by Hogan, Hulk
Brother, I could not have been more wrong. Filming one of those shows is just a nonstop series of eighteen-hour days. That’s no exaggeration. It was compounded by the fact that I was an active executive producer on this thing, so I had to deal with key grips coming in from L.A. and problems with the catering and every little thing under the sun. All of that was in addition to trying to memorize ten to fifteen pages of dialogue per day. My brain couldn’t take it. My head was spinning. I had to put cheat sheets all over the set.
In the meantime, something really fascinating was happening in the wrestling world: Vince McMahon’s WWF was facing its first major competitor.
Media mogul Ted Turner and a real smart guy named Eric Bischoff had launched a televised wrestling program called the WCW—World Championship Wrestling—and with Vince mixed up in a federal investigation, they exploited the whole fiasco. They stole some of the WWF’s best wrestlers—and they stole some of the WWF’s big audience.
All they needed was a Hulk Hogan, and there was no doubt they could knock McMahon’s socks off.
Strangely enough, the WCW filmed their matches on the very same Disney lot as Thunder in Paradise. I was in Studio A. They were in Studio B. Small world, right? It wasn’t long before Eric Bischoff and his buddy, former WWF superstar Ric Flair, started paying me visits.
“Hey, Hulk, we have all these tourists coming through on the Disney tours, and they see the wrestling ring, and the first thing they ask is if they might get a glimpse of Hulk Hogan!” they said.
They started giving me the sales pitch, about how big the WCW was getting, and how we could walk right over Vince McMahon if we all worked together.
The thing was, I really thought I was done with wrestling. My reputation was so damaged, and I was just so hurt and tired. I basically ignored them and kept plugging away at this TV show—until a little situation with Linda forced me to rethink my current career choices entirely.
Home Sweet Homes
As if my career meltdown and the stress of working on Thunder in Paradise weren’t enough, it was right in the middle of those years when Linda first started complaining about living in Florida. I’m not sure if she was suddenly homesick in her mid-thirties or if she thought she’d get more help raising the kids being close to her mom in L.A., but she kept insisting that we needed to move to California.
It’s a theme that Linda would never let go of for the rest of our marriage.
We had this beautiful home on Belleview Island, but Linda insisted we needed to at least give it a try. Her mother was always dabbling in real estate and actually had a house not far from her own that she offered to rent to us. I wanted Linda to be happy, so I said yes, and we wound up bouncing the whole family back and forth between these houses in Florida and L.A. (The kids weren’t in school yet, which made it easy to do.)
Apart from the hassle of constantly traveling, the fact was, my wrestling business—and even Thunder in Paradise—was based on the East Coast. Linda knew that. Living in California only meant more traveling and longer plane rides than I had already endured all those years trying to get back to be with her and the kids. She didn’t care. And her mother was there backing her up all the time. “I don’t understand why you don’t sell that place in Florida and just move here?”
Whenever we were in that rented house in L.A., the moment I would come downstairs I’d be hit with Linda’s mother or grandmother or someone telling me about all these things I should be doing. All I’d want to do was get to the gym and have some sort of a normal routine, but Linda’s family was always in the house.
The bickering with Linda and her sudden tantrums turned a corner in those years for some reason, too. Even way back then she started throwing out the word “divorce” when she was yelling at me about something. “Well, why don’t we get divorced and then you can stay in Florida all you want!”
There were times when it seemed like nothing I did would make her happy. She seemed to complain all the time, about everything. I remember one day we went to the beach and it was a little bit windy, and she said, “I hate the fucking wind.”
How does somebody hate the wind?
I was a complainer, too, don’t get me wrong. I was complaining about wrestling, complaining about money, complaining about the Feds, complaining about the rift with Vince, complaining about the eighteen-hour days on the TV show, complaining about how the fans had turned on me. It’s real easy when two people are in a marriage to start bolstering the worst aspects of each other’s personalities instead of fostering the best part of the two people who got into this bond in the first place. Before you know it, you’re complaining about your significant other and all of their faults to your friends and family and anyone who’ll listen.
That is not a good way to live.
Marriage for me was a lifelong bond, though. Even though I barely took a day off from wrestling to get married to Linda, I loved her. In fact, I was crazy about her. And despite all the problems I just wanted to do whatever I could to make her happy. I wanted to find some way to bring back that old bubbly, shiny personality that had blown me away the first time we spoke at the Red Onion.
Right after I left the WWF, just as I was getting ready to start Thunder in Paradise, the thing that Linda said would make her more happy than anything else—the thing that would allow her to live in Florida, which would allow me to spend more time at home, which is what I really wanted more than anything else in the world—was if she could have the money to build her dream house.
Fine. Done. If it would make Linda happy, that sounded like a great deal to me.
