Hulk Hogan Was The Hero We All Needed
Hans Fiene
I love professional wrestling because it’s simple stories of good versus evil told with fists and dropkicks. And Hulk Hogan embodied the good.
In the summer of 1988, I discovered professional wrestling. My family had recently moved from Utah to Connecticut. And having not yet made any new friends to run around with, one Saturday morning, I got up, took my bowl of cereal into the family room, and flipped around the channels until I stumbled upon a show that was unlike anything I had ever seen before, a show called WWF Superstars of Wrestling.
I was instantly addicted. To a 7-year-old boy, a bunch of musclebound maniacs beating each other to a pulp in a modified boxing ring would have been enthralling enough. But this wasn’t just violence. It was violence with storylines and pyrotechnics, costumes and theme music. This was a world where the virtuous heroes brought justice to the sneering, cheating villains by physically dominating them with bodyslams and suplexes. And it was instantly clear to me that the hero atop the pro-wrestling mountain was this shirt-ripping, flag-waving, balding Hercules named Hulk Hogan.
Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1953, Terry Gene Bollea was an aspiring musician before deciding to apply his 6’7” frame to professional wrestling. After spending time in smaller promotions, Bollea worked his way up to the WWF (now WWE), where, in 1979, he received the name “Hulk Hogan” because promoter Vince McMahon Sr. wanted someone to appeal to Irish-American fans.
In a few years, however, Hogan’s appeal would go far beyond what McMahon Sr. had imagined. When Vince McMahon Jr. bought his father’s promotion, he established Hogan as the face of the company in his attempt to bring professional wrestling into the mainstream. It worked marvelously. While the sports-adjacent enterprise had always had its own stars who were extremely popular with fans, men like Bruno Sammartino, Hogan was the first crossover star, the first true household name. He graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. He hosted Saturday Night Live. Like Elvis, he starred in myriad terrible movies. Even my mother, a woman who couldn’t have told you the names of five NBA stars in the late ’80s, knew who Hulk Hogan was.