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Wrestling with Their Son's Career
Posted: Thursday June 08, 2000 05:01 PM
Join Rick Reilly for a special chat on Wednesday, June 14 at 2 p.m. ET. Click here to submit a question for Reilly before the chat.
Pssssst. Keep this under your hat. If what I'm about to tell you ever leaks, professional wrestling will come apart like wet sushi. There won't be another wrestler's autobiography on The New York Times best-seller list. Wrestling will pull worse ratings than test patterns. This is because I know the truth about America's bloodiest wrestler, Goldberg, the half-man, half-Sasquatch who enjoys head-butting doors and smashing folding chairs over the heads of his colleagues. You ready? His mother, Ethel, is a classical violinist! His dad, Jed, is a Harvard man and an esteemed obstetrician-gynecologist! They live in South Florida, and you can only imagine the conversations around the bridge table. Phyllis: My son's a lawyer! Gladys: My son's a doctor! Ethel: My son bites the heads off chickens! Not only that, but the big mook has a flower named after him! Ethel not only played with the Chicago Symphony but also bred an award-winning hybrid orchid that is so precious she named it after a certain slobbering neckless grappler. Sportscaster: Uh-oh. Here it comes! Looks like Goldberg's pulling out the secret weapon! Color analyst: Not the wrist corsage! What's more, one of the world's biggest s.o.b.'s has a brother who happens to be one of the country's biggest FOBs -- Friends of Bill. Brother Michael, who's in the cargo plane leasing business, is a heavy donor to President Clinton and the Democratic party, has spent a night at the White House and has had the President over to his house in Aspen for fund-raisers. Goldberg has even shaken Clinton's hand. A wrestler cozying up to a liberal? What's a redneck supposed to do for a role model anymore? Underneath, Goldberg is about as savage as instant pudding. Yeah, as Bill Goldberg, he was an All-SEC defensive tackle at Georgia and played that position for the Atlanta Falcons until his career was ended by a torn abductor muscle, but the truth about him is that he likes nothing better than a nice Merlot with a good recipe to follow. He was raised on Bach. True, he's back wrestling after losing a fight with a limousine window (196 stitches in his forearm) and recuperating for six months. Away from the minicams he's about as violent as a button fair. He addressed Congress to try to get cockfighting banned nationwide. He's a national spokesperson for the Humane Society. I mean, the guy has three cats! Sure, some other wrestlers have cats -- but only for between-meal snacks. Here's something: Mr. Neanderthal has had the same girlfriend for seven years. Not tied up, either! Oh, and he's Jewish. How many Jewish wrestlers have you ever heard of? "I've never once tried to hide my heritage," says Goldberg, who, believe it or not, plans to visit Israel soon to accept the Tree of Life award, once given to Henry Kissinger. "I'm proud of being Jewish." Can't you just hear the chanting at the next loser-shaves-head-and-leaves-town cage match? Gold-berg! Oy! Gold-berg! Oy! Of course, breaking the news to his parents that he wasn't going to be the next Senator Moynihan or Dr. DeBakey wasn't easy. "When I told my family I was going to be a pro wrestler [in 1997], they all hated me," he recalls. "My brother wouldn't speak to me. My mom screamed, and my dad said I was out of my mind." These days you can hardly keep them outside the ropes. You haven't lived until you've heard a retired, Harvard-educated gynecologist screaming, "Tear off his femur, Bill, and beat him with it!" When Ethel got up the courage to watch a match on TV, she took a look at his caveman opponent and thought, I hope Bill doesn't bring this young man home for dinner. Then pro wrestling started to grow on her. "I was shocked at Bill's agility!" she says. "In one of the first matches I watched, he did a backward somersault in the ring!" Now she won't sit anywhere but in the first two rows. "Some people give me an attitude about it," Ethel says. "They say, 'How could you let your son do that? Don't you have to be low-class to be a wrestler?' But my son does wonderful things for people with his wrestling. Children's hospitals. Make-A-Wish. The animals. No, he's not a doctor, but I'll tell you something: He makes 10 times what a doctor makes!" Hey, Ethel, it could be worse. He could've become a governor.
Issue date: June 12, 2000
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