Crashout Hulk Hogan Was Great, Actually | WCW Monday Nitro 2/9/98
William Regal forces Goldberg to put his working boots on! The Mega Powers explode again! Scott Steiner kisses his bicep!
So much of Hulk Hogan’s career in professional wrestling, including his final appearance on Raw earlier this year, feels like the act of a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis that pointing to a year on the calendar as the year he went through one seems futile, but I will go ahead and say that 1998 was Hogan’s mid-life crisis year. It took six years for him to realize that he was no longer the marbled god who’d changed professional wrestling forever in the 1980s — six years from his loss to The Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VI to his heel turn at Bash at the Beach 1996 in which he tried and failed to translate Hulkamania to something beyond pro wrestling, then tried and failed to restore Hulkamania within wrestling to its former ubiquity, the desperation of each successive move (chumping out Bret Hart at WrestleMania IX, surrounding himself with flunkies, the endless Dungeon of Doom angle) only making what did put him squarely back in the cultural zeitgeist (his turning heel has the same mainstream appeal as the “hey, comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” coverage of graphic novels) reverberate more.
In 1998, that was coming apart. There was a clear direction for his character to go, and instead of losing clean to Sting at Starrcade 1997, WCW swerved. The nWo hadn’t quite split yet, but if you read the dirtsheets (I did not, as I was nine), you knew there was friction between Hogan and Kevin Nash, a real life power struggle that happens every time Hogan has an associate who can actually wrestle or get over with a crowd. The Kevin Nash of 1997-1998 was absurdly good at getting over with a crowd. A big, hot, mean-ass dude with a sick finisher and a smooth voice and a million catchphrases and a friend, in Scott Hall, who was the medium-size version of all of that. They were cool, and Hogan was not, not even when the nWo was just the three of them.
Most mid-life crises are a matter of an insecure man chasing past glories. What makes Hogan’s 1998 so fun is that he’s desperately chasing something he never had, which was an ounce of cool. 1998 is the year that gives us The Woodmaster, feuds with celebrities that conveniently allowed him to sidestep a PPV singles match against Diamond Dallas Page, and a phony run for President spurred by the political success of Jesse Ventura. He tried to run a scorched earth campaign on The Ultimate Warrior and singed his own eyebrows off in the process, cut endless promos about his dead brother, signed one of the craziest contracts in the history of professional wrestling, and also had that Nitro stunner against Bill Goldberg in the Georgia Dome. It’s a wild ride, to the extent that the Finger Poke of Doom is the story’s coda and not its climax, but here in February 1998 we’re still pretty early in the run. He’s got Jimi Hendrix as his theme song. He’s going to run another Mega Powers explode angle with Randy Savage. It’s appointment viewing, y’all. Especially in the girlie bars. The girlie bars are all about the gaga, brother.
Oh, also this is the one with Goldberg vs. Regal. Let’s rock.
Colette Arrand