My Life Outside the Ring (39 page)

I was baffled by it. I called Linda and asked her why. She told me she did it to protect him. She told me she was taking her mother’s advice that Nick would be in great danger as a minor surrounded by a bunch of adult criminals. She didn’t seem to understand the danger he was in by staying in that solitary cell.

Brooke started talking to me a lot more once Nick was in jail. As awful as the circumstances were, it felt good to have Brooke back in my life. She even revealed to me why she had been so distant since the latter part of 2007: For months, Brooke revealed, Linda had been telling her all the stories of the affairs she always imagined I was having. Brooke was now well on her way to figuring out that her mother might not have been telling her the truth.

The thought of my own daughter thinking the worst of me for all that time still saddens me. No daughter should have to think that about her dad. Thankfully, in the middle of Nick’s ordeal, we started down the path toward setting things right.

Finally, on the Friday of the second week, it looked like Judge Federico was ready to amend his original ruling and allow Nick to move into a juvenile facility until his eighteenth birthday on July 27.

Linda objected to that move, too.

I reached Linda on her cell phone that Friday around dinnertime, and she was out at a steak house with her friend Darci Morrison. She told me Darci visited a juvenile facility about eighteen years ago and said it was the scariest place she had ever been. So Linda decided she didn’t want Nick to go there.

“Linda, there are all kinds of different juvenile facilities! This one’s not for violent offenders! They have Bible programs, and work programs.” When I berated her friend for giving her such bad advice, she got really angry at me and hung up the phone.

Another weekend. I didn’t move.

Another week of wrangling. I didn’t move.

Now the juvenile facility decided they wouldn’t even take Nick if a judge ordered it, because he wasn’t tried in a juvenile court and they didn’t want to set a precedent. So back to square one.

Nick was so fragile through this whole ordeal that I tried to do anything I could to refocus him on other things. We tried to talk about the good things that could happen when he got out of jail. He was still in talks with the TV execs about that reality show on drifting, and we talked about that. We talked about how much John would love to be a part of that show, and when he’s healed and healthy and walking again how great it would be to have John back on the pit crew and participating in that show.

The guilt of the accident was eating Nick alive, so I kept reading to him from the Bible and the books about the law of attraction and spirituality and strength that I had discovered since January to help him find an explanation for what happened. We talked about the negative things he thought about in his own life, and how that could have drawn negative consequences. We talked about John, and how down he was after coming back from Iraq, how he talked so negatively all the time, how he talked about thinking he was going to die, and I raised the question of whether or not that might have been part of what caused John’s injuries. I did anything and everything I could just to alleviate my son’s suffering. Just to relieve some of the guilt and pressure he was putting on himself. I was willing to say almost anything, no matter what it was, to get him through these seemingly endless days in that solitary cell.

Tale of the Tapes

As we entered the third week of this nonstop struggle, my third week sitting in that chair, I suddenly received a flurry of worried calls from attorneys and friends describing something I just couldn’t believe was real.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department released tapes of Nick’s jailhouse phone conversations to the media. His conversations with me. His conversations with his mother. Even conversations with his grandmother, my mom, Ruth Bollea. Private conversations that were recorded in my son’s darkest hours.

That tabloid trash Web site TMZ sifted through these twenty-six hours of tapes, found the most potentially inflammatory ten-second sound bites, cut them out of context, and pasted them on the Internet for the whole world to hear.

I knew all of our conversations were monitored and recorded. There was a reminder that came on and told me so every two minutes we were on that phone. I interpreted that the same way every other person with a family member in jail interprets that message. You can’t have murderers and thieves having conversations about planning their escape or putting hits on people. The reason to monitor jailhouse conversations is safety. We all get that. Nowhere is it ever said or written or even implied that these tapes could be released for public consumption.

Have you ever heard Charles Manson’s jailhouse tapes? Have you ever heard Ted Bundy’s jailhouse tapes? Have you heard O.J.’s jailhouse tapes? A lot of people would find it pretty fascinating to hear those tapes, but they’ve never been made available. Come to think of it, have you even heard Paris Hilton’s jailhouse tapes? Or any other celebrity’s jailhouse tapes? No! Never before, to my knowledge, have
anyone’s
jailhouse tapes been released to the media except ours down here in the hillbilly circus. It is a violation of privacy at someone’s most vulnerable point, and I pray that no other parent with a child in jail is ever forced to go through something like this. The release of those tapes was unconscionable. Now all of us would have to face the music when it came to the things we said.

The most inflammatory statement of all of those sound bites was one that came out of my mouth. I was talking about the law of attraction, and I made the suggestion that God laid some “heavy shit” on John. Then Nick responded, in the spirit of talking about the law of attraction and the idea that there could be some explanation for why this accident happened to both of them that night, that John was a “negative person.” We weren’t just talking about the accident, of course. The “heavy shit” that was laid on John was also the horrible situation in his home life.

I’ve apologized for making that statement, and I’ll apologize again here. Even in complete privacy, it is not for me to judge how John lived his life. I shouldn’t have said it, and I’m sorry. I hope that after reading this book, people will understand that my words weren’t said with any kind of malice.

