This is quite the example of the boy who cried wolf.

Released seven years after his initial autobiography, the first half of this book covers largely similar ground. There doesn’t seem much point in this unless Hogan’s going to take a different approach, for example speaking more honestly and openly than was possible under the WWE Books banner.

This book is copyright Eric Bischoff, LLC.

I’d initially planned to cover everything in this book that seemed suspicious, but that topic’s been addressed much better by writer Stuart Millard, and my list of points to check ran onto three pages.

Suffice to say there are some real classics here. The best know is the lengthy explanation of how Hogan would regularly fly back and forth between the US and Japan and that the time zones and international date lines meant he wrestled on 400 days a year.

Some claims at least make sense on the surface but don’t stand up to scrutiny such as Hogan wrestling in Tokyo the night after WrestleMania III at the start of 29 straight days. That might have been more plausible had he not stopped touring New Japan nearly two years earlier and had the WWF not taken a 12 day break after WrestleMania, with no record of Hogan returning to the ring until more than three weeks after the big show,

And then you have the stories that defy the evidence of your own eyes, most notably the repeated claims that Hogan suffered life-long problems after the Undertaker messed up the match-winning tombstone at Survivor Series 1991 and his head crashed into a chair.

In fact his head was so clearly several inches from making contact that I, a teenage fan still trying to cling to the illusion of wrestling, had to conjure up an explanation in writing up the match for a fanzine of how the move didn’t fully connect but still had a jarring effect that compounded the earlier punishment in the match.

So far, so Hogan, but the real problem comes with the second half of the book which addresses his divorce from wife Linda and his son Nick’s incarceration after he drove a car in a crash that hospitalised a passenger for two years. The former topic is addressed in a way that somebody with more time and energy might contrast with Linda’s own book.

The latter includes numerous points where Hogan disputes the media narrative — and indeed the prosecution’s case — about the circumstances of the crash and Nick’s actions. The problem is that by this point it’s absolutely impossible to assess how credible his arguments are.

The book then concludes with a lengthy account of Hogan’s spiritual awakening and discovery of the law of attraction. If you get anything out of this — or indeed the rest of the book — then more power to you.

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