Hulk Hogan vs. André the Giant (Jan 1987 – Aug 1988)

Background

By January 1987, Hulk Hogan had held the WWF Championship for three straight years, a reign that carried the company through national expansion, the Rock 'n' Wrestling era, and the first two WrestleManias.[1] By 1987 exactly one opponent was left that the audience could believe might beat him: his friend.

André the Giant was billed as "the Eighth Wonder of the World" and as undefeated for fifteen years.[1] The claim was promotional license. André had taken count-out and disqualification losses over the years, and he and Hogan had wrestled a series of matches in 1980, when Hogan was a heel, including at Shea Stadium, where Hogan had slammed him before.[1][5]

But in the kayfabe of 1987, none of that had happened. On WWF television André had never been pinned and never been slammed, and the company leaned on both claims in the build.[2]

The other essential ingredient was the friendship. Hogan and André were presented as friends and occasional tag partners, and to a real extent they were, coexisting because André, the special attraction, never needed Hogan's title.[1][5] Bobby Heenan had feuded with both men and managed a string of failed Hogan challengers. If André had a grievance, Heenan was the man to turn it into a title challenge.[1]

Almost nobody watching knew that André was breaking down. He was in his early forties, his acromegaly untreated, and his back had deteriorated to the point where standing was painful; he had spent much of 1986 away from wrestling filming The Princess Bride.[8][9] The biggest match in company history was built around a man who, by every later account, could barely carry his own body to the ring.[5][9]

Build-up

The turn was built almost entirely in one talk-show set: Piper's Pit. In January 1987, WWF president Jack Tunney presented Hogan with a trophy celebrating three years as champion. André came out to congratulate him, remarked that three years was "a long time," and walked out while Hogan was mid-speech.[1][2]

The following week André got his own trophy, noticeably smaller, for his billed fifteen years undefeated. Hogan came out to return the favor, talked his way back around to himself, and André walked off again.[1] No punches, no run-ins: just a giant quietly deciding he'd been disrespected, in front of millions of people who could all see the trophies didn't match.

Jesse Ventura stoked it from the commentary desk, hinting he knew something about André, and promised to produce him on the Pit if Piper could produce Hogan.[2] On the segment that aired February 7, 1987, Hogan stood on the set expecting a reconciliation, and André walked out with Bobby Heenan at his side.[1]

Heenan accused Hogan of befriending André only to keep him from ever challenging for the title. André issued the challenge for WrestleMania III. When Hogan sputtered, Piper had to snap "you tell HIM no!" at him, and André ripped Hogan's T-shirt and the crucifix from his neck, the chain cutting Hogan's chest.[1][2]

There was no title switch to protect and no screwjob to explain. A friendship broke over jealousy, and a man billed as unbeatable challenged a champion billed as unstoppable. Gorilla Monsoon called it the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, and the WWF spent February and March letting one question sell itself: could Hogan even get André up for a slam?[2] The two barely touched between the challenge and the match: a weigh-in, a pull-apart, André flattening Hogan's tag partners on house shows.[1]

WrestleMania III sold out the Pontiac Silverdome, and close to a million more fans watched on closed-circuit screens in 160 arenas across North America, with pay-per-view revenue estimated at $10.3 million, a record at the time.[2]

The Matches

WrestleMania III took place on March 29, 1987, at the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. The WWF announced the attendance as 93,173, a number disputed ever since and covered below in Legacy. Hogan defended the WWF Championship against André in the main event, with André accompanied by Heenan and wheeled to the ring on a motorized cart.[2]

The match ran 12:01, and its structure was dictated by what André could physically do.[2][15] Hogan went for the slam immediately and collapsed under André's weight, with André falling on top of him for a near fall so close that Hogan spent years insisting his shoulder was up. The one thing everyone came to see had been tried in the opening seconds, and it had nearly cost Hogan the title.[15]

André spent the body of the match grinding Hogan down: clubbing shots, standing on him, and a long bearhug that let both men rest while the crowd willed Hogan back to life.[15] Hogan escaped, staggered André with punches, and finally, off an André charge, hooked him and delivered the slam. The leg drop followed, Joey Marella counted three, and Jesse Ventura, the heel commentator, gave the moment its scale: the giant had been slammed and pinned in the middle of the ring.[2]

