14 Biggest Pops In WWE History

9. Hulk Hogan Returns To Wrestling - Backlash 2005

Hogan€™s been suffering from the law of diminishing returns in more ways than one in the last decade or so, having milked the drama out of an epic return without actually doing anything more times during his career than we€™d care to count. At Backlash in 2005 though, the Hulkster had significant capital with the crowd. They genuinely cared. Since leaving WWE fairly acrimoniously in 2003 during a feud with Vince McMahon as the tyrannical boss (remember the Mr. America storyline? Best not, really), Hogan hadn€™t wrestled in the USA. He€™d had a great 2002 as an actual wrestler, not the overweening ego in tights that everyone had suffered through in WCW: he€™d parlayed his status as a wrestling icon into quality feuds with genuine WWF/WWE superstars, putting them over more often than not, helping to build the younger talent. By 2003, all that humility had clearly rankled with him: he quit abruptly over having to work on the secondary brand, Smackdown, and not getting the big star treatment on television. His induction into the WWE Hall Of Fame in 2005 was the first time almost anyone had seen him on a wrestling show in two years: the longest gap of his career, and a comeback that was considered such a big deal that it was filmed for the first season of his reality TV show, Hogan Knows Best. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyyPZ927yvA The build-up to his alliance with Shawn Michaels and their beef with Muhammed Hassan and his manager Daivari were incorporated into Wrestlemania 21, but his entrance at Backlash for the match itself was the first time Hogan had entered a WWE ring as a competitor in two years, and the crowd definitely let him know how much they€™d missed him€