10 Misconceptions About Hulk Hogan You Probably Believe
2. “He Was Always On Steroids.”
Hulk Hogan took steroids. A lot of steroids. For a long time. All of this Terry Bollea himself has admitted under oath. But what you might not realize is that Hogan was steroid-free for a good portion of his career.
In testimony at Vince McMahon’s steroid trial, Hogan claimed to have weaned himself off steroids several years earlier after discussion with his wife, last taking the drugs in 1990. He had thus begun a gradual transition from really, really huge to just huge as the drugs left his system.
In early 1992, when the steroid scandal finally implicated him by name and threatened to tank his career, Hogan’s physique abruptly shrunk down to jarringly slim proportions in the two and a half month period between 1992’s Royal Rumble and WrestleMania. It’s not that Hogan had just then stopped taking steroids and immediately withered away like Bane in that awful Joel Schumacher Batman movie. It’s just that Hogan could no longer afford even the appearance of still being on steroids, so he deliberately lost weight in that period. Of course, anyone with a functioning memory or access to video tape would then assume he had been on the gas in the past, but by then, the steroid cat was out of the bum bag.
TV announcers played off this massive weight loss as “strategy” by Hogan to improve his speed and quickness. Hogan kept this physique, euphemistically dubbed, “lean and mean”, for many years, including during his run in WCW, which had a notoriously lax steroid policy.