Afrikaans
Akan
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bemba
Bengali
Bihari
Bosnian
Breton
Bulgarian
Cambodian
Catalan
Cebuano
Cherokee
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Ewe
Faroese
Filipino
Finnish
Frisian
Ga
Galician
Georgian
Greek
Guarani
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Interlingua
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Kinyarwanda
Kirundi
Kongo
Korean
Krio (Sierra Leone)
Kurdish
Kurdish (Soranรฎ)
Kyrgyz
Laothian
Latin
Latvian
Lingala
Lithuanian
Lozi
Luganda
Luo
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mauritian Creole
Moldavian
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Montenegrin
Nepali
Nigerian Pidgin
Northern Sotho
Norwegian
Norwegian (Nynorsk)
Occitan
Oriya
Oromo
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Punjabi
Quechua
Romanian
Romansh
Runyakitara
Russian
Samoan
Scots Gaelic
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Sesotho
Setswana
Seychellois Creole
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhalese
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Spanish (Latin American)
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Tatar
Telugu
Thai
Tigrinya
Tonga
Tshiluba
Tumbuka
Turkish
Turkmen
Twi
Uighur
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Wolof
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
This is the ovation for Brutus the Barber!
Fan -favorite Brutus the Barber Beefcake helped define the golden age of the WWF
with his larger -than -life persona.
The blades are part of me!
Brutus is known for cutting and strutting. He was very popular, very
charismatic. But backstage, Brutus had to fight for respect due to a lifelong
friendship with the industry's biggest star.
Whoever Hulk Hogan is.
Brutus, the ever beefcake customer.
The number one Hulkamaniac ever. Hulk took him under his wing like a little
brother. They were best friends. So why would you not want to help somebody that
helped you so much?
Everything I was getting is because I worked my ass off.
While at the top of his career, a devastating accident leaves Brutus
This was one of the most traumatizing moments that I have ever witnessed.
His face is totally smashed.
And I'm telling everybody, my face is falling off. I never thought he'd
He almost died.
Holzer says, you're going to live. Son of a bitch. You're going to get better.
Leading to a reversal in fortunes. He had everything and then nothing.
And a falling out with the friend who had carried him to the top.
Hogan is a class act.
And if you are loyal to Terry, Terry is loyal to you.
But... Don't ever betray him.
In 1984, Vince McMahon's WWF was transforming the wrestling business into
spectacle. And Ed Leslie, a young wrestler from Florida, soon became one
era's most memorable characters.
The fans like to be entertained.
And let me tell you something.
This Brutus character was entertaining the hell out of them.
I'm Brutus, the Barber Beefcake, WWE Hall of Famer. The crazier I got, the
wilder the things I did, the people loved it. Because it's about connecting
the people.
His wrestling wasn't even that great, please.
Hello, I'm Nasty Boy Brian Knob, one half of the Nasty Boys, and I know
bought the Beefcake back in the 80s. Like in our era, it was like Rockstar,
the Rolling Stones or something. That's one of the reasons I got in the
business.
Beefcake was a rock star right along with everybody on the WWF roster.
People would recognize you no matter where you went.
I'm B. Brian Blair, and many of you know me as one half of the Killer Bees, and
I had so many matches with Brutus the Barber Beefcake that I can't count them
all. Beefcake is a muscular guy, basically, with a nice butt.
Beefcake! Beefcake!
Beefcake!
That's why they call me the Beefcake, because I had the Beefcakes.
He's flaunting his Beefcakes.
Definitely sizable. Thutimus Maximus.
God gave me one hell of a body.
I'm going to show it off.
I've got to say it, brother. That was the best looking thing they'd ever walk
through their doors that I had on TV.
Look at you. That's pencil over there.
That's what my wife says. She goes, you're the best wrestling wrestler? I
care what anybody says.
You know, watching all this stuff, like, I full -on bought all this stuff. Like,
I'm such a wrestling fan. Like, this was not fake.
I started watching wrestling on Sunday mornings.
One morning, out comes this guy, and I just...
My eyes spun like hubba hubba.
My name is Missy. I'm the wife of Brutus the Barber Beefcake. It was like tunnel
vision. Like I am in love with this friggin' guy. Who is he?
The first time I met Missy in 1986,
Boston Gardens.
She snuck in the backstage area and she came running over and yelling, I love
you, I love you. I was like...
A little taken back at that point going, oh, my God, this girl is beautiful.
