In the late 1970s, Terry Bollea debuted as a wrestler in his home state of Florida. He worked the territory circuit for two years in Memphis and Atlanta, but also in places like Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Booneville, Mississippi. Prior to McMahon consolidating the industry, there were thriving regional and local promotions throughout the country. That’s where Bollea got his start, on the back roads of the southeastern United States.

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Bollea wasn’t a star at that time. But he stood out. He had long blond hair, a blond goatee, and was simply a large individual. A bodybuilder for years, Bollea was billed as six-foot-seven and weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. Steroids, which weren’t made illegal in the United States until 1990, were pervasive in bodybuilding, some Olympic sports, and, of course, pro wrestling.

While already a large man by any standard, Bollea understood that injecting himself with steroids would allow him to increase his muscle mass. Strength is important in pro wrestling, but aesthetic is everything. It’s show business. Bollea had an innate feel for that—what fans reacted to—from the beginning and the unique charisma to carry it out.

That included adapting things as part of his character from his own squared-circle heroes like “Superstar” Billy Graham and Dusty Rhodes and making them his own. From Graham, he borrowed poses and catchphrases, like referring to his bulging arms as “pythons.” From Rhodes, he picked up in-ring mannerisms like finger-wagging and pointing.

In 1979, Bollea was promoting one of his matches on a morning talk show in Mobile, Alabama, and the other guest was Lou Ferrigno. An actor and bodybuilder, Ferrigno had been portraying the live-action version of Marvel Comics’ The Incredible Hulk on television for two years. The host of the show joked that Bollea was “bigger than the Hulk.”

Bollea had an innate feel for that—what fans reacted to—from the beginning and the unique charisma to carry it out.

Bollea started working under the name Terry “The Hulk” Boulder from there, until he began with the WWF (which is now WWE), then promoted by Vincent James McMahon, the father of the McMahon who guided the WWF to national prominence.

The elder McMahon thought Bollea looked Irish, so he handed him a bottle of red hair dye and renamed his character to Hulk Hogan. Bollea’s father was Italian, and his mother was French, Italian, and Panamanian. That didn’t matter. Vincent James McMahon’s characters in the WWF were defined by their nationalities, like Italian immigrant Bruno Sammartino, and Bollea was close enough. The New York-based WWF wanted to sell tickets to the area’s substantial Irish community.

Bollea ditched the red hair dye bottle. But the new name stuck. Bollea would be known as Hulk Hogan from then on.

With a new moniker, Hogan started carving out a path for himself in the WWF. But he was portraying a bad guy, or heel, which would likely only limit how big of a star he could become.

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Professional wrestling features a fairly elementary framework for storytelling. There are heroes, called babyfaces, and villains, called heels. The babyfaces, in most cases, are the stars of the show, the ones who prevail in the end. The heels are the ones cheating and trying to do everything to overthrow the babyfaces’ dreams of being champion or attaining whatever goal the storyline is outlining.

Heels have to win matches and establish credibility as legitimate threats to their enemies, the babyfaces. Heels can be champions and sometimes ascend to becoming a promotion’s biggest star. But, especially in pro wrestling prior to the 1990s, the heel characters are mostly there in service to the babyface characters.

The babyface is the wrestler the fans are supposed to get behind, the one the audience is cheering for to emerge victorious. The heel is there for the fans to boo, to stack the deck against the babyface so that when the babyface finally wins, there is a feeling of catharsis. But that therapeutic reaction can only be achieved if the heel is effectively malevolent enough that fans want the babyface to dish out comeuppance.

Pro wrestling, at its core, is a morality play. It’s Shakespeare in a ring.

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Hogan got his big break in 1981— and it wasn’t in the wrestling ring. While working for the WWF, Hogan received a Western Union letter backstage from Sylvester Stallone, one of the biggest action stars of the decade. Stallone said in the letter that he wanted Hogan to play a role in Rocky III.

Stallone was looking for a wrestler to be paired against the Rocky Balboa character in a charity exhibition match in the film. Hogan was a fan of the first two Rocky movies, both of which did well at the box office. Stallone was a megastar. He believed it was a no- brainer to take the part.

His promoter felt otherwise. Vincent James McMahon told Hogan that he was in the WWF’s storyline plans and there just wasn’t time for him to jet off to Hollywood to film a movie. The elder McMahon issued Hogan an ultimatum: If you do Rocky III, don’t bother coming back to the WWF.

Believing that sharing time with Stallone on the silver screen would do wonders for his profile, Hogan walked out on the WWF and took the role. Rocky III ended up doing very well at the box office, becoming one of the highest- grossing movies of 1982.

