Georgia Native Hulk Hogan Dies at 71

He slammed a giant, went toe to toe with legends like Ric Flair and Randy Savage, and turned a carnival sport into a mainstream spectacle.

Hulk Hogan died today. He was 71.

The story of the icon began not with a roar, but with a quiet fact: Terry Gene Bollea, was born in Augusta, Georgia. While his family moved to Tampa, Florida, where he would grow up, his origin point remained in the Garden City, an unlikely prologue to a life lived at maximum volume.

In the ring he was billed as being from Venice Beach, California or from Tampa, Florida, where he actually lived. Augusta, his hometown, never got top billing during his wrestling career.

His early path gave no hint of the phenomenon to come. He was a musician playing in local rock bands, a bank teller, a bodybuilder at a local gym. It was there he was discovered, and his journey into the strange, punishing world of professional wrestling began under the tutelage of legendary trainer Hiro Matsuda in 1977. Matsuda, in a now-famous rite of passage, broke Hogan’s leg on his first day of training to test his resolve. Hogan returned.

His ascent was not immediate. He wrestled in smaller territories across the country, honing a persona. He was Terry “The Hulk” Boulder, then Sterling Golden. He had a brief, early run in the then-World Wrestling Federation, but his star truly began to rise in the American Wrestling Association (AWA). It was there that “Hulkamania” was born, a groundswell of popularity that caught the eye of Vince McMahon, the ambitious promoter who was about to take his regional WWF national.

McMahon made Hogan the foundation of his empire. The watershed moment came on January 23, 1984, at Madison Square Garden. Hogan, the all-American hero, defeated The Iron Sheik to win his first WWF Championship. The arena erupted. A cultural phenomenon was ignited.

For the rest of the decade, he was the center of the pop culture universe. He held the WWF Championship for more than four years. He starred in films, had a Saturday morning cartoon, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He was the main event of the first nine WrestleManias, a pay-per-view event he helped build into a global institution, most famously by body-slamming the 520-pound Andre the Giant at WrestleMania III in front of a reported 93,000 people.

But no character can stay the same forever. By the mid-1990s, the red-and-yellow hero felt dated. Hogan moved to rival promotion World Championship Wrestling (WCW), and in 1996, he did the unthinkable: he turned his back on the fans. As the villainous “Hollywood” Hogan, clad in black and white, he formed the New World Order (nWo), a move that revitalized his career and created one of the most successful storylines in wrestling history. He would go on to win six world championships in WCW, matching the six he held in the WWF.

The man, Terry Bollea, lived a life far more complex than the narratives he sold in the ring. The heroic image was powerful, but it was also fragile. His later years were a public reckoning with the man behind the persona, a story that played out not in sold-out arenas but in courtrooms and on a family reality television show that exposed the cracks in his personal life. There were highs and lows. A divorce, a racism scandal, a public cancellation followed by redemption and the birth of new ventures.

The lines between the invincible Hulk and Terry Bollea often blurred, leaving a legacy as messy as it was monumental. Most recently, millions watched Hulk Hogan take the stage that The Republican National Convention to show his support for President Donald Trump.

The spectacle is over. The giant has been slammed, the titles won, the story told and retold until it became a modern myth. But every myth has an origin point. For the immortal Hulk Hogan, that point was a city in Georgia. And today, the story of Terry Bollea, the boy from Augusta, came to its end.