My Life Outside the Ring

by Hogan, Hulk

  In the end I got three rooms at the Vinoy: one for Debbie, one for Ed—because they were separated—and one for Ed’s parents, who had flown down from New York. Ed and Debbie weren’t getting along though and the arrangement didn’t last long. The family left the Vinoy and I paid for Debbie to stay in a different hotel.

  My Happy Home

  The Grazianos weren’t the only ones who had trouble in their home life, of course. As much as I didn’t want to think about it or focus on it, the trouble with Linda was still unfolding even in the aftermath of this accident.

  It was real strange having Linda back home. I was hardly there. I stayed at the hospital as much as I could. Linda, Brooke, and Nick were sometimes with me, but when we crossed paths at the big house, it was tense.

  Linda was drinking pretty much every night, and it seemed that her behavior after the accident was more more volatile than ever.

  Three or four days after Nick’s crash, I came home and heard Linda screaming upstairs. She was up in Nick’s room, and the door was closed. When I realized she was yelling at my son, I opened the door—and found Linda standing over Nick with a wine bottle in her hand and screaming like a madwoman, “You’re going to fucking jail! You’re finished!”

  I pulled Nick out of there as quickly as I could, and she flailed off screaming unrepeatable obscenities as she stumbled toward our bedroom.

  Nick was a wreck. He was so fragile already. This accident had put him in a terrible place that he’d never been in before. He felt deeply responsible for what happened to John. He felt guilty. He didn’t need this. No one needed this.

  As much as she was on Nick, she was on me and Brooke, too. For a long time I had been wishing for my family to come together again. Now I wished that Linda would just leave.

  Every night she was threatening divorce. She meant it this time—I saw how she had changed—but how could she be thinking of divorce right now? It just seemed so selfish to me.

  I practically begged her, “Please, don’t file. Our son’s just had this accident. If we do this now, it’ll make us look like the Britney Spears family. Please, don’t file for divorce!”

  I thought the idea that we would be publicly humiliated and raked through the tabloids might have some effect on her. Linda enjoyed her newfound fame, so obviously she wouldn’t want this in the papers, right? I went so far as to tell her that if she was really hell-bent on ending this thing, I’d be willing to go ahead and get a mid-nuptial agreement. I said we could go to our financial attorney, Les Barnett, and draw up some papers and separate—but we wouldn’t have to tell anybody. We could keep it private, and try it for a while; she could have all the money she wanted and everything she needed to live on her own in California, and then we could see if things got better.

  Linda wouldn’t hear it. I couldn’t talk any sense into her. It’s almost as if she wanted things to stay as awful and miserable as they were.

  Linda was often perfectly normal by day, just like before she split for California. Once the wine wore off, we’d get along and get through this, and communicate as best we could. I even saw glimpses of the old Linda I fell in love with.

  As we went into the second week of the hospital vigil, waiting and waiting for even the slightest improvement in John’s condition, Debbie still looked real tired to me. I finally said, “Debbie, you know, this hotel thing is just too much. For John’s sake, you need to go home and get some rest.” That’s when I realised things had got so bad she couldn’t go home.

  At that point, John still wasn’t showing signs of making a rapid recovery. None of us knew how long this might go on. I really felt bad for her. I wanted to help her. And Linda felt the exact same way.

  So we rented Debbie a beautiful townhouse on Island Estates. Linda went out and bought her tons of furniture, just to make her feel at home. Comfy beds, and sofas, and flat-screen TVs, and every appliance and utensil she’d ever need in the kitchen. Believe it or not, Linda did that out of the kindness of her heart. Linda’s got two sides. When the chips are down she’ll take her shirt off her back for you—and then if she doesn’t like you, she’ll stab you in the back. But I know that she would have gone out and spent that kind of money for anybody in Debbie’s situation.

  Months later, the Grazianos’ lawyers would accuse us of making a hollow attempt to pay Debbie off and convince her not to sue us. That simply wasn’t the case at all. I knew the Grazianos would likely have to sue in order to pay for John’s medical care. I understood that. I even talked to Debbie about it. “Debbie, I know you’re gonna have to sue me. I understand that eventually you’ll need to find a way to help pay for John getting back on his feet. Let’s not even worry about that.”

  In a time when it seemed like nothing could make the situation worse, Debbie’s father died. She asked if we could help with the funeral expenses, and we did. We took her other son, Michael, and enrolled him back in college, simply because he hadn’t been in college for a while and we were trying to get their life back to some type of normalcy.

  Normalcy. It seemed like the thing she wanted most.

  If John had been injured by somebody else, or in some other car accident, or if he had come back from fighting in the Middle East with some life-threatening injury, I think we would have done the exact same thing for his family. It wasn’t unusual behavior. I mean, Linda used to buy our housekeepers new carpet when they needed it. I haven’t had a housekeeper yet that I haven’t bought a car. That’s how Linda is. She’s over the top. That’s the Linda I fell in love with, who was always so positive and uplifting. I loved seeing glimmers of that. It actually gave me some hope for our marriage again.

  Considering how much time John spent at our house, and how close he was to Nick? Doing everything within our means to help his family wasn’t even a question.

