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LOOKING AT HULK HOGAN'S CAREER PART TWO

In 2025, it may seem strange or not easy to compute why it was such a big deal that Hulk Hogan left the WWF and never returned, but instead went to World Championship Wrestling. One has to remember that for the entirety of his 1980s WWF run, Hogan was seen as the ultimate banner holder for the World Wrestling Federation. Period.

He was the ultimate hero. He was the one who was the big star that was on The A-Team and Saturday Night Live. And make no mistake about it, there was a massive communal activity around Saturday Night's Main Event, especially when parents would get their kids up late at night and wake them up or let them stay up in order to see Hulk Hogan face the likes of Bob Orton or Roddy Piper or the Iron Sheik or Nikolai Volkoff or Paul Orndorff and see good versus evil play out before their very eyes.

There was an entire generation of kids whose sense of right and wrong was forged, in some cases, by a lot of what they were watching on WWF programming in a time period where there was only a couple hours of wrestling a week. A show featuring competitive matches with all the top talents was a very unique novelty when it aired every six or eight weeks, and it was something that was so important, it remains seen by fans as a cultural milestone of their youth.

For Hogan to exit the WWF in the eyes of those fans was unthinkable. Even in the wake of steroid scandals and new generations of talents approaching their prime as Hogan left what was believed to be his, the reality was that Hulk Hogan, much like John Cena many generations later, was a living, breathing, walking billboard for professional wrestling as it existed under the banner of the World Wrestling Federation.

So in 1994, when Hulk Hogan signed with World Championship Wrestling, it was unthinkable. It was something that blew a lot of people’s minds. For one, Hogan was going to a secondary wrestling company—one that usually existed in the minds of the wrestling fans who were diehard as the opposite of what WWF did. WWF was about caricatures. It was about punching and kicking. It was about over-the-top cartoon characters. And even though it started to make inroads towards more in-ring wrestling that was of a higher premium with the likes of Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels and others, wrestling was never the focus.

In World Championship Wrestling, in its best days, the hourglass was flipped. It was about the wrestling of Ric Flair, of Sting, of The Midnight Express, of The Four Horsemen, of wrestlers who for the most part were truly talented in the ring and could go in the ring with long, special, athletic, progressively unique matches. When WCW attempted to lean into the more cartoonish aspects of professional wrestling, they came off like a Xerox of the WWF and, in fact, really accomplished nothing more than turning off some of the audience that lived and breathed the idea that this was their true professional wrestling home.

If you look at WCW just a few months before Hulk Hogan was announced as signing, their Spring Stampede 1994 show in Chicago was built around great wrestling matches, including Ric Flair against Ricky Steamboat, The Great Muta against Steve Austin, Cactus Jack and Maxx Payne against The Nasty Boys. It was more about athletics. It was more about the grit. It was more about the blood and guts.

As much as some of that, in its best moments, were great, WCW was always secondary to WWF and was always going to be. Part of that was due to the fact that they were in a very weird system—a Ted Turner sports programming fiefdom, where everybody in that corporation was out to save their own asses through Hollywood accounting and out to make sure that they were protected more than they were out to make sure that the company was truly financially successful.

The reality is, WCW was never really wanted by that organization—except for one person, and that was Ted Turner. And when he was in power, it didn’t matter whether it was losing money because he knew that the Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) was built on the power of several things: one being Atlanta Braves baseball, one being reruns of things like Andy Griffith and Leave It to Beaver, and one being Georgia Championship Wrestling, and later, Jim Crockett Promotions. Ted Turner was loyal to professional wrestling and he was willing to spend money to make it better because he legitimately loved and cared about pro wrestling.

All of this leads us to the unthinkable moment where Ric Flair and Eric Bischoff meet with Hulk Hogan on the set of Thunder in Paradise in Orlando, Florida, and Bischoff rolls the dice and somehow succeeds. He brought Hulk Hogan into World Championship Wrestling at the Bash at the Beach pay-per-view in 1994.

