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The Great Antonio |
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Next year at the awards in Las Vegas April 15-17, the second annual CAC Cribbage Tournament will take place. If you have a desire to be a part of and help the Scholarship fund, contact The Sensational Intelligent Masked Destroyer through his website, www.thedestroyer.com, for further details and to lock in your spot for a place in the history books. Thanks ... Percival |
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This past week, we lost a good man that never hurt anyone. I had the pleasure of meeting this lovable man in the early 70's in Calgary. He was an awesome sight coming down the aisle to wrestle. His big claim to fame was to pull as many as four buses full of people. He started life in Europe and migrated to Montreal, where he began work as a youngster to help support his family. He lived in a scrap yard, where he worked during the day gathering large piles of scrap metal to be crushed and then sent to smelters. His home there was a ramshackle arrangement of cardboard topped with a hood from a vehicle. Anton Barichievich enjoyed sports, and he attended matches whenever he could. He was always fascinated by wrestling and the huge weekly crowds it drew at the Forum. Some weeks, it would be in excess of 10,000 fans. Anton decided after a few visits that this was his calling, and he tried to contact the promoter but could not make the connection. Anton decided to do something that would attract attention. He would pull a bus loaded with people in downtown Montreal. This stunt not only landed him a call from the promoter but also from the police, who watched in awe as he pulled the huge city bus down the Saint-Laurent Boulevard. They warned him that he could not disrupt traffic and cause havoc with paying customers inside the bus. Anton went on to be in the Guinness Book of World Records for other stunts in later years, like pulling a train and other strongman stunts. He was taught to wrestle but chose to rely on brute strength while he was in the ring. He won every Battle Royal he was ever in, a feat unquestioned until Andre the Giant came along. Many times, this gentle giant would be picked on in different territories, and life in general was very lonely for him. He was often the victim of pranks that the boys would think up. The worst was when they pulled a MABEL party on him in Calgary. Many times, Anton would play tug of war with as many as 10 men using a one and a half inch rope that he carried in either his International Truck or his custom built Lincoln Continental. It was truly amazing the natural strength this man had. He did have one drawback, though … he LOVED garlic and would eat it by the clove. Unfortunately, it would come out of his system by way of his pores, and he would have a dreadful smell about him. He would splash a whole bottle of cologne on himself prior to a match. Sometimes it worked to hold down the odor, but often times the garlic would come through as the winner. After retiring from the ring, Anton would challenge different companies to pull things like jet airplanes for the publicity it would draw. He made a meager living by selling photos of his wrestling days at these events. He let his hair and beard grow and, in later years, rarely bathed. He became homeless and lived in subway entrances during the last few years of his life. He sold pencils and cards depicting his life with pictures on them for a living. He was grocery shopping September 7 when he was hit with a massive heart attack and died on the spot. Montreal remembered the strongman in a column in the Gazette newspaper. Rest in Peace "The Great Antonio" … Anton Barichievich.
(THIS FROM THE GAZETTE ... Thank you for remembering one of the greats from the wrestling world.) Oddball strongman Great Antonio dies at age 77 ALAN HUSTAK He boasted he had the strength of 10 horses. He could eat 25 chickens or 10 steaks at one sitting, wrestle 18 men at the same time, juggle six people on his shoulders and single-handedly pull buses, trains and jet planes full of passengers. Anton Barichievich, otherwise known as the Great Antonio, was a Montreal oddball whose feats of brute strength earned him an international reputation. But the Great Antonio has pulled his last bus. He died of a heart attack while grocery shopping Sunday morning, one month shy of his 78th birthday. "There are so many legends about strongmen that it is hard to figure out which is true," Johnathan Goldstein wrote two years ago in a Saturday Night magazine profile of Antonio. He kept every scrap of paper that had been written about him over the years, news clippings from all over the world, in garbage bags.
Anton Barichievich said he was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, on Oct. 10, 1925, one of five sons in a Siberian immigrant family. Later in his life, he claimed to be of Italian origin. According to stories he told, he was 6 years old when he first went to work with a pick and shovel. By the time he was 12, he could pull trees out of the ground with a cable around his neck and run an endurance race for 24 hours without stopping. He never talked about what he did or where he was in Europe during the Second World War. But whatever happened then seems to have psychologically affected him for the rest of his life.
He tipped the scales at 465 pounds and stood about 6 foot 4 inches. His suits were size 90, and his shoes size 28. Barichievich first made it into the Guinness Book of Records in 1952 when he pulled a 433-tonne train in Montreal along the tracks for 19.8 metres. He also pulled four city buses loaded with passengers along Ste. Catherine St., which landed him in the 1960 Guinness Book of Records. During the 1970s, he travelled the world, putting on shows of strength and wrestling in world capitals. He appeared on numerous television variety shows, including Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson and NBC's Real People. That show's host, Skip Stephenson, once said of Barichievich: "On a scale of one to 10 of the bizarre, he's a 10." The Great Antonio also made appearances in several movies. In the 1970s, he was making enough money to buy a new custom-made Lincoln Continental every two years.
Antonio owned what he said was the world's largest rocking chair - 4 metres high and 2 metres wide. He almost became the North American heavyweight wrestling champion in 1971, but the title bout in Calgary ended in a riot. "The people of Calgary had never seen such a vicious competitor and didn't like the idea of an ugly guy with long hair beating the local favourite and becoming their champion," recalled Alberta wrestling coach Percival A. Friend. In 1985, Barichievich approached boxing promoter Don King and asked him for a million dollars to do a fight film. He also wanted to go on tour on a double bill with falsetto singer Tiny Tim. And lift the cross atop Mount Royal. He even offered to pull a Boeing 747 filled with passengers across the tarmac if Boeing gave him a jet "at no charge." He once said he trained by running head-on into trees from a distance of 60 metres. "Me an expert on physical strength. To understand is to do it, but no one can do it. Six billion people in the world. No energy. No strength. Nobody understand, you understand." He was an illiterate, and he signed his autograph in big bold block letters. To everyone's surprise, he sang with a soft, beautiful voice. When his strength began to wane, Antonio braided his dreadlocks into a club held together with masking tape and used his matted locks to play "hair golf." He is thought to have been married at least twice, once in Europe and once in Canada to a woman named Jannine, but he leaves no known descendants. In later years, Barichievich hung out in doughnut shops in Rosemont and frequented the Berri-UQÀM métro station, where he peddled brochures outlining his life story. By then, he was a somewhat lonely, pathetic figure whom people avoided not because they were afraid of him but because he never bathed. By this spring, when a Gazette reporter last spoke to him, he was convinced he was descended from extraterrestrials. "I went to donate blood, and they refused because my blood was too strong. I have extraterrestrial blood!" No one dared argue with him. ahustak@thegazette.canwest.com
Percival A. Friend, Retired
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