In 1987, Andre returned to WWF television on a “Piper’s Pit” segment in which Hogan and Andre both received trophies for their accomplishments—Hogan for his three years as champion and Andre for his career-long undefeated streak. Andre felt that Hogan upstaged him—he did, actually—and the seeds were sown for Andre to turn on his erstwhile friend.
Andre brought on Heenan as his new manager—the ultimate signal of his turn to the dark side—and in a moment of shocking realism, he tore off Hogan’s shirt and ripped the gold crucifix from around his neck, incidentally scratching Hogan’s chest and drawing blood. Clearly, Andre was neither subject to the “demandments” of Hulkamania nor the mores of common Christianity. After all, what does one god have to offer another?
When Hogan and Andre finally climbed into the same ring at WrestleMania III, the crowd had been teased into a certifiable lather. Jesse “The Body” Ventura said from the commentary table that it was “the biggest match in the history of professional wrestling,” and there was no room to argue with him. This was Hercules vs. Zeus, with immortality on the line. When Hogan bodyslammed Andre, it wasn’t (in truth) the first time that Andre had been slammed.* And when Hogan pinned Andre for the victory, it wasn’t (in truth) the first time that Andre had been defeated. But that’s how it was billed, and that’s what the crowd believed.
Hogan stood victorious, but the spectre of Andre still loomed. Heenan “sold” the Giant’s services to the “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase, a newly emergent top-level heel. Hogan and Andre met again almost a year later, on February 5, 1988, in NBC’s Main Event (a renamed version of Saturday Night’s Main Event). Thirty-three million viewers tuned in to see Andre get his revenge. As it turned out, the Million Dollar Man’s money had bought not just Andre’s services but also the betrayal of referee Earl Hebner (who had “gotten plastic surgery” to pass for his brother Dave Hebner, the match’s referee of record), and Hogan was pinned even though he’d clearly gotten his shoulder up after a count of two.
Every young wrestling fan learned about injustice on this day. For many of us, this was perhaps the most infuriating, gut-wrenching moment in television history. We could halfway understand Andre as the bad guy, a foreign giant with foreign motives, but we couldn’t comprehend his need to cheat to win. After the match, Andre relinquished the belt to DiBiase, and we were apoplectic. He was not just a villain, not just a cheater, but now he was a sellout. He was no better than any other WWF bad guy.
The storylines that followed backed up that sentiment. His feud with Hogan over, Andre was relegated to the midcard, where he feuded with Jake “The Snake” Roberts (storyline: Andre was deathly afraid of snakes), a returning Big John Studd (storyline: it’s the same feud as before, only now Studd is good and Andre’s bad), and the Ultimate Warrior (storyline: Warrior can beat up Andre). In most of these feuds, his still-failing physical state was hidden in multipartner tag matches. Andre teamed with Haku to form the Colossal Connection, and the duo (managed by Heenan) won the tag team titles. But soon permanent retirement was beckoning. The Colossal Connection lost the belts to Demolition, and when a livid Heenan came into the ring to reprimand Andre for the loss, Andre attacked his manager.* Andre had seen the light, and he was finally once again in the good graces of the WWF audience.
Andre appeared only sporadically thereafter. His last U.S. television appearance, on 1992’s WCW Clash of the Champions XX special, was depressing for a number of reasons: Andre’s crutches, WCW’s shoddy production values, the impertinence of the whole thing. He wrestled his final match in December ’92 in Japan, but it was a sorry spectacle even for the entertainment-style legends match that it was. He needed help getting to the ring, moved around in obvious discomfort, and at one point danced with one of his opponents to the ironic delight of the crowd. Perhaps most depressing of all, he couldn’t even climb over the top rope to get into the ring anymore.
Three months later, Andre died. In terrible physical pain, he had traveled from his North Carolina ranch to France to attend his father’s funeral; one night, in the Paris hotel room that he stayed in (presumably because it fit him better than his family home would), he died in his sleep. There was no autopsy, but the cause of death was ruled a heart attack due to various complications from acromegaly.
