My Life Outside the Ring (14 page)

I came back to Allentown after that to find a Western Union telegram waiting for me—a certified letter that I had to sign for.

Please call Sylvester Stallone. It’s an emergency.

It was getting closer and closer to when they would actually be shooting this film, and Peter and Rhonda were starting to panic that they weren’t going to be able to deliver the one guy Sly wanted.

So I called him, and he picked up the phone, and it really was Sly Stallone. It was so weird to hear that familiar voice on the other end of the line.

I wasn’t sure how interested I was in being in a movie. I’d never done any kind of acting (outside of the ring, at least). I told him, “Look, I’m going back to Japan for two weeks, but I’ll stop by to see you when I’m back.”

We met at a gym. I had blue jeans on and cowboy boots, and my nose was all taped up—it got smashed in a match in Japan, and I hadn’t had a chance to fix it yet. I wasn’t prepared at all for some kind of audition.

Stallone insisted. “I want to see how you move in the ring.” So Stallone starts doing his Rocky thing and starts reaching out to try to punch me.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Well, see if you can stop me,” he said.

“Stop you?” I laughed out loud. He was maybe 170 pounds, and I was pushing 320 at that point.

He stayed pretty serious about it. “When I try to punch you, see if you can get ahold of me,” he said.

So in one move I grabbed him and hooked him and pinned him to the canvas. Over in Japan, I had actually learned some real wrestling moves. The Japanese guys taught me hooks and submissions, all this UFC-type of stuff that you could use to survive if anyone really tried to come at you in a fight.

Stallone seemed real impressed by how easily I took him down. So he got right up and said, “Hit me as hard as you can.”

“I don’t think you want that,” I said.

“Well, hit me like how you would hit somebody when you want it to look good but you don’t want to really hurt ’em.”

I explained that one way to do that would be for him to bend forward a bit and I would hit him with my forearm between the shoulder blades.

“Great,” he said. “Do that. Hit me as hard as you can.”

I refused. He’s not a big guy! I could’ve killed him. But he kept insisting. “Hit me seventy-five percent then,” he said. Finally, “Fifty percent!”

So I bend him over and “Grrrrrr,”
bang
! I hit him, and dude, I had no idea he was gonna crumble like he did. The second my forearm hit his back, Sylvester Stallone’s face hit my cowboy boots.

Amazingly he popped right up again, this time with blood trickling out of his nose. “You got the job,” he said.

I remember walking out of the ring thinking,
This guy’s fucking nuts!

Then all of a sudden he put a camera in my face. “You got the job,” he repeated again, all excited and pumped up. “Now tell me how bad you’re gonna kick Rocky Balboa’s ass!”

I caught on to what he was doing real quick. He wanted to see if I could talk, to maybe cut a promo or something. So I turned on that voice I’d been developing since my first TV appearances back in Memphis. “Okay, Balboa, you’re goin’ down!” I don’t remember exactly what I said. I’d sure love to see that tape. It’s probably in a vault somewhere. Anyway, after a few seconds he turned the camera off and said to me one more time, “You got it.”

We shook hands. I didn’t have an agent at that point and had no idea what you should get paid to appear in a film, but he said, “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to do the movie.”

Me, being the smart negotiator I am, thought it sounded a little low. “How about fifteen thousand dollars?” I said.

“Okay, fourteen,” he countered. Done. I signed a piece of paper right there on the spot. I couldn’t believe that I was going to be in a Rocky movie. Not in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine acting in films, let alone acting with someone as big as Sly Stallone. I knew it would be a huge boost for my career. Heck, a boost to my whole life.

When I got
back to New York I told Vince McMahon Sr. that I would be shooting this movie in a couple of months.

“No, you’re not,” he said.

For some reason I didn’t take him seriously. “Okay,” I replied, but I never even gave it a second thought. I knew this would be great not only for my career, but for the whole sport of wrestling. To put one of us up there on the big screen in a Rocky movie, which was sure to be a huge hit seen by millions of people? It was a real no-brainer.

Like I said before, I was always looking ahead, thinking about making more money, thinking about how I could make this Hulk Hogan thing bigger and bigger. I thought Vince Sr. thought that way, too. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was just like the other promoters. He had control of the number-one territory, his own little kingdom, and maybe that was enough for him. Maybe he just didn’t have the vision for how big this could get.

A couple of months later I was wrestling in Fall River, Massachusetts. As I left the arena at the end of the night, I said good-bye to whoever it was that McMahon had running the show that night. “I’ll see you guys. I’m gonna go do this Rocky movie tomorrow. It should take like ten days, maybe two weeks to shoot, and I’ll call you when I’m done.”

They were shocked. “No. We just called Vince. He said you’re supposed to leave tonight and drive to Charlotte to be on TV by noon tomorrow.”

It made no sense. He knew this film was coming up. So I called McMahon at his home in Boca Raton. There was no way I could make it to Charlotte by noon the next day anyway. It was snowing in Massachusetts that night. So the whole thing was nuts.

“Terry,” McMahon says, “you’re a wrestler, not an actor. If you go do this Rocky movie, you’re fired and you’ll never work here again.”

“Okay, Vince.” I hung up the phone, said good-bye to everyone at the arena, and flew out the next day to do
Rocky III
. I’d come too far to let anyone, even Vince McMahon Sr., hold me down. I knew the ins and outs of the business now. I also knew that Hulk Hogan was already bigger than anything McMahon could envision—especially in Japan.

