In a way it is classic Hulk Hogan – stealing the shine off younger, more deserving talent.  I had originally intended to write this week’s column about the positive state of women’s wrestling following WWE’s second Evolution pay-per-view (like a Twitter user who refuses to call it X, I refuse to call them “premium live events”).  The day before, AEW had billed its Toni Storm versus Mercedes Moné main event as the biggest women’s wrestling match of all time and featured its own stellar cast of female performers in the All In women’s Casino Gauntlet match at the same event.  There was lots to talk about.  I also wanted to talk about the sweet relief All In brought to AEW fans as Hangman Adam Page finally ended the dire and dull Moxley era and liberated the AEW world title from the Death Riders’ dirty briefcase.  How it’s an exciting new chapter in the AEW story and I’m looking forward to the ride that leads us to August’s Forbidden Door PPV (and yes, of course I’m going!)

But then Hulk Hogan died and anything else in wrestling felt somehow less pressing than acknowledging the complicated feelings most wrestling fans were having trying to process the death of a childhood hero who had, ultimately, become the living definition of the very opposite of a hero.  In fact, he always had been far from heroic.  Bobby Heenan was right all along: Hulk Hogan was a bad person.  A legitimately bad person.  A racist, a loud and active supporter of Donald Trump, a man accused of domestic abuse, a union buster, a selfish in-ring and behind the scenes politician who always put himself first and the business, and his fellow wrestlers, last.  My wife told me the news – the alert coming up on her phone – and despite all the known awfulness surrounding Hulk Hogan (oh the glee I had felt watching him get booed out of the building earlier this year at the Raw debut on Netflix!) I still felt sad to hear it.  Another part of my childhood gone.  Another “larger than life” character shown to be very much as limited by mortality as anybody else.

Because despite hating Hulk Hogan intellectually and even emotionally for most of my adult life, the semiotic propaganda game is strong in professional wrestling.  Those first triumphant chords of Rick Derringer’s “Real American” theme tune played out of an arena sound system will instinctively bring me back to being an excited ten year old watching wrestling for the very first time.  It’s the early nineties.  I haven’t seen a single match, but I already know who Hulk Hogan is.  I’ve seen his distinctive handlebar moustache, bright red or yellow bandana and torn vest popping up throughout pop culture even before Sky television brought the WWF to UK shores.  Then, when they do, he’s all over the place.  The face of this new American phenomenon, draped in the stars and stripes, as muscular as Superman; a real life comic book hero.  He even has the same name as the green guy from Marvel who is my favourite.  

The first wrestling event I ever see is a few matches of SummerSlam ’91.  I’m told to go to bed before the main event match featuring Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior against Sgt Slaughter, General Adnan and Colonel Mustafa, but Hogan’s aura is all over the undercard – and Sky’s commercials for the event – as commentators get us ready for the grand finale to the show and I lie in my hotel bedroom (we didn’t have Sky at home) thinking about what I’d seen (Ted Dibiase, The Big Boss Man, Bret Hart, Mr Perfect) and also wondering about the things I hadn’t (Hogan) and wishing I could have stayed up longer.  Then, by the following spring, the first full PPV of my life is WrestleMania VIII and it’s the first time I hear that Derringer music.  Hogan versus Sid Justice.  My skin rises in gooseflesh.  It’s happening…

You’d expect me to say that I fell in love with Hogan as a wrestler that day, but anyone who’s seen the match would know that would be unlikely.  Hence why I say the semiotic propaganda game is strong in professional wrestling.  If anything, finally seeing Hogan wrestle destroyed the mystique that had been building in my head.  The match was disappointing.  Far less entertaining than the earlier title match between Ric Flair and Randy Savage, or even the undercard Intercontinental classic between Bret Hart and Roddy Piper.  I enjoyed the drama of Hogan shaking himself awake from the destruction of a Sycho Sid powerbomb, but I enjoyed the save made later by the Ultimate Warrior far more.  I was intrigued by this Papa Shango fella too, dressed like a voodoo priest, who had caused the need for the Warrior’s run-in.  Hell, I was even more interested in the storyline of why exactly Sid had turned on Hogan than I was on the rather predictable idea of Hogan’s retribution.  But I’d been sold the idea of Hogan’s importance by WWE, and the world, for so long that despite all of this his music excited me and I was rooting for him throughout the boring match with Sid.  WrestleMania ended and I looked forward to seeing more.  After all, Mania was synonymous with the Hulkster.  At the small video library in my little West Midlands village, the shelves displayed the previous seven efforts prominently and Hulk Hogan’s face was plastered all over the electric blue and purple boxes.  Hulk Hogan was professional wrestling.  

When I watched WrestleMania VII a few months later at a friend’s house, despite finding the Hogan/Slaughter main event one of the worst matches on the card (and the storyline objectionable, even then) I still wanted to believe in the idea of Hulk Hogan as he posed off with his belt at the end.  Again – the music did a lot of heavy lifting.  Hogan had been a disappointment the two times I had actually seen him wrestle.  But as a dual US/UK citizen always wondering about the American side of his heritage I was being sold the idea of Hogan as Americana.  To not like the Hulkster would be like somehow rejecting America.  I had yet to discover punk and become politically awakened enough to realise that it’s ok to reject America, or any country.  In fact, it might even sometimes be necessary.

