Hulk Hogan: The Fall of an Idol

Bill Cosby’s a rapist and Hulk Hogan’s a racist. I’m pretty sure our 1980s idols are imploding themselves quicker than even Michael Bay can cash in on their nostalgia. Welcome to 2015, folks.

Like many wrestling fans in my age range, I grew up with Hulk Hogan as a prominent fixture of my childhood. One of my strongest memories of a child was when I tiptoed out of my bedroom on the evening of March 29th, 1987 at the age of ten (“and a half!” I would have assertively said at the time), crept down the stairs and sneaked toward the family room, where in a rare moment pay-per-view was being watched in the house. The event, of course, was WrestleMania III. As an adult, I can tell you that the best match of the night was clearly Randy Savage and Ricky Steamboat’s almost universally-recognized five-star classic for the Intercontinental Title. That is a match that will live in history as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, WrestleMania match of all-time. But I couldn’t tell you a damned thing about the first time I saw it, because I honestly can’t remember. What I do remember is staring with wide-eyed wonder around the corner of the wall, careful not to make too much noise with my bare feet on the clear plastic carpet runner, as a blond warrior reached down, found his inner strength and managed to pick an absolute behemoth, slamming him to the ground.

I can say, without equivocation or exaggeration, that witnessing that moment changed my perspective on life. For a kid who was raised in a religious (but not zealous) family, this was the physical manifestation of the David vs. Goliath story that I had learned in Sunday school. With Hogan looking not unlike a Norse god and Andre representing the Titans, I don’t think it’s unrelated that soon after, I discovered D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths and developed a passion for mythology, including those of the Greek and Norse pantheons. People love to talk trash about wrestling and how it’s lowbrow entertainment, but it draws from the classics as much as anything and there is no doubt that it pushed me into my scholarly loves, which eventually led into my geeky loves. Without any doubt, Hulk vs. Andre helped shape who I am as a person on a very real level.

That influence wasn’t just as a result of that one match of course, although it made quite a first impression on me. Growing up as a wrestling fan, I loved Hulk Hogan like many of us did. I liked Ultimate Warrior of course, and Randy Savage. Strike Force and the Rockers were two of the tag teams I really rooted for; I remember being absolutely crushed when Strike Force lost the tag titles to Demolition at WrestleMania IV, and then more so when Rick Martel turned heel on Tito Santana and broke up the team. But Hogan was the constant, the man who every kid could look up to. I watched Rock N’ Wrestling. I tuned in for every Saturday Night’s Main Event I could manage, often at my grandmother’s house with my older brother watching alongside me. When the Mega-Powers exploded at WrestleMania V, I was shocked. But it was clear who I was going to root for in the match and sure enough, I was ecstatic when the Hulkster hulked up, hit his leg drop and got the pin, winning his second WWE Championship. All was right with the world once again.

Of course, times change. Years dragged on and over time, Hogan became less an influence in my life as my tastes changed and developed, and his character began to grow a bit stagnant. I was firmly on Hogan’s side when he battled the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VI, and when he faced the traitorous Sgt. Slaughter in that most American of WrestleManias, WrestleMania VII. But by the time he was taking on Sid at WrestleMania VIII, something had happened. Whether it was Hogan’s character or my own entertainment tastes changing, I wasn’t as invested. And I don’t believe that it’s a coincidence that, as Hogan drifted away from the WWE, I found my attention drifting from wrestling into other areas.

And drift it did. I dove further into movies and TV, started developing a real interest in popular music for the first time. My comic book love reached new heights. I would look to the wrestling world, but it just didn’t interest me in the same way, and part of that had to do with the fact that Hogan was gone (or rather was on WCW, which I wasn’t aware of at the time). It would take the Shawn Michaels/Bret Hart rivalry to bring me back in any substantial capacity, recapturing the Hart Foundation/Rockers era that I enjoyed. To this day, Shawn Michaels is still my favorite wrestler of all-time from an intellectual viewpoint. But Hogan was always the guy who I loved from an emotional standpoint, and again it isn’t surprising that my return to being a full-fledged wrestling fan was the Monday Night Wars. And as much as I loved HBK, it was Nitro (and Thunder) I was tuned into, week after week.

Of course, time and the internet age would eventually give us, the IWC, a look behind the curtain. And then many more looks behind the curtain. As the veil of kayfabe was ripped away, we began to hear what Hogan was really like. And it’s no different than many others. Ric Flair, we learned, was a philandering spendthrift and apparent alcoholic who has more personal issues than your average Toddlers & Tiaras mom. Some few people knew about the legend of Jimmy Snuka’s alleged involvement in the 1983 death of girlfriend Nancy Argentino, but the internet made that widespread. Shawn Michaels was discovered to be much more like his on-screen character than we were comfortable with. Sunny and Chyna — well, the less said in both instances, the better. And that’s just scraping the surface.

The point is, what we learned — very, very quickly — is that our idols are actually humans. People in the industry decry the internet for exposing secrets and riding on scandals, but this was an important thing to happen. Yeah, there are some that can’t be gotten around. If you believe that Snuka killed Argentino, that’s not “just human,” that’s criminal. But for most of them, it’s added a human component of fallibility to the larger-than-life characters we see on the screen. It’s created a world where professional wrestling needed to be authentic to get by. Characters that feel fake don’t last anymore, except perhaps as comedy characters. One of the reason that John Cena has become such an important face for the company is that he feels authentic as a babyface. Yes, he may be an asshole behind the camera to some, but his Make-A-Wish work and his respect for the military are real. That makes his character, as stale as we find it, real. We believe that Daniel Bryan is an underdog and root for him as one because he is. CM Punk — well, even babyface Punk was never a nice guy. And that’s fine. We didn’t ask him to kiss babies; we asked him to kick ass. That’s what he did, and it came across as real.

