10 Wrestlers Who Changed The Business Forever
7. Hulk Hogan
Vince McMahon has been looking for the "next Hulk Hogan" since 1986, at which time he infamously adjudged Tom Magee to be his successor.
Hogan was the biggest drawing card of the modern era - certainly insofar as longevity - and the length of his run, indirectly, has informed WWE's rotten, latter-day creative. Hogan thrived because he was a magician of a worker able to conjure a reaction just by shaking his head from side to side in defiance of pain. But Hogan only prospered in the episodic TV era for two years; prior and subsequent to his legendary run as Hollywood Hogan, his act felt corny, overfamiliar and diminished.
As with so much else, because it worked before, Vince attempted to replicate the success of the character with the pushes of John Cena and Roman Reigns, both of whom were tasked with leading WWE as the face of the company for a very long stretch incompatible with the punishing grind of weekly TV. It's because of Hogan that Cena batted away (and bantered off) all comers. It's because of Cena, in turn, that Reigns was blasted from near enough day one. The threat of another decade of this was that daunting.
Seth Rollins is the next Roman Reigns, and all of this will continue, as long as Vince is in charge, because his vision for the top WWE babyface is a man he can exploit for as long as humanly possible in a miscast, d*ckhead-adjacent roles.