Fire Fundraiser: Andre the Giant vs. Bam Bam Bigelow 6/25/88

Andre the Giant vs. Bam Bam Bigelow 6/25/88

So I had just watched the Hart/Andre match, and was going down an Andre rabbit hole, saw he wrestled Bigelow and then read further and found that this was supposedly an "infamous" match where Andre took "liberties" with Bigelow to "teach" him "a lesson" for having a "big mouth". Bigelow apparently stormed to the back, quit on the spot, and walked out. The timeline interestingly backs a possible story up, as Bigelow only worked one more match with the company and didn't return until 4+ years later. So looking at the timeline and it's somewhat plausible that something happened that made BBB skedaddle. If online results are complete he had a match against Hercules a month later, and nothing else in WWF until his return in 1992. So that is weird, as he certainly could have quit after the above linked Andre match, but then why come back a month later to work a house show match against Hercules? There's a story here, certainly.

My calls to both Bam Bigelow and Andre Giant have so far gone unreturned. I'll keep you posted.

And if you had no idea going into this that Andre "taught Bigelow a lesson" then I'd be surprised if you would even suggest any sort of lesson got taught by anybody. This seemed like a very much normal match. Andre looked like he worked much tougher against Bret Hart in a match I posted earlier, choking him constantly with his actual giant hands, and then just flattening Hart with an elbowdrop. Nothing he did to Bigelow in this match looked near as violent as that match ending elbowdrop he did to Hart.

That being said, CONTROVERSY ASIDE, I liked the match. Really, the only problem with it was Bigelow's offense, which at one important point looked...bad. I thought Andre looked good, liked the story they told, and really liked the announcers getting over Andre psychology (I believe we had Rodger Kent as the lead). Bigelow used his fun big man agility to dodge Andre, Andre threw a couple of really great punches, and Andre is a guy I don't remember having great punches. I'm closing my eyes and thinking, and I really don't remember Andre punching at all. Normally just big overhand chops. So the punches look great. And the headbutts looked great. And at one point Andre drops 5 straight bombs away butt drops on Bigelow. Bigelow gets a fun comeback nailing Andre with a huge shoulderblock which leads to Andre getting stuck in the ropes. And then for some reason Bigelow decides to throw some of the worst possible strikes to the prone Andre. It was like he couldn't decide whether he was throwing elbows, or a punches, or a shoulder blocks or...what. I don't know what he was doing. He did a lot of them, though! I would be interested in a Family Feud style "we asked 100 people..." question of "What was Bigelow doing to Andre in the ropes?" No matter what answer you gave, nobody on your team would go "Good answer, good answer!" They would all just stand there, silent, confused; not understanding what it was that they were supposed to be seeing. Meanwhile, while you were frozen in confused wonder at what Bigelow might possibly be doing, Richard Dawson just molested every female on your team.

Andre escapes from the ropes and Bam Bam's weird cuddle party, and locks on a bear hug. And this is when the announce team got good, as this is a LONG bearhug. A long one. Close to 4 minutes, and thanks to the work of both men and the announce crew I was not bored for one second of the bearhug. I also love bearhugs in wrestling, but I don't think my extreme bearhug bias was tinting my eyeglasses here. So Andre grabs Bam Bam from his knees, and the announcers do a great job of pushing it as Andre taking a knee for better leverage, which sounded like a great work around to Andre's physical limitations. Bam Bam put over the bearhug perfectly, and Kent went on to describe Andre's shifting grip strength, talking about how he kept locking the hands in slightly different places to keep shifting the pain on Bam Bam. Real smart stuff from Kent. Bam Bam breaks free but really doesn't get much of anything. He knocks Andre into the corner, runs into a boot (and really plows face first into that boot) and then Andre drops an elbow for the win.

It was a fun match, I enjoyed it, but really nothing in this looked like anybody was getting taken advantage of. It looked like a very normal match that a person would have with Andre. Read the youtube comments. No, really. It's filled with experts who "can tell" that something "is up". They can just tellllll that Andre is up to something. I assume they've never seen a Finlay or Stan Hansen match, as they would have hundreds of different theories about guys being taught a lesson. Andre's punches at the beginning were probably the meanest things in this, but they just looked like nice punches, not "stop bragging about your main event payoff" punches. I'm starting to think that sometimes....wrestlers maybe aren't completely truthful when relaying stories from the past.