He had had a magnificent career, and his in-ring work was by that point almost certainly over. But there was a pervading sense in his obituaries that he had lived up only to the cusp of something, that pro wrestling was about to become bigger than ever, that Andre was a sort of Moses, unable to get to the promised land. It’s certainly the case that he didn’t live to see the full explosion of the Modern Era of wrestling, but that’s just as well. He was an icon of a different era, the last in a long line of real men—William Wallace, Vlad the Impaler, Davy Crockett, etc.—who became gods in the retelling of their tales. In the Modern Era, with television and later the Internet, there is no folklore, no mythmaking outside of the sort of postmortem spit-shining that’s been done to the legacies of those like Ronald Reagan. Andre’s death, heartbreaking as it was, elevated him into the pantheon, into the world of memory and legend, which is where he always belonged anyway.
In his forty-six years, everything that Andre touched turned not into gold but hyperbole: He was the biggest athlete of all time; the WrestleMania III bout was the biggest wrestling match of all time; his 1981 Sports Illustrated profile was the biggest SI profile of all time. One would think that, at his size, the superlatives would be sort of redundant.
Ric Flair tells the story that when he started out in wrestling, some of the old-timers told him that Andre the Giant—who was passing through the territory at the time—had multiple rows of teeth, like a shark. Whenever Ric got close enough, at the right angle, he snuck looks into Andre’s mouth to see if the legend was true.
Andre the Giant was as much a man of myth as a man of reality. He was a god who couldn’t be contained by the outsize world of professional wrestling, but moreover, he was a god in the classical-historical sense: His existence was sustained by his legend, and his legend evinced his existence.
CAPTAIN LOU ALBANO
One could forgive a child of 1991 if he were to look at a photo of Captain Lou Albano and say, “That’s Super Mario,” or a teenager from 1986 if he were to say, “That’s Cyndi Lauper’s dad.” And one could forgive a late-’80s wrestling fan if he saw Albano only as a buffoonish torchbearer for the good guy wrestlers, or an older wrestling fan if he knew him only as a loudmouth heel hypeman.
The popular image of Captain Lou Albano is probably a crude amalgamation of the first three; the lattermost is certainly the most accurate if longevity—or the opinion of wrestling diehards—is the measure of a reputation. But if Albano can’t be defined without some acquiescence to all of these disparate parts—if he’s as much none of them as he is all of them—the confusion was largely of his own creation. And in that way, he kicked open the doors for wrestling’s erratic Modern Era, his dissociative personality spreading to his sport at large. In retrospect, it’s paradoxical that a performer footed in the Golden Age of wrestling would incite its unraveling.
After a lackluster go in the ’50s as a singles wrestler—sometimes known as “Leaping Lou”—Albano teamed up with Tony Altomare to form the “Sicilians,” two stereotypical Italian mob goons who were securely situated on the repugnant side of the Territorial Era spectrum. It was also of a more naive era: Not only were Albano and Altomare hated by the fans, but their shtick was also convincing enough that, during a run in the Midwest, they elicited threats from actual organized crime in Chicago. Despite the fact that they were holding the Midwest tag titles, the threat of reality won out, and afraid for their well-being, the duo hightailed it back to the Northeast without even dropping the belts.
Albano and Altomare also appeared on a 1963 episode of Jackie Gleason and His American Scene Magazine (a.k.a. The Jackie Gleason Show), as professional wrestler Sandpaper
Sam Staccato and referee Harry Hornet respectively. Gleason, in bringing the wrestling world in all its oddity to mainstream culture, chose a young Lou Albano as his shepherd. And Albano straightforwardly and eagerly affected a new character—he became someone else—for mainstream exposure. This basic equation would repeat itself throughout Albano’s career.
