I said, “I’m going to put an end to the party.”
I slipped out the door, took about twenty minutes to sneaky-crawl, SEAL style, up to their campsite—in fact, I looped around and came in on them from the opposite side. At one point, as I was lying there, one guy walked out from the campsite, stopped literally no more than four feet from me, urinated, and went back to the party, never having any idea I was there.
At the appropriate time, I walked into the center of the camp. Can you imagine? Most of the partyers are probably half out of it, smokin’ pot and drinkin’ beer, and all of a sudden this six-foot-four monster appears out of the woods, fully loaded with weapons, right in the middle of their camp.
I told them, very quietly, “Well, I’d have three confirmed kills on you guys right now, if I wanted them. But don’t worry, I’m friendly forces.”
I looked them all up and down, real slow. All I could see was row upon row of frightened, bleary eyeballs staring at me. “The party’s too loud.” I told them, “It’s time for the party to end now. I’m going to disappear again, as quietly as I came. But there’s a lot of Harley-Davidsons here. I want them all walked out to the road and started there, not here.” And I narrowed my eyes at them and growled, “Don’t make me come back.” Then I turned and disappeared back into the woods.
They sat there for a while and didn’t say a word. And lo and behold, every Harley got walked out to the road.
A couple of weeks later, I walked into the local gas stop a half mile from the house, and two Brooklyn Park police came up to me. They said, “Hey Jesse! We heard you broke up a party along the river the other night—you did our job for us!”
“How did you know about that?” I asked.
They laughed, “My God, that story’s spread all over town! We heard you used pretty good technique!”
“Well, they had me outnumbered about fourteen to one, so I had to let ’em know I was serious and that the advantage was mine.”
So word was spread that occasionally I would do some strange things along the riverbank. Well, it was my riverbank. I was the captain of the river.
Patrolling was good training for Tyrel, too. Whenever we went out, we took it very seriously. We did everything by the books. When you go out on ops, there’s no talking. So when Ty and I went out, it was in complete silence; all hand signals. It was good discipline.
I did that for a reason. I believe very strongly that guns are instruments of death. That’s all they’re used for; there’s no purpose for them other than to kill. I think you have to understand that in order to respect them. I have no fear of my son handling weapons, because he has that respect. I remember the first time I let him shoot my M-16. He was just a young kid. I took him up to the lake, I set up a target range, and I let him shoot. He fired it three or four times, then he set the weapon down, walked away, and sat down. I asked him, “What’s the matter?”
He said, “I kinda . . . just need to rest a little, Dad.”
I told him, “See? It’s not like the movies, is it? This is real.”
And he understood. What you see in the movies, and what you pretend when you play cops and robbers and that sort of thing, is very different than what you’re doing when you fire the real thing. You know that those projectiles you’re firing could kill. That’s what they’re designed to do.
Ty’s a well-rounded, good kid. He’s also a gentle kid—he’ll walk away from a fight; he’s not like his old man. I admire him for it. It’s a quality I wish I had more of in myself. I don’t walk away from a confrontation.
There was recently a unique story on the editorial page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune: They compared me to a Klingon. There was even a little drawing of me, with the caption, “Governor Klingon.” The guy who wrote the article explained that Klingons are very honorable; they believe in things. And if you draw a line in the sand, they’ll fight you to the death for what they believe in. When I read the story, I thought it was very accurate.
I have two great kids, in spite of the somewhat unusual up-bringing they’ve had. Even though the odds in the wrestling business are stacked against the wrestler half a dozen different ways, I managed to make a fairly decent living at it. Terry and I swore that we wouldn’t start a family until we could provide for one properly, and we were married for five years before we got to that point.
