Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Live: Andre the Giant

Episode Date: December 26, 2019

Andre the Giant was a giant both figuratively and literally. Sure he was a wrestler, but more than that he was a human being who left a great legacy behind. Even if you're not a wrestling fan, you can appreciate his story. Join us for this very special live edition of the story of Andre the Giant.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey Seattle, we'll see you Thursday, January 16th at the Moore Theater. In San Francisco, we're gonna be at the Castro on January 18th. When else, Chuck?

That is it man, January 18th at the Castro, our annual trip to Sketchfest. We love performing there, we have great crowds there. Go get a ticket, if you wanna come see me at Movie Crush the next night on Sunday in a small venue where you can shake my hand and hug my neck, I would welcome that as well. Well, that's what I was setting you up for

when I said, what else? I appreciate that. We'll see you guys, you can get all the info and tickets you need on sysklive.com or sfsketchfest.com. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark,

there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's not here, but all of these beautiful, wonderful people are at Plaza Live in Orlando, Florida. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! This is Arsenio Hall stuff going on back there. Yeah. Whoop, whoop, whoop.

I like Florida. Um, yeah, we indeed, thank you for that. Our show's playing here next week. That sounds... I could relive my childhood. Yeah, puke on the sand, people pulling up their shirts, for those of you at home, you'll just never explain. Yeah, you'll never get it.

Jerry just cut all that out. Yeah, right. So before we get started actually, if you guys will indulge me, I would like to dedicate this show to a very special woman named Alice Harrison, who also happens to have been Yumi's grandma and she passed on Monday. So she is actually a fellow Floridian. She lived outside of Tampa for most of her life, had like parrots and peacocks, like

super Florida, right? And she was just a very wonderful woman. So I want to dedicate this show to Alice Harrison in her memory, everyone. Very nice. Thanks for that. And Yumi's here and she's very proud of you right now. Yeah. So we didn't really just bring you here to talk about Yumi's grandma exclusively.

We asked you all here tonight to talk to you about legends, and in particular, one legend, no. Oh man, the crowd-shouter is rarely funny. Well done. Yeah. This legend- It wasn't some drunken d***, right. Already beeping this early in the show, not very. That's the last one you get though.

So this legend was even better than Zelda. This legend's name was Andre the Giant. And by the way, if you're not a fan, I know this is Florida, but if you're not a fan of wrestling, they're like, what are you talking about? Fear not. I'm not a fan of wrestling. You're not a real fan of wrestling. This is interesting stuff.

We wouldn't bring you something so niche that only wrestling fans would enjoy. Trust us. In fact, you can make the case that if you are a wrestling fan, you might not like this show. Yeah, just excuse yourself. So to start at the beginning, Andre the Giant was not born Andre the Giant. He was born Andre Rene Rousimov, on May 19th, 1946, in Columnière, France, which is a town that is close to where he was raised in a French farming town called Moliens, I'm sorry,

I don't have a peanut butter in my mouth, Moliens. And in Moliens, he was raised by his parents, Boris and Marianne Rousimov, who were of Bulgarian and Polish descent respectively. And he was the third of five siblings, and he was born at 11 pounds, which we're told is kind of big. I heard a couple of women gasp. Yeah. Someone sucked air through their teeth.

Yeah, Boris Rousimov, I'm surprised he's Bulgarian with that name. Jerry cut that one. You can't just cut everything. Sure we can. You got to put yourself out there. You live on the edge. Like that. Boris Rousimov, Bulgarian, who would have thunk it?

There you go. All right. Who would have thunk it? Cut that one too. No. So there were a family of farmers, and he worked on the family farm as did all the kids. I think he was the third of five children. And here's one thing that may or may not be true, but an interesting little tidbit we'll

throw out. Supposedly when he was in school, along with the other children there in rural France, they would occasionally get rides in the pickup truck to school from playwright Samuel Beckett. Yeah. Right? That's the appropriate response to that. Like a little surprise, but not like totally blown away. But little Andre, who was never little because he was 11 pounds at birth, he began to grow

very early. All of his siblings and even his parents were all just sort of average size, so no one knew it was coming when little Andre by the age of 12 was six feet tall and weighed 240 pounds. Yes. And so his parents being farmers were like, yes. Yeah. We have an ox. Yeah.

