WI: No Hulk Hogan?

Even though I didn't watch wrestling as a kid, I knew who Hulk Hogan was. In fact, for the longest time he was one of the only wrestlers I knew along with Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock and The Undertaker. Hogan though seems like he was the catalyst for the boom in wrestling that came in the 80's and 90's. He might not be the best ever, but he is probably the most famous ever.

So my question is, what if their was no Hulk Hogan? Would wrestling have become what it is today? Who else could have filled his place?
 
While Hulk Hogan was the public face of wrestling throughout the 80s, he was far from the only wrestler capable of carrying the business to ludicrous heights.

I'm going to skip over Hogan's brief run in WWF under Vincent J. McMahon (who gave him the name Hulk Hogan) in 1979-80, since that's not when he took off. He really became "Hulk Hogan" under Vincent K. McMahon, the Vince everyone knows, starting in 1983. However, the key here is that Vince McMahon, not Hulk Hogan, was the true motive force behind Hulkamania. Vince saw star power in him, since Hogan had a superhero's build and natural charisma, but he was by no means limited in his choices here. If Hogan were to have died somehow in 1982, Vince would still have been scouting for talent, would still have been looking for wrestlers with natural charisma to lead the program, and would certainly have found someone to grow into a superstar. I'm not sure who it would have been, and it might even have been a situation where a couple guys, rather than just one, were the anchors of the program, but someone would have risen to take his place.

There's a thread on here called the Rise of the Dragon, which while it doesn't handwave Hogan entirely looks to be doing a fair bit of what you're looking for. The PoD in that thread is that Hogan gets hurt before the War to Settle the Score, and Vince is talked into using Ricky Steamboat as the headline attraction at Wrestlemania I against Roddy Piper. While Steamboat may not have been the guy in a Hogan-free world, something like that would happen eventually; VKM's plans were just too grand to be thwarted by the absence of a single man, no matter how big a star that man became.
 
This is from the Wikipedia entry on Hulk Hogan:

After purchasing the company from his father in 1982, Vincent K. McMahon had plans to expand the territory into a nationwide promotion, and he handpicked Hulk Hogan to be the company's showpiece attraction due to his charisma and name recognition.

Yeah, I know it's Wikipedia :) But it's consistent with other things I've read and heard over the years. Hogan was picked by VKM because of his charisma and ability to sell the WWF to a national audience as the face of the company.

Also, Hogan, at 6-foot-7 and around 300 pounds, was the right size for the big man prototype that McMahon reportedly has preferred for decades.

So with no Hulk Hogan, Vince McMahon's candidate has to have


  • charisma
  • good looks
  • size
  • the ability to sell the WWF to the nation, and to the world
  • family and kid-friendly, because he's going to have to sell lots of merchandise

Who else could meet that criteria, at least in part?


  • Andre the Giant
  • Big John Studd
  • Roddy Piper
  • Ric Flair
  • Bruiser Brody
  • Kerry Von Erich
  • Hacksaw Jim Duggan
  • Randy Savage

All of them meet some of the criteria above, but none of them really meet all of it.


  • Ric Flair has the charisma, but his party-with-the-ladies makes him family- and kid-UNfriendly.
  • Randy Savage could pull it off, especially with his WWF good-guy persona, but I'm not convinced he could do as well as Hogan had.
  • Kerry Von Erich has the look to be popular with the fans and wholesome sex appeal that doesn't negate his marketability to families and kids. But would he have been as personable as Hogan, and would his personal demons have consumed him in such a high-profile, high-pressure position?
  • The knock against Piper is his (lack of) size, and also his personality isn't as attractive to moms and kids. He worked very well in the lead heel role.
  • Studd, Andre and Brody were more attractions, and Brody in particular not only looked like a wild man, he went where the money was...and liked not to be tied down to any one promotion. Also, not as mom-friendly and kid-friendly as Hogan was.

Therefore, the closest guy of the aforementioned wrestlers to a Hogan-type I can think of is Hacksaw Jim Duggan. Size, charisma, looks, family-friendly, mom-friendly, doesn't scare average people off, all-American guy that the fans can rally behind. The only limits to Duggan's success would be how well he could handle the job.

And if that didn't work...

Perhaps Vince throws money at Mr. T to be the face of the WWF.

Or, he decides that the face of the company has to be a smaller-sized guy (throwing the door wide open to the likes of a Ricky Steamboat)...

Or...waits for someone who fits his ideal criteria comes along, and is rewarded when Jim Hellwig comes along in 1987, and becomes mega successful as the Ultimate Warrior
 
Or...waits for someone who fits his ideal criteria comes along, and is rewarded when Jim Hellwig comes along in 1987, and becomes mega successful as the Ultimate Warrior

Didn't he and Vince end up having issues with each other though? Unless I'm thinking of something else...
 