So we bought a piece of property on Willadel Drive, in the Belleair neighborhood of Clearwater—the town’s poshest spot. It’s a neighborhood where Lisa Marie Presley had lived, and where Kirstie Alley had a place, and where John Travolta and Kelly Preston lived before they moved to that spot in Ocala where he lands jumbo jets in his own front yard. (On a side note: Yes, those names are all associated with Scientology. Clearwater’s the big center for the Church of Scientology. I’ve never been pulled in that direction at all. They’ve tried. Representatives of that church have been after me for years, but I just never went down that road. There were no other reasons behind our selection of that neighborhood than the fact that it was absolutely beautiful.)
In the end, we spent $2 million on a house just to tear it down. It was a stunning location, right on the corner of this cove with a private boat dock exclusively for the neighborhood’s residents. The plan was to build Linda’s seven-thousand-foot dream on the footprint of that big old house.
One contractor started the job but was on the job for only six months before another contractor took over. And the contractor who took over? Linda’s brother.
I would wind up putting millions and millions into the Claridge family’s pockets before I was through with this marriage.
Just before construction was set to start, I paced the footers and did the math in my head, and I couldn’t figure out what had gone awry. The way I figured it, this house that was laid out in the dirt there wasn’t seven or eight thousand square feet—it was more like twenty thousand!
I asked Linda what was up, and she said, “Oh, I talked to my mom, and my mom said, well, if we’re building a house and making all the rooms, why not make each room four, five feet longer. It won’t make a difference anyway.”
Well, it did make a difference. The next time I showed up at the work site, instead of seeing a wooden frame going up, I saw I-beams—the same steel beams that you’d use to build a skyscraper.
The whole look of the home was like a Tudor style, French country house kind of a look. Which is interesting, since Linda’s parents’ house was a Tudor-style home. Linda decided she needed to go 100 percent authentic, so she started flying in these four-hundred-year-old roof tiles from France.
She tore down three French châlets to get this authentic French farmhouse-style roof, when at the end of the day you could’ve bought a tile roof here that looked
exactly the same for a quarter of the price. Not good enough. This was Linda’s dream. She even flew over extra tiles, so we have crates and crates of them in storage just in case, God forbid, a hurricane ever blows that roof off.
All the doors are thick and hand-carved. Everything is custom. The pool is gorgeous. My gym was perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I love that house, and I miss it every single day. But we were about midway through construction with bills mounting up to our ears when Eric Bischoff and Ric Flair came poking around the Thunder set.
The thing is, once I left the WWF I really thought I was through with wrestling. Even though the one-hour TV drama was too grueling a schedule for me to take, I would have found some other way to make a living had we just kept the home on Belleview Island.
I knew that nothing could bring me income the way wrestling did. Movies, TV shows, endorsements, none of them were nearly as lucrative as selling out Madison Square Garden in a pay-per-view special. Not even close.
So I took a look around at this massive house, and I remember saying to myself, “You know what? I better go back to work.”
If it hadn’t been for that house, I honestly believe I would’ve retired from wrestling completely.
In the end, I forked over somewhere around $14 million to get that house completed, the vast majority of which went to Linda’s brother.
Fast-forwarding a bit, a few years later Linda still insisted that she needed a home in California. She wanted to live there in the summers, and go back and forth whenever she had time. So I forked over another $4.5 million for a gorgeous place in Thousand Oaks—right next to where Heather Locklear lives.
After that Linda wanted a little retreat on the sand, away from the big house, but somewhere nearby in Florida as well so she could try out a whole different decorating scheme. So we bought a house on Clearwater Beach with nothing but sand between us and the ocean, and she filled it with tartan-plaid carpet and paisley wallpaper on the ceilings.
Of course, Gail Claridge Interiors—the home furnishings and furniture store that’s owned by none other than Linda’s mother—furnished all of these homes. Guess who’s always been her best customer? Moi.
From the early 1990s through the end of our marriage, Linda kept jonesing for real estate. It was just so weird. We’d stop in Vegas and she’d suddenly be out looking at properties to buy, saying how great it would be to own a home in that desert. We’d blow through Atlanta and she’d suddenly be out looking at properties in Atlanta’s posh suburbs. I swear if we had gone to Alaska she would have spent a day driving around looking to buy a high-end igloo. It just never stopped.
Anyway, it was Linda’s dream house that made me change my mind and start talking seriously with the WCW.
At a time in my career when even Ted Turner himself thought the Hulk Hogan name had been too tarnished by the steroid scandal to transfer over to his organization, Eric Bischoff, Ric Flair, and a guy named Bill Shaw stood up for me. As the dark cloud of Vince McMahon Jr.’s federal trial loomed in early 1994, they truly believed in me and fought for me. “We’re fans,” they said to the powers that be, “and we think the rest of Hulk Hogan’s fans are more loyal than to let this controversy keep him from the ring.”
I certainly hoped they were right.
Once Vince’s trial finally began at the U.S. District Court in Uniondale, New York, in the summer of 1994, I was set to be called as the prosecution’s star witness. When I found out what the charges against him were the year before, I told him, “We’ve got nothing to hide!” I honestly didn’t think he had anything to be scared about. He just couldn’t believe I would go up there as a witness for the prosecution, though. I had no choice! But he was so angry. I guess he thought I was gonna make up lies to hurt him, which wasn’t the case at all. Vince was my hero. He’s the guy who opened up this whole universe for me. Why would I do anything to hurt him?