  Dead or Alive

  It’s hard to remember the time line of how things went down in that hospital. The days and nights seemed to blend together. I think it was right around the start of the third week when something terrible happened. Something that I still can’t shake.

  I came to the hospital that night, right around dinnertime, and no one was in John’s room. Even though he couldn’t respond, I rubbed his hand and talked to him like I always did—saying all these real positive things, trying to pump him up and challenge him to get better, telling him he could do anything he put his mind to. That same sort of push we would give each other in the gym. He always responded to that kind of motivation before the accident, so why wouldn’t his mind respond to it now? That was my thinking, anyway.

  By this time I’d started to learn what all the lights and beeps on the machines meant, and I noticed that his oxygen level was real low. I asked a nurse about it, and she said they had blood on order for him. His blood levels were down about four pints is what they told me, but the blood hadn’t come up from downstairs yet. It’s the kind of stuff that happens in hospitals that just makes you insane. Someone needs blood and they have it downstairs, but no one’s brought it up yet? Excuse me? It’s not a pizza delivery!

  So anyway, I’m in there talking to John, spending some time with him, and Debbie and a friend of hers came in. As soon as they walked in they both commented that John’s color didn’t look so good. And not three seconds after I put John’s hand in Debbie’s hand, he flatlined.

  Beeeeeeeeeep. It happened out of nowhere. Just like that. The alarms went off, and about ten nurses and other hospital personnel came rushing into the room while the three of us pushed back against the walls, worried to death.

  I’ve never been around anything like that. This big, heavy lady started pushing on his chest. The others were all checking the tubes and wires. But nothing was happening.

  Then out of nowhere this male nurse Jamie, this guy with a small frame on him but who’s really well built and muscular, came rushing in and pushed that big nurse out of the way. He yelled at one of the other nurses to get him this box of some kind that was on the floor, and she grabbed i
t and put it down on the other side of the bed. “No!” he yelled. “On this side!” He wanted the box to stand on.

  So Jamie climbed up on that box and started pumping on John’s chest. It looked like he was completely crushing John’s ribs. He pumped and pumped and pumped. This must’ve gone on for like two or three minutes. It was intense. Jamie just wouldn’t stop. He was soaking wet with sweat—and then all of a sudden, as quickly as this whole thing started, it stopped. The machines came back on. The beeping started. John’s color came back. He was breathing again. Just like that. He’s remained pretty stable ever since.

  I honestly thought that was it for John. I was really shaken up by it. Nick was real upset when he heard about it, too—to think that his best friend had actually died and been brought back? In some ways I don’t think Nick has ever been the same since that moment.

  In some ways, neither have I.

  Triumphs and Setbacks

  It was the first week of November when we finally got approval to move John out of that hospital and over to the VA Medical Center. I say “we” because I’d been working with Debbie Graziano the whole time to make that happen. She was still John’s appointed guardian at that point. It had been a long process with all kinds of paperwork, but we just thought he’d get more individual care over there than he was getting at Bayfront. The two of us were so happy it was finally happening.

  John was still nonresponsive, but doctors had started him on rehabilitation exercises to keep his muscles in shape. I was sure the new location would help him improve. Then, just as things started looking up a little bit, I got walloped.

  After what they called an “extensive investigation,” the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department issued an arrest warrant for my son—charging him with reckless driving and driving with alcohol in his system (despite what I said about how the blood test was issued). They even cited him for having dark tinting on the windows of the Supra.

  On November 7, my now seventeen-year-old son turned himself in. I couldn’t believe he would have to go through this, and go to court. It was a one-car accident. His best friend was crippled, and even the top doctors were saying he would likely require hospital care for the rest of his life. Isn’t that punishment enough?

  But Nick understood, and he faced it like a man. They booked him. We put up the ten-thousand-dollar bail so he could come home with us that same day, and we girded ourselves for what was to come, all the while hoping that this would play out in a court of law and not in the press like so much of this had already.

  The very next day, November 8, we moved John over to the VA hospital. As I headed in the front door to visit him, just as I had every day since the accident, these police officers stopped me. They had received a call from Ed Graziano, they said, and they were told to stop me from going into John’s room. I talked them through it, and talked to Debbie, and I managed to visit John one or two more times after that. But that was it.

  The Grazianos forbid me to come see him anymore.

  No one ever gave me a reason, but I knew it was because they were preparing to file suit against us. I knew it wasn’t Debbie making that decision. No way. I guess I should have seen it coming. How could you sue a guy who was talking to your son in his hospital bed, trying everything he could to help motivate your son to get better? I wanted nothing more than to see him up walking again. But my whole thing was that I wouldn’t take a lawsuit personally.

  Of course it was my son behind the wheel. Of course it would take a lot of money to give John the best care possible. I wanted to make sure John got the best care possible, and I was more than willing to pay for that. If a lawsuit was what it took to make that happen, so be it.

