My Life Outside the Ring (8 page)

I started going to the gym a little more myself—where word was just beginning to get around about steroids and what they could do for your performance.

I remember sitting at a club one night drinking with Superstar Billy Graham and asking him, “Hey, man, you know anything about steroids? You ever taken steroids?”

“No, brother,” he said. “Never taken ’em.”

(Yeah, right. If you know anything about the history of steroid use in wrestling, Superstar Billy Graham was one of the first guys to take steroids. He was a pioneer! Many years later he would openly admit it, but he certainly wasn’t gonna admit it to this nobody bass player who kept talking his ear off at these clubs.)

Once I started to look at these guys as just regular human beings instead of these larger-than-life figures, I started watching what happened in the ring with a whole new set of eyes.

That’s when the revelation came—a revelation that would change my life forever.

If you’re a wrestling fan, you’re probably familiar with Randy Orton. Well, Randy’s father, Bob Orton, was a big wrestler here in Florida. He was a real aggressive guy in the ring.

So I was at this match one day with a seat close to the ring, watching Bob Orton do his thing. He’s on top of this other wrestler and gettin’ ready to pummel him, and I read Bob Orton’s lips, as plain as day.

“Hit me.”

All of a sudden the guy reaches up and hits him!

I went,
What
? Had I really just seen that? I kept my eyes glued to Orton’s mouth until it happened a second time. “Hit me again,” he said. And the guy hit him again!

After all this time, nobody’d ever smartened me up to the notion that wrestling was fake, let alone that the ending of the match was predetermined. Even as kids we all had moments where we wondered about it. It seemed like common sense that if I’m beating some guy up and I throw him against the ropes, I’m not gonna just stand there and let him bounce off the ropes and come back and knock me over, right? Why did they do stuff like that?

But I’d never seen anything as clear as this.

“Again,” Orton says. “Again, again!” And the guy keeps hitting him. I can see it’s not a one-off thing. I recognize that Orton is creating this tension in the ring where it looks like he’s about to get beat, so that he can suddenly turn it around and make a comeback. And he does. And the crowd goes nuts!

My whole world changed. Right in that moment I thought to myself,
I can do this. I can
do
this!

Once I knew
that these guys weren’t trying to kill each other for real, that no matter how crazy it looked in that ring it wasn’t a real confrontation, I knew in my gut that I could get up there and do it as well as any of those guys I’d idolized, if not better.

I instantly went from being a pumped-up fan, from just being proud to hang out and have a beer with some of these wrestlers, to wanting to be one of them.

That’s when I started pestering them. “Hey, man, you know, God, I’d sure like to be a wrestler someday.”

When I wasn’t getting any assistance from the wrestlers themselves, I turned my attention to the only manager I knew: Oliver Humperdink.

Humperdink’s role was to bring all the bad guys in to try to dethrone Dusty Rhodes. So I thought I’d try to be a bad guy for him and have him bring me in, too. I had the build and had already been trying to get even more of a bodybuilder look, just to look better in the band. Diet sodas had been introduced around that time, and most days I’d go to Burger King and eat a Whopper with a Diet Coke or a Diet Pepsi and fries, and that would be the only meal I had all day. I got down to like 240 on that Burger King diet, which actually looked rail thin on me at the time.

I just kept bugging Humperdink until finally one day he told me to meet him at his apartment over in Clearwater at noon. I was pumped. I was there right on time, but he didn’t show up until four or five o’clock. He had been down in Palm Beach for a match the night before, and wrestlers pretty much kept musicians’ hours. So I shouldn’t have been surprised he was so late.

There are two things I remember about our meeting that day. One, Humperdink wasn’t wearing socks, and when he took his penny loafers off I got hit by a stench like nothing I’d ever encountered in my life. The smell of that Humpty Dumpty guy’s feet will haunt me for as long as I live, no matter how much I try to block out the memory.

The second thing I remember, even though I had never set one foot in a wrestling ring, is what I swore to Humperdink that afternoon. “If I can get into the wrestling business,” I promised him, “I’ll be the greatest wrestler who’s ever lived.”

There was something about being in a band and being onstage and having that interaction with the crowd, combined with this newfound knowledge that wrestling was more of a show than a fight, that made me absolutely confident I could do it.

I thought about Dusty Rhodes and how he could pump up the crowd, and the bad guys yelling at the ref, and the boos and the ire they’d inspire, and I knew I could do it. I just knew it.

I had spent so much time watching Dusty and Superstar and all of the other great wrestlers that I had this vision of just stealing a little something from all the best wrestlers and rolling it all into one character. I didn’t know what that character would be called, or how it would all play out, but I could see it in my mind.

So with absolutely nothing to back up my words except my own gut feeling, I sat in front of that smelly-feet Humpty Dumpty just begging and bragging my ass off. “I swear to you, if you help me, I’ll be the greatest wrestler who ever lived!”

You know what Humperdink said? “Terry, my brother—I think you will be.”

That was the beginning of my demise.

The thing I
didn’t realize about Oliver Humperdink was that he wasn’t really in control of anything. He was just an employee of the organization, you know? So when he invited me down and I started hanging around the matches, rolling my sleeves up, anxiously waiting to be a part of his stable—thinking I would jump right in as one of his big blond bad guys right next to Superstar Billy Graham—I had no idea that I was barking up the wrong tree.

