Planet Kayfabe: Remembering Hulk Hogan
Planet Kayfabe: Remembering Hulk Hogan
By: Paul Matthews
@PlanetKayfabe on X/Twitter
On July 24, 2025 the news broke by TMZ that Hulk Hogan had died. Rumors of his declining health have been swirling for weeks and as is typical when such rumors start making the news cycle, they are downplayed or outright denied, as I’m sure they want their privacy. Even though the Hogan camp denied the rumors, I still believed them since the same happened with Ozzy Osbourne recently and Eddie Van Halen a few years ago. Where there’s smoke, there’s a fire.
When Hulk Hogan died, he left behind a complex legacy. In later years, his public embarrassments, outright lying and yes, the racist remarks caught on camera, all tarnished his image. The latter is a shame because he truly is the Michael Jordan of pro-wrestling in the United States. His name transcends the fandom of wrestling. Much like people who have never watched a second of golf in their life know who Tiger Woods is, the general public knows who Hulk Hogan is. It is the name synonymous with wrestling. Even if you’re too young to experience Hulkamania, there is a chance even you would not be a wrestling fan if it weren’t for him, as there could very likely be no WWE as it is today without Hulk Hogan. However, if you’re between the ages of 40-60, then there is a good chance that Hulk Hogan was your favorite wrestler as a kid. Even if he wasn’t your favorite and even if you didn’t like him, if you were of that age, he was the centerpiece of the show for many years and the face of the company long before it was all about branding and just promoting “the WWE superstars” being in town. It was Hulk Hogan.
Let’s break it down with the good and the bad. Keep in mind, I will be mostly celebrating the good times in wrestling so if you’re one of those self-righteous hypocrites who have certain emoji’s in their name to proudly display their defining personality trait and regularly posts buzz phrases like “be kind”, “choose kindness”, “no H8”, “just be a good human” while at the same time celebrating the death of Hulk Hogan then you’ll probably want to stop reading before you get break down need to take a mental health day.
The “complex” part… in short:
If Hogan admitting his racism on tape soured you on him, I can’t argue against that. I can’t defend it, although in the past, I think I was more than open to him redeeming himself if he showed that he was truly sorry. Unfortunately, his apology seemed to come off as bullshit to the locker room backstage and it didn’t seem like he changed much. In all his interviews, he was still the same workin’ and bullshittin’ Hulk Hogan to a point where he was even coming off as completely delusional. I know Eric Bischoff said he was a changed man in later years, but I didn’t see it. I don’t see it in the same way I saw it in Shawn Michaels or even Lex Luger. Hogan seemed like the same Hogan I saw 20 years ago when those comments were made. It is also important to note that Hogan was set up and illegally recorded and did win a case over that fact, but it doesn’t change time. The people heard what they heard. Some forgave him and some didn’t and at the time I honestly put more stock in those who worked with him. Booker T, Dennis Rodman and Virgil defended Hulk Hogan publicly so excuse me if I feel that carries more weight than whatever the fuck Titus O’Neil or Big E thinks. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that what was said was said and the damage was done to his public image. Although I do find irony in much of the IWC using Iron Sheik’s old burials of Hogan in posts today when Sheik said way more racist and homophobic shit than Hogan did, but hey, that’s good old selective outrage for you. I guess its ok for Sheik to call people “cheap Jew faggots” because at least he knew he was being recorded and he could always hide behind the cloak of “working” a character. Maybe that’s what Hogan should have done. Just say he was working out a new heel persona and say the marks fell for it.
In later years, Hogan also tended to make an ass out of himself in interviews. He would flat out lie, make up stories or just come off as delusional at times. Many know the “sick kid at Wembley Stadium” story. The story about how he auditioned for Metallica, which was eventually shot down by James Hetfield of Metallica himself when asked about it in an interview. Also, there was the story about Wrestlemania 3, when he outright lied, saying that Andre “The Giant” was booked to win but at the last minute decided to put Hulk Hogan over. That’s ridiculous. That whole angle and the entire build to WM3 were to highlight the peak of Hulkamania. They were not having Hogan lose at what really was the biggest and most important WWF event at the time. While its common now, the idea of a heel winning to close the main event of Wrestlemania was unheard of back then and it didn’t happen for the first time until Wrestlemania 2000 when Triple H won. They had 15 straight years of babyface finishes. They weren’t putting the heel over in 1987.