Before and after that moment on that tape, we spent all kinds of time talking about the good things about John, and how much we were praying for his complete recovery. Those twenty-six hours of tapes are filled with positive, life-affirming messages that were meant to help my son survive his ordeal, but the media didn’t play them, or the long passages I read from the Bible. That’s just the way the media works. I accept that.

You want to know what? After we had a chance to digest it and talk about it, Nick and I were both grateful that those tapes were released. We were grateful because it woke us up. It made us realize that even as we discussed our spirituality in private, it was important to be mindful of our words.

Words are powerful things. The words I used to distract Nick from his misery, combined with the motivational words and spiritual words I used in those phone calls, helped my son to survive the cruel and unusual punishment of his confinement.

We stayed on the path of positivity—and something good actually came out of that whole ordeal. At the end of May, my friend Duane “Dog” Chapman read what I was going through with Nick and those tapes, and he had his lawyer, David Houston, give me a call. The last thing I wanted to do was explain Nick’s case to yet another lawyer, but David heard me out and did something none of those other lawyers did: He hopped on a plane and flew into Tampa to take care of this thing firsthand.

First he filed a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office for releasing those jailhouse tapes, asking a judge to bar them from releasing any more tapes in the future. Then David Houston came up with a way to file a motion that even Linda wouldn’t object to: We asked that Nick be removed from solitary and allowed to serve his jail sentence at home with an ankle bracelet until he turned eighteen, at which time he would go back into the adult minimum-security jail as expected. It was less than two months that Nick would be on house arrest. It seemed like a very reasonable solution.

On June 3, Judge Federico held a hearing and denied the request.

After all the press attention, I think he simply didn’t want to lose face. He didn’t want to look like he was giving in to the Hogans. That’s my opinion. He also must have realized that it was time to do the right thing, though, because two days later, in what sources at the jail told the press was a “routine review,” Nick was suddenly moved out of solitary and allowed to mingle with two other juveniles who were brought into a segregated area of the adult minimum-security prison. Nick suddenly had some human contact. He had access to a television. He had access to an outdoor courtyard.

“Dad, I can even go outside at night and see the stars!” he said. My son was elated. My son was grateful beyond belief. His voice finally regained some sense of normalcy.

I knew he would survive now. I knew he would make it.

After twenty-eight days, I finally got out of that chair and walked into my bedroom. With eyes full of tears—the best kind of tears—I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.

Visiting Days

During that twenty-eight-day nightmare, I disregarded everything else in the world. Nothing else mattered to me. In fact, had Nick stayed in solitary any longer, I actually would have given up a tremendous opportunity to move forward in a new direction with my career.

Back when
American Gladiators
first started, my old WCW pal Eric Bischoff and I started pushing an idea for a show called
Celebrity Championship Wrestling
—sort of like
Dancing with the Stars
but with body slams and choke holds. We wanted to take some well-known TV stars and teach them how to wrestle—give them the moves, the attitude, the character development, really teach them how to work a match and whip a crowd into a frenzy.

It was a chance for me to continue a wrestling-centric career without continuing to bust up my back. I would act as a judge and mentor, and I’d bring my friends in, people like “Mouth of the South” Jimmy Hart and Brutus Beefcake, to really show these celebrities the ropes.

Just as I wrapped season two of
Gladiators
and dealt with Nick’s going to jail, this idea became a reality. CMT, the country music cable network, picked it up. Filming was slated to start in early June—coincidentally within a couple of days of Nick being taken out of solitary.

Even then, I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to risk missing a phone call from my son. It was Nick who encouraged me to follow through with it. “Go, Dad. It’ll be good for you,” he said. “I promise I’ll be okay.”

So I flew off to California and started this new show where I was really calling the shots (along with Eric) for the first time in my TV career.

There was only one problem: visiting days.

For the rest of Nick’s stay, we were allowed to visit with him for an hour on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. They weren’t in-person visits. We weren’t sitting behind a screen or a piece of Plexiglas like you see on TV. The only view we had of Nick was through a video-monitor system, and we spoke to each other on an old-fashioned phone handset.

I wanted to make as many of those visits as I could. I knew how important they were to Nick, and I figured that his mother would potentially flake out on them.

That meant flying back and forth from
Celebrity Championship Wrestling
’s Los Angeles set to Tampa every chance I got. Suddenly, it occurred to me that those old crazy days of flying back home to Florida in between matches to see the kids had been training sessions for this summer of 2008. There was no way I could make every visiting day and still film this show. So Brooke promised me that she would make it to see Nick every Wednesday, and I arranged the show on a four-day schedule for myself so that I could fly to Tampa first thing every Friday, and fly back to Los Angeles every Sunday night.

The crew on the show called me Yawni, like the musician Yanni, because I yawned my way through that whole experience. I didn’t have the energy I did in my thirties and forties, that’s for sure—but those visits with Nick were worth every single yawn.

In the beginning
Linda and I would go together. We would actually lean our heads together against the phone’s earpiece so we could talk to our son and hear him at the same time. Nick just loved seeing us together. It gave him hope. But Linda stopped that after just a few visits. I have a feeling her lawyer told her it was setting a bad precedent for whatever she wanted to win in the divorce. So we decided to split the visits half and half. I would take the first twenty minutes, she would get a straight half hour, and then I would step in for ten minutes to say good-bye at the end.