  What really bothers me is that maybe because of all these ulterior motives they seemed to have, they actually removed Debbie as John’s legal guardian and put some court-appointed guy in charge of John’s care instead of his own mother. From what I could gather, the court did that because they felt Debbie had been swayed by the gifts and money that Linda and I gave her in the weeks right after the crash. What saddens me is that soon after this, Debbie started badmouthing Nick, and my whole family, in the press. I’m not sure what made Debbie change her stripes. I don’t even want to think about it. The fact is that somehow the whole family were convinced to make a united front against the Hogans.

  At that time, my biggest challenge was learning to live with the fact that I wasn’t allowed to see John anymore. They couldn’t stop me from praying for him, which I did every day and still do, but not seeing him was tough on me. It had become a daily ritual. Going to see John was a part of my life now. I felt a responsibility and an overwhelming desire to be there as much as I could. It’s all I would think about at times.

  I was worried about what might happen to him if I wasn’t there. I was worried that he’d lose motivation if he didn’t hear my voice.

  I was worried for my son, too. So worried I was sick. I felt tired and drained. Why was this all happening?

  In the middle of all of that, Linda decided it was time for her to up and go back to California—and she wanted to take Nick with her, to get him away from all the local press. Not to mention that Brooke was barely speaking to me. She wouldn’t tell me why she was angry, and I worried myself to death about that, too.

  I suddenly opened my eyes to the fact that my whole life, which had been falling apart before this accident, had continued to fall apart while I was focusing all my attention on John.

  About the only thing that kept me going was that I finally had something to look forward to at the end of November: a job. Not just a one-off wrestling gig, either. A new job that I hoped would help put everything in my life back on track.

  A Kick to the Chest

  Three months had passed since Nick’s accident. There I was, standing on the Los Angeles set of American Gladiators—a revamped version of the popular 1980s competition in which regular people go head-to-head in a series of battles and challenges with a crew of pumped-up male and female bodybuilders. It was my first-ever prime-time network television show, and I was all suited up with minutes to go before the cameras rolled.

  Let me tell you, brother, I was nervous. It seems crazy, I know. I’ve been on TV a million times. I’ve had cameras all over my house. This was different. I’d never been a television host before.

  In wrestling it was always someone else in charge of holding the mike. I’d be the guy going, “Hey, Mean Gene, let me tell you something!” I’d talk right into the camera with my Hulk voice raging while the other guy kept it all together. On Hogan Knows Best, you weren’t even supposed to acknowledge that the camera was there. So this was new. And I couldn’t even lean on my cohost, Laila Ali, the daughter of the great Muhammad Ali, for advice because she was on shaky ground, too. She’d just come off Dancing with the Stars, and I think the producers thought I was gonna lead her through this hosting thing. Boy, were they wrong.

  As if the pressure I was laying on myself wasn’t bad enough, the head of the network, the big man in charge, Ben Silverman, was ten feet away watching my every move. He was the guy who thought I’d be the perfect host for this show; who made the decision to hire me; who put his name on the line; who had the faith that Hulk Hogan could carry the day even after all of this bad press I’d suffered after Nick’s accident.

  We’d spent the day doing walkthrough rehearsals, and none of them were smooth. The stunts, the Power Ball, the Gauntlet, the rigging—here it was the eleventh hour and everybody was still scrambling to try to get the mechanics down. So nobody really paid any attention to Laila or me. Neither one of us knew where to turn, or which camera to work to.

  It felt to me like we needed two more weeks of rehearsal, and here we had scrunched all of it into one day and had just a few minutes to go before we went live. (Not “live” live. We wouldn’t be on the air. They were shooting this “live to tape,” which means they try to do the whole thing without stopping so it has the energy of a live show; and if you mess up
and have to shoot something over again, there’s usually hell to pay.)

  So there I stood. A thousand people in the stands at the Sony building in L.A. The excitement was wild. Nobody knew how hard my knees were shaking. The thing is, no one knew how much I needed to be on prime-time TV.

  As far as I was concerned, this was the break of a lifetime. I had so much riding on it. Not only in my career, but in my life. If this is a hit, maybe Linda will realize I’m not ready to go to the glue factory after all. This is what I’m thinking as we’re about to start the show: If this prime-time gig takes off, maybe I can get other stuff going where I don’t have to get hit in the head with a steel chair to make a living anymore. This could be the huge transition I’ve been waiting for. This could lead to bigger endorsements, big movie work. And if all that happened, then maybe—just maybe—this would be the thing that could finally fix my marriage.

  Even then, no one in the outside world knew that my marriage to Linda was broken almost beyond repair.

  The thing is, after all these years, Linda still didn’t seem to fully grasp the concept that I couldn’t make a living in L.A. I couldn’t walk away from wrestling. There was too much money in it. And my wrestling career was on the East Coast. Sure, I could live in L.A. and make a low-budget B movie for kids every two to three years, but that wasn’t anywhere near enough to pay the rent—not the way Linda wanted to live. At fifty-three years old, what did she expect me to do to keep bringing in millions of dollars a year?

  So this, a primetime gig on American Gladiators, a show I loved in its original incarnation back in the 1980s, with the same kind of showmanship and characters you’d find in the wrestling world, a show that shot in L.A.—just a few miles from that house Linda rented in Brentwood—this thing really got me fired up.