The Phantom Rant: Remembering Hulkamania

Greeting conversationalists. I am Joseph Davis and on a sad day for Wrestling as the world of Professional Wrestling/Sports Entertainment has lost the man who quite literally put Wrestling into the mainstream with the death of Hulk Hogan. Before I go any further, yes Hogan was a complicated man. That’s a nice way of saying he was not perfect. I could cover all the negative things about him (and God knows that would fill an entire column in of itself), but believe it or not there were positives about him.

I’m old enough to have lived through the entirety of Hulkamania. One of my earliest memories is watching television with my father and seeing Hulk Hogan beat The Iron Sheik for the title. Hulkamania was indeed a phenomenon. Now granted I didn’t have all the merchandise that Hogan was shilling, but I was hooked on the WWF and now here I am some forty years later still riding with them. ..for better or worse.

Hulk Hogan for better or good was a huge chunk of our collective childhoods and on Thursday a part of that childhood passed away and it’s hard to believe that Hogan is now in the past tense as a person. At the start of the column, I said he put Wrestling into the mainstream. Vince McMahon took a huge gamble on Hulk Hogan because had the stars not been aligned right, Hulkamania could have easily failed. That fails and there’s no Rock n’ Wrestling on MTV, No Wrestlemania and if you go deep enough down the rabbit hole we would not be here today.

That’s a bold statement to make, but it’s true. Yeah the WWF had New York locked down as a territory. But they were going national at the time Hulk Hogan was the reason it worked. Now I will not go as far as to say he didn’t have help. He had many great “dance partners” along the way. First it was The Iron Sheik. Then “Rowdy” Roddy Piper helped take it to another level with the Rock N’ Wrestling thing on MTV. MTV back then was a big deal and they could have easily laughed at the idea of involving themselves with rasslin. With the involvement of Cyndi Lauper and her teaming with Wendi Richter as a manager, Wrestling looked very cool at the time.

I know I am condensing some things for time here, the second event on MTV was a match between Piper and Hogan and with the involvement of Lauper and Mr. T it took off to the stratosphere leading to the first Wrestlemania. Hulk Hogan was everywhere. He was on Saturday Night Live. He was on The A-Team. He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. You had to be there to really experience it.

Hogan’s next great dance partner was “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorf. Much like Piper, Orndorf was a great villain to Hogan’s super hero. I still remember watching WWF Superstars on a Saturday when Orndorf did a “Pearl Harbor Job” on Hogan as Gorilla Monsoon would say. Of course in retrospect, some of us might have booked Hogan to lose the title sometime in 1986 to Paul Orndorf…but the fact is Hogan was making so much money that it would have been stupid to take the title off of him. Wrestling is a business and when it comes down to it…money talks. The Hogan/Orndorf feud sold out Exhibition Stadium in Toronto and also led to probably one of the best WWF Steel Cage matches ever with the double climb down angle with the duel referees. Of course Hogan would win like he always did.

The next big thing with Hogan was of course The Mega Powers. That whole angle on Saturday Night’s Main Event starting with a standard Bret Hart vs. Macho Man match led to Honky Tonk Man shoving Ms. Elizabeth. She runs to the back and he gives the ol El Kabong to Savage with the guitar. As the heels are gloating, Liz returns with Hulk Hogan and a new friendship was born. Hogan took a backseat to Savage for a bit as Savage would end up winning the WWF Championship at Wrestlemania IV (with Hulk’s help), but the seeds would be planted over the next few months into 1989 for a Mega Powers EXPLOSION.

Wrestlemania V was the culmination of the Mega Powers exploding and with Ms. Elizabeth in a neutral corner because she was going to support both men, Hogan ended up winning his second World title and over the summer, Ms. Elizabeth would be in the corner of Hulk Hogan as he defended against Randy Savage (who had a new manager in Sensational Sheri) around the states and the world.

The next few years, you could say that Hulkamania was cooling down. Truth is all the little Hulkamaniacs were getting older. What was cool when you were five or six is not so much at ten or eleven. Hogan eventualy went to the competition in WCW and Hulkamania didn’t have the same feel it used to. For starters, Hogan was in Flair Country. Hogan and Flair had good matches together, but the old formula of Hulking Up was wearing thin. He also brought in a lot of his old contemporaries like Kamala, Jim Duggan, Earthquake (who became The Shark) and not least Brother Brutus himself so he could have matches with people who knew how to put Hogan over best.

