My Life Outside the Ring (36 page)

I was humiliated. I was angry. I didn’t know what to do. There was no one to sue—the story was true. I couldn’t even figure out who to be angry with, except for myself for letting it happen in the first place.

Then something remarkable happened. After about a day’s worth of wallowing in all this self-pity and frustration, I stopped. I took a deep breath. I realized nothing positive could possibly come from my being angry about this. And I put it aside.

I made a choice right then and there to take the high road on this thing. I didn’t want to stoop to the level of whoever gave the
Enquirer
that letter—so I decided not to respond.

As far as I was concerned, this was the first volley in what was sure to be a giant battle of a divorce with Linda. There would be many more shots to come, and when it came to talking about my private life to the press, I knew I would have to pick my battles carefully. So I decided not to fire back.

I’m not sure if Linda was frustrated by my lack of response or what, but months later she hired a publicist and sent out a statement to the media claiming that the Christiane affair was the reason she filed for divorce. But I couldn’t believe she had known about it before she saw that letter. From everything I’ve ever seen, if Linda had known about Christiane, she would’ve gone ballistic. She wouldn’t have kept it quiet for all those months.

The thing I couldn’t figure out was why Linda would want to drag this divorce out and turn it into a battle in the first place. Florida is a no-fault state. Even if the affair were the reason she filed for divorce, it wouldn’t have any bearing on a judge’s ruling on how much money or support Linda should get. So why would she want to make a big deal out of it again and drag it all out into the public eye?

Oddly enough, I would eventually find explanations for all of Linda’s behavior in the middle of all of that spiritual reading I was doing. Answers that would allow me to understand that behavior, and finally learn to move past it.

I was so
excited by the results of all the reading I’d done, and the possibilities of this whole spiritual awakening I was going through, that I started to share it with everyone I could. I bought multiple copies of
The Secret
and handed them to friends. (Yes, a few of them laughed at me.) I talked about the law of attraction and how important it was to be grateful for everything we have in this life with anyone who would listen. The person I was most grateful to have listening to me was my son.

It’s hard to explain how broken up Nick was by the fact that he wasn’t allowed to visit John in the hospital anymore. It had been four months since he’d seen him with his own eyes, and as scared as he was to go to that hospital, and as painful as it was for him to see his best friend in that condition, to not see John and to just live with the mystery of whether he was getting better or not was so much worse. He knew the reason he couldn’t see John—because the Grazianos were preparing to sue us—but he couldn’t make sense of it.

On top of it all he worried about what might happen with these criminal charges, and he was real down about the situation between Linda and me. I’m sure he blamed his accident, in part, for causing the stress that led to the divorce. Even though he was wrong, the thought that he was laying that additional guilt on himself just killed me.

So I started talking to him and reading him passages from these books whenever I could. I thought it would help to keep his spirits up, the same way it was helping me. Now that I knew about the law of attraction, I also wanted to make sure he stopped dwelling on the negative and started looking ahead to the positive things that could come out of this whole terrible situation.

One big way we did that was to pray for John to be totally healed. We committed ourselves to being grateful for John’s recovery. The more positive energy we could send John’s way, the better chance he’d have of pulling out of this thing. I truly believed that, and still do.

But on March 24, 2008, the Grazianos finally filed their civil suit against me, Linda, and our still-minor son, Nick. Like I said, I knew that day would come. The cost of John’s care is immense. There are bills to pay, insurance companies involved. They wanted to collect damages to somehow put a price tag on John. As cold as that seems, that’s just the way things work. I knew that.

I tried to step back and look at the millions of dollars they were trying to squeeze out of me with some kind of objectivity, and I just couldn’t make any sense of it. I kept asking myself, “Is the point of a lawsuit to bankrupt the other party so that everything they’ve worked for their whole lives is taken away? So that one family is no longer allowed to function while the other family suddenly gets rich? Or is the point of a lawsuit supposed to be to make sure that John has the best care possible for the rest of his life so that someday he can get back on his own two feet?”

If this situation were reversed, and Nick were the one in that passenger seat without a seatbelt, I know with 100 percent certainty that I would be seeking the latter. Just as I know with 100 percent certainty that I would want John in that hospital room every single day visiting my son and trying to help him pull through. That’s what friends do. Instead, they banned us from seeing John and sued us for what I felt was a ridiculous sum of money.

As all of
this got under way, I basically started a whole new career: talking to lawyers. Since early 2008, I feel like that’s been my full-time job. There were lawyers everywhere I turned. Linda’s lawyers, the Grazianos’ lawyers, my own divorce lawyers, the defense lawyers I put in place to help my son with the criminal charges stemming from the accident. All of them demanding my time, taking deposition after deposition. Before I knew it, my mornings, my afternoons, my evenings, and even my weekends were taken up talking to lawyers. It never stopped. All that talk has forced me to relive the events of my crumbling marriage and the horror of driving up on that accident scene over and over again. It’s enough to make a person’s mind explode. It’s no exaggeration to think that I might not have survived without the support of my ever increasing connection to spirituality.

