09/27/2026
André the Giant sitting at the bar inside Trump Plaza during WrestleMania V weekend in Atlantic City.
Kevin McIntyre took the photograph, and the story he remembers around it might be even better than the picture.
The hotel was full of wrestling fans. Wrestlers were arriving with their bags and making their way through the lobby. Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart had just checked in. Everywhere Kevin looked, there was somebody from the wrestling world mixed in with everybody who had come to Atlantic City for WrestleMania.
And then there was André.
Sitting at the bar.
Kevin wasn’t a photographer working the event. He didn’t have a credential hanging around his neck or access to some private area of the hotel. He was a wrestling fan who brought his camera with him and happened to recognize that what he was looking at was worth remembering.
“He sat there for hours,” Kevin told me.
I love that detail.
Because if you were a wrestling fan in 1989, André the Giant barely seemed like a real person. You knew him from television as this enormous attraction who had been presented for years as something unlike anybody else in professional wrestling. Two years earlier, 93,000-plus fans had watched him challenge Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania III.
Yet here he was during another WrestleMania weekend, not behind a curtain or separated from everybody.
He was at the hotel bar.
Fans could walk through the lobby and see André the Giant sitting there having a drink.
And look at the photograph. Nobody has cleared the room for him. There isn’t a photographer positioning him or somebody making sure the background looks right. There are drinks and napkins on the bar, bags sitting around, people with their backs to the camera and André right in the middle of it all.
That’s wrestling history, too.
The next day, André would be inside the ring at WrestleMania V with Jake “The Snake” Roberts, with Big John Studd serving as the special referee. The show would be remembered most for Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage finally colliding after the breakup of the Mega Powers.
Those are the pictures everybody knows.
This is the kind we don’t.
A fan carrying a camera through a crowded Atlantic City hotel happened upon André the Giant sitting at the bar and pressed the shutter.
Thirty-seven years later, Kevin can still tell us what was happening outside the edges of that photograph.
André sat there for hours.
That’s why I never get tired of the photographs our readers send us. Sometimes the most interesting wrestling history isn’t another picture from ringside.
Sometimes it’s sitting at the bar.
📸 Kevin McIntyre
If you’ve got old wrestling photographs, videos or stories tucked away somewhere, send them to us. That’s a big part of what this page is here for.
— Steve Stasiak, Book Pro Wrestlers
