My Life Outside the Ring (11 page)

Even though I was running the Anchor, I didn’t drink. I went all of 1978 without putting a drop of alcohol into my body. Alcohol just wouldn’t cut it with the schedule I was keeping.

After working out and running the gym all day, Brutus and I had a pretty standard routine. We’d open up the bar and get everything settled, and then we’d come back and watch David Letterman’s
Late Night
show. Man, we laughed our asses off. While we watched, we’d drink these power shakes. I’d take the most fattening protein there was, called Metabol, and dump it in a blender with half a cube of vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream, a banana, and two huge wads of peanut butter. Probably the most fattening shit you can eat. We’d drink two blenders of that crap, watch Letterman, then go back to the bar and stay until closing at 4:00 a.m.

I would have been wrecked the next day if I’d been boozing it up. So alcohol was out.

And pot was in.

I had started smoking pot a little bit in the last couple of bands I was in. The other guys would disappear on me during breaks. I’d put the bass guitar down and ask, “Where the fuck did everybody go?” It’s as if they had a secret code to lose me or something. They would come back smelling like weed. I finally asked David, the keyboard player, about it, and he said, “You should try it!”

I never wanted to. I was a pretty clean-cut kid. But then the whole band went on this camping trip down the Withlacoochee River, and I finally smoked a joint. Nothin’ happened. So I smoked another one. Nothin’ happened. I must’ve had four, five joints that first time, and I didn’t feel a thing. Then all of a sudden when we stopped to pitch the tent I started eating everything in sight—potato chips, Oreos, everything I could get my hands on—and they’re all laughing, “Oh! You’re stoned! You’re stoned! You’ve got the munchies, man!” It sure didn’t feel like I was stoned, but I guess I was.

Maybe that’s why those fattening shakes went down so easy in Cocoa Beach—I was stoned!

Part of me could have stayed in Cocoa Beach just living that laid-back life forever, but settling in one spot wasn’t in the cards for me. Life has a way of always keeping you in check, doesn’t it? Just when things seem to be settled and going great, the rug gets yanked out from under you.

At the end of that year, Whitey decided to get married. He’d had it with the whole beach scene and he decided to sell the bar. I couldn’t keep the gym open without Whitey’s backing, so that had to close down, too.

Poof! Our little bachelor-party lifestyle was shut down.

The thing was, enough time had passed that I’d started to think about wrestling again. The crap I went through took a backseat in my mind to that amazing feeling of being in the ring with a big crowd of people hollering and oooing and aahing to my every move. Plus, now I had this body on me. I finally looked like those heroes I worshipped as a kid. In fact, I looked better than them!

I started to wonder—if I got out of Florida and away from the stigma they had put on me because of the way I got into this thing, maybe there was a chance that I could make the big time.

I had a newfound confidence that didn’t exist back in Tampa, so I called up Superstar Billy Graham.

“Dude, I think my arms are bigger than yours now. I just taped my biceps and they’re twenty-four inches!” When Superstar Billy Graham’s hit twenty-two inches in the mid-1970s they were considered the biggest guns in the world. Now all of a sudden mine were twenty-four inches around! I couldn’t touch my shoulders for like a year I was so bloated up.

Graham couldn’t believe his ears. “If you’re that big, and you really want to wrestle,” he said, “I’m gonna send you to Louie Tillet.”

Tillet was this French-Canadian guy who ran the Alabama wrestling territory, which covered Pensacola and Panama City—basically that whole northern Florida panhandle.

I was pumped. I was ready.

I asked Brutus if he wanted to come along. He didn’t know a thing about wrestling, but I promised to teach him everything I knew—and I wouldn’t torture him like I’d been tortured by the guys in Tampa. He already had the body and the size, and I figured wrestling would be a lot more fun with a partner in crime along for the ride.

He was 100 percent in, and so was I. So we packed up my customized gold Dodge van that I’d bought from Whitey. I said good-bye to Cocoa Beach, and I drove off to Alabama.

It was the start of a whole new adventure.

Wrestling Mania

“Everything happens for a reason.”

A lot of people say that phrase. We’ve all heard it a million times. But I don’t think I ever really understood what it meant until this last couple of years.

The thing is, there are lessons to be learned from every moment in your life—the good, the bad, the amazing, the awful, everything. Whether you recognize those lessons or not is up to you, but you can’t avoid them. Because of that, everything that has ever happened to you, from the day you were born until this very second, has helped prepare you for the moment you’re in right now.

It’s kind of mind-boggling when you think about it: Every single thing that’s happened, whether you wanted it to or not, has led you to where you are right now.

Unbeknownst to me, all I had done through that point in my life had prepared me to become the biggest professional wrestling superstar the world had ever seen. Just like everything I did in the years that followed would prepare me for the backlash and the wallops I’d suffer in 2007 and beyond.

It’s all connected. It’s all intertwined. I know that now. I didn’t know that then.

Chapter 6

On the Road

Brutus (Ed Leslie) and I looked
a lot alike after our year in Cocoa Beach. We both had blond hair. We both had mustaches. We were both juiced-up musclemen. So we started wrestling as the Boulder Brothers—Terry Boulder and Ed Boulder—and a lot of people assumed we were really brothers.

We were certainly as close as brothers. Traveling around the Alabama territory was fun at first. We’d get to the arenas early, and I’d take Brutus in the ring to teach him the ropes. I’d grab three or four of the other wrestlers, and we’d show him how to work a match—how to fall without killing yourself, how to make it look like you were wrenching a guy’s arm without actually snapping his wrist or breaking his elbow.