Didn't he and Vince end up having issues with each other though? Unless I'm thinking of something else...

They did, but the original issue was money. Without Hogan, assuming Vince rode it out until Warrior hit the scene, he would have been making so much more money, as Vince's one and only go-to star, that the original issues that led to the split would never have happened.
 
Without Hulk Hogan i belive Randy Savage as Macho man would become a even bigger star. He had it in him, and IMHO Hulk was the only thing between him and superstardom.
 
Savage wasn't particularly kid-friendly, I don't think he could have pulled it off.

Hogan's always going to be the best Hogan though- Vince would have tried someone else.

My pic as to who it would be- Barry Windham. He had the size, only thing would be the muscles, but I think he could have done that. He was able to have great matches.
 
Without Hogan, there's not going to be an expansion like the WWF experienced in OTL. Hogan was the main draw during that period and without him, I don't think there would have been anyone to fill his shoes. You have to remember that Hogan was already a huge name in the industry due to his part in Rocky III, his work in Japan and the fact Hulkamania became a concept in AWA, not the WWF.

At the time of the mid-1980's, there was no one to really fill Hogan's shoes. He was the superhero Face and had the right amount of charisma, the right look and had an excellent knowledge of his in ring role to succeed in getting the live crowds behind him.Hellwig's character wasn't able to grab crowds as much as Hogan because he was a bit too out there. Other characters from the period didn't fit the mould Hogan did or had huge personal demons that would have haunted them.

Without Hogan, the WWF would have expanded, but I honestly believe it wouldn't have been as successful as it was in OTL.
 
I would think the WWF's expansion would be delayed until the late 80's when Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels were ready. The arrival of the Undertaker would also have taken place during that time period.
 
I would think the WWF's expansion would be delayed until the late 80's when Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels were ready. The arrival of the Undertaker would also have taken place during that time period.

Actually, I read an interesting story that said Hulk Hogan was responsible in part for giving The Undertaker his big break in the business. Here is a link...

Sometime in 1990, Calaway was cast as a bounty hunter in the movie Suburban Commando, alongside WWF Champion Hulk Hogan. Hogan had seen Calaway wrestling for WCW and offered to bring him over to the WWF. Having just left WCW, Calaway accepted. Hogan introduced Calaway to Vince McMahon, who gave him the gimmick of the Undertaker, based on a mortician from old Western movies.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Un...be_Memories_review_of_Hulk_Hogan_biography-15

I would still expect Calaway to end up in the WWE/WWF, but the circumstances would be different, and who knows if he would have ended up as "The Undertaker", or even becoming what he did.
 
I would think the WWF's expansion would be delayed until the late 80's when Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels were ready. The arrival of the Undertaker would also have taken place during that time period.

If we're talking about 88-89, Bret was probably ready for a singles push into the IC belt by that point, but Michaels was still a little too young
 
If we're talking about 88-89, Bret was probably ready for a singles push into the IC belt by that point, but Michaels was still a little too young

Actually, Bret only got a singles push in '91, he was a solid tag team man until WrestleMania VII when the Hart Foundation lost the belts. Bret and Shawn weren't the draws Hulk were though and I honestly think the only guy who might have competed with Hogan back then would have been TA Magnum.
 
With the absence of Hulk Hogan, perhaps the war between WWF and NWA continues longer than it did. It would probably be more interesting to imagine if Hulk held a grudge against the McMahon family and went to work for Crockett after his stint in the AWA.
 
That's one of the great question of wrestling. Are these megastars (Hogan, Austin, Cena) one in a million draws that became pop-culture icons by who they are, or is it a matter of the right guy in the right place at the right time? Certainly these stars tend to come just as wrestling is changing and they help to embody those changes so in part it is about right place right time. They do tend to be mega stars for a reason however so it wouldn't be right to completely wright that off.

I think here is a danger of falling into a sense of determinism with this kind of question. We know Hogan helped to bring the WWF to the forefront of the wrestling world, but without him the whole sense of wrestling could change. WWF may not reach the same heights but the NWA (WCW in particular) AWA, or WCCW could all have become hits instead.

Another issue is that it's hard to look at this time period and find a match for Hogan due to design. Hogan was very good at politicing to make sure no one could be seen as his equal a fact that WWF saw as good business by making the hero seem to be in a whole other league so can you look at Savage and say "at the time he couldn't have done as well" when that mentality was purposefully crafted?

In my opinion WWF would get behind Savage due mainly to his talking ability, but I also don't think it would have been the powerhouse it became. So as you project into the future there would likely be more promotions in the country but the sport would be smaller.
 
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