So I flew out to Los Angeles and shot my scenes with Stallone, playing this over-the-top character named Thunderlips.

When I was done, I rang up my new pals in Japan. “Guess what?” I told ’em. “I’m free to come wrestle whenever you want me now. And I can stay there as long as you want.”

Chapter 8

Hulking Up

It’s pretty wild to imagine
a kid from Port Tampa moving to the Far East, but that’s exactly what I did in 1981. I basically decided to go where I was wanted most. Stallone wanted me more than Vince McMahon Sr., so I went to L.A. and shot his film. The Japanese promoters wanted me more than the American promoters, so I went to Japan.

It’s an awesome thing to feel wanted. But the thing that made my time in Japan
really
memorable was I met and dated this gorgeous Japanese girl. She spoke perfect English, which definitely helped in the finding-my-way-around department, and her business gave her hookups for everything.

When the big rock ’n’ roll acts came through, from Rod Stewart to the Rolling Stones, she always had backstage passes. And when it came to partying in a country where getting caught with a few ounces of marijuana could mean a lifetime in jail, she had access to every drug under the sun. I even dabbled in a few other substances besides the steroids, and I’ll tell you a little more about that later.

The long and short of it is, I was real happy hanging out with her in Japan.

With no exaggeration, I was like Brad Pitt in that country. Everywhere I went was a mob scene. I towered over almost everyone, and the people there worshipped me. Most of all, they were nice to me. That’s what I really loved. There was just a respect and sincerity among the people there that I’d never experienced back home.

But it wasn’t home.

As some of the American wrestlers came through, they started telling me about this guy named Verne Gagne, a promoter in Minnesota. He apparently wanted to talk to me. So one day when I was feeling a little homesick for the good ol’ U.S. of A., I called him up.

“I want you to come wrestle here,” Gagne told me. “I’ve got this guy named Jesse Ventura who I want to put you in the ring with. We’ve got a real small territory here, which means you’ll only have to wrestle four days a week—but I want to pay you a lot of money.”

Like I said, at this point I just wanted to go wherever I was wanted the most, and from the numbers he was throwing at me, Verne Gagne wanted me bad.

So I said okay. Just like that, in early 1982, I left Japan, that girl, and that crazy fame, and I went back to wrestle in this tiny Minnesota territory.

There was just one problem. I was supposed to be the bad guy. That always worked before, but after
Rocky III
hit theaters that spring, every time I would step foot in an arena the place would explode. The crowds cheered for me instead of booing. It started to become real clear that my playing the heel wouldn’t cut it anymore. That basically ruined all of Verne Gagne’s plans to make me the challenger to Jesse Ventura.

In a way, that was the start of Hulkamania right there. It was the audience that made that happen, the crowds that decided Hulk Hogan was someone they wanted to cheer for rather than boo. So I embraced it. I wouldn’t fold with one punch. It would take three or four punches to make me fold. I would really play it up, combining bad-guy and good-guy elements all in one: I’d get hit in the head with a chair (which, not surprisingly, hurts like hell), or swiped by a pair of brass knuckles, and it’d just get me mad and I’d shake it off. There was a whole different aura to everything I did, and the audience just started eating from the palm of my hand.

It was in those arenas that I started playing Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” as my theme music whenever I walked in. Wrestlers never used theme music before that. You can’t imagine how loud the crowds roared when they heard that song from
Rocky III
.

I was the main attraction at every arena. Hulk Hogan was the star. No question. Everyone in the wrestling business knew it, too. I could feel the world opening up to me.

The Linda Factor

During my years in Minnesota, I was still flying back and forth to Japan all the time. The four-day schedule made it pretty easy to do that, and the Japanese audience just couldn’t go long without their fix of Hulk Hogan in the ring.

What I’d usually do on my way there or my way back was stop over in Los Angeles. I had become friends with Stallone at this point, and we’d occasionally hit the town together—just stirring up everything and making the girls go wild at the clubs. I also reconnected with an old high school pal of mine named Nelson Kidwell.

One night Nelson took me to this place called the Red Onion, up in the Valley. The place was just swimming with Valley Girls. Blond hair and long pink fingernails everywhere. But this one girl really stood out. Her name was Linda Claridge, and she actually asked me to dance. I still wasn’t much on dancing, so I said no, and Nelson went out and danced with her instead.

It was there on that dance floor that I really started to notice her. She was just gorgeous. Built like a racehorse with these muscular legs, and that ass of hers—that’s my weakness right there.

When she came back over I bought her a drink, and we just started talking. That was the start of everything.

Linda’s personality was so over-the-top. She was real bubbly and happy. I was drawn to that immediately. She didn’t have that hard edge to her the way a lot of Florida girls did. After that initial meeting at the Red Onion, she played hard to get and that drove me wild. I kept calling her and calling her.

I liked the fact that she seemed to be successful in her own right, too. She told me she owned this nail salon she worked in, and she drove this brand-new Corvette. She was cool!

Whether I had my blinders on again or Linda hid it all from me, there didn’t seem to be any negative side to Linda Claridge at all. She was the most positive, upbeat, happy girl I’d ever met. That over-the-top, fun personality of hers drew me in like a moth to the flame.