Cognitive dissonance was there from the start, and stayed as I made my way through all the previous Manias and SummerSlams, Survivor Series and Royal Rumbles.  I remember thinking how old Hulk Hogan looked.  How I didn’t quite understand the baldness and old man moustache in the context of this guy being sold to me as some young and supposedly enviable superstar.  I thought his punches and kicks looked hokey and fake compared with other wrestlers I was watching.  His finishing move, the legdrop, looked weak.  I’d already seen others do it better in the middle of their matches and didn’t understand why one of those mid-match moves, when done by Hogan, would lead to a three-count?  While I enjoyed the “hulking up” pantomime as much as anyone, it was also the dumbest and fakest thing I’d seen in wrestling, and the face Hulk made as he shook his head and pointed his finger at his opponent made me laugh rather than feel like I was watching something cool.  An old looking man puffing out his cheeks and simply deciding he wasn’t going to pretend his opponent’s fake moves hurt anymore broke the illusion other wrestlers managed to maintain all the way to the end of their matches.  The shirt-ripping was cool, but the more I saw him do it the more I realised the shirt must be gimmicked and pre-torn, and that rather than being a spontaneous show of legitimate rage and intention, it was just a well-rehearsed piece of fluff to sell t-shirts.

Basically, I watched my first handful of Hulk Hogan matches trying to square what I was actually seeing with the idea of Hogan I had built up in my mind and found it difficult to parse reality with fiction.  Like the crowds who watched the Emperor parade naked in his supposed “new clothes” but didn’t say anything, I got pulled along with the narrative and the marketing to pay lip-service at first to the idea that I liked Hogan and thought he was good, even as I knew in my heart that I much preferred the more athletic and realistic wrestlers on every card they shared with the Hulkster.  Even when it came to the big lugs in the main event, I was an Ultimate Warrior guy, not a Hulk guy.  Then, when I finally got Sky and became a full-time viewer of the product, it was 1993, and with a flash of a fireball from a Japanese photographer’s camera at King of the Ring, Hogan was gone.  It was time for a New Generation of superstars to take the reins and, to fans like me, a champion looked like a Bret Hart, a Shawn Michaels, a Diesel or a Steve Austin, not a steroid-abusing musclebound monster.  Hogan and his type were yesterday’s news.

Yet despite all this, Hogan was still coded in my head as professional wrestling.  He was synonymous with the thing.  His absence from WWE was seen as a lack of something, even for those of us who hated him and were enjoying where the product was heading without him.  When WCW brought him in it felt worryingly like they might even takeover the wrestling business and WWE might fall.  Certainly his presence there – even as he grew worse as an in-ring performer – legitimated the company in the eyes of viewing audiences.  It certainly made me give them a second look as a kid, intrigued about how the number two company seemed to be recruiting all the top stars from the number one place.  And when Hogan famously turned heel in 1996, even those of us who had no interest in watching another Hulk Hogan match in our lives couldn’t help but tune in to WCW and see what was going on.

All of which goes to say that, even though I am far from being a Hulk Hogan guy, the news of his death still felt like something that, as a wrestling fan, it was hard to ignore.  Even harder to process.  Because in the wrestling arena fucked up feelings about fucked up people is normal.  We boo, we cheer.  We also do a lot of intentional ignoring of problematic personal lives.  I don’t think I want to ever talk too much about politics to anyone in professional wrestling other than maybe Sami Zayn or Zack Sabre Jr.  Hogan’s Trumpism was worn on his sleeve (or, I guess his shirt – he didn’t have any sleeves), but I am sure there are a ton of active WWE and AEW performers who voted for Trump too.  How many conspiracy theory nuts are in our wrestling locker rooms?  How many anti-vaxxers?  How many racists?  Homophobes?  Transphobes?  Domestic abusers?  This is not an attempt to whattabout critics of Hogan (I am his critic too), but an attempt to remind ourselves that in many of the showbusiness and escapist things we enjoy there are probably a lot of things we don’t want to know too much about if we dug a little deeper into the personal lives of our heroes.  Because Hulk Hogan was such an iconic public figure, we know everything about his ugly side too.  He used his public platform to amplify his stupidity and awful thoughts.  But, besides the level of his crossover fame, he is probably not much of an outlier in a business not exactly known for its radical leftwing politics.  For example, Hogan may have stopped wrestlers from unionizing once upon a time, but in the decades since, who has been stopping the wrestlers from forming a union?  

