On July 24, 2025, Terry Bollea, known the world over as Hulk Hogan, passed away from a heart attack at age 71. This news sent shockwaves around the world and became a big story in mainstream media, an uncommon occurrence for professional wrestling in 2025.
Of course this is to be expected: Hogan was, still is, and likely still will be for a long time still, the most recognizable professional wrestler in the English-speaking world. Few wrestlers even come close to Hogan’s level of instant recognition: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Ric Flair, and John Cena might come close.
And in terms of drawing power the only wrestler to reach Hogan’s level in recent times is “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. With Hogan’s passing an inevitable slew of interviews, articles, and retrospectives will come out in the coming days. Some will focus on Hogan’s fame and drawing power, both of which are undeniable.
Others will focus on his reputation and the controversies that enveloped him, both within the professional wrestling industry and beyond. But instead of copying the same talking points, let’s focus on how Hogan changed professional wrestling itself, and how he created the template that countless wrestlers would follow for decades to come.
Hogan’s wrestling formula was incredibly simple: pit him against some kind of monstrous threat, have said monster beat on him and beat on him and beat on him until Hogan found himself on the verge of losing, and then Hogan would “Hulk up,”make a miraculous comeback, and win from seemingly insurmountable odds. It was simple but effective storytelling: Hogan would show off his perseverance and back up his uplifting motto – “train, say your prayers, and eat your vitamins – with his actions in the ring. Over time Hogan would reduce what he did in the ring down to the bare minimum on offense: punches, a scoop slam, a big boot, the big leg drop, and sometimes another move here or there depending on circumstance.
From a modern perspective Hogan’s antics in the ring might come across as overly exaggerated and a bit over-the-top. And for the many detractors that either didn’t like Hogan or his particular wrestling style this was all the proof they needed to watch alternative wrestling. But one thing to keep in mind is that Hogan mastered a key part of being a wrestler: reacting to the audience’s reactions and tweaking his formula accordingly. Many wrestlers who didn’t understand this skill would simply wrestle the same match regardless of fan reaction which isn’t always a successful formula. Over time Hogan came to understand his audience so well that he knew exactly when to do certain things to maximize audience satisfaction, even if what he did in the ring wasn’t as technically brilliant as that of his peers.
Three different situations come to mind on this. First there’s Hogan’s famous heel turn at WCW Bash at the Beach 1996. He saw the writing on the wall and instead of staying babyface amidst growing accusations of being stale and outdated, Hogan freshened up his gimmick with a new coat of paint and in doing so reshaped the direction of the Monday Night Wars.
The second is one of his most famous matches: the Icon versus Icon match between Hogan and The Rock at WrestleMania X8. That match was, for some reason, not given the highest praise by some critics – both at the time and retrospectively – highlighting the crowd and atmosphere as the match’s biggest strengths. However one of the reasons this match is still so adored by longtime fans is because of the spectacle of the match. In the build-up to the match Hogan, as his Hollywood persona, was presented as the heel from the past mocking The Rock. But instead of booing Hogan Canadian crowds cheered him. Loudly. Unendingly. Both before this event and afterwards. Though he had become a heel in WCW fans’ nostalgia and appreciation for him were more powerful than some manufactured storyline.
Sending this Hogan changed the match with Rock to have them switch roles, with him being babyface and Rock being heel. The outcome was still the same with Rock scoring the pinfall at the end and beating the Icon from the previous generation. But Hogan’s decision, spurred by fans reacting differently to him than what was intended, caused him to take them on a different journey. Had he stuck to the original plan the end result in Toronto would’ve, in all likelihood, not been as memorable, both in the moment and over time.
Thirdly, the overwhelming focus on Hogan’s more mass produced and fast-foodified matches during Hulkamania and during the 1990s ignore the fact that he actually knew how to wrestle in a more traditional sense. Because he achieved such monumental success in WWF by focusing on his curated formula, over time many people forgot that Hogan actually knew way more than what he showed off 95% of the time. Hogan demonstrated this in his pre-Hulkamania days but the best examples were in his matches in Japan. Hogan achieved immense success in that country, which prided itself on a more action-focused product.
