Ask 411 Wrestling: What’s the Story on Hulk Hogan’s Music Career Before Wrestling?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 . . . the last surviving weekly column on 411 Wrestling.

I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling. If you have one of those queries searing a hole in your brain, feel free to send it along to me at [email protected]. Don’t be shy about shooting those over – the more, the merrier.

Hey, ya wanna banner?

Tyler from Winnipeg is rocking out with his c . . . let’s just say he’s rocking out:

Can you give some backstory to the musical group Hulk Hogan was in before he wrestled?

Hogan wasn’t just in one band before he became a professional wrestler. He was actually in at least three different bands.

The earliest of those groups was called Infinity’s End, and Hulk (then known by his birth name of Terry Gene Bollea) was in the ninth grade when he joined up with the group. Infinity’s End was basically a rock cover band with the young Hulkster on bass, mostly playing in the Tampa Bay, Florida area. If you’d like to see some promotional photos of the band including Hogan wearing an ascot, you can do so here courtesy of the Tampa Bay Music Scene Historical Society. You can also see a couple of shots from one of their live shows, held in 1970, here. Hulk is visible in one of those pictures, and he already looks like a grown ass man despite being a high school student.

Hogan’s second band, also playing predominantly in the Tampa Bay area, was formed in 1973 and originally called Magic, though they quickly underwent a name change and became Koco. The lineup including Hogan can be seen here. They were also a run of the mill local cover band as near as I can tell.

Third and finally, you’ve got Ruckus. This band did have a few original songs but again mostly played covers. Hogan was interviewed about his time with Ruckus by Vice a few years back, and it seems as though his stint with them was fairly unremarkable.

All in all, though the Hulkster spent roughly a decade in the music industry in some form or another, it’s not as though he was ever part of a group that was going to give us a Top 40 hit.

The conclusions reached by Lev will probably come as no surprise to any of our female readers:

This may be a more controversial question. Looks matter in wrestling, but to what extent are looks still so much more important for women than men, even in this modern era? I ask because I feel that all the women who are over in WWE are conventionally attractive: Becky, Bianca, Charlotte, Alexa, Asuka, etc. Rhea is gorgeous too even if people aren’t into the goth look. But the women that struggle (and I won’t name anyone) are simply not as ‘conventionally’ beautiful.

There’s a one-word answer to this one:

Sexism.

Seriously. This isn’t an issue unique to wrestling, either. Across the board in professions in which beauty standards matter – and even several in which they don’t – those standards are applied more harshly to women than they are to men. It’s part of the longstanding systemic issues in our society that have made it harder for women and female-presenting people more generally to get ahead. I feel as though this is something that has gotten better within my lifetime, but we are still far from perfect.

Donny from Allentown doesn’t even go here:

It’s become a commonplace in wrestling anymore where a normal heel will get a huge babyface reaction when they are performing in front of their hometown or home country. I was wondering: Was Bret “Hitman” Hart the first heel to start this trend back in 1997 when he was cheered everywhere but the United States? Was he the first heel to get the hometown/home country pop?

No, Bret wasn’t the first one to experience this phenomenon.

Honestly, I remember this happening for as long as there have been national wrestling promotions. It didn’t happen as much in the territories in part because kayfabe was stronger in that era and in part because in regional wrestling you usually had quite a few guys on your roster who were at least somewhat local. However, as soon as you had people who were big names in a particular city or particular territory touring nationally and only coming back to that city or territory one or two times per year, you were naturally setting up a bit pop for the local kid who broke big.

Dino Bravo and the Rougeau brothers are great examples of this, as they were heels in the WWF in the mid-1980s, but they continued to receive huge babyface reactions anytime the company was in their hometown of Montreal. Years later, when Jacques Rougeau was an undercard heel in WCW, they actually went as far as playing off this by letting him pin Hulk Hogan clean on an April 11, 1997 house show in the city.

Doug attempts to convert the masses:

You have a friend who is unfamiliar with pro wrestling. You want to introduce them to the industry by showing him the greatest matches of the last 40 years.

Here’s the kicker: You only have an hour.

Understanding that matches devoid of context are a very different ball game, which matches do you go with? What if you had two hours? 30 minutes?

First, let me just say that, in my experience, it’s very rare that matches convert non-fans into fans. Almost every story I’ve heard of how somebody got hooked on wrestling begins with a personality or a story, not with a match. Thus, I think that this exercise would be highly unlikely to actually work, but I’ll still give it my best shot.

