What if Hulk Hogan had refused to join the nWo?

3. Hulk Hogan joins WWE’s Attitude Era

Hulk Hogan may well have defected during the Monday Night War.

A number of sources have claimed that Hulk Hogan was on the cusp of returning to WWE in the middle of the Monday Night War before striking a new deal with WCW. Source vary in terms of how serious negotiations were, or whether Hogan was only leveraging WWE for a bigger contract from Turner, but it’s fascinating to imagine what might have been had Hogan made the leap. The scenario becomes much more realistic if Hogan hadn’t been on board for the hot nWo stable.

Would Hogan have carried on with Hollywood-type heel persona? Surely, the old school Hulkster wouldn’t have worked so well alongside Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock, though conceivably he could have worked something like Bo Dallas’s NXT gimmick, in which he claimed to be a hero while behaving more and more heelishly. Hogan may have had some interesting matchups in that era, like squaring off against Austin, Mankind, or Kane.