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The Great Antonio dies
By
GREG OLIVER - Producer, SLAM! Wrestling
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  The Great Antonio in 1976. -- courtesy Paul Leduc |
MONTREAL -- The Great Antonio, a well-known strongman who once impressed
Montrealers by pulling city buses, has died. But he was much more than
just a strongman: Pro wrestler, actor, raving madman, celebrity,
extravagant self-promoter.
Antonio Barichievich, 77, died Sunday night after suffering a heart
attack in a grocery store. But his was an unique story, to say the
least, and no doubt the facts lie somewhere to the edge of the
previously-published stories of his life.
Named 'Best Montreal weirdo' by the Montreal Mirror entertainment
newspaper in 2002, Barichievich was born in Yugoslavia in 1925, of
Siberian descent. He worked at age six with a pick and shovel, and by
twelve, had graduated to pulling trees out of the ground with a cable
around his neck. At age twenty, in 1946, he came to Canada and learned
of the history of the strongman in Canada, names like Louis Cyr, Victor
Dellamarre, and the Baillargeon brothers.
Paul
Vachon wrote about The Great Antonio in his self-published book,
When Wrestling Was Real. "He was truly a character, in a business
that by nature is full of unusual characters. Antonio started his career
as a scrap yard worker, a scavenger, and a resident. Here was a guy,
6-foot-4, 450 lbs., that worked not only in a scrap yard but lived there
in a shack that he made for himself out of old planks, cardboard, cement
blocks, and the hood of a junked car. The owners of the scrap yard let
him stay there in exchange for the work he did moving scrap iron
around," Vachon wrote. "Nobody ever really knew his origins, but he
spoke in a mixture of French, Italian, English and Russian and I think a
little Hungarian was thrown in the mix."
Barichievich got stronger moving the scrap metal around, and graduated
to moving cars and buses around the lot. He showed up at a Montreal bus
terminal, moved a bus in front of many people and a legend was born.
Barichievich was smart enough to capitalize on his feats of strength,
getting much media attention, and printing up postcards to sell with
photos of his accomplishments. Some of the more notable feats of
strength included pulling a train loaded with lead for 65 feet, and
pulling up to four buses at once, loaded with people. (The secret,
according to Vachon, was to use the momentum of the first bus to move
the other buses, leaving enough slack between the vehicles.)
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The Great Antonio in 1976. -- courtesy Paul Leduc |
Sid Stevens, director of Sun Youth, a Montreal community-aid group,
recalled one feat performed by the giant, who stood 6' 4" and weighed
about 500 lbs.
"I remember he pulled a bus on Saint-Laurent Boulevard -- the 55 -- and
it was full of passengers," Stevens told Montreal radio station CJAD.
"The bus driver was pleading with him not to because he was kind of late
on his schedule. But he didn't care. He just grabbed the bus with a rope
and pulled it. And when the police officers came, they just stood and
watched him and didn't even try to interfere. Imagine getting this type
of individual into a police car."
Jonathan Goldstein of Saturday Night magazine did a short story
on The Great Antonio in March 2000. "Antonio says that he's just
naturally strong, that it doesn't matter whether he trains or not. So
where does strength come from? What makes one man stronger than another?
It isn't only in the size or the muscles. It's something else. Perhaps
it is will," Goldstein wrote and then quoted Antonio: "Me an expert on
physical strength. To understand is to do it, but no one can do it. Six
billion in the world. No energy No strength. Nobody understand, you
understand?"
There is an equally fascinating section on The Great Antonio in Bill
Richardson's 1997 book, Scorned & Beloved: Dead of Winter Meetings
with Canadian Eccentrics. He recalled meeting with Antonio at a
Montreal donut shop, where the giant of a man began pouring out oodles
of clippings proclaiming his greatness.
"The headlines just keep on spilling, one after the other, all of them
clamouring to be heard after their confinement in the green garbage bag.
