WCW legend Booker T is speaking out — and defending Hulk Hogan — despite the Hulkster’s well-documented use of racial slurs and his own admission to being “a racist to a point.”
Hogan, who passed away recently, has had his legacy stained by a leaked 2007 recording in which he repeatedly used the N-word while discussing his daughter’s African-American boyfriend. The tape didn’t surface until 2015, but when it did, the backlash was swift, with many fans and wrestlers calling for Hogan to be “canceled” permanently.
But not Booker T.
Now 60 and still active in the wrestling world as a commentator and independent promotion owner, Booker T is choosing forgiveness — not erasure. And he’s got a reason. In a candid reflection, he points to a moment in 1997 when he was the one who accidentally dropped the N-word on live television… while referring to Hogan. The moment was unscripted, shocking, and instantly infamous.
So what did Hogan do? Nothing. No calls to management. No revenge. No public embarrassment.
“A racist would have tried to get me fired,” Booker T said during a recent broadcast. “A racist would have made me pay for that. He didn’t. He supported me.”
Booker T says he even asked Hogan years later why he didn’t retaliate. The answer? Hogan told him, “Brother, I’ve heard that word many times… I wouldn’t go try to get another wrestler fired.”
And when Hogan later joked with Randy Savage, reportedly saying, “Well, if I’m an N-word, then I’m a good N-word,” Booker T saw it as a sign of grace rather than racism. The whole issue, Booker claims, never even came up again until just recently — nearly three decades later.
“From that moment, in the 90s, we never spoke that until just last week on my radio show,’ Booker T added. ‘That’s how irrelevant it really was.”
But here’s the thing: Booker T wasn’t always this lenient. Back in 2015, when Hogan’s racial rant hit the internet, Booker publicly condemned it, saying on Twitter that the N-word “should be eradicated from the English language.”
Now, however, Booker T appears to separate the man he knew backstage from the man heard on tape — and he’s choosing to remember the one who showed him decency when it mattered most.
Hogan’s history can’t be rewritten. But for Booker T, at least, it can be forgiven.