So how did you reconnect with Brutus after all these years?
Huge wrestling fan, Internet dating. You know, you meet guys online and, oh,
what do you like? Oh, I like wrestling.
So I was talking to this one guy. I'm telling him, you know, my Brutus
story. And he says, oh, Beefcake lives in Winchester.
I'm in Quincy. Hello.
So I texted him, and I said, I want you to know that I'm a huge British
beefcake fan, and it's been a fantasy of mine to sleep with you, and I just
wanted to know if you thought that was possible.
The phone. Ring, ring, ring, ring.
Hello, hello. Yeah.
Yeah, can we meet?
This is pretty exciting.
But I wanted it just to be like a one and done.
I didn't think.
you know, anything was going to happen from that.
He kept calling.
When we started dating, he'd say, I'm your friend. I'm your best friend. And I
used to say, I don't want a best friend. I just want somebody to love me. And
then fast forward, I realized a friend is the best thing that you can have.
If Brutus calls you a friend, it's huge, huge.
The base of.
All of his goodness comes from there.
It's a friendship from his childhood in Tampa, Florida that leads Ed Leslie into
wrestling. While Ed will become Brutus Beefcake, his childhood friend Terry
Bollea will transform into the wrestling icon Hulk Hogan.
Me and Hulkster grew up eight blocks apart.
We were all in the same circle, same high schools.
He was in a rock and roll band, played a bass guitar.
I see him and his buddies all at the beach. They called it Mad Beach.
I was just a young punk kid hanging around. I'm the kid that would quit. I
always came back. I always showed up.
They couldn't get rid of me.
One day, Hogan says, guys, I'm going to try to break in the wrestling business.
That was his deal. He was a rock and roller and wanted to be a wrestler.
So the phone rings.
Hey, kid, want to be a wrestler?
So we started working out twice a day, six days a week in our little homemade
gym. And after like 12, 14 months, we were both monsters.
Terry gets the opportunity to train professionally with the legendary Hiro
Matsuda and then shares what he learns with Ed.
Terry was getting stretched in the dungeon, and it was very, very
You fight.
for your life and survive, or you run out without your clothes.
Whereas Beefcake was just basically tossed straight from the street to the
He was very fortunate that he had a great friend like Hulk Hogan who
him and did everything he could to put him in the ring with the right talent to
get him to first base.
Well, a lot of people don't know me because I'm relatively new to the
I've just come into the scene recently.
Terry helps Ed break into the industry by making him his tag team partner.
Living together out of a van in Pensacola, the two are inseparable.
Whatever Hulk was doing, Brutus was right there. And Brutus was always just
ride or die.
We were friends. We were bonded.
Friends to the end.
People would always say, you must be brothers.
And we finally said, I think it's time just to say, okay, yeah, we're brothers.
And go with it.
Our gimmick was we were bigger and stronger and better looking than
The Hulk and his brother Eddie Boulder will be right. That's what we did, the
Boulder brothers. A bunch of different names where we were brothers.
Dizzy Hogan, a brother of Hulk Hogan.
And Terry Funk.
He named me Dizzy. He's just like, you're Dizzy.
Making a lot of money and everything, you know.
Why is he Dizzy?
Kind of like a...
A male valley girl, if you will.
Play with it a little bit, you know, count it once in a while.
Busy, busy Hulk.
While Terry was going off to stardom, he always had Brutus right behind him.
After lighting up the territories, Hulk makes the jump to the WWF and soon
becomes the face of Vince McMahon's empire.
Hogan was over in WWF from the minute he got there. I mean, the immortal Hulk
Hogan.
I mean, it goes down in history, probably having the biggest career in
ever.
Struggling to gain traction as Busy Hogan, Ed gets the opportunity of a
to step into a new gimmick conceived by Vince's wife, Linda.
Linda has this beefcake name in her head.
He says, what about Brutus?
Like Brutus and Popeye. What about Brutus Beefcake? And I'm sitting there
thinking to myself, my God, here's my chance to wrestle in Madison Square
Gardens, and my name is going to be Brutus Beefcake.
I couldn't even say it without giggling and laughing.
I was going to be Brutus Beefcake in Chippendale.
So I came out with spandex. I had a bow tie with rhinestones. I dropped about 25
pounds. dyed my hair black, and cut it real short, and walked in to Vince's
office in this outfit, and Vince nearly fell out of his chair and said, oh, my
God, how can this not make money?
