Name: Hulk Hogan | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #455
Uploaded: 2023-07-25T15:00:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Hulk Hogan | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #455' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-07-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Hulk Hogan | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #455' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-07-25. Transcript available.

Hulk Hogan | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #455

Hey guys, we've got some brand new merch to tell you about. The tie-dye Be Good
to Yourself tees are now available.
You can get those in aqua, creamsicle, and indigo. Get that and more at theovonstore.com.
And I have some new tour dates to announce. I will be in Lincoln, California on
September 15th
at the venue at Thunder Valley and Las Vegas, Nevada on October 27th and 28th
at Resorts World Las Vegas.
Tickets for these shows are available starting Wednesday, July 26th with code RATKING.
We've also got some new shows in Toronto, Ontario on August 31st.
We've added that new show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 8th at the
Miller High Life Theater.
Today's guest is a native of Tampa, Florida.
He's one of the most known human beings in the entire world.
He's one of the most recognizable figures.
He headlined eight WrestleManias, and he headlined my childhood, if I'm really
honest with you.
I'm grateful to get to spend time with him today.
He's an entertainer, an athlete, a movie star.
Today's guest is Mr. Hulk Hogan.
I'll tune my men up.
You just eat one of your own teeth?
If you did, that's the toughest thing I've ever seen anybody do.
No, but I did bite a piece of bacon when these veneers fell off.
I almost ate it.
Yeah.
I could just see you just having one.
So how was Flair?
Did you behave at all?
Dude, the guy, I'm going to just go out on a limb and say the guy's got some
issues.
You think?
Yeah.
I mean, he just, he'd drink his own blood if you told him it had gin in it, I
think.
Yeah.
You know.
Are we filming?
Huh?
Are we filming?
We don't have to.
No, I don't care.
You can film it.
Yeah.
I don't know if we're filming yet.
Are we recording?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, because 30 years, I never saw him take a drink of water.
Yeah.
Brother, breakfast, hard liquor, vitamins, hard liquor.
Yeah.
Lunch, a couple beers, hard liquor at night wine.
I love him to death.
Oh, yeah.
But I never saw him drink, drink any water until recently.
And I think he's back off the water, back on the roll again.
Yeah.
He said he's back.
Yeah.
He said he did 30 days sober and then walked across the street to a bar and
turned in his chip.
Yeah.
For a drink.
That's right.
The funny part is.
He can, he just can, he's, that's who he is.
Yeah, he's the man.
The funny part is when he was, had that really serious health issue.
Yeah.
Um, I got a call from Wendy and it didn't look good.
So I flew up, got a plane right away, flew up to Atlanta and, uh, I walked in.
The doctor pulled me aside.
He goes, Hey, your buddy here has destroyed his body, the inside of some of his
intestines
and stuff were dying and stuff because he's got a 5% chance of making it
through the surgery.
So he goes in, we wait, Jimmy Hart was with me.
We waited, we waited, we waited.
He comes out.
He's still alive.
Um, his girl's crying.
His daughter, Ashley's crying.
I'm sitting there holding his hand, holding his hand.
5% chance to make it.
He opens his eyes.
He looks up at me.
He goes, ah, Hogan, get me a six pack.
I went, what?
First thing he said to me, get me a six pack.
When he woke up.
Yeah, I'm not shocked, man.
I don't know.
I was just tripping, man.
Just kind of blew my mind, you know?
Yeah, he's a good guy, bro.
He's the best there ever was.
He's a, well, he would, he, and he says that about you, you know?
No, he's the best there ever was.
Is he the better wrestler?
Is he the better, is he the best entertainer?
Is he the best wrestler?
He was more consistent because I quit.
I really didn't care about the business.
I came from playing in a rock and roll band, you know?
And that whole attitude.
But once he got in it, he was, you know, he was real consistent and he held it
down.
Like when I was doing the New York Madison Square Garden thing, he held the
Southern Belt
thing down, which was actually a little harder because he was going an hour
every night.
Sometimes they do like what they call it, Broadway's where nobody wins.
He'd do like two hour Broadway's with Harley Race.
Just those, just those two in the ring.
Yeah, because they didn't want to switch the belt.
So, and they didn't want to make either wrestle with that.
So, okay, you're going to our Broadway tonight.
Wow.
If somebody told me to go on our Broadway, that's just beat me.
I'm out of here.
I'm going to get room service and a beer, you know?
Yeah.
But no, I say he was the best server was simply because he was so consistent.
Now, if you're talking about who drew the most money or internationally, who
saturated
all the international markets over the years, you know, I had more time and I
had more
seat time, like a good race car driver.
I had more seat time in all these foreign markets.
And Rick spent the majority of his career down south.
And he didn't have that swing arm to plug into Mozambique, Zambaui, Malaysia,
all these
places where people will know who Hulk Hogan is, but they might not know who
Tom Brady is.
Right.
But, you know, he was the man.
I love working with him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's a scrappy.
He just will not be denied, really.
You know, there's something about him.
And there was something about that whole NWA.
I don't know if it was AWA or NWA at that time when he was really the king of
it, you know,
but it came on, I think, on Sunday night.
Like, it was almost like I had friends that watched wrestling, right?
They knew you.
But I knew if they really watched wrestling, if they knew about NWA.
You know, that's when you could tell if they were that next level of fucking,
you know,
it was a lot of guys that just couldn't even read and they'd be in the stands
yelling,
just signs misspelled.
Yeah, you had to be dialed in to be like that whole Crockett Southern Belt
promotion.
You had to be a wrestling fan.
Oh, you had to have rabies, I feel like.
I was more accessible to the housewives and the kids that didn't know what
wrestling was.