At one big powwow a few months down the road, as I attempted to reach a settlement with the Grazianos, I looked around the room and counted twenty-four lawyers. Twenty-four! All of them getting paid, presumably, by me. Meanwhile, as all of those people sat around earning big fat paychecks, John sat in a hospital bed with nothing.

There’s no logic to it. I mean, in a sane world we would all sit down and agree to set up a medical trust fund for John with an endowment that would more than pay for the absolute best care at the best medical and rehabilitation facilities in the world, no matter how long it takes to get John back on his feet—something I still haven’t stopped believing will happen someday. Instead, all I see is this crazy ongoing cycle of lawsuits and lawyering that prevents that from happening.

Tell me: How does that make sense?

Chapter 19

Coincidence or Fate?

The Grazianos filed their suit
just a few days before I was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles to start work on the second season of
American Gladiators
. I had already decided to invite Jennifer to come with me to California, and I couldn’t have been happier when she said yes. It was a big step for such a new relationship, but I felt like there was a reason we met, and I wanted her there every step of the way.

Walking onto that set felt really good that second season. Despite the new pressure of the lawsuit, I was already in a much better place emotionally than I was the season before. I knew that being happy was a choice I could make, and it was definitely the choice I was making.

After all I’d been through, it was real weird to see Laila Ali again—the girl who almost single-handedly saved my life. She was just as friendly as ever, and just as positive as ever. I’m not sure if she picked up on this change I was going through right away or not, but out of the blue she asked me again if I’d like to go to her church with her sometime.

“Where is this church again?” I asked.

“It’s the Agape Church, here in L.A.,” she said. “It was founded by Dr. Michael Beckwith. I could—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Michael Beckwith from
The Secret
? That Michael Beckwith?”

“Yes!” she said. She seemed surprised that I knew of him.

Michael Beckwith was one of
The Secret
’s most prominent voices. He was one of the main figures in the DVD that played over and over again in my car.

“Yes!” I said. “I’d love to go!”

The coincidence was too strong to ignore. She had invited me to go to that very church when I was sitting in my bathroom on Willadel Drive with a gun in my hand. Now the teachings of the leader of that church were a major part of my life. Laila had offered me a golden ticket back then, and I mistakenly ignored it. I sure wasn’t ignoring her now. I was floored by it.

That was the second remarkable coincidence that happened right around that same time.

One of the biggest revelations in the
Secret
DVD, a moment that had truly knocked my socks off, was when author James Arthur Ray asked this really weird question about gaining control over the direction of your life. “When would
now
be a good time to start?” he asked.

It was such a weird phrase, and it just blew my mind. His point was that you could change your life whenever you decided to do it. You didn’t have to wait for a New Year’s resolution, or put it off until you lost some weight, or until you felt better, or until you finished school. You could change your life
right now
. You could change everything this instant just by changing your perspective, changing your outlook, and changing how you thought about your life and your circumstances.

I was so blown away by that idea and by the presence James Ray had on screen that I started to think about what it would be like to meet him and talk to him in person.

Not three weeks later, Nick was in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and who did he bump into? James Arthur Ray. Nick called me up, all excited. “Dad, I just ran into that guy from
The Secret
. Hold on. Let me see if he’ll talk to you!”

Nick approached him, and next thing I know I was on the phone with James Arthur Ray. The two of us started talking pretty regularly after that. He became an adviser and friend to me, and to Nick, as we geared up for Nick’s upcoming court date.

James, it turns out, was also friendly with Michael Beckwith. When I told him I was planning on going to the Agape Church, he put me on the phone with Dr. Beckwith himself. So when Laila and her husband and Jennifer and I got to the church that day, we had a parking spot right up front, and they led us right up near the front of the church for his sermon.

I hadn’t been inside a church for a very long time, and I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the experience. I never thought much about it in all those years. My church was Madison Square Garden, you know?

Now here I was, surrounded by this congregation of people who were all dialed in to this world I knew nothing about just two months earlier. The tradition they have at this church when a new guest comes in is they ask you to stand up, and then every member of that whole congregation points his or her palm right at you, arm outstretched in your direction, while they welcome you into the fold with words like “we love you” and “we’re here to support you.” Now, that’s a powerful experience. Remember how I told you I would tear up just hearing the music on those religious Sunday morning TV shows? There was no way I could avoid the waterworks in this place. I wept like a baby.

It’s hard to explain that feeling of suddenly having a whole church full of people vowing to support you and love you. I didn’t feel so alone anymore. It dawned on me that there’s a whole world full of people out there who experience life in a way that I never even knew existed.

It also occurred to me that I had been thinking about church all wrong, ever since I was a kid. You don’t go to church to find God. God is already inside each and every one of us. The reason to go to church is simply to help bring God out of you, and to better help God function through you. I loved that whole concept.

Jennifer and I met with Dr. Beckwith after the service, and we went back again a few times while we were in L.A. Ever since, his assistant has been kind enough to send me CD copies of Michael’s weekly sermons so I can listen to them in my car here in Florida.