Brutus Beefcake.
Beefcake was a very colorful guy, but he was an average worker.
What's he going to do off the rope?
When they put Brutus with Greg Valentine, who's one of the premier
wrestlers ever in this business, solid, believable, hardcore, it just really
helped Beefcake learn how to work.
Beef,
to his credit, adapted very, very well. He was really finally understanding
the art of the business.
He was green, but he was good. I could see the potential.
I'm Greg the Hammer Valentine, WWE Hall of Famer. I was Brutus the Barber
Beefcake's tag team partner.
Not only did we draw money, but we had a lot of fans that cheered the bad
guys, the heels, and they loved us.
Brutus was a chick magnet.
I mean, I could get girls that wanted to, but we're talking about Bruce.
Boston is our town, Hammer!
He talks too much sometimes.
Look at that face! Look at that face on her! He gets on a whim and I go, shut
up, man.
No, but we were a perfect combination back then.
Match made in dream team heaven.
Our matches were incredible.
The people went...
nuts over them. That was the point where we knew, like, we've made it, brother.
After almost three years of success as the Dream Team, the decision is made
to split the pair and for Brutus to become a colorful new character.
They hand me this white cosmetology jacket and give me a pair of scissors
say, now you're the barber.
What do you mean, I'm the barber?
Don't you think you maybe should give me a little warning?
First thing I do is go into the dressing room and just start breaking everything
I could find.
Finally, somebody went and found Hulk. He said, you better go find Beefcake. He
lost it.
He's tearing the place up.
So he comes in. What's going on? I said, what's going on? This is what's going
on. I quit.
This is bullshit.
What does a barber do in wrestling?
He says to me, what if you use the sleeper hold and put your opponents
You get the scissors and you cut off some of their hair.
Look it, he's got a pair of scissors. The guy thinks he's a barber now.
Brutus the barber, beefcake he wants to be known as.
I was strutting all over the ring.
We're going to talk about strutting and cutting here.
And then cut.
You could see that Eddie had matured, and he was taking strides that made
Beefcake into one of the premier WWF characters.
What are you going to do when the barber at Hulkamania runs wild on you?
Definitely didn't hurt to be Hulk's friend, and definitely Hulkster helped
Brutus out big time.
Anytime they mention Brutus Beefcake, they always mention, oh, well, he's Hulk
Hogan's best friend.
It can help and it can hurt you because jealousy of the friendship. That's all.
That's all it is.
Jealousy.
I'm Missy Hyatt, the first lady of wrestling.
Or I like to be called the walking riot. And I'm really good friends with Brutus
the barber beefcake.
Whether he was Hogan's best friend, he wouldn't have been in WWE for as long as
he was. Unless you draw money for Vince, you're not going to be there. People
could think whatever they wanted. It didn't matter. I didn't care.
I was good at what I did. I was at the top of my game.
We had WrestleMania in March, beat Mr. Perfect, and then the next step was
SummerSlam, take the belt, boom, and get to where I was supposed to be.
But then Brutus was in a catastrophic
accident. I can picture this like it was yesterday.
He was living a nightmare.
Nobody knew.
Whether Brutus was going to live or whether Brutus was going to die.
Here we are.
Holy cow, we're in Lutes, Florida at the lake house scene of the crime where
Brutus nearly lost his life, man.
This was a heck of a party house, guys.
There was no other docks. There was not as many houses and stuff as there is.
By 1990, Brutus the Barber Beefcake is one of the most popular stars of the
July 4th, and I had one day off.
So I'm going to party like it's the end of the world. We're in the boat. We're
going to have a band set up later on the outside in the back, and we're going to
party all night.
Mike Hannes, who's a friend of Beefcake's, he had a really fast ski
liked to take people parasailing around the lake.
Everybody was having a great time.
We had just been parasailing for hours.
Several people had had near catastrophes. So we're actually thanking
stars that nobody's hurt during the parasailing today. And we're done.
And then Brian Blair, the killer bee.
His friends, a couple people, came roaring in, and they wanted to parasail.
I wasn't about to go up there because it didn't look like the safest thing in
the world to me.
But a friend of mine, Tracy, wanted to go up in the parasail.
Mike, he's like, no, no, we're done.
And they wouldn't relent.
Mike finally just, he's pissed.
He said, all right, all right.
But at that time, there's no wind.
to fluff the parachute up.
