Part 1: The Early Years of The Hulk Hogan Story
They say that the winners get to write history, and for many viewing the industry through a WWF lens, it begins in 1984 and the national expansion.
The detailed contrast of “smoke-filled arenas” and VFW Halls housing this fringe form of entertainment, with Vince McMahon’s presentation of big sporting arenas, network television, and appealing to Madison Avenue, sounds great at a NATPE convention or to someone without any historical context. The truth was that the industry was a thriving one in 1983.
Whether it was Gorgeous George on the Dumont Network, weekly network broadcasts on Friday night in Japan, Lou Thesz and Baron Michel Leone, Jarry Park in Montreal, or tens of thousands piling into the Louisiana Superdome multiple times per year, that was never part of the WWF narrative.
Professional wrestling went from an industry of multiple territories that thrived with more full-time opportunities for U.S.-based talent into one dominant promotion reaching new heights. There was a strong oppositional force in Jim Crockett Promotions, the backend of World Class’ peak, and others trying to make ends meet in the AWA, Memphis, and Portland, among them. The WWF became the name brand in professional wrestling, but there were also fewer options than ever by the ensuing decade.
McMahon is often positioned as both a promotional genius and someone who did great harm to the territorial system, and both have merit, to a degree. McMahon saw opportunities by getting onto the USA Network and launching All-American Wrestling in August 1983, offering competitors a chance to send tapes of their stars for a national audience, and being featured in their Victory Magazine. A nice gesture in the short term, but the long game was introducing these talents to the WWF audience and eventually signing them away.
The WWF stockpiled by stripping the AWA of its key talents, bringing in Roddy Piper and Greg Valentine from Mid-Atlantic, Paul Orndorff from Georgia Championship Wrestling, Randy Savage & Jimmy Hart from Memphis, Junkyard Dog from Mid-South, and the formula was transparent.
George Scott was the booker in the WWF and McMahon’s chief lieutenant, and helped put the pieces in place for a pivotal year in the company’s history.
Brad Balukjian’s book The Six Pack gives clarity on the roles of Jim Barnett, Joe Perkins, and Jim Troy, who were tasked with getting the WWF into as many markets as possible, a big gamble where plenty of money was going out with the hope of it paying dividends down the road. It was effective with the WWF expanding from twenty-four markets in 1982 to forty-four in 1983 and expanding to 201 by the summer of 1986.
Troy served as a conduit to get McMahon in front of USA Network executive Kay Koplovitz and begin a relationship with the network that continues today as the home of Friday Night SmackDown and, by extension, Peacock.
It was a constant “go, go, go” mentality from new markets to break into, added television in Tuesday Night Titans in May 1984, taking over Maple Leaf Wrestling in Toronto, taking on territories on their home turf to mixed success, agreeing to purchase Stampede Wrestling, and ending the year with access to nearly one hundred markets nationally.
The summer of 1984 was pivotal, with a purchase of Georgia Championship Wrestling finalized and WWF assuming the WTBS time slots on the Turner networks and expanding their reach with another national window for $750,000.
The upstart MTV saw the WWF as a great complement to its programming and partnered for “The Brawl to End It All”. The crossover was Cyndi Lauper, who had reached incredible fame and was linked to pro wrestling through the casting of Captain Lou Albano in the “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” music video.
With Madison Square Garden booked on July 23, the WWF and MTV crossover saw Wendi Richter unseat Fabulous Moolah as the Women’s Champion and Hulk Hogan make a title defense against Greg Valentine, generating a 9.0 rating on MTV (its second largest in its short history) but failed to sell out the venue, something Hogan achieved in five of his eight MSG main events that year.
Despite not reaching capacity, the greater focus was on the television reach and was viewed as a home run, enough to revisit the same experiment in February 1985 with greater stakes attached, using The War to Settle The Score as a precursor for WWF’s return to MSG six weeks later for the inaugural WrestleMania.
