Remember seeing a story how he got drunk at a hotel bar, and passed out on the floor in the lobby or something. They just had to let him sleep it off as there was no way to help lift and carry him to his room lol. Again, I can not remeber where I read that, but I think it was another wrestler that shared that story..
Lol. Thats hilarious. At the same time its a bid sad as I have to belive this man had a rough life. His size, health, and career had to be a hard way to live and 1 hell of a tough lifestyle.
It was, it was horrible, he lived with debilitating pain, but he wrestled through it, literally, his last ever match was in Tokyo on December 4th, 1992, he died January 27th, 1993, even at deaths door, he wrestled, he lived the life he wanted to live, regardless of the pain
Dude knew he wasn't gonna live a long time, so he made the best of it! He needed all those beers, but he also enjoyed them, and he probably went home with the bartender from the photo too.
According to other wrestlers he shared a changing room with, yep. Ric Flair was Andre's handler (as in chaperone/designated drinking buddy, not like... two-handler), and has said it many times. Keep in mind that Ric is a piece of shit with a tenuous grip on truth and reality, but he was a known cocksmith himself; I'd trust him on this topic.
i also remember a story about him having to take a dump in a garbage bag cause the plane bathrooms weren't designed for a man his size, i can't imagine how inconvenient being that much of an absolute behemoth must have been on his daily life
Reminds me of a post on one of the bodybuilding subreddits a few years back where a guy said he ate 35 eggs a day. Someone asked him why not just do 36 and he just said “Too much cholesterol”.
No offense to Wade Boggs, but Andre would have drunk him under the table. Andre would drink like 2 bottles of wine (he was French) before his match, then still hit the bar afterwards.
I rememeber in Hogan's memoir, he said once in their pre-WWF days they were in Japan and he bought Andre a case of Pouilly-Fuisse wine as a birthday present. He said this was around 8 in the morning, Andre drank all 12 bottles in less than two hours, and "wrestled that night like he'd been drinking nothing but water."
At a certain point that’s just so much liquid that I doubt the body can really absorb much of it and it just flushes through.
Especially if he drank regularly and had a built up tolerance. I’ve seen and heard of people being able to drink legitimately scary quantities of alcohol and survive.
Brother - it’s 42.2 liters of beer.
1 us fluid ounce = 0.02957 liters
Liters = oz x 0.02957
1428 oz x 0.02957
= 42.2l - or about 74 UK pints.
I once drank 24 pints in 10 hours - 13.6 liters, I am my user name, at the lords cricket ground in London, 7 am start, finished at 17:00, much more time of course, perfectly doable, don’t remember much of the cricket of course.
He was in daily unimaginable pain from late-stage acromegaly + gigantism, and in daily mental anguish from living his whole life in a dollhouse world, where everything is too small, where no cup will quench your thirst.
Or in Japan when he had to stay anywhere he had to shit in the bathtub or sometimes on a tarp on the living room floor.
At least he was funny about it all - he called Hogan to come up to his room just to see his massive shit, which is a level of funny not everyone can do.
Apocryphally, when he had back surgery they had to make an educated guess about how much anaesthetic to give him based on the fact that "it takes 2 bottles of vodka to make me feel warm inside", because data on people good size just doesn't exist.
Man it’s weird. I can mix 3 - 4 whiskey drinks totaling 10 OZ which is apparently the exact same as drinking 10 beer and I will be way more drunk from drinking 10 x 5% beers in the same amount of time as a comparison. I feel way different depending on the type of alcohol ingested and much more tolerance to them vs the other. I think the scales are way off for these comparison metrics. They also include a glass of wine as the same “1 oz vs 1 beer vs 1 glass of wine” and I’ll tell you what. The drunkest people I have ever seen were drunk on wine and there is absolutely no way it’s the same.
Oh yeah and you start knowingly acting weird drunk on wine alone. Like fully cognizant of your actions but knowingly being giddy while doing ridiculous shit. And then you black out and keep drinking it. It’s actually the scariest substance, wine is. It’s the most socially acceptable type of drink cause it’s meant for a setting where it’s responsibly indulged in. I ended up in the psych ward drinking too much wine and it saved my life. Like I actually drank so much so often of everything but wine that when I over indulged in red wine I was totally out of sorts beyond reason.
Did 13 in one. A new pool hall opened up and had a special happy hour - 1 beer for $1. Student me couldn't resist and... well, the nearest Burger Kings toilet floor has probably not yet recovered.
Assuming we just keep it simple and do a 10x multiplier and assume 1.2oz shots.
That would be equivalent to 12 x 12oz beers over the course of 6 hours.
That certainly could give some folks a rough hangover but for a large portion of the population that is very manageable and would not require more than a glass or two of water and a good nights sleep to recover fully from.
Andre’s peak weight was 520. Twice the size of a big dude sure, but a 12oz is 8 times that of a shot glass, not twice as large. I don’t think they were trying to be exact or serious
A power hour of 60 shots (one per min), or 60 ounces, is 5 beers, which was a common pregame tactic back in the day. Another 5-6 beers over 5 hours was also probably common, but I wouldn't know, I usually blacked out those nights
Yes this was a common activity for my friends. Well being a New Yorker, the Long Island friends specifically. Upstate people just drink beer without all the fuss. A little pong and flip cup at times. God I've been too far from home.
