On a recent episode of Talk Is Jericho, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer, WCW announcer Mark Madden and Chris Jericho shared stories about the late Hulk Hogan. Jericho worked with Hogan in both WCW and the WWE, and he talked about doing a run of house shows with the wrestling icon.
“I know that when Hogan returned to the WWE in the early 2000s, I worked with him quite frequently,” Jericho said. “It’s gotta be at least a dozen times that we did house shows together. It was really cool. He’d bring a 6-pack of beer into the dressing room, and I’d never seen guys drinking in the dressing room at that point in time. But that was just Hogan’s thing.”
Jericho went on to reveal Hogan’s approach to setting up their matches. “He was like, ‘Whatever you want to do brother,’” Jericho said. “He left it up to me to call the whole thing. When we started working a few times, he was telling me, ‘You don’t know how refreshing this is.’ I’m paraphrasing, but when he was at his peak in the ‘80s, he told me everybody was out to get him and to take advantage of him.”
Jericho also said Hogan told him that his opponents weren’t always the most amenable when it came to taking a clean loss from The Hulkster. “(They) wouldn’t want to work with him,” Jericho said. “(They) wouldn’t want to lose to him. Do you remember for a short period of time he wore that helmet with a fist on it? He told me he got that to give the heels an excuse to lose. No one wanted to lose to him on these shows in Little Rock or whatever, so he had to get a gimmick where Jimmy Hart could hit the heel with this helmet to give them an excuse to lose.”
Jericho said that Hogan’s statement left him dumbfounded. “I was like, ‘But you’re Hogan.’” Jericho continued. “He said ‘It was a different world back then, brother.’ No one wanted to lose to him. And no one wanted to sell for him. I thought that was so insane. He could’ve been working me, but I don’t think he was about that sort of thing.”
The full Talk Is Jericho episode remembering Hogan can be heard here.
