I recall when I first watched wrestling on TV on a weekly Saturday show, a guy named Gordon Solie was the announcer, and wrestler Barry Windham was brand new to the sport.

For about aa monh or so, I actually believed wrestling was real.
By the time Hulk Hogan came along, I'd already stopped watching for a long time, and only discovered him in the early 1980's as a celebrity visible outside the world of wresttling.