Louie Tillet liked us and put us out there seven days a week—but we were hardly making any money. I’d only take home twenty-five or thirty dollars a night. So rather than waste our dough on hotels, the two of us just slept in my van. It was carpeted and had a loft bed where I would sleep. Brutus would settle in on the floor. It was perfectly comfortable for a while.

North Pensacola Beach was central to just about all the venues we hit, so we parked the van right there most nights and basically made that parking lot our home. There were public restrooms, so we had a place to shower, shit, and shave in the mornings. There was a great little all-you-can eat restaurant nearby, too. Man, they were scared when they saw me and Brutus walk in. We’d eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in one sitting. We’d clean the place out!

There were a couple of other wrestlers who were living out of their van on that beach, too: these Samoan guys named Afa and Sika, who became known as the Wild Samoans. Years later, when we were all on TV, they pretended to be these wild brothers who were pulled right out of a jungle somewhere to wrestle and who couldn’t speak English at all. Actually they spoke English just fine, and we all became friends—just parking our vans by the sand.

It was a perfect place for Brutus and me to work on our tans. I remember that feeling of walking out on that sand in the morning, looking out on the ocean, feeling the wind. Not a bad way to live. Between wrestling seven days a week, tanning all the time, and continuing the steroids, I perfected that bronzed god look I was going for. That look gave me just a little something extra in the wrestling ring.

Technically, I wasn’t the best wrestler. I wasn’t quick. Wasn’t athletic. I couldn’t jump off the top ropes. On the other hand, I wasn’t an old-fashioned thickheaded fat wrestler, either. I was right in between. And the more I wrestled, the more I developed my own style. In fact, it was right during this time that I started using the leg drop to finish off my opponents. The crowds went nuts for it.

A few months into this routine, Louie Tillet made a big mistake. “I’m booking you out this Monday night,” he told me. “I want you to go up to Memphis.”

By this time I had started to understand the wrestling business a little more. I had picked up on things. I didn’t have those blinders on like I did when I first started in Florida, and I knew that Memphis could be a major stepping-stone to wrestling in New York City.

The Memphis territory, run by Jerry Lawler and Jerry Jarrett, was known for doing all kinds of circus stuff. They had tar-and-feather matches, and loser-leaves-town matches, and hang-the-manager-in-a-cage-above-the-ring matches. Crazy stuff. But it was also the perfect place to develop a gimmick—and that was key, because all of the guys who were making the really big money in New York had a gimmick.

There was Sergeant Slaughter, the Russian Bear, the Iron Sheik. There were no Joe Blows, you know? No regular-named wrestlers who just got in the ring and wrestled. Everybody had something extra.

So Brutus and I drove up to Memphis for this one night to wrestle as the Boulder Brothers, and we put on a hell of a show. I know because Jarrett and Lawler pulled me aside immediately after the match and said, “Terry, we want you to come work here.”

I told them I couldn’t. I was committed to the Alabama territory. Louie Tillet had given me a break when I really needed it, and I couldn’t let him down.

Then they asked me how much money I was making.

“Like one fifty, one seventy-five a week,” I said.

“Well, we’ll give you an eight-hundred-dollar-a-week guarantee.”

Now, that was a shocker.

I wasn’t as much of a mark as I used to be, but I wasn’t totally disloyal, either. So I played real cool and told them I needed to go back and talk to Tillet about it.

And that’s exactly what I did. I went back to Alabama and confronted Tillet. “I’m wrestling seven days a week for you. The Boulder Brothers are making a name and drawing audiences. How come I’m only making one seventy-five tops?”

His response? “That’s all you’re worth and all you deserve.”

So I hit him with the eight-hundred-a-week guarantee I’d just been offered in Memphis and said Ed and I were leaving—and Tillet just about shit a brick.

He called Jarrett and Lawler up in Memphis screaming, “How can you steal talent? I did you a favor for one night and this is what happens? How can you do this?!” He was pissed. Didn’t matter. Brutus and I already had one foot in the van at that point. We were on our way to the big time, and we knew it.

The offer came at the perfect moment, because just as we were rolling into Memphis the motor blew in that gold van. Not only was that van our home, but it was the only transportation we had to get to wrestling gigs. No one flew in those days, and the matches were all over the place. In the Memphis territory it would be a 200-mile drive to Nashville one night, then 250 miles to Tupelo, Mississippi, the next, followed by Evansville, Indiana—nine hours away. The venues were never lined up in a row to make it easy. Nobody planned like that. So you were literally all over the map.

Imagine if the van had broken down while we were broke and living at the beach. What would we have done?

As soon as we rolled into Memphis, Jarrett took me straight out and bought me a big green Lincoln Continental. I’d pay him back for it, but he was more than happy to front me the money. He treated me like one of his own, right away. And since he was paying me eight hundred dollars a week, I didn’t need a van to sleep in anymore.

The Hulk

As I started rising in Memphis, Jarrett asked me to go on TV now and then to promote matches. I could certainly talk the talk, you know? After all those years listening to Dusty Rhodes and interacting with audiences in all those bands, I was a natural. I wasn’t saying “Hey, brother” and that real Hulk Hogan–style stuff quite yet, but I could say, “Hey, this is Terry Boulder, and I want you to come down to the Mobile Civic Center, where you’ll see the greatest wrestlers in the world!”

One day, I went on a local talk show and wound up sitting on-air right next to Lou Ferrigno. That’s right, the guy who played the Incredible Hulk, who was all over people’s TVs with his green body makeup at that time. He was a real nice guy, and everyone was so impressed by how huge he looked with those big bulging muscles.