I made sure I had full immunity in exchange for my testimony, of course. I wasn’t a fool. Then all I did was tell the truth—a truth the federal prosecutors didn’t want to hear.
The night before the trial I got a taste of why Vince was so nervous. I was sound asleep at the Marriott across from the Nassau Civic Center—right by the courthouse—when someone started pounding at my door. I woke up in a start and rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 2:00 a.m.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
It was two of the federal prosecutors on the case. They seemed worried about how the case was going. They wanted to go over my testimony and were hoping to get some control over the situation, so they walked me through what they expected I would say: about buying steroids from Vince, and how he shot me up, and how he sold steroids to all the other wrestlers, and how steroids were a job requirement in the WWF. The gist of the conversation was that they had spent millions on this case, and they needed me to hit the ball out of the park for them. Maybe I was just nervous, or overthinking the situation, but the whole scene in the middle of the night seemed like something out of The Godfather to me. I was scared to death. So I yessed them as much as I could just to get them to leave, even though the things they seemed to be counting on me saying didn’t match the whole truth that I knew and expected to share in that courtroom.
As they left, they said they would pick me up in the morning to make sure I got to the courtroom on time. The moment they were gone I called my entertainment attorney, Henry Holmes, and his response was simple, “Bullshit!” He came to my hotel before sunrise and made sure I was out of there before the prosecutors could come back.
Outside the courthouse that day, it looked like a scene from the O.J. trial. The parking lot was just a sea of satellite news trucks. I had never encountered anything like it.
Vince truly had nothing to worry about. On the witness stand the Feds asked me if Vince had ever sold me steroids. I answered, “No.” They asked me if he had ever injected me with steroids. “No.” I even explained to them how I wouldn’t trust anyone else to stick a needle in me because I’d stuck myself a thousand times and knew how to do it without hitting any nerves. I would never trust Vince to stick a needle in me!
They asked me about every angle of their entire case, from Zahorian’s role to Vince’s secretary’s role. I answered honestly about everything. The fact was, I had introduced Vince to steroids during the filming of No Holds Barred, the movie we wrote together in a forty-eight-hour run down in Florida, and I testified to that fact. I also spoke about how I shared steroids with Vince, and Vince shared steroids with me—the same way two buddies might share cigarettes. That’s as far as it ever went.
Vince hadn’t done anything differently than any of the rest of us. He wasn’t distributing steroids. If they were gonna put him in jail, then they needed to put every single wrestler in jail along with him. I said that on the witness stand.
The prosecutors were dumbfounded. And dude, the moment the judge dismissed me I slipped out of that courtroom through a side door, hopped in a cab to Teterboro Airport, and chartered a plane down to Florida as fast as I possibly could. I didn’t go back to New York for five years. I was scared to death that those Feds would find a way to arrest me or put a hit on me, or something. Even when I was with the WCW, no one in New York had a chance to see me wrestle in the flesh—I wouldn’t show up at those New York arenas. I was just too scared.
It was worth it, though. There is no better feeling than telling the truth, no matter how much it hurts and what terrible repercussions it might bring.
The truth I told on that witness stand that day was the reason that Vince McMahon Jr. walked away a free man, and that’s all I ever wanted to see.
How did Vince thank me in return? He stood on the steps of that courthouse, in front of all of those microphones and cameras and satellite trucks, and he buried me. “I’m happy with the verdict,” he said, “but I wish Hulk Hogan had told the truth.” What did he mean by that? I had told the truth.
By then, Vince knew I was going over to wrestle for his competition. “It
was just business,” Vince would say years later when I asked him why he did that to me.
Well, I guess my taking the Hulk Hogan phenomenon over to the WCW was just business, too, Vince.
Just business.
Three days after testifying in New York, I wrestled Ric Flair for the WCW championship belt. The Bash on the Beach was a massive success—even though fans held up signs saying HOGAN, DID YOU TAKE YOUR SHOTS TODAY? and DON'T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT YOUR STEROIDS!
Like I said, I had stopped using steroids by 1992—but that’s the lesson I learned the hardest way possible about the media, and how a trickle of a lie can snowball into an avalanche. Once that trickle gets started, the way it did with my Arsenio comments, there’s no way to stop it. All you can do is ride it out and hope you don’t get buried so deep that you’re lost forever.
Over time, the taunts from the fans went away. As my massive bulk from the steroids went away, too, something really strange happened: I actually started to look better on camera. I didn’t know anything about how cameras and lighting work on a body when I set out to develop my twenty-four-inch guns back in 1976. Nearly twenty years later, I started to notice that it was all about proportions. As my steroid-free waist got a little bit thinner in proportion to my shoulders, I actually looked bigger on-screen. With the water weight gone, my muscles just had a more ripped and powerful-looking appearance than they ever did before. And I put that lean-mean power look to good use.
I blew the roof off of the WCW. The audience exploded. For a long time, we absolutely crushed Vince McMahon in the ratings.
