Hulk Hogan And The Ultimate Warrior: The Best Worst Match

It’s weird how some things can be so objectively bad, and yet there’s that magnetic feeling that pushes you toward it. I remember being eight, nine, ten years old and we didn’t have cable and even if we did we wouldn’t have been able to afford a pay-per-view. And so after a big wrestling event, and thankfully there weren’t many back then, my friends and I would wait a month, maybe a month and a half, before the VHS appeared for rent at the local video store.

This cycle of excitement and frustration was perhaps never so great as it was in 1990. Wrestlemania VI. The Ultimate Warrior vs. Hulk Hogan. Two titans facing off, and both of them were good guys, fan favorites, babyfaces.

For my friends and I, Hogan was great, but we were really into the Ultimate Warrior. He was pure adrenaline, wild, anarchistic, powerful, destructive. All id, all action, no thought. The Ultimate Warrior was the zenith of that wrestling scene we’d grown up on: big bodies and big talk. Later, some fans would demand that wrestlers have a modicum of talent. But for now, and especially for kids, it was all about speed, adrenaline, excitement. We found some of that in Hulk Hogan, but all things being equal, he was vanilla. Too good. Too pure.

And the Ultimate Warrior’s weirdo promos sure appealed to a weirdo kid like myself who was isolated in a small town in Upstate New York and liked reading instead of football and watching horror movies instead of playing outside. Did it matter that his promos made no sense? Of course not. That actually added to the appeal. What the hell did “Should I lay on the lawn and let it run me over with lawnmowers” mean anyway? What kind of supernatural lawn did the guy have? And of course there was the infamous promo where he encouraged Hulk Hogan to throw a couple of pilots from a plane, take the controls and then nosedive the thing. At least I think that’s what he was saying.

The real-life Warrior, born Jim Hellwig, was a different story. Deadspin even published an article shortly after his death called The Ultimate Warrior Was An Insane Dick, which just about covers it. There was, of course, the infamous “Queering don’t make the world work” quote he delivered during a speech at a Young Republicans event at UConn in 2005. Most of his garbage opinions have been deleted from his official website, but archived versions of his site still have the money quotes. Like this one, in a rambling post from April 2006 called “Warrior on Queer Studies at DePaul University” where he wrote about an encounter with some protesters:

“One guy without (sic) his husband and two physically repulsive butch-dykes…in an act of pure selfish pleasure the guy got himself physically thrown out by the masculine security guard, unmistakably loving every single masochistic, man-loving moment of it.”

Yikes. But that’s how it went with the guy. Apparently he was as unhinged in real life as he was when he played a wrestler on TV, but in a less goofy, more hateful way. Well. Quite wonderful to have been young and ignorant of this kind of thing. And of course as I got older I realized that the Warrior’s promos were just stupid and incoherent. But as a kid, I thought I didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about because what he was saying was above my comprehension level. Oh dear. But was I ever really so innocent?

There was a discussion thread on Reddit at some point last year where someone said that Hogan vs. Warrior was the best worst match they’d ever seen. I think this is probably the most concise way to sum the thing up. It lasted for thirty minutes. Thirty minutes! Impressive for a couple of guys, especially the Ultimate Warrior, who weren’t exactly known for their stamina. And what a long thirty minutes. Even as a kid, the thing seemed to take forever. Not that I was ever bored. It just seemed to go on and on. Part of that is because they spent almost all of their time using rest holds. There was very little heavy cardio going on, which was good, since the Warrior could get gassed pretty easily.

If you can believe it, this epic encounter began with these two huge guys shoving each other like two petulant children fighting over a sandbox toy. Then they held their arms in the air and locked their fingers for a test of strength. Part of the theme of this match was just how even these guys were, that there would be no clear winner (The Warrior eventually got the pinfall, but Hogan kicked out exactly as the referee made the three count). Each wrestler overpowered the other at various times. Stretching the time, making the drama last as long as possible, making the fan think they’ve gotten their money’s worth. That was the name of the game and Hogan and Warrior were able to make it work.

One bizarre consequence of this weird pacing came about a third of the way through the match, when Warrior tossed Hogan out of the ring and Hogan hobbled around, pretending his knee was blown out. This allowed both men to sort of stand there for a while, catching their breath while keeping the dramatic tension high. But when Hogan got back into the ring, he almost immediately recovered and the knee didn’t bother him for the duration of the night. The commentators, Jesse Ventura and Gorilla Monsoon, tried their best to cover for the stupidity. At one point Monsoon bellowed, “Hulkster’s now able to put some weight on that leg.” Okay. So there’s that.

Neither wrestler had what you would call an arsenal of moves, and that’s part of the problem. The Ultimate Warrior vs. Randy Savage match at the following year’s Wrestlemania was great because Savage called the match. Savage was an expert at making lesser performers look good. Warrior was a great talker and awesome at hyping the crowd with frenetic entrances in which he ran to the ring and shook the ropes like a maniac, but he was absolutely terrible in the ring. The guy couldn’t even do a decent clothesline, and there are very few moves more fundamental. Barring a very impressive gorilla press in which the Warrior briefly lifted Hogan above his head, there just wasn’t a lot for either performer to work with.

People talk about wrestling matches they’d show to someone who isn’t a fan in an effort to make converts out of them. This is not that match. Objectively, this match is boring. Nostalgia makes a lot of things rosier and those of us who grew up loving this stuff will no doubt watch Hogan vs. Warrior with at least something of the zeal we had for it when we were younger. But new fans? Nah.

Maybe, and this is a big maybe, the frenzy of the crowd of more than 67,000 people would make things a bit more exciting for the first-time viewer, but put the thing on mute and you see how absurd the match really is. My guess is that the uninitiated viewer would wonder why these people were going so crazy for something where nothing really happens. Context matters in wrestling, especially in a match like this, where the participants are basically holding hands and hugging for most of the time.

So, is Hogan vs. Warrior a bad match? Yeah, pretty bad, though it’s competent and not nearly the disaster that their 1998 re-match turned out to be. But for people born during a certain time in the late 70’s through the early 80’s, there will always be something elusive and magical about it.