Beefcake stood in the water above his waist.
Myself and another guy named Paul was holding up the parasail.
Eddie's responsibility as the rope man is to communicate with the person about
to take off in the parasail, and he also has to communicate with the boat
driver. So I'm out in the shallows there trying to get the people set up up
there on the grass.
We got everybody ready to go.
Mike just said, I'm going, and just took off.
Eddie drops his hand, and as he does, he turns in.
And so he's right in Tracy's line of fire, right in her flight path.
She's coming right to the back of my head. It's happening so fast, nobody can
even yell, look out.
move, anything.
As she sees that she's not getting lift, she buckles her knees up
to try to clear Eddie's face.
And I turn around just in time to get her knees right in the face.
Boom. It hits me so hard that it pulls me out of the water and I do what's
called a gainer, where your feet go over your head first and then come back
down.
And by the grace of God, I wasn't knocked out.
And I'm down, like, trying to get my shit together.
I can't see a thing. I can't breathe.
And nobody has any clue that I've been mortally injured.
I ran as quick as I could, grabbed him from the water. Everything was shattered
from the nose, the cheekbones. His whole upper jaw was sitting on top of his
bottom jaw.
I forced my hand in my mouth. I lift my palate, saying, my face was falling off.
He couldn't speak. He tried to speak, but it was only gurgles coming up from
throat.
While we were waiting for the ambulance to drive, I just kept Eddie up and
conscious, trying to keep him from falling asleep.
I didn't know anybody could be hurt that bad and still be alive.
They rolled me into the emergency room, and they did my blood pressure and
realized it's like 200 over 100 or something.
Next thing you know, they're yelling, code blue, code red, code purple.
Finally, I x -rayed my head and realized that my face is gone, and they had no
idea what to do.
It's the 4th of July, and the phone rang.
So the guy on the phone said, it's Brutus Beefcake.
He is severely injured, and they need your help immediately.
I said, Brutus Beefcake?
Never heard this name. And then my son yelled, Dad!
This is Doc Hogan's partner.
My name is Mutaz Habal, and I am a plastic surgeon.
By the time I arrived, I remember I asked, because he was so big, how could
somebody smash him like this?
And I said, well, Doc, please just kill me, because I'm done.
I can't take it another minute.
The pain is unbearable.
He was totally fractured.
Of course, the first thing we want to determine is that he had a good airway,
because if a person cannot breathe well or there is something obstructing the
airway, of course they can pass. But I was more worried about that he may lose
vision.
Working over the course of 16 hours, Dr. Habal and his team of specialists
reconstruct Brutus' entire face.
It's like building a house.
And I really always like to build the house from the stable area to the
unstable.
A lot of his skull was stable, so I started from the top. They cut me from
to ear, across the top of my head, peel my face down
and my scalp back, and then using strips of titanium, he's going to
rebuild my skull.
The most important thing in the face is where the eyes go, how far they are. Put
the eyes in the right position, put the nose where he is, then put the upper
teeth, the lower teeth, and then we sew the eyelid together so the person will
not be able to see for 24 hours at least.
After the surgery, they took me to ICU, to a drug -induced coma, basically, for
me to wait for a couple days to see what happened if I kept on living.
But I can't see, I can't speak. Everything I had worked 20
years for was gone and wasn't coming back.
Following surgery to repair Brutus Beefcake's shattered face, he is put
medically induced coma.
With no guarantees for his survival, doctors contact the one person Brutus
depend on.
They said, we need somebody there to talk to him because if he wakes up and
panics, we need to have a familiar voice.
Both of my parents had died within two years.
I was going through a horrible divorce. I had brothers and sisters and family,
but I've been gone for 15, 20 years on the road.
The only person that I was really close to was Hulk.
Concerned about his best friend, Hulk Hogan leaves his pregnant wife in
California to be at Brutus' bedside when he wakes up.
They said, look, we can bring him out of this drug -induced coma. We have no
idea what's going to happen. Is he going to freak out?
Hulk Hogan says, don't worry about it, Brutus.
I'm going to take you home.
To California, we're going to get you better.
I don't care what the doctors say.
You're going to live.
The only luck thing about for him is the impact was right in the middle of his
face, between the eyes. If it was on the right or on the left, he would have
lost vision in one of those eyes.
Surviving is a miracle. To regain his vision is also a miracle.
Terry was there, you know, talking to him. They walked down the hallway, and
Brutus' eyeball fell out.
