Hollywood Hulk Hogan

1

A Rock and a Hard Place

You can be the Babe Ruth of wrestling and still have something to prove.

That’s the way I felt on March 17, 2002, at WrestleMania X8 in the Toronto SkyDome. I had something to prove to myself and a lot of other people, and there was only one place I could do it—in the ring. Against a guy called The Rock. In front of nearly 70,000 screaming fans.

It was already preordained that The Rock would win this clash of titans. We both knew he was going to come out on top that night.

But that didn’t make my job easier. If anything, it made it harder. It would have been simple if all I had to do was put a boot in his face and lay a legdrop on him and strut around afterward like I owned the place.

Yeah, that would have been a piece of cake.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go down. I was supposed to lose the match, but I was supposed to do it in a way that made even bigger stars of both of us. And that was going to take some doing, brother. Losing this match the way I needed to lose it was going to be a lot harder for me, a lot more complicated, a lot more demanding of my skills as a wrestler and as an entertainer than anything I had done before.

Because this wasn’t just a wrestling match. It wasn’t just two guys tossing each other around in a ring for a piece of leather with a buckle on it. This was our shot at immortality. This was our chance to create something that people would talk about for a long time to come. Nobody had ever had an opportunity exactly like this one in the whole, long history of wrestling, and maybe no one ever would again.

It wasn’t like all the movies I’d done where you could roll the cameras over and over again until you got it right. This was one time, one chance, don’t screw it up or else.

And for me, there was something even bigger at stake in that arena. Immortality is great, but before you can even think about that you’ve got to get respect—and the person I’ve always found it hardest to get respect from is myself.

I’m always asking myself, What’ve you done for me lately? And before that WrestleMania, as I paced the long, curving corridor backstage like a lion in a cage, my answer had to be, Not much.

Two years earlier, I’d left another wrestling organization under a black cloud. Basically, I was kicked out on my ass and told I’d never wrestle for them again—that I was a has-been who could never be the attraction I used to be.

They had got me doubting myself. I was forty-eight years old. I’d had three knee surgeries over the past year and a half and I would eventually need to replace the knee joint altogether. And what they had said about me in public was dragging me down like a boulder hanging from my damn neck.

But I hadn’t gone under the knife three times just to accept the verdict they’d laid on me. I did it to have an opportunity to make things right again, to end my career on my own terms and not someone else’s.

I didn’t want people to remember me as the guy who wrestled until he was washed up. I wanted them to remember me as the guy who wrestled longer than anybody and went out on top. I wanted that to be the ending of the movie.

That whole time I was sitting at home and recuperating from my surgeries, all I ever wanted was one more chance. Just one shot at making things right again. And here I had gotten one.

Of course, it wasn’t just my knee that was giving me trouble. I’d just gotten over a hundred-and-three-degree fever that damn near killed me and eventually landed me in a Florida emergency room, so I wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be. Plus I had cracked a couple of ribs a few weeks earlier and I hadn’t given them a chance to heal, so it hurt like hell just to breathe.

But I wasn’t going to let that weak crap keep me from wrestling. I told myself, Save the drama for your momma. There’s seventy thousand people out there waiting to see you face The Rock. A fever doesn’t mean a thing. Cracked ribs don’t mean a thing. You’ve got a job to do, go out there and do it.

I was wearing black and white, the colors of the New World Order—a gang of street-cool, renegade wrestlers—with a matching feather boa and sunglasses. I had been wearing the same thing since I came back to the World Wrestling Federation as a bad guy in the beginning of the year.

But people had been cheering me anyway. It didn’t seem to matter what I said or did, or how badly I treated them. They still cheered for me and booed my opponent. And that was the problem I had to face in the ring that night in Toronto.

Not just to lose. Not just to lose in a way that didn’t diminish me. But to get people cheering for The Rock again too, so when the match was over we would both come out smelling like roses.

I knew a bunch of the other wrestlers thought I was going to fall flat on my face out there. I hadn’t had to prove anything since I came back. This was my first chance to show them I could still hack it.

To show them…and to show myself.

Vince McMahon, the guy who runs the company, came over to join me as I waited for my music to start. I was so nervous and pumped up at the same time, I looked at him and I told him, Everybody screws with me, brother. My wife makes me work hard, my kids make me crazy, the government screws with me, the IRS screws with me…and sometimes even you screw with me, Vince. But out there, that’s my damn house and nobody can mess with me. Now I’m going out there to collect my money. I’ll see you when I’m done.

He looked at me like Huh?

