Professional entertainer and wrestler Hulk Hogan poses as he speaks on stage on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)My 9-year-old self, uniformed in a Mets hat and Coke-bottle glasses, was a Hulkamaniac. It’s embarrassing now for countless reasons. I first saw the man born Terry Bollea as Thunderlips in the 1983 classic Rocky III. He was improbably muscled, blond, and tan: pure kid catnip. I became a World Wrestling Federation fanatic and was glued to the Zenith as Hogan rapidly climbed the WWF ladder. In January 1984, Hogan completed a meteoric rise to defeat the Iron Sheik and avenge the Iran hostage crisis (seriously). That title match wasn’t fake to me. It was as real as game 7 of the World Series, and when Hulk broke free from the Sheik’s dreaded “camel clutch” and secured the pin, I jumped up and down so much that the people downstairs called up to complain.
What I did not know was that there was a real world at odds with this ecstatic experience. I did not know that the Iron Sheik, a former Olympic wrestler who was once a bodyguard for the shah of Iran, could have cracked Hogan in two. He even almost went off script to do so because he found Hogan to be, as the Sheik put it, “a jabroni.” It was all 1980s fake, as fake as Reagan’s jet-black hair.
Now that Hulk Hogan has died at 71, the media, top wrestling honchos, and particularly the Trump administration are verbosely mourning this leather-skinned mass of steroids and bile stuffed in spandex. The media is treating Hogan’s death like they are in on a bit. They praise “Hulk Hogan” for being an American hero while ignoring that Terry Bollea led an ugly, amoral life; that he was accused of abuse by both one of his wives and a daughter; that he was broadly loathed by generations of wrestlers; and that his final act involved shilling full-time for Donald Trump. Hulk Hogan was a racist scab and a liar, which made him a natural fit for a prime-time appearance at Trump’s Republican National Convention.
It is gratifying, however, that last Thursday is, in addition to the day of Hogan’s death, the 10th anniversary of the National Enquirer’s publishing audio of Hogan going on an n-word-laden tirade. The coincidence is serendipitous, allowing the legions he harmed to remind people that many mourning this man are mourning a myth. His racism also matters because it dovetails with years of complaints made by Black wrestlers about both his treatment of them and his role as WWF co-owner Vince McMahon’s right-hand man, making sure they never got a shot at his top spot. (In fairness, many white and brown wrestlers have made the same claim.)
Then, as Hogan has himself admitted following years of accusations, he informed on his coworkers, telling Vince McMahon about a secret unionization push led by Jesse “The Body” Ventura. When one considers the shocking number of wrestlers who prematurely died in the 1980s and ’90s because of depression and addiction, both results of being hellaciously overworked, a union could have saved lives.
But Hogan’s harm can be counted in more ways than just what took place behind the curtain. He sold what was left of his soul to Palantir founder and sweaty, ham-faced fascist Peter Thiel who bankrolled Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker. With Thiel’s help, Hogan crushed an audacious Internet journalism outlet that I guarantee would have published the Epstein lists by now. That we lost Deadspin because of Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan will never not make me apoplectic.
Speaking of Jeffrey Epstein, Hogan’s death, as well as adoration for alleged rapist and alleged sex trafficker Vince McMahon, now also provides an opportunity for the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, to change the subject from Trump’s depredations. Fresh off freezing billions in desperately needed public education funds, Linda McMahon, the billionaire wife of Vince, will use Hogan’s death to try not to look like a repulsive representative of a scandal-soaked administration. It will be Hogan’s last act of fealty to the McMahons.
The Hulk Hogan of 2025 embodied all that is wrong with this country. He should be remembered as a living expression of our national decay: a hero exposed as a fraud, a fraud exposed as a coward, and a coward who cried with joy upon finding an authoritarian who told him that his sins were, in fact, virtues.
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