The February special did sell out The Garden along with the adjacent Felt Forum for Hogan vs. Roddy Piper and a major angle being shot, leading to Hogan & Mr. T facing Piper & Paul Orndorff on March 31 and the involvement of Cyndi Lauper. The 9.1 rating proved the success of the marriage and was as strong of a promotional tool for the biggest gamble the WWF was undertaking.
While pay-per-view was in its infancy, the concept of WrestleMania was to present its own super card with approximately 200 closed-circuit locations booked around the country. They had built a syndication model, giving away their show (or in many cases, paying the broadcasters to air it) and now hoping to recoup some of that revenue by fans paying to see the “big event”.
McMahon has attested to everything being on the line with this show, and there was incredible risk if WrestleMania had bombed. He was paying out a lot of money on the idea that his product could export across the country beyond the Northeast borders. There were several aces up their sleeve from reworking their arrangement with New Japan Pro Wrestling, so that Inoki’s group would have to compensate WWF for talent being sent over, and an eventual sale of the WTBS time slots to Jim Crockett Jr. for $1 million and taking in a profit by the middle of 1985 for some financial relief. Another area of interest between 1983-85 saw the WWF stage tours of Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Oman, and UAE, and it remains a mystery if there was significant revenue attached to these tours for the WWF.
One week prior, roughly seventy of the closed-circuit locations pulled out and gave a signal that this may not work. But through several unique circumstances, the show caught on in the final week largely through the promotional efforts of the top celebrity, Mr. T., and his tag partner, Hogan.
The hosting role for Saturday Night Live on March 30 was scheduled for actor and comedian Steve Landesberg, but he had to pull out during the week (he would make an appearance on the show but could not host) and opened the door for Hogan & Mr. T to get some last-minute PR for WrestleMania the next afternoon. It was a big success as the show was averaging a 7.5 rating on NBC that season and featured multiple plugs for ‘Mania.
Not as advantageous was an appearance on The Richard Belzer Show that week, where Hogan was coaxed into applying a hold on the host, and ended up choking Belzer, whose head bounced off the floor and was bleeding as he threw to break in a stupor. It led to a lawsuit, but also added attention when the WWF was hungry for it.
In The Six Pack, former WWF VP of Finance Bob McMullan categorized WrestleMania as a big success by grossing $9 million and $300,000 going toward Hogan.
It was a formula that was repeated in 1998 with Steve Austin and Mike Tyson, where the celebrity brought eyes to the company’s chosen star and was able to take that casual observer and keep them engaged with the core product.
The next step was network television with the cultivation of a relationship with Dick Ebersol and NBC to launch the popular Saturday Night’s Main Event franchise on May 11 in the slot occupied by SNL during one of its off weeks. With Hulk Hogan and Cowboy Bob Orton paired on the special, it generated an 11.6 rating, and Ebersol looked like a genius while McMahon was now commanding audiences in syndication, closed-circuit, NBC, USA Network, WTBS, MTV, and soon to add Hogan’s own CBS cartoon.
As noted in Abe Josephine Reisman’s Ringmaster book, WWF’s revenues escalated from $29.5 million in 1984 to $63.1 million in 1985 and $77.4 million in 1986, with the figures being reported in a future lawsuit.
The NBC and CBS platforms were huge for the WWF and contributed to many young kids discovering these real-life superheroes, who, unlike Superman or Batman, appear at your local arena several times per year.
The formula was fairly straightforward, as WWF was mass producing its style as the McDonald’s of professional wrestling. Competitors failed to understand the value of star power over in-ring technicians, with the idea that if they had the “better” wrestlers, the fans would realize and reject the WWF style of prototype “big man” matches with little fanfare, but were marketed to such a degree that the audience saw stars.
One of the key philosophies that differentiated the WWF from Jim Crockett Promotions was building around a babyface, as opposed to a heel. Hogan was the All-American good guy, who triumphed over the villains and sent crowds home happy with a posing routine to the sounds of Rick Derringer. In JCP, it was the idea of the babyfaces being built up and constantly chasing Ric Flair throughout the ‘80s, and whether tonight would be the one where Flair can’t escape with the belt. While JCP (later WCW) would soften as the decade ended, in 1985, it was drawing tremendously well with this presentation and using Dusty Rhodes as the lead babyface.