All the clippings tell more or less the same story. International
travel. Meetings with celebrities. Movie roles in films that required
convincing autochtones, such as Quest for Fire and The
Abominable Snowman," Richardson writes. "As Antonio shows off his
impressive collection of cullings, one by one by one, he annotates the
stories in his associative, rambling, stream-of-consciousness style. He
gets very loud. A Strong Man show 'n' tell unfolds right there, in the
middle of Montreal in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of
Dunkin' Donuts."
After his feats of strength made him a name in Quebec and to a lesser
degree around the world, Barichievich tried to break into wrestling by
bugging local promoter Eddie
Quinn, and showing up at the Montreal Forum challenging wrestlers.
Continually rebuffed in his efforts to become a grappler, Vachon says
that Antonio just started promoting shows himself, usually with him
going over in a battle royal main event.
Eventually, with the wrestling magazines clamouring over the potent
self-promoter, a few grappling gurus gave him a shot, including Stu Hart in
Calgary. Percival Al Friend was a young wrestler, and wrote about his
memories of The Great Antonio on his web site. "He had a huge beard and long hair
parted down the middle that hung to his shoulders. I had seen strongman
stunts that he did in Montreal and Quebec City, like pulling a bus
loaded with people down a main street using a chain and harness made
from heavy leather that he hooked himself into. I even saw them hook him
up to a diesel locomotive, and he pulled it down a set of tracks for
about a city block," Friend wrote. "I never had the opportunity to
wrestle with this guy, but then again, after seeing all the stuff he
did, I am not too sure that I would have cared to match wrestling holds
with the guy. Antonio also loved garlic. He would eat clove after clove
of the stuff, as he said it gave him lots of internal strength, and it
kept his heart good. He never had too many dates with even the worst
looking gals that followed the guys around the arenas. The truth was
that his body reeked from the garlic."
According to Vachon, Antonio was simply "unmanageable" for wrestling
promoters, who were used to getting their way. "He was a Prima Donna
(sic), and when he saw the big crowds he figured it was all because of
him." 'The Butcher' said that on one occasion, Antonio was in Japan and
was proving difficult to work with. He refused to lose to Japan's top
star, Rikidozan, which resulted in thugs beating Antonio up and shipping
him home the next day.
For the last number of years, Barichievich seemed comfortable being a
well-known weirdo around Montreal, someone that everyone had a story
about seeing somewhere, usually on the subway, or popping up
unexpectedly in front of a city bus, wanting to pull it. Claiming to be
a descendant of extraterrestrials, he peddled pencils and his postcards
everywhere. His hair grew even longer than during his wrestling days,
with dreadlocks that descended to the floor and the bottoms wrapped in
electrical tape, which made it possible for him to golf with his hair.
On a handful of occasions, he would attend local wrestling shows,
usually to visit old colleagues like Paul Leduc
or Deepak Singh.
"I walk towards him and he gives me a big friendly wave," wrote
Goldstein in Saturday Night. "The Great Antonio is cute, like
those big furry monsters from the Muppets, but The Great Antonio is also
intimidating, even at seventy-five. Standing before him, I feel the way
I did when I was four and an adult was getting ready to pick me up and
squeeze me."
In his enormous bag of clippings, Antonio would pull out photos of
himself with luminaries like Michael Jackson, Sophia Loren, Liza
Minelli, Clint Eastwood or a letter from President Bill Clinton's office.
In Scorned & Beloved, Richardson perhaps puts it best of the
last, loony years of The Great Antonio's life. "Perhaps it's not so
surprising that he chooses to dwell in the marble halls of his halcyon
days. He trails a magnificent past, that's for sure, and God knows he
worked hard for whatever rewards he has received, as any of the
bus-pulling photos can attest. He worked hard with what he had, with
strength, nerve, and more than a little gall."
-- with files from Canoe wire services
Greg Oliver founded SLAM! Wrestling with John Powell way back in 1996,
and has been writing about pro wrestling since 1985. He is the author of
the recently published book The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The
Canadians from ECW Press. Order it in Canada from Chapters-Indigo
or in the U.S. from Amazon.com.
Greg can be emailed at
goliver845@gmail.com.
