The Last Days Of Hulkamania

To attempt to understand the constantly-moving motivations of the men talked about in this article would like sending out one traffic cop to try and straighten out the spaghetti junction. Too much chaos, everybody's only got their own interests at heart, and it'd end in multiple deaths.

Instead, let's try and focus on just the one - the demise of Hulkamania. The phenomenon that became part of 1980s pop culture lore had clung, winnet-like, to pro wrestling as late as 1996, but audiences were desperately trying to shake it off before Hogan at long last sorted his sh*t out at Bash At The Beach.

When World Championship Wrestling signed Hulk Hogan in 1994, his presence was there to promote more than just the odd pay-per-view. Which is lucky, because odd ones were all he had written into his contract. It was perception management from Eric Bischoff, and it worked a treat. Fans weren't exactly flocking to WCW events by 1995, but from a distance it was certainly a more viable alternative than Vince McMahon's industry standard.

Getting a green light for Nitro was the objective measure that the expensive Hogan experiment had worked. But chaos awaited as an infamously large ego inflated beyond the 24 inches his pythons were reproaching. Getting high on your own supply will do that, and the WCW World Champion was eating an awful lot of his own f*cking pasta...

CONT'D...