Hogan knew this, which is why he did things over there that most American fans would never expect him to: drop toeholds, chain grappling, matwork, working the limb, and other techniques associated with “workrate” and in-ring prowess. Hogan showed this many times over the decades against the likes of Antonio Inoki, Rusher Kimura, Tatsumi Fujinami, Stan Hansen, Riki Choshu, and many others. But perhaps the most famous example of this was his 1993 match against The Great Muta in which a still-in-his-full-Hulkamania-mindset Hogan actually grappled with Muta in one of the most cerebral contests the Hulkster had ever been in. To this day the sight of Hogan engaging in “technical wrestling” is one of the most shocking things to show anyone who only remembers Hogan for his one career-defining gimmick.
These examples all show that Hogan was much more of a dynamic and savvy performer than how he was presented most of the time yet he chose to stick with a more simplified formula. Why? Because Hogan had come to understand that’s what his audience paid to see. A big part of pro-wrestling is manipulating the audience’s emotions to tell a story and different audiences respond to different things. The Japanese audience loved seeing Hogan show off technical skill. 2000s WCW fans circa 1996 initially responded with disgust at Hogan’s heel turn but grew to love him because he freshened up his character so suddenly and so well that people simply couldn’t turn away from him. WWF fans in 2002 were simply nostalgic for Hogan and rejected any idea of booing him. And what got Hogan so over in the first place? By being this righteous living superhero who backed up his upstanding promos with a never-say-die attitude in the ring.
This formula of Hogan’s was so successful that attempts were made to recreate it many times. The two most notable examples in more recent memory are John Cena and Roman Reigns. Both of these men were cut from the same cloth as Hogan: handsome, muscular, smiling babyfaces who overcame adversity each and every time and never gave up. WWE’s attempts to get both men over as Hogan copycats yielded mixed success at best, with Cena being hated by audiences throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s and Reigns receiving legitimately hostile reactions from late 2014 until the fall of 2018. Though both of these men would later go on to receive positive reactions from fans, they both experienced significant backlash from fans, with many commentators during those times praying for – or at least fantasy booking – the possibility of one or either pulling a Hogan at Bast at the Beach ’96-inspired heel turn.
And while there’s no proof of Hulk Hogan ever working for a lucha libre promotion, had he ever done so it’s easy to imagine him donning a lucha mask, calling himself El Hulko, and doing dropkicks and armdrags in Arena Mexico; not because he could but because that’s what got over to that audience.
Comparing other wrestlers to Hogan isn’t exclusively an American phenomenon, either; his style of match, interestingly, also found its way to Japan, where one particular wrestler is said to have taken his formula and given it a Japanese twist. In one of the most unusual and unexpected comparisons in modern wrestling, Minoru Suzuki argued in his 2015 book How to Become “Free” in Pro Wrestling that Kenta Kobashi, one of his favorite rivals, one of his closest friends, and one of the most universally-respected wrestlers in modern times, structured his matches like a Japanese Hulk Hogan and achieved incredible success while doing so.
If you think about it, Kobashi’s pro wrestling is mostly about taking a beating. He gets beaten, beaten, and beaten, and then finally lands a big lariat and wins—that’s his style. All Japan was called the “Royal Road” of pro wrestling, but Kobashi’s pro wrestling was the “Royal Road of the Hero.” He’d get beaten and beaten, and then win in the end. It’s just like Ultraman. He gets beaten by monsters, his color timer starts blinking, and the kids start shouting “Hang in there!!” or “Help!!”—then he rises from the brink and defeats the enemy. Kobashi’s pro wrestling fulfilled those conditions. But if you trace it back, Rikidozan and Antonio Inoki were the same. Structurally, even Hulk Hogan is the same. He gets beaten, gets beaten, then Hulks up and makes a comeback (laughs).
Though he hadn’t wrestled a match in over a decade prior to his passing, Hogan’s impact on pro-wrestling remains. While today’s wrestling product might be making more money, there simply isn’t anyone today as instantly recognizable as Hogan. Nor is there anyone today who captures the larger-than-life personalities long associated with wrestling. And nor is there anyone whose mannerisms, catchphrases, way of speaking, and overall presentation hypnotize and captivate the way Hogan did.
One could argue that his success was a product of its time yet there’s still something timeless about Hogan’s charisma that made it impossible to turn away from him when he was on screen or turn away when he spoke. He was so successful that many people have tried to straight-up copy him in one way or another, either in terms of presentation or in the ring. But there’s simply no way of successfully copying Hogan, no matter how hard one tries.