Like, whoop, popped out of the socket.
And Hulk's looking at my eyeball, popped out, just, oh, my God, Doc, we've got
to get him back.
Eddie's recovery had to be extremely difficult because he had to learn to
again. He ate liquid for so long because, think about it, you can't chew
This is a grueling.
grueling comeback.
I know he had a lot of prayer warriors out there. He had a lot of people
for him.
Sherry Martell.
Sherry Martell and I were friends.
So Sherry comes to see me and the guys are like, you can't react.
They're trying to prepare her. When you see him, you can't react.
Because if you do, you might totally freak him out.
Door opens.
Sherry has, like, this big stuffed animal and cards and stuff. Takes one
me and goes, ah!
She's just a ghost or something, like, screams.
First thing they do is, like, grab her and throw her back out of the room.
you tried to kill the poor guy, and she's out in the hallway screaming and
crying. Oh, my God! Oh, my God!
I was almost laughing. I was like, that's a shit effort.
That's real funny shit.
It set the tempo kind of for me. You know, it's like I can't feel sorry for
myself. Sometimes you don't get the cards you want, but you got to play them
anyway. The only thing I hoped for was to at least recover so I could do
something. Nobody expected me to ever really come back to wrestling.
I remember he pulled up.
At my house, when I looked at him, I go, oh, my God.
I just felt so bad for him.
As soon as I was able to get back in the gym and start working out, my body
responded instantly. It was like magic.
I'm with Hulk. We're in California training and getting better and getting
better. The doctor says you just can't wrestle. I had no intention of wanting
get into the ring and die.
With recovery costs mounting, Hulk ensures that Brutus doesn't go broke.
Doing the movies, you know, I was looking for a new career.
Hoping for something to come out of this.
I wouldn't look behind me for a million bucks.
I hate to say this, carrying Hogan's bag, that's not right.
You know, first of all, you have a lot of jealousy. Probably a lot of people
glad he got his head knocked off.
And that's bullshit.
People look at him like, oh, beefcake, all he does is carry Hogan's bag, or he
carries Hogan's drugs, so if he gets caught, you know, it'll go on to Brutus.
had his gimmicks in his bag, and, you know, money. He trusted me
with his money and everything else.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Eager to get back into wrestling, Vince gives Brutus his own regular interview
segment called The Barbershop.
Barbershop time, right? This is what you've been waiting for.
He doesn't look different.
You don't know what's so responsible for bringing food to Scott Barber.
Back to the WWF!
The barbershop was fantastic.
Welcome to the barbershop, ladies and gentlemen. The thing you can't buy is
heart. But the snake is still standing.
Could have went on and on and on.
But the barbershop was destroyed by Sid for WrestleMania 8.
That's the way they do things.
Had WWE, they created it, they destroy it.
With the barbershop having run its course, Brutus has taken off WWF
as Hulk takes a hiatus from wrestling due to the steroid scandal that engulfs
the business.
They were counting on me to deliver Hulk to them to be prosecuted, and
Vince too.
They thought I was going to be their golden goose.
Didn't happen.
I said, no, no, no, none of this shit ever happened. I don't know what
talking about.
Help save his ass and Vince McMahon's ass too.
Returning to the WWF in 1993, Hulk Hogan is reunited with Brutus Beefcake as his
new tag team partner.
Beefcake had a match at WrestleMania, tagging with Hogan against Ted DiBiase
IRS Mike Rotundo. That was another gift from Hogan.
The idea was, let me see how I feel.
In the ring, do I feel like I can do this every day? Because it felt good.
Brutus' comeback is short -lived as he's soon dropped by the WWF and returns to
the independent circuit.
It's not until Hulk signs a massive contract to join WCW that Brutus gets
another opportunity to revive his struggling career.
He came with Hulk Hogan. He was what I refer to as the Hulk Hogan tax.
Hulk didn't demand anything, but we had an understanding that if he
wanted something bad enough, I had to pay for it.
I'm Eric Bischoff, and even though I'm here to talk about Brutus the Barber
Beefcake, I'm happy to be here.
Everybody in that locker room knew that the only reason Ed Leslie was in that
locker room was because of Hulk Hogan.
In 1994, Ed Leslie once again follows his friend Hulk Hogan, this time to
WCW. With the Brutus Beefcake name owned by the WWF, Ed cycles through a number
of different characters in WCW.