The Silverdome crowd generated a sustained roar for the slam that WWE has replayed for four decades. Underneath it, Ricky Steamboat vs. Randy Savage for the Intercontinental Championship gave the card its classic wrestling match.[2]

The gate was $1.6 million, a company record, and between the live crowd, closed-circuit theaters, and pay-per-view, WrestleMania III became the financial high-water mark of the 1980s boom.[2]

Aftermath

The program ran another full year. At Survivor Series in November 1987, Hogan and André captained opposing teams and brawled briefly before interference got Hogan counted out; André was his team's sole survivor, keeping the question of a singles rematch alive.[1] On the January 2, 1988 Saturday Night's Main Event, after Hogan retained against King Kong Bundy, André attacked him from behind with a chokehold so prolonged that a crowd of babyfaces failed to break it until Jim Duggan cracked André with his 2x4.[1]

By then the rematch had a date and a twist. Ted DiBiase, the Million Dollar Man, had failed to buy the title from Hogan and instead purchased André's contract from Heenan to win it for him.[11] At the Royal Rumble contract signing on January 24, 1988, André slammed Hogan's face into the table and tipped it over on him.[1]

The rematch aired February 5, 1988, on NBC's The Main Event and drew a 15.2 rating and 33 million viewers, still the largest audience ever to watch a wrestling match on American television.[10][12] André won the title with Hogan's shoulder visibly off the mat. The referee counting was not Dave Hebner but a paid-off identical twin, Earl Hebner, in one of the era's most famous reveals.[10][11]

André immediately "sold" the championship to DiBiase. President Jack Tunney ruled the transaction invalid and vacated the title, setting up the 14-man tournament at WrestleMania IV, where Hogan and André eliminated each other in a double disqualification and Randy Savage won the vacant championship with Hogan's help.[12][13] That finish is the direct bridge into the Mega Powers story that ran through the next year of WWF television.

The singles rivalry wound down on the house show circuit, headlined by a steel cage victory for Hogan at WrestleFest in Milwaukee on July 31, 1988. The tag blow-off came at the first SummerSlam, where the Mega Powers beat André and DiBiase's Mega Bucks.[1] Hogan and André shared a ring once more in March 1990, Hogan teaming with the Big Boss Man against André's Colossal Connection.[1]

Behind the Scenes

The match almost didn't exist because André almost couldn't. His back had deteriorated so badly that he underwent spinal surgery in late 1986, and multiple accounts describe Vince McMahon personally visiting him during The Princess Bride production to persuade him to return for one more match: the biggest one.[8][9] André wrestled WrestleMania III in a back brace hidden under his singlet, and by most accounts was in constant pain simply standing.[8][9]

There is a widely repeated story that André was too large for conventional anesthesia and that his legendary drinking figured into the surgical planning. It makes every retrospective, though the details vary enough teller to teller that it's best treated as legend built on a real surgery.[16]

The finish is where the accounts genuinely conflict, and the conflict is the story. In Hogan's telling, repeated in interviews for decades, Vince McMahon didn't confirm Hogan was winning until the night before the show, and nobody could say for certain that André had agreed. Hogan went through the curtain not fully sure the giant would let himself be slammed and pinned.[6][14]

Other accounts hold that André had agreed to put Hogan over when McMahon asked him well beforehand and simply never bothered to reassure Hogan, and that mid-match, when the time came, André told him plainly: "Slam me, boss."[5][14] The two versions aren't quite incompatible. André agreeing with Vince while letting Hogan sweat is entirely in character for a man famous for ribbing, but the versions assign the drama very differently, and Hogan's has grown in the retelling the way most Hogan stories do.[5][8]

That growth is its own backstage subplot. Over the decades Hogan's accounts have inflated André's weight (billed around 520 pounds that night, often "700 pounds" in Hogan's retellings), the state of André's health, and how soon after the match André died; he lived nearly six more years.[5][8] Fact-checking Hogan's WrestleMania III memories has become a minor genre of wrestling journalism in itself.[3][5]

The business logic behind the turn was straightforward: Hogan had beaten everyone, the Silverdome had been booked, and only one attraction in the company was bigger than the champion.[6] André understood exactly what he was giving. Passing the torch to Hogan in the most public way possible was, in the assessment of nearly everyone who has written about it since, the most valuable single favor one wrestler ever did another.[5][7]

