Hulk Hogan is gone — but everywhere
He may not have been a traditional athlete, but the late pro wrestler’s influence is pervasive.
I’m not sure where to put Hulk Hogan in the history of sports — or whether to put him in there at all.
Hogan, who died Thursday at age 71, could pull off exceptional athletic feats with his massive, sculpted, 6-foot-8 body. Still, a professional wrestler’s trade is — spoiler alert — entertainment, not pure competition.
And yet it’s impossible not to recognise wrestling’s evolution from regional circus to widespread cultural force. Today this is an accepted, well-trodden observation: sports, politics, and daily life are closer atmospherically to the wrestling ring than ever before.
We’ve become a nation of noisy confrontationalists, the skilful soft touch replaced by the swing of a folding chair. Reason is routinely drowned out by the loudest voices in the room. Wrestling strips life’s complications down to primal conflicts, and few wrestlers embodied this approach as famously — and forebodingly — as Hulk Hogan.
I’m not a wrestling obsessive. I’ve been a couple of times, that’s it. I still need to look up the correct spelling for Bruno Sammartino. But I know enough to know Hogan, born Terry Bollea, was a transformative figure, one of the most larger-than-life characters in a larger-than-life universe.
A true brand name, Hogan over time refashioned himself as a heel to hero to heel and everything in between. He had too many comebacks, collapses and professional detours to count. Celebritised and repeatedly scandalised, swapping places as poster boy and pariah, fired after getting caught on tape using racist slurs, a strange protagonist in a media crusade and even a convention speaker, he was controversial and omnipresent through the end.
He exploded on the scene in the early 1980s. A lot of people’s first exposure came when he appeared in the ring as “Thunderlips” (“The ultimate male!”) against Rocky Balboa in Rocky III, tossing Rock like a rag doll as a horrified Mickey and Adrian recoiled.
Going to Hollywood cost Bollea his job in the then- WWF. (They didn’t want him to do it.) But Hulk-a-mania only grew, and he returned. The fever reached the point he landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated, in April 1985, biceps flexed, hands clawed, a fictional barbarian at the gate.
Traditionalists howled. Pro wrestling wasn’t real sports! How could The Hulkster enter the same cathedral as Koufax, Ali, and Abdul-Jabbar?
I admit to harbouring the same feelings when I see pro wrestling events treated seriously by major sports outlets: We’re doing this … why?
Yet wrestling’s reach is indisputable, and Hogan’s timing in its ascension was impeccable. He hitched his career to its leap from localised product to global force, a handsome blonde agent of Vince McMahon’s aggressive growth strategy and a media ecosystem they cultivated better than most.
Hulk understood a very old-fashioned wrestling concept: To be seen, it’s better to be outrageous. To be heard, you need to be loud.
If it earns you love, great. But even if you are hated, you are still noticed. This kind of intentional performance — what wrestlers call a “work” — is routine in sports. Common is the athlete who arrives on the scene and makes noise to get attention, make a name, and make money. It’s pervasive in every profession now. The media used to be a necessary partner, but now the digital tools exist to do it on one’s own.
Influencers, business antagonists, media flamethrowers, the performative fray of social media, the exhausting not-very-real “reality” programming on television … there’s a little bit of wrestling in all of it.
I’m not sure the tools exist to turn the clock back. The appetite exists for relief, but I don’t know if there’s room anymore for subtlety, context or even expertise. The algorithms reward volume, and so does the culture. The rest of us are caught in the noise. Hulk Hogan is departed, but he remains among us.
The Wall Street Journal
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