How "BIG" a Star was Andre the Giant?

Publish date: 2024-05-02

There isn't a great deal that I can add that hasn't already been said, but I will state that Andre is probably the main reason I got hooked on wrestling as a youngster. Being an old timer myself, I can recall watching All Star wrestling from the then named WWWF and staying glued to the set every Saturday afternoon in the hopes that I would get the chance to see...yep, Andre the Giant. It was probably around 1975-1976 or so that I bugged the crap out of my dad to take me to a house show to see the big guys do their thing live. Finally, I got the surprise of my life when my dad turned up with two tickets to the original Boston Garden to see a live show. Talk about a thrill; it was magnified about a hundred thousand times when I was informed that one of the featured bouts was Andre the Giant vs Ernie "The Big Cat" Ladd.
A couple of things stick in my memory from that card. Number one, this must have cost my Dad a few bucks even back then, because not only was Andre on the card, but if I remember correctly, Bruno Sammartino defended his title that night too(I don't remember against who, it was nearly 40 years ago, and I was obsessed with the Andre match). The second thing that comes to mind was, as a 10 year old boy, even sitting in the upper balcony at the old Garden in one of their obstructed view seats(anyone who has ever been in the old Boston Garden knows exactly what I'm talking about), I was absolutely overwhelmed by the size of Andre'. It's no exaggeration for me to say that I was blown away by the visual of Garden security and Boston policemen coming up to about Andre's shoulder as they escorted him to the ring. The last thing that I can remember is the pop Andre' got when he walked the midway to the ring. I'd be lying if I told you that I remember all the details of the match itself, but I think that Ernie ended up getting disqualified , or counted out.
Again, it's important to note that in 1976, this was before wrestling was national, before there was an internet to disseminate information, and before kayfabe was broken in the wrestling business. I was blissfully unaware that Andre and Ernie had probably been performing the same match all over the northeast 6 nights a week for the past month and a half. Suffice it to say that after this experience, I was forever hooked on the wacky, surreal world of professional wrestling. Andre the Giant was a big part of it for me, maybe the biggest part. In the 1970's, in the northeast, there were two mammoth drawing cards, Bruno Sammartino, and Andre' the Giant. Andre' may well have been the most succsessfull draw in the entire business up until the arrival of Hulkamania in the mid 80's. I would continue to mark out for the big guy well into my late teens, and he's the reason I drove my shitbox chevy vega to the Providence Civic center in 1985 to watch wrestlemania 1, just so I could see him beat up John Studd.
Andre was definitely one of the first professional wrestlers to cross over into mainstream media, having appeared on the hugely popular "Six Million Dollar Man" television show as Bigfoot, appearances on late night talk shows and other venues. There's no doubt that his natural charisma and ebullience won over millions of fans as a face when he worked in North America, but he was able to portray disdain and menace when he worked in Japan as a heel.
In closing, Andre' was one of the most famous wrestling attractions in the history of the business.

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