As soon as I said it, I regretted it and I wanted to take it back. It sounded cocky and arrogant, and I hadn’t meant it to sound that way. I was just trying to tell Vince that I was focused, that I was as ready as I could be.

And instead I sounded like an ass.

All of a sudden, my music started and I walked through the curtain and down the ramp, an ocean of people waving signs and cheering for me at the top of their lungs, and millions more watching on Pay-Per-View at home. And I was thinking, "Way to go, brother. If you had a ton of pressure on you before, you’ve got two tons now."

It was bad enough all these people in the wrestling business were waiting for me to slip on a banana peel so they could say, We told you so. He’s too old, he’s too crippled, he’s too bald-headed, he doesn’t have it anymore.

Now I had Vince wondering about me.

So as I made my way down to the ring with the music thundering and all the lights on me, all I could think was, "God, I’m such an idiot. Now I’d really better not screw up."

2

Growing Up

My mom and dad met about as far away from the Toronto SkyDome as you can get, down in Central America, in the Panama Canal Zone. My dad, Pete Bollea, had gone down to Panama to work as a pipe fitter. My mom, whose name is Ruth, was a secretary working for the Navy.

She had been married before and had a son named Kenneth Wheeler. He’s thirteen or fourteen years older than I am and wound up going to military school, so I didn’t see much of him when I was growing up. I was closer with my brother Allan, who was my full brother and only seven or eight years older than I was.

For a while, our family lived in Augusta, Georgia. I was born there on August 11, 1953. But about nine months later we all moved to Tampa, which wasn’t nearly as built up as it is now. It was more like a small town in those days. Kids would roam around all day on their bikes and not come home until the streetlights came on, and their parents wouldn’t ever have to worry about them.

We lived in a little two-bedroom, wooden frame house that my dad bought for five thousand dollars. Our neighborhood was what you might call lower middle class. Every ethnic group was represented—Italian-Americans, Puerto Rican–Americans, Irish-Americans, all across the board.

My dad worked for Cone Brothers, a construction company that was laying in storm drains for all the major malls around Tampa. He wasn’t especially big, five feet eleven and maybe two hundred and ten, two hundred and twenty pounds, but he was tough in his way.

He grew up in a place called Hanover, New Hampshire. His parents had six or seven girls and he was the only boy. His mother was real heavy-handed, a strict disciplinarian. You didn’t want to cross her. But on those occasions when I went up to visit them, it was my grandfather who really fascinated me.

He was a farmer, a big guy with real big hands, and he had a picture of this rock he once picked up. The thing had to weigh six hundred pounds, maybe more. It was just a superhuman feat.

I remember watching him cut wheat and corn and tend to the cattle. He had a lot of cattle. And a lot of milking machines in his barn, I remember that. I don’t think his life was anything glorious, but he worked hard to give his family some security.

I’m not sure why my dad left New Hampshire. I never asked him. But I know he was a hard worker too, a guy who took pride in what he did.

I went on the job with him a few times when I was a kid. He was a foreman at that point and he had a couple of key guys who he relied on. There was one guy in the crane who would dig the ditches and another one in the hole who he trusted to bend the pipe and make everything fit.

But sometimes the guys in the hole were assholes who were lazy or didn’t know what they were doing. Then my dad would get impatient and he would jump into the hole and do the work himself. And that was dangerous sometimes, because we had a lot of soft sand in Florida and holes had been known to cave in. I remember my mom worrying about my dad being way down in a twenty- or thirty-foot ditch with all that soft sand around him.

And it wasn’t just the danger that I remember. Sometimes guys would laugh at my dad for working so hard. The guys he had kicked out of the hole because they weren’t doing the job right, they would be looking down at the old bald-headed man working his butt off and cracking up because he was doing their work for them. I’ll never forget that.

But my dad was good at what he did. I used to watch him working with trigonometry tables, bending the pipe to just the right angle because sometimes he was the only one who knew how to do that, and make the water flow x number of miles in y amount of time.

He worked until the sun baked his brains out and he put up with a lot of stuff on the job, but he never said a bad word about anyone. He might have had a nip of cream sherry or a couple of beers now and then, but you never heard him say, That guy’s no good, or That guy’s an asshole. To this day, he’s the only person I ever met who never said a bad word about anyone.

Unfortunately, as hard as my dad worked and as good as he was at his job, construction workers didn’t make a lot of money. Since there were only two bedrooms in the house, my brother Allan and I had to share one of them growing up. But Allan was a big guy, as big as I am now by the time he was grown. After a while, we got too big for the bed and ended up sleeping on the floor.

It wasn’t exactly luxurious, but somehow my mom made us feel like we weren’t deprived of anything. I remember every Friday, she would make minute steaks for us. That was a big deal, brother, getting a skinny little steak on Friday. That was a main event kind of deal.

