WWE Hall of Famer Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake had known Hulk Hogan for nearly 50 years.
When he debuted as a pro wrestler in the late 1970s, Beefcake was known as Ed Boulder and part of a tag team with Hogan, who went by Terry Boulder.
It was Hogan, real name Terry Bollea, who “recruited” Beefcake, real name Ed Leslie, to be a wrestler out of high school.
So Beefcake was thinking of his friend Hogan — who had reportedly been dealing with several health issues — in the days leading up to his death Thursday morning at age 71, and in an interview with TMZ, Beefcake expressed regret about not being able to see him one last time.
“I was going to try to go to his house a couple of days ago,” Beefcake said in an interview published Saturday. “My wife said, ‘You should just go over there.’ And I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God,’ but if I go to the house and they say, ‘No, you can’t come in,’ it would have crushed me. So I didn’t [go,] and now I wish maybe that I had tried to get in and tried to get to see him before he passed.”
A cardiac arrest call was placed from Hogan’s Clearwater, Fla. home Thursday at 9:51 a.m., police said, with medics arriving five minutes later.
He died at 11:17 a.m.
Beefcake remembered Hogan as a loyal friend.
He said Hogan flew across the country to see him after Beefcake’s face was destroyed during a parasailing accident in Florida on July 4, 1990, requiring 16 hours of surgery.
“I was in a horrible accident and not expected to live,” Beefcake recalled to TMZ. “And [Hogan] left his family in California — his wife was about to have a baby, his son Nick — to fly to Florida to be there because the doctor said they didn’t think I was going to make it. And he flew there to be there for me.
“And when they brought me out of a drug-induced coma, and he said to me, ‘Don’t even think about it. Brutus, you’re going to live.’ And I did. And he was there for me at the moment I needed the most.”
After getting Beefcake started in the business, Hogan inducted his friend into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2019, a day he says he’ll treasure forever.
“I owe him everything,” Beefcake said of Hogan.