There were a number of times in my career, though, when wrestling went bad on me. There were dark patches in those years that were marked by backstabbing and betrayal. I once had a close friend you’ve probably heard of. His name was Hulk Hogan. Like me, he was a disciple of “Superstar” Billy Graham. Like me, he turned rebel on the twenty-six-region system and threw his lot in with Vince McMahon at the founding of the modern WWF. He was Vince’s golden boy, the favored son. He was fed up with the unfair working conditions we wrestlers faced, just as I was. But it turned out that he had his own way of dealing with it, which led to the end of our friendship.
Wrestling, you see, is unlike other sports in that it’s not a simple contest of athletic ability. There are a whole lot of other intangibles that go into it. Wrestlers are close with each other as a rule, but there’s an element of competition in there, too, because we’re all vying for that push from a promoter that can make or break your career.
All through your wrestling career, remember, you’re an independent contractor. You’re paying out an enormous amount in taxes. There’s no pension, no health benefits. And the moment you’re not making that draw, the promoters couldn’t care less about you. You’re a piece of meat. I knew guys that had worked hard for twenty years or more and still retired with nothing. Wrestling operated under some of the most unfair working conditions in the country. I don’t know how they got away with it for so many years. The WWF was supposed to change things, but it hadn’t turned out that way.
I had been rumbling quietly about forming a wrestler’s union for a while. One day I had met up with Gene Upshaw, the union rep for the National Football League, in an elevator. Gene looked at me, and in that big deep voice of his said, “You boys in wrestling need to unionize!”
And I said, “You’re right, Gene, we do!” Ever since then, I had been talking quietly among the boys. They were all for it. All we had to do was to wait for the right moment, which came pretty soon after that.
It was spring of 1987. We were scheduled for the WWF’s Wrestlemania II in Los Angeles. All the publicity had gone out on it already. About two weeks before the event, I went into a dressing room full of wrestlers and said, “Boys, if there was ever a chance to organize, now is the time to do it. All of our faces are on the Wrestlemania publicity—the fans are expecting us. They couldn’t back out of the deal now. Now’s our chance.”
But a couple of the wrestlers said, “We need Hulk Hogan. We can’t do this without him.”
“No, we don’t,” I explained. “Hogan’s scheduled to wrestle King Kong Bundy, and Bundy has publicity out on him already. If Bundy backs us, Hogan has to wrestle him. If we all stick together and simply tell Vince we’re refusing to wrestle unless we’re allowed to unionize, what are they gonna be able to do? And if the other unions all back us up, who’s gonna turn the lights on in the building?” Vince had invested millions in Wrestlemania II. We had him.
But nobody wanted to be the one to risk it. They were all behind me until I started drawing heat for it. Then I was alone. I came home a few nights later, and as soon as I walked in the door the phone rang. It was Vince McMahon. I knew something big was going down because he’s not in the habit of calling his wrestlers at home for a chat.
“Ventura, what are you trying to pull? I heard you were trying to unionize wrestling.”
I thought to myself, “Who told him?” But I’m not the type to back down from anything, so I said, “Yeah, I’m looking into it. Why wouldn’t I? This is not to fight you, Vince. This is about me and all the other wrestlers who have to pay four or five thousand a year for health care. If we’re in a union, we can buy it i
n bulk and save a lot of money.” I went on to tell him all the reasons why unionizing would help us. But he argued and threatened, and we basically got nowhere. I told him, “Jeez, Vince. This is just like the movie Norma Rae.”
For years and years, I wanted to know who had squealed on me. It was just me and the other wrestlers in the room that night, so it had to have been one of them. A few years later, I faced Vince McMahon in a court of law, and that’s when the truth came out.
Fortunately for me, I soon had another option. I had just been signed to do the movie Predator and had appeared on the TV show Hunter before that. I was now eligible for my Screen Actors Guild card. I had my union. To this day, I keep my dues paid, because that’s where I get my health and retirement benefits.
Once my SAG card had kicked in, I told Vince, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to try to unionize anymore. I have my union card. If those guys are too gutless to do it, let them find their own way into a union.”
