• Look Back In History
• Pmessages
• Quiz
• Stump The Staff
• Top Fifty
• Close

Big Show Unable to Wrestle His Way Out of Andre the Giant's Shadow

Posted: Oct 23rd 2015 By: Ryan Dilbert - BleacherReport.com

Big Show's career-long battle to surpass Andre the Giant's legacy was never a fair one. He is an alligator gar tangling with the Loch Ness Monster.

WWE's jaw-punching giant and company mainstay is billed as 7'0'', 450 pounds. Andre was listed by WWE itself to be 7'4'', 520 pounds. But there are more than four inches and 70 pounds separating their respective immensities.

There is a different tone when one talks about Andre. It is the same one used to discuss immortals, legends, beings we don't understand.

Wrestlers are all meant to be larger than life, but Andre was something well beyond that. He became a mythic figure, his presence ballooned by hyperbole, his backstage exploits shared like tall tales.

By comparison, Big Show is just a very large wrestler.

And by a variety of measures, Big Show is a better wrestler than Andre was. The World's Largest Athlete is a better showman, a better talker and a more versatile performer. Andre was never asked to, but it's difficult to imagine him being able to pull off Christmas-themed comedy skits.

Yet Big Show's charisma and unexpectedly good comic timing have allowed him to succeed just as well as he can in moments which require just straightforward, fiery anger.

Andre the Giant had massive, history-making matches, but they weren't all that good. Big Show has more bouts that beg to be rewatched for the action rather than the story, more slobberknockers that belong on "best of" collections.

Most recently, Big Show and Roman Reigns delivered the match of the night at Extreme Rules 2014, a hard-hitting, intensity-laden clash.

Andre's matches were never as good as that, especially after his acromegaly worsened and he could barely move. They were dramas built around his almost unbelievable size. They displayed his toughness and love for clubbing folks with his shovel-sized hands.

But side by side, Big Show has the better set of in-ring greatest hits. And that doesn't matter.

Big Show remains underappreciated; Andre remains revered. Big Show will forever be compared and fall short of both what Andre was and what we have dreamed him up to be.

When Paul Wight made his debut as The Giant, fans had already seen the first and last chapter of Andre's career. They had already been awed by the massive man, seen him make a large man like Big John Studd look small and watched him tower over a titan like Hulk Hogan.

WCW made no bones about trying to make The Giant a ripoff of Andre. The powerhouse wore the same signature black singlet that Andre did. His ring name was a clear reference to the late Frenchman.

And part of his gimmick even became that he was supposed to be Andre's son.

But this supposed heir to The Eighth Wonder of the World existed in a wholly different time with a wholly different audience. When Andre the Giant first made his name, the wrestling infrastructure was built around the regional territory system. He was the traveling marquee attraction who roamed from city to city.

Tales of his size spread. Whispers traveled along the country's highways. His legend had a chance to grow.

There was little risk of overexposing an audience to him. Before the days of Hulkamania and WrestleMania, he never settled in one promotion for long.

Big Show, on the other hand, is on TV just about every week. And he has been since the mid '90s. Fans have grown numb to what makes him special in a way they never could with Andre.

The WWE faithful are snarkier than they were in Andre's heyday, too. Fans poke fun at wrestlers on Twitter. They bring mocking signs to shows. They direct "Please retire!" chants at Big Show.

The wrestling audience was more mystified by the business as a whole in Andre's day, before the secret of its scripted nature had been so widely shared. And no one mystified like Andre.

Even people who know next to nothing about wrestling know who Andre is. His name has echoed beyond the ropes, beyond the arenas.

Andre's face became the center of an street-art phenomenon. He is the subject of two graphic novels. WWE recently named a Battle Royal after him.

Big Show, or any other wrestler for that matter, hasn't inspired the same kind of lore, fascination and awe that Andre did. For that reason, comparing them is unfair. They aren't two different species; they belong to separate kingdoms.

David Shoemaker mused in The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Pro Wrestling, "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."

That is not how anyone describes Big Show.

He will end up being known as one of the best big men in the business and eventually a Hall of Famer. He will just never be able to escape being dwarfed by Andre's towering legend.