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THE CULT: HULK HOGAN

This week's inductee to The Cult is a man who, to a child of the nineties, was an overblown comic book hero brought to life. To the adult that child subsequently became, the reality seemed rather darker.

Cult Grade: Scales From Our Eyes

To a child born in the early nineties, the glorious circus of professional wrestling was viewed through truly guileless eyes. To a British youngster, watching highlights of  Rawand  Smackdown!on T4 just after the turn of the millennium – or maybe even watching the old WWF on Sky at the house of an especially snotty schoolmate – the overblown theatre of the fighting and trash talk felt utterly fantastical, so alien was the culture and so far away. Thousands of miles over the Atlantic, made manifest by our television screens and VHS players, enormous demigods with polished bronze muscles struggled and grappled with each other, hurling their enemies about by their oily hair or tossing them around by the waistlines of their sparkly underwear. These were fierce men of gargantuan stature who appeared able to take an inhuman amount of physical punishment, and as such they seemed like real-life manifestations of the superhero cartoons and comic book narratives on which so many of us were raised.

Standing tall above these giants – The Undertaker, 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin, Sting and the like – was one particularly bombastic character who somehow appealed to the childlike psyche more than any of his contemporaries. That man was none other than Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan. Though he was relatively late in his wrestling career at this point, he was still one of the most imposing men out on the canvas, coming in at a monstrous billed height of 6'8 and weighing no less than 21st. There was something about his blonde horseshoe moustache, his yellow bandana and his habit of ripping his shirt from his chest while screaming like a loon that set our juvenile hearts aflutter, perhaps because his wrestling persona was essentially the atavistic male ego with an aesthetic somewhere between  Flash Gordon and  He-Man.

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