Butcher, the man with no name.
Zoodiac, the booty man coming out here. I was able to become a character.
I was able to do it with four or five different gimmicks. In my mind, that's
amazing feat. It's like being a good actor like Mel Gibson.
Brutus thinks he's as good as Mel Gibson as an actor?
That made me laugh there. That's a good one.
I mean, all them other gimmicks didn't get over at all.
pretty much conducted himself professionally while he was in WCW for
part. I think Brutus was there for the party.
I'll be honest with you.
Yeah, he was a partier. He was a drinker. And I've been on the back of
motorcycle. We've had one, a couple, too many, but I trust him with my life.
The day I got fired from WCW, I called him. He actually saved my life because I
was getting ready to.
Jump out the window. And he talked me off the ledge.
Brutus was the savior.
Brutus was the savior.
Why do you have to humiliate somebody and give them all these stupid gimmicks?
Brutus was treated like shit at WCW.
After the booty man and the butcher and the man with no name, Eric Bischoff was
basically saying, we can't repackage beefcake anymore.
Okay, here's what I'm going to do.
I went home. I went to Florida.
I spent two, three months growing my hair really long, dropping my body fat
content to 5%, 45 years old, and shredded to
the bone.
He looked like a god.
He looked like something from Grecian times.
He was just sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy.
I'm schvitzing over here.
Flew to Atlanta, went to the CNN Towers, home of WCW.
Fox says, I got to introduce you to my new disciple.
And oohs and aahs. Who is this in the ring?
And then he says, oh, did I mention that that's Brutus Beefcake?
So I stuck it right up all their asses. Boom.
Big, hard.
Bam, right up the ass with that one.
How about that?
Despite his radical transformation,
Brutus fizzles out at WCW, but bigger problems await.
He had a money manager that sold all the money and went to, like, Barbados or
something. Stole a lot of hulks, too.
You're a millionaire one day, and the next day you're selling your house.
I poured everything I had into this home where I planned on living my life out,
and now?
Had to sell it. So now my now ex -wife takes my daughter, moves back to Boston
where her parents live.
To provide for his family, Brutus makes the difficult choice to move to Boston,
taking a job as a toll collector for the Metro Boston Transit Authority.
And it was brutal to have to live in Boston for 12 years in that cold,
miserable place.
To be in a bad marriage.
living in an attic, worked nights with rats running across his feet.
That was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life, but I was doing it
for my daughter.
This particular time, instead of aspirin, I used to have these called BC
I don't know if you've even heard of it. You just dump the powder in your mouth,
and you absorb it real fast.
One of my BC powder little packets fell out on the floor.
I did my shift, packed up, left.
This lady came in, saw this little tiny thing down on the floor, picked it up.
When she tried to open it, the powder just went poof.
And she started screaming anthrax, anthrax. And there was that big anthrax
thing, but like, you know, it was like COVID, you know.
And they shut the train station down.
You want the truth or you want me to lie?
I want the truth.
It wasn't anthrax.
It was cocaine.
If anybody falls on hard times, anybody's got a problem with drugs and
addiction, they make those kind of stupid mistakes.
Unfortunately, this one scared the hell out of a lot of people.
It's aspirin in a little, like a little packet.
You can understand why people would not believe that, right?
Yeah, oh, 100%. But why wasn't he arrested?
He wasn't arrested. It was a big embarrassment.
They made him go to rehab.
Eventually, when I went back for my review, they...
Fired me. They let me go, which I was extremely happy about.
Out of a job and with his marriage ending, Brutus is forced to reckon with
toll wrestling has taken on his body and his life.
When you're a wrestler on the road, 350 days out of the year, your body
is beat to shit. Just to get in the ring.
Nine out of ten guys had to take something for the pain.
You take the pill, you have a little drink.
Very habit -forming.
I can't do these pills. I can't do this anymore because it's going to take my
life.
And Missy took me in and gave me a home and a place to live. And she was there
at a time that could have went either way.
His friends would give him pills and drag him around to bars and say, we got
Brutus beefcake. Brutus is not a loser like that, but he had a
habit. He had a life, and he was
numbing himself.
We have weeded out all of the assholes.
All of that is gone.
I never play with it, though, because I'm too afraid I'm going to break it.
What?
Okay.
I don't even know how he posed to me.
He would always say, I want to marry you. You're the love of my life.
ever done the things for me that you've done.
What did you like?
