Pro wrestling’s greatest star, Hulk Hogan leaves indelible yet complicated legacy behind

In the world of pro wrestling, where the lines between truth and scripted fiction are purposely blurred for the sake of entertainment, it’s often difficult as a fan to separate the character from the actual person behind the gimmick. 

More often than not, we would come to find out, it was even more difficult for the performers themselves. 

In the two decades since the end of Hulk Hogan’s prime run as the biggest, most recognizable and, if we’re being honest, most important pro wrestling star in the history of the business, he never stopped publicly portraying the virtues of his oft-billed “immortal” character — who preached a daily diet of prayers and vitamins — even as the “immoral” setbacks of the man, himself, as human as any of us, routinely threatened to stain the legacy of everything he accomplished. 

That’s why the sudden death of Hogan, whose real name was Terry Gene Bollea, at age 71 on Thursday, after a series of recent health complications that led to cardiac arrest, makes it so increasingly difficult to come to terms with the correct set of emotions to feel. 

The business of pro wrestling simply would not be as large and lucrative as it is today without the contributions of Hogan, who was the right man at the right time to be the face of former WWE chairman Vince McMahon’s vision that an entertainment genre such as this could become a global and family-friendly phenomenon that serves as the intersection between sports, pop culture and the scripted portrayal of good versus evil. 

As a character, Hogan was quite literally larger than life. Billed as 6-foot-7 with bleached-blonde hair and a physique (featuring his 24-inch biceps that he called “pythons”) that looked as if it was cut out of stone, Hogan played the role of superhero patriot who overcame the steady challenges of foreign villains and jealous ex-friends to perfection. 

As a good guy (or, babyface, in wrestling terms), he headlined the first nine of McMahon’s “WrestleMania” cards (pro wrestling’s answer to the Super Bowl) and used his popularity and undeniable charisma to easily make the leap to television and movie acting roles. But it was as a bad guy that Hogan, through his unforgettable heel turn in 1996, authored an incredible second act behind his “Hollywood” Hogan character as the leader of the “nWo” faction that helped rival WCW overtake WWE for 83 consecutive weeks at the peak of their “Monday Night Wars” ratings battle on cable TV. 

A child of the 1980s, I was just 6 when Hogan, through McMahon’s ambitious “Rock ‘n’ Wrestling Connection” partnership with MTV in 1984, became the biggest thing to ever happen to my childhood. For the next five years, there wasn’t a single poster, action figure or piece of merchandise in my bedroom that didn’t have Hogan’s face on it. 

Even his heel turn changed my life when, like many high school students whose newfound love for grunge rock pushed any remaining childhood interest in pro wrestling to the back burner, Hogan’s new anti-hero character aligned perfectly with the teenage angst and authoritative rebellion that became my daily fuel to reignite my fandom. 

And from the files of “never meet your heroes” came a 2011 in-person interview for me, as an aspiring writer whose nostalgic love for wrasslin’ had never been extinguished, who sat down with Hogan for nearly an hour to promote one of his final matches (under the TNA banner) and found him to be everything from charming to funny as he shared tall tales about his legendary slam of Andre the Giant at “WrestleMania III” in 1987 and recalled a series of recent back surgeries that nearly cost him his life. 

The reference above to Hogan’s liberal use of the truth following the end of his in-ring career started as somewhat of a joke among wrestling fans who typically gave him the benefit of the doubt. But, soon, it became clear that Hogan wasn’t misremembering the biggest moments of his career as much as he was embellishing them, constantly.  

Soon enough, there wasn’t anything being said out of the mouth of Hogan that could be taken at face value as he attempted to take credit for just about everything that ever happened in the business to almost a comical degree. 

But just as Hogan’s reputation as a wrestling worker was never quite as bad from an athletic and technical standpoint (particularly in the early 1980s) as his critics point out, the reputation he would go on to develop away from the durag, spray tan and feather boa as Terry Bollea, teller of constant fibs (and, unfortunately, much worse), turned out to be nowhere near as pure and heroic as the character he so amiably played during my childhood. 

Sadly, the pro wrestling world never truly got to know the real Terry Bollea because of how willing he was to let the outsized Hulk Hogan appear at every single turn. It made the man behind the character feel unapproachable, if not insincere, because every one of his decisions he made could be downplayed by the fact that he was playing a character.

Ultimately, it felt more like he had played himself.

Outside of my father, the character of Hulk Hogan was among the important role models that the younger version of myself had ever encountered through the lens of entertainment. But like even our own aging relatives can sometimes do, the version of him from outside the ring let me down, which doesn’t make his passing any easier to sit with.

There was the time Hogan publicly lied about his performance-enhancing drug use on a 1993 episode of “The Arsenio Hall Show,” only to switch course the following year while testifying under immunity against McMahon in his steroid trial. Not to mention, there were decades worth of stories from other wrestlers who portrayed Hogan’s behind-the-scenes business acumen as selfish, cunning and cutthroat in order to keep himself on top. 

Hogan’s public reputation, however, took a much darker turn for the worse in 2015 when a leaked sex tape from eight years earlier not only saw him in bed with the wife of his best friend, Hogan could also be heard making repeated use of racial slurs against blacks before admitting to being racist in an almost braggadocious manner. 

Despite being fired from his WWE legends contract and having his action figures literally pulled from stores (as WWE tried to remove his likeness from as many things as possible), Hogan was never quite as humbly remorseful about his abject racism as his heartbroken fans would’ve hoped even though he was reinstated as a WWE Hall of Famer in 2018 (after settling a lawsuit with the website Gawker for leaking the tape two years earlier for $31 million) before beginning a slow return to WWE television. 

In recent years, Hogan became nothing more than a caricature of himself as he peddled his “Real American” gimmick to sell everything from beer to being used as a political pawn when he revived his gimmick of ripping off his t-shirt during over-the-top appearances to support President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention. 

A large portion of the wrestling fan base, however, still never forgave him. In fact, on Jan. 6 of this year, when WWE made its debut on Netflix with an episode of “Raw,” Hogan was mercilessly booed by the Los Angeles crowd and tried to suggest in subsequent interviews that it was only because the last time Southern Californian wrestling fans saw him wrestle, he did so as a bad guy. 

And that, right there, is the biggest conundrum regarding his death and the separation between the good guy he largely played on TV and the often flawed human he was in real life. 

The inability of wrestling fans to come to terms with identifying the exact line where Hulk Hogan ends and Terry Bollea begins was only made more difficult by the fact that the man who played both failed to realize there was ever a difference between the two.