Terry Gene Bollea aka Hulk Hogan was able to navigate the psychotic world of professional wrestling for decades, but three seasons of reality TV destroyed his life more thoroughly than a jack knife power bomb through a stack of tables.

Since Hogan Knows Best first aired in 2005, Hogan’s marriage has been in the crapper. His wife wants half and is dating a 19 year-old from their kids’ high school. His son Nick went to jail for eight months for a 2007 reckless driving incident that left his friend, John Graziano, in need of round-the-clock nursing care for the remainder of his life. While Nick was in the Pinellas County stir, guards caught Hulkster and son plotting to spin the tragedy into yet another reality show. Hogan Knows Best got cancelled proving that even VH1’s Celebreality has its limits but the show’s IMDB and Wikipedia entries seem to leave open the possibility that it can return at any time.

After his show was put on hiatus with the disintegration of his family, Hogan has tried to cling to the reality TV gravy train. Brooke Knows Best, a show focusing on his daughter striking out her own, has made it through two seasons, but Hogan is just back story there. His stab at re-branding, the depressing Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Championship Wrestling, was mercifully ended by the Country Music Television cable network after only eight episodes in 2008. The re-boot of American Gladiators, which employed Hogan as an announcer, didn’t make it out of 2008. While Hogan is most likely proud that Brooke has been able to let the cameras into her life without him, the Hulkster is one of the most limelight starved individuals ever to be ready for his close-up. With dwindling off-network options, Hogan has retreated to the last place that would have him with his appearance tonight on Spike TV’s NWA Total Nonstop Action (TNA, get it?).

Taped in a TV studio in Orlando, Florida, TNA’s flagship show Impact! is a far cry from the comparative glitz of Vince McMahon’s WWE, which made Hogan an 80s icon. While Impact! maintains the gritty feel of traditional big time wrestling that McMahon’s slick shows lack, and TNA does gives a lot of young talent a chance that might not make it on any of the WWE’s three weekly programs, the promotion’s top tier is beginning to look like a last stop for broken-down pieces of meat before they fade into Randy “The Ram” Robinson oblivion, or worse.

Recently, TNA broadcasts have made extensive use of highlight footage from an August pay-per-view match where the grey-haired Kevin Nash (age 50) and former WWE champ Mick Foley (age 44) beat each other into crimson messes with steel chairs, baseball bats covered with barbed wire and hidden razor blades. The most painful aspect of watching these scenes isn’t the massive bloodletting but it’s the obvious pain that both men have from wrestling on bad knees. Sadder still is the sight of Foley going to such extremes after his initial retirement from the ring in 2000. His three wrestling memoirs have made the New York Times bestseller list and he has written three children’s books and two novels. With publishing and commentary duties, Foley shouldn’t be risking his health and sanity by wrestling hardcore matches, but TNA somehow lured him back into their five-sided ring.

Like Hogan, fellow WWE castoff and recent TNA champ Kurt Angle also has marital problems. In September 2008, Angle’s wife left him and shacked up with Jeff Jarrett, TNA’s co-founder and a wrestler best known for smashing a guitar over peoples’ heads. That can’t make for a supportive working environment. In August 2009, Angle was arrested for violation of a restraining order and possession of performance enhancing drugs in a suburban Pittsburgh, Penn. strip mall. Angle parted ways with the WWE in May 2006 due to concerns over his then growing painkiller addiction. TNA scooped him up just four months later.

TNA president Dixie Carter and Hulk Hogan in the sleep-inducing finale of this week’s installment of TNA Impact!

Hogan’s first TNA appearance itself was beyond lame. He didn’t appear in the ring, didn’t call anyone out, didn’t stare down Angle, Sting, Samoa Joe or any of the promotion’s other better known grapplers. Instead we were treated to footage of a boring press conference held in what appeared to be a concourse of Madison Square Garden. Hogan, clad in a tight, pink t-shirt and a matching pink bandana (maybe to make him look less orange) gushed about how great Spike TV was as the president of the network stood beside him. He also referred to himself as a “game changer”.

