The Undertaker has had a long complicated history with Hulk Hogan. But after Hogan's death, some of the things he's said are making fans question everything. Oh, brother, you got me.
I'm like, oh. Oh, crippled the golden goo. Some fans think he may have revealed more than he intended, even hinting he played a bigger role in Hogan's death than anyone realized.
Let me break it down. The man who built his own executioner. Ever since Hulk Hogan's death, the Undertaker has been opening up more, talking about their tension and what Hogan did to him during his time in WWE.
And while a lot of that has been entertaining, it's also made some people feel a certain way, with some even linking him to Hogan's death. But before we get to the things he said that are now raising those questions, you need to understand this. Before the tombstone, before the tension, before any of it, there's one fact that cuts through everything.
Hulk Hogan is the reason the Undertaker exists in the first place. In 1991, Hogan was in the middle of filming a movie called Suburban Commando. The production had a need.
Two large actors to play alien bounty hunters. They had found one. They could not locate another man with the physical frame to fill the role.
Hogan knew someone. Mark Callaway, a wrestler then working for Jim Barnett's promotion in Atlanta, Georgia, doing time on the NWA circuit in the South, big enough to fill any room he walked into. The Undertaker.
Um, it's kind of funny how The Undertaker came about. I was doing a movie called Suburban Commando and the casting problem was simple. They needed someone massive and we needed a couple really big aliens and we had one actor and we couldn't find another guy big enough.
Hogan thought of someone specific, a man he knew from the NWA circuit in the South. I remember mean Mark the NWA. He was working in Atlanta, Georgia for Barnett at the time.
They tracked him down, brought him out to Hollywood and the movie got made. And when it wrapped, the connection didn't end there. So, I had somebody hind down.
We brought him to Hollywood. And the Undertaker, Mark Callaway, was one of the uh bounty hunters in the movies. They worked together.
They got along. And when the film was done, Hogan used the most important relationship he had in professional wrestling, the one with Vince McMahon, to bring Callaway somewhere that mattered far more than any film set. We became really good friends.
Once we were done, I said, "Man, you got to come to New York. " So Hogan brought him in, walked him directly into a meeting with Vince McMahon. Mark Callaway in to meet Vince, and Vince took a long look at him and looked him up and down.
And the verdict from McMahon was immediate. He was a monster, 6'10, in really good shape. And Vince said, "I'm going to call you the Undertaker.
" Hogan's first reaction was disbelief. This gimmick made no sense in the world he'd built. I just said, "Oh my god, Vince, you know, we've been training, saying our prayers, and eating our vitamins, and you know, this will never work.
" He was convinced the dead man character, the body bags, none of it would land with the audience Hulkamania had built. The body bags and dead people. But I was wrong on that one.
He was. And Hogan knew it. He said so himself.
The Undertaker debuted at Survivor Series 1990, managed by Ted Dios, designed to establish him as a force that could not be contained. The match pitted him against a team that included Dusty Roads, the Heart Foundation, and Coco Beware. The whole structure of the match was built to make Undertaker look formidable.
It was a showcase and at the center of it was a move that would go on to define his career for three decades. The very first time Undertaker delivered a tombstone pile driver in the WWF, the man receiving it was Koko Beware. And it did not go cleanly.
So, when I debuted Survivor Series 1990, um I was I got to work against uh Dusty Roads, The Heart Foundation, and Coco Beware. The whole match was designed to make the newcomer look like a force, and the finish involved the first ever tombstone pile driver in WWF history. Obviously, the whole thing, the whole match was designed to, you know, make me look good and shine.
The very first tombstone that I give was to Coco. The move landed. The pin was counted.
I give him the tombstone. One, two, three. He's out.
But backstage, something was waiting for him. I get backstage. Koko is like he he gets me in the hallway and man, he's just giving me the riot act.
Koko was not there to congratulate him. Koko cornered him and told him exactly what he thought. Undertaker apologized genuinely and more than once.
