As Dirge’s resident pro wrestling expert, it falls to me to eulogize one of God’s own creatures: Terry Gene Bollea, better known to the world as Hulk Hogan, is dead at 71.
The face of the 1980s pro wrestling boom, Hogan was the champion and top star during one of the industry’s highest peaks. For almost ten years, he reigned over the sport like an invincible god, turning away countless challengers who were legends in their own right. There would be no WrestleMania without Hulkamania, and he was also the first wrestler to make the leap, however tepid, to mainstream celebrity. He hosted Saturday Night Live. He starred in awful but theatrically-released movies. Brad Garrett (!) voiced him in a Saturday morning cartoon. And he released a vanity music album, including the teary child death ballad “Hulkster in Heaven.”
But here’s the thing. The story that song tells — Hogan getting a Make-a-Wish kid front-row seats to watch him at SummerSlam 1992, but the kid dying before the show — isn’t true. Hogan wasn’t even at SummerSlam 1992. It was a bullshit story to what, impress people who were already on the bandwagon enough to buy a Hulk Hogan vanity rock album? What kind of wretched soul would do that? Certainly not Hulk Hogan, the moral paragon who always preached his “three demandments” — train, take your vitamins, and say your prayers.
Right?
Look, Hulk Hogan playing fast and loose with the truth is not news, but when you start to catalogue his lies over the years, it becomes hard to see “Hulk Hogan” as anything other than an amorphous cloud of bizarre prevarications. He demonstrably lied about dead kids, but also about defeating his coworkers in shoot fights, fictitious interactions with bigger celebrities, and even bizzare claims about time travel. At the center of that swirling cloud of bullshit was Terry Gene, a real person whose life’s work was pretending to be that cloud — at all costs — and that was often not pretty.
Despite his frequent exhortations that Hulkamania would live forever, the last decade of his life was marked by Hulka-lukewarm acceptance at best and Hulka-open derision at worst.
In 1986, at the height of his power, Terry Gene ratted out colleagues who were trying to unionize. In doing so he secured his own position atop the industry, but damned many of his contemporaries to spend their old age in chronic pain and squalor. In the 1990s, his incessant politicking helped kill WCW and usher in a two decade dark age of pro wrestling in North America. In the mid-2000’s, he exploited his teenage children in pursuit of Osbournes-style reality television stardom.
By that time, the internet existed, and Hogan’s ability to confidently control the narrative was compromised. His name was already something of a punchline for those who cared to know, but fans were still usually genuinely happy to see him. The wrestling business is built on bullshit and backstabbing, after all, but what really killed Hulk Hogan and dragged Terry Gene into the harsh light of public scrutiny was the racist sex tape.
It was a smoking gun. He literally said the words “I am racist” as pillowtalk after sleeping with Bubba the Love Sponge’s wife, a sentence that has certainly summoned some kind of demon. There was no way to claim he was misquoted or taken out of context. A deeply ugly part of himself was revealed to the world, and with it, the viability of Hulk Hogan as Terry Gene’s public face was shattered. In the resultant lawsuit, Terry Gene was forced to testify that Hulk Hogan was not real, most infamously by stating under oath that the two personas had different penis sizes.
He attempted comebacks after this, but it never stuck. Despite his frequent exhortations that Hulkamania would live forever, the last decade of his life was marked by Hulka-lukewarm acceptance at best and Hulka-open derision at worst. He had tanked his own public image, in much the same way he bitterly complained about his daughter tanking an unspecified business deal with the Saudis (incredibly, this exchange was also recorded as racist sex tape pillow talk).
Like so many other celebrities with vanishing fanbases, Hogan ultimately threw his lot in with the MAGA movement, actively campaigning for Trump in the 2024 election. With Hulk Hogan no longer able to capture the public’s imagination on his own, Terry Gene tried to rub some Trump stink on himself to get a sliver of a percentage of the adulation that he once commanded as a matter of course. If this devil’s bargain made him feel like things were back to normal, it wouldn’t for long, because when he next appeared for WWE, he was brutally booed by the same fans who were once his lifeblood. Incredibly, this would mark his final appearance for WWE — rejected by the same fanbase that chanted “Thank you Vince” to a hair-shitting mohuncher.
I’m sure that lots of people will take the angle that Terry Gene’s legacy is complicated. That’s true, broadly, but it’s also missing the point. One of the greatest carnies in the history of the carny-ass wrestling business, Terry Gene was a man who, after an incredible 40-year streak of meticulous image management, lost control hard and kind of shit all over his own metaphorical rug. In the aftermath of that public humiliation, he stood revealed not as an action figure come to life, but as a human being—an extremely human being.