Before Rocky III even had a chance to premiere, the American Wrestling Association (AWA) in Minnesota, promoted by highly respected former amateur and pro wrestler Verne Gagne, came calling for Hogan’s services. So Hogan headed up to Minneapolis for another shot with a major wrestling company.

The problem was, the fans did not view the bronzed Hogan, billed from Venice Beach, California, as a bad guy, despite how his character was being scripted to act. He was booked to be a villain, but movie star and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger had made Venice—he trained at an outdoor gym there called Muscle Beach—a recognized and cool place in the 1970s, especially to parka- wearing Midwesterners. Hogan also had a personality that connected with the audience as something more than a one-dimensional, meathead heel.

Before the end of 1981, spurred by audiences, the AWA made Hogan a babyface. When Rocky III came out a few months later, Hogan started walking out to the ring with the Rocky theme song, “Eye of the Tiger,” playing over the PA system. When he got to the ring, he ripped off his shirt, exposing his substantial pectoral muscles.

Hogan also began a side hustle, printing T- shirts at the local mall and selling his own merchandise with catchphrases on it out of the back of his truck. Hogan’s name was growing so much that Johnny Carson had him on The Tonight Show in 1982.

“That’s where I started planting the seeds that would grow into Hulkamania,” Hogan said.

A McMahon reached out to Hogan in 1983. But it wasn’t Vincent James; it was his son, who had purchased the WWF from his father a year earlier. The younger McMahon wanted to take the WWF national, with Hogan as his lead character. He was signing some of the top stars from around the country, away from the regional, territory promotions. This was the opportunity Hogan had been waiting for, and it wasn’t difficult for him to depart the AWA.

Hogan returned to the WWF in December 1983 and, in his fourth match back, on January 23, 1984, he won the WWF World Heavyweight title, beating hated villain The Iron Sheik, who played an anti-American character from Iran. The relationship between the United States and Iran fell out after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the two countries have not had diplomatic relations since then.

The Sheik, a real-life former national-team wrestler from Iran, represented America’s biggest political foe at the time. Hogan would begin walking out to a new theme song called “Real American” in 1985.

The next step for McMahon’s wrestling revolution and Hogan’s burgeoning fame was a supershow at New York’s Madison Square Garden that would be called WrestleMania.

The WrestleMania I headliner was built around a storyline involving Lauper. At a WWF event, Lauper awarded WWF manager Captain Lou Albano with a gold record. Albano played Lauper’s father in the music video for her hit song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, the promotion’s top heel, interrupted the ceremony, cracked the record over Albano’s head, and then “kicked” Lauper. Hogan came out to save her and ran Piper off.

Pro wrestling, at its core, is a morality play. It’s Shakespeare in a ring.

The angle, the pro-wrestling term for a non-match storyline development, was everything McMahon could have hoped for and more. WrestleMania just needed a little more star power to complete McMahon’s vision to take wrestling mainstream.

McMahon looked down on what wrestling had been, events where storytelling took place in the ring through simulated fights. What he wanted to build was an entertainment company, so much so that he later banned the use of the words “professional wrestling” on WWF television, with “sports entertainment” as the substitute. Wrestlers could not be called wrestlers; they were “Superstars.”

McMahon didn’t think he could grow his promotion on the back of fake fights. He needed glitz and glamour. The first Wrestle-Mania needed celebrities with the hope that their presence could elevate McMahon’s “Superstars” to that same status.

Peter Young, Hogan’s agent, also represented Mr. T, who was brought in to be Hogan’s tag-team partner for the big main-event match. At the time, Mr. T was starring in the hit show The A-Team. That wasn’t all. Muhammad Ali was hired as special referee. Billy Martin, the controversial then-manager of the New York Yankees, was a guest ring announcer. And Liberace, the flamboyant pianist, was guest timekeeper.

The injection of luminaries from the worlds of music, sports, and television worked wonders for McMahon’s marketing of WrestleMania. And Hogan himself.

The week of WrestleMania I was a whirlwind of trying to drum up interest for the event. Hogan and Mr. T were all over TV, especially news programs after an incident that occurred on the Lifetime show Hot Properties, hosted by Richard Belzer. The man who went on to become most famous for playing a television detective was something of a victim that night.

Hogan reluctantly agreed to placate Belzer when the host asked him to demonstrate a wrestling move. Belzer had been talking trash jokingly with Hogan and Mr. T and actually asked Hogan why he was a “bad guy” and then became a “good guy,” somewhat alluding to pro wrestling not being real, which was a no-no then. Belzer then asked Hogan to perform a submission on him.

Hogan, his hairline already betraying him before he became a household name, towered over Belzer as he explained that he would put the skinny comedian in a front headlock. Hogan gently grabbed Belzer’s shoulders and pulled him downward, bent at the waist. Hogan then wrapped his giant right arm around Belzer’s head and neck and connected his right hand with his left bicep.