Even after I left the WWF, Vince McMahon still found ways to exploit me. He was very big into marketing, and he had my voice and likeness on about ninety videotapes that he had for sale. I had asked him once why he was making all this money off of me, yet I wasn’t seeing a dime of it. He’d said, “C’mon, Ventura. Nobody gets royalties off of videotape. Hulk Hogan doesn’t even get royalties. Why would you?” And I believed him.
Later in my career, I developed a friendship with an ally who started smartening me up to this kind of thing. His name was Barry Bloom, and aside from being a die-hard wrestling fan, he was also a Hollywood talent agent. He liked to watch wrestling at night in his hotel room when he was on business trips, and he’d seen this big powerful blond guy with a feather boa and a commanding presence, and he was convinced that I was perfect for the movies.
Barry is a terrific guy. He’s right at home with my particular brand of strangeness. He’s game for just about everything. He’s pretty good on a horse. He’s even been out patrolling with me and Tyrel.
We took Barry out to the little island in the river we used to camp on. We got in there at night and made our camp and set up booby traps with flares, in case anybody came up on us at night. Ty had a little plastic gun; I had my AR-15, loaded. I never carry one that isn’t. In the morning, we cleared up our camp, packed up our booby traps, and made it look like no one had been there.
When we were coming back up to the house, I told Barry to hide behind a hill. When Terry came out, I got a worried expression on my face and said, “Where’s Barry? We left him an hour ago. He’s not here?”
Terry was about to panic. “You left him down at the river all by himself? That guy from L.A.?” That’s when Barry stepped out from behind the hill, in hysterics.
I was the first wrestler in history to ever bring in an agent. From then on, Barry negotiated with the WWF for me, and he kept bringing up the subject of royalties. But each time he did, he was told that no one in the WWF gets royalties for videotapes—just as I had been told earlier, with only one exception. So I figured that if no one was getting royalties, what chance did I have? Barry also told me that I had a right to protect the use of my likeness. So I filed a federal trademark on “Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura.”
I actually took Vince McMahon’s company to court over the royalty issue. I sued on what’s called “quantum meruit” for the fair value of my contributions to his videos. As it turned out, I had been lied to for several years, because Hulk Hogan and others were getting royalties for their videotapes. And the court agreed with me that had I known the truth, I would not have agreed to perform unless I got royalties too.
We learned that Vince had made $25 million from the ninety videotapes I was on. When they applied a fair royalty rate to those tapes, it came out to about $800,000. And after interest was added in, I walked away from that lawsuit with about a million dollars. I made an enemy of Vince McMahon that day. Since I’d beaten him in court, he wasn’t ever going to hire me again. It doesn’t behoove promoters to have wrestlers who know what their rights are.
During the lawsuit, I took my lawyer, David Olsen, aside and asked him, “If the opportunity comes up . . . could you see if you can get McMahon to tell who it was that squealed on me about the union?”
So during Vince’s deposition, David asked, “Mr. McMahon, has there ever been a union in wrestling?”
“No.”
“Has anyone ever tried to form a union?”
“Yeah. As a matter of fact, I think Jesse Ventura spouted his mouth off about it.”
“Were you in the room?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Well, then how did you know about it?”
Without any hesitation, Vince replied, “Hulk Hogan told me.”
I didn’t show any emotion at the time, but I almost fell over in my chair. Hulk Hogan had been a friend of mine, or so I thought, for six or eight years at that point. He was the last person I would have suspected. It was then I knew that he was a traitor. In my mind he was the ultimate stooge. It turned out that Vince was taking care of him very well, and I guess he didn’t want to share any of that with the other wrestlers. It came out in court that in one Wrestlemania, for example, he got paid more than all the rest of us combined.
Now, I fully acknowledge that he’s the biggest star wrestling’s ever had, I don’t want to take any of that from him. But for him to pretend to be friends with all of us while all the while going behind our backs and telling Vince everything we said, and to ultimately stop us from unionizing, which would have made life better in countless ways for all of us, is pretty sad. From that point on, I lost all respect for him.
