My Life Outside the Ring (34 page)

“Linda,” I said, “What’s going on?”

“I thought the whole family could be together for the holidays,” she replied in this cutesy voice.

I finally backed up. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “Linda—wait a minute here. I’ve been trying to talk to you for months, and you haven’t wanted to talk about anything, so—just let me regroup for a minute here.”

As soon as I gave her any hesitation, that cutesy tone started to change. “What do you mean?” she said.

“Well, I need more than thirty seconds to figure this out, Linda. Just hold on,” I said.

That’s when she noticed I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring.

“If you want to reconcile, put the ring back on your finger and let’s reconcile,” she said.

It was all too much. I said, “Well, we need to talk about this. I’m not just gonna—”

“God damn it. Put the fucking ring on, Terry!”

Just like that, the nasty side of Linda came flying right back out.

Now, I don’t want to overanalyze the situation, but all my lawyers, everyone around me who was really close and who saw the back-and-forth and this “abuse” (if that’s what you want to call it) that Linda laid on me, they all seem to agree that there could only be one explanation for why Linda did this: She never thought I would answer her divorce filing.

That’s a legal term—when someone files for divorce, the spouse has to “answer” it in order for the filing to proceed. And I did. After my meeting with that divorce lawyer, Ann Kerr, I answered Linda’s filing. As much as it pained me that she wanted to end the marriage, I saw that something had changed in her and she didn’t want to talk about getting back together. I knew that it was truly over.

So the only thing that makes any sense as to why Linda was in that house with an apron and a smile on is that my “answering” the divorce filing caught her off guard; that she never actually dreamed that I’d go through with it. She was so used to my kissing her ass and bending over backward—“Oh, honey, we can move to Miami. Oh, honey, we’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy”—that she filed the divorce as a big public “Fuck you” to get back at me somehow and make me do things her way once and for all. And if that’s the case, then this whole situation must’ve been some kind of a move to win me back and take control again.

So I’m sure she never expected what happened next.

The old Terry, the old Hulk Hogan—that guy? I can guarantee that he would have wrapped his arms around Linda and thanked her for coming home, and probably broken down like a baby as he put that ring back on his finger, feeling so thankful that his marriage wasn’t going to fail after all.

That’s not what I did. When Linda started cussing, I started walking backward down this long skinny hallway behind me. She kept cussing and demanding I put the ring on. “Don’t you dare walk out that door,” she said.

But that’s exactly what I did. Without saying a word, I walked out that door. I got in my car. And I left.

That was the last time I stepped foot in that house, and the second step I took toward gaining control of my life. This idea that I could change direction and somehow find happiness wasn’t just a thought anymore. It wasn’t just something I had resolved to do. I had actually taken action. I made the choice not to go backward. I made the choice not to step into a future with Linda by my side.

If I wasn’t going backward, and I wasn’t standing still, that could only mean one thing: I was moving forward.

And that scared the shit out of me.

Turning the Page

Chapter 18

A Secret Revealed

It never occurred to me
how much looking back I would have to do in order to move forward with my life after Linda. From the moment I backed away from her, I started paying more attention to the things I had done and said in the past. It’s almost like I needed to piece together clues from my own life to convince me, fully, that I was doing the right thing. And when I thought about some of my behavior—especially my behavior in recent years, and in the most private moments of my life—there was no question I had been yearning for a major change.

In the last years of my marriage, there were times when I’d wake up early on Sunday mornings and tune the TV to whatever religious programming I could find. I wasn’t really paying attention to the sermons or anything like that, but there was something about the organ music and the whole mood of those shows that would just set me off. And I’d cry. It was just my way of venting. Just this crazy release.

I never told anyone about it, but this roller-coaster ride I was on was so dramatic, and so stressful, and so painful, it was eating me alive. I had to unlock a valve now and then just to get some relief. If I had a moment to breathe, to not be Hulk Hogan, to not hold it all together for the cameras or my kids, I’d just let it go. I couldn’t help it.

I remember every once in a while my kids would catch me crying at the movies. It wouldn’t even have to be a sad scene. I’d look around the theater and nobody else would be crying, but two people hugging on screen, or the rise of the music, some little thing would set me off and I’d just lose it. It was kind of embarrassing, you know? All of a sudden the kids would hear me sniff a little bit. I’d try to catch myself real quick, but Brooke would always notice, and sometimes laugh at her sensitive old man.

When friends of mine hear about some of this stuff, they ask why I haven’t gone to see a therapist. Maybe it would have done me some good, but honestly, the idea of going to a shrink just never occurred to me. I’ve always found my own way to handle everything.

After Linda filed for divorce and then pulled that
Play Misty for Me
crap at the house before Christmas, I started turning strangers into therapists.

I felt like I was just bouncing around in a pinball machine for a couple of weeks there. Sometimes I’d run into someone who seemed like they wanted to talk, and I’d just unload on them about everything that was wrong with my life. At the same time, I didn’t really want to be around people. Public appearances were real hard for me at that point. To be mobbed by fans who wanted to see that Hulkamania madness and pose for a snapshot as I flexed my muscles was nearly impossible for me. I just wanted to be at home.

