by Hogan, Hulk
Like I said, a rat to poison. Until I finally had a wake-up call in ’86.
Alan’s End
Was it fate or a big coincidence that Studio 54 got shut down for good in the spring of 1986? I think the collective party in this country had just gone on for far too long and got far too crazy. I mean, life has a way of slapping you in the face when things go too far, and I think that can happen on a grand scale as easily as it can happen in any one man’s life. We had all been on this party train since the ’70s, and all of a sudden it was running out of track.
Early that year, something terrible happened to my brother Alan’s ex-wife, Martha Alfonso. While he had gone on his odyssey—through Texas, and riding with the Hell’s Angels up in Frisco—and had remarried this lady named Marsha and started a new life in L.A., Martha stayed back in Tampa and raised their three kids on her own.
Martha was making a decent living managing a hotel by the Tampa airport. For a while she was dating a guy who had a whole lot of money, yet who never seemed to have a real job.
Well, one day Martha and her boyfriend got in a real big fight, and after work she went into the hotel bar and wound up dancing with one of the employees there. Her boyfriend walked in and shot her twice—killed her right there on the dance floor.
So all of a sudden I have two nieces and a nephew who lost their mom. (My nephew is Michael Bollea, who would eventually wrestle as Horace Hogan in the National Wrestling Alliance and over in Japan. He grew up thick and strong, like Alan.)
So these three kids started bouncing around between Martha’s side of the family, the Cuban side, and my parents. I did whatever I could to send money back to try to help them out. But just a few months later we were knocked out by another wave of bad news.
Alan started showing up to my matches in L.A., the same way he used to show up in San Francisco and Oakland a year or two earlier. Only now, instead of having the Hell’s Angels in tow, he’d bring his new wife, Marsha.
I knew that drugs were still a big part of Alan’s life. He hadn’t turned his life around as much as I thought.
It wasn’t long before my brother came right out in the open with it. “I need pain pills, man. Can you help me out?” He knew that I knew a doctor named George Zahorian back in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—this doc that would hook me and all the other wrestlers up with steroids and other stuff if we needed it. It wasn’t like I was giving him LSD, so I probably didn’t think much about sharing a few pain pills with my brother.
This one day in 1986, though, I went back to L.A. and met up with Alan and Marsha, and something had shifted—like someone had pulled the rug out from under their whole world. The two of them started giving me this crazy fuckin’ story. “We can’t pay the rent on the house. We’re behind on the van payment. Our carpet company’s goin’ under.” They were late on Alan’s motorcycle payment, they were out of groceries, they were desperate and needed my help. It was this, that, and the other, nonstop.
So I wrote ’em a check. I can’t remember if it was for five grand or ten grand. I was making enough money that it didn’t make a difference at that point. Anyway, as soon as I wrote that check, the two of them just started arguing like hell in this restaurant we were in.
I finally pulled my brother aside and said, “Alan, look. Why don’t you just come with me to San Francisco tonight?” He looked real stressed out, and I told him it was only an hour flight up there. I was scheduled to wrestle at the Cow Palace. “We can just hang out and talk and, you know, maybe we can see some of your old friends. Then we’ll just fly back. We’ll be back by midnight tonight.” The last flight out of San Francisco airport’s an eleven o’clock. I was happy to pay for it. It was no big deal.
“No,” he said. “I can’t, I can’t. I gotta stay here. I wanna do this, I wanna do that.”
I really thought he should get away from the craziness. Catch a break for a night. But he needed to go pay those bills right away and get everything taken care of, he said. So I gave up. “Okay. I’ll call you when I get back.”
That night I flew up to San Francisco and wrestled as the main event at the Cow Palace as planned. As I came out of the ring, Blackjack Lanza, this old-time wrestler who worked as the on-site agent, who always stayed in back and dictated who would win or lose the matches, came up to me looking real serious and handed me a note. “It’s an emergency,” he said.
