André the Giant's Early Matches in Burlington Set the Stage for His Iconic Wrestling Career 

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• Main Event Collectibles
• Grand Prix Wrestling poster of Giant Jean Ferre from the early 1970s

On October 28, 1971, more than 2,100 people filled Memorial Auditorium to watch the stars of Montréal's Grand Prix Wrestling perform for the first time in Burlington. Another 1,000 people were turned away at the door.

Vermont wrestling fans had become familiar with the upstart wrestling promotion through Canadian television, either on the English-language CFCF 12 or French-language CBFT 2. Among Grand Prix's stable of performers, the biggest draw of the night was also the largest grappler that anyone had ever seen — on TV or elsewhere.

André Roussimoff was a 25-year-old wrestler from a farming village in northern France. He stood seven feet, four inches tall, weighed well over 400 pounds and wrestled for Grand Prix under the name Giant Jean Ferre. Not long after he wowed Queen City crowds, he became known to millions by a different name: André the Giant.

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• Courtesy Of Wikicommons
• Giant Jean Ferre in action, 1971

Dubbed the "Eighth Wonder of the World," André the Giant was a pop culture phenomenon as a wrestler during the 1970s and '80s, squashing all challengers while drawing huge crowds on every continent but Antarctica. At the time, he was the most profitable gate attraction in the history of the sport. And his journey from regional curiosity to global icon can be traced to his matches in Vermont.

In his Burlington debut, Giant Jean Ferre pummeled 245-pound Cowboy Kirk (misspelled as "Kuirk" on the promotional poster) into submission in just five minutes. Many who attended the event said Roussimoff looked even bigger than they expected. To show off his bulk, the wrestler would take a ring off one of his kielbasa-size fingers and pass a silver dollar through the hole. He was strikingly agile for such a large man, not only tossing around his foes but also running, jumping and drop-kicking with ease.

Montpelier native Dave Moody, who is now one of the country's best-known motorsports commentators, attended that Memorial Auditorium show after watching Grand Prix on Canadian television.

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• Grand Prix Wrestling stars Édouard Carpentier, Giant Jean Ferre and Yvon Robert Jr.

"When [Roussimoff] walked past me, he placed his hand on top of my head like he was palming a basketball," said Moody, who was 10 years old at the time. "I clearly recall that his one hand nearly covered both of my ears."

Moody and the rest of the Memorial crowd were far from the last people to be astounded by Roussimoff. As a wrestler, André the Giant is perhaps most renowned for his 1987 match with Hulk Hogan at the World Wrestling Federation's WrestleMania III. Held at the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan, the spectacle drew more than 93,000 fans, making it one of the largest crowds ever for an indoor sporting event in North America. By the time of Roussimoff's death in 1993, his stardom extended well beyond the ring.

Graphic artist Shepard Fairey made Roussimoff an icon of street art with his "André the Giant Has a Posse" and "OBEY" images, which became fixtures of 21st-century youth culture. Roussimoff also made numerous appearances in television and movies, perhaps most notably The Princess Bride in 1987. HBO's 2018 film Andre the Giant is one of several documentaries about the man.

Essential to any rendering of Roussimoff's rise is the striking response he received in Burlington. While his first two American shows were in Minneapolis and Milwaukee in summer 1971, Roussimoff demonstrated his ability to draw consistent live crowds in the United States with his string of sold-out performances at Memorial Auditorium and other Vermont venues over the next few years.

Before pay-per-view TV, wrestling was primarily a live-event business. Television shows served as advertisements for the in-person experience. It took a compelling performer such as Roussimoff to draw fans for return visits. His Burlington appearances, in particular, foreshadowed the box office appeal that André the Giant would have the world over.

According to detailed records compiled by Canadian wrestling historian Vance Nevada, Roussimoff wrestled in Vermont for Grand Prix on half a dozen occasions between 1971 and 1973 — four times in Burlington and once each in St. Johnsbury and Rutland.

"I heard about [Roussimoff] from my friend Frank Valois, an old-time Canadian wrestler," Grand Prix promoter Paul "Butcher" Vachon recalled. Vachon, now 85 years old and retired in southern Québec, was the first North American promoter to hire Roussimoff, who had previously been a star in France and Japan.

Vachon and his brother Maurice "Mad Dog" Vachon, along with a couple of other well-known Québec wrestlers, created Grand Prix to tap into Montréal's long-vibrant wrestling scene. Almost immediately, the promotion became a bankable live draw across Québec and a fixture on local television.

Eventually, Grand Prix was shown coast-to-coast on Canadian television — a rarity in the regionalized, territorial wrestling business of the era. Wrestling fans in border states such as Vermont soon caught on, too — first on Canadian TV and later in syndication on Saturday afternoons on Burlington's WCAX-TV.

