Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear a singlet and know they’re Superman. Jared Hogan wore that ‘S’ on his chest, on a t-shirt, and played the role – as a wrestler, a teammate, a friend and a son. “He was tough, hardworking, resilient and completely embraced the grind that comes with the sport. Everybody on the team respected him because we knew his journey,” says Dusty McKinney, one of Hogan’s teammates at East Gaston High School. “He was living proof that hard work can overcome setbacks. To me, Boo was larger than life. Growing up, he was everything I wanted to be. He was confident, fearless, athletic, and everybody loved being around him.” Hogan wasn’t always Superman. As a toddler, his parents called him Pooh Bear, which evolved into Boo. “Because he scared me,” says his mom, Missy Hogan. “He was walking at eight months. That was a little scary. He was going to be the one to push the envelope. He wanted to be the best.” In 2002, he was the best. He won the NCHSAA State Championship wrestling title at 152 pounds and was a member of East Gaston’s first place team. For his achievements, he is a 2026 inductee into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame, as an individual and member of that state championship team. “Boo represented everything people love about wrestling,” McKinney says. “He didn’t place at state his freshman or sophomore year, then came back and became a two-time state champion.” At the championship match, Hogan faced the defending state champion, an undefeated wrestler from Northwest Cabarrus.

“So that was a little scary,” Missy says. The teams paraded into Cricket Arena, paired by weight, to the song “We Are the Champions.” “I looked at my husband and said, ‘He’s having a ball and the guy he’s going to wrestle looks very subdued. He’s worried.’ But as a mother, you’re nervous, the camera is shaking,” she says. When Hogan won, the photographer by the mat caught it. “Boo stood up and turned around where we were sitting, and he started crying, and in the back of the picture you can see Dusty McKinney standing with his arms in the air, and it was the greatest photo ever,” she says. “Then he fell backward and lay there a second, then jumped up and turned toward us and punched the air.”

The beginning Hogan was about nine when he played Pop Warner football and an AAU wrestling coach noticed him. Hogan’s father, Ronnie, who had wrestled at East Gaston, started his son in the sport on the AAU path. “They were weighing in before the match, and one of the fathers, who knew Ronnie, commented ‘Ain’t nobody walking in here with no ‘S’ on their chest!’ and then the kids, Boo and his brother Michael, walked in with those t-shirts on,” Missy says. “The continued it over at East Gaston. We gathered up a bunch of Superman shirts and gave them to the guys wrestling.” Gardner-Webb University offered Hogan a full scholarship. Coach C.D. Mock at UNC Chapel Hill also offered him. He chose Carolina. But changed his mind. College athletics was a different brand of competition. “We enroll him, and we get books, and his room and his food cards, and we’re walking around and Jared says, ‘I don’t belong here.’” The campus was big, crowded. Team members rose at 5 a.m., ran Keenan Stadium, had study halls, then went to their first morning class. “It’s not a family,” Hogan said. “It’s a business.” He came home, became an assistant coach at Stanley Middle School and enrolled in Gaston College, to get his credits before choosing another university.

The accident On November 20, 2004, Hogan was a passenger in a vehicle involved in an accident. He was hospitalized at Pitt Memorial Hospital in Greenville, in an induced coma with a traumatic brain injury. Several East Gaston players made the trip to the ICU. “I think God was giving them time to say goodbye to him and give us time to make our peace with it,” Missy says. “We would go to the chapel every day and say ‘Please, God, don’t take him. Whatever kind of shape he’s in, I’ll take care of him.’ You go when you’re supposed to go. It’s God’s plan.” Hogan passed away on Friday, November 24, 2004. He was 19. “We went to go see him,” says EG teammate Joe Pacheco. “Me and (teammate) Charles Mauldin and by the time we got there, he’d passed away 30 minutes ago. He was a driving force in my progression as a wrestler.

I was stronger, and he was quicker, and we would battle every day in practice. It gave me motivation, and every accomplishment professionally (with Bellator) and with my club (Modern Warrior Wrestling) is for him.” Pacheco and Mauldin each got a Superman tattoo, with wings and a halo, in honor of Boo. “Boo was the best kind of person,” says EG teammate Tripp Rogers. “I still remember the Superman flower arrangement. We were a bunch of teenagers who were good at wrestling, and we had confidence and we believed in ourselves. He had superheroes. He picked Superman. I had some Spiderman stuff. I have a Superman tie that I wear every match when I coach (at Hough High School).” “When he passed away, it completely changed my perspective on life. I remember thinking, if this could happen to Boo, it could happen to any of us at any time,” McKinney says. “I made a promise to myself after that. I was never going to look back on life and say I didn’t give everything I had. I was going to live life to the fullest in honor of the life that Boo didn’t get the chance to finish living. “That mindset has stayed with me ever since. It shaped how I approached wrestling, the military, leadership, raising my kids, and life in general.”

The legacy Hogan’s influence extended beyond the wrestling mat, sometimes comically. “He was just somebody people naturally gravitated toward,” McKinney says. “He had confidence, personality and a huge heart.” And a flair for honesty. “When I first got to high school, I still had this straight-up bowl haircut,” McKinney says. “I mean a real bowl cut. Like somebody literally put a bowl on my head and cut around it. Boo looked at me one day and basically said, ‘Buddy… you’ve got to fix that. That is not cool.’ The high school had a Mr. East Gaston pageant. Hogan and McKinney entered. “I had spent months putting together this whole breakdancing routine, practicing every detail of it. Boo, meanwhile, probably spent about thirty seconds thinking about what he was going to do. “He gets onstage and starts doing this little dance routine, and at first the crowd isn’t really reacting much. Most people would’ve gotten nervous or embarrassed.

Not Boo. Instead, he pivots in the middle of the performance, rips his shirt off, starts flexing and dancing, and every girl in the crowd absolutely loses their mind. I remember sitting there thinking, ‘How in the world does this guy have the talent of just taking his shirt off onstage and somehow making it work?’ That was Boo.” Pacheco’s Modern Warrior Wrestling gives an annual Jared Hogan Award at the club’s banquet. “We present it to someone with the tenacity and the want to be great,” he says. East Gaston has a Jared ‘Boo’ Hogan Memorial Scholarship. Cody Edge, who wrestled at East Gaston beginning in 2003 and runs Lost Boyz Wrestling club in Stanley, has been assistant coach since 2025. The scholarship had been dormant awhile, but it’s back. “Dusty’s mom and I did some fundraising,” Missy says. “Jared was so much fun to watch; the moves he did, it’s hard to explain. In his second state championship, he and the guy were standing up and the whistle blows, and I’m filming and all of a sudden, Jared’s behind the guy. He went through the guy’s legs, ended up behind him, the guy was like, ‘Where’d he go?’ He was fixin’ to get thrown down to the mat! Magical moves.” Missy worked in East Gaston’s office when her sons were students. Jared would frequent the office, to talk, and always leave with a kiss. “We would always part with ‘Love you, bye.’ Or ‘Bye, I love you.’ We were a close family.”