Hulk Hogan

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

A little piece of trivia for today: On this day in 1992, i kissed the girl that would eventually be my wife for the first time. The fact that I know this might make me a little ol’ sentimental romantic type, and that’s fine. But full disclosure, I actually remember that for a very peculiar reason.

You see, I’m a big pro wrestling nerd, and on that same day in 1984, Hulk Hogan won the World Wrestling Federation Title for the first time. Back then, the WWF (as it was know then), was just one of several wrestling promotions, along with the National Wrestling Alliance, the American Wrestling Association and a bunch of others. But once Hogan became champion, the WWF’s popularity skyrocketed and it became a huge international entertainment company. In fact, it became such a huge deal that the World Wildlife Fund actually decided to enforce

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its trademark on those initials and the wrestling version of the WWF became the WWE, standing for World Wrestling Entertainment. Today, it’s a multibillion-dollar brand known all over the world, and much of that success can be credited to the popularity and charisma of Hulk Hogan. He was everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s — in the movies, in commercials, on “Saturday Night Live,” on lunch boxes and cereal boxes — there was even a cartoon starring “The Hulkster” and his friends.

But, as I’ve heard, “Father Time is undefeated,” and eventually Hogan’s wrestling days were over. But he continued to fins success outside the ring, most famously as the star of a Reality TV show featuting him and his family, “Hogan Knows Best,” which came around about the same time as a lot of those kinds of shows in the early 2010s during the Reality TV boom, when everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to the Kardashians to Paris Hilton to all the various “Real Housewives” got their own shows.

Anyway, Hogan still made appearances on WWE TV from time to time and he was still a fairly well-likes celebrity — until he wasn’t.

The wheels started to fall off when he began to try pullilng strings to make his daughter a popstar, despite a pretty clear lack of “star” quality talent.

Then his son was involved in a near-fatal drunk-driving crash that, while not directly involving Hulk, tarnished the family’s image and put financial strain on the family.

The big blow, however, came in 2012 when Hogan had a sex tape leaked to the internet — a bad look, sure, especially since the other participant in the video was not his wife.

The worst part, to the public at least, was that in the video, Hogan is seen and heard making a slew of racial remarks and using the “N-word” and such, and there was a huge backlash once that came out.

Since then, Hogan has been largely on the outs with the industry he helped build into what it is today, and it has only been in the last year or so that he has attempted to step back into the limelight… and it largely hasn’t gone well.

His appearance at the Republican National Convention rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, right or wrong.

He also rolled out his own brand of beer, “Real American Beer,” which, again, rubbed some people the wrong way, likely due to the fact that his son was a known multipletime drunk driver.

And in his first appearance for the WWE in years this past Jan.6, on the company’s Netflix debut, the fans basically booed him out of the arena where the show was taking place.

So, while you can’t deny his contribution to the wrestling business, there seems to be a strong indication that the fans want little to do with him. It also goes to show how you can be the most popular guy on the planet but if you get so caught up in yourself, it can all come crashing down, especially if it turns out you might just be a crappy person…

And as far as Jan. 23 goes, I think I’ll just hold on to that date as a remembrance of that first kiss instead of the whole Hulk Hogan thing.