I open the note to see what the hell he’s talking about, and all it says is “Call Marsha, it’s an emergency.”
Fuck, I remember thinking. What now? Who knew what Marsha’s idea of an emergency was? I mean, I don’t know what I expected other than another crazy sob story about how the money I gave them wasn’t enough and how they were in even more trouble or whatever. But she’s my brother’s wife. So I called her.
“They found your brother dead in a hotel room.”
Apparently Alan took all of that money I gave him and rather than paying off bills or getting a handle on all the shit in his life, he went out and bought a boatload of whatever his drug of choice was. Then he overdosed and died.
I guess I’ll never know if it was on purpose or not. Whatever it was, he did it with my money. The bread that I gave him. My big-time wrestling career and big fat wallet made it possible for my brother Alan to die that night.
That’s not what I thought about when I first heard the news. That sorry fact would hit me in the middle of the night sometime later. No. When I hung up with Marsha, all I could think about was my mom and dad. I was so worried about how they would react. I knew they were going to get that phone call, and I knew how crushed they would be.
“One day, we’re gonna get a phone call about your brother,” my mom had been saying for years. Her nightmare had finally come true.
Even with all the problems, all the hell he put them through, Alan was still their favorite son. That’s just my opinion, of course. My mom will totally disagree. Every time I see her she says, “Terry, you’re my number-one son.” I don’t want to seem mean or anything, but there are times when I’ll be sitting there with my mom for an hour, watching TV, and she’ll want some water and she’ll still say, “Alan, get me some water.” She doesn’t even know she does it, and I don’t ever feel the need to correct her.
“Okay, Mom.”
My dad was the same way. It was always “Alan this, and Alan that.” I never had anything against it. I just knew that Alan was his favorite, too. As a younger brother you can just tell.
Even right before my dad passed away, whenever he would talk to me he would always start with “Alan—I mean, Terry.” So I knew this news was gonna crush them. Not to mention those three kids who now had lost both of their parents in the course of six months. Even though they hadn’t lived with Alan since they were little, can you imagine the pain they must’ve gone through, knowing that the possibility of ever seeing their father again was gone?
I quit using cocaine right then and there. After seeing what drugs could do to a person, and do to an entire family like that? I was done. Smoking pot was one thing, and drinking beer was another, but I was done with any kind of hard-core drugs. There was no way I would ever meet an end like Alan’s.
As for how his death made me feel? My emotions? I guess I didn’t really have any.
Emotions were one of the things I didn’t have time for back then.
Comfortably Numb
I don’t know how to explain this really, ’cause I’ve never really talked about it before, but the weirdest thing about wrestling was how numb it kept me.
I worked so much, and worked so hard, there just wasn’t any time for personal feelings.
In those days, there was no Rock. There was no Stone Cold Steve Austin. When this thing took off, I was the main event seven days a week—twice on Saturdays and twice on Wednesdays—and never at the same venue. Even on those double-match days, I would hit the Philadelphia Spectrum for a 1:00 p.m. match and then wrestle up at the Boston Garden that very same night, or wherever.
> And it never stopped.
I got on planes an average of three hundred days a year.
I’d hear flight attendants on the old Eastern Airlines complaining endlessly, “Oh, they’ve kept me running for nine days straight.” And I’m sittin’ there thinking, I’ve been going for ninety-one days and I haven’t had a day off yet!
To really blow your mind, think about this: If I say I wrestled four hundred days a year, it’s no exaggeration. My years were actually longer than 365 days.
The American audience had no idea that I was wrestling in Japan during the whole Hulkamania thing. There were times when I’d fly back and forth to Japan twice in a week just to wrestle. I used to complain about driving nine hours between matches in the Memphis territory. Now it was nothing to wrestle in Madison Square Garden one day, then fly all the way to the Egg Dome in Tokyo on the same day, ’cause you’d gain fourteen hours, and then fly back to the West Coast and hit San Francisco or L.A. before getting right back on a plane to fly to Narita International Airport before jumping on another plane to fly back to Boston.
