The Mad Lies of Hulk Hogan

With a less truthful biography than Kim Jong-il

This week, the world learned of the existence of a Hulk Hogan sex tape, which raises a lot of questions. Will Mean Gene be at bedside, mic in hand, for an incomprehensible, pre-fuck promo? Will a spent Hulkster overcome the penile refractory period by hulking up? And will he finish by dropping the big leg on her tits? For me, I found myself wondering what if, instead, it had been a Brooke Hogan sex tape (answer: my balls would have ended up in a sling), and secondly, what shape would this story take over the years that follow. You see, Hulk Hogan is the king of crazy exaggerations and outright lies. “It was a foursome with three triplets, brother. One of each colour,” he’d say, “and inbetween thrusts, Brutus ‘The Barber’ Beefcake did pull-ups off my 24 inch python.”

In the sleazy, scuzzy sphere of professional wrestling, there’s none more carny than the Hulkster. Old wrestlers come from a world where there’s no such thing as a lie, just a “work,” where the faces and heels would change in separate dressing rooms, and onscreen personas had to be maintained on the street, to keep up the illusion and protect the business. Consequently they live entirely in fantasy kingdoms of their own making, where the truth is whatever version of the facts is coming out of their mouth at that given moment, repainting incidents from the past like dinosaur hunters crushing prehistoric butterflies beneath their heel. Roddy Piper’s autobiography reads like Alice in Wonderland when compared to verifiable history, and Hogan’s is even worse. While we’re going to get into the outright crazy stuff, a lot of it comes across like a cry for help from a man who simply can’t stop making shit up, like claiming to have won his first world title at Wrestlemania I, which is easily disproved by anyone with access to Google. Of all the insane fantasists in pro wrestling, Hogan is the one most tangled in a web of exaggerations and untruths, stumbling from one outright whopper to the next on his frequent media appearances, and like a bigamist who knows it’s a wife’s birthday, but not which one, he just cannot keep all those lies straight.

Old wrestlers are grown-up versions of those kids from junior school who went on holiday to Florida and saw Ghostbusters 3 and 4, and whose dad was in the SAS and let them shoot his government-issue Uzi in the garden at weekends. But when you went over to their house for tea, the jet-bike they kept bragging about was always suspiciously missing because it was “getting repaired.” With that in mind, let’s examine the mad lies of this confused, orange Walter Mitty.

If there’s one thing Hulk Hogan understands, it’s that for true longevity, you need to weave yourself into the fabric of history. For example, Elvis was a huge fan when Hulk was working in Memphis, and would regularly go to see him wrestle. Hogan debuted in ’79, the King died in ’77.

During one interview, he made a point to stamp out all those incorrect stories of him being romantically linked with Dolly Parton. And Pamela Anderson. Oh, and Drew Barrymore and Brooke Shields. Actually, rumour-killing is a great idea. While I’ve got your attention, I just went to put the record straight and say that all that stuff you might have heard about me ruining Jennifer Lawrence with my Pringles-can of a nob is hearsay at best. But back to Hogan, and I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if the girl in the sex-tape just ‘becomes’ Marilyn Monroe or Megan Fox when the story gets retold on a radio show in a couple of years.

Maybe all these celebrity affairs were at the root of his divorce problems. So heavy weighed the depression of that fallout with his wife, that one night, Hogan was sat on the bed holding a pistol to his head. Just as his finger tightened around the trigger, the phone rang. It was Muhammad Ali’s daughter, inadvertently saving his life. Fate, no? This tall tale is a weird inverse take on another popular Hogan trope; having sat next to Kerry Von Erich on a flight from LA to Japan, talking the whole way there, three days before Kerry killed himself (Neither guy was in Japan that week). Or, how Chris Kanyon would call him up all the time, opening up about how tormented and confused he was about how his sexuality, before he too took his own life. Hogan was also the one to personally tell Bret Hart that his brother Owen had died.

My favourite brush-with-fame fable is the story of Hogan partying in LA after Wrestlemania II. He’s such a wildman that nobody could keep up with him, not even noted partier John Belushi, who was there with the Hulkster that night. Such was Belushi’s struggle to match him drink (and whatever else) for drink, that Hogan kicked him out, which was a little unfair considering that in 1986, when this happened, Belushi had been dead for four years.

