Hulk Hogan, an absolute trainwreck of a human being and the most important professional wrestler who ever lived, has died at seventy-one. Let’s get that second part out of the way, because while most of the world knows that it’s true, actual wrestling fans are often in complete denial about it. And Hogan, of course, is entirely to blame: he’s spent the last several decades begging anyone who would pay attention to flush a legacy he dropped into the toilet.
And that’s where his legacy will remain, too big to flush and too disgusting to leave anywhere else. From a technical standpoint Hogan was a mediocre wrestler, a man who only had a dozen moves in the ring but who always made them work. At the height of his career he was an avalanche of cocaine-fueled charisma on the mic, but over time his promos devolved into a dull rehearsal of shoehorned catchphrases. Hogan’s schtick was a perfect fit for the cartoonish wrestling culture of the 1980s and ’90s, and he pulled off an impressive heel turn for a few years after that, but by the end of the Bush era he had devolved entirely into an anachronistic nostalgia act.
Still, to this day Hulk Hogan remains one of the most recognized names on the planet. In the ’80s, he almost single-handedly elevated professional wrestling from a regional curiosity that toured in high school gyms and county fairs to a global multimillion (eventually billion) dollar industry. Hogan competed with the Pope to pack more people into stadiums. He had his own cartoon, his own live action show, and his own movies. He was an A-list celebrity at a time when other first-tier wrestlers might struggle to sell tickets in their own hometown. Ric Flair was a more accomplished wrestler, Dusty Rhodes was better on the mic, and Andre the Giant was a more impressive athlete — but Hogan was the man who made wrestling what it is.
He was also, by all accounts and evidence, an absolutely pathetic and reprehensible human…
Auteur: Carl Beijer