So I could wrestle in Japan today and then fly back across the international date line and land in another town yesterday. I was constantly adding days to my years!
The thing was, in my mind, I couldn’t slow down. Just like when I was working for peanuts back in Memphis, this job still had no security. There was no retirement plan or medical benefits. More than that, I was the top of the food chain, and every wrestler coming up wanted to dethrone the king. If I broke my leg tonight in Madison Square Garden, not only would I be left to tend to it at my own expense—and simply be out of a job until I could get myself back in the ring—but someone would try to replace me as America’s big hero the next day.
But the biggest obligation that pushed me forward was the expectation of the fans. I mean, when this Hulkamania thing really took off, I don’t mean to brag and say every night was sold out, but it was! It was like the Beatles or something. Which is crazy to say, but these giant stadiums were just packed every night of the week. There were screaming mobs wherever I went. And when you’re six foot seven, there’s nowhere to hide.
So when Marsha told me that Alan died, there was simply no time to react. Okay, your brother died. Tomorrow you gotta be in Tokyo ’cause it’s sold out, and the next day you gotta be in Osaka and then Boston Garden and then back in Kumamoto—they’re all sold out.
Instead of taking a month, or a week, or even a couple of days off to mourn and be with my family, I kept wrestling. Nonstop. It was like a fear that they were going to replace me. A blind instinct to just keep going.
Part of that instinct was driven by the fact that I couldn’t believe none of the other wrestlers had caught on to what I was doing. How come nobody else has figured it out yet? Junkyard Dog couldn’t figure it out. Rowdy Roddy Piper couldn’t figure it out. Ultimate Warrior couldn’t figure it out. Even André didn’t quite get it—this whole thing of just getting the crowd involved and getting thousands of people to eat out of the palm of your hand. You didn’t have to be a great wrestler. You just had to draw the crowd into the match. You just had to be totally aware, and really in the moment, and paying attention to the mood of the crowd.
For some reason I couldn’t allow myself to be in the moment and totally aware when it came to paying attention to my personal life or my feelings and emotions. In the ring, though, that sense of control and presence came easy to me.
Looking back, I realize that it was much more than just my ability to work a crowd that kept me on top. It was the whole package: the blond hair, the tan body, the red and yellow. Even the fact that I claimed I came from Venice Beach, California—that was all just part of working the show, you know? I’d never even been to Venice Beach when I started using that line on the New York circuit, but I knew that image of California had an effect on people. It represented something. The American dream. Hollywood. All of it. So the whole idea that this bronzed god had emerged from Venice Beach, where all the musclemen lifted weights outdoors by the golden sand and the glistening ocean—it just made sense that crowds would get into that whole thing.
Of course, none of it was rocket science. Back then I was convinced that at any minute some other wrestler would emerge with an even better plan, an even better story, an even better gimmick that would win over the audience and make Hulk Hogan yesterday’s news.
So I just kept going. I kept looking ahead to the next venue, the next match, the next TV spot or interview. I didn’t live life for the present. I just kept living for the future. I stayed numb to my immediate surroundings. I stayed numb to what was happening in the here-and-now of my life.
As a result, it’s not a stretch to say that I don’t really remember half of my career.
People always come up to me with questions about the places I’ve been. Local journalists are notorious for that. “You’ve wrestled in St. Louis every couple of months for the last twenty-five years. Where are your favorite places to go?”
“Well, I’ve been to the Marriott and the arena and the airport.” That was my answer.
People ask me about Paris or London, and it’s the same thing: the airport, the hotel, and the arena.
I barely even stopped to marry my wife. Think about that. Think about how disconnected I was to not even bother slowing down to get married—to treat that commitment, that unbreakable bond, like a blip in an otherwise busy schedule.
That’s what I did. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was married for about ten years before I ever took three days off in a row. It took that much dedication and drive to stay on top.
I just didn’t think about the consequences that might have on my relationship with Linda.