Dixie Carter, the businesswoman who serves as president of TNA not the Emmy-nominated actress from Designing Women and Desperate Housewives, referred to Hogan as “the man, the brand” in a yawn of a speech that could have been delivered at any sales convention. She was also sure to let us know that she had joined Twitter. I shit you not. Like, that’s so early-to-mid 2009. At 9:30pm PST on Thursday, the Twitter feed itself contains only two posts, the first of which reads: “Celebrated the Hogan signing at staff meeting this morning with champagne and donuts.” In a nutshell, the fundraising symposium I had to go to last week contained more gripping mat action than Hogan’s TNA debut.

Vince McMahon would have never allowed things to go down this way. If Hogan had signed to the WWE, he would have been on Monday Night RAW staring down “The Viper” Randy Orton before being double-teamed from behind by Legacy. Hogan may have also been put through a table or hit with a folding chair right before the show ended, compelling us to tune in next week. At this rate, the Hulkster is far from making TNA “the number one sports entertainment company in the business,” as he promised from the podium. Instead, he will be another budget-draining mistake for a promotion with limited resources.

Yes, Hulkamania is back folks, but does it still run wild?

Manny Pacquiao, the “People’s Champ” of the Phillipines, talks about the worst disaster to hit his country since World War II in the HBO Boxing documentary series “24/7.”

Manny Pacquiao is in the city of Baguio in the Phillipines to train for his November 14 fight against WBO welterweight champ Miguel Cotto. The HBO Sports documentary series 24/7 is there to show us the fighter’s training camp but recent typhoons have left half of the city underwater. In between footage of the boxer hitting the focus bag with lightening quickness are scenes of the city’s poor wading chest deep through floodwaters. Mountains of mud have crashed down upon homes leaving hundreds dead. Actor Liev Schreiber’s somber narration sounds more like something from an installment of PBS’ Frontline than your standard sports doc. Pacquiao “would have to work as his country fell apart around him,” and the disaster takes “the most from those who have the least,” Shreiber informs us. This is heady stuff from a show that’s mainly there to compel us to shell out over 50 bucks to watch two men pummel each other through 12 three-minute rounds.

But HBO Boxing’s 24/7 has always walked the fine line between documentary and infomercial since it first started by building up the De La Hoya/Mayweather bout in 2007. Since then, 24/7 has become an expensive proposition for me. Out of the six completed seasons of the show, three of them have ended with me selecting the fight through my satellite television remote control. That’s a 50% success rate (at least as far as I’m concerned), leaving me out over $150 just to watch a few hours of television. Part of this is because I’ve always been a sucker for training reels ever since I first saw Rocky when I was six years old and 24/7 is almost nothing but training reels.

Even for those seasons of the show where I’ve been able to resist 24/7’s siren’s call, I’ve hemmed and hawed about ordering the fight until the very last minute before deciding not to. Last season, we saw Mexican legend Juan Manuel Marquez prepare for his September 19th fight with Floyd “Money” Mayweather by tossing volcanic rocks around an ancient mountain and drinking his own urine. In the Floyd camp, we saw his reunion with his dad. What HBO didn’t spend too much time on was that Marquez had to come up two weight divisions at the age of 36 to meet Mayweather. There was almost no mention of how this would affect the fight. Such analysis may have dissuaded people from purchasing that PPV. During the bout, Marquez only landed 12% of his punches while Mayweather achieved a 59% connect rate. I’m glad I passed on that fight.

The show’s seventh and current season, 24/7: Pacquiao-Cotto is a somewhat lopsided affair. Pacquiao and trainer Freddie Roach are struggling to train with “destruction all around” while Miguel Cotto is shown eating delicious-looking skewered meats and getting a new tattoo. The attempt by HBO to generate drama from Cotto comes not from the fighter’s present predicament but from his recent past. He quit during the 11th round of a July 2008 bout with Antonio Margarito after his face was beaten into swollen and bloody mush. “That thing that passed through my mind was stop the fight for my benefit, for the benefit of my kids,” Cotto confides.

Boxer Miguel Cotto cries “tears of blood” following his controversial loss to Antonio Margarito.

Like something out of an old film noir with Robert Ryan, Margarito was later caught using illegal plaster in his hand wraps before a January 24, 2009 fight with “Sugar” Shane Mosely. “You had to see how deep his wounds were,” Cotto’s father, Miguel Sr., tells the camera to the tones of dramatic piano music, “It’s impossible to explain. I couldn’t explain how some with gloves could do that.” Although Cotto, Jr. gets somewhat of a reprieve from the news that Margarito possibly had to resort to tampering with his hand wraps to dish out such a beating, questions as to how much Cotto can come back from such a beating remain, at least according to HBO.

