Planet Kayfabe: Hulk Hogan Had His Chance
Hello and happy new year. Thank you again for reading Planet Kayfabe. Hogan knows best? Well, he had his chance and blew it, it seems. Raw has officially moved off USA on cable television and is now streaming on Netflix for the first time. The episode was packed with cameos of stars of the past and celebrities in attendance. Fans loved seeing The Rock. Undertaker came out as the American Badass to much applause. Triple H hyped up the crowd with one of his usual speeches like we have seen at big NXT shows. Macaulay Culkin got what was probably the pop of the night.
And Hulk Hogan got booed out of the building.
Ya know, old readers might remember an old column I wrote years ago when the tape of Hulk Hogan’s racist remarks was leaked. The column was largely openminded, some may say, defensive of Hogan and I expected a bit of a backlash for it. Still, thankfully, people read more than I assumed at the time and people saw that I didn’t entirely let Hogan off the hook. I explained how we are all guilty of something and saying things when we were younger that may not be so politically correct today. The big difference is you said them and one person heard it and has since forgotten. It wasn’t on camera and it didn’t live on forever and was heard by millions of people. I highlighted that people can change, however, when Hogan already said those remarks on tape (albeit, while drunk) he was already an old man mostly set in his ways. However, that shouldn’t make someone underserving of forgiveness because if we live in a world without forgiveness then we have no reason to ever change.
A few years have passed and I can remember clearly that at the time Hulk Hogan was going out of his way to retweet posts from black fans of his. Almost like he was saying “See look, they forgive me”. I mean, seriously, if you’re a black wrestling fan reading this, send Hulk Hogan a tweet putting him over and I bet you he re-tweets it. Especially after this past Monday. Just try it as a social experiment even if you aren’t a fan of his. Let me know in the comments if get that RT.
We don’t really know these people in real life, so just the same as I’m not going to assume that Mick Foley is a perfect angel as many do, I’m not going to assume that every bad thing spoken about Hulk Hogan from a bunch of bitter old midcarders who blew their money on cocaine and Rolex watches is true either. I did however say in that piece that we have to give Hogan a chance and see what he does going forward. Since then, most of what we heard was that Hogan apologized to the locker room, but it came off as tone deaf and his main message to the boys was more like “be careful because you never know when you’re being recorded” instead of “what I said was hurtful, wrong and I regret it”.
Hulk Hogan, in all his public appearances since, has acted almost oblivious to the whole situation. It’s like he just wants to pretend the boos aren’t there as if there is nothing he can do about it. The boos rain on him every time he comes out there and he just nods and flexes and does his catchphrases and namedrops Randy Savage and Andre “The Giant” expecting to squeeze a pity pop out of the fans.
If Hogan thinks there is nothing he can do to combat this wave of boos, he is wrong. His apology backstage was a flop, but we never saw it. He could take a second crack at it with the fans on camera. Looking back at that segment on Raw, if I were Hogan or an advisor to Hogan I would have read the room. Imagine if Hogan stopped for a second. Let the fans boo. Then he took off his sunglasses. Even took off his bandana and said “Hey Terry here. I know I let a lot of you down. I don’t expect everyone to forgive me, but I am embarrassed and sorry for what I’ve done and everyone who once looked up to me as a role model and was hurt by my actions”
That’s it. He doesn’t even have to explicitly mention the incident on TV. Had he said that, some would have booed but many would have applauded him, and at least for many they could start to move on. The more Hogan decides to just ignore it, the more he’s going to have to live with it every day. If he just said he’s sorry to the fans, then we could start day 1 of moving on. Instead, every appearance from him is just going to be a sad shower of boos.
Now, I can’t entirely let many of the fans off the hook either. While it’s certainly easy for fans to take the high road and say they’re booing him over his racist remarks, I feel like that holds a lesser percentage to a few other noteworthy reasons. That being him being the butt of every shoot interview for 20 years and the perception that he was ruthless backstage and held down talent. Also his recent coming-out of the political closet speaking at the RNC in support of Donald Trump. Let’s not pretend like that has nothing to do with it either. The Iron Sheik famously and openly called people “cheap Jews” and faggots and y’all laugh and would pop huge if he were still alive and made a cameo today. Bret Hart in his old Calgary newspaper column would refer to Triple H as Shawn Michaels’ “boyfriend” and call them homos. John Cena was making gay jokes in his feud with the Nexus. Small potatoes, I get it but my God, look at Ric Flair. Look at how he has spent his later years and I know none of you would boo him if he came on TV. Its amazing how words speak louder than actions, though. Ric Flair can wave his wand at a married flight attendant, scaring her while trapped on a plane 32,000 feet in the air with his drunk naked ass staggering around, but Hogan says the banned word uh-oh! I mean, what Hogan did was grossly offensive, but if you or I did what Ric Flair did on The Planeride From Hell, we probably would have been arrested the moment the plane touched down and have to register as a sex offender.