Thirty -three years ago, tonight, you were in the hospital, almost
dead.
Now I look at you.
Go ahead, Daddy.
Go for it.
Go for it, Daddy!
Happy Fourth of July.
Cutie pie, how happy you are!
She's an amazing woman. She's beautiful. She's smart.
She's intelligent.
She knows what she wants, and I love that about her. I'm so happy that he
someone. That just tickles me to death.
Brutus returns to the wrestling business in 2008, this time with Missy by his
side. We did the Hogan and Friends thing. That was the first time that I
Hogan, but Brian Nobbs was the right theater to tell me.
You're not in the fold until Hogan says you're in the fold.
I was working hard and wanted to get back to Florida. All those years I was
there, I wanted to go back to Florida.
We visited with Terry, and everything was great. We had a good time. We went
out one night.
Terry was singing my praises, telling Brutus how wonderful I was and how he
so happy for Brutus.
We said goodnight, and then the next day we went over to Terry's house, and it
was like someone flipped a switch.
And he was really cold.
And I remember thinking, something happened, something's changed.
I don't know what set him off, what happened.
Brutus Beefcake, him and I have fallen out.
It's got a lot to do with the way he's married, too.
We've heard that the incident between Hulk and Brutus stems from...
Prove it his new wife, Missy, and Hulk not liking her.
No comment.
Hulk is a very great guy and a very good friend.
And, you know, I can't see him, you know, being mad at you unless you did
something. I don't pry into people's business too much. But, you know, Terry,
had to write him off. His exact words, I had to write Beaver off, man. He's just
too much.
I think Beefcake took advantage of Terry.
And, you know, you can only have that happen so many times. You can forgive so
much, and then you've got to move on.
Were people trying to protect Brutus from you?
No. No, not in the beginning.
Not until they realized that I was a take -no -shit. Brutus isn't going out
working for $300.
Not happening.
Then I became, like, the threat. So she's difficult.
I feel bad for Missy because she's been so misunderstood by so many people. I
have witnessed the monster. That jealousy is so horrible because she's so
beautiful. She's so loving. She's so nice that people hate her.
guts. It's hard to have a relationship with someone year after year, 365,
partying, you're hanging.
Every day the phone rang two, three, four times.
They were close.
And I know that he misses him.
So where is that now?
They are not talking.
All right, so we're doing a poster. You've got to put a fist up and make a
look on your face because you can take a couple pictures, all right? Okay, come
on.
Awesome. All right, cool.
Thanks so much. You're welcome. Appreciate it.
He is doing wonderful.
People are always happy to see him. The fans, they come out. They love Brutus so
much, and Brutus makes everybody feel like...
He's known them for so long. When he's telling a story, like, he's known you
forever. Yes, they wanted to shoot us together.
He went through a horrible accident, and today he's
back 100%. That's just a lesson to you in how strong Bruce is.
So, God bless him.
He was elevated because of the company that he kept.
But wrestling's all politics.
You've got to have talent to stay there. And there's a lot of jealous people in
the wrestling industry.
I'm happy for every dime, every match that Brutus ever had.
Despite years of strained relations,
Hulk Hogan comes through for his friend one more time when he inducts Brutus
into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2019.
Please welcome the immortal Hulk.
Brutus went through some really tough times. I was there when he had a
parasailing accident, but he came back and he made Brutus Beefcake larger than
life.
What's he going to do when Brutus the Barber Beefcake has a haircut just for
you? So please welcome Brutus the Barber Beefcake to the 2019 Hall of Fame,
brother.
They did you cool. They did you really good.
That's the last time you ever saw Hulk Hogan.
That's it.
That's the last time you ever saw him.
Hulk and I were best
friends and have been friends for years.
We could be friends again at the snap of a finger.
How would I know that the guy...
in the front row, heckling all the wrestlers at the armory in Tampa, would
become my best friend.
You all know him as Hulk Hogan.
I love you, brother.
Thanks for all the good times and the good times to come.
That's what my ambition is, to hopefully be able to shake hands.
And look them in the eye and say, you know, thanks, buddy, for being my friend
and all that we've gone through in our lives. And, you know, I love you. And
boom. Like I said before, you get dealt your cards, you got to play them.
And I'm perfectly, super, duper happy the way
it turned out that I got my Missy.
my soulmate to be able to spend my life with.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get subtitles in any language from opensubtitles.com, and translate them here.