I Ain't Got Time to Bleed

by Jesse Ventura

  But it hit me again the next night when I was wrestling in Oakland. I was running out of breath in the ring; I couldn’t get enough air. I was getting through the matches, but it was becoming extremely hard to keep going.

  At that time I was hanging with Big John Studd, and he and I were planning to go to a gym to work out. But I told him, “John, I’m gonna go to bed; I’m not feeling good.”

  The next morning, we were scheduled to fly to San Diego, my last match before the start of the big program with Hulk Hogan for the title. John and I were going to go to the gym again. That was the routine: You flew into the city in the morning, then checked into your hotel, worked out, and rested and ate until it was time for your match in the evening. That morning, we checked into a Travelodge and were going to go to Jack Lambert’s gym. Again, I told John to go on without me, and I went to bed.

  I woke up at about one in the afternoon, drenched in sweat. Whenever I took a deep breath, I’d get hit with such severe pain in my lungs that I couldn’t stand it. I’d had pneumonia a few years earlier, and I thought I was getting it again, because it was the same kind of severe ache in my lower back and searing pain in my lungs. But even when I’d had full-blown pneumonia, I was in such good shape that when I breathed into one of those devices that test your lung capacity, I took it all the way to the top. So when I checked myself into Sharp Cabrillo Hospital that Saturday afternoon, I didn’t think I had all that much to worry about. I told them who I was and that I thought I was having another bout of pneumonia.

  The doctor did some preliminary tests on me, then came back into the room with a grave expression on his face. He told me, “I want you to sit in that chair, and I don’t want you to move—sit and do not move!”

  This doctor was an ex-marine, and I had told him that I’d been a SEAL, so we had a special understanding between us. I looked him in the eye and said, “C’mon, Doc, give it to me. What’s the deal here?”

  He said, “I don’t think you have pneumonia. I think you have pulmonary emboli.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Blood clots in your lungs.”

  “What!”

  He shook his head, “I’m telling it to you straight. If one of the clots breaks loose and travels to your heart, you could have a heart attack. If one travels to your brain, you could have a stroke.”

  They called in another doctor to give me an angiogram. Ever had one? They’re interesting. I had to be awake through the whole procedure. They cut me open at the groin and ran a tube up through my heart and out the heart valve, and they then shot dye into my lungs so they could see if I had clots. Both lungs were packed with them.

  They immediately immobilized me, put me on intravenous heparin to dissolve the clots, and had me on a twenty-four-hour monitor screen in the nurses’ station so they could keep an eye on me. They brought in one of Southern California’s top lung specialists, Dr. Applestein. He called Terry and told her, “You’d better fly out. He could die at any moment.”

  I was in intensive care with Terry at my side for six days, until they determined that the heparin had dissolved all the clots.

  I was supposed to have started wrestling Hogan by then. We had already sold out at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. I would have made a huge amount of money. But I had to cancel the tour because I was going to be on Coumadin, a blood thinner, for sixty days. Coumadin keeps the clots from forming, but it also makes you a bleeder. If I had been injured in the ring while I was on Coumadin, any bruises or cuts I received would have just kept on flowing until I died.

  I never got my matches with Hogan. I guess I must have lost about a million dollars on that deal. It was a chance of a lifetime, gone. I was stuck at home, recuperating, face-to-face with the fact that even if I was able to get back in the ring after this, there would eventually come a day when I couldn’t wrestle anymore. It’s a traumatic moment for any professional athlete to face: What do you do when it’s over? What happens when your body can’t perform anymore? What do you put on your résumé? Where do you go from here?

  Now, long before this, even before I realized to what depths I was getting shafted by wrestling’s powers that be, I had already been making plans for the inevitable day when I had to move on. But what I had come up with on my own, before the blood clots took up residence in my lungs, would never have taken me where I went next.

  I had already opened Ventura’s Gym, a weight-lifting center in Minneapolis. I ran the place for five years while I continued to wrestle. It made me more powerful in my run-ins with Vince McMahon and his ilk because they knew I had it to fall back on if I ever got kicked out of wrestling.

