Stop the references, I mean it!
Well, he did spend much of his life on the road, eating and drinking in bars and restaurants.
Andre, incidentally, is said to hold the world record for the greatest number of beers drank in one sitting. I won’t mention the number, since I’m not quite sure weather to believe it, but it’s a lot.
One of the most poignant moments in the documentaries on the special edition TPB DVD was Robin Wright talking about how, when it was cold on the set (which was apparently most of the time), Andre would put his hand on her head to help her keep warm. And his hand would much more than cover her head.
She lost her composure a bit describing it, and I must confess to getting a little catch in my throat as well listening to it.
Citation: I’ll corroborate this, what WhyNot says, based on a TV show about his life. I think it was an episode of Biography. It was a good insight into the life of this man.
Your description is accurate. With a rope tied around his waist he could have towed a Space Shuttle, but his back was in terrible shape.
Andre used to drink a case of beer the way an ordinary guy drank a single beer after work. When he had his leg operating on the anesthetists had no way to guage how much anasthetic to use except to estimate based on his drinking capacity.
That would have been 200 iirc on a flight back from Japan.
Just wanted to point out how apropos the OP’er’s handle was.
well, according to the big show, paul white, his own strength was GREATER then it is now, because they removed the tumor. so andre , never having his removed would have kept that strength.
I never saw andre stain to do anything, and i seen him pick and body slam near 400 pound kamala, slap around 6 foot 9, 350 erinie ladd, double arm suplex, near 400 pound bam bam bigalow.
the car incident is legit, there are police records of it, and there were three men in It, so even more weight
Again to compare, big show, while still having the tumor, got real life mad after a match, and tore the ring apart, and i use to put those together, he’d broken the steel support cable under the ring to do that.
andre was just as big, if not bigger
It is said, by anyone that knew him, nobody could beat him, if he diddn’t allow it.
So he had to be strong enough to over power guys like hogan, who addmitted, andre was stronger then him, by a lot. so take hogan, s strength, and maybe , half again as strong ?
mass means a LOT also.
i’m big, 260 pounds, and it’s so easy, to lift and move things, regular sized guys cant. i can’t imagine, being over 500, without it being blubber. he got over wieght, but was more muscle then fat, he just had no cuts
Yes, I find it very easy to believe that Andre the Giant’s strength in the past was greater than it is now.
ETA:
Oh, wait, you are saying someone named Paul White was stronger in the past. My bad.
What, no Obey jokes yet?
Well, it must be true then!
Oh, and
That, plus the fact that he’s instantly recognizable. Most famous actors, if they don’t want to be recognized, can just look like an ordinary guy (that’s what they’re trained at, after all). Or at most, people would walk by and say “Hey, that guy looks a lot like _____”. Probably lots of us have shared a restaurant with various celebrities and just never realized it. With Andre, though, if you were in a restaurant with him, you would notice, and there would not be any chance of mistaking who he was.
To update the Andre/Samuel Beckett story I mentioned four years ago, there is a now a very entertaining dramatization of this, told in a suitably Beckettesque style.
And he was rather uncomfortable with that. Nobody would say “Hey, that guy looks a lot like Andre Rousimoff”. He wasn’t comfortable having his whole life consumed by the character he played. I have no doubt his prodigious drinking was a way of coping with the public existence he couldn’t escape.
He was almost a Redskin . . . sort of . . .
I read in a book by William Goldman with lots of Princess Bride stories, though I recollect it that they would WALK to school together. I’ll recheck.