Just several months after the aforementioned Spring Stampede, we start to see the mutation—the evolution—of World Championship Wrestling as it starts to form a new identity around the Hulk Hogan Show. Hulk Hogan versus Ric Flair. Ric Flair, managed by Sherri Martel. Mr. T making appearances. Hulk Hogan’s friends like “Hacksaw” Duggan, Jimmy Hart, The Honky Tonk Man, and so forth. Coming in later: Randy Savage. Then: Roddy Piper. The Hulk Hogan identity becomes fused to World Championship Wrestling. Hell, Brutus Beefcake main evented a Starrcade, which still sounds criminal decades later.  The numbers go up, but the more diehard—and perhaps more Southern—a wrestling fan you were, chances are you were pushing back vocally against the Hogan era. And that is the truth.

The reality is that they try to portray it as Hulk Hogan showed up and WCW exploded. That was not necessarily the case, although the numbers did go up in terms of the ratings and the pay-per-views, with Hogan shrewdly negotiating a good piece of that money for himself. So while the numbers were far better, they were also greatly benefiting Hulk Hogan before they benefited anybody else. Hulk Hogan was many things, but when it came to making his money, he was not a stupid man.

WCW continued to build its momentum, with Ted Turner giving Eric Bischoff two hours on Monday nights on TBS—sorry, one hour on TNT, which later became two hours, and eventually three hours. And immediately the idea of “we now have to go toe-to-toe with the WWF in a way that we've never done before” was the reality for Eric Bischoff, unless he wanted to be the person bounced out of that role—Executive Vice President of WCW—like so many others before him.

Bischoff, as he's told many times, took a legal pad and wrote down all the things that the WWF did great and all the things that they didn’t do, and Bischoff said, “That’s my plan. I’m going to focus on making a product that’s different from WWF. I’m going to have better wrestling. I’m going to have a more reality-based product. I’m going to have people cutting promos in the ring. I’m going to have competitive matches.” And that was the blueprint of Monday Nitro, which, if we’re going to be fair, in many ways today’s professional wrestling across the board is very much that same blueprint, as WWF would later adopt it and other companies would later adopt it as well.

But there was one person who was at the top of the pyramid for World Championship Wrestling that entire time in the beginning, and that was Hulk Hogan. The first episode of Monday Nitro was built around Hulk Hogan against the Big Boss Man, with Lex Luger showing up—jumping from the WWF—and showing that anything could truly happen.

WCW began going for the throat. They would reveal results. They would knock the competition.  They would hire talents away.  They would claim, privately and publicly, they were out to kick the ass of WWF, and Bischoff—even though now he’ll say he really didn’t mean it, or he really didn’t say it—would privately, talk in locker room meetings about kicking WWF’s ass and wanting to put them out of business.

Whether it was just his own bravado or whether it was the truth of what he believed at the time, we’ll never know. But the reality was WCW very quickly became competitive with the WWF on Monday nights, often beating them and then kicking their ass for a historic 83 weeks.

A big part of that was because Hulk Hogan turned heel. Again, to understand why this heel turn meant so much compared to heel turns that would soon follow in the years and decades after—including John Cena’s earlier this year—and why they all pale in comparison to what Hulk Hogan did, you have to remember what Hulk Hogan meant from 1983 on to the average wrestling fan. Hulk Hogan was pro wrestling. He was synonymous with it. He was one of a kind.

The same way you might look at the top Hollywood stars now and think Robert Downey Jr. is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were the action heroes of the ‘80s, or The Rock was the action hero of the ‘90s and early 2000s, Hulk Hogan was professional wrestling. It was him—and then it was everybody else.

There were others who were better wrestlers. There were others who were talkers as good or better. And there were others who had better bodies. But nobody was able to combine it in that time period the way Hulk Hogan did and immerse himself in the mind and psyche of the average wrestling fan who was growing up.

So when the 5-, 6-, 7-year-olds of the 1980s were now in their teens and early twenties in the mid-1990s, the idea of Hulk Hogan—who had become passé over time—now becoming a bad guy shocked them to their core and made them want to watch World Championship Wrestling.

We all know the story. The NWO came to fight where the Big Boys Play. Scott Hall, then Kevin Nash showed up using their real names, with the idea that they were talents from the WWF who had made their way to WCW—allegedly, but never said at the behest of the company—to take out WCW and bring them the war that WCW had been claiming that they wanted. They wanted to fight the Huckster. They wanted to fight the Nacho Man, and the others who has knockedthe WWF.  In WCW, they were renegades. They were mavericks. They were hooligans…and they had a third man.

