Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea embodied professional wrestling at its best and at its worst. He could thrill, inspire and amuse people. He was also a prolific liar and a comical charlatan.
“I think people want to know the truth,” says Hogan at the beginning of the beautifully produced series Hulk Hogan: Real American, which was under production when he died. “Who was this guy really?”
“It’s two different people,” says Hogan of the difference between the Hulkster and Terry Bollea. Of course, no one thought that when the camera was off, Bollea was defeating bad guys between saying prayers and taking vitamins. But the idea that there was a neat distinction between the wrestler and the man is a fantasy. As with all great professional wrestlers, there was no line between Hogan’s public and private selves. Hulk Hogan and Terry Bollea overlapped.
Hogan grew up in a working-class family in Florida. He caught the performing bug in music as a bass player. As an aspiring professional wrestler, though, he became himself.
Pro wrestling is a tough industry. According to the Hulkster, he had his leg broken in his first training session. I’m sure that it at least felt like he did. He paid his dues in the territory wrestling system, working for Championship Wrestling from Florida (CWF) and Continental Wrestling Association (CWA). Every week was a blur of highways and hard knocks.
“He was not very good,” says wrestling legend Jerry Lawler. By this, Lawler means that he was no ring technician. By the time he reached Vincent K. McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation, though—with help from a star turn in Rocky III—Hogan proved that he did not have to be one.
A blond behemoth—built like a Greek statue yet with a surfer’s cool—Hogan became iconic. “The people wanted to cheer,” says Jesse “the Body” Ventura, “They wanted a hero.” It could only have happened in the 1980s. Mass media, the Reagan boom, and the Cold War made people hungry for a big patriotic champion. The flag-toting Hogan was a man for the hour. When he body-slammed the seemingly immovable Andre the Giant at WrestleMania III in 1987, Hogan seemed like the mustachioed embodiment of the USA.
It is easy to sneer (and there were cynics then, like Richard Belzer, whose disdainful request for Hogan to demonstrate a wrestling move prompted the Hulkster to unwisely choke him into unconsciousness). But people have an enduring love for superheroes, for the idea of power and purity in concert. The Avengers were mega-popular decades after Hogan reigned and ruled in the WWF, and, while his leg drop might not have been the most convincing move in professional wrestling history, it was a lot more realistic than the fight scenes in Marvel films. The glamorous images and racing music of the early episodes of Real American effectively communicate the optimism of a time when stagflation was ending and Vietnam was becoming easier to forget.
Of course, it would not have taken a grizzled cynic to suspect that things were not so wholesome behind the scenes. Hogan’s bulging muscles were forged from steroids as well as vitamins, as he implausibly denied on television. (“That’s something to be classified in the mistake category,” says Hogan, sounding more like a disgruntled PR consultant than a pro wrestler.) What was more damaging for his legacy, though, was the sense that the heroic champion cared far more about his own interests than anybody else’s. The longer the Hulkster stayed on top of the business, the more audiences grew tired of his schtick. But Hogan seemed to resent sharing the spotlight. When the wrestling machine Bret Hart reached the main event of WrestleMania 9, facing the humongous bad guy Yokozuna, Hulk Hogan was inexplicably inserted into the main event to win the WWF Championship.
It is only fair to acknowledge that if one has never been “the guy” in an industry, it is hard to comprehend what the fame, the wealth, and the excessive lifestyle could do to an individual. Hogan did a lot to give back to the fans. Bret Hart—a man who has never been extravagant with his kind words, and who calls Hogan a “backstabbing … piece of sh*t” in the documentary—has written that the Hulkster “always had all the time in the world for kids who needed him to be their hero”.
Yet Hogan was also a calculating backstage politician and a man whose achievements were never big enough for him to resist the temptation to exaggerate them. “He’s a good man,” says President Donald Trump in the documentary, which might not be the ultimate endorsement.
That said, Hogan was flexible enough to understand that staying on top might demand that he evolve. If the fans were going to turn on him, he was going to turn on them. At World Championship Wrestling (WCW), having hopped over from WWF, Hogan “turned heel”, which means becoming a bad guy. He led the New World Order (nWo)—a group of wrestlers who combined malice with a subversive cool to reflect the culture of an edgier age.
Hogan’s career thrived once again. But his keen emphasis on his own interests continued to make him unpopular. It often seemed that what was good for WCW, or for the fans, was not so important as what was good for Hogan. WCW fell apart—because, among other things, Hogan and other top stars were demanding too much for too little work.
A return to the WWF yielded a triumphant main event at WrestleMania 18. Hogan admits that he should have retired then. Alas, the last decades of his life were catastrophic—sometimes due to factors outside of his control, like innumerable surgeries caused by years in the ring, and sometimes because of his own miserable decisions. Even his legal triumph over Gawker must have been difficult to completely enjoy, given that it came as a result of the release of footage of the Hulkster having sex with his friend’s wife. There was also dire wrestling, racial diatribes that were striking in their vehemence, coming as they did from someone who had worked so profitably with Mr. T and Booker T (no relation), and a leap aboard the MAGA bandwagon that seems all too likely to have been an attempt to promote his “Real American Beer”.
I am not sure if the creators of Real American were credulous or just indulgent of their subject, but Hogan talks a lot of nonsense in the series without being challenged. The infamous fabulator—he claimed that he was asked to join Metallica as a bass player, that Elvis Presley was a fan of his (despite dying just six days after his debut), and that he had wrestled 400 days in a year—tirelessly emphasizes his significance, his virtue, and his sacrifices. It had become a way of life.
The most surprising interviewee in Hulk Hogan: Real American is the directorial legend Werner Herzog. “All of us, in a way, have a performative life,” says the German auteur. “In the case of Hulk Hogan, it would be interesting to look into the performer and into the real Hulk Hogan, if he still exists.”
I am not convinced that there was a real Terry Bollea. Nor, though, does it seem quite correct to say that he became his character. In his truest form, the Hulkster was neither Terry Bollea, the Floridian son of a foreman and a dance teacher, nor Hulk Hogan the American hero. Rather, he was Hulk Hogan the professional wrestler: a man who always had an agenda, but who was also never far from entertaining people. His life was lived outwardly and opportunistically, but also with such a keen sense of drama and fun that he could captivate millions. A good life? I’ll leave that to someone else to weigh up. But what a life!
We won’t see a wrestler like Hulk again. Even John Cena’s fandom was too conflicted and ironic to be comparable. Like the Hulkster, the USA in the 1990s had become so successful—so without peers—that it became dangerously complacent and hubristic, leading to disasters in the 2000s. Trumpism, with Hogan posing in the background, was in part an attempt to revive the optimistic spirit of Reaganism. But the Iran War has proved that its architects believe too much in their own gimmicks. “Wrestling is a mimicking of life,” says Trump in Real American. “There’s a winner and a loser.” Life is not so simple—nor, sometimes, is wrestling.
Hulk Hogan was professional wrestling at its best and at its worst. In his charisma, his spirit, and his self-importance, there is at least some extent to which this can be said of Hulk Hogan and the USA.
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