ESPN's Bill Simmons Recommends WWE DVDs; Yearns for Andre the Giant Tribute

Anyone who reads Bill Simmons (aka "The Sports Guy"), ESPN's online columnist, knows he's a major wrestling fan.

We're not sure how he feels about ECW, but Simmons included WWE DVDs on his list of summer recommendations in a recent column:

Somehow I landed on the WWE's DVD mailing list a few months ago. Every 10 days or so, a Fed Ex envelope shows up with another DVD, followed by the Sports Gal grumbling, "Oh, no, it's from the WWE. I'm throwing it out," then me acting cool and pretending there's no way I would ever watch it ... then, as soon as she's not looking, I race off to watch it.

Most of them are serviceable, some of them are terrible (like the unwatchable one about "Degeneration X"), but four recent ones are worth renting if you cared about wrestling at any point over the past 25 years:

1. Hitman Hart (hysterically bitter and full of himself) and
2. Dusty Rhodes (whose body will make you happy that the Steroids Era happened)
3. The "Greatest Managers" DVD (I'm ashamed to admit how much I enjoyed this one)
4. The three-disc history of the WWE belt (my personal favorite because it contains more than eight hours of title matches).

Truth be told, I'm against these DVDs because they remind me that Vince McMahon chooses to make money this way over forming the all-wrestling channel that should have happened years ago. Since the WWE owns the rights to just about every relevant match now, this really shouldn't be hard to pull off.

Heck, the MSG network showed old matches from the '80s on Wednesday nights this summer (I probably received 200 e-mails from delighted wrestling fans alerting me about it).

Just give us a network. For God's sake. Throw us a bone. Like some of you wouldn't check the Wrestling Channel 10 times a day to see what they were showing?

But here's the real reason I bring this up: Why haven't they made an Andre the Giant DVD yet? Andre, the one wrestler who could never be recreated or duplicated, the Eighth Wonder of the World, someone who touched the lives of everyone he ever met. Screw the footage; you could make a two-hour documentary just of people telling Andre stories. He was that memorable. I don't care whether it's the WWE, ESPN, HBO, whoever ... somebody needs to make an Andre documentary. I don't ask for much.