Chapter 10
The Perfect Family
In the early days of Hulkamania, the thought of having kids didn’t really cross our minds. Linda and I were newlyweds, and we were riding high.
Plus, for me, I knew we didn’t have enough money saved. I still felt wrestling didn’t bring any security. Even at the peak of this I was still scared that it was all gonna disappear at any moment.
So we just kept partying and reveling in all the fame and fortune we could. We were constantly getting on planes, going to the next photo shoot, hitting the next party or awards show or premiere. In fact, the first three years of our marriage we were hardly ever alone.
I remember one time I wrestled in Hawaii, and Linda and I decided to stay on and take a mini vacation at the hotel afterward. It was only a two-day break—but by the second day, Linda was so bored she was crawling out of her skin.
Times like those were when the early cracks in our marriage started to emerge. Especially that third year in.
There were times when Linda would start yelling at me for what seemed like no reason at all. She’d just suddenly start cussing up a storm and freaking out on me over the littlest things—like not being able to find her shoes, or if we forgot to pack something.
When it started happening frequently, I went to Linda’s mother and asked her if she’d ever witnessed any of these anger issues in Linda before—and she acted like it was an everyday occurrence. “You’re the one who married her,” she said. She was practically laughing at me.
Thanks a lot, lady.
Those were my first glimpses of the mean streak Linda had in her—this thing that I think she inherited from her father, Joe, an ex-cop.
It was just one of many little secrets I learned about Linda and the Claridge family in the months and years after we married. Little bits of information kept trickling out—all of which were distressing to me, but none of which seemed too big to overcome when I took them on one at a time.
Remember the Corvette that Linda was driving when I met her? Right after we married I learned that she didn’t own it outright. In fact, she was barely making the payments and needed my help. And that nail salon she supposedly owned? She was just a part owner, and the whole place was deep, deep in debt.
Linda didn’t just have
minor problems with her father, either—she had tremendous problems. They fought like cats and dogs when she was young. It got so bad, Linda left home when she was just a teenager and led a wild, rebellious life.
I didn’t learn any of this crazy stuff until after she had that ring on her finger. By then, of course, I thought it was too late to do anything about it. So I figured I’d just have to live with it.
It got so bad, I remember having conversations with buddies of mine—like maybe it was time to leave her. Maybe this married life wasn’t for me. My pal Ed Leslie (Brutus Beefcake) was in the middle of divorcing his first wife around the same time. He had joined the WWF, and we were even tag-team partners again at this point, and I remember wondering out loud with him if getting married was the wrong thing to do. “Linda and I always had so much fun just hanging out on the road together,” I remember saying. “Maybe it should have stayed that way. Maybe getting married put a damper on things.” All I knew was that she kept showing this angry side, and I couldn’t figure out what on earth was making her so unhappy.
As the anger progressed over the years, there would be a few times when I wished I had done with Linda what I did with Donna—just taken the ring off her finger and told her she was free—but I always stopped myself. The thing is, if that had happened, then I wouldn’t have Brooke and Nick in my life, and those kids are my whole world. So you can’t second-guess these things. Everything happens for a reason, right?
It’s funny, though—and I never really put this together until recently—those cracks in the marriage first started to show the same year that I lost my brother Alan.
More precisely, they started the same year that I stepped back from the fast lane—and Linda didn’t.
It’s more dramatic in retrospect than it was at that time in some ways. I mean, whenever we had a fight I would just get over it and move on. In my mind I’d always tell myself that it wasn’t that bad. The fact is, I was proud to be married. I was proud to have my wife with me out on the road instead of a different girlfriend at every port or a bed full of floozy groupies after every match. And as long as we were rolling with it, Linda would constantly rise to the moment—climbing on that next airplane, driving in a hot car, walking into the stadium to the cheers of fans who had lined up for hours to catch a glimpse of me. We still had lots of fun in those moments. The high of that would get her—and me—through most of the next couple of years.
