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July 26, 2025 - Lionel Nation
21:26
HULK HOGAN DEAD: The End of an Era, the End of A SUPERSTAR

HULK HOGAN DEAD: The End of an Era, the End of A SUPERSTAR

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Paul Cogan is dead, okay?
And so is a level of entertainment and wrestling.
You will never see again.
That's it.
Vince is dead.
Well, not figure.
Wrestling is dead.
This entire theater platform is dead.
He was a part of something young folks will never understand.
And how I was so lucky to have been born in, like Tampa, like Terry or Hulk Hogan.
I think he was born in Port Tampa.
Tampa was the mecca of wrestling.
People like Hulk Hogan, I think Mike and Eddie Graham, I think Steve Kern was born in Tampa.
They were all part of this group.
Dick Slater, Tampa was also a great baseball town, but you don't, just give me a moment here.
He was a part, the last part of when wrestling was big, and then Vince killed it.
He made it so big, much like the actual steroid bodies themselves, he destroyed it.
Wrestling got to a point where it's like a spice.
When you add spice to Basco or Scotch Bonnet, it becomes so hot and so spicy, you ruin it.
You know what I mean?
Wrestling lost its regionalism.
It was fake.
When wrestling broke Kay Fabe, I don't know what year that was when he basically was trying to be exempt from sports regulation because when Vince said, it's not real, it's fake.
And all of that, the Iron Sheik and Hacksaw Doug and all these moments, that's when it blew up and it became a joke.
I know you're going to think to yourself, it's a joke, but he was there at a time when wrestling was real, but it was around the WrestleMania, Cindy Lauper, Lou Albano.
That's when wrestling became cool the way Deep Throat became cool.
Remember when porn, here in New York, when people like Henry Kissinger and Jackie Kennedy would go see Deep Throat, it was Kitschy.
And then during WrestleMania, it was Liberace was there and Trump was there.
And they destroyed it.
They destroyed it.
He was a part, the last part of when wrestling, great wrestling was Kay Fabe, when it was secret, when it was hidden, when it was, when it was homertau, when you didn't give up the secrets.
I had the absolute privilege of knowing as one of, and I can say this unequivocally, one of my best friends, I was probably closer to him than a lot of people I've known in my life.
It was Gordon Soley, who was the announcer, who kind of introduced me to that.
Knowing exceedingly well Bobby the Brain Heenan, but seeing when wrestling was Kfabe, meaning when it was secret and the fans didn't know and you didn't break Kfabe.
Kfabe, K-A-Y-F-A-B-E, the rumor has it as to the derivation of the name was when wrestlers used to appear, or used to be on the road.
And in the old days of person to person, when you wanted to call your wife or tell them, I'm in, I'm in the next stop, because wrestlers travel 300 days.
I mean, it was the most brutal existence.
It was horrible.
What they went through physically, emotionally, financially to do this, you can't believe this.
But the story goes when a wrestler would be in a town, he'd call his wife, let's say, and he wanted to say, I'm here.
He would say, yes, collect call or person to person to Kay Fabe.
And the wife would say, well, he's not here now.
Thank you, Click.
And that was, I'm okay.
I'm, you know.
So the story goes.
It was when wrestling spoke Kiazarni.
When you spoke Karni, when you talk about Marks and Miazarks and that sort of thing.
Well, Hulk was the last of that.
Then Hulk got into the degeneracy of the, you know, the business, and he lost me there.
But he was, at his prime, the biggest, biggest.
Now remember, it's hard to put this into Japan.
Japan was another world.
Japan wrestling in the old days, you know, Baba the Giant, all these other guys, completely different.
There were greats.
The greatest wrestler in my book, mine, professional wrestler, not in terms of athleticism, but in terms of performing, was Dusty Rhodes.
Barn.
Maybe one of the greatest, toughest wrestlers was either Harley Race, Haku or Ming, you know, those, you've heard those stories of me.
The backstory is terrific.
Bobby Heenan told me one time he found out his Bree broke his neck.
He would wrestle with a broken neck.
He'd tell me Von Rossky stories, but they kept.
And Bobby the Brain Heenan, probably the greatest manager ever, then he was one of the greatest announcers.
Bobby Heenan was another story.
Brilliant.
And the nicest man with his wife and his daughter.