At the Bash at the Beach in 1996—just two years after Hulk Hogan’s red and yellow walked into World Championship Wrestling—he showed up looking to save the day. The great and enriching irony was that the only person who saw it through the façade was longtime enemy Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, who openly wondered on commentary what side Hulk Hogan was on. And well, two minutes later, there was no doubt that Hulk Hogan was not on the side of World Championship Wrestling.  After all those years of knocking Hogan, “The Brain” was now a prophet.

Dropping a leg on Randy Savage and cutting a promo, eviscerating the fans and saying in an eternally beloved and shocking promo, “All this garbage that the fans have thrown in the ring—it represents exactly what they are. Nothing but garbage. This is the New World Order of professional wrestling.”

They were off to the races, and people were shocked and stunned because the man who had inspired so many to grow up doing the right thing—saying their prayers, eating their vitamins, doing so much for charities, doing so much for Make-A-Wish kids—was now turning his back, spraying graffiti, spitting on people, attacking the heroes, and doing all the things that wrestling fans never thought in their lives that Hulk Hogan would ever do.

Just as André the Giant a generation ago was never body slammed—even though he was, even though Andre was never defeated (he was), even though he was never in the ring with Hulk Hogan (he was)—Hulk Hogan now had now, in the eyes of these fans who did not have the context of knowing that in the early days of Hulk Hogan’s career he was a villain managed by the likes of Fred Blassie, commited the unthinkable: the greatest hero of their lives had just turned evil.

This would be akin to Captain America joining Hydra in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or Robert Downey Jr. deciding now that he’s got the Infinity Stones, he’s going to take over the universe instead of saving it.

Hulk Hogan’s heel turn shocked the entire world and became one of the most talked-about things in that era among wrestling fans. And thanks to the notoriety and uniqueness of the idea that these top WWF stars were now here to destroy WCW, the reality was that everybody was enamored by the fact that Hulk Hogan was now doing black-and-white commercials, talking up the NWO, and looking at every single thing in a different light because Hulk Hogan pulled out everything that you could ever imagine as the ultimate heel.

At the time, people were shocked—and it made Hogan and WCW a ton of money, especially Hulk Hogan. Hulk Hogan’s contract at the time reportedly included a 25% guarantee of whatever pay-per-view revenue a show that he headlined brought in, as long as it hit 2.4 million. Otherwise, if it didn’t hit that, he got an automatic guaranteed $600,000 for a pay-per-view main event. Not bad work if you could get it.

Now, there are some people who are going to say, “Oh, Hogan didn’t deserve it. Hogan didn’t do this.” But the reality is this: WCW never hit pay-per-view numbers as high as they did until the day Hulk Hogan walked into that company. When he wrestled Ric Flair and then did a rematch with Ric Flair at Halloween Havoc, they made so much money, and their pay-per-view buy rates were well over 100% higher than they were the year before.  No Hogan, and despite the best efforts of all involved, WCW would have just continued spinning its wheels as executives exited and were replaced.

Hogan was the biggest swing possible, and it was a grand slam by Eric Bischoff, but that revitalized red and yellow act had greatly cooled off over time.  When Hogan finally turned heel, it was something that he desperately needed. A lot of people forget that after the initial run against Ric Flair, they veered into the Hulk Hogan campiness—the Dungeon of Doom and scenes where the worst sort of violence was André the Giant’s alleged son, Paul Wight (now with AEW after years with WWE as The Big Show), attacking Hulk Hogan and shaving half of his mustache off. Not really the most violent of acts.  How does one really avenge their mustache, anyway?  One of the toughest ever in pro wrestling, Big Van Vader wrestled Hulk Hogan, had to hold back, and disappeared immediately afterward—things of that nature did nothing to propel Hogan or WCW forward. 

