What If Hulk Hogan Had Never Existed?
Hulk Hogan was, without question, the biggest star of the professional wrestling in the 1980s and early 1990s.
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He was the foundational performer Vince McMahon made his national expansion of the WWE on the back of, leading to the Rock N Wrestling Connection that brought the company into the mainstream, and events like WrestleMania that would build WWE into an institution.
From there, Hogan remained one of the biggest names of the late 1990s and into the 2000s on top of WCW, then for a huge nostalgia run with WWE.
But what if Hulk Hogan had never existed?
There are pieces of wrestling that would have carried forward without Hogan. McMahon probably would have pursued his national expansion anyway, and other people would have filled his role in certain ways. Things probably wouldn’t have worked out entirely the same way, though, particularly as more time went on, introducing more variables into the series of historical events.
This article takes a crack at imagining wrestling history without arguably its most important star, the one and only Hulk Hogan.
#5 Orndorff-a-Mania Runs Wild
If we are to imagine a world without Hulk Hogan, the first step is to consider whom Vince McMahon might have plugged In as the face of his company instead? There are quite a few possibilities.
Maybe it would have been Andre the Giant, but larger than life legend was already well on his way out the door of wrestling, past his physical prime and eyeing retirement.
Maybe it would have been Jimmy Snuka, but the legal scare around the death of his girlfriend made him a bit unsavory. It’s possible someone like Hacksaw Jim Duggan might have gotten the nod for his everyman qualities, but he didn’t have the same Superman look that Hogan did.
In the end, Paul Orndorff was the man who, at that time, demonstrated the proper Herculean physique, good looks, charisma, and in-ring work to accomplish similar objectives as Hogan. No, his charisma couldn’t match Hogan’s, and he had injury issues start to catch up to him in the 1980s. As a launching point, though, it’s likely McMahon would have strapped a rocket to him.