But Koko was not satisfied, and the back and forth eventually reached a point where Undertaker, having extended every apology he had, told him plainly that if he wasn't going to accept it, they could settle it another way. Koko backed down from the confrontation and told him to just be more careful going forward. They were fine from that day on.
The story became something Undertaker carried. He genuinely believed he had handled that tombstone correctly at the time. He thought Koko had overreacted.
Then years later, he went back and watched the footage. His original assumption that Koko had overreacted didn't hold up to the footage because I was always under the impress I was like he's he's overreacted here a little bit and then I went back and watched it. What he saw stopped him cold.
He damn near killed Koko. Beware. Koko had not overreacted.
The move had been imprecise. And from that moment, Undertaker treated the tombstone as what it was. A move that carried enormous responsibility.
One that demanded absolute precision every time. one where someone's physical safety was entirely in his hands. By November 1991, one year into his WWF run, that reputation was established and Vince McMahon had decided it was time to test it against the most important opponent in the company.
He was going to face Hulk Hogan, the exact man who had brought him there for the WWF Championship. The shower conversation nobody was supposed to hear. Pay-per-view days had a rhythm in that era.
The rest of the roster had a 1:00 call time. Hulk Hogan being Hulk Hogan operated on his own schedule. He was the top of the card.
He was the money maker. He came in when he came in, which was usually somewhere around 5 in the evening, just early enough to do what he needed to do and not a minute before. The the rest of the talent usually had to show up by 1:00 on a pay-per-view TV day.
Hogan usually roll in around 5. That was the pattern. That was how it worked.
So when Undertaker arrived at Joe Lewis Arena in Detroit around noon, he expected to be among the first. I get there at Joe Lewis Arena, Detroit, Michigan. I show up there about noon, 12:30.
Hogan's already there. Hogan was already in the building. Not at 5, not at 4:00, noon.
The man who never showed up before 5 was at the arena when Undertaker arrived in the middle of the day. That detail alone tells you what was happening inside Hogan's head before they ever stepped in front of a camera. Hogan spotted him in the hall and pulled alongside him.
He asked if they could talk. Undertaker told him to let him put his bag down first. Hogan said he'd come with him.
They walked to the locker room, then further to the showers because in the wrestling of that era, the showers were where conversations happened that couldn't be overheard. Let's go back here into the shower. Like back in the day, you you go in the shower usually means you you you're going to settle something.
Whatever was about to be said, it mattered enough to be said in private. You either going to fight or, you know, something was going to happen. That's usually where it happened.
At Hogan's message delivered away from anyone who might be listening was straightforward. He was nervous about the tombstone. He had neck problems, pre-existing issues.
He needed Undertaker to know that going into the finish and he needed Undertaker's word that he would be protected. I'm really nervous about taking the tombstone. Uh, you got this bad neck.
Undertaker gave him his word without hesitation. Terry, I said, "Look, I promise you. " I said, "I'll take great care of you.
" His head would never touch. Not the mat, not the chair, not anything. He would be completely safe.
Undertaker had no reason not to give that promise. It was the same promise he implicitly gave everyone he worked with. He prided himself on it.
He had learned that lesson from Koko Bw Wear's hallway confrontation the year before, and he had never let himself forget it. The conversation ended. They went their separate ways to prepare for the show.
But Hogan was not done. Every time that I see him for the rest of the day, like, you know, going through catering or whatnot, you know, he gives me the old like, "Don't forget what we talked about. " And it wasn't just words.
He'd hold his neck and, you know, get me brother. So, yeah, it started to it started to get to me a little bit like the match unfolded the way it was designed to. Ric Flair, not yet officially a WWF talent, but appearing at ringside, slid a steel chair into the ring at the critical moment.
Paul Bearer stood at ringside with the ern. The moment was staged with a specific vision. Undertaker drives Hogan down onto the chair, knees absorbing the contact.
Hogan's head hanging, suspended and protected. And the referee counts three. A new champion, a new era.
