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The locker room beef between Hulk Hogan and Kevin Nash apparently got pretty nasty behind the scenes.
On Tuesday, ESPN sportswriter Marc Raimondi released his book about the NWO, “Say Hello to the Bad Guys: How Professional Wrestling’s New World Order Changed America,” which is currently available on Amazon.
In the book, Raimondi details the friction between Hogan and his NWO teammates.
Hogan and Nash had similar ideologies about wrestling, but they were coming from very different places in terms of experience.Hogan was the aging icon clinging to his top spot with every muscle in his giant, bronzed arms.He felt he had been wronged before and was going to do everything in his power to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Nash’s backstage power in the WWF had come from his group of friends. He subscribed more to the rising- tides-lift-all-boats mentality, as long as his and his friends’ boat rose the highest.
At its very foundation, the beef between the two of them could be boiled down to one thing. Nash and Hall felt like they were the real now—the younger, charismatic guys who gave thegroup its cool factor, the ones who spoke directly (and irreverently) to the coveted teen and twentysomething male demographic. Hogan, though, felt like the nWo would not have worked had it not been for his long-established star power and the shock of his heel turn. Hall and Nash might have been hip and captivating talents, but Hogan was the biggest financial draw in the history of the business.
Former WCW boss Eric Bischoff told Raimondi that Hogan and Nash got into a heated argument that was pretty serious considering one of them may have had access to a gun.
And the worst possible thing nearly happened on August 5,1998, in Casper, Wyoming. It was
the final WCW TV taping—an episode of Thunder—before the Road Wild pay-per-view. After months of tension and public and private shots taken at each other, Hogan and Nash, with Hall also involved, had a “f-cking heated argument,” according to Bischoff.
“One of them, I knew, had a gun in their bag,” Bischoff said. “And I was the referee.”
Meltzer reported at the time that Nash felt like Hogan and Bischoff were doing everything they could to make the Wolfpac group look bad, like fodder for Hogan’s Hollywood sect of the nWo.
There were even questions about whether or not Nash would show up for Road Wild, which he did, or even quit the company. Nash was an afterthought on the show, despite he and the Wolfpac being wildly popular with the crowd.
“They actually came pretty close to blows,” Scott Steiner said of Nash and Hall’s standoff with Hogan. Bischoff said the confrontation between the three core members of the nWo was ultimately just “posturing.”
“Nobody was going to stab or shoot anybody,” Bischoff said. “Nobody was really going to get in a fight, but man, it felt like it for a minute.”
Despite reportedly having issues with Hogan in the past, Nash has spoken recently about his cuttent relationship with The Hulkster.
“Hulk is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met in this business. I saw something the other day in one of these comments. The guy said, ‘You really hate Hogan, don’t you?’ I’m thinking to myself, that’s probably one of the 10 closest people that I have in the industry. Terry and I could not talk for eight months, and we can get on the phone and talk, and we’ll talk for three hours, and we’ll catch up on each other’s lives.”
Excerpts from SAY HELLO TO THE BAD GUYS by Marc Raimondi Copyright © 2025 by Marc Raimondi.
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, NY.