My mom is a tall woman, about five feet, eight inches in her prime. Before she met my dad, as a teenager and into her early twenties, she was a real good dancer. She even taught it at some point. I remember seeing pictures of her when she was a kid with a little dance uniform on.

My mom always used to tell me that she thrived on stress, that stress was her energy. She was always trying to figure out how she was going to pay the bills or take care of some family crisis.

And before long, there were plenty of them.

You see, when my brother Allan became a teenager it was cool to be a redneck, and if you were a redneck you drank a bunch of beer and you went out and got into fights every weekend. Allan got real good at street fighting. He had this reputation around the Port Tampa area that if he fought you he would kick your ass.

This was back in the old days, where if you got into a fight and got arrested, you’d spend the night in jail and get out the next day for a twenty-five-dollar fine. That was the pattern with Allan. Hardly a weekend went by when he wasn’t either fighting or hurting someone or getting hurt himself, so he was constantly getting thrown into jail and getting bailed out. It was an ongoing saga with him.

I remember how upset my mother and father used to get when they found out my brother had gotten into another fight. They were always trying to figure out why he was getting into trouble, always trying to piece it together. They would always say they weren’t going to help him anymore, but of course they helped him anyway. So there was a lot of turmoil in my house, a lot of talking to and about Allan.

Being a lot younger than he was, I had other things on my mind. I was too busy playing corkball and stickball and running around with my friends to really think about the trouble my brother was getting into. But on some level, it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like the turmoil. I just wanted things to be normal.

One of the things I liked to do most was play with this black Tonka truck I’d gotten for Christmas. I would take it out and play construction in the dirt all day long, from the time I woke up until the time I had to go in for dinner. I made believe the truck was the big red one my dad drove when he was laying pipe. I would use Popsicle sticks for people and dig holes in the ground and make a whole construction site with that one Tonka truck.

The funny thing was as I sat there in the dirt I’d look for rocks of a certain size, bigger than a BB but not as big as a dime, and when I found them I’d stuff them up my nose. I don’t know why that type of thing appealed to me. I just knew I could be happy stuffing rocks up my nose all day long. It was like my hobby or something.

Then one night as I was lying in bed I couldn’t breathe all of a sudden. My parents panicked and stuck a flashlight up my nose and saw I’d stuffed a rock way up into my sinuses. They had to take me to the hospital and have it pulled out. That was the first inkling they got that their son was a rock stuffer.

Another thing I liked to do was pick these little orange spotted caterpillars off the oleander trees and collect them in glass jars. I remember having a fight with one of the kids in the neighborhood over them. His name was Roger and he was a red-haired, freckle-faced kid who was usually one of my good friends. But that one day he decided to steal my caterpillars, so I picked up a rock and as he was running home I plunked him in the back of the head. The rock split his head open and he bled like a stuck pig.

But then, I’d always had a strong throwing arm. When I was eight, I started putting it to good use in Little League. I was pretty good at baseball. When I turned nine, I became one of the few kids my age ever been allowed to play in what they called the majors.

I was a hard-throwing pitcher and a pretty good third baseman. The problem was that I was fat and really slow, so if I didn’t hit the ball over the fence I couldn’t get an extra base hit. The other team would always throw me out at second.

And let me tell you, brother, it didn’t take a genius to figure out why I was fat. Even when I was really young, I was a serious candyholic. My favorite vice was Baby Ruth candy bars. They used to make them real big, like about six or nine inches long. I just remember I’d buy two or three of them at a shot and shove them down my throat one after the other.

By the time I got to first grade, I was pretty chubby. I couldn’t do as many push-ups as the other kids, I had a problem when it came time to climb a rope, and I ran like I was pulling a piano.

At Ballast Point Elementary School, we had a football field. One of the phys ed teachers, was real strong but had a short leg and would walk funny, used to make the kids run across the field and back again. But not me. I was so fat he put me at the far goalpost and had me run just one way. And even with my head start, the other fifty kids would still beat me.

Whatever games we played at school, I was the last one to be picked. Nobody wanted a kid on their team who looked like the Goodyear blimp. And it wasn’t just in sports that kids didn’t want to pick me.

Every other Friday, this teacher would roll out an amplifier and a record player and make us dance with the girls. Of course, the girls got to choose who they danced with, and they never wanted to dance with me. They’d dance with just about anybody but me.