Those lies are fairly benign. Although, from a historic standpoint, I find it harmful that one may actually believe Hogan’s take on WM3 simply because it came from his mouth. None of those moments make him look like a particularly bad person, though. I’ve even heard people like Dave Meltzer say that a lot of these older wrestlers live a lie and get so used to working all the time that they don’t even know the truth anymore and just make up stories and I believe him when it comes to that. In 2007, one of Hogan’s worst moments came, again when he was being recorded, talking to his deuchebag son Nick in prison after a drunken auto accident that left his friend paralyzed and almost killed both of them. Hogan was in denial that his son did anything wrong and instead blamed his friend saying “it was God’s will” and that his friend must have done some bad things in his life for God to lay that type of punishment on him. Damn. If Hogan want to come off as the father who “knows best”, instead of blaming the victim and trying to get your son out of his prison sentence, then maybe he should have done more to hold his own son responsible and help the victim’s family. The more that family was on TV the more they came off as the least likable people in America. Even recently, his daughter Brooke spoke about how she’s moved on with her life and doesn’t speak to either of her parents anymore.
It paints a sad later life for Hulk Hogan. Prior to that reality show and everything that came after it, Hogan was universally praised. Hulk Hogan should be treated like pro wrestling royalty, but instead he is largely mocked for his public scandals and embarassments in his later years and like it or not, these stories were too public and too big to ignore. Its part of him and unfortunately, its how many younger fans will remember him.
As far as the wrestling-related stories you hear in shoots about him, I don’t give a shit about that. I don’t care if Hogan abused his creative control. I don’t care if he refused to put people over. I don’t care that he ratted out Jesse Ventura for trying to unionize. I don’t care that he didn’t put over Bret Hart at Wrestlemania IX. A lot of that is all wrestlers bitching about the top guy and bitter that they didn’t have his spot and swearing that they’d do things differently if they had Hogan’s power. No they wouldn’t. 99% of wrestlers, if they had Hogan’s power and influence that he had in the 80s and 90s would have done things the same way. No aging wrestler making a ton of money and still getting bookings on national TV with a major promotion is going to willingly give up their spot and start putting over some 24-year-old without being forced to do so. They all care about the now and what they’re getting paid. No 40-something-year-old wrestler is going to give a shit about some 20-something’s future. That’s for the booker and promoter to care about. It’s not Hulk Hogan’s responsibility to make sure your messageboard darlings become world champions and household names. Unless you were in WWF or WCW in the 80s or 90s I don’t want to hear you bitch about how Hulk Hogan held someone back. Even if you are, I still don’t want to hear it.
Remembering The Good Times:
I’m not a young fan anymore, but I’m still outside of the age when Hulkamania truly ran wild. I was, however, at the right age to experience the nWo form and run wild. Before I became a real fan I knew who Hulk Hogan was. As I said at the top, the name was synonymous with pro wrestling. That is still the case today. Even today when I see some normie imitate a wrestler its always “whatcha gonna do” and flexing and pretending to rip their shirt open. Cornerstones of every Hulk Hogan promo from 40 years ago still resonate today. It can’t be understated. People point to the fences imitating Babe Ruth calling his shot before cracking a home run. People stick their tongue out like Michael Jordan when dunking a basketball. People pose like Hulk Hogan when pretending to wrestle in their living rooms. His impact on pop culture is that deep-rooted and vast and it really should be celebrated and not ignored (knock, knock, Tony Khan)
Not only was Hulk Hogan perhaps the biggest babyface of all time (and yes you can make an argument for Stone Cold Steve Austin, but that’s it. He’s the only one who comes close.) Hogan also became a huge heel with the nWo. I’m sure everyone reading this knows that already, but what’s more important is that it is still widely viewed as the greatest heel turn of all time and all big turns are compared to it. The WWE used to commonly tout Shawn Michaels turning on Marty Janettey as the greatest turn ever back when they just outright refused to give WCW any credit for anything even after they bought the company and while that was a great and memorable turn, its not The Immortal Hulk Hogan turning heel and cutting one of the promos of his life while trash adorns the very ring he’s standing in. When John Cena turned, people compared it to that of Hogan’s turn, but, obviously things didn’t work out as well in the follow-up.
Hogan was away from the WWF for 8 years and came back as a heel with the nWo, but WWF fans weren’t having it. They still loved Hogan. The nWo wasn’t really that over anymore and WCW guys really struggled in the WWF largely because the WWF spent years telling the fans that they were all old, washed up and inferior to the WWF and then when they came in to the WWF, they were treated accordingly by the fans. When Hogan came out with Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, he had their attention. The fans were chanting for Hogan. Not only were they chanting for him, they wanted him rid of the “Hollywood” name. They wanted him out of that black attire. They wanted red and yellow “Real American” Hulk Hogan. They shit on the nWo, and Hogan came out of it a babyface.