And I knew them so well.
And I really, I didn't know a lot of people, but he was very close.
What a wonderful, what a wonderful, wonderful man.
But Hulk Hogan was Pele, Muhammad Ali.
He was it.
Mike Tyson, he was the biggest thing anybody's ever seen.
And by the way, where did he?
He ripped off superstar Billy Graham.
Superstar Billy Graham ripped off Dusty Rose.
You know, babe, this was this affected black urban rip-off kind of voicing.
That was Dusty Rose.
Mac and Dream going Thole with a Lisp.
Remember that one?
Oh, Wax, Uvalde Slim and Midnight Rider.
I can go back.
Hulk Hogan, biggest one ever.
Biggest.
Andre the Giant thing.
But for those of us who were purists, he was the, he made that transition.
It's when February, whatever the day was in 64, when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, the world changed overnight.
With Hulk Hogan, it changed.
With Vince and whatever, he became so, remember when Hulk Hogan, I knew Richard Belzer.
Richard Belzer got his house in France when he was, they were on that show, and he says, can you choke me out?
And Hulk put him in a choke and choked him.
And Richard Belzer fell, remember, broke his head.
Cracked his head.
He was bleeding and sued and, you know, all that stuff.
He was the best.
Then Hogan got into this degeneracy.
Remember with his daughter and taking the, he was rubbing.
I mean, he's just, he's not somebody that I want to hold up as some kind of a testament to, you know, morality.
He got the whole thing with my, an old friend of mine, Bubba the Love Sponge.
When Bubba the Love Sponge, when I used to work on, I was on WFLA, he was FLZ.
He was the FM version of that.
This was so big.
They were into this kind of this degeneracy back to Hulk Hogan.
He was it.
Now, why did he die?
You're going to find out.
If I had to guess, all right?
Had to guess.
Listen to me, listen to me.
It says Carnac, all right?
I have no information.
Haven't read.
Just saw he died.
That's all I saw.
Atherosclerosis.
Heart.
Might have been exacerbated in some respects by, you know, PEDs and the like.
I don't think you're going to find the steroids are as bad as people think.
I'm sorry to say this.
Hunter Biden was on this something when he said that crack was purified.
I know you're going to think I'm crazy, but there's a little bit of something to that.
There's a little bit of something to it.
Just saying, just, just saying, but I'm going to leave it at that.
And people are going to say that he died because of the vaccine.
He took a job.
I'll bet you.
There's all these arms that I don't know why he died.
I'm not an expert.
I don't know.
But that's not the point.
He was at the top of the game.
It was like the Uncanny Valley.
And then it just lost it.
It's lost.
Vince got into his problems.
It got so big, so huge.
So carnivalistic.
Vince McMahon says, who was your hero?
He said, McDonald's.
He wanted it to be for kids.
When I grew up, though, it was a different time.
It was at the Armory when there were men who didn't look, who looked kind of like your dad.
When Dick Murdoch and Dick Slater, Dick Slater, by the way, excuse me, from Tampa.
Dick Slater, Steve Kern, Mike Graham, Eddie Graham, Terry Boulea.
I remember he played this group.
He was a bass player.
I think he played around USF area and Fowler.
And he was Sterling Golden and all this stuff.
And then he just blew up, obviously, with events.
And it changed everything.
But remember, he ripped off superstar Billy Graham, Billy Graham.
Remember the Graham brothers, Luke, Crazy Luke.
They weren't all brothers, of course.
But Eddie Graham, whose name was Gossett, he killed himself, shot himself, committed.
Eddie Graham, the promoter, shot himself twice.
His son, Mike, and Mike's son.
Three generations.
Oh, the stories, the backstories are, I mean, this is degeneracy.
The thing about the old days, about the boys, as they say, was they were always into the rib.
It was a rib.
It was a joke.
The thing they loved to do was shaving off an eyebrow.
I don't know why they thought it was funny.
Everybody got the shaving off the eyebrow thing.
It was a charm.
It was carnival.
It was so raw, it was scary.
When you were a kid, and I would go to my dad, I was raised in Tampa.
We didn't have professional sports.
We had University of Tampa.
And then later on, we had the Rowdies as soccer team.
That was nice.
Buccaneers came later, maybe like 70, 70, 89, something like that.