  In the end, though, it was steroids that drove me out of the gym business. Guys came in to work out and shot up steroids in the bathroom. I found used syringes in the trash cans. The last thing I needed was for a mother and child to come into my gym and see a bunch of guys shooting up. But I couldn’t control it. I even put up a sign telling people not to bring gym bags into the bathrooms. It was like adult day care. Finally, I got fed up with the whole thing, closed the gym, and leased out the space to Domino’s Pizza. Looking back now, I’m glad the gym didn’t work out, because however secure it might have been, it could only have taken me so far.

  Out of bad comes good sometimes. I believe in fate; I believe things happen for a reason. I look back now on the closing of the gym and my battle with the pulmonary emboli as things that had to happen to clear the way for what came next. It was through that adversity that a whole new phase of my life opened up.

  One afternoon when I was pretty close to being fully recuperated from the emboli, I got a call from Vince McMahon. (This was before I sued him, remember.) He said, “I have an idea. . . . There’s never been a bad guy on the microphone. Somebody who will do color commentating and side with the villains. Do you think you could do it?”

  I said, “Sure I can.” And that’s how I started making my transition from the mat to the microphone. Out of that adversity came my broadcasting career.

  In retrospect, I can see it was the wake-up call I needed to start moving into the next phase of my life. It couldn’t have come at a better time. A couple years before this, in 1983, Terry and I had welcomed the birth of our daughter, Jade. I now had the three of them to take care of. I hadn’t realized it yet at that point, but wrestling had taken me about as far as it could, and I needed to go a lot further in life.

  Tyrel had been born early; Jade came late. I was right there in the delivery room for her birth, just as I had been for Ty’s. But we knew something wasn’t right when, the moment after she was born, they took her away from us.

  Jade was having seizures. The doctors who examined her claimed she had even been having them when she was still inside Terry. At first, nobody could figure out what was wrong with her. After they did a CAT scan on her, a doctor informed us that whole parts of her brain were missing. He told us she’d most likely go through life in a vegetative state and that it would probably be best if we institutionalized her. Well, there was no way in hell Terry and I were going to do that.

  Can you imagine just having given birth and being told that? It’s pretty hard to take. Thankfully, it turned out that the doctor was wrong. When someone has seizures, it can cause pockets of fluid to build up on the brain. On the CAT scan, the fluids obscure the view of whatever’s behind them, which is why it looked like parts of Jade’s brain were missing. Her brain was all there. Rest assured, this was one young lady who was not destined to be a vegetable.

  But the seizures continued. We had to go home from the hospital without her. For sixty days, Jade was in intensive care. We went to the hospital to visit her every day and went home and cried each night. We handled it in our own ways, together and separately. We swore to get her the very best care we could, and we were determined she wasn’t going to go through life as a phenobarbital junkie in an institution somewhere. No matter what happened, we were determined to make life as normal for her as possible. But there is no nightm
are in the world like knowing that something is threatening your child’s life and that you’re powerless to do anything about it.

  Meanwhile, the doctors were trying to figure out what exactly was wrong. They’d never encountered something like this before, so they were trying to figure it out by a process of elimination.

  Finally, they brought in Dr. John McDonald from the Courage Center in Minneapolis. Dr. McDonald was a neurological specialist. He knew of one other case like Jade’s: a child in Florida who had a form of epilepsy that manifested in seizures like Jade’s. He sent for the records of the case and found out that the problem was an inability to metabolize vitamin B6, which is important for the central nervous system. Dr. McDonald put Jade on massive doses of B6, and, sure enough, her seizures stopped.

  We brought her home, and she was seizure free and doing great until she reached age two. That’s when the government expects you to have your child inoculated with the DPT vaccine against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. They now know that the vaccine has a bad effect on kids who are susceptible to seizures, but back then, it was only a theory, so they insisted that every kid go through with it, in spite of the accumulating evidence. So Jade got her DPT shot.

