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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HULK HOGAN WAS A VERY BAD MAN  
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Carl Beijer
July 26, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Hulk Hogan, who died this week at age 71, was the most important
professional wrestler who ever lived. He was also a terrible human
being. _

Hulk Hogan takes the stage during a campaign rally for Donald Trump
at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on October 27, 2024., (Anna
Moneymaker / Getty Images)

 

Hulk Hogan, an absolute trainwreck of a human being and the most
important professional wrestler who ever lived, has died at
seventy-one. Let’s get that second part out of the way, because
while most of the world knows that it’s true, actual wrestling fans
are often in complete denial about it. And Hogan, of course, is
entirely to blame: he’s spent the last several decades begging
anyone who would pay attention to flush a legacy he dropped into the
toilet.

And that’s where his legacy will remain, too big to flush and too
disgusting to leave anywhere else. From a technical standpoint Hogan
was a mediocre wrestler, a man who only had a dozen moves in the ring
but who always made them work. At the height of his career he was an
avalanche of cocaine-fueled charisma on the mic, but over time his
promos devolved into a dull rehearsal of shoehorned catchphrases.
Hogan’s schtick was a perfect fit for the cartoonish wrestling
culture of the 1980s and ’90s, and he pulled off an impressive heel
turn for a few years after that, but by the end of the Bush era he had
devolved entirely into an anachronistic nostalgia act.

Still, to this day Hulk Hogan remains one of the most recognized names
on the planet. In the ’80s, he almost single-handedly elevated
professional wrestling from a regional curiosity that toured in high
school gyms and county fairs to a global multimillion (eventually
billion) dollar industry. Hogan competed with the Pope to pack more
people into stadiums. He had his own cartoon, his own live action
show, and his own movies. He was an A-list celebrity at a time when
other first-tier wrestlers might struggle to sell tickets in their own
hometown. Ric Flair was a more accomplished wrestler, Dusty Rhodes was
better on the mic, and Andre the Giant was a more impressive athlete
— but Hogan was the man who made wrestling what it is.

He was also, by all accounts and evidence, an absolutely pathetic and
reprehensible human being. His great moment of infamy, of course, will
always be his notorious “racism” tape where he, well, told the
world that he is a racist. That incident got him temporarily shunned
from the WWE and kicked out of its Hall of Fame until professional
wrestling’s other great villain, Vince McMahon, welcomed him back.
The fans never did. In Hogan’s last appearance on televised
wrestling earlier this year he was booed
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But racism isn’t all that destroyed Hogan’s legacy. Over the
years, memoirs and leaked recollections from the locker room revealed
a side of his career that had always been hidden from the public. He
was a ruthless, self-absorbed careerist who constantly “went into
business for himself” — industry parlance for wrestlers who
promote their own brands at the expense of everyone else in the
promotion. Hogan repeatedly shot down dream matches against opponents
he thought were beneath him, like Jake “The Snake” Roberts and
Bret “The Hitman” Hart. He insisted on winning titles even when he
had no interest in defending them in matches. He faked an injury in an
attempt to smear WWE legend The Undertaker as an unsafe wrestler. And
when opponents floated matches or storyline developments that made him
look like anything less than an invincible, virtuous superhero he
always came back with the same go-to line: “That doesn’t work for
me, brother.”

Hogan also exposed himself over the years as a compulsive liar.
Historically, professional wrestlers have always_ _been liars; their
entire job is to blur the line between fiction and reality, and to
present themselves to the public as larger than life. But Hogan
didn’t just lie for the sake of entertainment; often he just lied
for the sake of lying. And over the years, the lies devolved into
increasingly absurd and childish “my uncle works at
Nintendo”–style lies. Hogan claimed to be recruited by multiple
baseball teams, by Metallica and the Rolling Stones, and_ _by Darren
Aronofksy to play the lead in _The Wrestler_. He claimed that Mike
Tyson was too afraid to fight him. He told lies about dying children
and dying colleagues; in my favorite lie, he claimed to have crossed
time zones so often that he somehow worked four hundred days in a
single year. Some might say that it was hard to tell fact from fiction
with Hogan, but that isn’t really true: it was extremely easy. All
you had to do was assume that he was always lying.

From here things only get worse. Hulk Hogan is a snitch
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he, personally, is why professional wrestlers have never been able to
form a union. Hulk Hogan is why we lost Gawker
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served as the tip of the spear for the Paypal Mafia’s aggressive
media ambitions. And in one of his final public acts
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Hulk Hogan endorsed Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National
Convention.

Hogan gave wrestling fans a handful of genuinely iconic moments in the
ring, and he also made our world significantly worse. His 1990 feud
against John “Earthquake” Tenta taught me to stand up to bullies.
He claimed to have found Jesus like a dozen different times throughout
his career, so maybe he made it into Heaven. But Hulk Hogan is a liar,
so I guess we’ll never know.

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Carl Beijer is a writer at carlbeijer.com
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* pro wrestling
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* union busting
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* Peter Thiel
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* Donald Trump
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* Hulk Hogan
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* WWE
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