So, WCW Nitro with the NWO became the blueprint for professional wrestling. Hogan absolutely needed the reboot. It helped enhance Nitro and put it into the lead position in the Monday Night Wars for such a long time.   The idea was Hogan, as the WCW Champion who had no respect for anything or anybody, spray-painting and defacing the legendary Big Gold Belt that Ric Flair and so many others had strived and fought for, smoking a cigar alongside Dennis Rodman and being a complete piece of trash…that trash was golden in the era.

Now, WCW tried to find a way to unite against those who not only were the interlopers in their promotion, but against those who turned against the promotion—like Stevie Ray, like Buff Bagwell, like Scott Steiner and others. And now Randy Savage, DDP, Ric Flair, Roddy Piper, Lex Luger—all trying to stop Hogan. It wasn’t always perfect and certainly there were missteps along the way, but it all built up to a great moment for Lex Luger winning the WCW title and then an incredible beloved storyline where, for almost a year, WCW’s biggest superhero prior to Hulk Hogan’s entry—Sting—morphed from the surfer: neon orange, blue, yellow, etc., into a black-and-white, morose, silent stalker playing off the look of the famous comic book and movie character The Crow.

For many months he would be in the rafters of arenas, staring down, waiting for his moment. Unaffiliated with World Championship Wrestling. Unaffiliated with the New World Order. And fans wondered what he was going to do until finally he emerged from the rafters and attacked Hogan and the NWO and made it clear that he was there for WCW and he was there to take Hogan out.

The fans, who waited such a long time, finally got their moment at Starrcade - and were ready to pay for it.

Except once everyone got in the ring, it all went to hell.

Sometimes, in a perfect world, things do not exactly go the way that you manifest them in your brain. And this, my friends, may have been one of the worst-case scenarios of that.

The idea was that Hulk Hogan was going to get the pinfall on Sting, but heel referee Nick Patrick, who had shown his loyalty to New World Order, was going to do a fast count. This would then bring out Bret Hart—fresh off being screwed at the Montreal Screwjob just a month before—making his WCW debut that night as a referee for Larry Zbyszko versus Eric Bischoff, saying as a referee, “He’s not going to let anybody get screwed the way he was.”

Bret Hart would restart the match, Sting would save the day, and WCW would be rejoiceful as their hero reclaimed the championship and the power—and for at least that night sent the New World Order and Hulk Hogan packing.

Except there was one problem.

Nick Patrick did not ever fast count. In fact, it was so slow that there was no doubt in the eyes of anybody who was watching in the arena or live at home that Hulk Hogan had just successfully, cleanly pinned Sting.

But when they continued to do their plan, Bret Hart now looked like the asshole who was screwing over Hulk Hogan—as did Sting—and it came off completely flat.

Why did Nick Patrick do that? No one will ever know. He'll never say. Did Hulk Hogan tell Nick Patrick, “No matter what you're told, count it the regular way”? It's always possible. No one’s ever admitted it. Did Nick Patrick screw up? It's hard to believe that someone with his level of authenticity in the ring as a referee, and someone with his respect in the business, would be able to whiff such a big mistake on the biggest match in the entire history of the promotion that he always worked for—but one never knows.

Patrick would later claim he received instructions that went against what he was initially told. Eric Bischoff later stated that Hulk Hogan saw the shape Sting was in and believed that Sting didn't deserve to get the title. Was Hogan playing politics? It's quite possible. But in the end, Sting got the belt, but it came off so flat it never worked the way they believed it was going to.

At this point, we need to talk about Hogan politics. Because one of the things people will talk about is that Hulk Hogan made it about himself—and that it was about Hogan and everybody else. You have to understand that WCW at the time, without Hogan, never would have had the success that it did.

Certainly, there were other aspects. There was great booking at the time under Kevin Sullivan. There was smart business at the time under Eric Bischoff. There was great wrestling from the WCW cruiserweights and the luchadors who had come in, and there was that next generation of talent that was getting ready to break into the next level.

But the reality was that the notoriety and the novelty of a villainous, black-and-white-clad Hulk Hogan, alongside Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, being there—those were the things that made that company compelling compared to a WWF that was still trying to find its way and did not really find its way until Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Hogan signed a new deal with WCW. He received several millions in a signing bonus, 25% of the ticket revenue after tax for any episode of TV he appeared on, never getting less than $25,000 a show, 50% of the merchandise that they sold, 100% of any 900 number he got involved in, and approval over all of his wrestling matches that he wrestled or performed in—with approval not to be reasonably withheld.

