Match Spotlight: Hulk Hogan Vs. Andre The Giant, WWE WrestleMania III

It's arguably the most famous wrestling match in the history of the business, and at the 2026 WWE Hall of Fame ceremony, the main event of WrestleMania 3 between Hulk Hogan and Andre The Giant will take its rightful place in the Hall of Fame as only the second match to be the recipient of the Immortal Award that was created last year.

Hogan and Andre have already been inducted into the Hall of Fame previously, with Andre actually being the very first inductee all the way back in 1993 shortly after his death, while Hogan was inducted individually in 2005, and as a member of the New World Order in 2020. Both men are icons of the business, but if there is one match that truly defined their careers, their WWE Championship showdown at the Pontiac Silverdome on March 29, 1987 has to be it.

The match's story was born out of Andre feeling underappreciated by the company as Hogan overshadowed basically everything Andre did. Despite being friends, Andre was angry at Hogan being the focal point of WWE at the time, especially when Hogan's trophy for being WWE Champion for three years was noticeably larger than Andre's trophy for being undefeated for 15 years, and the Giant snapped. Andre would join forces with Bobby "The Brain" Heenan, rip the shirt off of Hogan's back on an episode of "Piper's Pit," and issued the challenge of all challenges for WrestleMania 3 — something Hogan didn't want to accept at the time as he wanted to preserve their friendship. However, when Hogan realized that Andre cared more about championship glory than friendship, Hogan accepted, and the match was on.

We here at Wrestling Inc. have covered a number of matches on the road to WrestleMania 42 to get us excited for the big event on April 18 and 19, and with this match now taking its place in the WWE Hall of Fame, there is no better time than now to shine a spotlight on it. Let's take a look at Hulk Hogan vs. Andre The Giant for the WWE Championship from WWE WrestleMania 3! 

Going back this far and watching certain matches from the 1980s, you have to try and put yourself in the mindset of what it would be like to watch it in 1987. You can't sit there with the eyes of someone who has watched another 39 years of wrestling, different styles, different countries, the evolution of the business. We've seen so much change since Hulk Hogan and Andre The Giant headlined WWE WrestleMania 3 so you have to take some of the sloppier moments with a grain of salt.

Having said all of that, for as historic as this match is, and as important as it is... it's fine.

Is it worthy of going into the WWE Hall of Fame this year? For the body slam and the occasion and the setting and the men involved, obviously it is. On all of those bases it probably should have been inducted before Bret Hart and Stone Cold Steve Austin's bout from WrestleMania 13 despite that being objectively the better match. But is it a good match? That's a little more debatable.

It's certainly a great performance from Hogan as the guy was literally working with a giant of a man in Andre who at this point in his life could barely move. Andre famously wore his one-shoulder singlet over his traditional trunks to hide the back brace he was wearing as the pressure of being that large all the time worn down his spine into dust by 1987. The fact that Hogan was able to get him up for the body slam is THE WrestleMania moment, you just have to ignore the fact that Hogan did actually body slam Andre a few years earlier... and he isn't the only one who did it... and most are available to watch.

The finish does come out of nowhere for me, and with the match clocking in at just over 12 minutes, it doesn't feel like a major main event style match at times. Just a couple of minutes earlier, Andre delivers a Back Body Drop to the exposed concrete that Hogan doesn't want to take because it doesn't work for him (brother), making the move look like it's happening in slow motion. The point being that Andre does have control for the vast majority of the match, so when Hogan bullrushes Andre to knock him off his feet for the first time, he goes right for the body slam, then the Leg Drop, and that's it. It's over just like that. I would have liked to have seen some more build up of the story of Hogan going for the body slam, rather than him attempting it at the start once, being worked over for 10 minutes and then just winning, but that's just my taste.

Again, it's important, it's historic, it takes you back to a simpler time. However, it's not the greatest WrestleMania main event ever, and it's not even the best match on this show.

Every generation of wrestling fans will have their distinct eras that they deem to be the best. The "Attitude Era" will obviously be in the conversation of the best era just because of how successful it was, but also for how accessible it was, making wrestling a mainstream talking point amongst normal, non-wrestling fans in the 1990s and 2000s. Some fans might even point to recently where WWE is making more money than it knows what to do with, but the financial success of the past few years will be kind to the modern era when it's been in the history books for a while.

However, the "Rock and Wrestling Connection Era," "The Hulkamania Era," "The 1980s Boom Era," whatever you want to call it, this for me is the peak of the WWE. The company has never felt so important and so grand as it was at WrestleMania 3. After all, there would be none of the eras mentioned in the first paragraph without the success of an event like this or an era like the one it exists in.

Yes, the 93,173 figure is fluffed up beyond belief to the point where shows like AEW All In London 2023 and WWE WrestleMania 32 have surpassed it from a ticket standpoint, but just look at this show. The idea of any wrestling company in 1987 filling a stadium this big must have been mindboggling. This wasn't just a wrestling show, you could have found them in territories all over the country in 1987, this was a cultural event that everyone, and I mean everyone knows about. Gorilla Monsoon's call of "the irresistible force meeting the immovable object," Andre The Giant's singlet, Randy Savage vs. Ricky Steamboat, even the little rings the wrestlers arrive on, there are so many things from this show alone that are embedded into both the minds of wrestling fans, and pop culture in general.

When you look at what WrestleMania has become in the past 40-plus years, every event chases what WWE achieved with WrestleMania 3. Hell, the company itself chases the success of this era with every decision it makes to this day it was that big. Nothing in terms of size, figuratively and literally, has ever truly matched the era that many fans still refer to as "The Golden Era," and this is the pinnacle of it. Is it a show that your friend who only started watching WWE when it moved to Netflix would enjoy? Probably not just because it's hard to watch a 1987 show through a 2026 set of eyeballs. But is it a show that every wrestling fan needs to watch? Absolutely.