And they sucked.
Remember, John McKay was the coach.
But wrestling was it.
In the old days, wrestling, the territories were important.
Florida was Eddie Graham.
The Carolinas, I think, was Crockett.
Fritz von Erich Atkins was Texas.
Bill Watts.
Vern Gagne was Minneapolis.
They never went really west.
There was no territory.
It's kind of like the mafia.
It was always East Coast.
Amarillo, Georgia was a big one.
Oh, St. Louis, Keele Auditorium.
The auditoriums were, and New York was, of course, WWWF Vince Sr.
This is when it was regionalism.
But see, that was the days of this guy, Ed Farhat, whatever, the original chic.
What was his name?
Thing, a pencil.
He never said anything.
He never said anything.
He was the greatest heel of all time.
Hulk Hogan was from that era.
After Hulk, it became McDonald's.
It became Nobody Believed It.
It became Star Wars.
It became CGI and AI.
It lost its charm.
I can remember one time sitting and watching Johnny Valentine, Greg Valentine's father, I was a kid.
After the match, everybody's leaving.
He was in the corner.
He was sitting collapsed like in the corner in the ring with this blood dripping, was like pulsing.
And we're walking out and I'm watching.
And he didn't even get up and leave.
He just sat there in the ring.
It was the greatest.
you know, do I stare?
This was like watching gladiators.
And when you went there, it was scary and excitement.
I remember I couldn't go to sleep.
My mother told my father, Don't you ever take him to that again?
I couldn't sleep, couldn't go to school the next morning.
I just saw the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my life.
When was the last time you ever saw anything, any event, anything where you went and you couldn't sleep?
You were freaked out.
It was orgasmic, paroxysmal.
You lost your mind by watching this thing.
It was bigger than anything anybody ever saw.
Nobody can explain this.
Nobody could put this into perspective.
But I can't.
I saw it.
And with Hulk Hogan, that's the end of that.
You know, there was the warrior.
There's all these deaths.
There's so many you've seen because maybe, who knows?
It could be substantially.
It could be a lot of things.
I know there's going to be loads of people on TV talking about Hulk Hogan.
And Hulk Hogan leaves a veritable, a litany, a library of shoots.
Oh, a shoot.
Shoot interviews?
Shoot meaning the real thing.
Never heard that.
You break Kay Fabe, you're done.
Rumor has it in the old days.
Eddie Graham one time found out someplace, somebody on St. Pete Beach or Madeira Beach or something here in Florida.
We're in Florida.
There were two wrestlers.
They were at a party.
A baby facing a hill.
Good guy and a bad guy.
And they showed up at a party, and I think they fired him or something.
He said, you can't be seen in public.
You can't travel.
When the sheikh, I think it was Hacksaw, Jim Duggan, where they were caught in that cocaine thing.
What Vince McMahon was upset the most about?
What were you doing traveling together?
Not the drugs.
What were you doing traveling together?
It was that serious.
And then after, after, you know, Hogan, it became kind of, you know, Los Angeles.
I mean, maybe kids today like action figurines.
Imagine that.
Can you imagine a Harley race doll?
What?
Vince McMahon was the Barnum and Bailey, the John Ringling.
He exploited it and killed it.
You'll never get that back again.
Never, ever, ever, ever.
Nobody would ever want to go through it.
And then we have outlaws and things.
Terry Funk, I think he was doing, he recently passed away.
He was phenomenal.
Could be one of my favorites.
It was so, you don't know what Kay Fabe was.
It taught me one thing.
It was about putting the opponent over.
Never breaking the fourth wall, never breaking the K Fabe wall, but also putting over, going out there and being a worker where you make the other guy look good.
You sell it.
You bring heat.
Life's lessons.
It's the most important and critical messaging in the world.
So, Terry Bole, Bole, Balay, I don't know how you pronounce it.
Tampa Zone, Tampeño.
Poor Tampa.
You know, he was it.
He was something.
And his death marks the final closure of an era, of an epoch or epoch, as people called it, that you will never see again.
Thank God for video.
Thank God for YouTube.
Thank God for it.
But you will never know what it's like.
You don't know what it's like to go into a local match and to see people lose their minds.
When I was at one time, a couple of times as a kid, when my parents, no, my mother never went, my father.
And we loved it.
