There’s a moment–burned into the memory of anyone who watched wrestling in the 1980s–when the screen goes gold, the chords of “Real American” ignite, and Hulk Hogan stalks to the ring like some musclebound Paul Bunyan, shaking the ropes and flexing not only his biceps but the boundaries of reality. It didn’t matter if you were a true believer or a snarky teenager; when that music hit, the arena became a revival tent, and the only gospel was Hulkamania.

And now, with the passing of Terry Bollea–Hulk Hogan, the last American folk hero–pro wrestling has lost a legend and a gravitational center. The man whose shadow stretched over the ring, the locker room, and the living rooms of an entire generation is gone. Wrestling will go on, as it always does, but the world feels less technicolor.

It’s easy to forget how unlikely a thing “Hulkamania” was. Hogan was not wrestling’s best athlete, not its best promo, not its most convincing villain or purest babyface. But he was, in the language of the squared circle, “over”–so over that the shape of American entertainment bent to fit him. In a business built on exaggeration, Hogan’s existence made the exaggeration obsolete. You didn’t need to hype the myth. The myth wore a yellow tank top and told you to say your prayers and eat your vitamins.

To measure Hogan’s impact on professional wrestling is to measure the difference between wrestling before him and after him. Before: a smoky, regional sideshow, beloved and derided in equal measure, where heroes wore masks and heels got stabbed in parking lots.

After: Madison Square Garden sold out, action figures in every toy store, a red-and-yellow army of kids ran wild through suburbia. Hogan turned wrestling from cult secret into mainstream spectacle, from carny whisper to pop culture shout.

Before Hogan, professional wrestling was, to the average civilian, a local oddity: a smoky arena on a weeknight, a regional TV slot, a carnival with a parking lot. There were stars, of course–Bruno and Dusty and the Funks–but there wasn’t yet a singular avatar that a national audience could carry around like a lunchbox.

Hogan became that avatar. He was the face on the poster when Vince McMahon bet the house on the idea that pro wrestling could be more than territorial turf wars; it could be a national entertainment enterprise, a mainstream calendar of tentpole events. WrestleMania needed a main character. Hogan wasn’t only that; he was a literacy test. If you understood Hogan, you understood what the business was about to become.

He was a simple promise packaged in yellow and red: the strongest man in the room will use his strength for you. He made morality easy. The matches were morality plays choreographed for television, and Hogan’s toolkit–hulking up, the wagging finger, the big boot, the leg drop–was as comforting as a bedtime story.

The slam of Andre the Giant at WrestleMania III is where the myth solidified. Anyone who’s spent time around wrestlers knows what that night was: trust, pain management, and the delicate physics of helping one another to immortality.

It was a fable made of flesh. Pontiac roared, the camera shook, and a nation exhaled in unison. The business thrives on images you can’t forget, and Hogan authored the definitive postcard of the boom. If there was ever a single moment that told grandmothers and third graders, “This matters,” that was it.

He wasn’t the first wrestler to break into the public consciousness, but he was the first to take it over. Bruno was beloved, Andre was feared, Flair was envied, but Hogan was worshiped. You could see it in the way children mimicked his cupped ear, the way grown men cried when he “Hulked Up,” shaking off villainy like rainwater. Hulkamania wasn’t a storyline; it was a mass movement.

If you want to understand what made Hogan so singular, you have to look at what he symbolized: not simply heroism, but American heroism at its most flamboyant. He was Reagan-era optimism in human form, flexing his muscles in the morning mirror of America. He was the New York City skyline and Venice Beach sunshine stitched together in a bandana.

In a time of Cold War anxiety, he body-slammed a Soviet giant and made it all feel winnable. Hogan’s America was a place where the good guy always came back, where the odds could be stacked to the ceiling, and the finish would still be three punches, a big boot, and a leg drop–guaranteed.

That finish was never pretty. It didn’t have to be. Hogan’s matches weren’t about technical brilliance. They were morality plays. The drama wasn’t whether he could beat the Iron Sheik or Andre or King Kong Bundy–it was whether hope could survive another day. And when it did, when he pointed at the crowd and summoned their energy, it felt like more than a scripted moment. It felt like magic, or at least as close as wrestling ever comes.

Of course, the magic faded, as all magic does. Hogan’s career outlasted his myth, as careers always do in wrestling. He was a superhero in an era that lost its taste for superheroes. The NWO turn was both an act of self-preservation and a final, perfect twist–the hero who becomes the villain, the sun that sets on the empire. But even as a heel, Hogan couldn’t escape the gravity of his legend. He played the bad guy, but the crowd never stopped reacting like he was the main event.

The impact Hogan had on pop culture is almost too big to calculate. He sold more merchandise than some actual sports leagues. He hosted Saturday Night Live, starred in Saturday morning cartoons, sold pasta in grocery stores, and lent his voice to the jumbled language of American fame. Even people who never watched a match know what a “Hulk Hogan” is: a synonym for strength, for spectacle, for kitschy Americana at its most overblown.

But the biggest mark Hogan left was on wrestling’s soul. For decades, every up-and-coming wrestler has either been compared to Hogan or measured themselves against him. The “next Hogan” was always lurking–the Rock, Cena, Austin. But there is no next Hogan. There’s only the echo of the Hulkster’s entrance, forever ringing in the collective memory of anyone who ever believed, even for a second, that the good guy could win.

When wrestling loses someone like Hulk Hogan, it doesn’t just lose a performer–it loses a myth, a set of rituals and signifiers, a shared childhood language. Hulkamania was never about one man, but the way one man became a mirror for millions. He asked you to take your vitamins, say your prayers, and believe in something bigger, whether that was a comeback, a country, or yourself.

Now, as the curtain drops, all we can do is remember the lessons, hum the entrance music and, if we’re lucky, feel the electricity one more time. Whatcha gonna do when immortality runs wild on you?

RIP Hulk Hogan. Wrestling will never see you again, brother.

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Brian Carson is a reporter at the Lewistown Sentinel.