And that’s how it is to this day. Later in my career, I was working for Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW); I was not small potatoes. But Hogan came into the organization, and within three months I was fired. That’s the power he has in wrestling. He knew that I know the true Hulk Hogan, so he didn’t want me around. Besides, he wanted my act. Just look at him. He’s going for the same look I had fifteen years ago.
That was by no means all of it. Back in the eighties, when steroids were legal, wrestlers were eating them like candy. It was accepted. Then all of a sudden, when Ben Johnson got caught using them in the 1992 Olympics, they became the Scourge of Humanity.
I had been talking about them for years, saying, “Doesn’t anybody else out there see what’s going on?” Steroids came into wrestling with the advent of the bodybuilder physique popularized by “Superstar” Billy Graham, who suffers grave medical problems today from his past use. Not only do they shorten your life, but guys who took a lot of them were susceptible to what became known as “ ’roid rage.” They’d suddenly snap under the slightest pressure and would go into a frenzy.
There was a doctor I won’t name who made his living providing steroids to wrestlers. Wrestlers went to see him and left with their hands full of pills, no questions asked. The promoters drove wrestlers so hard that their bodies never could have withstood the punishment they were taking without them. They became a necessary evil. I’ll be the first one to tell you—I used them occasionally myself. I would take testosterone for thirty days, then I’d go off it for nine months. But I later found out they were destructive. I even did a poster for the FDA once, explaining that I once took them and warning kids not to use them.
But when steroids became such a great evil in the public’s eye, Hogan went on Arsenio Hall’s national TV show and told the world that he had never used steroids except under doctors’ orders for an injury. His big mantra to the kids at that time was to take their vitamins, work out, and say their prayers. I used to laugh at him and say, “What kind of ‘vitamins,’ Hogan? Orals or injectables?” Many wrestlers in the United States knew he used them. And yet he had the gall, on Arsenio Hall, to call “Superstar” Billy Graham, who was a hero and the number-one inspiration to both of us, a drug abuser for using them.
I broke new ground in wrestling in a lot of different ways. That’s why I can’t work in the bu
siness today. I’ve been banned because I’m known as a rebel. They know I’ll stand up for myself, and that I know what my rights are. I made a lot of headaches for them.
My wrestling career was marked by deceit, betrayal, and broken friendships. But the low points were balanced out with some phenomenal high points. The moment I look back on as the most memorable of my career was when I wrestled Bob Backlund in 1981 for the WWF world title in Madison Square Garden. The standard saying in wrestling was that the heels drew the crowds, and I drew ’em that night. I was scheduled to go into the ring with Backlund three times in a row. The place was sold out. That was the highlight of my career: selling out three times in the mecca of ring sports. I don’t know how I could have topped that.
I’m sure my world tour against Hulk Hogan would have been another great high point, if it had happened. This was a few years before his betrayal and the end of our friendship, and when both of us were enjoying a huge amount of popularity. Hogan was the world champ at that point. We were scheduled to go “around the Horn” together, wrestling in a whole bunch of cities all around the globe. It would have been one of the biggest draws in wrestling history and a great moment for both of us. But as it turned out, whatever force was at work that night at SEAL Cadre when I went over that dam and lived to tell about it was working its influence on my life again. Fate had other plans for me.
C H A P T E R 6
“THE MOUTH”
It happened that fast—the beginning of the end of my wrestling career. One day I was wrestling in Phoenix, two days later I was flat on my back in a San Diego hospital in intensive care, with doctors telling me not to move and calling Terry to tell her I could die at any minute.
That night in Phoenix, I had known I wasn’t at my best. Through the whole match, I couldn’t get enough air. I thought it was just because I was a Minnesotan, used to cold weather, and Arizona’s hot fall air was messing with my metabolism.
I Ain't Got Time to Bleed Page 11
