WWE WrestleMania: What every main event should have been

WrestleMania III

Actual main event: Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant

What the main event should have been: Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant

There was absolutely no way in the world that I was going to change this one. While there have certainly been better matches, there is still no bigger match in professional wrestling history than the main event of WrestleMania III that saw Andre the Giant battle Hulk Hogan for the WWE Championship.

The build for this was done so beautifully. Hulk Hogan had been the WWE Champion for three years and had beaten everyone thrown in front of him. However, there was one man that he had never beaten and one man that hadn’t been beaten in 15 years, which is actually inaccurate but nobody needed to know that at the time. That, of course, was Hogan’s best friend and mentor, Andre the Giant.

While Hogan was given a trophy for being champ for three years, Andre was given a smaller trophy for his accomplishments, which led him to turn heel and hire Bobby “The Brain” Heenan as his manager. Adding Heenan to the mix was genius, and the Piper’s Pit segment that saw Andre rip Hogan’s shirt and crucifix from his body was fantastic.

On March 29, 1987, more than 93,000 people filed into the Pontiac Silverdome to watch this epic main event, and for what WWE needed at the time, the match delivered. Andre had the upper hand for the majority of the match, but Hogan fought back and delivered the “bodyslam heard around the world” as he defeated Andre in the biggest match in WWE history. WrestleMania III is the event that really took WWE into the mainstream, and from top to bottom, including the classic that was Randy Savage vs. Ricky Steamboat, there’s not a thing I would change about that night.