Little Big Man: Warner Wolf and Andre the Giant

One of the biggest names in sport -- from one of the biggest men ever to play a sport -- owes a lot to the little guy. (Scroll down to see the whole interview).

"Andre the Giant" was born Andre Roussimoff in 1946 in Grenoble, France.  Most Americans know of him from his WWF days in the 80s (and his role in The Princess Bride) -- though at that point he was 40 years old, overweight, and suffering from alcoholism and other health problems that would lead to his death in 1993.  But take a time machine back to the 1960s and 70s, and you could see his showmanship on full display to audiences in Europe and Japan.  Check out these amazing photos from when he was truly at his physical peak.

So why was the little man (Warner Wolf) so important to the big man (Andre the Giant)?  In the 1970s, wrestling was not nationally organized, but a loose confederation of regional circuits.  If you lived in, say, Atlanta, you only got a chance to see wrestlers from the Georgia Championship Wrestling (check out this map of regional wrestling organizations that were all independent at the time).  The comedian Andy Kauffman's foray into professional wrestling only became public after the fact, because his matches were only broadcast locally in Memphis, Tennessee.

If you wanted to follow a phenomenon like Andre the Giant, who was outside of your geographical area, you were out of luck... unless you could watch Warner Wolf's sports highlights.  Unlike many of his prominent sportscaster colleagues, Warner regularly included wrestling in his TV highlights -- in Washington in the 1970s, New York in the 1980s, and nationally on the CBS Morning News.  Listen to this recollection of wrestling podcaster Don Tony, who attributes much of wrestling's early nationwide success to Warner Wolf.

The below interview is a perfect example.  On March 31, 1975, the Capital Centre was hosting a wrestling card featuring Andre the Giant -- who was so popular at the time, that his parent organization regularly "loaned him out" to all the regional circuits to promote his popularity.  Warner Wolf, then the sports anchor for WTOP-TV in Washington (now WUSA), obviously considered it a newsworthy local event, having shown Andre's highlights on numerous broadcasts.  Andre's showmanship was on full display, making jokes about having "too many girls," and picking up Warner with one hand at the end of the interview.  (For the record, Andre and Bruno Sammartino defeated the tag-team champion Valiant Brothers by disqualification).

By 1986, when Warner rebroadcast the clip on the CBS Morning News, wrestling had consolidated its regional circuits into a singular organization called the WWF, with Andre as one of its superstars.  A year later, at Wrestlemania III in Detroit, Andre fought Hulk Hogan in front of the largest audience ever at an indoor sporting event.  A year after that, he was immortalized as Fezzik, the friendly giant, in The Princess Bride.  And a year after that, Andre's image became a pop art sensation that still sells today.  And the WWF (now the WWE) has since become a nationwide media conglomerate, worth more than half a billion dollars.

The local-news interviews, smiling and waving at the end, seem quaint by comparison.

Yet without the little guy, the big guy wouldn't be nearly as big.

Let's go to the videotape!

Originally filmed March 31, 1975
Rebroadcast February 21, 1986