In WWF, the schedule was historically one of the hardest ever conceived, with the WWF criss-crossing the country before strategic routing was incorporated, so you had talents crossing time zones, needing to look the part, bumping every night, and on a never-ending hamster wheel that had dire consequences for the lifestyle it developed, and problems created.
While the tales of wrestling 300 nights per year are often thrown out, and Hogan famously defying time by stating he worked 400 nights per year because of Japan, his peak number of matches was 162 in 198,7 and never wrestled more than 150 per year in the WWF, according to Cagematch.
Beyond the first WrestleMania, George Scott found himself on the wrong end of a political fallout and was bounced by the company, with booking duties led by Pat Patterson and signed off by McMahon.
By 1985, JCP and AWA were still going strong, and World Class had yet to hit its decline, while WWF was gaining market share. But it was a series of hits and misses. Often, when WWF went into an established market, it was not an instant success because it was different from what that audience had been raised on.
In August 1985, a remarkable attendance of 50,000 attended the Ohio State Fair in Columbus, where the WWF provided a free show with admission to the grounds and the opportunity to see Hulk Hogan take on John Studd.
WWF tried its hand at pay-per-view in November 1985 with “The Wrestling Classic”, with a one-night tournament and Hogan vs. Piper, which didn’t connect like WrestleMania and led to the company waiting two years before attempting another non-WrestleMania event on pay-per-view.
In 1986, the second edition of WrestleMania had the promotional hook of airing from the three top media markets in one night – New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It followed Jim Crockett Promotions’ staging of Starrcade the previous November in Greensboro and Atlanta.
Hogan was assigned top billing in L.A. with former World Class star King Kong Bundy inside of a steel cage. It became one of Hogan’s unlikely opponents for such a big event, promoted through an attack on Saturday Night’s Main Event and convincing fans that Bundy was a threat to the champion. That year alone, Hogan would have larger drawing opponents between Paul Orndorff and Kamala, who were viewed as stronger programs.
WrestleMania 2 failed to achieve the heights of the first version.
WrestleMania 2 is also the event that centered around an organizational effort by Jesse Ventura to rally the troops in the locker room and realize their fair share of the blossoming revenues they are helping to produce. It was a rare time that the term “union” was openly being discussed among talent and gambling with their limited leverage, requiring strength in numbers, and needing the ultimate player to back them – Hogan.
It’s a major “what if?” if Hogan’s response was to go to bat for the locker room and demand certain perks and have proper representation akin to a players association for the major stick and ball sports
Instead, it was revealed in court testimony years later that Hogan ratted out the plan to McMahon, and once it reached the top, there were enough scare tactics to quell any notion of such an association or union effort. Hogan readily admitted to being the one to inform McMahon when speaking on the Mr. McMahon documentary on Netflix last year.
The double cross, as Ventura perceived it, left a lifelong grudge between the future Governor and Hogan, one that was never rectified and can be argued has mitigated any hint of such organization in the decades since. While the WWE has grown into a billion-dollar business and benefited greatly from the escalation in its media rights, unlike MLB or NFL players, they receive no portion of that revenue nor any percentage of sponsorships and are still required to cover certain costs on the road as independent contractors.
It was also a demonstration that if you take care of the top guy(s), then they’ll have little incentive to put their neck out for the lower card talent, who have the most to gain from such advancements. Today’s WWE talent are making tremendous amounts of money by the comparisons to their predecessors, but they are also working for a company whose revenues have dramatically outpaced the rate of escalation for talent pay.
One of Hogan’s greatest house show runs occurred with Paul Orndorff after the latter turned on Hogan, and they took the match across the country. There was no greater representation of this dynamic than The Big Event in Toronto on August 28 on the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition.
It was a “sold show” to the CNE (an annual fair in Toronto over several weeks) and promoted locally as “Wrestling Hulkamania Night,” incorporating local sponsors Molson, Q107, and CHCH TV, and promoted with Concert Productions International.
