Hulk Hogan embodied the American dream — and its many nightmares

Indian Express

26-07-2025

Pro wrestling is an ostentatious, over-the-top spectacle of violence and showmanship, an endless soap opera whose characters dress in tights and perform mind-boggling stunts to entertain their legions of fans. The audience knows about kayfabe but doesn't care, allowing wrestling to straddle reality and fiction unlike any other performing art in the world.
In many ways, pro wrestling is the perfect microcosm of Donald Trump's America, a country where the line between what is true and false has been catastrophically blurred, news is increasingly unmistakable from parody, politics is conducted and consumed like entertainment, and conflict underpins public life. Trump's own links to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and Vince McMahon, the promotion's erstwhile owner who also played a cartoonishly evil, eponymous character, add further heft to this assessment.
Hulk Hogan, pro wrestling's greatest ever superstar who died this week, is MAGA through and through. And he is the quintessential American, an ultimate embodiment of the great American Dream, with all its vast contradictions and ugliness.
The son of a construction worker, Hogan was a relative unknown outside wrestling circles when he landed a cameo in Sylver Stallone's Rocky III in 1982. His performance caught the eye of the ambitious McMahon, who saw in Hogan's impressive 6'8' stature and 24-inch pythons (read biceps) the key to taking pro wrestling from grimy backrooms and local TV networks in small-town America to the pinnacle of mainstream pop culture.
Indeed, WWE might never have been a billion-dollar company without Hulkamania. In the 1980s, Hogan was as big a celebrity as there has ever been — imagine Taylor Swift today, but on steroids (literally). Hogan's rise to superstardom exemplified the ideals of the American Dream: it was a story of what the average Joe could achieve in America through sheer hard work, uninhibited self-belief, and a healthy dose of patriotism.
But behind the success of Hulkamania was a carefully crafted in-ring persona deliberately fashioned around these cherished American ideals. McMahon booked Hogan as the archetypal babyface: He would almost always take a pounding before suddenly turning the bout around, and finishing his opponent with an Atomic Leg Drop. This move, in anticipation of which audiences would go into a frenzy, did so much damage to Hogan's spine that he spent his last years on and off a wheelchair. Hogan, and many other fellow wrestlers, would call this his ultimate 'sacrifice' for wrestling.
The moustachioed baldie, who would arrive at the ring to Rick Derringer's 'Real American', always reminded the fans to 'train hard, say your prayers and take your vitamins', although he himself would later admit to using anabolic steroids to hulk up. After a high-profile investigation on steroid use in the WWF in 1993-94, Hogan would quickly lose a noticeable amount of muscle — so much for the vitamins.
Hogan's character also championed the classic 'cheer for me because I'm American and my opponent isn't' angle, with Hogan wearing his patriotism on his sleeve (often literally). His feuds with the likes Nikolai Volkoff, an ethnic Czech made to play the 'evil Russian' by McMahon, and the Iron Sheik (later called General Mustafa), a supposed Saddam Hussain sympathiser, were rife with not-so-subtle racist stereotyping. Hogan almost always emerged victorious, and in the process cemented America's supremacy.
In recent years, a number of unsavoury details have come out about Hogan's private life and personality. He has often made both racist and homophobic statements: A leaked phone conversation in 2015 saw Hogan telling his son, who at the time was serving a brief prison sentence, 'I just hope we don't come back as a couple, I don't want to say it, blizz-ack gizz-uys, you know what I'm saying?'
Hogan was also a prolific philanderer and a through-and-through company man who would snitch on his colleagues to curry favour with management. Charisma and wrestling chops aside, Hogan politicked his way to the top and politicked some more to stay there, famously ratting out Jesse Ventura to McMahon for trying to get wrestlers to unionise in the mid-1980s.
Hogan thus leaves a complicated legacy for fans of being the quintessential American hero while also, by many accounts, being a somewhat dubious character. His emergence as one of the most vocal supporters of Donald Trump in recent years — Hogan famously called Trump his 'hero' at last year's Republican National Convention — has only made him more polarising.
But while it might be 'woke' to hate Hogan today, he was but a product of the world he inhabited. He did what he did to succeed and survive in a cut-throat industry, said what he said because he knew what the audiences wanted. That America made him the superstar he was speaks more about Americans than Hogan himself.
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