It was our thing that we did together.
It was father-son.
We loved it.
It was the greatest thing.
It was fantastic.
And I remember one time there's a woman like an Amumu.
We were in the armory on Howard Avenue.
It was Howard Armory.
I mean, anyway, it was a National Guard Armory.
So hot, big fans, industrial fans.
And they had black, the black folks were at the top of the cheap seats.
And then once the bell rang, everybody just, everybody moved, nobody cared.
Sold boiled peanuts in the front.
This woman next to us, she had, I've never forget, she had, you know how sometimes, I'm sorry to say this, but sometimes women can get to, they just grow and they get these gargantuan breasts and they're, that's like, they're not even human.
It's like, are you, are you, is there, is there a family in there?
Is there a human being wearing mumus, smoking cigarettes, wearing like a mumu with this fat, just, it's like, what, it's like a circus act.
And she's an acting, screaming and yelling and cursing.
I can't believe what I'm hearing.
This is a woman.
It's like a grandmother with a cigarette.
Losing her mind.
And the first time I went to a match, I said, oh my God.
He goes, that's just the first match.
I was spent.
I had to wait to the end.
Lights out match.
I'll tell you the Steve Kern story one time.
That was the best match I ever saw in my life.
There was a guy one time, a black dude, who went so crazy he lost his mind.
Real skinny guy.
Had his hat backwards.
Again, cigarette.
People smoked.
He couldn't take it.
He ran into the ring.
And it was Bobby Duncom.
Bobby Duncom was huge.
I mean, these people were just big ex-football or whatever, big dofin, Alabama times.
And the rule was, anybody who enters the ring, stop them.
You have our permission.
Kill them.
We don't know if you've got a gun or knife.
Some people were stabbed.
Some people were shot.
And there was very little security when they walked to and from the ring.
And it was this match where this black dude just went crazy.
He just couldn't take it.
And he said, damn it, I've got to do something.
And he ran into the ring.
And Bobby Duncan, I remember watching this and hearing this.
I mean, because a lot of bits, you know, it's a work and everything.
But I saw him get hit.
And I heard this.
Even over the crowd, the din of the crowd, this kind of a thud.
And this guy was down.
They flattened him.
And I thought, this is wild.
I can't believe what I'm seeing.
Real blood, real juice, Geozeus, real scars, real, not chicken blood.
I don't know why they said chicken blood.
Who would put chicken blood?
Salmon, not all kinds of bacterial.
They worried more about wrestlers had hepatitis more than anything you can imagine.
They used to sterilize the ring, autoclave it because of the blood.
It was wild.
It was this woman screaming walking around with these, oh, 300 pounds under a mumu, and you're into this hot, sweaty armory.
The smell, you know, the smell of body heat.
You know what it is?
It's not bad.
It's not good.
It's just you can smell heat.
The heat of the clothing, heat of the sweat.
Hasn't really turned it most sometimes, B.O. And then screaming and yelling, and I mean, the ding, the bell, and oh my God.
And Hulk Hogan was the last of that trajectory before he went Vince style and before he killed it, killed professional wrestling.
So, Terry, rest in peace, brother.
Again, all of that fake black stuff that Dusty Rhodes, Virgil Riley-Runnels, that's the one who gave you some.
Okay, going thole, baby.
You know, I'm, I'm, uh, anyway, no, I just, I'm losing myself.
This is a great part of my life that I was so lucky to be a part of.
And Tampa was a mecca.
It was a mecca.
It was a mecca.
Sportatorium, they used to tape 253-0841.
Don't forget plenty of free parking.
This is what Gordon told me was a plenty of free parking.
There's no plenty of free.
We parked.
You just parked in people's lawns.
This kind of a West Tampa neighborhood that was surrounding the armory.
You just parked in people's, it went crazy.
You can't park there.
Well, it's free parking.
Well, Gordon said so.
Then even that's it.
What do you think, my friends?
What are your favorite recollections?
What are your favorite recollections?
What are your moments, not only of Hulk Hogan, but just wrestling?
Where were you?
What was your territory?
Who were the stars when you were growing up?
Did you ever meet them?
Did you see them?
It was the first real royalty that we had growing up.
So let me know, my friends, and comment as you see.
Oh, after you subscribe.
After you subscribe.
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