Hulk Hogan
Hulk Hogan has died, aged 71. There are few bigger stories - or bigger obituaries, at least - imaginable in professional wrestling, so as a professional wrestling historian, you might think I would relish the chance to pen that abridged biography, to dissect his legacy, but I have almost no desire to write about Hogan on those terms. That’s a job for others, and we already know how it will go. He will be eulogised, placed on a pedestal, his failings forgotten, his shortcomings forgiven, now that the man himself is no longer around to further degrade his obituary.
You know the bullet points of his life, regurgitated across every news aggregator in the hours since his death - Rocky III, Wrestlemania, bodyslamming Andre The Giant, reinvention in the New World Order, the wilderness years, and then scandal; in the wake of his death, the specificity disappearing in the rear-view mirror, labelled as oblique “controversy”, in order to fit the standard format. Such was Hogan’s - real name Terry Bollea - commitment to maintaining his gimmick and his image (during his lawsuit against Gawker he was afforded the privilege of wearing a “formal black courtroom bandana” out of deference to the importance of his image) that kayfabe and lies are repeated without examination in mainstream news coverage of his death; such august organs of the press as the BBC and the Guardian repeat trumped up stats and attendance figures, with only the Independent hedging their bets at “a crowd of around 80,000” at Wrestlemania 3, rather than the oft-repeated 93,173. Hogan’s life was a patchwork of lies - his own and others - and it feels almost fitting that nobody can get their story straight even in death; indeed, Hogan’s final days were marked by conflicting reports from long-term confidante Jimmy Hart and former friend Bubba The Love Sponge as to whether the Hulkster was fit and healthy or on his deathbed.
I have written a fair bit about Hogan in the past - a quick search of my first book, Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling, tells me that his name appears no less than 103 times - and I would have written far more in that book; earlier drafts included an additional chapter, cut for space and pacing, about the intersection of kayfabe, social media, and reality TV, in which Hulk Hogan would have featured heavily. But I am always careful to point out that my book, and my writing as a whole, has never been intended as a history of the WWE, or of the version of wrestling history that they have managed to convince the world of, in which Hulk Hogan looms unmatched as the biggest star in the pantheon, a wrestling Prometheus who took wrestling from a niche affair, in the “smoke-filled auditoriums” of Vince McMahon’s imagination, to the bright lights and sold out stadia of Wrestlemania. This story isn’t true - Hogan and Vince may have made the WWF’s business bigger, but it made wrestling as a whole smaller, eating up territories, cannibalising their audience - the result was that Hulk Hogan may have drawn record numbers to individual shows, but the sum total of wrestling’s audience in the United States grew smaller in the period where Hogan was at his peak.
Increasingly - and particularly in my forthcoming book, Hackenschmidt’s Ghost: Tales From Wrestling History - I find objectivity both impossible to maintain, and misguided to attempt. I am myself an active participant in my writing, in how I engage with wrestling history, and how it influences me. So it would be folly to pretend that my own biography has no bearing on how I have come to process Hulk Hogan’s.
I am English, so not for me the flag-waving jingoism and star-spangled muscularity of Hulk Hogan’s pomp. I grew up in a time when all things American were met with a dual fascination and revulsion; we were culturally enthralled by how big and bombastic everything over there was, while sneering at how uncouth and brash it seemed, a nation seemingly without shame or nuance. You could barely ask for a more perfect exemplar of the American way filtered through a British televisual lens than the bulging muscles, dripping sweat, and shouted catchphrases of Hulk Hogan, already in the early ‘90s more cartoon character than human being.
What’s more, my first flush of wrestling fandom largely bypassed Hulk Hogan all together. By the time I had stumbled across the WWF on Sky TV, Hogan already had one foot out of the door - he was synonymous with wrestling, but the fact that he wasn’t on my wrestling show made a young Patrick W. Reed assume that he must wrestle in a nebulous Somewhere Else, perhaps the same place inhabited by names like Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy, who I likewise knew only through cultural osmosis, through jokes and references in The Beano. I drifted away from wrestling, and didn’t return until the new millennium, by which point the WWF may as well have existed on another plane of existence to Hulk Hogan. He played no part in my formative fandom, and I experienced him only as a reputation, a nostalgia act, an anachronism, or as an exercise in delving into the archives, and parroting other people’s opinions.
Somebody I have written even more about than I wrote about Hulk Hogan was Antonio Inoki, who passed away while I was writing the chapter of Kayfabe in which he features most heavily (his name appears 420 times to Hogan’s 103).
