Hulk Hogan, an absolute trainwreck of a human being and the most important professional wrestler who ever lived, has died at seventy-one. Let’s get that second part out of the way, because while most of the world knows that it’s true, actual wrestling fans are often in complete denial about it. And Hogan, of course, is entirely to blame: he’s spent the last several decades begging anyone who would pay attention to flush a legacy he dropped into the toilet.

And that’s where his legacy will remain, too big to flush and too disgusting to leave anywhere else. From a technical standpoint Hogan was a mediocre wrestler, a man who only had a dozen moves in the ring but who always made them work. At the height of his career he was an avalanche of cocaine-fueled charisma on the mic, but over time his promos devolved into a dull rehearsal of shoehorned catchphrases. Hogan’s schtick was a perfect fit for the cartoonish wrestling culture of the 1980s and ’90s, and he pulled off an impressive heel turn for a few years after that, but by the end of the Bush era he had devolved entirely into an anachronistic nostalgia act.

Still, to this day Hulk Hogan remains one of the most recognized names on the planet. In the ’80s, he almost single-handedly elevated professional wrestling from a regional curiosity that toured in high school gyms and county fairs to a global multimillion (eventually billion) dollar industry. Hogan competed with the Pope to pack more people into stadiums. He had his own cartoon, his own live action show, and his own movies. He was an A-list celebrity at a time when other first-tier wrestlers might struggle to sell tickets in their own hometown. Ric Flair was a more accomplished wrestler, Dusty Rhodes was better on the mic, and Andre the Giant was a more impressive athlete — but Hogan was the man who made wrestling what it is.

He was also, by all accounts and evidence, an absolutely pathetic and reprehensible human being. His great moment of infamy, of course, will always be his notorious “racism” tape where he, well, told the world that he is a racist. That incident got him temporarily shunned from the WWE and kicked out of its Hall of Fame until professional wrestling’s other great villain, Vince McMahon, welcomed him back. The fans never did. In Hogan’s last appearance on televised wrestling earlier this year he was booed out of the arena.

But racism isn’t all that destroyed Hogan’s legacy. Over the years, memoirs and leaked recollections from the locker room revealed a side of his career that had always been hidden from the public. He was a ruthless, self-absorbed careerist who constantly “went into business for himself” — industry parlance for wrestlers who promote their own brands at the expense of everyone else in the promotion. Hogan repeatedly shot down dream matches against opponents he thought were beneath him, like Jake “The Snake” Roberts and Bret “The Hitman” Hart. He insisted on winning titles even when he had no interest in defending them in matches. He faked an injury in an attempt to smear WWE legend The Undertaker as an unsafe wrestler. And when opponents floated matches or storyline developments that made him look like anything less than an invincible, virtuous superhero he always came back with the same go-to line: “That doesn’t work for me, brother.”

Hogan also exposed himself over the years as a compulsive liar. Historically, professional wrestlers have always been liars; their entire job is to blur the line between fiction and reality, and to present themselves to the public as larger than life. But Hogan didn’t just lie for the sake of entertainment; often he just lied for the sake of lying. And over the years, the lies devolved into increasingly absurd and childish “my uncle works at Nintendo”–style lies. Hogan claimed to be recruited by multiple baseball teams, by Metallica and the Rolling Stones, and by Darren Aronofksy to play the lead in The Wrestler. He claimed that Mike Tyson was too afraid to fight him. He told lies about dying children and dying colleagues; in my favorite lie, he claimed to have crossed time zones so often that he somehow worked four hundred days in a single year. Some might say that it was hard to tell fact from fiction with Hogan, but that isn’t really true: it was extremely easy. All you had to do was assume that he was always lying.

From here things only get worse. Hulk Hogan is a snitch — he, personally, is why professional wrestlers have never been able to form a union. Hulk Hogan is why we lost Gawker and served as the tip of the spear for the Paypal Mafia’s aggressive media ambitions. And in one of his final public acts, Hulk Hogan endorsed Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Hogan gave wrestling fans a handful of genuinely iconic moments in the ring, and he also made our world significantly worse. His 1990 feud against John “Earthquake” Tenta taught me to stand up to bullies. He claimed to have found Jesus like a dozen different times throughout his career, so maybe he made it into Heaven. But Hulk Hogan is a liar, so I guess we’ll never know.