HULK HOGAN: THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR
By Susan Keiser

Having Hulk Hogan die on your birthday hits differently when you turn 41 than it would’ve had it happened when you turned 7. Terry Bollea passed away on July 24 of cardiac arrest at the age of 71, but Hulk Hogan had died a thousand tiny deaths before the ultimate challenge which we all must succumb to. Eleven years ago, in 2014, I tossed off the series of notes below for The Classical, on the death of one of the few wrestlers who challenged Hogan as not only the face of what was then the World Wrestling Federation, but of wrestling itself: The Ultimate Warrior.

It’s a good article if I do say so myself, aided by having David Roth (now at Defector) as my editor, and in trying to reconcile Warrior’s homophobia with his homoeroticism, I made a very small name for myself in the online wrestling community at the time. This was seven years before I came out as trans, and eight years before I legally changed the name I made for myself to show who I truly was — meaning I have at least one thing in common with Warrior (who was born James Brian Hellwig before changing it in 1993).

Rereading my piece, I noticed how I said that Warrior was “out of costume” for his final public appearance, which occurred less than 24 hours before his passing. For a man who truly lived his gimmick, he still appeared to be a relatively normal — if reprehensible — human being who once was a wildly popular wrestler, as opposed to Hogan, who by the end of his life pretended that both “normal human being” and “wildly popular wrestler” still applied to him, but fell quite short of embodying the epitome of either.

I have never been a professional wrestler, but I have been a writer, and I still am, of sorts, if only at comedy shows and open mics. I appreciate the charisma that an entire generation of wrestlers stole from Superstar Billy Graham and Dusty Rhodes (who both stole it from Muhammad Ali, who in turn stole it from Gorgeous George and Jackie Fargo), and ultimately made their own. 

More importantly, I appreciated these wrestlers’ physiques, built up and torn down by hard work in and out of the ring, and through the use of performance-enhancing chemicals that were criminalized in a moral panic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What I mistook for a mere fetish back when I wrote the piece was a very “eggy” longing to alter my body to truly become who I wanted the world to see, and who I knew to be all the time, instead of conflating the bit of Being A Man with my actual life. As homophobic and rancid a human being Warrior was, he was the embodiment of self-actualization that spoke to me almost as much as his mixed metaphors on the mic, as are quite a few other wrestlers, bodybuilders, and other people who became something more than who the world once saw them as.

We currently live in a time when right-wing influencers, politicians, and personalities get to alter their appearances, lifestyles, and bodies however they see fit, while doing their damnedest to deny anyone else from doing the same. This is not hypocrisy, because they never had any intention to let us be ourselves in the first place. They see themselves as above everyone else — whether “everyone else” is disabled, queer, a person of color, feminine, or anyone whose expression of freedom differs from their own “freedom of expression.”

Instead of singing Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” we are living in Antonio Gramsci’s proverbial “time of monsters,” and the old world — i.e. people doing whatever they can to become Hellwig’s Ultimate Warrior or Hogan’s Ultimate Male in Rocky III — are trying their hardest to prevent the new world, where we all can become monsters of our own making, from being born.

DON’T ALWAYS BELIEVE
April 9, 2014

I was at a bar when a friend told me that the Ultimate Warrior, born James Hellwig but known legally as Warrior since 1993, had passed. Of course we were in denial; we asked our bartender about the Ultimate Warrior, and he believed we were speaking of Saturday’s Hall of Fame induction, or maybe his appearance on RAW a little over 24 hours earlier. Of course, we also might have been talking about our childhoods, when the be-tasseled wild man briefly became a legitimate hero to us all.

Said friend and I had, just minutes before, discussed the Ultimate Warrior’s “retirement match” against Macho Man Randy Savage from WrestleMania VII. As the storyline went, Savage lost to Warrior, but reunited with his former valet (and then-wife) Miss Elizabeth after Sensational Sherri attacked Savage -- an admittedly complicated storybook ending to what was already a memorable match. It was a little bit before we realized that Warrior was the last of the four people in that match left alive.

I did not watch Warrior’s Hall Of Fame speech when it first aired. That was less because of his known anti-gay point of view, and more out of sheer fatigue after listening to Mr. T rhapsodize at length about his mother. I can only assume Warrior was at once sincere and self-serving during this speech, as he generally was; what I have seen of it confirms such. I did, however, tune in to this Monday’s RAW, where Warrior made what was to be his final public appearance.  

Even as an adult, there remains a stubborn habit of imagining your childhood heroes to be immortal. I was not even thinking about physical mortality that night, so much as my disappointment when Warrior did not run to the ring, as he did to promptly dispatch Intercontinental Champion Honky-Tonk Man during SummerSlam ’88. I knew Warrior was in his mid-fifties, and like most wrestlers of his age not in peak physical form, but still held out hope that at least he would be wearing his warpaint, and not some souvenir mask that could have been cut out of a cereal box. But Warrior, for better or worse, wasn’t wearing that costume anymore, though he did sport a nifty black denim jacket with his likeness on it.

***

I remember at the age of seven or eight, getting a WWF coloring book. It was already out of date. Several wrestlers in it were, by the time it got to me, either retired or had died or had left the sport on other terms -- Randy Savage, Kerry Von Erich, and the Ultimate Warrior. Still, there were their cartoon bodies in cartoon form, ready for America’s children to fill what were already apparitions.

This was near the end of my first period of wrestling fandom; I’d started to learn that wrestling was fake, but had no idea exactly what that entailed. It was also during a part of my childhood where I could sense I was different, yet already imagined myself to be different in so many other ways as to almost completely ignore my attraction towards my own gender.

It took me years to completely realize that I was gay, but even then I realized that something about these cartoonish bodies that made me feel different, and that this was especially true about the Ultimate Warrior’s. Nothing further came of these thoughts at the time, but upon hearing Warrior’s later opinions on LGBT rights, including his bizarre anti-eulogy of Brokeback Mountain star Heath Ledger, I could only frown at what a former childhood hero believed in, and then laugh at the sheer irony of one of my formative early crushes being a rampant, raving homophobe.  

Warrior’s official blog, which appears to have been dormant since at least 2009, still includes a longform post describing a visit to DePaul University. It mostly rails against the “queer” attendees disagreeing with his political platform, deems a Catholic university that has an LGBT studies program to be hypocritical, and consistently tries to take back the term “queer” as something to mock non-heterosexual individuals. It’s hard to take someone too seriously who takes himself too seriously, and so it’s easier to sigh than seethe with rage upon reading this article.

As I near 30, I appreciate pro wrestling in different ways than I did growing up. To wrestle is to risk shortening your life in order to perform dramatic yet supremely childish acts; it is, often, to take drugs which will screw your body and your mind while still having to cut promos about the dangers of cigarette smoking. There are heroes, and there are survivors, and by the end of the Ultimate Warrior’s life, he seemed to me more a survivor than a hero.  

It makes sense, in a way, that it would be a professional wrestler -- a man who was outsized and overstuffed for a living -- who so well embodied the vast hypocrisies within ourselves as individuals and as a nation, and who showed how, within this hypocrisy, we all find ways to be truly alive. This is a good way to eulogize Jim Hellwig, the man, the warrior, The Ultimate Warrior. Walt Whitman’s line about containing multitudes would’ve sounded both great and strange in Warrior’s booming voice. But it would’ve been something if we could have heard him say it. It might have helped us to understand just what these words truly meant. At least until he asked about Whitman’s wife, at which point it would be time to change the subject.

Copyright Susan Keiser. You can read more of Susan’s work on her Patreon.