Hulk Hogan: Mortal

It’s impossible to have watched pro wrestling for any amount of time and not feel some kind of way about Hulk Hogan. Whether you’re old enough to have been watching when Hogan dropped the leg on the Iron Sheik and started Hulkamania, or if you’ve just been around for a few years and seen Hogan shilling for beer & politicians, surely you’ve formed an opinion that won’t change much now that he’s passed away at the age of 71.

My Hulk Hogan experience is probably different from yours. I started watching in 1990, when WWF Superstars & Wrestling Challenge were airing back to back on Saturday mornings at 10 & 11. I didn’t see evening programming until a little while after that, and PPVs were definitely out of the question in my household. As a result, my early wrestling memories don’t feature a lot of Hulk Hogan matches. Sure, he’d be talking, but I grew more attached to the Superstars I saw wrestling every week. Guys like Jake “The Snake” Roberts, “Ravishing” Rick Rude, Bret “Hitman” Hart and others that wrestled on Superstars & Wrestling Challenge most weeks became my favorites. My first action figure was of Rick Rude, and I had a Million Dollar Man Wrestling Buddie. There’s a chance that was because that’s what was left at the toy store by the time my mom got there, but it was perfectly fine by me.

Sure, Hulk was still winning championships and appearing on talk shows and doing motion pictures, but he was more of a distant figure in my early fandom. I didn’t mind him, but he didn’t have the connection with me that he did with millions of Hulkamaniacs. Some of my longtime wrestling fan friends still call BS on this, but it’s true.

Now, once the Hulkster arrived in WCW was when he first really had an effect on my fandom. Mostly because I’d grown to like WCW as a different thing from WWF, and it seemed like every wrestler & announcer friend Hogan had made the move to WCW with him and displaced guys like Cactus Jack & Stunning Steve Austin that I saw big things in. Jesse Ventura wasn’t around much longer. Hell, even Ricky Steamboat & Rick Rude had to retire around the same time. It seemed like everything I had liked about that period of WCW was gone and replaced with 1990 WWF. Probably an early lesson for me that not everything I liked was best for business, but it was still a bummer.

WCW’s fortunes started to go up, but Hogan’s act never really translated with that fan base for one simple reason: he hadn’t evolved. He was doing the same stuff he’d done in the WWF forever, and many of the folks that preferred their wrestling on TBS didn’t like it to begin with. I didn’t know all this at the time but I still felt it like some smark that didn’t know they were a smark. Monday Nitro became a thing and WCW got more competitive with the WWF, but Hogan still needed some kind of spark. That would come with the New World Order.

As we all know, many of the best wrestling characters are simply the wrestler themselves turned up to 11. From what I know about Terry Bollea the human being, Hollywood Hogan was a lot closer to his personality than Hulk Hogan was. All of the negative character traits I later read about Hogan behind the curtain were evident in the presentation of Hollywood Hogan. One could say that Hogan was simply an incredible actor, but…well, we saw him act in movies & TV shows.

Regardless, Hollywood put the NWO over the top and made it one of wrestling’s greatest factions. Companies are still making money off of their merchandise. People connected with the NWO still have a following because of it. As great as Hulkamania was for most involved with it, so was the NWO. It gave Hogan a second act and extended his relevance to another generation.

This led to plenty of nostalgia runs afterwards for the Hulkster. He came back to the WWF in 2002 and had a match with The Rock that helped lead to another world championship. When he wasn’t doing business with WWE, he was getting money from people that wanted to compete with them, or he was doing reality shows or selling something or other.

Hulk Hogan was constantly in the news, which was fine up until around 2012 when it mostly started being for negative reasons. There was a sex tape that also managed to contain racist remarks, which when you think about it is kind of impressive in its ability to offend in different ways. It kind of ended up going well for Hogan, as he launched a lawsuit that managed to destroy several popular websites and issued an apology that taught people not to get caught. Hogan then became political in his later years, jumping on board the grift train that seems to rule the world these days.

The status of Hulk Hogan as a sports entertainment icon can’t be denied. He was the featured performer during the Rock & Wrestling boom of the 1980s that sprung the World Wrestling Federation to the dominant promotion in the business, a position that it’s only given up for a couple of years in the past forty. During those couple of years, Hogan was one of the focal points of the angle that led World Championship Wrestling past the WWF. It would be silly for anyone to sit in my chair and deny that Hulk Hogan was one of the biggest stars in the history of wrestling.

Back in the day, most online debate concerning Hogan regarded his status as a backstage politician and his low amount of wrestling moves compared to his peers. Internet wrestling writers back in the 1990s & 2000s typed many words about how his matches weren’t great and how he held back wrestlers that weren’t good friends of his. Once the 2010s & 20s hit, criticism of Hogan extended to his out of ring endeavors, many of which were looked upon poorly. Criticism of Hogan also extended to his tenuous relationship with the truth, showcased in countless interviews where he made claims that were easily debunked. Hogan wasn’t unique in that way, but he was quite prolific in the genre. Certain beliefs he espoused that have been amplified these days aren’t good for anybody.

With that all being said, Hogan did a lot of charity work, visited children’s hospitals and did his best during most of his career to inspire his fans. Whether he lived up to the Demandments of saying prayers, training and eating vitamins, it was still a good message that had an effect on countless viewers. There’s a very good chance that many of your favorite wrestlers were inspired to get in the business by Hulk Hogan.

Some of you may say I’ve been too harsh towards Terry Bollea/Hulk Hogan. Others of you will say I haven’t been harsh enough. I feel like many of us (including the Hulkster himself) have forgotten that no human being is perfect, and no human being is without some good. Part of the hero worship culture that Hulkamania fed into. We tend to fall in love with our chosen leaders and feel that they can do no wrong, and refuse to believe that people that disagree with us are capable of any good. The reality is that people are equally capable of doing good & bad, often in the same hour. Most of us end up saying one thing and doing another at various points in our lives. That’s part of being human.

“Immortal”? Nah. Hulk Hogan was just as mortal as the rest of us.