HBO has three more episodes of 24/7: Pacquiao-Cotto to convince me to plunk down that $54.99 for that November 14th championship match and there’s little doubt that they will pull out all the stops to get this done. In the meantime they are showing us the wealthy of Baguio (Pacquiao sadly included in this) working out in air-conditioned gyms while the poor of the city languish in Katrina-like refugee camps. With this unflinching look at economic class amidst a natural disaster, HBO just might make a documentary along the way.

The first episode of 24/7: Pacquiao-Cotto can be watched on HBO’s website by clicking here. New episodes will air on Saturday nights until the November 14, 2009 pay-per-view match.

Al Sharpton tries to educate the masses inside and outside the ring on this week’s “Monday Night RAW.”

Capping off a month of rising racial tensions spurred by Glenn Beck and shouting Southern congressmen, this week’s installment of The Ultimate Fighter offers us a bout pitting a muscular black street fighter from Miami against a flabby redneck brawler who goes by the handle of “Big Country.” If that wasn’t enough, earlier in the week, the WWE’s Monday Night RAW was hosted by the Reverend Al Sharpton. While a former president decries racism and the current one denies it, one wonders if the post-racial era has any chance of regaining its pre-healthcare debate momentum after the shellacking it’s taking at the fists of our basic-cable combat sports, both real and staged. Only one thing is certain: the symbolism will be thick enough to cut with a tomahawk chop to the chest.

Al Sharpton is the latest celebrity to host Monday Night RAW since the WWE started this experiment with a June appearance by Donald Trump. While guests ranging from Seth Green to Jeremy Piven to Bob Barker have mostly used the show to hype new books or movies, Sharpton was there to promote his national education tour with Newt Gingrich and Education Secretary Arn Duncan (now that’s a tag team). This made for one of the strangest television hybrids in the process as the USA Network brawl-for-all strayed into the realm of community access programming, only with more body slams.

Sharpton was booed heavily by the audience in Albany, NY as he made his way into the ring to James Brown’s “Living in America” during the show’s opening segment. The surly crowd also booed the mention of the words “education” and “civil rights.” Wow, civil rights and education; what horrible concepts! Remember when wrestling fans used to boo Nazis and Soviets? Full time sourpuss and tag team belt holder Chris Jericho did everything in his power to turn the mob’s ire from Sharpton to him by saying that the people in the arena were “gelatinous tapeworms” who “don’t deserve to be educated.” Sharpton finally earned some cheers by “empowering the people” and making a match between the Caucasian heel team of Jericho and The Big Show and their better-liked rivals MVP (a Barry Bonds/Kobe Bryant takeoff) and the World’s Strongest Man, Mark Henry, both of whom are African American.

Pro wrestling, a phenomenon closely associated with unwashed hillbillies in the public imagination, may seem like an odd venue for Sharpton’s outreach efforts however the WWE in particular is responsible for one of the first post-racial stars with Dwayne Johnson AKA The Rock. Like Barack Obama, the Rock is mixed-race with ties to Hawaii. Early attempts by Vince McMahon’s brain trust at casting then Rocky Maivia as an Islander babyface fizzled quickly. Later, The Rock was the head of a cabal of grappling black militants called The Nation of Domination, but little mention was made of his ethnic heritage by the time he made it to the top-tier of the WWE’s roster. He didn’t have to dance in between clothes lines like his black father, Rocky “Soul Man” Johnson, nor did he wrestle barefoot and wear puka shells like his Hawaiian uncle Peter Maivia. Like Tiger Woods, that other pillar of post-racial America, The Rock was able to become the number one attraction in an athletic field that previously had a mostly white fan base.

Al Sharpton’s classroom of freaks.

After Jericho and The Big Show defeat MVP and Mark Henry (through nefarious means of course), the next time we see Sharpton he is on a soundstage made to look like a schoolroom. We know it’s a schoolroom because there’s an apple on the desk. Any good that the WWE may have done by creating one of America’s first post-racial stars is almost undone as Shaprton’s classroom is overrun by a cavalcade of ethnic stereotypes. There’s an angry Chicano, an Italian with a clueless dago shtick that was collecting dust when Chico Marx was still using it and a grunting dwarf in a leprechaun suit. Sharpton soon waves them away and proclaims that tonight “it’s all about “education.” Yes, I enjoyed this skit, and yes, I feel deeply guilty about this.

