How WWE Superstar Seth Rollins Would Fare Wrestling Andre the Giant

The premise was pure fantasy booking. It is WrestleMania, and standing across the ring is Andre the Giant, 7-foot-4 and 500 pounds, the eighth wonder of the world. How does Seth Rollins solve that problem? The WWE superstar did not flinch. He lit up.

"I have actually had a really great history of matches with big men," Rollins said on the show. "I love wrestling a big guy." His reasoning got at something he loves about the whole art form. "I'm one of those guys who when I watch wrestling, I don't want to see two guys who do the same thing." Styles make fights, and wrestling is unusual in offering matchups no other combat sport allows. "In the UFC or in boxing, there's weight classes. You don't get to see Seth Rollins, who's 220, 6-foot-1, against Andre the Giant."

That appetite for a size mismatch runs through his favorite work. Rollins named The Undertaker, Kane and The Big Show as the kinds of opponents he relished. But the match he lit up about happened in San Juan, Puerto Rico, against the giant Omos, and the backstory was better than the booking. Rollins was sitting at a coffee shop in Los Angeles, expecting time off, when his phone rang. "It's Vince McMahon, and he says I'd like you to work with Omos. And I said, what? Why?"

The pitch, as Rollins told it, was about star power for a Puerto Rico show headlined by Bad Bunny against Damian Priest. Rollins tried to explain the cultural weight of the moment to his boss, comparing Bad Bunny in Puerto Rico to "Michael Jackson in his prime popularity having a wrestling match in Gary, Indiana, where he grew up." He laughed that the reference did not quite land. "Vince didn't get it."

Rollins took the assignment as a dare. With only two weeks of Monday Night Raw to build a match nobody expected to be good, he and the young, green Omos went out and, in his words, "tore the house down." He remains a big believer in his opponent, a man he described as legitimately 7-foot-2 or 7-foot-3 and dangerously strong. "Does not know his own strength," Rollins said. "You could snap all my limbs in an instant."

So how does he handle Andre? With total confidence and a chainsaw metaphor. "If I'm in there with Andre the Giant, oh, it's easy, baby," Rollins said. "You just run around him, chop him down like a tree and have a party. I would relish the chance to work with Andre." His only logistical concern was the finishing sequence, the stomp Andre's frame would demand. "You might need like three feet for the stomp," Rollins said, still marveling at the scale of the man. "His head, the size of his head." A dream match, decades too late, and Rollins would take it in a heartbeat.