By the time Bash at the Beach, World Championship Wrestling’s pay-per-view tournament, rolled around in July 1996, Hulk Hogan, the wrestling persona of Terry Gene Bollea, was a known quantity.

In the public eye, the character was a Force for Good, a “Real American,” as his theme song put it. He told kids to take their vitamins. He used his bulging muscles and signature leg drop move to slay “evil” forces, like the Iron Sheik and Andre the Giant. His popularity helped propel wrestling from a niche form of entertainment to the center of mainstream culture, making Hogan a star and a profit machine far beyond the ring.

And then, giving a body slam to his carefully curated all-American image, Hogan initiated one of the most shocking plot twists in pop culture history: He became a bad guy. It was a momentous event in the trajectory of sports entertainment, and for Hogan, who died on Thursday at 71.

As Danny McDonald, the owner of the Monster Factory wrestling school in Paulsboro, N.J., described it in an interview, it was a swerve on par with Darth Vader informing Luke Skywalker of his true parentage in “The Empire Strikes Back.”

At the time, W.C.W. was the top competitor to the World Wrestling Federation, which would later become World Wrestling Entertainment. This was the era of what became known as the Monday Night Wars, when W.C.W.’s top program, “Monday Nitro,” on TNT went head-to-head against the W.W.F.’s “Monday Night Raw” on the USA Network. Both were among the top-rated programs on cable.

Hogan was W.C.W.’s top star, having defected from the W.W.F. in 1994 after an effort to ride his crossover appeal to a Hollywood acting career didn’t take off. When Hogan signed, he was given a rare power: creative control over the character. He could win or lose as he pleased.