Universal Ramblings

For many people, Andre the Giant is the epitome of professional wrestling. One of the biggest stars of the 1970s, he had three tremendous advantages as a wrestler:

* He was big.
* He had a strange yet extremely effective charisma.
* He was fucking huge.

Andre Roussinoff was born in France in 1946. One can only imagine this process as a bit of an ordeal. Andre was afflicted with acromegaly, a painful hormonal imbalance causing abnormal lifelong growth. Andre’s disease elevated him to over six feet tall by age 12 and kept him growing well past puberty. He eventually settled down somewhere in the neighborhood of seven feet (although he was advertised by promoters as being 7-foot-4).

Andre started off a skinny but muscular giant when he first emerged as a wrestler in France, then jumped the Atlantic to begin working the robust Canadian circuit. His fame soon spread to the U.S. market.

His size was his obvious selling point, and his increasing bulk created an increasingly formidable appearance. Billed as the “eighth wonder of the world” (after a line in King Kong), he was often advertised as weighing more than 500 pounds, which was actually true at his peak weight, but not through most of his career.

Andre had a gentle demeanor (in both his private and public lives), which combined with his awe-inspiring size to make him an extremely effective babyface (good guy) wrestler. He worked under a variety of unnecessarily clever stage names until joining the WWF in 1972, when Vince McMahon Sr. gave him the simple sobriquet that would define his career.

Andre was a rare mainstream star in the days before Vince McMahon Jr. created the first nationwide wrestling promotion. McMahon booked Andre as a special attraction, moving him from city to city, and loaning him out to other territories, resulting in much wider exposure than most of his peers enjoyed.

McMahon also booked Andre on one of the longest legitimate undefeated streaks in modern pro wrestling history, which lasted almost 10 years and cemented the Giant as an unstoppable force, or more aptly, an immovable object, too large to be pushed around by the usual wrestler’s tactics.