But it also included family drama with his son imprisoned for a reckless driving accident and his wife filing for divorce.
10 Things You May Not Know About Hulk Hogan. From the origins of his wrestling name to the sport he almost played professionally, here are some facts about the WWE star. As one of the most recognizable American wrestlers, Hulk Hogan amassed such a crazed following that the sensation became known as Hulkamania.
The enthusiasm was well warranted during his 33-year career, when he won 12 world titles — six with World Championship Wrestling and six with World Wrestling Entertainment, making him at one time WWE’s highest-paid athlete.
“As a kid I was scared to death of them because back in the day wrestlers were very protective, and if you called wrestling fake, they would punch you in the face ,” Hogan told Vice.
MLB scouts soon had their eyes on him, but he injured his throwing elbow during his final year of high school, putting an end to his pitching days. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I segued into wrestling," Hogan told the MLB.
Scandal followed with a sex tape where Hogan was caught making racist and homophobic remarks, and he later won a $140 million in a defamation lawsuit from Gawker, who had published the footage. Here are 10 things you may not know about the larger-than-life wrestler:
In Savage's song 2003 song "Be a Man, " he laid it right into Hogan, adding more fuel to their real-life feud. "The story goes that Hogan ended up stealing [Savage's ex-wife Miss Elizabeth] away, and she died of a drug overdose, and he blamed it on Hulk," Bill Edwards, founder of Big3 record label, said .
There, if anything, he made the situation worse. “I just hope the brotherhood can get back to the way it was,” Hogan argued. “Because when you’re in the ring and somebody’s body-slamming somebody or piledriving somebody, you protect your brother and you make sure physically they’re safe. And outside the ring, you’re supposed to protect your brother. In this case, it’s a situation where 75, 80, 90 percent of the wrestlers are protecting me and they’re giving me another chance to move forward. There’s just a few wrestlers that kind of like don’t understand the bond and the brotherhood of wrestling, and hey, if someone makes a mistake, you need to forgive them and move on and try to let them prove themselves.”
On the same recording, the Enquirer reported, Hogan expressed frustration over his daughter, Brooke, dating rapper Yannique “Stack$” Barker, who is Black.
By any kind of reasonable standard, based on what’s in the public domain, Hulk Hogan has not done anything to warrant being welcomed back with open arms. He’s repeatedly refused to take responsibility for what he actually said, obfuscated what he actually said, and generally showed little to no awareness of what actually got him in trouble. The specific context of how what he said was directed at someone he had convinced was his best friend was largely ignored, which helped Hogan further evade consequences.
He added that many of the wrestlers present saw the speech as much more “I embarrassed the company because somebody filmed me when I didn’t know I was being filmed” than it was “under any circumstances, what I said was abhorrent.” It also didn’t help that, in introducing Hogan to the locker room, WWE executive Paul “Triple H” Levesque “told people about the dangers of being a celebrity on social media,” specifically saying that “you have to remember when you go out that people may record you with their phones without your knowledge.” Multiple Black wrestlers would soon confirm publicly that this was the gist of the speech and part of why they didn’t see it as a sincere apology.
When myself and Maria Bustillos discovered partial audio of the original racist rant in unsealed court records for a report for Death and Taxes Magazine, SPIN’s now defunct politics and culture blog, several months later, it turned out that Hogan’s comments were actually worse than what was in the Enquirer report, which was based on a rough transcription. In particular, on the audio, the “racist to a point” line gains further meaning.
It was on ABC’s Good Morning America that the WWE wrestling legend, there to theoretically apologize for using the N-word in a surreptitiously shot video, issued the mea culpa.
David Arquette Thought His Life Was Over. So He Became a Wrestler. Again.