My Life Outside the Ring (5 page)

But my brother was nowhere to be found.

From what I could piece together, Alan had been down at the Silver Dollar, one of these real hard-core bars by the docks. He had gotten in a fight, like usual, and beat up a couple of people real bad. He and his buddies were high as kites, doing that LSD and drinking thing they always did. As soon as they left, someone at the Silver Dollar called the MacDill Tavern and warned, “Alan Bollea’s headed your way, and he’s really, really messed up.”

When Alan walked into that bar and asked for a drink, the barmaid refused to serve him. So he grabbed her by the back of the head and threatened her. And when she told him to get out of the bar, he pushed her head down on the counter. Now, I don’t know if he “pushed it” or “slammed it” down. There were different accounts of what happened—there are always different accounts in heated situations like that—but everybody that I talked to agreed that her face hit the bar.

So the barmaid pulled a gun from under that counter and shot Alan.

My brother, tough guy that he was, took two bullets, fell down in the dirt, picked himself up, brushed himself off, and drove himself to the hospital before the cops even arrived.

Like I said, Alan was one crazy motherfucker.

The doctors managed to get one of the bullets out, but they couldn’t remove the second one. It was too close to his spine. So it stayed in Alan’s back the rest of his life.

That didn’t slow him down, though. A few months later, right when he was getting ready to go to trial, Alan disappeared. I found out later that he’d moved to Houston, Texas, where he hung out for a while and held down different jobs. He changed his name, but he didn’t change his attitude. He got in all kinds of trouble there, too.

The fighting just never stopped. He kept in touch with my parents, and I’d hear from him every now and then, but I never really saw Alan again until my wrestling career was in high gear.

I didn’t see
my other brother, Kenny, until my wrestling career took off, either. I realize I haven’t mentioned Kenny until this moment. I guess it’s because I barely ever knew him.

Kenny is my much older half brother. My mom was married once before she married my dad. By the time I was born, I guess her Kenny had moved out or was living with his father or something, because I don’t remember him living in that house on Paul Avenue at all. I heard about him from time to time, though.

My mom was real proud of Kenny. He got into the air force and went to the Virginia Military Institute—if I’m remembering this right—and he graduated as a lieutenant. By the time I started wrestling with the WWF in late ’78, ’79, he was working in the budgeting department at the Pentagon, and he was a full-blown major, or a colonel, or whatever his rank was—he’d done real well in the air force.

When things really got going with the WWF, I wound up wrestling at the Capital Centre in Maryland about once a month, not far from his place up there, and we started to get in touch with each other. I’d even stay at his house when I was in town. This went on for about two years. It was nice having some other family to connect with in another part of the country like that. It was a nice break to staying in hotels night after night, too.

Then this one time Kenny asked to borrow some money from me. I don’t remember what he needed it for, but it was something pretty urgent, as I recall. He came down to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa on a government plane, and the amount he wanted to borrow was five thousand dollars.

At that point it could have been fifty thousand dollars or more and I wouldn’t have said “no.” He’s my brother. He’s family. But he was real insistent. “I’m gonna pay you back in 30 days, don’t worry,” he said.

I said, “Okay, no problem.” And that was that.

Well, thirty days went by, then sixty days, then ninety days. I remember my mom asked me if Kenny had paid me back yet. I don’t remember if I told her about the loan. I’m pretty sure he didn’t. Anyhow, one way or another, she knew, and I guess she kinda called him on it. He said to her, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m gonna get the money to Terry.”

But it never happened. Instead, he quit communicating with me. Just quit. Basically to this day we don’t talk, over that small amount of money. I mean, if we’re not talking anymore he might as well have gone to half a million, you know? That was a cheap lesson for me in the long run. Money does weird things to people.

If Kenny had told me he couldn’t pay me back, that would have been fine, but I just never heard from him again. I had a real problem with that for a while. As years went by and Hulkamania started taking off, there must have been a dozen occasions when some random fan would come up to me and go, “Hey, you got a brother named Kenny?” I was so freaked out by what happened between us that I’d usually just say no.

“Oh, you know, your brother—he works in the Pentagon. He says his brother’s Hulk Hogan, the champ!”

I’d just go, “No, I don’t know him.” I went on with that ridiculous crap for ten or fifteen years before I finally got over it.

Many years later, when my father was dying, Kenny came down to Tampa with his whole family. We were all gathered at Tampa General, and they took my dad outside in the wheelchair—so he could get out and see the water there—and I remember when I tried to say hi to Kenny’s wife, Susan, she just turned her head. I don’t know what I ever did to her. But the whole thing’s just strange. Except for a few words right after my dad passed away, Kenny and I haven’t spoken at all. He’s based in Dayton, Ohio, now. He must be sixty-seven, sixty-eight years old. And it hasn’t changed.

I basically learned to let it go. But here I am writing about it. So I guess maybe it still bothers me. I just don’t understand how a little bit of money could rip a hole like that in what’s supposed to be one of life’s strongest bonds—the bond of family.

Chapter 2

Finding Faith

While Alan was getting high
and throwing punches, I actually turned my attention in a whole different direction.

