Wrestler Hulk Hogan died at 71

Terry Bollea, the wrestler of Florida who acceded to celebrity under the name of Hulk Hogan and whose private life, centered on tabloids, has become a legal battlefield on the first amendment, said, said the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) in a press release Washington Post THURSDAY. He was 71 years old.

For a generation of fans of professional struggle, Hulk Hogan reigned supreme. At the peak of “Hulkamania” in the 1980s, the wrestler of 6 feet 7 and 295 pounds was the face of the company of Vince McMahon Jr, then known as World Wrestling Federation (World Federation of Wrestling). The image of Mr. Bollea has affected all aspects of popular culture, including cinema, television, video games, derivative products and even a chain of pasta restaurants.

With his deeply tanned skin, her sparse blond hair, his mustache with the fu manchu and his red bandana, Mr. Bollea flexed his “24-inch pythons”-the nickname he gave to his biceps-removed his shirt and preached words of encouragement to hordes of fans known by the name of Hulkamaniacs: ” Eat your vitamins, be faithful to yourself, faithful to your country. Be a real American! »»

After interpreting a wrestler larger than life called thunderlips in the boxing film Rocky III In 1982, the character of Hulk Hogan took off two years later when McMahon instructed him to beat the Iron Sheik (the stage name of the super-vaziri super-vaziri).

Exhausting the emblematic maneuver of Iranian, a chin key in rear bending known as “Camel Clutch”, Mr. Bollea rebounds on the ropes and drops his leg on the sheik, nailing it on the floor at the Madison Square Garden in Manhattan to win the heavyweight champion belt.

Wrestlemania, the Super Bowl version for the fight, then established video command records on the menu with the games of Mr. Bollea featured. The “slam heard worldwide” took place in 1987 in Wrestlemania III, in front of 93,173 spectators at Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan.

Entering the ring to the sound of his theme song, Real American From Rick Derringer, Hulk Hogan put an end to the 14-year invincibility series of André Le Géant (the late André Roussimoff), who, from the top of his meter eighty-dix, weighed at the time, according to Bollea, nearly 700 pounds.

The star Hulk Hogan transformed McMahon’s company, renamed in 2002 World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), into a global marketing giant.

Mr. Bollea’s reputation was briefly tarnished in the early 1990s when he admitted to having used anabolic steroids. But he then flourished for a few years in the role of the bad “Hollywood Hulk Hogan” within the World Championship Wrestling of the Ted Turner media magnate, an ephemeral competitor of WWE.

Legal battle around a “sex tape”

Decades after its peak in the ring, Mr. Bollea remained in the public’s crosshairs, for the better and for the worse.

His reality TV show, Hogan Knows Bestprobably a view of his private life, was broadcast on the Cabinée VH1 channel from 2005 to 2007. He became an essential character in the audience rooms after having sued the owners of a popular website of gossip which had broadcast parts of a 2007 “sex tape” featuring Mr. Bollea and the wife of a friend.

The registration would have been carried out without the knowledge of Mr. Bollea and extracts would have been published on the Gawker site in 2012. The former wrestler asked for compensation from Gawker Media and his founder and main owner, Nick Denton, claiming that the publication of the registration had no informative value and that it was only a rough commercial attempt to obtain clicks at his expense. He described it as privacy damage.

Gawker lawyers argued that Mr. Bollea was a public figure adept at flamboyant exhibitionism, in particular by frequently mentioning his sex life in interviews, which made video a question of public interest protected by the first amendment.

The trial lasted years and, in June 2016, a Florida judge confirmed the verdict of a jury granting Mr. Hogan $ 140 million in damages. Shortly after, Mr. Bollea concluded an agreement of $ 31 million with Gawker Media, who had filed for bankruptcy and sold to the media company Univision. Gawker.com has been closed.

During the procedure, it was revealed that Mr. Hogan’s trial had been partly funded by the risk capital investor of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, a billionaire of Paypal and one of the first Facebook investors. Mr. Thiel is deemed to have been injured for years by a Gawker blog which had revealed his homosexuality. He accused the company of publishing articles that “ruined people’s lives without reason”.