And that’s where Hogan became a problem. Hogan’s got massive charisma, the look, and yes, even the wrestling skills. He’s no technician or aerialist but he can put a match together that means something, even if physically he probably can’t pull it off at this stage in his career. But his character has always been a cartoon. Hulkamania was in the era of cartoony gimmicks in wrestling, and while Hollywood Hulk Hogan felt like the closest he’d ever been to authentic, even that felt more like a caricature than his stablemates, or his counterparts in WWE. Returning to WWE the first time was a fun nostalgia trip, but Hogan felt the need to make it last and his greed with his payouts got him terminated. A second WWE comeback happened just as his reality show hit, and that was where it was all blown wide open. Like any reality TV show, it gave us as close of a look as we wanted at the man behind the camera, and that was far closer than most of us ever wanted to see.

And that’s why, as shocked as I was by what Hogan said on this newly-revealed tape, I wasn’t surprised. Nor do I consider this Hogan’s “fall.” I talked at length about the racial tirade in our roundtable that went up last night; I don’t feel the need or desire to go over all of that again. It’s depressing, it’s been talked to death already and frankly, the story is just getting started.

What I’m more interested in talking about is how we view Hogan. For many of us he was the first icon — and one of the last — in the industry. There are other icons that came and went during that time and for the older among us, or those who started somewhere besides WWF/E, there were ones that came before. But Hogan is probably the most recognizable. I’m not trying to say that the post-Attitude Era stars aren’t worthy of being considered legends, but there are legends and there are those who are truly synonymous worldwide with professional wrestling. People like Bruno Sammartino, Harley Race, Ric Flair, Randy Savage, Jesse Ventura, Steve Austin, The Rock and Dusty Rhodes. Hulk Hogan is inarguably more recognizable than all of them to the world.

This is the image most of us carry of Hulk Hogan from our nostalgia: the heroic crusader ripping his shirt apart like some gladiator, ready to smash the forces of evil. That’s the icon we know. It’s a symbol of professional wrestling at its height, its most glamorous and — in some ways — its most innocent. What we now know of Hogan diminishes him as an icon, but not because he liberally dropped racial slurs to demean a group of people. The deconstruction of Hogan as an icon began years earlier, when we began to learn of him as a person. His appearances on Hogan Knows Best, scripted as it was like any reality show, gave us a deep look into Hogan the man. The more he would talk about his personal life in interviews with Howard Stern or Bubba the Love Sponge, it became easier to associate him with a fallible, complex human being instead of the cross-wearing, milk and vitamin-advising slammer of giants that was falling further into the past with every second.

Hogan has never seemed to understand that, and that’s a shame. He has continued to try and build this aura of mystique around him by saying things like “Elvis was a Hulkamaniac,” despite the fact that the King died two years before he began wrestling. Another was that Lars Ulrich asked him to play bass for Metallica in the early days, which Ulrich flatly denied. There’s the supposed boxing match with George Foreman, and the claim that Andre the Giant was 800 pounds at WrestleMania III. The latter is of course more of an exaggeration for showman’s effect, often during promos, but they all added up to creating this reality for fans that Hogan’s myth couldn’t be believed. That reality broke down the mystique around him as effectively as his reality show, the radio appearances, all the shoot interviews about him and the rest did.

And that creates a unique dilemma for us longtime fans of Hogan’s. Some of us still have a difficult time reconciling the icon we loved with the man we know. As a result, the immediate inclination is to default to either one or the other. We might leap to defend him automatically, or we might believe whatever is said about him is true no matter what it might be. Hogan’s offense is not even remotely comparable to that of Bill Cosby’s, but the reactions have been similar. It’s been easier to accept the story about Hogan because he took down the wall around him willingly over the course of years — well, that and the fact that there is audio proof of what he did. But I see the way people react to this story and it’s been on along a similar, if shortened, timeline.

It’s easy for us, as bystanders whose primary connection with Hulk Hogan is that of a fan or critic, to judge him from where we’re at. It’s easy for us to either point at his defenders and say we should listen to them, or scoff at them and say they’re blind or lying. I should know; I’ve done it. We all have — if not over this, then over one of his “tall tales,” or over how his TNA run went, or one of a dozen-plus other moments. But it’s harder to understand them, because it requires that we set that icon aspect aside. It’s trickier than you might think. Even an icon that’s fallen from its perch is still an inimitable image, one that you’re not likely to get out of your head.

I know that for me, I can call out the man for his failings, and I can hope that doing so isn’t harsher than it needs to be because I feel like he’s let me down. I can still watch his classic stuff (as long as it stays on the Network, which I hope is forever) and love it, even if my perspectives of his matches with Rock or Zeus feel a bit weird for a while. Not everyone can do one of the other, and I hope we can all understand that. It’s not easy to let go of your heroes, for good or ill.

Hulk Hogan’s place in wrestling is assured. No amount of erasure by WWE would be able to eliminate that. They literally cannot discuss their history, their rise and fall and rise again, without discussing Hogan. The WWE Hall of Fame will have an empty spot if Hogan is actually jettisoned, one far more noticeable than if he were quietly left in. WWE has to do what they have to do for now, and that’s understandable; they can’t be viewed as monetizing Hogan-related appearances or products at a moment like this. But whether they wipe him or not, he’ll always have been the biggest icon in professional wrestling history — one that long since crumbled and fell, but an icon nonetheless.