I had gone to Ballast Point Baptist Church off and on since about the first grade. The church sat catty-corner to the elementary school, and my parents (more likely my mom) would sometimes bring me on Sundays. Now and then I’d go with Vic and his parents—the ones who owned the local bowling alley. Then later on I’d go with these two junior high football buddies of mine, Don and Ron Satterwhite—two brothers who coincidentally enough are both ministers now.

Church never had much of an impact on me as a little kid. My dad was really hit-or-miss with the whole religion thing, and I think that probably rubbed off on me. We would go on Sunday, then come home and never talk about God or religion during the week at all. I asked about going to Sunday school a few times, mostly because I saw all the other kids going and making things out of clay and painting them, and it looked kinda fun. But my parents were always “No, no, no.” Dedicating an hour a week to church was enough of an inconvenience already.

Things changed when I was about fifteen. I had just gotten my learner’s permit, and I already had my first car: a 1965 Ford Galaxy. Green with red interior. It looked like a Christmas tree. But instead of the regular shifter it had this three-speed Sparkomatic in it that some previous owner had installed. So it was almost cool! (Almost.)

I don’t remember if I was still playing football at that point or if I had quit already, but I remember it being just after football practice that the Satterwhite brothers finally convinced me to come with them to the Christian Youth Ranch. They’d talked about it ever since junior high. But they finally suckered me into coming by saying they needed someone to play guitar so everybody could sing along. They knew that music was my sweet spot.

I had a wooden box guitar and could play your standard three-chord progression, which is all most of those church songs were. So I went. And all the kids sang along. It was just a real nice peaceful environment.

The meetings were every week. I forget if they were Mondays or Tuesdays, but I didn’t have anything better to do at that time, so I kept going. And in between the songs each week I’d listen to the lessons of the Rev. Hank Lindstrom—especially the one verse that Rev. Lindstrom would beat into everybody’s heads, week after week:

 
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.        
—John 3:16

When Rev. Lindstrom was done he’d say, “All right, now how many of you here accept Christ as your savior? Close your eyes, everybody. Raise your hands.” Everybody would be peeking with one eye open to see who was raising a hand and who wasn’t.

In the beginning I wouldn’t raise mine ’cause I didn’t understand it. But it didn’t take long for it to all sink in.

Growing up, I
always believed there was something more to us than just the flesh—something more than just this meat suit that we’re running around in, you know? Other kids would say things like, “Oh man, I don’t ever want to die.” And even early on I remember saying, “I’m not afraid to die because I think I’m going to heaven.” I never really understood the whole religion thing, but I just had a feeling there was a God.

Now I realize that people follow a lot of different faiths. Whether it’s Allah or the “higher self,” every religion has a name for what they believe to be the higher spirit or higher energy or higher being. But simply “God” made sense to me for some reason.

I also had my own sort of moral code as a kid. “Well, if I’m good, if I get good grades, if I don’t get in trouble”—it was more like a checklist, like Santa has—“if I’m a good person, then I’ll get into heaven.”

It wasn’t until I met Hank Lindstrom that I came across a barrier to that basic belief. He told me, “You know what, man? You can’t get into heaven like that.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

“You have to accept Christ as your savior,” he said. “You have to accept that we’re all sinners, you know? And that God gave his only begotten son—he sacrificed his son to pay for your sins.”

I took a real interest in what he was saying for some reason, and I kept asking him to read me different passages from the Bible. What they all seemed to be saying is that you don’t necessarily have to do good, the way I had been doing things. All you have to do is believe. And that didn’t make much sense to me. I mean, after seeing what my brother Alan had gotten into, I definitely knew I wanted to go down the right path and do the right thing. I didn’t quite agree with the idea that you could go out and murder people and all of a sudden, “Oh, I believe in Jesus Christ,” and all would be forgiven and you’d walk through the pearly gates.

But that didn’t negate the idea that if you believe in Christ, you’ll have eternal life after death. To me, it just felt like acknowledging what I already knew in my gut—that everything wasn’t just surface level. That everything wasn’t materialistic. There was something more.

Why did I believe in God? Maybe I was just too scared not to:
I don’t want to say I don’t believe in God ’cause, oh my God, what will happen then?
You know? But when you really stop and think about it, the Bible’s been so consistent, and handed down over thousands of years. How can you not put some kind of stock in it? Even if you’re just reading the words and going, “Oh, I don’t know if I can believe this.” Look at it from a different angle: If there’s nothing to it, if it’s a hoax, if it’s folklore, if it’s an urban legend, it’s a pretty good one to have survived all those years.

All I know is that I could tell the difference between my human flesh and what I felt inside. Call it a spirit. Call it whatever you want. But if you believe in that, and you believe in John 3:16, which is the foundation of Christianity and what I believe in, well, then all of a sudden you’re not afraid to die anymore.

And the amazing part is, once you’re not afraid to die then you’re not afraid to
live.

I didn’t fully understand the power of that when I was fifteen, sixteen years old, but I did feel something shift in my life at that point. I followed that feeling, knowing that I’d been saved; knowing that I would have eternal life if this meat suit I’m walking around in ever got wrecked.

Once I accepted Christ, I just stayed on the path that I was instinctively following before. It was mostly commonsense stuff—this overwhelming feeling of just wanting to be good instead of bad.