The handoff from one generation to the next, delivered in the most dramatic packaging possible. Undertaker picked Hogan up. He wrapped his arms around him in the tombstone grip.
He had held people this way thousands of times. He lowered himself toward the canvas. Impact the way they were trained to, and in the very moment his knees made contact with the mat, before the referee had even registered the pin, he heard it.
Oh, brother, you got me. Three words came out of Hulk Hogan's mouth the instant that Tombstone landed. When I tell you, I had the man.
I've given my kids rougher bumps than I give Hogan. He was that certain he'd protected him completely. And then the finish hit.
I wrap him up. I've got him. The chair comes down.
Boom. As soon as my knees touch. Three words came back at him.
Oh, brother, you got me. I'm like, oh, I just I just crippled the golden goose. The championship moment was gone.
All he could hear were those three words. Oh, brother, you got me. That sound, that groan, those words triggered something that the referee counting three and the crowd reacting and Paul Bearer raising the urn could not come close to touching.
Everything Hogan had drilled into him all day. Every grab at the neck, every pointed reminder, every look in every corridor, all of it collapsed on top of that moment simultaneously. Undertaker had just tombstone the golden goose onto a steel chair, and the golden goose was moaning.
The crowd noise became white noise. The championship moment evaporated. What replaced it running through his mind in real time as he stood in the ring, having just won the title, was a single unbroken thought.
I'm about to go backstage and get fired. The character didn't allow for any visible reaction, so nothing on the outside showed the chaos going on inside. He walked to the back.
The question that filled every step was the same one. Where is Hogan? Someone told him Hogan was in Vince McMahon's office.
He went to the office. What he found when he got there stopped him in the doorway. Hogan was on the floor, not in a chair, not sitting with his back against the wall.
on the floor stretched out with people gathered all around him and a level of urgency in the room that made the walls feel tighter. EMTs were arriving and in 1991 Kayfabe was still law. You did not break the business in front of anyone who wasn't cleared to see behind the curtain.
So when those medical personnel entered, Undertaker stepped back into the restroom behind a partition wall that kept him out of sight but not out of earshot. The questions from the EMTs were cutting right through the wall. Shane was shaking his head, trying to communicate that it wasn't as bad as it sounded.
Shane McMahon came back to where Undertaker was pressed against that wall, visibly trying to communicate that this wasn't what it looked like. Undertaker couldn't take it in. His mind was not in a place where reassurance could land.
He could hear the EMTs on the other side of the partition. He could hear the questions being asked about sensation and feeling and responsiveness. And then through the wall, he heard Hogan's voice.
One sentence through the partition. Somebody get my wife and kids on the phone. If there had been any remaining threat of equilibrium left in Undertaker at that moment, that sentence severed it.
A man who calls for his family in a medical emergency is a man who believes something has gone seriously wrong. And Undertaker pressed behind that partition, heard it as confirmation of exactly what he feared, that he had hurt the most important person in the building, possibly ended a career, and destroyed the very moment that was supposed to be the beginning of his own rise. Undertaker was left standing in the back of the building.
Hogan was loaded onto a board, placed on a gurnie, and taken to the hospital in an ambulance. The scene played out in full. The man who had shown up at noon because he was anxious about what was going to happen to him that night.
The man who had whispered in the showers, who had rubbed his neck in every hallway, who had asked Undertaker for a promise and received it, left Joe Lewis Arena in an ambulance. And Undertaker stood in the back of the building, unable to move, unable to eat. the dinner reservations he had made for his family sitting ignored while colleagues kept approaching him with a version of the same thing.
Mark, his head never touched. He couldn't hear it. None of it was registering.
The night that was supposed to be the beginning of everything for him, a young man from Houston who had been building toward this for a decade collapsed into something he couldn't see past. I know what you're all about. The playback systems backstage at pay-per-views in 1991 were nothing like what exists now.