If you choose to be selective with your outrage, then it should be called out. Much like Tony Khan who did the same thing shining his Twitter virtue signal years ago when Dynamite started and swearing that Hulk Hogan would never be allowed to taint the purity of the AEW program and then quickly thereafter had convicted rapist Mike Tyson on the show. I mean, I got not problem with Tyson, he did his time and all, but if we are weighing what’s worse here are we really going to compare a drunken old man’s private racist rant to rape? Especially when at the time AEW was presenting themselves as some progressive company that was always going to take some moral high ground and be so pro-worker like no wrestling promotion ever has before… and nope.
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As for Hogan, it is sad that this is the reaction one of the truest living legends in wrestling has to get in the later part of his life. He’s 71 years old, which is like 91 in wrestler years of his generation. Regardless of what you think of his ~WoRk RaTe~ he belongs on the Mount Rushmore of WWF/E wrestlers. It is sad, but he deserves every last bit of it. Regardless of what your reasons are for booing him, political or because he didn’t fucking put over Bret Hart or whatever, he deserves it. Hogan’s failure to acknowledge his past transgressions publicly is a significant factor in the continued negative fan reaction. I’m not confident that Hogan will right this. Just this past year I listened to him speak on Logan Paul’s podcast and Theo Von’s podcast and the dude is either an irredeemable pathological liar or completely oblivious to some of the stories that come out of his mouth. If he has no regrets other than the tape leaking, then maybe he shouldn’t address it and if that’s the case. He should probably just enjoy his time on the beach and not make any public appearances any more because the public has clearly rejected him. We’ve all heard the rumors that he has future appearances booked for WWE. Either cancel those right now or take a little bit of my advice here.
Hogan, you can still change this. I’m 36. I didn’t grow up a Hulkamaniac. I didn’t get to experience your rise to fame. I laugh every time The Undertaker makes a passive-aggressive remark toward you on his podcast. Its not like I’m pleading as some old fan who wants the innocent image I had as a child of Hulk Hogan to come back into my mind. Seriously, I was WWF fan growing up (while Hogan was in WCW) and my earliest memories of Hulk Hogan are playing WCW/NWO Revenge at my cousin’s house and when he returned to WWF in 2002 when I was fucking 14 years old and barely even watching anymore because all my favorite wrestlers from the Attitude Era were either retired, injured, off in Hollywood or doing some lame new gimmick. You are, though, a massive part of wrestling history and your legacy should be celebrated, not mocked. You need to get before the fans. Yeah, its late. Yeah, it’s been a long time coming, but you either start now say something or you’re going to die someday and this is what is going to live on. This is what people are going to talk about. Not Wrestlemania 3. Not the NWO. Not the Megapowers colliding. They’re going to talk about that recording. You can’t keep running from it. A half-assed apology to the locker room isn’t enough. If you publicly apologize, it will start to be part of the past. If you continue to ignore it, it will forever be a part of your future.
Thanks again for reading everyone. I am not sure what the goal of this column is since I doubt Hogan is reading it right now and saying “I need to change”. I guess sometimes you just need your thoughts out there and many of you have thoughts on this topic and I felt I needed to make my thoughts known too, free of memes and messageboard humor. I almost feel like I care about Hogan’s legacy more than he does. Is he happy just ignoring that response and acting like nothing happened and that it will just magically get better? No. He has to act. You don’t need to apologize for your support of Trump or for using your status as the biggest draw in wrestling to your advantage for almost 20 years. You have to say something to the fans who looked up to you and were hurt by your actions and on a large scale. Not in a written statement. Not in a tweet. You had a chance on TV and even if you got heat for going off script of what the segment was intended for (to put over Netflix and promote his beer) I think it would have been worth it.
Finally, some real-world talk. If you’re reading this from the Los Angeles area, I hope you’re safe out there. There are real human lives at stake (and their pets) and people are losing everything in their homes. Like every disaster, there is the political noise that comes with it. If you call LA home, be sure to demand better from those in charge as you rebuild. You put up with enough from those crooks.
For NoDQ, this is Paul Matthews.