Terry Bollea, the Florida wrestler who shot to superstardom as Hulk Hogan and whose tabloid-centric private life became a legal battleground over the First Amendment, has died in Clearwater Beach, Florida, the Clearwater Police Department and World Wrestling Entertainment said. He was 71.
Emergency personnel responded to a call for a cardiac arrest and took him to Morton Plant Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Clearwater police said.
For a generation of professional wrestling fans, Hulk Hogan reigned supreme. During the peak of “Hulkamania” in the 1980s, the 2m, 133.8kg grappler was the face of Vince McMahon Jr’s company, then known as the World Wrestling Federation. Bollea’s likeness touched every corner of pop culture, including movies, television, video games, merchandise and even a chain of pasta restaurants.
With his deeply tanned skin, thinning blond locks, Fu Manchu moustache and red bandanna, Bollea flexed his “24-inch pythons” – the nickname he bestowed on his biceps – ripped off his shirt and preached words of encouragement to hordes of fans known as Hulkamaniacs: “Train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins, be true to yourself, true to your country. Be a real American!”
After he portrayed a larger-than-life wrestler called Thunderlips in the 1982 boxing film Rocky III, the Hulk Hogan character took off two years later when McMahon tapped him to beat the Iron Sheik (the supervillain stage name of Hossein Vaziri).
Escaping the Iranian’s signature move, a back-bending chinlock known as the “camel clutch”, Bollea bounced off the ropes and dropped his leg on the Sheik, pinning him at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan to win the heavyweight championship belt.
WrestleMania, wrestling’s version of the Super Bowl, then set pay-per-view records with Bollea’s matches as the featured act. “The slam heard ’round the world” came in 1987 at WrestleMania III, in front of 93,173 fans at the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan.
Entering the ring to his theme song, Real American by Rick Derringer, the Hulkster body-slammed and ended the 14-year undefeated streak of Andre the Giant (the late André Roussimoff), who, at 2.23m, was nearly 317.5kg at the time, according to Bollea.
The star power of Hulk Hogan turned McMahon’s enterprise, rebranded in 2002 as World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), into a global marketing behemoth.
Bollea’s reputation was briefly dented in the early 1990s, when he admitted to using anabolic steroids. But he subsequently flourished for a few years as the villainous “Hollywood Hulk Hogan” with media mogul Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, a short-lived WWE competitor.
Decades after his heyday in the ring, Bollea kept in the public eye, for better and worse.
His reality TV show, Hogan Knows Best, presumably a view into his home life, aired on the cable network VH1 from 2005 to 2007. He became a fixture in the courtroom after suing the owners of a popular gossip website that showed portions of a 2007 sex tape featuring Bollea and the wife of a friend.
The taping reportedly had been done without Bollea’s knowledge, and excerpts appeared on the website Gawker in 2012. The former wrestler sought legal redress from Gawker Media and its founder and principal owner, Nick Denton, saying that the publication of the tape had no news value and was solely a crass commercial attempt to garner clicks at his expense. He called it an invasion of privacy.
Lawyers for Gawker claimed that Bollea was a public figure given to flamboyant exhibitionism, including his frequent mention of his sex life in interviews, which made the video a matter of public interest protected by the First Amendment.
The lawsuit dragged on for years, and in June 2016, a Florida judge affirmed a jury verdict awarding Hogan US$140 million ($231.7m) in damages. Not long afterward, Bollea reached a US$31 million ($51.3m) settlement with Gawker Media, which had filed for bankruptcy and sold itself to the media company Univision. Gawker.com was shuttered.
During the proceedings, it was revealed that Hogan’s suit was bankrolled in part by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a billionaire founder of PayPal and one of Facebook’s earliest investors. Thiel had reputedly been aggrieved for years over a Gawker blog that had outed him as gay. He accused the company of printing stories that “ruined people’s lives for no reason”.
All along, journalists and First Amendment advocates said that the case, Bollea vs Gawker, would have far-reaching consequences. Their fear was that media organisations would quash valid stories out of fear of financial retaliation or be shut down entirely for publishing something newsworthy but controversial.
The case was the subject of a Netflix documentary 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 settlement didn’t end Bollea’s troubles. In 2015, the National Enquirer published dialogue – allegedly from the same sex tape – of him using racist language involving African Americans. WWE immediately cut ties with Bollea, scrubbing its website of his references, before reinstating him after a three-year suspension.
“I’m not a racist, but I never should have said what I said,” Bollea told the ABC show Good Morning America. “It was wrong. I’m embarrassed by it.”
Even before the Gawker case, Bollea’s personal life had been unravelling amid an acrimonious divorce from his wife of 24 years, Linda Claridge, who made allegations of physical abuse and infidelities.
The divorce was finalised in 2007, the same year their son Nick seriously injured a friend in a car accident and was charged with a felony. Bollea said he fell into a major depression and contemplated suicide. Drinking Captain Morgan rum and popping Xanax, Bollea said, he sat in his bathroom for several hours with a gun.
“People might look at a guy like me and think, He would never commit suicide. But I was so depressed I just kept thinking, This would be so easy,” Bollea wrote in his 2010 book, My Life Outside the Ring, co-authored with Mark Dagostino.
Bollea credited a serendipitous phone call from boxer Laila Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali, for lifting him out of his suicidal thoughts. She had been his co-host on NBC’s 2008 revival of American Gladiators, a show that pitted amateur competitors against superfit cast regulars in bouts of athletic prowess.
“In a way, it snapped me out of it. At that moment, I switched gears,” he told Today host Meredith Vieira. “I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. Her voice kind of saved my life.”
Terrence Gene Bollea was born in Augusta, Georgia, on August 11, 1953, and grew up in Tampa. His father was a construction foreman, and his mother was a dance teacher and homemaker. He was a star baseball player until he suffered an elbow injury at 14.
He shunned entreaties by coaches to join other team sports. Instead, he took a liking to professional wrestling on TV. He spent the mid-1970s as a dockworker and lifting weights while attending the University of South Florida.
He also played bass guitar in a band called Ruckus, where he found a showman’s knack for pumping up the audience between songs. The band developed a local following, with some of his childhood wrestling heroes among the fans. They recruited him to the ring.
Bollea’s first training session ended with a broken shin, and his initial stint in the business didn’t last more than a few months before he quit out of frustration over poor pay and few opportunities.
Instead, he helped a friend manage a club and open a gym. He also began wrestling with another friend, Ed Leslie – known later as wrestler Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake. Bulked by steroids, Bollea began wrestling with Leslie as the Boulder Brothers.
He adopted the nickname Hulk based on the popular TV series The Incredible Hulk, based on the Marvel Comics character. In the WWE a few years later, he was rechristened “Hogan” – an Irish surname suited to a profession where wrestlers were presented to fans along ethnic or cultural lines. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005.
In 2010, he married makeup artist Jennifer McDaniel, before divorcing in 2021. In 2023, he married Sky Daily, a yoga instructor. He had two children from his first marriage, actor and singer Brooke Hogan and Nick Hogan. Survivors also include two grandchildren from Brooke Hogan, who married former hockey player Steve Oleksy, and several stepchildren.
In a life filled with personal and professional tumult, Bollea insisted he was a gentle guy, put off by real confrontation only to bask in the character he played in the wrestling ring or in front of the cameras for “reality” TV.
“Seriously, if wrestling wasn’t predetermined and was some kind of actual fight, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it,” he wrote in his memoir. “I was only attracted to it after I discovered that it was entertainment.”
Angie Orellana Hernandez contributed to this report.