Erica Nicole Clark, a stand-up comedian and the daughter of iconic actor Mr. T, recently shared a story from her childhood to explain why she often avoids telling people about her famous father. In a clip posted by the “Don’t Tell Comedy” Instagram account, Clark recounted a chaotic weekend surrounding the first WrestleMania that involved a legitimate injury to her father and a violent hotel room brawl between Hulk Hogan and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper.
Clark began by explaining the complex she developed as a child because no one believed her father was Mr. T. “I’m a black girl at an all-black school, and I’m trying to explain to my friends that the reason why they’ve never seen my dad before is because he’s doing WrestleMania with Hulk Hogan,” she said. “Everybody was like, ‘shut the fuck up, Erica.’ And those were the teachers.” This experience of being disbelieved led her to stop sharing stories about her life.
To illustrate her point, she told a story from the weekend of the first WrestleMania in 1985, where her father was teaming with Hulk Hogan. She was seeing wrestling live for the first time and her dad had assured her it was all fake. During the match, however, her father suffered a real injury at the hands of his opponent. “My dad gets into the ring, and immediately Roddy Piper flips my dad… and he cracks my dad’s ribs,” Clark recalled. “So my dad has to go to the emergency room.”
After Mr. T was treated and returned to their hotel room “all bandaged up,” Clark described a tense scene. She stated that Hulk Hogan was in their room, still in his yellow wrestling shorts, and was “doing like lines of cocaine.” According to Clark, Hogan was furious over the injury and was vowing to get revenge on Piper, yelling, “T, I’m gonna fuck him up when I see him.”
According to Clark, there was soon a knock at the door, and it was Roddy Piper, who had come to apologize for the injury. “He goes, ‘I’m real sorry about what happened’,” Clark said.
Hogan, however, did not accept the apology. “Hulk Hogan’s like, ‘fuck that,’ and grabs Roddy Piper, and brings him into the hotel room, throws him against the wall, smashes the mirror,” Clark stated. She described a chaotic brawl breaking out between the two wrestlers.
Clark painted a picture of mayhem in the hotel room, with her father, despite his broken ribs, trying to break up the fight. She recalled Hogan’s then-wife, Linda, being there and yelling for him to stop, using his real name, “Terry.” Amid flipped-over furniture, Clark and her sister were crying.
She concluded the story: “We get on a plane, we come back to Chicago, I go to class, we’re sitting in a sharing circle, and the teacher’s like, ‘what’d you do this weekend?’,” Clark said. “And I was like, not a fucking thing.”
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