From the start, journalists and defenders of the first amendment claim that the Bollea v. Gawker will have considerable consequences. They feared that the media will suffer valid articles for fear of financial reprisals or that they are entirely closed for having published an article worthy of interest, but controversial.

The case was the subject of a Netflix documentary entitled Nobody Speak : Trials of the Free Press (2017) and a book by Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy : Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue (2018).

The regulations did not end Mr. Bollea’s troubles. In 2015, the National Enquirer published dialogues-allegedly taken from the cassette of the same “sex tape”-in which he made racist remarks towards African-Americans. WWE immediately cut the bridges with Mr. Bollea, cleaning his website of his references, before reinstating it after a three -year suspension.

“I’m not a racist, but I should never have said what I said,” Bollea said on the show Good Morning America of the ABC channel. “It was a mistake. I am embarrassed. »»

Even before the Gawker affair, Mr. Bollea’s personal life was crumbling following an acrimonious divorce with his wife, Linda Claridge, who accused her of physical violence and infidelities.

The divorce was pronounced in 2007, the same year that their son Nick seriously injured a friend in a car accident and was accused of a crime. Mr. Bollea said he fell into major depression and planned to commit suicide. Burning Captain Morgan rum and taking Xanax, he sat in his bathroom for several hours with a firearm.

“People can look at a guy like me and think that he would never commit suicide. But I was so depressed that I kept thinking: “It would be so easy,” wrote Mr. Bollea in his 2010 book, My Life Outside the Ringco -written with Mark Dagostino.

Mr. Bollea attributes to a fortuitous telephone call of Laila Ali boxer, daughter of Muhammad Ali, the merit of having come out of his suicidal thoughts. She had been her co -host during the recovery in 2008 of American Gladiators On NBC, a program between amateur competitors and actors in great shape in athletic prowess fights.

“In a way, it brought me out of my hinges. At that time, I changed speed, “he told Meredith Vieira, host of the show Today. « I was tired of being sick and tired. His voice in a way saved my life. »»

Recruited from the ring

Terrence Gene Bollea was born on August 11, 1953 in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in Tampa. His father was foreman in the building and his mother was a dance teacher and a housewife. He was a star baseball player until he was injured in the elbow at the age of 14.

He did not want to follow the advice of his coaches to practice other team sports. Instead, he had a condition for professional fighting on television. In the mid -1970s, he worked as a tank top and made bodybuilding while attending the University of Southern Florida.

He also played the bass guitar in a group called Ruckus, where he discovered a talent as a showman to vibrate the public between the songs. The group has made a name for itself in the region, and some of the heroes of struggle of its childhood were among the fans. They recruited him to get into the ring.

Mr. Bollea’s first training session ended in a fracture of the tibia, and his first passage in the community did not last more than a few months before he abandoned, frustrated by the weakness of wages and the lack of opportunities.

Instead, he helped a friend manage a club and open a gym. He also started to fight with another friend, Ed Leslie, later known as Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake. Inflated by steroids, Mr. Bollea began to fight with Leslie under the name of Boulder Brothers.

He adopts the nickname Hulk, inspired by the popular television series The Incredible Hulkbased on the character of Marvel Comics. A few years later, at WWE, he was renamed “Hogan”, an Irish surname that is suitable for a profession where wrestlers are presented to fans according to ethnic or cultural criteria. He was inducted into the WWE renowned temple in 2005.

In 2010, he married the makeup artist Jennifer McDaniel, before divorcing in 2021. In 2023, he announced his engagement with Sky Daily, a yoga instructor. He had two children from her first marriage, actress and singer Brooke Hogan and Nick Hogan. The complete list of survivors was not available immediately.

In a life full of personal and professional tumults, Mr. Bollea insisted that he was a sweet man, put off by the real confrontations only to lounge in the character he played in the ring of struggle or in front of the “reality TV” cameras.

“Seriously, if the struggle was not predetermined and if it was a kind of real fight, I would never have approached it,” he wrote in his memories. “I was only attracted to the struggle after discovering that it was entertainment. »»

Angie Orellana Hernandez contributed to this article.