I only realized Leaping Lanny Poffo and the Macho Man were brothers (?) decades after it was no longer relevant to my life.
Yeah, brothers. And their dad was in the business, too.
The Macho Man originally wanted to play baseball (was in the Cardinals (?) farm system) but he wasn’t much of a fielder. Could hit the ball fine, though.
I saw Hulk wrestle live a few times. Even from the nosebleed seats, he was larger than life. A great ambassador for wrestling in the 1980s.
Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake is also still alive.
He started his career as a duo, starting alongside another wrestler. Brutus’s real name is Edward Leslie, and his original ring name was Ed Boulder. His partner was billed as his brother (though they weren’t real brothers). His partner/brother was called Terry Boulder in the ring. Together they were the Boulder Brothers, a tag team.
Terry Boulder’s real name was Terry Bollea, but just as Ed Boulder changed his name to Brutus Beefcake, Terry Boulder changed his name to Hulk Hogan.
Brutus/Ed is 68 and of course stopped wrestling a while ago. I mostly knew him as a partner of Greg “the Hammer” Valentine and as a kid I thought they were a pretty cool tag team.
Good fucking riddance. Rot in hell, you Trump-loving shithead.
What I remember NOW about Hogan is many lies and ebellishmeny he told over the years:
- The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky offered him the lead role three times. Hogan claims he turned it down because “he didn’t deserve it”.
Aronofsky denies that Hogan was ever considered for the role.
2.Hogan starred in Mr. Nanny & Santa With Muscles. Hogan claims he rewrote both scripts entirely, only to have his writing credits stolen from him by the dastardly Writers’ Guild.
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John Belushi died in 1982, but according to Hogan, he partied with him after WrestleMania II (in 1986).
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Hogan claimed that both Metallica and The Rolling Stones wanted him as their bass player, but Metallica member Lars Ulrich came to Hogan himself to ask him to play with the group.
There a lot more listed here:
The indestructible Mick Foley is still alive.
Mick Foley hasn’t even hit 60 yet; he’s younger than I am. Mostly the ones who avoided overdoing the steroids, pain killers, and recreational drugs are still alive.
Ric Flair is such an incorrigible party animal that frankly, I’m shocked he’s still alive. He has made the comment that he wants to die in the ring, but I don’t think anyone is gonna let him.
So good riddance, and I mean that.
Hogan will probably go down in history as the biggest mainstream star in the business of professional wrestling. And he and Vince McMahon (another who I very much look forward to reading his obituary one day) are without a doubt the two people most instrumental in bringing pro wrestling into the mainstream and making the WWE the multi-billion dollar force it is in the world today. He was also a racist, a sexist, and just a nasty, self-centered venal son of a bitch that even his own coworkers have very few, if any, nice things to say about. And yes he was MAGA and Trump supporter to boot. Nothing about that surprises me.
And his constant over the top lying has been well documented over the decades. Anyone who’s curious can just go Google “Hulk Hogan lies” or go to YouTube and do a search. Tons of documentation out there. And just to be fair, I expect pro wrestlers to lie or exaggerate a little bit. They’re showman, and they have to constantly sell themselves to their audience. Andre the Giant getting bigger over the years every time Hogan told the story about body slamming him at WrestleMania 3 is one thing. I expect that. But stuff like claiming that Metallica wanted him as their bassist or that Darren Aronofsky wanted him for the lead role in “The Wrestler” is something else entirely or at least it strikes me that way.
RIP you nasty son of a bitch. The wrestling business and the world in general is better off with you gone.
Was this ambition? Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
Purportedly…
‘I don’t like to speak badly of people. I have grown up thinking and being told that if you cannot say something nice about someone, you should not say anything at all. But I must break that rule in this case because I hate Hulk Hogan very much. He is a big ugly goon and I want to squash his face.’ - Andre the Giant
I mean how is that any different than The Rock?
We’ve seen The Rock absolutely struggle to anchor a film that isn’t an ensemble piece with other actors to carry him. If Hulk Hogan was at his physical peak today he would have the exact same career trajectory as The Rock.
I kinda doubt it. For all of Dwayne Johnson’s very real limitations he is:
A.) a better comedic actor than Hogan and
B.) better at choosing projects than Hogan.
Neither is capable of carrying a solo project, I think. ANY project, witness The Scorpion King. Schwarzenegger has them beat. However in terms of muscle-bound supporting characters, particularly the broader/lighter ones, Johnson is easily better than Hogan. Hell, at the end of the day maybe so was Roddy Piper 
.
I imagine most movie critics would say that Dave Bautista is better than either of them.
It’s not fair to go back over 20 years to what was basically his first acting gig. Compare Scorpion King with Hercules in New York and Johnson was way ahead of Schwarzenegger at the beginning of his career.
And Johnson is (or was for awhile) certainly a bette wrestler and physical actor than Hogan.
One less MAGA. My heart pumps piss for him.
TBF Arnold had not been kayfabeing 3 times a week giving hype speeches in arenas for years at that point. He made up for it fast, though.
Johnson was an important character in the WWE cast, but in a different era was not the be-all and end-all Hogan was, and when he took off for acting it was not to be playing The Rock. You get it that he knew all along he was one of a cast in a bigger show so he plays well as an ensemble anchor. Meanwhile ISTM Hogan could not really play anything but Hogan … but then again why would he need to. Of all his peers he was the one most secure in not needing to do/be anything else.
Mr, Rock is (IMO) a good actor. I like most of his roles. He has great comic timing. I’d put him as a true successor to Schwarzenegger for larger-than-life characters. I even liked Baywatch and I hated the TV show. He’ll never be cast as Hamlet, but then, there are many others that won’t, either. (eta but he’d make a great Naked Gun Nordberg!)
Hulk Hogan was only good at playing Hulk Hogan, and not even that very well. I’d rather watch Shaq playing Superman than Hulk in…anything.