Nah, it's a good excuse to me.

I grew up with relatively older family. Uncles, cousins, parents etc were all MUUUUCH older than me. I constantly heard "nigger" used for random shit. "Hey nigga" etc. And sometimes even the "I hate that nigger XYZ he fucked up my car" or something. The use of the word was common and it wasn't anything rude, half the time it was usually used towards someone white. My cousin, who was 2 years younger than me, got in trouble IN FIRST GRADE because the teacher asked the class what words end in "-er". I'm not kidding when I say he said, "Teacher! I know what word! Nigger!"

And before you go calling my family racists, they're not. None of them have any dislike for black people, hell we know many black people.

But the use of the word fro them is different than it is now. To them, it's a slur used against people who are poor, mean or just general scumbags with no association to race or color of your skin. But that's how they grew up. They grew up in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, all the stereotypical "I'M TOUGH CAUSE IM FROM NEW YORK" places. It's just a different part of culture, that now may seem dated and wrong, but to them it was normal.

Hogan is like 60 or something now, right? He's about the age of all my family now.

It's like college-age kids now saying "That's fucking gay dude", I grew up with that shit and I said it all the time. "The fuck man, that's gay. What are you, gay?". It's just different culture and stuff now.

It's not an excuse for saying it in public, but you need to remember that shit was his private life. I really doubt you'd hear Hogan go out and say "FUCK NIGGERS" and shit then, just in private it's how he talked. I didn't go around screaming "THAT'S FUCKING GAY" when I was 8 and it was okay to say it, I just said it in response to stuff my friends or family would say.