No Heroes, No Kings: Notes on Childhood Grief and Moving Forward

Hulk Hogan was everything to me as a kid. A hero. A religious-like figure. Moving beyond that gave me the space to become myself.

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On a Saturday morning in 1990, I sat on the floor in my grandparents’ house and felt pure and utter terror. I was eight years old. So lonely, so lost, so scared. I’d spent the day watching cartoons that served as an escape from my awful and turbulent life. Nothing around me felt good or safe save for those fleeting moments. And, that morning, I was watching one of the most important people in my entire world suffer unbearable harm.

It makes me feel silly, but I know that vulnerability and risking seeming silly is important. In fact, it’s one of the most important things we have now, holding onto those soft parts of ourselves that are under constant attack by a group of cruel abusers. But that morning, as I watched my favorite wrestler Hulk Hogan attacked by his evil rival Earthquake, I was petrified. Hogan was beaten. First responders swarmed him after the violence and placed him on a stretcher as he groaned in pain. You can see the people in the crowd shook by the scene, but if there was a camera there in my grandparents’ living room, if you could have seen me sitting there by her woodstove, clutching my chest, crying tears that ran sloppily down my face and onto the carpet, it would have eclipsed even the most concerned audience member.

In the weeks that followed, the wrestling show told us that Hogan was terribly injured and on the verge of retirement. The hero might be nearing the end. We were told it might help if we sent him our well-wishes, our thoughts, our encouragement. My grandma sat with me at her kitchen table and helped me write a letter to Hulk. I poured my heart out and told him how much he had meant to me and that I knew he could recover and come back. I told him about how he inspired me to get up every day and keep fighting, just like him. I promised to pray for him. To appeal to God to mend his wounds. And I did. I prayed until my hands ached and until my tears went dry.

A few years ago, listening to a podcast involving one of the people who ran the WWF back then, I found out the letter writing call was meant to build up the company’s mailing list. Sure enough, I would get one catalogue and sales-pitch after another in my mailbox. The entire angle with Earthquake and the attack was meant to sell the upcoming SummerSlam pay-per-view. When Hogan returned, I cheered and wept in joy. I begged and begged to order the show so I could see Earthquake get his comeuppance. We couldn’t afford it, so I had to wait to read about it in the WWF Magazine that was sold to me through one of my mailing-list ads. I’d spent the entirety of my saved-up allowance for the privilege.

Hogan and professional wrestling are perfect examples of America’s obsession and need for fantasy and how that obsession and need are used against us. Tuning in as a child in a turbulent and abusive household, I wanted desperately to believe in heroes who would fight on behalf against the onslaught of evil in the world. The feeling I had, that burning desire, was the same one that I brought into my church on Sunday’s. Christ and Hulk Hogan and a handful of other heroes were out there fighting on my behalf. And, with sadness, I have to admit what I was looking for all along was a father who would take care of me and keep the monsters at bay. Many of us, it turns, are looking for such a father.

Heroes are nothing new. Human civilization has always produced them. A host of myths and fables, a crowd of very human and very real human beings we have raised up on high. We’ve needed them to make sense of the world around us, to put to order chaos. We want to believe in something bigger and stronger than ourselves so that we can feel relief when we feel the pain and see how unfair and cruel life can be. The people of legend are etched in time. They don’t have stories other than the ones we ascribe and imagine for them. Real-life heroes, unfortunately, do.

Hulk Hogan, or Terry Bollea, spent the 1980’s and a large part of the 1990’s existing as a designed and packaged superhero. He was, without a doubt, larger than life, capable of dealing the Iranians a blow by taking the WWF Championship from the Iron Sheik, bodyslamming the 500 pound Andre the Giant, and seemed to punctuate the end of the First Iraq War by pinning that dastardly turncoat Sgt. Slaughter and winning one for the United States of America. He often waved the Red, White, and Blue, wore a crucifix around his neck, and told his adoring fans to train, say their prayers, and take their vitamins.

But all of those moments were manufactured and planned, created to provide catharsis for money-paying customers desperate to feel hope. Hogan’s most signature act was to take an incredible amount of violence, seem destined to failure, and then, in the nick of time, summon a force from within himself and overcome all the odds. It was perfected to elicit an emotional response in people who wanted to see themselves in Hogan as they toiled and struggled and felt on the verge of despair and defeat. The act was scripted, the muscles fake, and, like so many things, the only thing real was the money it accrued.

Professional wrestling is the United States of America. A two-bit carnival show that attempts to dazzle its believers with lights and sounds and bombast and narratives that feel good and stand in for what we actually need out of life. It is no surprise that Donald Trump is a WWE Hall of Famer or that the relationship between reality and lie - or shoots and works, in wrestling parlance - has blended until there is no discernment. It is one of America’s quintessential art forms because it so perfectly encapsulates what this country and what it has always been.