  I was out of town on a wrestling tour that day. In the middle of the night, in my hotel room, I suddenly woke up. A wave of apprehension broke over me, and I went from a dead sleep to wide-awake. Five minutes later, the phone rang. I picked it up and said, “What’s wrong?”

  Terry said that, after two years free, Jade had gone into heavy seizures and that they were on their way to the hospital. So tell me that there’s not some kind of telepathic connection between people who are very close.

  Jade was OK that time, but we refused to let anybody give her more DPT vaccine shots. It was the government’s fault she had to go through that, but there’s no way you can sue over it. People have tried. Even though the government knows there are kids who are susceptible to seizures from the shots, they have plausible denial, since there are usually so many other things wrong with those kids. In fact, one of my top security officers has a child similar to Jade. He sued—spending twelve thousand dollars of his own money—and still couldn’t win.

  To this day, Jade has never gotten any more of those immunity shots. Whenever some government official rumbles about Jade needing to have them to go to school, we say, “OK, but put it in writing that you’re ordering her to do this in spite of her medical condition, so we can sue you if she goes into seizures.” None of them will do it.

  Jade still has to take daily doses of vitamin B6. She’s a special-ed kid, and Terry and I have fought to keep her in the mainstream with her classmates. She’s the reason I’m a big advocate of mainstreaming special-ed kids—I’ve seen the miracle it’s worked on Jade.

  She’s doing great. She’s a remarkable young lady. She plays basketball, and she’s an accomplished horsewoman—she’s won trophies and ribbons. And she has an extraordinary way with animals, which a lot of special-ed kids seem to have. Every animal on the planet is her friend. Jade once brought a baby snapping turtle home from the lake. That turtle, whom she named Ed, got to recognize her voice and came when she called him. She fed him little shrimps from the end of a pair of tweezers. Ed’s been released back to the wild now, but his successor, Speedy, is quickly figuring out that the sound of Jade’s voice means it’s time to eat.

  Jade is a wonderful, sweet, well-mannered kid with a heart of gold. And she’s tough as nails, because she had to fight for her life from the day she was born. She has her own unique take on the story of her birth. Do you know what she says about the whole mix-up that happened at her birth, when the doctors thought she was going to be a vegetable? She says, “I tricked ’em.”

  Jade was the reason I “defected” to the WWF and joined up with Vince McMahon in the first place. Her medical bills were severe, and my health plan covered only a portion of them. We were deeply in debt. Remember, there was no union, no great medical policy. I felt I had to set my ego aside. My daughter’s life was more important than Jesse “The Body” and his ego. I believe in paying my debts, and I don’t go looking to welfare to do it. I take responsibility for my own actions, and I don’t expect the government to come and bail me out. I knew what I had to do for my daughter.

  I had been working for Verne Gagne in the Minnesota territory until recently. He was a yeller and a screamer, and he didn’t treat people right. I had quit working for him, and I didn’t like the idea of having to ask him to hire me back, but the money had to come from somewhere so I could pay for Jade’s treatment. I wasn’t wrestling at all at the time because I was busy running my gym. I told Verne my daughter was in intensive care and asked him if I could come back. He saw this as an opportunity to stick it to me and said, “I can’t use ya.” Now, I was a Main Eventer, I was a big draw at the time, so I knew this was bullshit.

  So I called Vince McMahon out east at the WWF. Vince said, “Look, Jesse, don’t worry about it. You’re over strong out here. I’ll tell you what: I’ll only book you on the weekends—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—so you can be home with your daughter during the week.”

  Well, after that, Verne called—he’d suddenly gotten a whiff of money—and said, “Look, Jesse, I just lost a guy here. Why don’t you come back and take his place.” So I called Vince and told him I had full-time work again.

  Vince said, “Well, Jesse. Maybe this is working out for the best. Go back and work for Verne for now. But I’ll tell you what. In a few months, I’m gonna call you. And when I do, I want you to come and work for me, full-time. Something big is gonna happen, and when it does, I want you working with me.”

