Hulk Hogan died July 24, at the age of 71. The coverage of his death, which was voluminous, in mainstream, sports and wrestling media, was focused largely on Hogan’s massive legacy as a professional wrestler, and how it was in some ways sullied by his late-in-life controversies, most notably the 2015 incident when he was recorded making racist comments, which got him banished from WWE for a time.
How much or how little Hogan’s legacy was affected by the racism incident and the other controversies was perhaps the biggest topic of conversation in the days following his death.
For those of us who have followed wrestling and Hogan’s career, going back to the 1980s, it’s a familiar feeling. Because I don’t remember a time when Hulk Hogan wasn’t polarizing. And that’s regardless of whether he was playing a hero or villain in the ring, and far beyond the controversies that dominated the conversation after his death.
The story is well-known: Hogan starred in Rocky III in 1982 as villainous wrestler Thunderlips, which put him up on the map at a time when he was still working for the AWA. Vince McMahon brought him back to the then-WWF, where he quickly won the world championship from The Iron Sheik.
Hogan ended up holding the title for four years, through the Rock ’n’ Wrestling era, the launch of WrestleMania, and the WWF’s largest boom period to date. He played a musclebound, uncomplicated superhero, perfect for the Reagan Era, and he used his muscles to triumph over evil, much the same way his old friend Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were doing at the multiplex in those days.
His antagonists tended to be massive villains (Andre the Giant, Earthquake), foreign ones (The Iron Sheik), and sometimes both, although he had memorable feuds with the likes of “Macho Man” Randy Savage, “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig, and the Ultimate Warrior.
Crowds responded to Hogan like nothing ever before in wrestling. But their were hints of a backlash, even in the ‘80s. Wrestling purist types tended not to be big fans of Hogan’s act. The schtick — hulking up, pointing, the leg drop, and post-match muscle posing — was the same thing, over and over again, and a lot of wrestling fans noticed that after a while.
90s Downturn
When the calendar turned to the 1990s, Hogan lost the championship to the Ultimate Warrior, made a mostly failed run at movie stardom, and then got caught up in the steroid trial, when Hogan both served as the star witness against Vince McMahon and admitted in court that he had used steroids. This led the WWF to embrace smaller, less musclebound stars like Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels, and in 1993 the Hulkster was out of the company.
A couple of key things happened in 1994 and 1995: Hogan jumped to WCW, where he did essentially his old WWF act, including against many of the same opponents. Then, widespread consumer adoption of the Internet began, leading to the nascent Internet Wrestling Community (IWC).
Wrestling was one of the first things people argued about on the Internet, but one thing they didn’t argue about was that most of its denizens despised Hulk Hogan and were sick of his act. “I hate Hulk Hogan,” read the email signature of one leading denizen of the wrestling newsgroup RSPW. “So should you.”
NWO Run
Everyone knows what happened next: In one of the most shocking moments in wrestling history, Hogan turned heel, joined the NWO in the summer of 1996, and made it part of the hottest angle in wrestling at that time. It worked because it was something different, and even the skeptics were won over, at least for a time.
The problem was, the NWO angle also got stale before long. Just like the era of muscle posing, it was the same thing every time — Hogan and Co. attacking babyfaces during matches and spraypainting them with the NWO’s letters. Other than the first one, the most memorable Hogan matches of the NWO years were when he lost the title, first to Lex Luger and later to Goldberg:
WCW rode the NWO story almost to its grave, tossing Hogan overboard along the way. And then, Hogan jumped back to the now-WWE in 2022, leading to his famous WrestleMania match with The Rock at WrestleMania 18. Hogan, ostensibly the heel in the match, did his old “hulking up” routine, leading to one of the greatest crowd reactions in wrestling history:
Rest in Peace, Terry Bollea aka The Immortal Hulk Hogan 🕊️💐
To millions of little kids you were a childhood hero – myself included.
In 1984, I gave you your “HULKSTER” headband back, in the locker room in Madison Square Garden – I was the lucky kid caught it when you threw it… pic.twitter.com/6kl67EZ8g1— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) July 25, 2025
It was a fantastic moment of nostalgia, and one of the most memorable WrestleMania moments of all. But let’s be clear about what it was: A brief, fleeting recapturing of the old feeling, rather than anything sustainable. Hogan’s subsequent return to his red-and-yellow face character didn’t really recreate the old days.
Then Hogan, like almost every other wrestler who didn’t die young, hung on too long, making a forgettable run in TNA and other secondary federations.
Tarnished Legacy
In the ensuing years, with Hogan mostly out of the ring, his reputation didn’t improve. When he was in the news, it was usually about the sex tape with his friend’s wife, the racism, tales of unsavory backstage politicking, or Hogan’s well-established penchant for telling ridiculous tall tales. If he wasn’t talking about lifting Andre the Giant up over his head, or Andre dying a few days later, he was claiming Metallica wanted him to be their bass player, or alleging that he was offered the George Foreman Grill before Foreman was.
Wrestling is just about the most well-documented thing on earth, and just about every wrestling figure of consequence has written a memoir, if they haven’t hosted a podcast. There have been about a billion documentaries, authorized by WWE and not, which have revisited most of Hogan’s more unsavory stories over and over again, whether it was the steroids, the sex tape, the Gawker suit, the wearing a do-rag to court, or dozens of other things.
Hogan, infamously, made his final WWE appearance in January, for the first-ever episode of RAW on Netflix, where the crowd booed him heavily. There has been discussion over why — was it because of the racism? Because he was there to shill for a beer company? Or because a crowd in 2025 didn’t especially care about a guy whose heyday was 40 years earlier?
There are people who can’t get over Hogan’s late-in-life MAGA advocacy, and others, who worked for or read Gawker, who can’t ever forgive him and Peter Thiel for destroying that publication. And the racism episode, more than anything else, ruined Hogan permanently for a lot of people.
And some will, and have, argued that Hulk Hogan was such a transcendent talent that none of the above should matter. We’re going to continue having that argument. And whenever Ric Flair goes, and when Vince McMahon does, we get to do this all over again.