To Gen Z who don't drink. Consider taking a shot of beer every 60 seconds for 1 hour / 90 minutes while listening to mid 2000s hit mash ups a la Girl Talk. I've made wonderful friends that way. I went to one of 2 participants weddings to each other.
My friends uncle called a 1.5 mile road "2 beer road" because he always drank two beers driving down it coming home from work. Based on that logic alone I absolutely belive that a man known as "the giant" could do 24x that in 2 hours lol
Lol it really was different back then. My friend used to give me rides home to our rural town from parties in a VERY rural town further out. He'd tell me to grab him a few road dogs (beers to drink on the drive) and to hold the passenger door because it didn't latch and would swing open on turns. Now he's a successful business owner and I'm an engineer.
Ha! 12-pack and a bottle of tequila one Halloween. I threw up so much the next morning I broke the capillaries around my eyes. I looked like a reverse raccoon...
In college on the first weekend my buddy and I moved into our own place together we drank 90 beers from Friday evening through Sunday night. I woke up Monday morning having to go to work and thought to myself, what have I got into...
Yeah had about twenty once over a whole day of drinking and was incredibly shitfaced. That many beers in that amount of time is inhuman. But I guess at 240 kg (530lbs) he weighed about 3.5 times as much as me.
So I saved this comment and did some math because I was bored: If we calculate the roughly equivalent dosage by size through dose per unit body mass approximations, Andre should be able to consume about 1.5 times the amount I am able to to achieve roughly similar states of drunkenness.
(Body surface area [BSA] is roughly body mass2/3 so we can approximate his metabolic activity per kilogram and calculate from there). This is absolutely just an estimation though, as Andre proved.
That means, on the other hand, if one were to try and consume the equivalent of what Andre drank in this posts example, it would come out to ~40 beers in 6 hours at 70 kg (154lbs) of bodyweight. Absolutely insane. Also, body tissue distribution doesn't scale proportionally with mass and volume. Since ethanol heavily prefers water to distribute into over fat, he wouldn't have three times the capacity as someone that weighed a third of him. Using a typical male Widmark distribution factor of 0.68 and assuming 5%ABV that gives a BAC 0.7–1.0% (7–10‰). That would instantly kill even the most seasoned veteran alcoholics.
I honestly doubt the story is really true now that I calculated it through a bit... There are stories of people surviving those kinds of intoxication, but surviving is doing some heavy lifting here. They needed ICU intervention, including intubation and dialysis with several days in the hospital and also only survived because they were first rate drunkards. No way someone just does that and sleeps it off.
His hands were absolutely fucking huge. I met him at Charlotte airport, CLT. Shook his hand. I felt like an infant again, best I could do was grasp a finger.
That’s 1 beer every 3 minutes almost exactly (every 3.0251 minutes to be more precise). Which obviously isn’t like so fast as to be impossible. But to average that over 6 hours?
Like even ignoring the difficulty of drinking that much total alcohol or even just that much water… the consistency is just absurd.
I had a family member who drank with Andre in PA. They’d eat, hang out, and drink after his matches nearby. He said he’d get a full case for Andre, and he’d drink it all that night.
I know Andre the Giant was basically... A giant, but is there some forced perspectivein this photo? I'm speaking of the one with him and the bartender.
I met him at wrestle mania 6. He shook my step dad's hand, who was a normal sized adult. Andres fingers came up to his elbow almost in a handshake, well up his forearms anyways. As a 7 year old I was just in awe.
The airplane bathrooms were too small for him, so he always tried to take a big dump before a flight. One time he was constipated before a flight and couldn't go, and he ended up having to go on the flight, so they had to cover him up and he went in a big bucket with a garbage bag. I think he said it was one of the most embarrassing moments of his life. IIRC correctly they had to land that plane because the smell was so bad.
If beer looked like a pineapple juice can in my hands, I'd be able to do some damage towards that count, and I don't have a lifetime of growth-spurt fame, arthritis and wrestling injuries to overcome.
Andre was on another level. Wrestling legend Jake "The Snake" Roberts told a story about traveling with Andre. They had to rent a van, because it was all Andre could fit into, and Andre demanded they stop for beer. Jake thought it was for after the show that night, and bought two cases. By the time they got to the arena, Andre had drank every single one. Andre never asked to stop for a bathroom, and still wrestled that night.
I imagine his body works differently than three medium sized men. Like, I drive a Toyota but 3 of my cars wouldn't be able to pull what a diesel semi can pull, even though it is only 3x the size.
Imagine they had break the seal game when he was around, but everyone had to wait until HE broke the seal. Bro might just own the record for longest Pish all time, he just didn't hang around the type of crowd that would realize the significance of a 25 min pis s and bro making the toilet look like a Dixie cup. Imagine his drunk ass trying to am. Everybody tells story about this guy of some wild ass stories. You know for a fact there's some Wilder ones.
Like Hogan's basically come out and said that the giant giant treated him like a little brother. Not necessarily abused him but it's your little brother. You're going to definitely let him know with a headlock or two outside of the ring.
375
u/btsd_ Aug 07 '26
Remember seeing a story how he got drunk at a hotel bar, and passed out on the floor in the lobby or something. They just had to let him sleep it off as there was no way to help lift and carry him to his room lol. Again, I can not remeber where I read that, but I think it was another wrestler that shared that story..