You couldn't walk over to a monitor and pull up a replay. You couldn't rewind to the moment you needed to see. The footage existed, but accessing it quickly was not a simple thing.
It took time to get eyes on it. It wasn't hours. It was days before he could actually see it for himself.
So, for days, not hours, but days. Undertaker lived inside what he was certain happened. He had heard Hogan.
The people around him kept saying the same thing. His head never touched. The guys at ringside saw it.
The camera angle showed it. His head was nowhere near the chair. Every one of those accounts bounced off.
Undertaker like sound off stone. He was not built to accept reassurance in a vacuum. He needed to see it himself.
And when the footage finally came, it showed him everything. Hogan's head was not close. It was not almost there.
It was nowhere near the chair. The tombstone had been executed with precision. Undertaker's body taking the weight, his knees absorbing the contact.
Hogan's head suspended safely in the air throughout. the same way he had trained himself to execute it after what happened with Koko B where a year earlier the way he had promised it would go in that shower conversation he had kept his word completely and Hogan had left in an ambulance anyway. Now there was something to say.
Now there was a conversation to have. Undertaker found Hogan and told him directly he had watched the footage. His head never touched.
What Hogan said in response to that is the turning point of the entire story. The moment that by Undertaker's own accounting explained everything he would ever need to know about who this man was. And then Hogan explained the protection itself had been the problem.
Hogan said the very care Undertaker had shown was what caused the issue. Something closed. He let it go.
He was not going to escalate it. But what that conversation gave him was something that would stay with him for the next 30 years. The explanation Hogan offered was that Undertaker had held him so tightly, so carefully, so protectively, with such deliberate care to keep his head away from the chair that the grip itself had left Hogan no room to absorb the movement.
That the very act of protecting him was what had caused the problem. Undertaker heard that explanation. He was not going to argue with Hulk Hogan.
He was not going to press the point any further. That was not a fight he was going to pick and he knew it. But in his own words, at that moment, he knew.
He said it plainly that Exchange told him everything he needed to know about who Hogan was as a person. The business moved quickly in the wake of all of this. 6 days after Survivor Series, WWE staged a pay-per-view that had never been planned and would never happen again.
This Tuesday in Texas, a one-off event that existed for one purpose, to give Hogan the title back. In the rematch, Hogan used ashes from Paul Bearer's ern, threw them into Undertaker's eyes, and rolled him up for the pin. The championship returned to Hogan six days after losing it in a hastily assembled pay-per-view on a Tuesday after a reported neck injury that had required an ambulance.
Undertaker at the time thought the unannounced Tuesday show was a punishment. Evidence that the company was already regretting giving him the title, pulling it back before it had even registered in the culture is real. And in his mind, the meaning of it was immediate.
The conclusion he was drawing was one he couldn't shake. From that point forward, he kept his radar up. He was cordial.
He was professional. He did not make it into a war. But the version of Hulk Hogan that the world had been given, the all-American icon, the man who inspired children, the selfless locker room leader, that version for Undertaker no longer existed.
Something had been replaced, and the replacement was permanent. Sometimes in life, things come back. The years after Survivor Series 1991 did not bring the two men back into each other's orbit for quite some time.
Hogan left the WWF in 1993 and moved to WCW where he reinvented himself as Hollywood Hulk Hogan, dyed his Hulkamania yellow into black and white, and created the nWo, one of the most profitable and culturally resonant angles in wrestling history. Undertaker, meanwhile, remained in WWE through the Monday Night Wars, evolving and adapting while his counterpart, Across the Street, was driving rating after rating for the competition. When Hogan finally returned to WWE in 2002, the two men ended up on a collision course again.
Hogan, running as a face after a crowd turned him organic at WrestleMania X8, won the undisputed WWE Championship from Triple H. Undertaker, now working as the American badass, the biker character, a deliberate step away from the Supernatural Dead Man, was his challenger. At Judgement Day 2002, Undertaker won the title back with a choke slam, capturing his fourth world championship.