Purely through being a big dude who came through that crazy-tough oldschool system, it’s actually true to say that back in the day, Hogan was a guy who could legitimately handle himself. His leg was deliberately snapped during his first training session, and anyone who could survive in the old territory system was probably a bad-arse, but as the years go on, the Hulkster’s been attempting to retroactively paint himself as somewhat of a Count Dante figure.

According to Hogan, at one point there was a proposed PPV match on the table, between him and an in-his-prime Mike Tyson. Unfortunately, this fell apart before the contracts could be signed, because Tyson was terrified that Hogan would shoot on him. (For non-wrestling nerds, shooting is deviating from the script to hurt someone for real). While it’s sad that this dream match never took place, thankfully the charity boxing match between him and George Foreman did, with Hogan describing in his own book how he stood toe-to-toe with the heavyweight champ, before being hit so hard that his legs went numb. When I say “did” I mean there are no records or evidence of this ever having taken place.

Notorious in the early nineties for casually telling the hosts of cosy, British, mid-morning talkshows that it was all fake, the Hulkster was lucky to have his Japanese career to fall back on for tales of it all being totally for reals. His Japanese debut against Riki Choshu turned into a shoot — won by Hogan in 2 minutes, just to prove a point — as did a match against Tatsumi Fujinami, and when the Hulk faced jumbo-jawed champ Antonio Inoki, he beat him so bad that Inoki actually died in the ring. Thankfully, Inoki was revived with CPR, but Hogan couldn’t leave Japan for a while, as the fans and the Japanese mafia wanted him dead. It’s not surprising he couldn’t stop murdering people, as he didn’t even know wrestling was fake until his very first match. He’d been training for real fights, brother.

In recent years, he’s claimed to have taken down and choked out a Hell’s Angel who “gave him a dirty look,” just like he did to Richard Belzer. And then, in something you can actually find if you Google for it, he left a threatening message on the voicemail of a nineteen-year-old musician who’d been hitting on his daughter claiming that he was “messing with Hulkamania,” and that he’d send the Hell’s Angels to break his legs.

Going back to Japan for a second, the pinnacle of Hulk Hogan’s claims at being the World’s Toughest Man are his recent admissions to having fought for real over in Japan for the Pride Fighting Championships. In the seventies. Maybe he was there, a mere couple of decades before Pride (est. 1997) existed, kicking a three-week-old Mirco Cro Cop around the ring, but it actually doesn’t matter, because MMA is all fake anyway. Hogan used to think it was real, until he got chatting with the UFC’s Randy Couture, who smartened him up to how it’s all just pretend.

Let’s start with a quote from a Rolling Stone interview.

“I’d go into the ring with a razor blade in my mouth, cut my head, cut the referee, cut the other wrestler and later on, drink beer all night with it still in my mouth.”

The wrestling business itself is possibly where the lies get the most outrageous. This is the Hulkster’s house, and it was built on the largest back in the world. He claims to have made, and wasted, hundreds of millions of dollars. Ever the innovator, he was the first ever wrestler to have entrance music (he wasn’t), and invented the concept of merchandise (he didn’t). Back in the day, he worked 400 nights a year. Yeah, you ‘eard. 400 nights a year. See, he flew so much, doing one show in NY before flying over to Japan, and then back again, that because of all the time difference, his years were 400 days long. It’s no wonder he sweated so profusely that Vince McMahon had to buy ten replacement WWF championship belts every month, which works out at roughly six hundred belts during his WWF career.

While we’ve established that he’s terrible with dates, his claim on ‘Hogan Knows Best’ that the Undertaker dropped him on his head in 1974 takes some beating. Maybe it happened in Pride, when Taker was nine years old. It’s possible, right?

Hogan also sold out Wembley Stadium at Summerslam 92, despite not actually being there. Incidentally, this is the same show where he looked out into the mass of 83,555 fans for the terminally ill child he’d invited to watch, only to see an empty chair forlornly staring back at him. Later told that the boy had died just before the show (the show Hogan wasn’t at either), he was moved to pen the song ‘Hulkster in Heaven’, donating the proceeds of the album to the child’s family. Although when Jamie Bulger was murdered, Hogan was back on the British talkshow circuit and decided that ‘Hulkster in Heaven’ had been written for him instead.

