Hulkmania has been raging my entire life.
It’s rare for an entertainer to stay relevant as long as Hulk Hogan has—let alone for reasons as diverse as the wrestler-turned-reality-star-turned-sex-tape-scandal-turned-digital-media-destroyer-turned-MAGA-political-figure.
Terry G. Bollea, whose bleach blonde hair and handlebar mustache helped him become famous as Hulk Hogan, died Thursday at age 71.
I spent my childhood watching him as the WWE’s most famous wrestler and in cheesy-as-hell films like Mr. Nanny, which I forced my poor hard-working parents to spend money on so I could watch. In college, I had no shame about poisoning my brain by watching his reality series Hogan Knows Best, which reinvented him as a family man and doting dad of an aspiring pop star. (Did I purchase Brooke Hogan’s first single on iTunes? No comment.)
One of my early big traffic hits as a reporter for The Daily Beast came when I covered Hogan’s leaked sex tape, in which he’s heard using racial slurs. It never ceased feeling surreal that, for weeks, I was being paid to watch a wrestler from my childhood have sex on video, on a massive computer that anyone who walked past my cubicle could see. Even more surreal was the realization that happened later: This man’s gross sex tape that I had watched dozens of times is what brought down Gawker, my beloved snarky digital media darling that defined my early career goals.
It’s wild that, over the course of my life, I really never stopped thinking about Hulk Hogan. He sort of found a way back into the spotlight and, therefore, my consciousness at the most random times and most random ways.
Case in point: One of the last times Hogan made headlines. In 2024, he electrified the crowd at the Republican National Convention, during which he endorsed Donald Trump. It wasn’t really a reinvention as much as it was a return and a resurgence: While Hogan had never been overtly political and in the past had supported both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, performatively reviving the ’80s and ’90s wrestling showmanship and “Hulk Hogan” character to delight and entertain the MAGA crowd did seem like a last gasp for relevance.
He once again sported a bandana over his blindingly white hair, with a pair of sunglasses perched on top. The handlebar mustache was glistening, as was his fake tan. Every word of the speech was bellowed. He called Donald Trump a “hero” who was going to bring “America back together, one real American at a time.”
The climax was a move pulled straight from his wrestling days. He ripped off his suit jacket and his search, tearing it half to reveal a Trump and J.D. Vance tank top underneath. The audience lost its collective mind.
He was a celebrity that found a way to tweak his unmistakable persona in different ways to be forever consequential. Whether in a wrestling ring, on reality TV, in the sex tape that I’m still traumatized from watching, or on a political stage, he was a showman. The mark of a great entertainer is opportunism—knowing when you might fit into a cultural moment and seizing that opportunity.
As that MAGA speech proved, Hogan was a showman to the end.
