Heroes, dead and otherwise
Terry Gene Bollea, better known as “Hulk” Hogan, was by all acounts a racist pig, a supporter of Fascism, and an all around asshole. He was also one of my childhood heroes, and I’m far from alone in that. He’s dead now, and I guess it is time to think about what it means to find out your heroes are monsters.
I grew up watching professional wrestling on VHS tapes rented from “Peach Video.” These were mostly old Wrestlemania tapes and compilations featuring multiple matches from a single performer. This is a strange way to consume wrestling, divorced from the context of time.
I was also a thrift store, yard sale, and flea market kid. I loved Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan, and I had their toys and pillows and whatever else I could find. I didn’t know Andre was already dead, I didn’t know any of the then current crop of wrestlers. I didn’t have cable to watch RAW on USA.
But I lived in Georgia, and that meant I could get TBS over the air, and that meant I could watch WCW Saturday Night, and eventually I could get some current WCW pay-per-views on VHS, and I could go to the Georgia Dome (remember the Georgia Dome?) and watch Nitro live at least a few times a year.
So I did, starting in early 1996. I watched in horror as Hogan turned on Sting and Luger to join the NWO. I had a new hero and a new villain, and more anger than a young kid could handle. This was good training.
As I grew older, and learned more about wrestling, about Kayfabe, and about the role Hogan had played in shaping that NWO storyline, I learned to forgive him. I respected him, even. This was a mistake, but I was still young.
I drifted away from wrestling, and didn’t keep up with Hogan. I heard, vaguely, that he’d been embroiled in scandle. I heard less vaguely that he, with financial support from Peter Thiel, bankrupted Gawker. I heard tapes of the man slinging racial slurs. I gave up on Hogan and I wrote of wrestling as a misguided childhood obsession.
Over the last few years, I have begun revisting those broadcasts from my childhood, and with increasing regularity also watching modern wrestling. It turns out, I really love wrestling.
A lot of the broadcasts that I cherished from that era are hard to watch today. Many of my childhood heroes were dead or permanently disabled as a result of what happened in those matches. (I’m not going to talk about Chris Benoit today, but I really can’t watch any match he’s involved in.) But Hogan? As much as I hate to admit it, he’s fucking dynamite. He was an electric performer, and such a hateable heel that I started to respect him again.
I read that he’d appologized, and it seemed like most of the industry was still willing to deal with him. As a result, I was getting ready to consider giving Hogan a re-evaluation. Then he walked out on stage in support of Donald Trump. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Kayfabe was central to Trump’s rise to power. He learned to be a celebrity from the WWF, of course Hogan would endorse him.
I read his so-called apology. I watched some interviews. I tried to make sense of his choices and behaviors. There was no sense to make. And so, I found myself forced to really contend with the fact that this guy who was critical to a thing I loved, central to it, was an irredeemable monster. (This was a central theme of the last 10 years, if we’re being honest.)
Terry Gene Bollea is dead. Hulk Hogan was a character he played. I’ve missed The Hulkster for decades, but I won’t miss Terry.
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