Legacy

Start with the number: 93,173. It made the Guinness Book, WWE has repeated it for nearly forty years, and it is very probably not true. Zane Bresloff, the local promoter who handled the event's box office, later told Dave Meltzer the real figure was around 78,000 and faxed him ticket accounting to back it up. Later investigations, including a seat-by-seat count of the Silverdome, landed near the same figure.[3][4]

Defenders of the announced number point out the Pope drew a recorded 93,682 in the same building six months later, so the capacity at least was physically possible.[3] Either way, it was the largest crowd in company history to that point.[3][4]

The match became the template for torch-passing matches since, and the slam became the most replayed few seconds in WWE's library.[7] Retrospectives consistently rank the Hogan vs. André program, and WrestleMania III generally, as the peak of the 1980s boom.[2][7]

For André it was effectively the end. His health declined visibly through the 1988 program, with the NBC rematch built to require even less of him than the Silverdome match had, and he wrestled sparingly into the early 1990s.[1][9] He died in his sleep in Paris on January 27, 1993, at 46, and became the first inductee into the WWF Hall of Fame that year.[9] The 2018 HBO documentary André the Giant brought the WrestleMania III story, including the attendance dispute and André's physical suffering, to its widest audience since the match itself.[3]

Hogan main-evented four of the next six WrestleManias. The slam still opens WWE highlight packages: the biggest man anyone had ever seen, up in the air, in front of the biggest crowd wrestling ever claimed to draw.[7]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. André the Giant–Hulk Hogan rivalry — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_the_Giant%E2%80%93Hulk_Hogan_rivalry
2. WrestleMania III — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_III
3. How Many People Were Actually At WrestleMania III? A Deadspin Investigation — Deadspin. https://deadspin.com/how-many-people-were-actually-at-wrestlemania-iii-a-de-1824178481/
4. Counting seats of the Silverdome to estimate WrestleMania III's true attendance — Wrestlenomics. https://wrestlenomics.com/2023/08/26/estimating-wrestlemania-iiis-true-attendance-seat-by-seat/
5. Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant: Secret History Behind Their Feud — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/hulk-hogan-andre-the-giant-rivalry/
6. Larger than life: An oral history of WrestleMania III — The Detroit News. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/entertainment/2017/03/29/wrestlemania-iii-oral-history-30-years/99729286/
7. WrestleMania Moments: Hulk Hogan slams Andre the Giant at WrestleMania III — ESPN. https://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/19013391/wwe-wrestlemania-moments-hulk-hogan-slams-andre-giant-wrestlemania-iii
8. 9 True Facts About André The Giant & Hulk Hogan's Epic WrestleMania III Showdown — Uproxx. https://uproxx.com/prowrestling/andre-the-giant-hulk-hogan-wrestlemania-3-facts/
9. The Eighth Wonder's Last Stand: André the Giant's Journey to WrestleMania III — WrestleBrand. https://wrestlebrand.com/the-eighth-wonders-last-stand-andre-the-giants-journey-to-wrestlemania-iii/
10. On this date in WWF history: 33 million viewers watch Hulk Hogan lose the title — Cageside Seats. https://www.cagesideseats.com/2013/2/5/3953718/wwf-hulk-hogan-andre-giant-main-event-hebner-ted-dibiase-Feb-1988
11. Reliving Andre The Giant's Controversial WWE Championship Win over Hulk Hogan — Bleacher Report. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2613881-reliving-andre-the-giants-controversial-wwe-championship-win-over-hulk-hogan
12. WWF The Main Event — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_The_Main_Event
13. WrestleMania IV — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_IV
14. Andre the Giant Didn't Let Hulk Hogan Know Whether He'd Go Along with Scripted WrestleMania Plan — People (via Yahoo Sports). https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/andre-giant-didnt-let-hulk-152854882.html
15. Match Spotlight: Hulk Hogan vs. Andre The Giant, WWE WrestleMania III — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/2143921/match-spotlight-hulk-hogan-andre-the-giant-wwe-wrestlemania-3/
16. The Myth Behind Andre The Giant's Anesthesia Story — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1111185/the-myth-behind-andre-the-giants-anesthesia-story/

Further Listening

• André the Giant (2018) — HBO documentary directed by Jason Hehir
• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — WrestleMania III episode
• WWE Rivals: Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant — A&E, Season 2 Episode 1