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• Main Event Collectibles
• Giant Jean Ferre souvenir pin

The Vachon brothers, who were big names in the business as both promoters and performers, used their connections to build up an impressive cadre of stars. But Giant Jean Ferre was their most popular attraction and offered a temporary leg up in Québec's highly competitive marketplace.

His allure in Vermont also helped Grand Prix build a strong beachhead south of the border in the early 1970s. A retired Burlington police officer named Ira Blow served as the local promoter of Grand Prix shows, booking 18 total events in the Green Mountain State between October 1971 and July 1974, not long before the Montréal promotion went out of business.

Twenty-first century spectators raised on the highly choreographed and cartoonish productions of World Wrestling Entertainment (the successor to WWF) would be surprised by the style of Giant Jean Ferre and his opposition in Grand Prix. Undergirding professional wrestling at the time was a strong sense that fans were watching a simulated fight that blurred the lines between fiction and reality. Footage of Grand Prix matches on YouTube shows that wrestlers were not just making contact; they were striking and grappling with force.

At the same time, Grand Prix relied on the showmanship of its performers to either win over a crowd or draw its ire.

"My brother and I had been in the business a long time, and we'd been around the world. We knew what the people wanted to see," Paul Vachon said. "We knew what got them excited and what kept them coming back."

Roussimoff learned to wrestle in Europe, where competitive matches were the norm. While in Grand Prix, he had to adapt his style to the conventions of North American wrestling.

"When he worked in France, André was taking bumps [falling on his back], getting head-scissored and wrestling on the mat," said Pat LaPrade, the foremost historian of Québec wrestling. "When [Roussimoff] came to Montréal, Paul Vachon explained to him that he needed to work as a giant."

As Giant Jean Ferre, Roussimoff's style started to evolve under the Vachons' tutelage. Typically, he squashed the competition, proving impervious to his opponents' blows while dominating them with his superhuman size and strength. Fans in Burlington responded to Roussimoff's overwhelming display of force, making him the latest in a long line of professional wrestlers to win over Queen City audiences.

As far back as the 1930s, professional wrestling had been a popular and rowdy attraction at Memorial Auditorium. A Burlington-based promoter named Jack Carter brought in talent from around the country, but the sport drew the ire of city leaders.

In 1944, the city banned youths under the age of 16 from attending matches at Memorial Auditorium due to frequent fisticuffs among spectators — and sometimes between fans and wrestlers. Two years later, mayor John Burns pushed successfully for a five-year ban on wrestling and boxing shows at the auditorium.

After the ban ended in the early 1950s, Blow brought wrestling back to Memorial Auditorium and promoted events all around the state. He, too, ended up on the wrong side of city officials.

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• Poster from a match in Burlington

In 1975, Burlington police officers and firefighters expressed displeasure with being assigned to Blow's wrestling matches at Memorial Auditorium, which were characterized by the same rowdiness that led to the earlier ban. In response, the city increased the number of police and firefighters assigned to the venue from six to 14 and required wrestling promoters to hire additional private security.

Nonetheless, the 1970s were certainly Blow's heyday as a promoter. Grand Prix provided him with the opportunity to book stars who appeared regularly on local television.

The 1974 demise of Grand Prix, due to differences among the organization's promoters, cut Blow off from his best-drawing talent. Still, Blow kept up the fight, booking shows until his death in 1987 — just as a new national wrestling boom, spurred in large part by André the Giant's feud with Hulk Hogan, brought big-name wrestling events back to Burlington. Memorial Auditorium hosted the WWF on several occasions in the late 1980s and '90s. The WWE appeared there a few times in the 2000s.

Roussimoff left Grand Prix in 1973 to work for Vince McMahon Sr.'s World Wide Wrestling Federation — the forerunner to Vince McMahon Jr.'s WWF — and began wrestling as André the Giant. In addition to his Giant Jean Ferre pseudonym, Roussimoff left behind much of the athleticism that fans witnessed in Burlington.

André the Giant's less energetic style of ring work almost certainly extended his career. While still in his twenties, Roussimoff developed serious back problems, started to gain significant weight and faced a series of additional health problems related to his gigantism. He died in 1993 of congestive heart failure at age 46.

There is no record of André the Giant working a match in Burlington after he left Grand Prix. However, his dazzling appearances at Memorial Auditorium in the early 1970s were highlights in the history of the storied venue. And the thorough embrace of Roussimoff by Vermont's wrestling fans constitutes a significant early chapter in the history of one of the sport's greatest icons.