A photograph from that night shows the two men shaking hands backstage after the match. The formality of it is unmistakable. Professional acknowledgement between men who share history and have found a way to coexist with it.
Not warmth, not friendship, recognition. There were no more major chapters between them. After that, the story had its shape, and they had both written the parts they were going to write.
What changed things, as it so often does, was time and the accumulation of everything that Hogan's name came to carry. In 2015, audio recordings from a 2007 sex tape surfaced. Those recordings, Hogan used racial slurs and made statements that were explicit and damning.
WWE cut all ties with him immediately, removing him from the Hall of Fame and scrubbing his name from official materials. He was reinstated in 2018, returned to television in subsequent years, and received positive crowd reactions at various appearances. The wound, it seemed, had healed over, at least on the surface.
Then came January 2025. WWE launched Raw on Netflix. Hogan appeared at the event in Los Angeles and whatever surface healing had taken place did not hold.
The crowd booed him. Not a mixed response, not a pocket of vocal detractors amid wider applause, but a collective sustained rejection from the Los Angeles audience. The Undertaker was asked about it on his podcast and he didn't soften anything.
And then the answer, no, he did not feel bad and the reasoning he gave for why those booze happened was not complicated. It was the same accounting that anyone paying attention to how wrestling audiences had evolved could provide. And he unpacked exactly why.
But then came 2015. The crowd in Los Angeles was the accumulated result of all of it. And there was a second layer to it.
One that went beyond the recordings. The audience had access now to decades of interviews, tell all books, podcasts, and firstperson accounts from people who had worked alongside Hogan in every era of his career. The locker room stories were out there.
the political maneuvering, the injury claims, the creative control decisions that had torched companies and careers alike. What the crowd in Los Angeles was responding to wasn't just the 2015 tape. It was a cumulative awareness of the gap between the image and the reality.
Undertaker still placed Hogan on wrestling's Mount Rushmore. He was clear and direct about that and there was no ambiguity in it. Even with everything that had happened between them, the answer didn't change.
what Hogan did for professional wrestling, the scale at which he expanded it, the children he brought into arenas who had never seen wrestling before, the mainstream crossover that turned a niche entertainment product into a genuine cultural force, none of that was erasable. Undertaker did not pretend otherwise and never has. But the separation between what Hogan did for the business and who Hogan was as a person inside it, that line was drawn clearly and Undertaker stayed on the correct side of it without flinching.
Then on July 24th, 2025, the news broke. The details emerged quickly and then the cause. Hulk Hogan died at 71 from cardiac arrest at his home in Clearwater, Florida.
Medics were dispatched. CPR was performed. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
The wrestling world absorbed it. The tributes poured in from WWE, from former opponents, from figures across decades of the industry. Undertaker released his own statement acknowledging Hogan's contributions, giving the man his due as one of the figures who built the foundation that everyone else stood on.
And so we come to the title of this video. The Undertaker reveals why he killed Hulk Hogan. Here is the full picture of what the record shows.
The Undertaker did not kill Hulk Hogan. That is the literal truth. Hogan died of cardiac arrest in 2025 and nothing in that event connects to a wrestling match or a tombstone pile driver or anything that happened at Joe Lewis Arena in Detroit in 1991.
His death was a medical event separate from everything discussed in this video. The tombstone itself was executed safely. The footage proved it.
Undertaker confirmed it and every person at ringside that night confirmed it. He had done exactly what he promised in the shower. The head never touched.
What Undertaker did do, however, was something that can reasonably be called a kind of killing, just not the kind the title suggests. He took Hulk Hogan's image, held it up against the light of a single backstage interaction, and watched it dissolve. The moment Hogan opened his mouth with an explanation for how being protected too carefully had caused a neck injury, the moment Undertaker heard that and registered exactly what it was, something died in that conversation.
Not a man, not a career, something smaller and more permanent. The idea that the person standing across from him was who he had been presented as. Love this video.