Yeah.
You know, so it was a whole different thing.
But then Rick came our way.
Yeah.
And I'd been begging him to come up there for years.
He wouldn't leave.
And then once he came up, then we started rocking, you know.
Was it scary whenever he got over to WWE?
Did you feel a little bit of like, holy shit, how is this going to go?
Because that's a lot of ego.
You know, at that point, there's a lot of ego.
There can only be so many men on the top of the, you know, on the mountaintops.
Well, it's kind of like, you know, it's hard to explain, but I play the dumb
fox a lot, you know.
And for me, I'm always looking at who's got the big dollar sign on their chest.
Yeah.
And I don't mean to be an egomaniac, but I mean, I could actually wrestle
anybody at that time and sell out.
I mean, we sold out everywhere constantly for years.
Yeah.
It didn't matter if I wrestled Flair or Kamala or Paul Orndalph, Mr. Wonderful,
or it didn't matter.
One man.
Oh, you could wrestle fucking Hunter Biden, dude.
I'd come watch you beat him.
But yeah, it was, it wasn't that with me.
It was, I wanted him to get over so I would have somebody to work with and
chase, you know.
So that was me.
It was about, for me, it was like the old school thing, the money and the miles,
you know.
So, you know, I wasn't really that into being on the road or getting beat on
every night.
Yeah.
But there was so much paper involved, bro.
I was in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you think that you felt more like an athlete?
Did you feel, I mean, because you came from a music background, did you feel
more like an athlete?
Did you feel more like a, like this is just, did you almost make wrestling your
music in a way?
Does that make any sense?
It's kind of, you're hitting it, you're hitting it on all these cylinders there.
I really wasn't an elite athlete that was great on the football field or, you
know, a great wrestler, you know, amateur wrestler or, you know, I had a
baseball background, but I didn't, you know, play major league baseball.
I had a couple of things that happened to me that stopped all that stuff.
But I looked at myself more as just, you said, it's like an art form, an
extension of my music.
And when I, once I figured out what the business was about, because you can
Google Hulk Hogan in Japan, you can see me get down and wrestle like Bret Hart
and all the guys.
Cause that's how I started, you know, back in the day here, the guy named Hiram
Matsuda, broke my leg the first day, ran me off, put me in the dojo for two
years, learned wrestling hook submissions, you know.
So you learned it all.
Well, I went through the motions because back then, if you got your ass beating
the bar, brother, you were out of the wrestling business, you know, back in the
seventies.
Back in the late seventies, a little bit different than the performance center
now with the WWE.
Yeah.
You know.
Oh, I can, I can only imagine me.
You had to live the lifestyle then.
Yeah.
And you had to protect the business.
And if you wanted a job, there's a 300 pound guy over there with cauliflower.
You had to take the food out of his wife and kid's mouth to get in the business.
Yeah.
It wasn't like, you know, there's 40 wrestlers here that have been training,
you know, at the performance center.
We can pick one when one gets hurt and replace, replace him.
It wasn't that way.
Right.
It was way different back then.
But yeah, it was, uh, it was, uh, something that once I figured the business
out, you know,
I kind of like watched a bunch of guys growing up.
Like I watched Dusty Roselaw cause I was from here, you know, and then I also
watched superstar
Billy Graham a lot.
And I kind of like stole a little bit from both of them.
And then I was digging and wrestling and digging and wrestling around here.
And, and then I quit and I went up to, you know, Northern Florida through P
Cola and Mobile, Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama, wrestled and wrestled.
Then I quit.
And then I went up to Memphis for a while and I quit.
And when you were quitting, what was it making you quit kind of?
Was it just the money, bro?
I was wrestling like 12, 13 times a week.
And they were giving me a check for $125.
Oh yeah.
When you're beating the shit out of somebody at a best Western.
Yeah.
I was a gig in my head for five bucks a night.
And then in between rock and roll bands, one of the lead singers in my band got
me in the laborers union here because in between bands, we'd go put our, go to
the labor, labor hall and they pull your number.
You may get a job for four days at the mall working with, uh, uh, a pipe fitter
or three days at, at a government shutdown, working with electricians.
And I got, uh, a call to go be a longshoreman, help a longshoreman.
I get in the union down there in where in Florida.
Yeah.
On 22nd street causeway in Florida.
Okay.
So once I learned how to be, it was a weird place.
Cause I was probably the first white guy ever in the longshoremen using here in
Tampa.
Oh, wow.
Is it mostly Latinos?
Latinos and blacks.
Yeah.
And so then I learned how to load the ships and I became a stevedore.
But in between wrestling, I was going, man, 13, 14 times this week, twice on
Wednesday, twice on Saturday, three times on Sunday.
I wrestled for $125.
I'm going back to the docks where I was making 400 bucks a day.
Yeah.
You know, eating the gimmicks and working 14, 15 hours, you know?
It just didn't pay.
No.
So I quit, quit.
I went back and forth, back and forth.
But, um, then I figured the business out.
Right.
Then I went back and one time I slammed somebody.
I went, I looked at the crowd on like that.
And the reaction.
Yeah.
Got more response than the body slam.
Yeah.
Wait a minute.
Let me hit somebody in the throat.
Yeah.
Look, and the reaction got, you know, more.
And I said, okay, now I got it.
It took me a while to figure it out.
And then when I got fired from the WWF the first time by Vince Senior, when I
went to make the Rocky movie, I went and spent three years in Minnesota.
And then I figured it out.
Jesus.
The Hulk mania thing out, the ripping the shirt, the Hulk and up.
And then I said, I wasn't an elite athlete, but I figured the business out