My Life Outside the Ring (41 page)

The basic idea is that certain people feed off of negative energy. They need it to live. The only way they can survive is to constantly create negativity in the lives of everyone around them: family, friends, co-workers—anyone they can draw into that vacuum of misery, they will.

A New Earth
calls that powerful, living, breathing type of negative energy a “pain body,” but I’ll spare you the new age language and try to describe this phenomenon in my own words.

It all goes back to the idea that your thoughts are like a magnet. The more negative the thoughts you harbor, the more negative the consequences you bring. Certain people get caught up in that negative energy: As their thoughts get worse, the consequences get worse, and as the consequences get worse, the bitching and moaning and complaining about the circumstances of their life gets worse, which creates even more negative energy, and so on.

Sometimes these same people fall prey to addictions. Alcohol and drugs fuel the hunger, but the thing they’re addicted to most is the uproar and chaos that they themselves create.

Reading those passages, realizing that what I’d witnessed in my own household had happened to other people, that it was tangible and describable—I can’t tell you what a relief that was. The understanding I took away from those pages acted like a construction crane, grasping and lightening the load of that boulder I’d been carrying on my shoulders. And that made it easier to carry the whole truth of my marriage once it finally started to emerge.

“Ask and ye shall receive.” I asked for answers about what kind of person would turn their divorce into a war, and in the summer of 2008 my own children opened my eyes to sides of Linda that I never even knew existed.

I still can’t believe it took a divorce and my son going to jail and my daughter not talking to me for months on end before I finally took off the blinders when it came to my wife. I was finally ready to understand not only the person Linda had become, but the true person she was in all of those years when I wasn’t around for days on end and she was home alone with my children.

In mid-2008, every time I saw Brooke I told her how bad I felt for all she had been through in these recent months and years. It just killed me that my daughter had been thrown on this emotional roller coaster that Linda and I created. I kept saying to her, “I just wish we could go back to the good times we had as a family.”

Then one day that summer, Brooke stopped my little trip down memory lane dead in its tracks. She stopped me by asking a question: “When
was
that, Dad?”

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“Those good times you’re talking about. I mean, it wasn’t really that good,” she said. “Ever.”

From that day forward I started to really talk with my daughter about this marriage, as
she
saw it. I guess I had never taken the time to do that—to fully imagine what life was like as Hulk Hogan’s kid and Linda Bollea’s daughter.

In fact, it really shook me up, because part of me never really thought all that much about what was happening in my home when I was on the road all those years. I think I made a lot of assumptions about how the kids were being raised, and the messages they were getting, and the lessons they were receiving. Linda was my wife, and I just assumed she was parenting in a way that was appropriate and compatible with my own values.

Until that summer, I didn’t realize there was a whole life between Linda and these kids that I knew nothing about.

Brooke didn’t want to explain it all to me, but she wanted me to understand. So one day, she told me about her diaries. Diaries she had kept going all the way back to when she was a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old. It was a shocking thing to hear my daughter open her private thoughts to me in that way, but it was that important to her.

The biggest revelation from Brooke was that Linda’s drinking affected the children. Linda was especially mean when she got drunk. So mean that Brooke apparently dreaded the sound of Linda’s footsteps in the hall. Brooke, my little girl, kept rosary beads hung above her bed so she could hold them and pray for the misery to pass.

All those years I had no idea.

I’ll stop there. I think you get the point. Having Brooke open up to me about what was in her diaries broke my heart.

The thing is, I’m not talking about all of this to
trash
Linda. I’m talking about it because I’m trying to
understand
her, and because I want you to stop and think about what happened to me and how it might apply to you: How massive, deep-seated problems can go unnoticed in a marriage or any other relationship if you’re not totally present and aware of what’s going on in your own life.

It’s staggering to me that I could have been blind to these things for so many years. I could stand in the ring at Madison Square Garden, totally present and aware of the mood swings and mindset of twenty-two thousand people—so much so that I could hold that entire audience in the palm of my hand—and yet I wasn’t present and aware enough in my life outside the ring to notice how dysfunctional and damaging my own family had become.

Finding Forgiveness

Throughout this yearlong reevaluation of everything I’ve ever done in my life, coming to grips with what went wrong in my marriage was the hardest part of it all.

But once I had that understanding, I had to do something more: I had to learn to let go of my anger toward Linda.

Linda’s a product of the home she grew up in, a product of her parents, a product of the environment that shaped her. She’s even a product of the life I gave her. A life filled with excess. A life spent living in Hulk Hogan’s shadow. A life with a husband who was constantly gone.

The more I’ve grown to understand all of that, the more I’ve grown capable of forgiving her. For everything.

I will always, always love Linda. Nothing will change that. And I’m so grateful that she came into my life. I’m grateful for the time we shared together. I’m grateful for this tremendous life that she allowed me to live—and she really did make it possible. She was the one taking care of my home and children and even my money while I was out wrestling every day. So I’m grateful for that. And of course I’m eternally grateful for the children that we brought into this world.

