King Kong Bundy was one of professional wrestling’s most famous giants.
Standing at 6ft 4in with a billed weight of 458lbs, Christopher Alan Pallies stomped into WWE rings in the mid-1980s and made a monstrous impact by destroying opponents with his ‘Avalanche Splash’ that demanded a ‘five-count’ from the referee.
He will be remembered as one of the most unique and devastating individuals to ever set foot in the squared circle, and wrestled perhaps the biggest match of his career at WrestleMania 2 in 1986.
Bundy went toe-to-toe with Hulk Hogan in the main event for the WWF World Heavyweight Championship inside a steel cage.
But, rather interestingly, that was just one of three matches to headline WrestleMania that year.
The event took place on April 7, 1986 — a Monday — and aired from a trio of different venues.
Matches unfolded at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, the Rosemont Horizon in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont, Illinois, and the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena in California.
Bundy and Hogan main-evented the LA portion of the event.
The Hulkster won the contest after he delivered his devastating leg drop and scaled the cage to escape, but Bundy’s mammoth girth and splashes came close to putting Hogan away.
Bundy went on to take a hiatus from WWE in the late ’80s, but returned in 1994 as a member of The Million Dollar Corporation.
In his later years, he stepped into the ring with The Undertaker at WrestleMania XI, and while he proved to be a worthy adversary, he lost the match and became another victim of The Phenom’s iconic streak.
The giant grappler left WWE shortly after, and while he wrestled for several independent promotions in the decade that followed, he embarked on a completely different career post-retirement.
Bundy tried his hand at stand-up comedy, and would perform regularly at various comedy clubs around his home state of New Jersey, and even further afield in places like Milwaukee and Delaware.
“It’s always something I’ve wanted to do. It’s like wrestling. You work at night and you’re not on stage forever,” Bundy, who performed 15-minute sets, said during an interview with ESPN in 2015.
“I tried to keep my show clean, but it was hard.
“It was like splitting an atom. So I had to get a little dirty.”
Away from wrestling and stand-up comedy, Bundy also enjoyed a brief acting career, appearing in two episodes of the sitcom Married… With Children as well as the 1988 Richard Pryor comedy Moving.
After stepping away from the ring, he revealed that he didn’t miss wrestling all that much.
“It was a job. I was never a wrestling fan,” the legendary big man said.
“The traveling, getting spit on by fans and the egos of some of the wrestlers. I had had enough.”
Bundy passed away in March 2019, at the age of 61.
Fans and wrestlers alike, including his great rival Hogan, took to social media at the time to pay tribute to a man described by WWE as ‘one of the greatest and most eye-catching big men to lace up a set of boots.’
“Overwhelmed by King Kong Bundy’s passing, only great memories. RIP big man, until we meet again,” Hogan said.
Current WWE star Kevin Owens, meanwhile, wrote that he remembers the late icon as ‘really funny’ and ‘just such a great guy’.