We’ll start with the half hour. In my experience, if a non-fan is going to be captivated by a match, it’s usually going to be something that is more fast-paced and athletic. It’s not a Hulk Hogan slugfest from the 1980s or even a slower paced Ric Flair Broadway.

As a result, my first pick would be Eddy Guerrero versus Rey Misterio Jr. from WCW Halloween Havoc 1997, which is an excellent high flying bout that still tells a story which is easy to understand without having any prior familiarity with the wrestlers. Plus, it runs a hair under 14 minutes, so we can still work more matches into that half hour.

My second pick to round out that half hour would be a 16-minute match: Gunther vs. Sheamus vs. Drew McIntyre from Wrestlemania XXXIX. Again, this is fast-paced and athletic, though it’s fast-paced and athletic in a completely different way than Misterio/Guerrero, introducing our hypothetical newbie to a second style of wrestling. Plus, I think if you’re introducing somebody to wrestling, it’s best to use something that is at least somewhat contemporary, because that’s going to be the easiest product for them to acquire early in their fandom.

So, let’s move up to an hour. I’ll stick with the first two matches I mentioned and add two more.

First is Akira Hokuto versus Manami Toyota from All Japan Women Destiny on September 2, 1995. This is often referred to as the greatest women’s wrestling match of all time, and with good reason. In fact, I would still say it’s better than anything I’ve ever seen from a U.S. based promotion in terms of women’s wrestling. I think there is some value in showing our prospective fan that the ladies can do this too. It’s also twenty minutes long so it works well with our time limit.

And we’ll compliment that with Masato Tanaka versus Mike Awesome from ECW One Night Stand. If I were just listing the greatest matches of the past 40 years, this probably would not make the cut. However, to fill out the last ten minutes that I have in my time limit, I need a sub-ten minute match, and this just barely qualifies. Plus, it’s a wild brawl that will give our new viewer a taste of well-executed hardcore wrestling.

Now we build out again and go to the two hour mark. Again, I’m just going to keep the four bouts that I already have lined up and add to them.

Because we’ve now added an hour to our time limit as opposed to thirty minutes, I’m comfortable putting a somewhat longer match into play. With that, let’s go to what many have referred to as the greatest pro wrestling match of all time, period: Toshiaki Kawada vs. Mitsuharu Misawa, June 3, 1994, All Japan Pro Wrestling. This clocks in at 35 minutes and frankly that might be a little on the long side for a brand new fan, but I think that they would be able to get into it if we’ve already primed the pump and taught them some of the basics of wrestling by watching everything else that we’ve included in the list up to this point.

That leaves us with 25 minutes remaining, and I’m going to fill out out with a 24-minute long match also considered to be one of the greatest of all time, that being the Undertaker versus Shawn Michaels in Michaels’ retirement match (sort of) at Wrestlemania XXVI. Though I actually prefer their match at Wrestlemania XXV, it is actually a bit too long to fit within our time constraints and the quality is fairly close, so we will use the sequel. In addition to providing epic in-ring action, it would also serve as an introduction to to of the most important wrestlers of the past 40 years.

And, there you have it. This is a topic where there is a lot of room for disagreement between reasonable people, and I suspect we’ll see a lot of alternative takes in the comments.

Redmondthe2nd knows that it’s not the length but rather what you do with it:

I had and have a massive amount of love for Matt Borne’s Doink, I feel it was an unforgettable performance in a run that only lasted about a year (from the time he started appearing in the crowd as an unnamed clown to his firing). Which had me thinking, what are the all-time great short runs? With qualifiers being the run has to be under one year and it had to have been the most notable run of that wrestler’s career.

The first one that comes to mind is Nobuhiko Takada, who started his career in New Japan Pro Wrestling in the early 1980s but then went away to the shoot-style promotion UWF, where he became their top star. Then, in 1995, he returned to spearhead a UWF invasion of NJPW and, in the process, defeated Keiji Muto for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship in the Tokyo Dome. The whole thing was one of the most successful angles in the history of New Japan and by most accounts served as Eric Bischoff’s inspiration for what would eventually become the nWo invasion of WCW. Unlike the nWo, they did wrap this one up in less than a year, and Takada was back to working outside of New Japan.

And what about Zach Gowen? He showed up on WWE television for the first time on May 15, 2003, and he was released on February 4, 2004. In that short period, he got to work a pay per view match against Vince McMahon, and he also stepped into the ring with the likes of the Big Show, Brock Lesnar, and Matt Hardy. I don’t know if Gowen is any fan’s favorite professional wrestler, but in terms of his own career, it was huge.