Writers, wrestlers, and anyone reached out to or obliged to comment on Hogan’s passing will inevitably hedge their bets and land on some variation of him having a “complicated” legacy, but from where I’m standing, Hogan’s legacy is pretty cut-and-dry. Now Inoki? That is a complicated legacy. Inoki’s controversies and problematic traits were in mythic proportion compared to the garden variety racism and scabbing of Hogan; while Hulk endorsed Donald Trump, presumably as much in a desperate grab for renewed cultural relevance as out of earnest endorsement of his politics, Antonio cut out the middleman and became a nationalist politician in his own right, as well as cosying up to Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong-Il, and making plans to wrestle Idi Amin. And then there’s the embezzling, the bullying, the dodgy business deals, private scandals, and the advent of “Inoki-Ism”.
We’re told that if there was no Hulk Hogan, there would be no wrestling business as we know it, that it was Hogan as the figurehead of the WWF that transformed the wrestling business. But really, Inoki gets the nod on that count too, if we’re totting up legacy. Without the butterfly effects of Antonio Inoki’s experiments with “shoot style”, we might never have seen the advent of modern mixed martial arts, without the innovations by Inoki and his business partner Hisashi Shinma, who passed away in April of this year, the shape of professional wrestling from the late 1970s to today would be utterly unimaginable, the after-effects of their influence are felt everywhere. For all that it has been said that with no Hulk Hogan, there would be no Wrestlemania, and no wrestling as the cultural juggernaut it was to become, I would tip even those scales in the favour of Antonio Inoki; Vince McMahon and the WWF’s version of history will tell you that the first Wrestlemania was an all-or-nothing affair, the McMahons emptying the family savings into one big gamble on their future, what’s missing from that story is how much of those savings came from Antonio Inoki in the first place - in the early years of Vince McMahon’s stewardship of the promotion he purchased from his father, it was arguably the regular stipend he received from Inoki’s New Japan Pro Wrestling that did more to keep the company afloat than any of Vince’s own promotional efforts.
That is a complex legacy. That is a legacy to be reckoned with. To make a comic book analogy, I would say that Inoki and Shinma are the Jack Kirby and the Steve Ditko to the Stan Lee of Hogan and McMahon, when it comes to the charting of wrestling history.
A veteran wrestler I worked with several times over the years once posited that he didn’t think anyone could claim to be one of the best wrestlers in the world if their work was derivative, that somebody’s legacy and influence should be measured by what originality and innovation they add to the sport. It’s a stance I have a lot of sympathy with, particularly when looking from the perspective of capital H History. It’s not necessarily the biggest stars who shape the future, but those whose influence reaches deepest and lasts longest.
For Hulk Hogan, we will doubtless be sold on him as a wrestler of influence beyond measure, but it doesn’t ring true. His significance, his influence, is measured in dollars earned and tickets sold, not in measurably moulding the shape of wrestling as a whole, and that’s great news if you’re Hulk Hogan’s accountant, but it’s a footnote to the historian. To again borrow an analogy from another medium; I could tell you the story of the rise of English punk rock in opposition to the bloated excesses of prog, and of the lasting effects of that cultural moment, but it would add nothing were I to tell you that the number one single on the day that Never Mind The Bollocks was released was Baccara’s Yes Sir I Can Boogie. Brian Eno famously said of The Velvet Underground that not many people bought their records, but everyone who did went out and formed a band. Hulk Hogan is neither the Sex Pistols nor The Velvet Underground in this tortured analogy.
All that said, Hogan was, undoubtedly, an icon. He was the most famous professional wrestler of our lifetimes, but more than that, he was literally iconic. The author Jason Pargin has spoken of the “cheat code” to fame, of creating and sticking to an image so instantly recognisable that any child could dress as you for Halloween. Blonde moustache. Red bandana. That is a shorthand for Hulk Hogan, and with that, for professional wrestling, for a campy muscular ‘80s nostalgia, and for a certain kind of bombastic American patriotism. But it’s an empty icon, with limited substance below the surface. It puts me in mind of other ‘80s icons, like Hogan’s one-time Wrestlemania tag team partner Mr. T, trapped for all time in a persona of their own invention, an ironic timewarp of image and catchphrases, frightened to break the bindings of their own gimmick lest they find there was nothing left underneath.