Around this time is when he’d have one of the best matches of his career at Wrestlemania 18 with The Rock. The Rock at the time was well into his mainstream superstardom. This was 2002. Hogan was in his late 40s and I expected Hogan to get a good response, but what I wasn’t expecting was The Rock to get outright booed. They’d go on to have a great match and the crowd was super hot for it. If Hogan’s career ended right there, it would have been perfect.
Hogan’s 2000s WWF/E run would continue. He was WWF champion one more time and he was actually the last world champion in the WWF while it was still called the World Wrestling Federation, which seems very fitting. He’d have miscellaneous feuds. One, a pretty high-profile feud with Vince McMahon, which was fun. A feud with Randy Orton which featured Randy hitting one of his beter “out of nowhere” RKO’s ever on the trunk of a car. We got to re-live a renewed feud with The Undertaker. His second biggest match in the 2000s WWE was probably with Shawn Michaels. Icon vs Icon. Shawn has spoken about this feud. I know this is the “good times” portion, but a lot of Shawn’s gripes were some of typical shit you’d hear from Hogan. Politicking backstage. Putting in minimal effort on TV to promote the feud. Wanting things a certain way but not even bothering to show up. He wanted Shawn to be the 1997 heel Shawn, but then when Shawn took it too far in promos, Hulk got upset. This lead to Shawn over-selling out of spite during their match at SummerSlam in 2005. Many won’t admit to it now, but believe it or not, a lot of people on the internet buried Shawn for this at the time, but of course, now we look back at it and laugh. Hogan’s last feud in WWE would be with Randy Orton in 2006 and he’d leave alltogether in 2007 after a falling out with Vince McMahon. Its around this time that things got pretty bad and ultimately never turned around.
In the mid-2000s, Hulk Hogan had a reality series called “Hogan Knows Best”, which did not depict him or his family in a positive light at all. Hulk came off bad. His wife came off even worse (and would continue to come off worse even after they split, believe it or not), and his kids came off like a couple of spoiled brats. His son Nick wanted to be some big shot who could never make up his mind what he wanted to do with his life. Brooke, his daughter, was an attractive blonde who wanted to make it as a pop star. She has since grown up and married a professional hockey player (I’m sure Hulk breathed a sigh of relief when he heard it was a hockey player) and Nick has pretty much done nothing. He’d DJ some of his dad’s events at his bar on the beach, but other than being “the son of Hulk Hogan” I’m not sure what he tells people he does with his life. You can even look at his Wikipedia. I’m not even sure why he has a page. There is a section on his fame as a reality TV star and the accident that sent him to jail and, oh, look, he had a DUI and reckless driving charge two years ago. Its amazing he out-lived Hulk.
Hogan would join TNA and it didn’t help his public image much. He and Bischoff and TNA all tried to capture lightning in a bottle again and do what they did 15 years prior and go head-to-head with Monday Night Raw, in which they got killed for in the ratings. Hogan’s time was largely seen as damaging to TNA and their expectations they had were never met, but hey, no biggie. He’d eventually return to the WWE after seven years and host Wrestlemania 30 and at this point Hogan’s approval rating was still very high. Yes the smarks knew the backstage shit, but he still got cheered and was over as a legend in the business. He survived the reality show and the PR hits he took for his role in the decline of TNA Wrestling. It was in 2015 on July 24 (ten years before the day he’d eventually die) where the scandal of his life went down and eventually lead to the downfall of his public image.
However, since Hulk died, I’ve been listening to the radio, talking to people at work, just normal folks. No one brings up that scandal. My local news station posted about Hulk Hogan. The Boston sports talk radio pages were posting about him and talking about him. Not one poster or radio caller brought up his racist rant on tape. That scandal was a big story at the time, but its almost as if the general public moved on and its wrestling fans who keep bringing it up. So, if you’re one of those fans who thinks we should only remember the good of the character that was Hulk Hogan, then I feel that’s a good thing in your favor.
As a fan myself and just talking about the timeline of his WWE and WCW runs and how his issues have been the last 15 years of his life, it is a sad end. Not just losing a legend, but its a sad end for Terry Bollea. Lots of wrestlers have done some nasty shit and said some offensive things, yet when they die we just honor their memory. Terry Bollea was clearly a flawed individual, but Hulk Hogan meant a lot of good to a lot of people and that should not go ignored.
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The goal of this column is just to share my thoughts and not tell you how you should feel right now or how you should honor or not honor the memory of Hulk Hogan. I’m not trying to play the middle here, but if you want to ignore all his flaws, then that’s on you and I cannot do that. However, if you’re one of these clowns who call everyone who runs politically to the right of Kamala Harris “Hitler”, and don’t like that he endorsed Donald Trump, then I can’t take you seriously either. Unless TMZ finds out there were concentration camps on Hogan’s beach, then you need to chill with pinning that tag on everyone.