I’m even grateful—get ready for this one, folks—for the hell that Linda put me through at the end of our marriage: the disappearing, the drinking, even the divorce itself.

If it wasn’t for all of that, I never would have bottomed out in December of 2007. And if I hadn’t bottomed out, I might still be walking on that treadmill of misery I called my life.

The fact is, I’m not walking on that treadmill anymore. As much as it may look like my life is nothing but pain and misery and ordeals as I continue to undergo back surgeries and the divorce gets drawn out and the Graziano lawsuit looms, nothing could be further from the truth.

The thing I’ve come to realize in this last couple of years is that sometimes right before your greatest success you face your darkest hours. Sometimes you have to have a tragic loss or some tragic event has to happen to you in order to make you become aware and present and grateful for your life. I’ve reached a point where my life is now drastically happier than it has ever been. On a minute-by-minute, day-by-day basis, I spend more time smiling than ever before.

I only wish Linda could get there, too. I pray for that to happen every day.

That’s the amazing thing about negative energy: Sometimes it gets so powerful that it finally crashes and sends you careening in the opposite direction overnight. That’s what happened to me when all of a sudden I grew sick and tired of being sick and tired. I just keep praying that Linda finds that feeling soon. I really do.

As for all of that other ongoing stuff in my life? Those are all just situations I have to deal with. I’ll admit there are a lot of really heavy situations that are still hitting me simultaneously. It’s more than a lot of people could take. Sure, it can be daunting at times. That’s a good thing, though. I like a challenge, and I know now that I can survive and thrive through all of these obstacles because something better is waiting for me on the other side.

That’s the power of spirituality.

I’m not some kind of hero for acting this way. There are no heroes here. I’m not doing anything other than what everybody should try to do. It’s pretty simple stuff, actually.

When it comes down to it, no matter what your situation, no matter what your circumstance, just ask yourself, “Would I rather be happy or sad?”

When you wake up every morning, stop and ask yourself, “Would I rather be joyful or miserable?”

When faced with a situation in life that could go either way, just ask yourself this one big question: “Do I want to be good or bad?”

That’s it. You choose. End of story.

I wish I
could say that every circumstance in my life improved the moment I had this spiritual awakening and these moments of forgiveness. It didn’t. I’d spent far too many years wallowing in negativity for it all to turn around just because I’d read a few books and made some new friends.

Just like it takes time for a seed to sprout through the surface of the soil, it takes time for a life to turn around and head in a new direction. My books taught me that. I see evidence of my life turning around every day now, because I’m as present and aware of what’s happening in my life as any man can be.

I could go on for pages and pages here about all the crazy situations life continued to throw at me as 2008 turned to 2009. I could talk for days about how quickly all the money I’ve ever made is being depleted—by Linda, by lawyers, by these massive expenses I’m laying out—to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. I could go on about the fact that at this moment, I don’t have a job, which means that all of that money could truly be gone by the middle of 2010 if this cycle doesn’t stop; which means there won’t be any money left for me to fund John Graziano’s care, let alone anything else his family wants to do with their winnings, should a judge decide to rule in their favor. I could go on about Linda trying to have me arrested when I drove near our old neighborhood. Or explain how Linda treated our kids now that I was no longer around to serve as her punching bag. I could certainly talk for hours about my wife’s nineteen-year-old boyfriend who was living the high life, driving my cars, driving my boat, and sleeping in that mansion while I paid for the nonstop party he and a whole bunch of his friends were having care of Linda’s wide-open wallet, and more.

Like I said, though, those are all just “life situations.” They’re not my life anymore.

I haven’t gone soft. Don’t get me wrong. I will continue to fight for what’s right, and what’s mine. There’s nothing about this new lifestyle of mine to suggest that I should just roll over. In fact, just the opposite. I need to fight for what’s right more than ever—to fight for what’s “right” and not “wrong.”

All I’m saying is that those things don’t consume me anymore.

The things that consume my thoughts are much bigger, and much brighter.

Nick walked out
of jail a free man on October 21, 2008. I don’t use the word “man” lightly. He grew up a lot in those months. It’s hard to imagine a way to become more present and aware and grateful for what you have in life than to see your simplest freedoms taken away, and I know Nick is stronger than ever for going through that ordeal.

The judge in my divorce finally allowed me to move back into our house on the sand in Clearwater Beach. So I gave Nick that bachelor pad to stay in till he decided where he wanted to live. (There was a real motivation for him to move to California—to escape the Tampa media madness, for one, and to have a shot at getting his license back sooner, so he could try to find work and establish a life and career for himself now that he’s turned eighteen. In 2009, that’s exactly what he would do.)

Living on the beach turned out to be a dream. I wasn’t allowed to change Linda’s putrid decorating experiments—the house was still a “marital asset,” so the tartan-plaid carpet and paisley wallpaper she installed on the ceiling have to stay until the divorce is finalized and we decide who gets what property. Still, waking up and looking at that white sand every day, dipping into the ocean whenever I feel like it—it’s an idyllic life that I appreciate now more than ever.