The Sicilians had a good run—they even briefly held the United States tag titles in Vince McMahon Sr.’s WWWF—but by 1969 they had dissolved their union. Never the most talented ring technician to begin with, Albano was nonetheless indisputably good at provoking the fans. On the advice of the iconic Bruno Sammartino, Albano made the first significant shift of his career, ending his days as a grappler and refashioning himself into a diabolical manager,* determined to dethrone Sammartino and end his years-long championship reign. He dubbed himself “Captain Lou”—a direct (albeit imprecise) reference to Albano’s prewrestling military career. His persona was more Italian thug than the broader character he took on in the ’80s; he wore silk shirts and fur coats and big watches. The manager shtick was a convenient storyline for pro wrestling’s Territorial Era: Sammartino was a WWWF mainstay, but his villainous opponents were often imported on short-term contracts to feud and, once dispatched, to disappear into a different territory. This kept the card fresh, but it limited the long-term storytelling potential. In his new role, Albano bridged the gap. He became Sammartino’s principle foil, despite the fact that he hardly set foot in the ring; Albano sent fearsome heels at Sammartino like an ornery god lobbing thunderbolts at antiquity’s heroes.
Under Albano’s tutelage, Ivan Koloff, a Russian monster,* defeated Sammartino for the heavyweight title—though he quickly dropped it to fan favorite Pedro Morales. (This is the quintessential example of the “transitional champion”; it was imperative that the good guys not be required to face off directly; in wrestling’s Golden Age, a face-to-face rivalry would have been unthinkable.) His goal had been accomplished, but Albano’s diabolical coterie didn’t fare quite as well in the following years. Never again did Albano manage a wrestler to the heavyweight title, though Greg “The Hammer” Valentine and Don Muraco each won the intercontinental belt with Albano as his mouthpiece. Albano would find his real niche managing tag teams; over the remainder of his career, he led seemingly innumerable duos to championship gold.
The tag team manager displays the manager’s role in its most distilled state. The world of tag teams is the land of the also-ran—the wrestler incapable of working out the psychology of a full-length solo match, too small to act as a believable adversary, or unable to summon the voice or charisma needed to convey the element of threat. This last type was the bread and butter for Albano and other managers of his ilk.
Even as a heel—some would say especially as a heel—Albano was a ragtag supernova of charisma: long, frazzled mane; Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned to the navel; rubber bands tying off his unkempt goatee and dangling from safety pins piercing his face. He was in some ways the same streetwise bully he had portrayed in his earlier wrestling days, challenging his rivals’ manhood and hurling decidedly un-PC epithets at the gathered crowds. He was a jerk, but above all he was a weasel, a guy willing to talk big but unwilling to compete, and in the arena of theatrical fisticuffs, that made him truly detestable. There were other managers who can be said to have worked the routine as well as Albano,* but Albano’s act was an inversion of the usual loudmouthed, string bean manager type: He looked like your tough uncle, like he could actually throw his weight around, and yet he remained safely situated behind his various protégés. His cowardice seemed inexplicable, so it was all the more infuriating.
Albano did make one notable return to the ring in this era as the payoff to a feud against “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka. Snuka had been in a rivalry with Albano disciple Ray “The Crippler” Stevens, but since feuds against Albano’s stable members were always de facto feuds against Captain Lou himself, Snuka eventually got Albano into a steel cage at Madison Square Garden. Years removed from the ring at that point, Albano nonetheless put on a satisfying show, recoiling comically from Snuka’s blows and (ostentatiously) razor-blading his forehead to bloody himself—or, in wrestling reality, to be “bloodied at Snuka’s hands.”
Albano’s career continued along this crowd-(dis)pleasing midcard path until an odd confluence of events landed him in an unlikely cultural spotlight. In 1983, Captain Lou Albano met pop star Cyndi Lauper on a flight to Puerto Rico. Perhaps seeing in Albano a kindred spirit—or maybe because her manager-cum-boyfriend Dave Wolff was a longtime wrestling fan—Lauper asked Albano to play her father in the video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” As legendary rock writer Richard Meltzer puts it in his devastating WrestleMania I treatise “The Last Wrestling Piece”: “Granted you might not’ve had an actual concrete rock-wrestling Connection—so-called—at least not the official horror the thing is currently saddled with, had not Lou Albano made a guest appearance in one of Lauper’s videos (and History proceeded from there).” It’s unarguable that the video instigated a wildly commercially propitious period for wrestling—the first “mania,” if you will, that the sport had seen in decades. Due to both his notoriety from the Lauper video and his electric, eccentric personality—to say nothing of his shaggy, bloated accessibility—Captain Lou would serve as the mascot and ambassador of pro wrestling to the world at large.