Now, that's very important, because just like fans would give WWF a hassle for not letting Bret Hart—who contractually had the ability to approve the last month of his WWF career, which led to him getting screwed in Montreal at Survivor Series against Shawn Michaels—Hulk Hogan had reasonable creative control over his main event matches, his storylines, etc.

You cannot blame Hulk Hogan for playing politics when WCW, in black-and-white, contractually gave him that right. There is not a wrestler, there is not a performer, there is not a singer, there is not an actor—who, if given that contractually, is not going to use it, and in the eyes of some, might even abuse it. But if they legally gave him that ability, that’s on WCW. It’s not on Hogan and his representatives for being smart enough to get that agreement.

If anything, WCW became too great for any one person to control.  With so many major names in one company, along with them came major egos and requested favors and suddenly, everyone is making so much money that it's almost an afterthought, which leads to a loss of appreciation and a leap in partying and politics and now the entire place is a giant shark tank where everyone wants to make sure they are taking the biggest bite.  When Jealousy is as commonplace as the next paycheck, it's just a matter of time before chaos commences - and it did.  Was that all Hogan's fault?  No, but when you are at the top of the pyramid, the arrows and the criticism are going to fly your way.

It was not long before Hulk Hogan had the belt back, then realized that the hottest person in the company was going to be former Atlanta Falcon Bill Goldberg.  Goldberg, who recently retired against Gunther on a WWE Saturday Night’s Main Event, defeated Hulk Hogan in the same city he retired in—Atlanta, Georgia—at the Georgia Dome on July 6, 1998, in front of 41,000 fans.   In a match that originally was booked to be a dark match, and then Hogan decided, “Let’s put it on Nitro,” probably because he could get credit in front of all the Turner executives for drawing 41,000 fans—but also creating a memorable moment.

Unlike when he was supposed to hand the torch over to the Ultimate Warrior in 1990 at WrestleMania VI, Hulk Hogan legitimately did absolutely everything he could to make Bill Goldberg ascend to the next level as the next great thing in World Championship Wrestling—at least that night.

The problem was—whether this was politicking by Hogan, or a mistake by the bookers, or whatever—the focus never shifted from Hulk Hogan to Bill Goldberg. And financially, you could understand why, because Hogan was still making so much money. You have to do something in order to justify why you're paying Hogan so much.   However, the reality was, especially in the eyes of the fans, this was Goldberg's time, but unfortunately, it did not ever end up presented that way—truly, consistently, in a fulfilling way for Bill Goldberg.

While Goldberg went on in his own direction, Hulk Hogan once again faced an old foe—the Ultimate Warrior. It did not really work out that well. In fact, one of those matches is considered probably one of the worst pay-per-view matches of all time. Hogan went through his program with the Ultimate Warrior, Goldberg went through his program and lost at Starrcade that year, and then the reins came off.

Goldberg was defeated after being hit with a cattle prod. His invincibility—after taking that first loss—was never the same. His aura was never the same. Indeed, the bald-headed Samson had no hair, but now the fans saw him as if his hair had been cut. Immediately after Starrcade, Hulk Hogan returned to the Georgia Dome in January of 1999. He had teased the idea that he was going to run for president—there was nothing to it. It was just a publicity stunt.

The storyline that night was that Bill Goldberg was going to get a rematch against Kevin Nash, except that night he was arrested—allegedly—for stalking Miss Elizabeth. Even though the police station in real life was just across the street from the Georgia Dome, it took him hours upon getting freed and released from these bogus charges to return to the show that night.

But by the time he returned, Hulk Hogan had taken Goldberg’s title shot. Hogan and Nash faced off in one of the silliest, most unfulfilling finishes that someone could claim as a "gotcha" moment—but in reality, they got themselves.