As with almost all of RAW’s celebrity guest hosts save for the incomparable Bob Barker, Sharpton participates in some of the worst television imaginable. Luckily, WWE champ John Cena is around to summon a steel cage to descend from the rafters as if by magic, thus restoring our bad TV equilibrium. Still, that large WWE audience was too tempting for Sharpton to pass up and the announcers did mention that you could find Sharpton’s National Action Network on Twitter and Facebook several times when they weren’t plugging this Sunday’s Hell in a Cell pay per view. Sharpton may be all about education, but Vince McMahon is still about the pay-per-view.

Kimbo Slice, the prophet!

If Don King were promoting Wednesday night’s Ultimate Fighter match between Kimbo Slice and Roy “Big Country” Nelson, it would have been billed as a battle between a black ghetto fighter and a white cracker. While the subtext of this match-up amidst the current political backdrop may be undeniable to certain intellectuals writing their blogs, race wasn’t even mentioned during the third installment of this season’s TUF. In fact, much more was made of Nelson’s big stomach than anything else. “He’s got the biggest belly I’ve ever seen,” Coach Quinton “Rampage” Jackson quipped before adding, “I wonder how he aims when he takes a pee.” UFC promoter Dana White, the man who sets the tone, also weighed in on Nelson’s weight by saying that the fighter “looks like he just left every buffet in Vegas.”

Instead of picking the sores of regional or ethnic divides, the producers of TUF let us get to know the fighters as likable guys with human foibles. In the beginning of the episode, Kimbo Slice talked about how he fought anyone and everyone because he felt they were “the enemy” until he had a revelation. “The true you is the enemy,” he said, “the inner me: enemy!” The more time the camera spends with Kimbo, the more you want to get to know him. “A bird that flies high eventually has to come down to get water,” he tells a fellow fighter, dispensing a kind of zen warrior wisdom that would sound cornball if it wasn’t delivered by such an imposing man. In my previous review of the season premiere of TUF, I wrote that this season’s older roster would have deeper back stories, and this episode is paying those dividends.

Nelson, bearded and scruffy, is kind of the John Kruk of mixed martial arts. As a former champion of the now defunct International Fight League, he is also the most experienced fighter on TUF this season. “He has tons of experience,” Coach Rashad Evans observes, “He won’t be intimidated by Kimbo.”

The weigh-in is brought to us by the “superior sludge protection of Castrol GTX.” Kimbo and his massive shoulders weigh an even 230 pounds and Nelson tips the scales at 264 pounds. “You don’t look like you weigh 264,” Kimbo tells Nelson but then Nelson takes off his shirt and reveals his spare tire. There will be two five minute rounds. If the fight ends in a tie, one more “sudden victory” round will be ordered.

The Battle of the Bulge: Slice and Nelson square off during the first round of their Ultimate Fighter bout.

Both fighters are cautious during the first minute of the match. Nelson frustrates Kimbo early on with his jab but Kimbo rushes in and starts throwing the bombs that have sent so many other hard men to the pavement. Nelson ties Slice up and both men’s flesh grinds on the Octagon’s chain link fencing as they vie for position. Nelson finally takes his man down. Kimbo’s head lands at a painful angle on the cage wall. Slice almost bridges out but Nelson maintains the mounted position and starts throwing short punches to the top of Kimbo’s dome. The round ends. “Big Country” has probably won it.

The second round begins. Nelson looks a little tired. Kimbo throws punches with the force of a jackhammer. Nelson looks dazed but takes Slice down again. Both men land hard on the mat. Kimbo, a heavy puncher with little experience in ground fighting is as effective in this position as a fighter jet is on a runway. Nelson lands more short punches to Kimbo’s bald dome. The ref orders Kimbo to fight back or else he’s calling the fight. Kimbo is tied up. He does nothing. The ref stops the bout in the second round. “Big Country” Nelson, the show’s most experience contestant has taken out its best known star.

“None of us could get that big belly the hell off of us,” the ever quotable “Rampage” Jackson muses, “It’s like having the moon sitting on you. How do you get the moon off of you?”

Roy “Big Country” Nelson’s win over Kimbo Slice wasn’t a win of white over black, but a victory for the fat over the fit.