It’s impossible to imagine professional wrestling without the influence of Antonio Inoki, or of Antonio Pena, of Jerry Jarrett, or of Vince McMahon. I don’t feel the same way about Hulk Hogan. I can’t see his fingerprints on the wrestling of today the way that the marks of others are so deeply embedded. We almost don’t need to imagine what wrestling history looks like without Hulk Hogan, because we’ve already had a trial run - ten years ago, in light of some of his racist comments, the WWE effortlessly snipped him from their version of wrestling’s past; there was nobody named Hulk Hogan in the WWE Hall of Fame, his image and catchphrases no longer rang out at the start of every show, and his name went unmentioned as a matter of course. He was not missed. His appearances since returning in from the cold have been an exercise in diminishing returns, and in outstaying his welcome - unable to sell anything but the Hulk Hogan brand, unable to lend credibility or significance to other performers the way that, on their best days, somebody like Mick Foley, Roddy Piper or Ric Flair could, he was reduced to isolated segments, an old anachronism doing ad reads and promo segments. His final appearance was met with resounding boos while he plugged a brand of beer that nobody drinks. To me, that was indicative a symbol of his legacy as body slamming Andre The Giant.
So what was Hogan’s legacy? Right place, right time. And it’s impossible to know how things could have gone differently. But he was in the right place at the right time to not quite become the top star for the AWA. He was in the right place at the right time to be booked as a megastar for NJPW - there’s Inoki again - as a proof of concept for his worth to the WWF. He was in the right place at the right time to be cast as Thunderlips in Rocky III; a role that Vince McMahon Sr. pitched Gorilla Monsoon for, and fired Hulk Hogan for accepting - in the mindset of the old promoter, actors shouldn’t wrestle and wrestlers shouldn’t act, because the moment you start muddying those waters, you give the audience all the ingredients they need to start questioning whether it’s all just pretend. It was Vince McMahon Jr. who broke with that tradition, and saw that the Hollywood-approved Hulk Hogan was the man to put his promotional efforts behind. Right place, right time. Vince Jr himself, through the accident of birth, being three generations into a family of New York wrestling and boxing promoters, and through the machinations of the old National Wrestling Alliance cartel, had exclusive access to one of the country’s biggest media markets from whence to begin building his empire. Right place, right time. When a writer’s strike put NBC’s television schedule in chaos, and its abrupt end meant they were left with an episode of Saturday Night Live to broadcast with no guest host, and they turned to Hulk Hogan and Mr. T for the part, effectively handing them two hours of free promotion live on NBC the day before Wrestlemania? Right place, right time. The man had the luck of the devil.
Outside of the ring, Hogan’s legacy is of a scab, a racist, and a walking endorsement of the current brand of American fascism. We all know the story of Hogan quashing Jesse Ventura’s efforts to start a wrestlers’ union, and while I’m not naïve enough to think that such an effort would have been successful - nobody has managed to pull it off since, Hogan or no Hogan - that’s no less an indictment of Hogan’s careerism and selfishness. As a racist, we can already see that reputation being massaged in real time. Ambiguously referred to as having made “controversial” or “racially charged” statements, and forgiven as an old man saying something he regretted, or a slip of the tongue, when it was nothing of the sort. I advise you to go back and revisit Hogan’s actual words, both those quoted at the end of his leaked sex tape, and in a prison conversation with his son Nick - in the latter, he expresses his fear that the worst outcome of Nick’s crime, a drink-driving offence that left his passenger with permanent brain damage, was that they might be reincarnated as black men, and worried out loud that Nick would be sent to a reform school full of, in Hogan’s butchered carny parlance, “blizz-acks”. In his more notable racist scandal, Hogan used repeated racial slurs, worried about his (now long since estranged) daughter Brooke dating black men, and unambiguously spoke the phrase, “I am a racist”. The lesson he ultimately took away from all this was “don’t get caught”.
More than the lazy, idiotic racism of a privileged white celebrity, more than the endorsement of Donald Trump, Hulk Hogan’s lasting legacy outside of the ring will be as the patsy, the frontman for a $10 billion dollar lawsuit filed by the far-right and anti-democracy billionaire Peter Thiel against the gossip website Gawker. For all of Gawker’s faults, and there were many, Thiel’s successful campaign to get them shut down after they outed him as gay put hundreds of people out of work, raised dire questions about the future of press freedom, and created the legal precedent that freedom of the press is of nothing when pitted against the vagaries of capitalist wealth. All Peter Thiel had needed was the right celebrity scandal to put his money behind, and in Hulk Hogan he found one, black formal courtroom bandana and all.
Right place. Right time.
