Originally written August 2nd, 2025
Hulk Hogan died on July 24th, 2025.
My first conversation after Hulk Hogan died was with my barber, which feels appropriately throwbacky to a time when Hogan was truly relevant. I don’t know much about my barber as a person, just enough to be confident our politics don’t line up. He defended serial sex criminal Vince McMahon with the old athlete-endorsed canard of “if you never started your own business, you don’t have the right to criticize him.” The “writers can only write what they know” logic that Stephen King debunked more than 40 years ago. But when I asked how he felt about Hogan’s passing, my barber’s first thought was “I’m surprised he died before Ric Flair.” Even in his own death, Hogan was an afterthought.
Growing up, I was not a Hulk Hogan fan. Randy Savage was brighter, Roddy Piper funnier, Jake Roberts more interesting, the Ultimate Warrior louder, the Undertaker more mysterious. But I didn’t need to be a Hogan fan to know he was necessary for pro wrestling to function, the same way no one likes wasps but understands we need them if we want the flowers to bloom. As a pro wrestler, Hulk Hogan was entirely necessary for a healthy and functional ecosystem.
I was also never a fan of The Apprentice, the show that effectively normalized Donald Trump. More on that in a minute.
Hulk Hogan was and probably still is the biggest star pro wrestling ever created. He was synonymous with the entire industry, the Kleenex or Xerox of the whole affair. If you ask your mother what she knows about wrestling, she’s going to say Hulk Hogan. For over twenty years, from his appearance in Rocky III to his Wrestlemania 18 match against the Rock where he turned an entire crowd against the biggest star of the Attitude Era, Hulk Hogan was wrestling.
Outside of wrestling, the best word to describe Hogan is unnecessary. He wanted to be a movie star, but his movies never caught on. He had less stage presence than Arnold Schwarzenegger, so it’s no surprise that Santa With Muscles, a Hulk Hogan star vehicle, made effectively zero dollars at the box office, while Jingle All the Way came out that same year and made over one hundred million dollars. Hogan’s television show Thunder in Paradise, the definition of a vanity project, was a pale imitation of Baywatch. Baywatch may have been stupid but it was relevant to the zeitgeist, which will never be said of Hogan’s … beach cop speedboat show? Hogan opened a pasta restaurant that failed while actual movie stars made Planet Hollywood. Imagine the hubris, thinking that a sit down eatery built around a food that latchkey kids can be trusted to make by themselves when their parents work late, would work. Pasta in the commercial sense is the most unnecessary carbohydrate. Surely someone is doing it well, but Hulk Hogan sure as hell wasn’t.
Hogan is legendary within the wrestling industry for his selfishness and short-sightedness. “That doesn’t work for me, brother” is a common quote among terminally online wrestling fans, a line attributed to Hogan shooting down any idea that didn’t revolve around him dropping the leg and winning. He famously snitched out unionizing WWF wrestlers in the 80s, crippled the finances and creative direction of WCW in the 90s, tried to make the fledgling TNA Wrestling company revolve around him to zero acclaim in the 00s. He ruined a year long blockbuster NWO storyline by refusing to look weak when conquering hero Sting finally came for revenge. Hell, the entire concept of the New World Order went from being gangsta rap coded (which would have been problematic for other reasons) to biker coded because Hogan liked motorcycles and not Tupac.
When Hogan walked out at the Republican National Convention and ripped his shirt to support Donald Trump, I was embarrassed. Being a wrestling fan in general is an invitation to be embarrassed. No one cares if you say it’s soap opera for men or point out the frankly absurd athleticism of the wrestlers. “It’s fake” is still an unkillable insult. Wrestling is, and has been for my entire lifetime, an unnecessary aspect of pop culture. Watching Hogan, the vanguard of the sport, support the cringiest and most criminal president we’ve ever had, was a reminder that this is what people see when they see wrestling. They see embarrassing men acting silly for no explainable reason.
The explainable reason Hogan supported Trump (aside from being old, rich, and white, which is usually enough) is the rage at not being the center of attention. The monoculture is dead. There will never be another finale of M*A*S*H capturing most of the viewing audience. Even the NFL, probably the last vestige of a national entertainment, is scrambling. One doesn’t have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to look at the chaste handholding of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, the other last national entertainer, and see an arranged marriage. It’s as though the sun is dying and pop culture is trying to sustain itself by smashing Venus and Mercury together. So Hogan, hurt at no longer being the center of his small universe, lashed out at the world that was moving on. The politics of spite. You won’t love me? I’ll destroy you rather than let you love another.
This is the world of Donald Trump as well. Every newspaper in America wanted to talk to him in the 80s and 90s. Now newspapers barely exist. He was on one of the biggest shows of network TV, and then network TV stopped being relevant. He was and is the darling of cable news, which doesn’t have to look far down the road to see the cliff. The common thought of why Trump wanted to run for the presidency in the first place was to stay out of jail, but it’s just as likely that he wanted to be in the last place that still counts as the center of attention. Being so afraid of being unnecessary that he’d take down the entire country to be relevant. And every hasbeen, reject, faded star is trying to get one last bit of the public eye by being near him.
Hulk Hogan is dead now. His final moment in the spotlight was being booed by a WWE crowd that was tired of endless one-last-rides, one last pop, one last appearance. Maybe they were tired of his politics, or his selfishness. Maybe they were just tired of him insisting he was necessary when he clearly wasn’t. We won’t talk about his death like we do Chris Benoit, a monster who taught us the dangers of brain injuries, or Eddie Guerrero, a cautionary tale about steroids and normal people chasing unattainable physical perfection. No, when we think of Hogan, we’ll think of ancient memories in smoky arenas and maybe a silly old man doing his act in front of fascists for their meaningless cheers. We’ll think of a man who catered to Nazis and morons rather than suffering the indignity of a private life. We’ll think of someone who was the vanguard of an art form that was never truly necessary and whose disappearance from the stage won’t ripple even in the tiny pond he created.
