The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 Hulk Hogan Rivalries

Hulk Hogan is an indisputable icon in professional wrestling. Like most top tier stars, a major part of his success was his feuds. The Hulkster spent the bulk of his career as a main event face and thrived beating back the top villains of his era. And then there were the NWO days and points later on when Hogan flipped the script on longtime fans and became the vile big bad, and worse yet the sort of dominant, long-running heel champion he had more than once combated as a face.

Critics want to paint Hogan’s career in black and white, and dismiss his heyday as cartoonish and predictable. It was a different time, to be sure, but Hogan was still a part of some of wrestling’s most captivating rivalries. Thus, this week I’m counting down the top 7 feuds of Hulk Hogan.

#7. Nick Bockwinkel

Hulk Hogan first found himself as a wrestling superstar when he performed for the AWA, and his most memorable run came as a fiery young good guy challenging veteran heel world champ Nick Bockwinkel. The on-air story was that Hogan had Bockwinkel’s number, but the wily champ kept finding ways to retain the championship by trickery and indecisive finishes. Reports vary as to whether Hogan was ever intended to take the title—the conventional wisdom is that owner Verne Gagne was reticent to put Hogan—a hot act, but not a true grappler—at the fore of the company, but that he may or may not have offered him a run with the strap to not jump to the WWF.

Regardless, the Hogan-Bockwinkel feud set Hogan’s career in motion as a larger than life force that the fans wanted see, who was both literally and symbolically challenging tradition and the forces of evil in this high profile feud.

#6. Bobby Heenan

It’s quite arguable that, by proxy, Bobby Heenan deserves to land higher on this list for having backed a number of Hogan’s top challengers in the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Indeed, the wicked Heenan Family stable proved a thorn in The Hulkster’s side, sending King Kong Bundy, Andre the Giant, and Mr. Perfect to challenge for the title, in addition to backing guys like Big John Studd, Haku, and The Barbarian who came after Hogan in various tag and battle royal scenarios. In each case, Heenan was a mouthpiece and a meddlesome interloper at ringside, adding heat to each of his charges and making Hogan seem like even more of a valiant hero for overcoming not just a formidable obstacle in the ring, but also The Brain’s interference.

Heenan transitioned to the broadcast booth and remained an enemy to the Hulkster, particularly acting as Ric Flair’s advocate during his 1992 run, and digging at Hogan over and over again because The Nature Boy was “the real world champion.”

#5. Ted Dibiase

In a more just world, Ted Dibiase probably would have gotten a legitimate world title run in his prime, as a reward for offering one of the most profound combinations of technical skill and gimmicked charisma to ever grace the wrestling world. He never really grabbed that brass ring (unless you were to count that very brief, dubious period after Andre the Giant sold him the strap) but he did give Hogan an iconic arch-nemesis to fend off post-Andre the Giant, perhaps most notably in the Mega Powers-Mega Bucks showdown at the original SummerSlam. The two would reprise their feud four and a half years later on opposite sides of the Mega Maniacs-Money Inc. program headed into Wrestlemania 9, and even feud indirectly once again in WCW when Dibiase defected from the NWO and backed WCW’s Steiner Brothers.

One of my favorite factoids of all about this rivalry, though, was that it truly started eight years before The Million Dollar Man character came about, when heel Hulk Hogan squashed babyface Ted Dibiase in 1979 WWF. That pairing failed to garner much of a following. It’s remarkable what a few years, some gimmick work, and the proper face-heel alignments can do.

#4. Roddy Piper

The greatness of the initial feud between Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan is altogether too easy to overlook for most of it having occurred pre-WrestleMania and in the infancy of the WWF emerging as a national presence. Just the same, one could argue that WrestleMania never would have truly been WrestleMania had it not been for this red hot program. Before Ted Dibiase, Mr. Perfect, or Ric Flair, Roddy Piper was the ideal punk heel to oppose The Hulkster—brash, a phenomenal talker, and a positive heat magnet with the crowds that ached to see Hogan put him in his place.

It may be all the more impressive that these two recaptured much of their magic in a totally different way twelve years later, when they feuded in WCW. Naysayers will dismiss the second coming of the feud as a sloppy slugfest between two dinosaurs—and, no, the matches weren’t objectively all that good, and the feud did run too long. But as a WCW fan at the time, I found the Piper-Hogan icon vs. icon schtick positively compelling, and Piper revealing Eric Bischoff as a member of the NWO was a pretty special little moment in the first year of the NWO angle, when the company could seemingly do no wrong.

The last meaningful incarnation of Hogan-Piper came up years later in WWE, when Piper interfered on Vince McMahon’s behalf in his bloody brawl with Hogan at WrestleMania 19, and then briefly served as a proxy for McMahon against Hogan as Mr. America in the months to follow. While not altogether offensive, the guys showed their age at this point and it was difficult to buy the angle as anything more than WWE milking the final drops from a decrepit cash cow.