Kevin Nash was poked by Hulk Hogan. Nash went down as if he were shot by an assassin, and Hulk Hogan pinned him—1, 2, 3. Hogan got the belt back. Nash embraced Hogan, and ha! Everybody—the NWO is back together. It was a horrible night. The fans were cheated out of a rematch from the biggest pay-per-view of the year, Starrcade. Goldberg was ripped away from his moment of justice.   Instead of delivering something that was dramatic and a major pivot or a major moment that could kick off the 1999 year of World Championship Wrestling, it was a comedy show...and WCW never drew as well as they did again in Georgia.

WCW began to fall apart in 1999. Hogan was injured. The rise of the Mr. McMahon character, the rise of Mankind, the rise of Triple H, the rise of Stone Cold Steve Austin, the rise of The Rock, the rise of DX, the rise of the Nation of Domination, and so much more led to the WWF Attitude Era—and WWF having untold riches come to their box office, untold ratings come to their television stations, and untold success come to Titan Tower.

The decision was made that it was time for Hulk Hogan to go back to basics—red and yellow—and WCW now looking stale compared to the likes of the WWF was at least partially due to Turner Broadcasting itself. Where Eric Bischoff was left to his own devices and able to do whatever he wanted, now there were people from the Turner Broadcasting who wanted the scripts handed in weeks and months in advance—completely misunderstanding the entire concept of what professional wrestling was and how much of it was improvised on the fly due to changes that might happen—due to injuries, due to what takes off in front of the fans, due to what fans get turned off by, as well as the overnight, minute-to-minute ratings.

Even though Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash, Sid Vicious, Sting, and others were there, they once again—in the eyes of the fans—were being seen as older and past the apex of their prime, the same way some of them were seen just a few years earlier in 1993 when Vince McMahon started to move toward Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels.  While Hogan, etc. had proved that idea wrong, WCW couldn't stand tall against the vibrancy of WWF's Attitude Era, not with an older cast and their creative flummoxed by Turners execs.

1999 was the year of the WWF—but it was also the year of a lot of turbulence and tumultuous insanity in World Championship Wrestling. Eric Bischoff was sent home—even though he was still getting paid. This allowed WCW executive Bill Busch to bring in Vince Russo with the idea that Russo had presented himself as the guy who created the success of the WWF.

The reality is: it's never one person in professional wrestling. It’s a team. Even if somebody gets all the credit, it’s always a team effort.

Russo and Ed Ferrara, as well as Bill Banks, left the WWF creative system. They came to WCW, and immediately the first thing they did was have Hulk Hogan lay down for Sting so Sting could beat him and get the belt back. But it came off as a Xerox of the Nash-Hogan debacle in Atlanta.

So right from the start, there was yet another thing to turn off the audience.  WCW was morphing into a copy of the WWF—but with lesser, less over performers now trying to swim upstream against everything they had done before—and an immediate shift from the DNA of all the things we talked about: World Championship Wrestling having at its core into a sports-entertainment product. The numbers dropped. The interest dropped.   Very little of what World Championship Wrestling did in that era is truly memorable to anyone except the most loyal Vince Russo follower who believes that he could do no wrong.

Hogan would return as a red-and-yellow superhero once again, battling the likes of the late Wall, battling the likes of Ric Flair, battling the likes of Lex Luger. But then the decision was made that Kevin Sullivan, who had replaced Russo after Russo disappeared, would be replaced again by Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff.

Eric Bischoff and Russo decided they were going to reboot the entire company—and every champion was stripped of their titles. Now the company was going to have several battling elements. It wasn’t the NWO and WCW—nope. It was the Millionaires Club of all the veterans facing the New Blood.

So all of your cruiserweights, all of your talents who had come from the WCW Power Plant, all of the younger “quote-unquote” stars who weren’t truly stars yet but were liked by some of the audience or finding their way, were now feuding across the board with the likes of Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Lex Luger, Sting, Kevin Nash, and so forth.  Out of this came Hulk Hogan vs. Billy Kidman, as a feud.  Yep.  Russo and Hogan—oil and water. We’ll leave it at that.

It all came to a head for Hulk Hogan’s last appearance at Bash at the Beach. This finish has been so debated and so argued over so much that they created a Dark Side of the Ring episode about it.

The finish was going to be: Jeff Jarrett lays down for Hulk Hogan. Yep—they were doing a knockoff of the Fingerpoke of Doom for the third time in several years. This is how ridiculous WCW was at this point. They would go back to what many fans felt was the weakest moment in the history of the company—and play it again, Sam.