Also, I think wrestling fans need to let go of the lot of the gripes that wrestlers have shot on Hogan over the years. Yes, the story Undertaker tells of Hogan faking a broken neck is funny and a dick move by Hulk, but it doesn’t affect your life. Him not putting over Jeff Jarrett or whoever doesn’t affect your life. His lying about steroid use doesn’t affect you. Even him ratting out Jesse ‘The Body” Ventura to Vince McMahon about forming a union doesn’t affect your life. You can think less of him and maybe he was a big asshole in a business that was rife with massive assholes at the time. It was an asshole business and all the promoters were assholes, too so you kinda had to be a huge asshole to survive long term, and if you weren’t an asshole going in, you’d eventually turn into one if you stuck around long enough. It’s not enough for you, a wrestling fan, to hate him, in my opinion.
I wrote about Hogan earlier this year after his was booed in Los Angeles at the premiere of Raw on Netflix. The column was called “Hogan had his chance”. I expressed that while I was incredibly open to him redeeming himself, he clearly didn’t do enough. Maybe Hulk thought that if he just hid from the PR nightmare, that it would just go away, but it never did and he never fully addressed it. In the piece, I suggest that Hogan shoot with the crowd when they booed him. Taking off his bandana and saying, “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.”
Now, would he have won everyone over? No. It would have been a lot better than doing nothing and then going on Ariel Helwani’s show and saying that he was only booed because the last time he was in Los Angeles he was a heel with the nWo. I’m not sure if that’s even true, but I already brought up how in 2002 when the WWE brought in Hogan as a heel part of the nWo, he was the one that was universally cheered and forced to turn babyface. Instead of being in denial and making up more stories, he should have addressed this head on and publicly with the fans. Even if they still continued to boo him on that day this past January, I think over time people would have respected him for it. As I said in that piece back in January, 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.
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Now that Hogan has died, I do believe time will heal all wounds. Many wrestlers are paying tribute and showing their support for him. Even some that have had problems with him in the past and there are many of them.
I feel its important to separate Hulk Hogan from Terry Bollea. Much the same way you can respect a troubled or problematic artist or musician for the great work they did and the art they created without fully endorsing and praising the man’s personal life and flawed values. Also, I feel there needs to be a high bar before we start cancelling these pop culture icons. Yeah, what Hulk said was bad, bit he didn’t actually hurt anyone. It made people upset, but it didn’t ruin anyone’s lives. However, if it bothers you so much that you get angry at the thought of anyone paying tribute to the biggest name ever in the history of professional wrestling, then its your problem and you’re the one who has to live with it because like it or not, Hogan was the biggest name in wrestling, his passing is a big deal, and you have a YouTube podcast no one listens to and a Bluesky account that you haven’t logged on to since this past January.
Thank you for reading this edition of Planet Kayfabe. I will respect Hogan as a wrestling character and the unmatched legacy he has in wrestling, but I will not exercise Terry Bollea levels of delusion and actively ignore his very public issues. I feel its best that we do remember the good times and not forget about them. I wish we got that true redemption story and Hogan put in more effort to rehab his public image, but he didn’t. He also didn’t kill or rape anyone, which is still more than some wrestlers can say. So, while his words were indefensible, they were just words and don’t forget they were also drunken words while he was being illegally recorded. While we can’t ignore that tape, we also can’t ignore the words of Mick Foley who when speaking of Hogan, talked about how great Hogan was with Make-A-Wish kids. You can’t say “what about when he said this” and “what about when he said that” and ignore the good he did and all the positive work he did in building the industry that you love today. Even if you were born after Hogan left WWE in 2007, you’re still a fan of a company that might not even exist without the rise of Hulkamania. I know WWE likes to whitewash history and make it sound like every other promotion existed in bingo halls and high school gymnasiums, but that’s not the case. Hulk Hogan had to be huge for Vince McMahon to be a success and for the WWF to rise and there was nothing like Real American filling up an arena at that time.
Take care everyone. Also, RIP to Ozzy Osbourne. I could write so much more about him, but I’ll just say its amazing that the final Black Sabbath show with the original band was able to be done and he got to have that one final moment with the fans. Unlike Hogan, whose final TV appearance had him getting booed relentlessly, Ozzy went out on top. Enjoy these legends while they are around. None of them live forever. In many ways Hogan was the last connection we had to that early WrestleMania era and it wont stop with him. We almost lost Ric Flair 7 years ago, but he won’t be around forever. The Undertaker almost died a month ago with his heart running at just 30%. “Immortal” is just a gimmick.
For NODQ I’m Paul Matthews. Follow on X at @PlanetKayfabe