With tickets topping out at $20, an overflow crowd of 64,100 showed up that evening with a paid attendance of 61,470, and others just let in due to the overflow and a staggering gate of $800,000 Canadian for what was largely a house show.
Even more impressive, WWF returned to Maple Leaf Gardens only ten days later for a tag match with Hogan & Piper against Orndorff & Adrian Adonis, drawing 13,000 people.
It became an iconic event in Toronto wrestling history, but often puzzling that the CNE never brought back the WWF until 1996, when the company was far less popular than a decade earlier.
It laid the groundwork for McMahon’s next seismic undertaking by booking the Pontiac Silverdome on March 29, 1987, and finally turning André the Giant for a revival of a program with its current champion and retconning the storied history they shared.
McMahon pulled out every trick, billing André as “undefeated” and a “first-time match” with Hogan, tactics that would fall on their face in the modern social media age, but in 1987, they ran with it in the hope that their fans weren’t aware of pro wrestling before 1984. Their first recorded match was April 26, 1979, in Pensacola and followed a match the next month in Dothan, Alabama, selling out the Houston County Farm Center.
As documented, André’s health was deteriorating, but another fact lost in the sea of fiction was the long-held belief that André had back surgery before the match with Hogan. It was repeated so much and accepted until the fact checking by Pat Laprade & Bertrand Hebert in The Eighth Wonder of the World, uncovering documentation that the back surgery occurred four months after ‘Mania 3.
The incredibly promoted match led to a monumental achievement for the WWF, packing the Silverdome, leading to a decades-long debate over the attendance figure. What is consistent is that the show generated $1,599,000 in ticket sales, another 450,000 in closed-circuit tickets, and “at least” 400,000 buys on pay-per-view, where only five million homes had access.
The attendance discussion is a lengthy one, as Dave Meltzer has repeatedly noted, when event promoter Zane Bresloff informed him years later that the real figure was 78,500 and backed up with internal records that WWF provided access to in 2001. Lost in this discussion is the undeniable fact that had the Silverdome been large enough to accommodate 15,000 more fans, it surely would have sold those tickets, it was that hot of an event, amplified by local blackouts, so you had to be in the building to see it in Detroit.
The gross for the day was reported at $16.6 million by the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.
Hogan and André were each paid $750,000, with Laprade & Hebert adding that André received a $250,000 bonus on top. The richest payouts the industry had seen to that point.
The legacy of the show is impossible to understate. If WrestleMania 1 was Vince McMahon telling the opposition, “Game on”, this iteration of WrestleMania was a signal that it was going to be “Game over” for many of the promoters still operating on the industry norms of yesterday. By the spring, WWF had programming in 90 percent of the country, it just pulled an 11.6 rating on NBC, and packed the Pontiac Silverdome with the industry’s largest star.
The success of WrestleMania 3 guided the promotion to expand its pay-per-view offerings beyond the annual show. In November, it launched the Survivor Series as a direct counterprogramming measure to JCP’s Starrcade pay-per-view. It placed an ultimatum on cable carriers to choose one show, or the other, but if it wasn’t the Survivor Series, they would forfeit the opportunity to carry WrestleMania IV. Only five carriers went with Starrcade, and it was a sizable blow to the company.
Two months later, JCP tried to run its Bunkhouse Stampede pay-per-view and was met with opposition through a free USA Network special, the Royal Rumble, which scored an 8.2 rating.
One day before the Rumble, Hulk Hogan’s reign as WWF Champion hit four years and saw a company expand from the Northeast to one that had blanketed the country, distribution on network television, created a merchandising machine, and passed the $100 million mark in gross revenue.
Hulkamania was still the catalyst, but it was time for Hogan to drop the title, and he would do so, in front of one of the largest television audiences to see a pro wrestling match.
The ‘80s were winding down, and the ensuing decade would place strains on the brand of Hulk Hogan and questions of whether the Real American image could hold up to the persona behind it.
Part 3 will cover Hogan’s transition into the ‘90s, the steroid scandals, and his exit from the World Wrestling Federation
