in Miami.

So I walked into the big house on Willadel, this giant place that was always full of noise and energy with the kids running around, and their friends, and especially this time of year with Linda going over the top with holiday decorations that rivaled something you’d see in Rockefeller Center in New York City. I walked in, and it was dead silent. I’m looking at all these pictures of my family. The kids. Me and Linda. I just couldn’t take it.

I made it all the way upstairs and saw Linda’s empty closet—this closet of hers that’s bigger than most people’s whole bedrooms. The whole thing was just empty.

I walked into Nick’s room, and kept asking myself over and over again why he was upset with me. He kept telling me nothing was wrong. He said everything was fine. But then he’d spend 90 percent of his time with his mother, and when he was with me he had this “woe is me” look in his eyes. I just didn’t get it.

I sat on Brooke’s bed and asked the same questions. She had moved out and was barely talking to me anymore. What had I done?

I felt miserable, and after traveling back from California, I was so tired I was wired. Do you know that feeling? My mind was racing, and I just couldn’t be alone. I couldn’t take it. So I grabbed my keys and headed right back out the front door.

I wound up at a place called Oz. A strip club. I was so naive, I never even stepped foot into a strip club until somewhere around 1992. No joke. All I ever thought about was wrestling and making money, and then when I had a family all I thought about was getting home to see them in between matches on the road. Man, I had no idea what I had been missing. And when Hulk Hogan walks into a strip club it’s not like any normal guy walking in. The whole place kind of goes wild, you know? The girls get all excited. “Oh, Hulk . . .”