Hulk Hogan, My Father, and Why His Passing Felt Like Losing Something I Cannot Get Back

I watched the Hulk Hogan documentary on Netflix recently and came away feeling something I did not fully expect.

A lot of people have complicated feelings about Hogan the person. The controversies are real and I am not here to minimize them or pretend they did not happen. But there is a difference between the man and what he meant to a generation of kids who grew up watching him, and for me that distinction matters more than I can easily explain.

Wrestling was one of the few things my father and I shared. Every weekend we would watch together, and Hulk Hogan was a constant presence in those memories. So when I watch that documentary and see the highlights and the matches, I am not just watching a wrestler. I am watching something that connects me directly to my dad. They are woven together in my memory in a way that does not come apart just because one of them turned out to be flawed.

There is a line from the documentary that stuck with me. You do not remember what a person says or what a person does. You remember how they made you feel. That is exactly right.

I remember how it felt to watch Hogan get beaten down, absorb everything his opponent threw at him, and then somehow shake himself awake and come roaring back. I did not know wrestling was scripted back then. To me it was completely real. And watching that man refuse to stay down made something in a kid from the Bronx feel like getting back up was always possible no matter what.

When Hogan passed, it hit differently than I expected. My father has been gone for more than a decade now. Hogan dying felt like the last living piece of what we had together when I was young. The wrestling, the characters, the Saturday mornings watching it all unfold. That era is fully closed now and I felt it.

I cannot justify everything he said or did. I do not. But I also cannot pretend he did not shape something real in me, and I will not. The connection between Hulk Hogan and my dad is embedded too deep to be undone by anything that came later.

For a lot of us who were kids in the 1980s, his passing feels like the end of something. Not just a career or a character. An era.