Now, Jarrett laid down. Hogan acted like he didn’t know what the hell was going on, won the belt, and began "allegedly" shooting: “Is this your deal, Russo? This is why the company’s in the shape it’s in—because of bullshit like this.” And Hogan walked out.

That was the plan.

The plan was also that Jeff Jarrett and Booker T would then fight. Booker T would become the new World Champion, and Hulk Hogan over time would return, and they would have a match between the two to determine who was the true, undisputed World Championship Wrestling Champion.

However, after Hogan and Bischoff got in a limo to leave—per the story—and went home, legitimately exiting the venue, Vince Russo came out and cut a promo declaring Hulk Hogan was done and you’d never see him again.

Hogan later sued Russo and Turner Broadcasting for being double-crossed. The idea of this match—much like Hulk Hogan against Bret Hart in 1993 in the WWF, which at one point was planned to be a SummerSlam match to pass the torch—never happened.

Hogan never returned to World Championship Wrestling. In fact, he later sued the company for defamation and breach of contract. The defamation claim was dismissed by the Georgia Supreme Court. However, the breach of contract ended up settled, and Hogan got a payday.

WCW limped along and was dead by early 2001, purchased by The World Wrestling Federation, as it was known at the time.  Vince McMahon pretty much tapdanced on the grave, opening and closing the last episode of Nitro.  The last thing seen? A commercial for Wrestlemania 17.

The reality is this: Hulk Hogan, Vince Russo, Eric Bischoff, and so many others are blamed for the death of WCW. Did they have a part, and should they be blamed for bruising it and hurting it? Absolutely. Did they kill it? Absolutely not.

The truth is the very environment in which it existed—the fiefdom that was Turner Broadcasting—destroyed the company as its own balloon was being popped so it could be assimiliated into AOL Time Warner, a business deal that almost immediately went to shit.

All analysis and all study of their financials—much of which has been done by Guy Evans with his excellent series of Nitro books on World Championship Wrestling—prove that the company would’ve been far more successful on the books and far more in the black had it not been for Turner Broadcasting’s own unique Hollywood-style accounting.

Despite that, Eric Bischoff—who towards the end found the financing and partners to buy the company and take it over with a planned reboot out of Las Vegas—could not find a new television partner in time before WCW was shut down. It was not worth as much as it would’ve been without the television time period on Turner Broadcasting, and as AOL Time Warner decided to reboot TBS and TNT into different styles of networks, World Championship Wrestling didn’t have a place there.  Nitro and WCW Thunder were canceled and without that programming space, all they were buying was a hope and a dream that died painfully as Bischoff sat on a beach, learning what he once made successful was no longer going to land in his hands. 

World Championship Wrestling went away.  Millions of fans (allegedly) went with it.  The biggest and absolute greatest cash cow in the history of professional wrestling up until that point died—partially because of the sins of everyone who was taking money from it—but mostly because the very environment that fed the cow decided to murder it because it was no longer able to be the black hole where all the financial losses and blame were sent.

In March of 2001, WCW was no more—which meant Hulk Hogan was back on the open market, far richer than he ever was before - and with a lifelong friend in Eric Bischoff, who would stand by him to the end.

Another of Hogan's closest confidantes, Jimmy Hart attempted to open the XWF.   They held television tapings at Universal Studios in Orlando, which would later become the home of TNA. Hulk Hogan returned to the ring, doing a rare independent wrestling appearance, wrestling Curt Hennig, the former Mr. Perfect. By the time the XWF tapings were done, the WWF had done what they always did—they got very predatory. Jerry Lawler, Curt Hennig, and others were hired and returned to the WWF.

By the time those tapings were finished, they were already outdated. And while the company did run some house shows, they never found a television home. In fact, the XWF broadcasts were never seen until they were later released on taped pay-per-view and DVD.

Hulk Hogan was the centerpiece of the XWF, but only wrestled once, and the XWF disappeared.

Later on, of course, all of this leads to the unthinkable.  In 2002, Hulkamania came home to the WWF, setting the stage for an incredible Wrestlemania moment.

To be continued in Part Three.

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