#3. Sting

For as hot as Hogan was as a face in the eighties and early nineties, he captured remarkable heat as bad guy in the late nineties in an organic, yet shocking heel turn that quite arguably made him wrestling’s premiere villain of the era. And for every great villain in wrestling, there is a great hero to play his foil.

Crow Sting was the antithesis of Hogan—not just a good guy to his bad guy, and not only a stalwart face to oppose the arrogant heel, but on top of all of that, in so many ways the opposite of Hogan’s long-time face character. He didn’t cut hyperbolic promos. He refused to speak. He didn’t stop and pose for the crowd. He lowered himself from the rafters and delivered righteous beatdowns with a baseball bat. For once, he was not the face who other top guys turned on, but rather a legit lone wolf, burned too many times and ready to stand on his own.

Over nearly a year and a half period, Sting-Hogan escalated to fever pitch, to culminate in what probably should have been the the most sensational showdown in WCW history when they met at Starrcade 1997. The booking got convoluted and Sting didn’t show up in tip-top shape, resulting in a disappointing climax that the guys didn’t do much to improve upon in rematches in the month to follow. Just the same, the initial build was better than most feuds in wrestling history.

As a coda to Sting-Hogan in WCW, the two renewed their rivalry in similar roles (albeit with Sting embracing a Joker-lite persona) to face off in TNA at Bound for Glory 2011. The results were about what you’d expect from two guys a couple decades past their prime, but as someone who watched it live, I can’t deny they still had a little charismatic juice left between them to create a far from stellar, but nonetheless electric little encounter in Philadelphia.

#2. Randy Savage

Hulk Hogan had more than his share of feuds in which friends turned into foes, ranging from Paul Orndorff to Sid Justice to Brutus Beefcake. But in that particular vein, there are few overarching storylines in wrestling history to better captured the dynamic of two guys growing as tight as brothers, only to be torn apart by jealousy than Hogan-Savage.

Like many of The Macho Man’s most compelling angles, Miss Elizabeth was at the fore, first as a force to bind The Megapowers together, then as the source of Savage’s rabid jealousy and over-protective nature. I don’t know that anyone in wrestling has ever played heated better than Savage defending Elizabeth, and as such the angle offered him a logical, organic reason to turn heel.

Moreover, Hogan-Savage, not altogether unlike Hogan-Dibiase, carried with it a kernel of realism in the regard that the heel really was the far superior in-ring performer, with a legitimate gripe for not garnering the same recognition as his muscle-bound counterpart. The comparision has been drawn between Hogan-Savage and the longstanding John Cena-CM Punk rivalry twenty-some-odd years later, and I don’t think that’s so off base.

Like a number of Hogan’s rivalries, this one enjoyed a brief encore in WCW where the two teamed up and went on to feud when, of all things, Hogan turned heel, and then struggled over power within the ranks of the NWO. While these iterations of the feud never quite recaptured the late eighties, early nineties magic, it was one of WCW’s better overall reprisals and helped round out the number two rivalry of Hogan’s career—just edging out Sting-Hogan, and just barely falling short of the number one entry in this countdown.

#1. Andre the Giant

Yes, Hulk Hogan had feuds that were more innovative (Sting), more heated (Savage), longer (Heenan), and perhaps even more formative to his identity (Iron Sheik, Sgt. Slaughter). But when wrestling historians look back on The Hulkster’s career a century from now, I’d argue that no moment will stand out more than the sight of The Immortal Hulk Hogan bodyslamming the five-hundred-plus-pound Andre the Giant in front of 93,000 fans at the Pontiac Silverdome at WrestleMania 3.

Hogan-Andre was truly a rivalry of epic proportions, pitting a super hero against a bona fide Giant. You can add some bonus points for the rivalry truly starting about five years earlier, with brash young heel Hogan tackling the legacy of benevolent big guy Andre. But fast forward to 1987 and you had all the trappings of a friend turned foe storyline, David versus Goliath, and a purportedly unbeaten and unbeatable monster against wrestling’s ultimate good guy. Hogan-Andre was the stuff legends were made of and a fitting final and greatest chapter, to Andre’s iconic wrestling career, finally cast as not the oversized attraction, but the fire-breathing dragon that Vince McMahon Jr. knew he was born to play, during the final years when he was physically able to do so.

Sure, Hogan slammed King Kong Bundy, Earthquake, Kamala, Akeem, and a dozen other super heavyweights, and sure he beat back seemingly insurmountable opponents time and again. But no feat compares to standing toe to toe with and defeating the most colossal obstacle of all.

What were your favorite Hogan rivalries? The Iron Sheik? Sergeant Slaughter? Ric Flair? Vince McMahon? Let us know what you think in the comments section. See you in seven.

Read stories and miscellaneous criticism from Mike Chin at his website and his thoughts on a cappella music at The A Cappella Blog. Follow him on Twitter @miketchin.