Out of all thirty boys in phys ed class, I would be one of the two or three that got snubbed. Our reward, which we thought was great at the time, was that the coach told us to go and play soccer. So we’d get a ball and go kick it around and laugh at all the boys who had to dance with the girls. I thought I was lucky. It didn’t sink in that I hadn’t been picked because I was a fat kid.

And it wasn’t just my weight that made me different. I remember in first grade, a girl named Sarah with glasses and curly blond hair shared a desk with me. On the first day of school, she sat down and stared at me for a minute like I was some kind of freak. Then she said, Has your head always been that big?

My head was huge all right, probably the same size that it is now. But I didn’t need her to point it out to me. Before I got to first grade, a neighborhood bully named Butch had teased me about the size of my head every chance he got.

In school, I figured I was finally safe from that stuff. Then along came Sarah.

But she didn’t get the last laugh. See, she had a sweater tied around her waist that she was really proud of. By the end of that first day of school, Sarah ended up peeing in her pants and peed all over her sweater. I figured it was her punishment for being mean to me.

It’s weird the things you remember as a kid.

Fortunately, there were ways I could excel even if I was a fat kid with a big head. One of those ways was bowling. From the time I was eight years old until I was twelve, I teamed up with a kid named Vic Pettit, who later became a professional bowler. We were the Florida state doubles champions five years in a row and one of us—Vic more often than me—was always the singles champion too.

When I turned nine I started using a sixteen-pound ball which was a little crazy. Adults use sixteen-pounders. The damn thing should’ve torn my arm out of its socket, but I was a big kid and somehow I was able to handle it.

One of the reasons we became such good bowlers was there was a bowling alley just five blocks from my house. It was called Pin-A-Rama and Vic and I would go there every week without fail. I never thought about it at the time, but we must have spent quite a bit of money in that place.

Vic’s parents must have thought so too because they eventually bought the bowling alley. Unfortunately, that was about the time I lost interest in bowling and got caught up in other things. Good timing, huh?

The other sport I continued to play for a long time was baseball. I remember one day they installed a brand-new electric scoreboard. In our town, where kids didn’t have much in the way of toys or bikes because their parents didn’t have much money, it was a real big deal to hit a home run. Then you got to take the whole team to Burger King for a Whopper or something.

Sure enough, the first night they had the scoreboard, I hit a ball right over it for a home run. That was a good day. A real good feeling.

When I was twelve, my last year in the Interbay Little League, I was named to my town’s All-Star team. We were playing a real good team from West Tampa and I was batting fourth in the lineup.

The first three guys on my team all got up and hit home runs. Bam, bam, bam! You want to talk about pressure? I was the cleanup hitter, brother. I wanted to hit a home run so bad my stomach was tied in knots.

The first pitch to me was high and inside. I didn’t care. I just stepped back out of the box and jacked it over the left-field fence. It was a rocket. I just blind drove it out of the park. I was two hundred pounds by that time so all I could do was wallow around the bases, but I’ll always remember hitting that home run in that inning with my boys.

I stayed with baseball after Little League through Pony ball and then Babe Ruth ball. And I probably would have kept at it, maybe even tried to make a career of it, if I hadn’t gotten hurt.

One day when I was sixteen, I was playing third and a batter on the other team hit a slow grounder down the line. I picked the ball up with my right hand and threw it on the run, fired it sidearm as hard as I could to the first baseman. Big mistake. As soon as I released it, I knew I had messed up my arm. It turned out I had broken something. After that I was never the same as a baseball player.

Of course, there was one sport I loved to death but never in my wildest dreams thought I’d participate in. That was wrestling.

From the very first time I saw it on TV, as a very little kid, I was hooked. By the age of six or seven I was looking for it every week. My hero was Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream. I’d sit home on Sundays to watch the local wrestling show and if they didn’t have Dusty Rhodes on I’d be really pissed. I’d start stomping around the house and cussing under my breath.

Pretty soon, I talked my father into taking me to see the matches at the Armory on Tuesday nights. It was better than TV, that’s for damn sure. The wrestlers were like Greek gods to me. They were giants, larger than life, and the combination of entertainment and physicality that I saw in the wrestling ring was something I had never seen in other sports.

And that, I guess you’d say, was where it all started for me.

Of course, I had other heroes. If you were a baseball player when I was a kid, you had to worship the New York Yankees. There was Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, Joe Pepitone…and because the Cincinnati Reds had their spring training camp in Tampa, I liked Pete Rose and Johnny Bench a lot too.

But Dusty Rhodes…he was it, brother. He was the real deal. Dusty Rhodes was the first guy in Florida to do the show business thing in the ring. He had a Muhammad Ali–type rap—Dusty Rhodes, the tower of power, the man of the hour, too sweet to be sour. He