Albano’s appearance in the video was an incredibly high-profile cameo for a pro wrestling personality; wrestlers were often ghettoized by their unconventional enterprise. Moreover, though, the Lauper video offered a distillation of the burgeoning mainstream Captain Lou persona. “Girls” is often viewed as the antic counterpart to the more self-serious “Papa Don’t Preach,” and Albano stood out in stark contrast to the distractingly earnest Danny Aiello, who played the father in the Madonna video. Where Aiello was sober and cinematically gauzy, Albano’s Papa was an overacted neon epiphany, wagging his finger and throwing up his arms in dismay—all the camp that served him so well as a blowhard antagonist playing to the wrestling world’s cheap seats now made newly potent under the lights of MTV hyperactivity.
It must be said that Albano was playing only a very minor variation of the “Captain Lou” character—he was uncostumed, or rather costumed simply as Captain Lou Albano. Setting the stage for much of the rest of his Hollywood career, Albano portrayed his WWF character with minimal affectation rather than delving fully into any new character. It’s stunning—galling even—how seamlessly he adapted to his new role. For years, the pro wrestling world had protected its secrets under the veil of kayfabe, keeping “wrestling reality” from being disrupted in any public setting. But Albano’s appearance on MTV was bizarre simply for the fact that he took his persona from the (putatively nonfictional) wrestling world and transposed it wholesale into the (obviously fictional) music video enterprise. As such, it was the moment modernity at last entered the petrified WWF. And rather than evict Albano for crossing the line, the younger McMahon, who recently had taken over the company from his father, embraced the crossover appeal it provided. It would prove to be a savvy business decision, but it would also bring to wrestling what modernity brings to every precinct it touches: a culture that values histrionics over history, a culture in which everything is disposable, a culture of . . . whatever.
The Albano-Lauper relationship segued into WWF television, where Lauper made a surprise appearance on “Piper’s Pit.” Albano—still a bad guy to the WWF audience—interrupted and cruelly tried to take credit for Lauper’s celebrity.* Once suitably provoked, Lauper assaulted Albano with her purse—he sold the attack with all the gusto that he summoned for Snuka’s headbutts years earlier—and challenged him to a proxy match between female wrestlers of their choosing: a setup for the legendary Fabulous Moolah–Wendi Richter match on July 23, 1984, on MTV—an event solemnly titled “The Brawl to End It All.”
It was odd that they would choose the near-invisible realm of women’s wrestli
ng as the site of their duel, but this was the dawning of a new era, so . . . whatever. The WWF touted the twenty-eight years that Moolah had held the women’s strap, so her defeat at Richter’s hands was made epic despite the notable lack of women’s wrestling intrigue in the preceding decade.
Richter’s win earned her the title, but more importantly, it signaled the victory of the incipient Rock ’n’ Wrestling movement.* The younger McMahon, who was eager to expand the promotion nationally, thrilled at the potential for such exposure. He wedded Hulk Hogan, newly reacquired from Minnesota’s AWA, to the Rock ’n’ Wrestling phenomenon, and Albano, newly chastened by Moolah’s loss (and brimming with crossover popularity), converted and joined forces with Lauper and Hogan.
It was a logical business decision—and a positive career move for Albano—but it was another slap to wrestling’s purist history. As Meltzer snarls:
While roleplay flexibility, including the option of 180° reversals on a dime, has always been a vital part of the trip, bad-to-good transitions have become an all-too-prevalent fact of life, as witnessed by the surrender-of-self of far too many Significant Malevolents in the last couple annums: Hulk Hogan, Sgt. Slaughter, Superfly Snuka and—saddest of all—Lou Albano. (Reagan Era culture death at its most chilling.)
For all his enthusiasm, Albano was basically neutered by being a fan favorite. Before long, he was marching the other Rock ’n’ Wrestlers to the ring as little more than a glorified corner man. These were good guys who, if decades of wrestling strictures had taught us anything, didn’t need a manager. If it wasn’t culture death writ large, it was still an awkward shift. Nevertheless, this new interdisciplinary endeavor pushed wrestling—as now defined by Vince Jr.’s WWF—to new heights of cultural “legitimacy.”
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 15