  “Vince, if I do that, I won’t just be burning my bridge with Verne, I’ll be exploding it.”

  Vince said, “The choice is yours.”

  Now in spite of what Verne had done to me, I still had to think long and hard about cutting my ties with him. I’m a very loyal person. But later, Verne made the decision for me.

  I went back to wrestling for Verne. I was in a tag match with Masa Saito from Japan, who I call “Mr. Torture,” because if anybody gets out of line, Saito will beat the shit out of them. When he and I decided to go back into the steel-cage tag match together, the house gross went up by about $7,000. But somehow, Saito and I got $100 less. The house was bigger, we were the Main Event—the whole reason the house was bringing in more money—yet we were getting less. Now how did that happen? Later on, we found out that Verne and his son had just gone on a big skiing trip to Aspen and somebody had to pay for it!

  So a few months later, when Vince called, I went. Verne had butchered my allegiance to him by trying to yank my chain when I was in need and then added insult to injury by taking my money for his own personal pleasure. So I went with Vince and got into the WWF express elevator just as it was about to rocket its way up to international fame. Soon after that, Verne, and other regional promoters like him, went out of business.

  Back in the days when wrestling was a twenty-six-territory sport, there was an unwritten rule that nobody crossed into anybody else’s territory. Each of the promoters had his own little piece of America, and they all belonged to the NWA, the National Wrestling Alliance, which met yearly to discuss how to handle us wrestlers and how to keep us in our place.

  Well, when Vince McMahon came along, he didn’t owe any allegiance to the old guard. He was taking over from his father, Vince Senior, who had run the World Wrestling Federation in the Northeast, and who was dying of cancer. This was right at the time that cable television was coming in. Vince bought heavily into cable TV, and then started taking one or two of the top talent from each territory. He came to Minnesota and stole the announcer Gene Oakerlund, Hulk Hogan, and me from Gagne. He offered us a better deal and a chance to go national.

  In essence, we were burning our bridges. All of the other promoters saw going with Vince as a betrayal, and if Vince failed, we had no place to go back to. Vince even got death threats. We all got notices sayi
ng, “What are you trying to pull, you sons of bitches? What are you trying to do to the wrestling business? You’ll never wrestle again!” But I was so disenchanted with the wrestling business by then that I thought, “Screw it. I’m gonna take a chance”

  But I hadn’t done anything illegal. It was capitalism. It was just as if I’d been a ketchup maker and left Heinz to go make ketchup for Hunt’s. The public just chooses which ketchup they want to buy. That’s how free enterprise works. That’s capitalism.

  By joining the WWF, which was nationwide, I was getting in on the ground floor of something totally new, and I realized that if it worked, I’d be a bigger name than I could ever be regionally. And it was true. If I hadn’t done that, Barry Bloom would never have seen me on cable TV in his hotel room.

  Amusingly enough, years later when I sued Vince McMahon, Verne Gagne came in to testify against him on my behalf! He was one of my strongest witnesses. He explained, “I hate Vince McMahon even more than I hate Jesse Ventura!”

  I had been on board with the WWF for a couple of years by the time I had the pulmonary embolism, and I launched my commentating career as soon as I was fully recovered. Vince flew me out to Toronto and made me an announcer with Gorilla Monsoon. Vince had two teams of announcers: The “A” team was himself and Bruno Samartino, who worked the best shows, and the “B” team was me and Gorilla.

  I was coming over powerfully on the microphone. The TV audience loved to hear me talk about how much “highly developed skill” it took to pull someone’s hair and hide it from the referee. I always covered for the bad guys. When the bad guys lost, I gave them great excuses. The people loved it! They’d say, “Yeah! Goddamn, he’s right!”

  I started building more and more momentum, becoming more powerful because I was so good on the mike. Vince soon replaced Bruno with me. It was at that point that NBC came in and had me and Vince do Saturday Night’s Main Event. Our producer, Dick Ebersol, named me “One-take Jesse.” When they’d set up the cameras to film the promos, I’d nail them all in one take and go back to my trailer.