I will say this about Hulk Hogan. He could wrestle when he wanted to. Problem is he wasn’t being paid to “wrestle” in the traditional sense. Watch some stuff of Hogan in Japan. He could do moves that would blow your mind. But here in the states he wasn’t paid for that. He was paid for the Hulk Up, come back, leg drop and pose. By 1996 though, the crowds were turning on him and the act had worn out and something had to change. In May of 1996 something did change when Scott Hall and Kevin Nash showed up in WCW. A month later Hogan turns heel joining up with them and a revolution in wrestling is born. That revolution was the n.W.o.

The n.W.o is a column in of itself. I will just say they were very cool. Well, Hall and Nash were cool. Hogan and his ego got out of control and just ended up ruining the whole thing. The worst part about the n.W.o. Was them going over EVERYONE all the time. WCW very rarely…if ever got a win over them. The biggest moment i’d say was when Lex Luger got a title shot against Hogan on a Nitro and he won the title. But it was short lived as Hogan won the title back a week later at Road Wild. This is the point where Hogan and his creative control went into overdrive. I mean he always must have had creative control, but it wasn’t as bad as it was in this period.

After the what I think was the disastrous n.W.o Hollywood vs. Wolfpac feud, Hogan did have a comeback in him with the red and yellow. By this point though the WWF and Attitude with Austin vs. McMahon was just killing WCW in the ratings. In June of 2000, Hogan’s run in WCW came to an abrupt end when Vince Russo (who was in the middle of the WCW reboot) had Jeff Jarrett lay down for Hogan so he could win the WCW Title. Now people debate was this a work or a shoot to this day. It was a work that turned into a shoot depending on who you asked. Either way Hogan was done in WCW and well, we know what happened to WCW not even a year later.

Many thought Hogan was done with wrestling. WCW was bought by the WWF and guys like Hogan, Nash, Flair all were being paid by separate contracts from the WCW deal and they were making more money sitting at home than what the WWF was willing to pay any of them. But eventually Ric Flair did turn up and that was the start of a Flair vs. McMahon angle that led Vince to want to “kill” the WWF and what better way to do that than the thing that killed WCW. Vince brought back the n.W.o. Hogan, Hall and Nash came back to a hero’s welcome even though they were the bad guys. Hogan got into a feud with The Rock, but the reborn n.W.o never really clicked with audiences no matter what they did with Rocky.

That didn’t stop them from having a Hogan vs. Rock match at Wrestlemania 18. Hogan was the heel, but something strange happened. The Toronto crowd started cheering for Hogan. So much so that Hogan reverted the Hulk of old and did a Hulk Up and it almost blew the roof off the old Skydome. It was on this night that the WWF would coin the term “Bizzaro World” when the crowd did the opposite of what they were expected. Hogan lost the match to The Rock, but that didn’t matter. The next night on RAW, Hogan got a huge standing ovation from the crowd that went on for minutes. Hulkamania was back once again.

I think his final title run in 2002 is a good place to end the reminiscing on Hulkamania. Hogan would come back a few more times over the next few years. I won’t even go into Hogan in TNA. That was just a train-wreck in every sense of the word. But as I said, the man changed Pro Wrestling. If there was no Hulkamania, almost everything in the last 40 or so years would have never happened.

Terry Bolea was a complicated man. All I can say is we know all of the bad stuff. I was just looking back at the Hulkamania that I lived through. In retrospect, things should have been different. But as I said Wrestling is a business and if Hogan wasn’t pulling in money than he wouldn’t have been on top like he was for all that time.

On that note I am done with this edition of The Phantom Rant. I’ll be back to mop up AEW or something next time. Before Hogan passed on, I was working on a column about AEW and how The Death Riders just won’t well die. We’ll see what happens on Dynamite this week with the Hangman vs. Moxley rematch.

Can’t believe Hulk Hogan is dead though. I guess @HulkHogan won’t unban me now.

As usual you can leave feedback down below, on twitter or email me at phantomlordnyc@gmail.com