Wrestling With His Identity

I hate to do this, trifle with the illusions of fans, but--come closer, I wouldn’t want word of this to leak out globally--I have to tell you something that may shock you. I mean, it’s my duty as a journalist, right?

Keep it under your hat, but you know that big hunk of a wrestler with the blond Fu Manchu mustache, the bulging biceps, the massive chest that scares you to look at? Goes by the name of Hulk Hogan?

OK, here it is: Hulk Hogan is a pussycat.

Now wait a minute! I don’t mean Hulk Hogan hides under the bed in thunderstorms or does needlework on the side. But you know the Hulk Hogan we picture. I mean, you look at this mountain of muscle and you want to run. Hulk goes, oh, say, 6 feet 7, 290 pounds. Not an ounce of fat. In shape. Boy, is he in shape.

He could empty a room. You remember how he used to be? The bully. The snarling, chronically angry bad guy. The successor to the Masked Marvel, Bobo Brazil, Dick the Bruiser, Dirty Dusek, Baron Leone and Freddy Blassie, those sociopaths in tights.

Hulk was one of them. He was the one who cuffed around the crew-cut collegiate hero, fouled and gouged local favorites, bit and kicked. And only occasionally got his comeuppance. In the morality play that was pro wrestling, he was the representative of everything evil.

Well, it was that Hulk Hogan I was expecting to meet when I scheduled a lunch with this mass of menace out in the Valley the other day. When the maitre d’ announced that the table wasn’t ready, I started to shake. I thought, oh, boy! is he going to be sorry! Hulk is probably not going to understand this. He’s probably going to come in here and start ripping out booths--and customers--by the roots. This restaurant is going to be a heap of rubble if they tell Hulk Hogan he has to wait.

You see, the only wrestler I had ever gotten to know at all was Freddy Blassie. You remember Freddy Blassie? Mad all the time. Howling at the audience. Used to hit referees with the stool. Freddy called everybody a “pencil-necked geek.” He called me a “pencil-necked geek.”

I figured Hulk Hogan would be more of same. A man with a short wick on his temper, nobody to cross, nobody even to approach.

When I saw Hulk Hogan approach, I thought, “I can’t look!” This was going to be instant earthquake.

When Hogan came in, he was wearing a blue bandanna wrapped around his head, a sweatband, a blue flowered hula shirt over these massive pectorals, blue jeans and track shoes. The people parted like the Red Sea. I expected him to bellow like a charging elephant to be kept waiting.

The first thing that surprised me was that he came in alone--no entourage, no five guys lighting his cigarette (he doesn’t smoke anyway), no flunkies holding the car door or clearing a path for him.

He created quite a stir, though, and when a fan approached with an autograph book, I thought, “Uh-oh, I don’t think I want to hear this!” I fully expected Hulk would turn on him, grab the guy by the lapel, lift him in the air, put his nose next to his and roar, “I’m having lunch here, you pencil-necked geek! Now, get that book and pen out of my face before I shove it up your ear!”

You can imagine my surprise when Hulk did no such thing. Instead, he signed it graciously.

“Who do you want me to sign it to?” he wanted to know. When the guy said “Thank you,” Hulk answered, “Thank you. “ It was a signal to other fans, who lined up. Hulk signed autographs for all, thanked them all.

“What’s going on here?” I asked him. “You running for office? Where’s the hulking brute, that man you love to hate?”

“You haven’t been paying attention,” Hulk reprimanded me. “That’s in the past. We’re in the sports-entertainment business today. We’re role models today. Villains are out.”

“Since when?” I asked him. “I thought the money was in bad guys.”

“Listen!” Hulk said. “When it comes to money, nobody in sport does better than Hulk Hogan. My 900 number is the busiest in the business. My merchandising licensees do better than Disney’s. Hulkamania and Wrestlemania do millions. We’re three times as big as the NFL in total revenues. Our competition is not other sporting events, our competition is ‘The Simpsons,’ the Cosby show. We can do $30 million in one night on pay-per-view. We can give Tyson-Holyfield a run for its money any time.”

“And it’s all due to reforming your character?” I wanted to know.

“I changed after I made a ‘Rocky’ movie,” Hogan admitted. “People cheered no matter what I did or how I behaved after that. I realized I had a positive image. People wanted a hero to worship, not a villain to hate. America needed heroes, not hate.”

And so, Hulk Hogan became the man you love to love.

Hulk Hogan began life as Terry Bollea around Tampa, Fla. He was a baseball player in high school till he broke his arm making an underhand toss to first.

His mother was a music teacher, and the future idol of America thought he was going to Carnegie Hall instead of Madison Square Garden. He finally settled on guitar and piano, and it was while he was playing weekend gigs in a band in a nightclub frequented by wrestlers that he made a career change.

These were the broken-nose, cauliflower-eared guys of the old wrestling circuits, not the accomplished thespians of today, and when young Terry wanted to try his luck at the sport, one of them, a Japanese bad guy, agreed to give him a lesson.

He gave him a lesson Terry would never forget: He broke his ankle for him.

The wrestlers knew the neophyte was a prospect, though, when he didn’t run home to mother. As soon as his ankle healed, he was back, learning the craft--submissive holds, the art of throwing your body--or the other guy’s--in a cartwheel across the ring.

Wrestlers are actually considerable athletes. The blood is often all too real. So is the acid thrown by some irate ringsiders. Hogan has had, by his own count, his nose broken 11 times. He finally found, he says, that a locker-room trainer with a clothespin was as good at resetting one as the highest-paid orthopedist.

The pay was not always good. Terry paid his dues.

“I used to travel around by van,” he says. “I wrestled seven nights a week for $125 a week.”

He experimented with an image.

“I tried several names. I was ‘Terry the Hulk.’ I was ‘Hulk Boulder.’ It was the era of ethnic brutes, so the promoters and I agreed on an Anglo-Irish identity. I became Hulk Hogan. The name grabbed.”

The promoters first recommended that he put a red dye in his hair but, says Hulk, “I threw it down the toilet and stuck with my own blond locks.”

But wrestlers can never forget that the prototype of the breed, Gorgeous George, died broke. Hulk Hogan today has one foot in the ring and another on a sound stage. From parts in “Rocky,” “The A Team” and other Hollywood films, he has branched out and is starring in a new theatrical release, “Suburban Commando.”

It is not a betrayal of his new persona.

“I play a galactic warrior,” Hogan says. “But I’m not a Terminator or a Rambo guy. I’m not a good guy who does good things in a bad way. My pictures are going to say the world’s OK. You don’t have to do bad to do good.”

In short, Hulk Hogan doesn’t kick anybody in the face on or off screen. For those who used to think Hulk Hogan spent his off-hours pulling the wings off butterflies, drowning canaries, or terrorizing small towns, be advised that this Hogan hero spends his time off with his wife and two children--daughter Brook, 3, and son Nicholas, 1--picking sea shells off Gulf Coast beaches.

I hate to blow his cover like this, but just in case he’s asking, don’t tell him you heard it from me.