Terry Bollea died on Thursday. The former professional wrestler was 71 years old. According to his longtime manager, Bollea died at his home in Clearwater, Fla.; different reports say that paramedics responded at dawn to an emergency call reporting that Bollea was suffering from cardiac arrest. He'd had some sort of recent neck surgery, and was rumored to be in failing health. Bollea's wife, Sky, recently batted away rumors that he was in a coma. Fellow washed-up wrestling luminary Jimmy Hart insisted Tuesday afternoon that Bollea was "doing phenomenal." That turned out to be not the case.
Reports of Bollea's poor health were first circulated by the radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Followers of Bollea's post-wrestling career will recall that Clem and Bollea were once good friends and sometimes appeared together on Clem's Tampa-area radio show. In 2012, the two made headlines when Gawker reported that Clem had recorded a clandestine video of his wife, Heather, having sex with Bollea. A separate recording that became public years later captured Bollea making vile and racist remarks while in conversation with Heather.
Gawker published short edited clips from the video, and Bollea, backed financially by vampiric futurist freak Peter Thiel, sued Gawker's parent company for $100 million. A hometown Florida jury ruled in Bollea's favor. The fallout of this lawsuit led inexorably to the destruction of Gawker Media, the eventual rise of Jim Spanfeller as a cut-rate villain of the final chapter of the blog era, and, well, the establishment of this very website.
Bollea eventually seated himself, unsurprisingly, as a champion of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. He also managed the neat trick of retaining enough general public goodwill from his early wrestling days that it has rarely been considered particularly controversial or damaging to one's reputation to express ongoing affection for his Hulk Hogan character, despite all that has been learned about the performer. That is not to say that his shtick worked on everyone: At his final WWE appearance, at a Monday Night Raw event back in January, Bollea, in his Hogan character, was booed relentlessly by a Los Angeles crowd. But in a sign of his cultural resilience, and the broad mainstream acceptance of ideas and behaviors that a saner society might otherwise consider grounds for literal exile, he was then invited onto ESPN's most popular show to talk about the experience with the network's most prominent media personality.
It would certainly never occur to the writers and editors of Defector to use our platform to dance on a person's grave. And so I will now bring this blog to a close.