Hogan’s downfall is tawdry but Shakespearan. Over time, we realized his storied 24” pythons were produced by steroids. We heard one lie after another - did you know, according to Hogan, that he was supposed to be one of the original members of Metallica? - until nothing he said could be believed. Leaks from behind the scenes revealed that Hogan had single-handedly curtailed professional wrestlers from forming a union, protecting the exploitative conditions that eventually became our accursed gig work environment. And then, in 2012, a sex tape that had been surreptitiously recorded by radio shockjock Bubba the Love Sponge, revealed that Hogan had repeatedly used racial slurs and harbored deep racial hatred. Because of that tape, Right Wing oligarch Peter Thiel was able to sue Gawker and inflict a chilling blow to journalism going forward. Eventually, Hogan would start selling disgusting beer, join the MAGA Movement, speak at the 2024 Republican Convention, and absolutely sully every single part of his legacy.

His final appearance in the wrestling world took place on January 6th, 2025 in Inglewood, California on the Monday Night RAW program. His old music hit - the same music that used to get me so excited that I would run through my house flexing my nonexistent muscles - and he shambled onstage with manager Jimmy Hart waving the American flag. It didn’t matter what he said, how he pandered, the capacity crowd booed him mercilessly.

I understand the feeling. If I had been there, or if I had ever seen Hulk Hogan anywhere, I would have likely booed as well. I was taken. Ripped off. My emotions were manipulated and my money stolen. As a young boy who was desperate to see light in the world, Hogan and the people around him, including Vince McMahon, who has been accused of truly horrific crimes, staged an elaborate an ongoing farce to take advantage of what I felt and what I needed. Sure, it was a show. Sure, it’s professional wrestling, but the power at hand here is still power.

We are a nation lost in these fantasies. Most have come to understand that professional wrestling is scripted and, for that, I think we are probably lucky. People can still appreciate the art form and theater for what it is rather than be drawn into that fantasy world and later discover their heroes were creeps. But it goes well beyond the wrestling ring and sports entertainment or whatever we want to call it.

MAGA, which Hogan joined in the same manner as he joined the villainous New World Order faction in 1996, works with the same techniques and same intentions. Trump, performing as a wrestling heel, plays upon the emotional needs and desires and deficiencies of his supporters, whipping them into a frenzy and promising to defeat their enemies. In this way, elections have been turned into pay-per-views. His “destruction of the Deep State” was as real as Hogan besting The Big Boss Man at Saturday Night’s Main Event. It is a sweaty act for desperate patrons. The only thing real, at the end of the day, is the money being taken at the gate.

Moving beyond all of this is the only way forward. When Hogan was revealed as a racist asshole I had to return to my childhood and sort through the feelings, even though distance made it an easier process. For me, it was like deconstructing my evangelical faith. Sitting in those pews, idolizing my pastor, ordering the world through the Baptist faith, helped make sense of things and provided some hope that maybe the Great Evil would be tamed and all of my suffering would be rewarded. Somehow, these things sink in. They rewire how we see the world to the point that we still have to catch ourselves, many years removed, and wonder anew why we ever believed them in the first place.

Heroes can be aspirations, but they are also traps. To believe in these larger-than-life things, to put our hope and unabashed faith in human beings and look past their flaws is to make ourselves vulnerable. It allows villains to clad themselves in the auspices of heroism, to promise us fantasies and dreams, and to rob us completely. In Trump, we see how the fantasy takes shape. Give me power, give me money, and I will make those dreams come true. No need to question how. No need to look further. Relax and enjoy the show. And that is the essence of grotesqueries like monarchy, where narratives and manufactured spectacle hide the true and ugliest of things, which is unfettered and unrestrained pursuit of power and resources. Which, I doubt I need to tell you, is what we are fighting against now and what we have always fought against.

This is the stuff of democratic nightmares. Simple pageants mask the harder things of life, the things we must do to move forward and to actually realize something better. The world I lived in as a child was harsh and painful and Hulk Hogan was my escape to another world absent that pain. Had I held onto that, or my destructive relationship with a church that abused and exploited similarly, I don’t know who I would be now. Certainly not myself and certainly not as critical of power and those who desire it.

Terry Bollea died today, but Hulk Hogan has been dead for many years. The artifice that strode through curtains, that bodyslammed giants, that hoisted the hopes and dreams of innocent marks, that came apart at the seams and left only Bollea behind. He’s gone now, too.

And there’s something to learn here and perhaps that makes the pain somehow worth it. Idols and hero worship belong to childhood and are something to leave behind, much like the fantasy that our parents or the adults around us are perfect or all-knowing. That journey from adorant to discerning, mindful adult is one we must all make, and too many of our fellow citizens, neighbors, and family members have refused to the point of violence. Comfort is the reason, for sure, but what they stand to lose is much more than money spent on a magazine.