Most people are complicated.  I know when my own parents died, I had complicated feelings about both of them which made the grief more difficult.  Issues that remained unresolved and, at the point of their departure, would now be impossible to ever put right.  I loved them both dearly, but at times had hated them both.  I loved them, but still had those old wounds, unhealed, to deal with when they died.  In the end, I turned the conflict into music.  Wrote and recorded my first ever attempt at solo songs – a concept album called 86 which tried to put into words the anger, the love, the confusion, the sadness.  It was cathartic.  Most importantly I tried to put myself into my parents’ shoes on some of the songs.  Understand what made them who they were and not just blame them for everything.  Because when I got the phone-call from a stranger telling me my father had died, or when the doctor told us my mother’s cancer was terminal, despite all the issues we had, and very real grievances, my first thought in each case was only of love, not hate.  My father’s death was sudden and unexpected, but my mother’s terminal diagnosis came at a time where we were not talking to each other.  All of that was forgotten when she told us she was in hospital.  It was no longer as important as just being there for her was.  Being there for my stepdad and my mom’s friends too.

In 2021, when Rush Limbaugh died, I remember getting an email from Alterative Tentacles Records with the headline “JELLO BIAFRA AND GSM DROPS LONG UNRELEASED GEM, “BLUNDER BLUBBER” TO CELEBRATE RUSH LIMBAUGH’S DEATH”  The copy of the text began “Woo Hoo! For once some good news: Rush Limbaugh is dead! Dead!! DEAD!!!” and I remember feeling sad for Jello that he felt the death of another human being – even one as monstrous as Limbaugh – was worth celebrating.  He did something similar again recently following the death of Jimmy Swaggart.  It made me think about the postcard I’d gotten from a Mark Thomas gig once, which I’d framed, of a mock up of a newspaper announcing the death of Margaret Thatcher.  The newspaper is on the floor, surrounded by the accoutrements of celebration – streamers, champagne bottles, etc.  I still have the postcard up on a shelf in my office.  It made me laugh at the time.  But I remember when Thatcher actually died (and yes, I bought “Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead” that week too in the hope it would reach number one) feeling bad when I thought about Thatcher’s family and friends, who had simply lost a loved one that day.  How awful it must feel to hear so many people gloating.  

Swaggart, Thatcher, Limbaugh, Hogan – all had their serious moral failings and impacted the lives of people in many negative ways, but I still wonder if celebrating their deaths rather than mourning them doesn’t make us more like the sort of terrible people they are rather than less like them?  As a prison abolitionist I guess I’ve just never been a great believer in the pointlessness of retributive punishment, even where the crime is undeniable.  I’ve always felt there are kinder ways of protecting ourselves from monsters than becoming monsters ourselves, and more effective ways of stopping future monsters than simply cheering when they die.  After all, history seems to show us that for every Thatcher that dies, a new one simply takes their place.  Even the death of Hitler – which certainly feels like a death worth celebrating – didn’t solve the problem of Nazism.  We still have the threat of right-wing extremists today, long after that asshole shot himself in a bunker.  The celebrations might feel cathartic and necessary, but they don’t address the real problem of what made these people the way they were – what made them do the things they did – and they don’t stop them happening again.  They only make us more callous as people.  Less nuanced and understanding.  Less forgiving.

Wrestling, though you might not know it from the basic image of constant battle, is all about nuanced character and forgivness; the possibility of change and redemption.  Any wrestler who stays with a company for an extended period of time goes – like WWE Hall of Famer, Ozzy Osbourne, another recent celebrity death – through changes.  Good guys become bad, or bad guys become good.  And wrestling audiences go along with the journey from face to heel and heel to face because we all understand that people are complicated and people can change.  That no one is a total lost cause.

Hulk Hogan was no doubt all of his worst aspects.  By all accounts he was not a nice guy.  But that is no cause to cheer for his death, as many seemed to do last week on social media.  

Call him out on his bullshit, don’t whitewash away the bad bits and pretend he was a saint, but when anyone dies we should be saddened that their story has come to an end, and all the more so when that story ends without them finding their redemption.  

Monsters, or even the merely bad and less-than-good, will still have friends and family who miss them.  Will still have sides of their character never seen by the general public which will be grieved by those who did see that part of them every day.  You don’t have to join in with the mourning and fawning, you don’t have to pretend they weren’t all the terrible things that they were, but when you start to dance on their grave it is perhaps time to start looking in the mirror and asking what exactly the values are that you believe the deceased was lacking that you – oh virtuous grave dancer – think you have.

I was never a Hogan guy, and I abhorred what I knew of Hogan as a person, but as an on-screen character in the crazy world of professional wrestling there was no denying his impact on the business and the way his branding was lasered into my mind at a young and impressionable age as the very definition of what pro-wrestling was.  For that reason, the news of his death felt like a loss, and there is no better tribute to the legacy that Hogan left behind than bumping the much better article I had planned for the literary equivalent of a past-his-prime old man clogging up the airspace with a lengthy routine of repeated weight-lifting poses performed to the strains of Rick Derringer.     

Until next time…

DaN McKee

www.everythingdanmckee.com

My book, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher, is available from Earth Island Books and wherever you get your reading material.

Don’t bother following me on social media – I’m trying to come off it as it’s killing us all.