We have investigated experimentally the behavior of a water soluble associating polymer system, hydrophobically modified (hydroxypropyl)guar, with very few randomly distributed hydrophobic substituents along the chains. We focus mainly on the rheological effects due to the superposition of the reversible hydrophobic interaction network on the physical entanglement network in dense macromolecular systems of that kind. Both linear and nonlinear response to transient, steady, and oscillatory shear flow prove that, in the semidilute and moderately concentrated regime, the hydrophobically associating polymer behaves like a classical dense macromolecular system whose long‐time dynamics can be described using only one long relaxation time, identified as a retarded disengagement time, much larger than the association lifetime. The temporary hydrophobically associating network can be destroyed when applying a critical shear stress τc, which is studied as a function of polymer concentration.