Why Hulk Hogan Refused To Lose To Ex-WWE Champion Twice
A current WWE executive has explained why Hulk Hogan was fine with losing once to a former WWE Champion but was dead against it happening a second time.
On the 8th of August 2002 edition of SmackDown Hulk Hogan found himself going one-on-one with a young man who at the time had yet to become WWE Champion, but soon would. That man was Brock Lesnar.
Lesnar and Hogan squared off with The Beast Incarnate leaving The Hulkster battered, bloodied, and beaten. It would be six months before Hogan returned to the ring in WWE when he faced The Rock at No Way Out in 2003.
Speaking on his Something To Wrestle podcast, WWE executive discussed the possibility of Hulk Hogan returning to face Lesnar again this time for the Undisputed WWE Championship that Lesnar went on to win at SummerSlam in 2002.
According to Prichard, the idea of returning to lose for a second time in succession to Lesnar didn’t work for Hogan:
“Well, I think more than anything, it was a lot of it, you know, Hulk thinking, ‘Well, god, I come back, he has already beaten me once. He destroyed me. He put me out. So one would think that the only logical thing to do was to come back and get his revenge.”
“But you’re talking about the guy that you were looking at for the future in Brock. It isn’t realistic for Hulk to come back and beat Brock, especially at that point in his career. And Hulk wasn’t really in favor of that. He didn’t want to do that. He didn’t see that.”
“He thought if he could come back and face Brock, that he felt he really needed to go over. I don’t think the championship was much of a deal as it was for the returning babyface to avenge the guy that put him out. And that’s not what we were looking for with Brock. We were looking to build Brock. So that quickly got stalled, and we went to look for a different opponent.”