Belzer looked like he was struggling as Hogan and Mr. T talked some smack. Then, Belzer’s arms went limp. Hogan let him go and the comedian’s body snapped to the floor, the back of his head cracking against the ground. The live audience gasped.

“You all right, brother?” Hogan asked as Belzer came to.

Hogan helped Belzer up and Belzer quickly seemed to regain his senses, throwing the telecast to commercial. Then Belzer turned around— and blood could be seen dripping from the back of his head down onto his blazer.

Belzer ended up going to the hospital. Hogan and McMahon were lucky. If Belzer had been severely injured or worse, the outrage might have gotten WrestleMania canceled. Instead, all that happened was the incident getting the WWF much more media attention.

Hogan and Mr. T hosted Saturday Night Live the night before WrestleMania I, which took place March 31, 1985. Pro wrestling was Hollywood suddenly, with Hogan playing the role of leading man.

The Associated Press reported the next morning that one million people watched WrestleMania I on closed- circuit television (the predecessor to pay-per-view). Several reports have put the attendance figure at 19,121. McMahon invested millions— his daughter, Stephanie, said years later that her mother and father “mortgaged everything they owned”— and the first WrestleMania was a massive success.

“It was funny, because nobody ever talked about wrestling except wrestling fans,” said wrestling journalist and historian Dave Meltzer, who has been writing the Wrestling Observer Newsletter since 1983. “And then, that week everybody talked about wrestling. It was just the thing in pop culture.”

Hogan’s peers were noticing the changes in the business, too. Wrestlers did not have guaranteed contracts then, instead getting paid a percentage of whatever the ticket sales were for the shows they were on.

“We’d sometimes run two or three cities a night with different people [in the main events],” said Jimmy Hart, a legendary onscreen wrestling manager and Hogan’s longtime confidant. “Well, all of us wanted to be on the show that Hulk was on, because we were going to make more money….We knew if Hulk was on [the show], no matter where it was, it was going to sell out.”

The WWF claims 93,173 people packed the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan on March 29, 1987, for WrestleMania III. The real number was closer to 78,000, but, in pro wrestling, exaggeration is the rule. The actual figure is impressive enough, in the same way the pain from a suplex or slam can be legitimate. But doesn’t it stand out more when it gets embellished?

More than one million more tuned in on closed-circuit television to see if Hogan could topple his most fearsome foe yet.

Of course, he did. Hogan was the WWF’s meal ticket, and people had paid to see the satisfying conclusion of the story: good over evil. Hogan slammed Andre, pinned him, and took Hulkamania to another level of stardom than wrestling had seen before.

The two men had a rematch eleven months later, on a card called The Main Event, which was on free-to-air NBC. The show drew thirty-three million viewers for a rating of 15.2, according to Nielsen. It still stands as the most-watched wrestling match ever in the United States on television, and there’s almost no chance that record will ever be broken with the deterioration of TV viewership due to other technologies.

Hogan was pro wrestling’s first real brand name in the modern era, someone who transcended the art. There is no formula to recognizing or building a star. Several things can help: someone’s looks or sex appeal, their physical charisma, and how they can engage with fans in interviews. That doesn’t just apply to wrestling; it applies to entertainment and sports, as well.

As in Hollywood, the biggest stars are not always the best actors. Hogan was not a mat wrestler who produced classic matches. Tom Cruise has never won an Oscar, either.

McMahon went about building stars like he did most things: with blunt force. Hogan was on prime-time talk shows, Saturday morning cartoons, on the cover of cereal boxes, featured at toy stores with his action figures. Everywhere you looked.

Hogan wore the colors red and yellow. Psychologists have said that those colors are effective in marketing—think McDonalds—because of how they make consumers feel. And Hogan was indeed like the pro-wrestling version of the Big Mac. He wasn’t a Michelin-starred meal—wrestlers like Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, Ricky Steamboat, and Terry Funk were the ones putting on the critically acclaimed matches of the day in the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) and then World Championship Wrestling (WCW).

Hogan was indeed like the pro-wrestling version of the Big Mac.

Hogan’s popularity was not because of how good he was in the ring, but because of how he resonated with the public. He didn’t have a long list of attacks in the squared circle, sticking mainly to punching, kicking, a big boot, and a leg drop.

But Hogan had the magnetism and oversized personality to make it work. More important, he was so incredibly driven to be at the top that he put in all the necessary work, which included an exhausting amount of travel for media and promotional events while maintaining his impressive physique.

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Excerpt from Say Hello to the Bad Guys by Marc Raimondi. Copyright © 2025 by Marc Raimondi. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, NY.