It turns out that Mike Graham and some of the other guys wouldn’t let him put me in the ring. Humperdink wasn’t from Tampa. He didn’t have that small-town mindset that so many of these Floridian wrestlers had. He saw that I had some charisma. He saw how big my arms were. He saw that I was six foot seven!

But the more I hung around and begged him to put me in the ring, the less he talked to me. He started to just plain avoid me. I didn’t get the subliminal message that none of these local wrestlers wanted me around, and I guess he didn’t have the heart to tell me.

It’s like I had blinders on. I was so confident that this wrestling thing would be my ticket, I suddenly became that guy I hated in the rock ’n’ roll band—the one who gave up just as things were getting good.

Ruckus got booked for a major out-of-town tour. When the guys told me it was locked I said, “Sorry. No. I can’t go.”

The guys looked at me like I was nuts. “What do you mean?” they said. “We’ve been trying to get this booking forever!”

I said, “Nope. I’m gonna be a wrestler.”

Dude, they died laughing. They knew how much I loved wrestling and how obsessed I’d become with it lately—but they also knew I hadn’t stepped foot in a ring.

It didn’t matter. That was it. I just fuckin’ quit. I knew what I wanted to do.

Chapter 4

Fighting My Way In

In 1976, I started going
down to the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory for the matches every Tuesday night. I’d hang around the backstage door afterward like some groupie just to see everyone. Then every Wednesday they’d tape matches during the day at the Sportatorium, and I’d show up there. I got to be real friendly with this guy Charlie Lay, who was like seventy, an old ex-wrestler himself who worked at the front desk and always let me in.

I had no idea how obnoxious I was. I have fans now who come up to me all the time and say, “Hey, Hogan! I’ve been working out for three years. I want to get into the ring. Look at me! I could be the next Hulk Hogan!” I just roll my eyes and can’t wait to get away from some of these people, you know? In the business we call these guys “marks.” They’re pretty much looked at as fools you can put a beating on if you’re so inclined. And here I was showing up saying I was gonna be the next Superstar Billy Graham, every single day.

I didn’t feel like a mark, though. Like I said, I was following my gut. I knew I wasn’t necessarily the toughest guy in the building, but I knew that if it had to do with smoke and mirrors, showmanship, calculating and planning, if it had anything to do with strategy, I could be really good at it.

I could see that wrestling was as much show business as anything else. I didn’t even know what the word “entertainment” meant back then, but it turns out I had an innate understanding of what it means to entertain. In many ways, I understood the meaning of that word better than a lot of people who’d been in the wrestling “entertainment” business their entire lives.

Only no one believed me.

After weeks of my not shutting up, telling everyone in town that I was gonna be a wrestler, Mike Graham finally pulled me aside. I knew Mike in high school and never liked the guy. He was older, and didn’t think much of me. He made that clear from day one. His father, Eddie Graham, was a wrestling promoter, and by this time Mike liked to think of himself as a bona fide wrestler. He was all muscled up and thought he was big news on the local wrestling scene.

So we’re outside the Sportatorium on this roasting hot day, and Mike Graham takes me to his van. It must be 120 degrees in that thing. He sits me on the floor, and he’s sittin’ on the hump between the front seats talking down to me.

“So you want to be a wrestler,” he says. “You’ve been telling everyone you want to be a wrestler. Well, I’ll tell you right now, the first thing you oughta know is that you shouldn’t be telling people you want to be a wrestler.”

Mike made it perfectly clear that no one talked about the secrets of wrestling. If somebody said wrestling was fake, he’d get punched out. That’s no exaggeration. You have to remember, it was the 1970s. It was barbaric. There were no lawyers, no PC police; there wasn’t anybody suing anybody. So if you said to a wrestler after a match, “Hey, that was a great show!” the wrestler would just flatten you. Put you in the hospital if he could.

I’m listening to this guy who never thought much of me, and who I still didn’t like, and he’s taking this authoritative tone—he’s lecturing me like he’s my dad or something.

Then something surprising happened. Instead of sending me away, he invited me to come back and get some training.

“I’m gonna set you up with a guy named Hiro Matsuda,” Mike said. “Be here tomorrow.”

Finally! I was beyond thrilled.
Oh my God, he’s really doing me a favor, setting me up with Hiro Matsuda!

I’d seen Matsuda
wrestle at the armory a bunch of times. He was a mid-card guy, and I never paid much attention to him, but it turned out he was the baddest sonofabitch around. In a real fight, Matsuda could’ve easily kicked any of the top-tier main-event wrestlers’ asses.

It also turned out that he was one of the partners in the promotion end of the local wrestling business with Eddie Graham. He owned part of the company, he was partially a promoter, and he did big business booking wrestlers in Japan—a whole other side of the wrestling world that I knew nothing about at that point.

So I went down to the Sportatorium thinking I was gonna get a workout from Matsuda, maybe learn a few things.

From the moment I walked in the door that day, they exercised me till I was about to pass out. Matsuda’s guys were ragging on me for my long hair, calling me a hippie, pressing me so hard that I was ready to puke. The whole stadium started to go white. I got lightheaded and couldn’t even see—that’s how close I was to fainting. But I walked in there willing to do whatever it took. So I didn’t stop.

Just when I was about ready to keel over, these guys said, “All right, now get in the ring and wrestle!”