When Hulk Hogan made his final appearance in World Wrestling Entertainment in January 2025, he was booed out of the building. When he died six months later, on July 24, 2025, the response from many corners of the wrestling fandom was much the same.
Whereas at many points throughout history Hogan surely mattered, he’d squandered any goodwill he may have garnered over the course of his 35-year wrestling career by coming out as a racist, Trump-supporting union buster.
There’s little mention of most of this in David Shoemaker’s book, Why Hulk Hogan Matters. Instead, the infamous leaked footage of him being intimate with his friend’s wife during which he admitted to being racist and uttered the n-word, which led to his firing from WWE, is relegated to a few pages at the end of this slight tome. So are his Peter Thiel-funded takedown of gossip website Gawker, and his endorsement of Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention
This is not a biography of Hogan. For that, it’s probably best consumed in conversation with Netflix’s recent Hulk Hogan: Real American, which is not unbiased but does devote half of its runtime to the controversies in Hogan’s later life that inform the political moment we’re in.
Writers other than Shoemaker have better contextualised how wrestling has influenced politics, such as Josephine Riesman’s Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Just when you think Shoemaker is going to dive into that, with chapters entitled “The Hack” and “Hogan vs Politics”, he swerves, writing respectively about Hogan’s schlocky Hollywood work and backstage politicking in order to always come out on top instead.
It’s here that Hogan’s union-busting efforts, snitching to the boss when other wrestlers tried to organise (a feat they still haven’t managed 40 years later), would have warranted a mention, but Shoemaker doesn’t bring the allegations up.
I will acknowledge that wrestlers are notoriously hard to biograph because of the inherent fiction of the industry, also known as kayfabe. And Hogan was perhaps the king of exaggeration, claiming that Elvis Presley was a “Hulkamaniac” (what Hogan called his fans – in fact, the King died the year Hogan started wrestling), that he partied with John Belushi (there is no evidence of this) and that Metallica wanted him to play in their band, which frontman James Hetfield has denied.
“The oddest part is that Hogan felt the need to tell the lies at all,” Shoemaker writes. “He lived a singularly spectacular life, but was compelled to embellish nonetheless.”
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The core tension throughout Why Hulk Hogan Matters and, indeed, Hogan’s legacy writ large, is what Shoemaker calls the “authorship” of Hogan: did Vince McMahon, disgraced former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, and his company make Hogan, or did Hogan make WWE? Unfortunately, I’m still left wondering after reading this book.
What Why Hulk Hogan Matters should have been entitled is Why Hulk Hogan Matters To Me, because this is a highly personal book. It’s clear that Shoemaker, like many who became wrestling fans during Hogan’s heyday, was influenced by Hogan’s career trajectory and his knowledge of Hogan’s early career in AWA and the tandem rise of Hogan and the WWE is commendable.
I would expect nothing less from the wrestling editor at The Ringer, host of The Masked Man Show podcast and author of The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling. But his prose can be riddling and contradictory at times.
Hulk Hogan matters because professional wrestlers are still exploited for their labour. Hulk Hogan matters because his friend, a WWE Hall of Famer in his own right, is cutting promos in the White House. Hulk Hogan matters because there have only been four Black male world champions in WWE history. But you won’t find most of these arguments in Why Hulk Hogan Matters.
Why Hulk Hogan Matters by David Shoemaker is published by Harper
