Rest in peace, Hulk Hogan.
There was another wrestler who called himself “the American Dream”—the great Dusty Rhodes—but it was Hulk Hogan, born Terry Gene Bollea, who more than any other star of sports entertainment embodied the colossal hopes, aspirations and absurdities of the United States of America, those wonderful things that have made America what it is and not Canada or Mexico or Liberia or any other nation on earth.
In every aspect, across every dimension, Hulk Hogan was larger than life. Standing six feet seven inches tall and weighing over 300 pounds, boasting enormous 24-inch biceps he referred to as his “pythons” and wearing a trademark bleach-blonde skullet and handlebar moustache, Hogan was instantly recognizable. Unmistakable.
THE WWF WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION!
In an arena packed with freaks, oddities, oddballs, showmen and showgirls, Hogan still managed to stand out from the crowd.
In England in the early 1990s, you had to have satellite television to watch the World Wrestling Federation, as it was back then. My best friend’s parents had a dish and a subscription to Sky, which was as good a reason as any to spend all my spare time at his house. We’d stay up well past our bedtimes and watch in awe as the Undertaker walked the ring ropes and Shawn Michaels delivered another dose of Sweet Chin Music, right to the kisser.
But it was Hulk Hogan we really wanted to see. From the first strains of his iconic “Real American” entrance, through his trademark shirt rip to his finishing move, the atomic leg drop, we just couldn’t get enough.
For us, the Hulkster was the WWF. In his person, he represented a world of bombast, bravado and badassery that was a million miles away from our sleepy little Dorset village, with its thatched cottages and medieval church and library on the green. It might as well have been another planet.
I’m not ashamed to say my lifelong fascination with America I owe to Hulk Hogan as much as anybody else—William Faulkner, Marlon Brando, Metallica. Donald Trump.
So if a little bit of the American Dream has just died, and it has, it’s worth remembering too, what Hulk Hogan did in his final year of life to ensure the American Dream will live on—or, at least, that it still has a fighting chance of doing so. There are too many great deeds to list, too many iconic moments in a career spanning five decades, but this one, I think, may just be the most important of all.
Cast your mind back to July of 2024. It was one week after that shocking Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania when President Trump came within millimeters of having his head removed from his shoulders by a sniper’s bullet. In a stroke of luck, or indeed by a miracle, Trump turned his head at the moment the sniper fired. The bullet grazed his ear instead of entering his temple.
At the 2024 Republican National Convention, Trump wore a heavy bandage on his ear as a reminder of just how close he had come to death and just how close America had come to losing its best chance of national revival—perhaps even its last chance.
When Hulk Hogan took to the stage, I think we all expected something unusual—
“But what happened last week, when they took a shot at my hero”— Hulk is tearing off his jacket, the crowd begins to clap and cheer—“and they tried to kill the next president of the United States, enough was enough”—he’s ripping his t-shirt off to reveal a red Trump-Vance t-shirt underneath, his eyes are bulging, he’s huffing and puffing, the crowd are going bananas—“And I said, ‘Let Trumpamania run wild, brother. Let Trumpamania rule again. Let Trumpamania make America great again.”
The camera cuts to Trump. He’s beaming from ear to injured ear. He blows Hulk a kiss.
Is this real!?
The Hulkster’s endorsement electrified the convention and helped send the Democrats into a tailspin. They had nothing that could even begin to match that display of “androgenic absurdity,” as I described it at the time.
Instead of realizing how out of touch they were with ordinary Americans, and especially with ordinary American men, the backbone of the nation, the Democrats leaned even further into their message of individual and collective emasculation.
At the DNC a few weeks later, Planned Parenthood brought a mobile vasectomy van and parked it in a lot nearby. Male convention-goers could walk in and get the snip, then head on into the hall for another round of treatment.
In the commentary box, CNN’s Dana Bash explicitly referenced Hulk Hogan’s antics at the RNC, explaining that the Democrats were “trying to put forward male figures—Tim Walz being one of them, Doug Emhoff last night—who can speak to men out there who might not be the testosterone-laden, gun-toting kind of guy who wants to listen to Hulk Hogan and the kind of players that came out of the RNC; but also, in addition, understand that it’s okay in 2024 to be a man comfortable in his own skin who supports a woman.”
On stage, Tim Walz performed his white-and-white minstrel routine, pretending to be someone’s embarrassing Midwestern uncle as he pogoed to John Mellencamp and pointed in fifty different directions all at once. Later, he brought out his family and his son, who’d been given a bowl haircut to make him look like a retard.
The message was clear: white men of America, you are a sideshow, a joke. The future of America does not belong to you. The future is female. The future is Kamala Harris.
Thanks to Hulk Hogan, Americans got to see the choice before them in the starkest possible terms. A return to all the things that made America a nation apart, that captivated little boys like me and still do—or the continued march of revolution, the transformation of America into something unrecognizable. A brave new world.
America rejected the Harris-Walz vision decisively.
In the end, Hulk Hogan was a patriot—as if there could ever have been any doubt about that. A real American. God bless him.