For all his myriad accomplishments, Hulk Hogan is the greatest nearly-man there ever was. Lars Ulrich wanted him to join Metallica as their new bass player, and at one point he almost joined the Rolling Stones. And then there’s the George Foreman grill. One day, he heard the phone ringing, but didn’t get across the room to pick it up in time. So, rather than going through his agent, or calling back later, the grill people immediately called George Foreman instead, and offered it to him, because that’s how that stuff works I guess.

The reason that mainstream movie success always eluded him is that in his early twenties, Hogan was blackballed from Hollywood after rebuffing the advances of a gay movie producer. Not that his movies weren’t successful, of course, as the likes of Santa with Muscles and Mr. Nanny all made $30-40m (lol no), with each of their scripts being rewritten by him because they weren’t any good. Although due to Writer’s Guild rules, he was robbed of his credits. He turned down the Little John role in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and the lead in a crime thriller opposite Pamela Anderson, who was to be his love interest, but the biggest should-have goes to Oscar nominated film The Wrestler. Three times, the Hulkster was sent the script by director Darren Aronofsky, begging him to take the role that had been written with him in mind, and three times he said no. Randy the Ram was entirely based on Hogan, as you can tell with his blond hair, usage of the word ‘brother’, and that deleted scene where he rubs suntan lotion right between the cracks of his daughter’s arse.

The famous match between Hogan and Andre the Giant at Wrestlemania III, something already spoken of (and rightly so) in mythic tones, is Hogan’s personal Pinocchio nose, wildly expanding like nocturnal tumescence almost every time he speaks. Andre was famously billed at 520lbs — an iconic stat in itself — but with the telling and retelling of the story, Andre’s size increases almost exponentially. It’s a living example of how historical narrative legends are formed, right before your eyes. First he’s 520lbs, and then 600lbs, then up to 700. Hogan’s accepted lore currently has Andre at half a ton. And he no longer just sloppily slammed him to the mat; he lifted him high over his head, and almost broke the ring in two with the force of hurling him back down to earth.

At one point, a new thing got tossed in about how, during the famous bodyslam, Hulk tore every muscle in his back. This later grew, into a tale of not just tearing his back, but both his biceps, his quadriceps and his lats, and not missing any shows. The most bizarre part of the Andre fables cropped up when Hogan Featured on MTV Cribs, and in his memorabilia room, made one of the most insane statements ever put to film. You have to see it for yourself to appreciate the casual way it’s just thrown out there.

WHAT?! “A couple of days later, he passed on.” No he didn’t! Unless six years is a couple of days. (Or maybe Andre spent those two days flying back and forth to Japan and gained six years) This particular statement fascinates me. Does Hulk Hogan genuinely believe that Andre the Giant died two days after Wrestlemania III? Does he think the slam contributed to Andre’s death? It’s not like isn’t public record, or that Andre wasn’t still on TV almost right up until he died. Hogan himself and Andre worked together one year later at Wrestlemania IV, and unless there was some Weekend at Bernies shit going on, he looked pretty alive to me. What would happen if someone confronted him with evidence of Andre being alive and well way into the nineties? The Hulkster’s reality would probably crack, like that bit in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves wakes up hairless and covered in jizz.

We had to end on Andre, because the Hogan tale that’s my absolute favourite is yet another story about the big man. Stories of Andre are legendary, and they don’t need to be embellished, but I’ll let you decide whether or not this one is true. I myself remain undecided. Once, while on the road, Hogan witnessed Andre the Giant take a poo in a hotel bathtub. He almost completely filled it.

“…all the way to the taps, brother”

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Hello. If you dug this, check out my new Patreon, which features a bunch of wrestling stuff, and plenty of Hogan content, like this one about No Holds Barred and Zeus.

Also, there’s an updated version of this post in my book.

Along with the Hogan piece, there’s a super detailed look at Brian Pillman’s Loose Cannon angle, and its place in the confusing world of kayfabe, and a bunch of other stuff that takes on areas of pop culture where the truth is murky, from Count Dante and the Dim Mak to psychic mediums and the legend of Bill Murray (“and no one will ever believe you…“) so check it out.

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More wrestling posts:

No Holds Barred, aka The Madness of King Vince

Dissecting Bray Wyatt

WWF Magazine’s Anti-Masturbation PSAs

Always Believe: Warrior, 1959 — 2014

Andre the Giant’s Bra Sunglasses

~ by Stuart on March 9, 2012.