But I couldn’t go home. My wife was in our home, and now the legal system was getting involved and deciding who went where. So I bounced around. I stayed at our beach house for a few days, but then there was a dispute over who could live in which house, so I stuffed whatever clothes I could find into Hefty bags and rented an apartment further down Clearwater Beach, in a high-rise overlooking the ocean. It was a nice place. It had sort of a bachelor pad feel to it, up on a top floor. But it wasn’t home.

I hadn’t lived in an apartment since I was in my twenties. Now, in my midfifties, to have all of my things taken out of my hands was such an empty feeling. My bed. My toothbrush. The chair where I brushed my teeth. Most of my clothes were still hanging at the big house. My gym and my office—two big things I depended on for my work and my income. All of it was inaccessible to me. The real irony of it was, from the balcony on the north side of that apartment, I could look across the Intracoastal Waterway and see the red roof of the twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion that I was no longer allowed to step foot in.

I could have fought to stay in that house. In fact, I’m sure a judge would have granted that to me, while Linda could have stayed at the beach house and lived the idyllic job-free life she wanted. But I didn’t want to fight. I also wanted the comfort of that house to be available to Nick.

During this time, because Nick was still a minor, he had to choose which parent to live with. Linda and I were fifty-fifty. He could choose wherever he wanted to go, and I told him I would not put any pressure on him. He said to me, “You know what, Dad? I think you’re going to be okay, but I’m worried about Mom. If she’s upset, I want to be there for her.” I understood why he wanted to do that. I also thought it was good for Nick to sleep in his own bed, in his own room, to have access to the life he knew before this all started. I knew how tough it was for me to not have access to my normal life, my normal routines. Why should he have to suffer that same fate?

At the end of that month, I flew to Texas for an appearance, and on the way back I started into my whole “woe is me” routine with a guy sitting next to me on the plane. We were seated in first class, where there are only a few seats, and when he opened the door of conversation I just walked right through.

I went on and on about all the misery in my life, and my wife filing for divorce, and how my son’s got to go through this whole fiasco in court because of these criminal charges even though he’s suffered so much because his best friend is still in the hospital, and my back hurts so bad that my legs are starting to go numb if I sit too long, not to mention my feet swell like crazy every time I get on a plane now. Just on and on and on with my complaining.

All of a sudden I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn, and this dark-skinned woman with the most peaceful face who was sitting in the row behind me says, “You should read this.”

And she hands me
The Secret
.

I realize now that
The Secret
, by Rhonda Byrne, is a book that became a giant bestseller, and was featured on
Oprah
, and has all these followers and people who swear by it—so much so that there are spoofs of it, and whole groups who think it’s a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and do all they can to hate it. But I had never heard of this book when she handed it to me.

“Just read it,” she said. “It may help you.”

Help me?

The guy next to me was sick of listening to me anyway, so I thought,
What the heck,
and I opened it up—and it hit me like a lightning bolt. It was eerie how much this book resonated with me. I get chills just thinking about it.

I’m an extremely fast reader. I can speed-read a whole script in fifteen minutes. That’s how I do a lot of my reading—knowing that I can always go back and read something slowly, line by line, if I want to study it a little closer.

So I read this book as fast as I could, just devouring its revelations about “the law of attraction”—this idea that we are personally responsible for attracting
everything
that happens in our lives. It was such a simple idea.

I went back and started to read from the beginning again to see if I could get a better handle on it—this whole idea that what you think about, you bring about. That your thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, dictate the reality of your life. This idea that seemed to trace all the way back to a phrase I remember reading in the Bible at the age of fifteen: “Ask and ye shall receive.” Was God really saying that everything we ever wanted or needed was there for the asking? All we had to do was ask?

Was this book suggesting that I could change this downward spiral I was on just by changing my way of thinking?

Just as it was starting to click for me,
ding!
The seat belt sign came on, and we started our initial descent into Tampa. I panicked. There was something about this book. I just kept reading, absorbing the pages as best I could, hoping I would get all the way through it again. We were at the gate with the seat belt sign turned off and I still wasn’t done. I didn’t want to move! The lady who gave it to me got up to get ready to leave, but she took one look at my face and saw how into this thing I was—and she gave me a great big smile.

“Keep the book,” she said.

“No, no, I can’t,” I said. She insisted. So I thanked her, and I took it home, and I read it again and again that night.

I wish I could find that lady to let her know what she did for me by handing me that book. Because that moment right there marked the start of a whole new journey in my life. A journey that would lift me off the treadmill of misery I’d been on for far too long.

The funny thing is, I had actually started the journey much earlier without even knowing it—in those moments when I started praying for happiness; in that moment when I sat with a gun in my hand thinking life might not be worth living; in the moment I backed away from Linda at the big house before Christmas—but I’d have to get a lot further down this path before I would understand what any of it meant.