Blitzkrieg is also a solid answer to this question. He didn’t accomplish much in terms of championships or big wins, but in terms of in-ring performance he seemingly came out of nowhere to immediately have captivating cruiserweight matches with the likes of Rey Misterio Jr., Juventud Guerrera, and Billy Kidman, who at the time were some of the hottest high flying wrestlers in the world. He did all this despite making his WCW television debut on January 27, 1999 and having his last match for the promotion on October 14 of the same year – which was also the last match of his career. According to an unsourced comment on Wikipedia (which means take it with a grain of salt) he worked as a registered nurse after getting out of wrestling.

Sticking with WCW, we’ve also got the Natural Born Thrillers. Consisting at various points of Sean O’Haire, Mark Jindrak, Sean Stasiak, Chuck Palumbo, Mike Sanders, Johnny the Bull, and Rick “Reno” Cornell, this stable of (mostly) Power Plant Trainees mostly started their tenure with the company in the year 2000 and were then obviously done when the company went bust in the first quarter of 2001. In the time, they were pushed as the future of the promotion, and Jindrak and O’Haire in particular looked like they had all the tools to be the next big things. Unfortunately, the WWF didn’t seem to have the same level of confidence in them.

And let’s close it out with James Gibson, who some of you may know better as Jamie Noble. During a brief hiatus from WWE, Noble tore it up in Ring of Honor for several months in 2005, including being the guy who ended CM Punk’s “Summer of Punk” championship reign and transitioned by belt over to Bryan Danielson. Plus, there were singles matches against the likes of Samoa Joe, Austin Aries, Roderick Strong, and Homicide. You could argue that this was not Noble/Gibson’s “biggest run” because obviously WWE was a much larger promotion, but this was the one time in his career he was booked as a main event singles wrestler.

Toot toot, Stromi, toot toot:

What is the non-kayfabe reason that Tugboat was removed from Hulk Hogan’s corner at SummerSlam 1990, to be replaced by Big Boss Man (who was already reffing a different match)?

It depends on who you want to believe.

If you go back to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter issue that addressed the situation, it indicated that Tugboat was depushed because his quick ascension to stardom gave him a big head and he rubbed people the wrong way.

Yet, when Bruce Prichard covered Summerslam ’90 on his Something to Wrestle With podcast, he disputed that account. According to Prichard, the removal of Tugboat from the main event was due to the fact that, originally, Tugboat was being considered for a heel turn and as Hulk Hogan’s opponent for Wrestlemania VII, becoming an Iraqi sympathizer. (Prichard referred to this with the ridiculous nickname “Shiek Tugboat,” but whether this was going to be his actual name or whether it’s just a gag by Prichard remains unclear.) However, when Sergeant Slaughter came back to the company, the role was given to him instead. Thus, there was no further reason to include Tugboat in the Mania main event of Summerslam and he was removed.

Of course, there is a bit of a hole in Prichard’s story in that Tugboat being taken out of the plans for Wrestlemania VII did not necessarily require that he not referee the Summerslam match. On the podcast, Brother Love’s co-host Conrad Thompson questioned him on that and said there must have been something else going on. Bruce didn’t really have an answer to that.

Noodle may or may not be the guitarist for Gorillaz:

Was Elimination Chamber: Toronto the first WWE PLE/PPV without any title matches on the entire show? Also, was it the first WWE PLE/PPV to have a segment as it’s closer and not an actual match?

No, it was not the first PLE/PPV show without any championship bouts. There have been several of those over the years. I’m not going to list every single one of them because that wasn’t the question, but a couple of examples that came to me pretty quickly were the 1990 Royal Rumble pay per view and the 1995 King of the Ring.

No, it was not the first PLE/PPV show to be closed by a non-wrestling segment. The closer of Summerslam 1991 was the wedding of “Macho Man” Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth.

HBK’s Smile sent in a series of questions about early Wrestlemanias as part of the road to this year’s event:

Is the Piper-Bad News Brown match from WM VI the only match removed from a card otherwise available on Peacock? Pretty sure it’s the only WM match that is removed. (This pertains to individual matches, not entire PPVs/PLEs).

I don’t currently have a Peacock account to double check its current status, but for at least a period of time there was a match between The Artist Formerly Known as Goldust and Flash Funk on the January 5, 1998 episode of Monday Night Raw that was cut. The bout involved Goldust dressing as a stereotypical 1970s pimp, which would have been bad enough on its own, but he also decided to wear full blackface.

We’ll return in seven-ish days, and, as always, you can contribute your questions by emailing [email protected]. You can also leave questions in the comments below, but please note that I do not monitor the comments as closely as I do the email account, so emailing is the better way to get things answered.