Raymond J. de Souza: Hulk Hogan told a simple story, but his life was far more complex

Thirty-nine years ago, on the first night of the Calgary Stampede, Hulk Hogan wrestled King Kong Bundy at the Saddledome. In 1986, Hogan, who died Thursday at age 71, was at the peak of his global fame and I, along with my teenage friends, were there to watch him defeat Bundy in a “house show,” meaning a non-televised match. Hogan and Bundy had been the main event at WrestleMania II just a few months previous.

It was, for a teenage boy growing up in Calgary, something of the apotheosis of professional wrestling. And it marked for me something of an introduction to wrestling’s darker side as a cultural phenomenon.

In the late 1970s, professional wrestling was organized into regional promotions, and the Hart family had one of the best, Stampede Wrestling in Calgary. Every Friday night, Stu Hart would stage the fights — often including his several sons — at the grungy Victoria Pavilion on the Stampede grounds, which would then be shown on grainy local TV on Saturday afternoon. The general ambience was both silly and seedy, buffoonish and bloody, and my parents would (wisely) not let me attend.

But by 1986, wrestling had gone global and respectable. Vince McMahon of the World Wrestling Federation (later World Wrestling Entertainment — WWE) bought out local promotions, hired the biggest stars, cleaned up the grime and shifted the whole enterprise toward lucrative cable and network TV.

During the annual Stampede, Stu Hart would move his show to the larger and more dignified Stampede Corral to stage an annual spectacular, featuring a global superstar like Harley Race or André the Giant.

By 1986, McMahon’s eclipse of Hart and his contemporaries was complete. WWF had bought Stampede Wrestling in 1984, but sold it back to the Hart family the next year when McMahon realized he had no need of it. He could stage shows at the Saddledome — or anywhere else — on his own. He had the biggest wrestling star on the planet — Hulk Hogan. Indeed, within a year of that Calgary show, Hogan would fight André the Giant at WrestleMania III in Detroit, drawing larger crowds than the Super Bowl or the World Cup.

My dominant memories of that night were not of Hogan’s wrestling. He wasn’t, actually, a very good wrestler. His physique was impressive, but he had no creative moves and all of his matches ended in the same underwhelming fashion. Several members of Stu Hart’s own family were far better wrestlers.

Hogan did have charisma, as much or more than any other performer in any field. Wrestling is all about lights and music and grand entrances, but Hogan was his own source of energy, uniquely able to connect with mass audiences. The frenzy of a full Saddledome that night was a formidable thing — a frenzy that the world would see at the Silverdome the following year when Hogan body-slammed the Giant.

It was the capacity for public frenzy that struck teenage me as a bit frightening. I recall a woman, climbing atop her chair, face contorted and screaming, resembling a woman possessed. She was my mother’s age, so should have known better.

The performers in the ring were scripted, directed toward telling a story. The frenzy on the outside was harder to control. In time, others would learn, in wrestling and the broader culture, that frenzy could be put to other purposes.

In the 1980s, McMahon presented Hogan as utterly wholesome, advising kids to “train, say your prayers, and take your vitamins.” Eventually, Hogan’s fans would discover that he “trained” with steroids, said nasty racist things, and took other men’s wives. Alongside that, as is always necessary in wrestling, Hogan became a villain. Frenzied adulation or frenzied vituperation matters less than the frenzy itself, which generates attention and relevance and revenue.

Fifteen years after the Saddledome, Hogan fought The Rock at the Skydome in the most memorable match of WrestleMania X8 (18). Remembered now as one of the historic moments in wrestling history, it was the pro-Hogan frenzy of the crowd that determined the outcome of the story, an unusual reversal of manipulators and manipulated.

Toronto 2002 would be the effective end of the Hogan era. Then, nearly fifty years old, boasting a litany of back and hip and knee surgeries, Hogan was losing the sheer athletic ability demanded of professional wrestlers. Soon, he would descend into scandal and, despite WWE’s attempts to restore him to prominence, his last wrestling appearance ended in an embarrassment of booing. The frenzy had turned.

Hogan’s career then slipped from wrestling into reality TV — and eventually to politics. For those of us who long ago explained that Donald Trump could not be understood apart from professional wrestling, Hogan’s introduction of Trump at the Republican National Convention last summer was sad confirmation of a malign cultural force converted to demoralizing political effect. The frenzied woman of 1986 was the Trump voter long before there was Trump to vote for.

WWE will honour Hogan in death, recalling the glory days of the 1980s. Vince McMahon himself will not do so, banished from the company he built after a flurry of sexual misconduct claims. Perhaps his wife Linda might, serving as she does as Trump’s secretary of education.

Professional wrestling is professional storytelling. Like other storytelling — novels, plays, journalism — it can be done well or poorly, to uplift or to degrade. At the Saddledome and Silverdome and Skydome, Hulk Hogan was a very good teller of a simple story that, for a time, lifted up a great many. The real story of his life was something more complicated, with much less to celebrate.