Hulk Hogan in 2011. Photo by Dave Moss/Wikimedia Commons.

“Stone Cold” Steve Austin was a wifebeater. Bret “Hitman” Hart was a serial philanderer. Scott Steiner tried to gouge out the eyes of his widely-beloved coworker, Diamond Dallas Page, during a backstage altercation. Jerome “New Jack” Young severed two arteries in the forehead of an untrained 17-year-old kid with a surgical scalpel during a match, nearly killing him. Cash Wheeler of All Elite Wrestling allegedly pulled a gun on a guy during a highway altercation. According to her mother, “Sweet” Stan Lane of the Midnight Express might be Republican congresswoman and gun-rights activist Lauren Boebert’s long lost father.

All of that stuff is real (except, probably, the Boebert thing), yet wrestling fans still love those guys. Meanwhile, the recent death of 71-year-old Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea, arguably the biggest professional wrestling star of all time, has been marked by relatively muted tributes. These wan celebrations are reflective of Hogan’s dwindling stature within an industry he once defined. The last time the former 12-time world champion appeared on live WWE television, in January 2025, it was to celebrate a $5 billion broadcast deal between the company he’d helped build into a global behemoth and Netflix: he was viciously booed throughout the segment by the 18,000-strong crowd at Inglewood, California’s Intuit Dome. In the wake of his death six months later, some publications openly wondered if any on-air remembrances by his former employer would be met with a similarly hostile reception.

There is always a sort of moral relativism at play in the way a fandom judges the sins of its idols. Wrestling fans are certainly well-accustomed to looking the other way when their favourites behave badly outside of the ring. Depending upon one’s own personal hierarchy of harmful behaviours, it would be easy to argue that Bollea’s various offences were of lesser severity than those of Austin or New Jack. And yet his transgressions clearly have a uniquely galling quality for how precisely they seem to poke at our collective resentments of the wealthy, the undeserving, the shameless grifters. The most instructive aspect of Hogan’s downfall is what it tells us about the changing values of contemporary fans—and of our endless broader culture war.

Hingeing an essay on the assertion that “[insert person/idea/thing] is America” is the sort of wobbly trope that would result in an instant D- on an undergraduate essay, but in the 1980s, that’s how Hogan was sold to the world by the WWE (then the WWF) and its architect Vince McMahon. Strutting to the ring to the........

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