Hulk Hogan, the former professional wrestler whose tenure as a walking Pavlovian beef-jerky ad came to an end last month after he was caught spewing racial epithets on tape, has apologized for his less-than-brotherly behavior. Hogan appeared on Good Morning America this morning in his first interview since being fired from the WWE in July; in the interview he apologized for his behavior, saying that he was suicidal around the time the sex tape (or, in this particular case, post-sex tape) was filmed. The depression, he says, had something to do with his daughter and her boyfriend. We won’t speculate on what.
“I never should have said what I said,” he said. “It was wrong.” He’s not a racist, he adds, he was just raised around them: “People need to realize that you inherit things from your environment,” he said. “And where I grew up was south Tampa, and it was a really rough neighborhood, very low income. And all my friends, we greeted each other saying that word. The word was just thrown around like it was nothing.”