For our third child. And they were pretty happy about this, and Andre said, don't get too comfortable because in two years I'm going to quit school in eighth grade and go find my fortunes in Paris. And he did. And it's one of those things where when you're researching and telling people that he went to Paris to find his fortunes after dropping out of eighth grade, if you stop and think about that, imagine letting your 14 year old son move to Paris by himself to go find his fortune.

Yeah. It was a different time. Those are cool parents. Very cool parents. Or maybe they just didn't miss him. They had four others wandering around. No, but I'm sure that they tried to talk him out of it. They're like, you swing a scythe like no one I've ever seen.

Who's going to pull the cart? Right. So he did. He actually started to find his fortunes. Not the best fortunes, but he found some. He started moving furniture, you know, go figure. He just kind of threw, he just kind of threw couches through the doorways, upstairs, that kind of stuff.

And then later he became a professional rugby player, which is okay. It's getting closer and closer. But rugby actually led him inadvertently and accidentally into the world of wrestling. That's right, because he trained at a gym as a rugby player along with some other wrestlers. There were wrestlers that trained there with him. And one day one of the wrestlers got hurt. They looked around the gym and they said, hey, huge human. Come over here, forget rugby.

You should wrestle with us, because it was France and they say, wrestle. Sure they do. And he did. And he really took to it. And before you know it, he was touring as a pro wrestler in Japan, Africa, and New Zealand. Yeah. And in Japan in particular, he had this persona named, was it Monster Rusimov? Well, he had a few names, right?

Yeah. Well, he wrestled under. The Butcher was one. Yeah. Andre the Butcher, Rusimov. So-so. One was the French Giant, which is way too on the nose. Yeah.

It's just like the American Podcaster, if I were a wrestler or something like that. And then another, can you imagine, I would get my ass kicked every match. Not if you were right in the match. It's fake, by the way, everybody. Oh yeah. Well, I guess we should just cut to the chase. Wrestling is fake. Sorry.

End of the podcast. And then the other one, Chuck, what was the third one? Well, the third one, I think we can all agree, is the best, maybe best wrestling name of all time, Monster Eiffel Tower. Imagine, like what does it do? It's like the, the second, the gap between the second and third stories, like the mouth that eats you. I guess so.

There's no arms. It bends over and like, like jabs you or something. It just doesn't make any sense if you really think about it. It's pretty good though. They ate it up in Japan though. They did. So in Japan, he had a different name, Monster Rusimov. And Monster Rusimov was what in wrestling parlance is called a heel, a bad guy, right?

And in Japan, Andre really ate that up. Like in the ring and outside of the ring at matches, he would, he would taunt the fans on the street. So he's a big celebrity on the street. If somebody took a picture of him, he'd chase him down and break their camera. He loved being a heel, right? All in good fun. Right.

Tell that to the Japanese guy who had to go buy another camera because Monster Rusimov broke the other one and none of his friends would believe him. So he eventually went to Europe to wrestle and there he wrestled under the name Jean Fair, which is a play on the term or the name grand fair, who was a hero in French folklore who would kill English invaders or cologne, I can never say that word, cologne-ly-n-old. Colonists. You're adding like five or six extra syllables. Colonialists.

Colonists. No. Colonialists. No, that's just wrong. Who says colonialism? Yeah. Colonialism. They're colonialists.

Right? No. Now I'm saying it like a bird. Colonists. Guys. Colonists, right? Okay. I'm not losing my mind.

Chuck is. Colonialists. Right here in front of everybody. I swear it is. I'm melting down. Colonialists. It doesn't happen until later in the show. Someone's snorting.

I love it. Makes me feel a lot better. So regardless of what they call the English invaders. Colonists. In folklore, grand fair would kill them with an axe and he was this big French hero in the story books. And so Jean Fair was a play on that name. Right.

And so when he became Jean Fair, he became a hero in the wrestling world or what's known as a baby face or a face. So you got heels and faces. Good guys. Everyone in this room doesn't know that already, right? So as Jean Fair, he became pretty big around Europe. So much so that there's a legend that he told himself once in an interview we read where he went back home, like age 19, I think, so it'd been about five years since he left

home. Yeah. He went back home after he'd made it. He shows up in a Rolls Royce, goes up to the door and knocks on it and says, hey, how you doing mom and dad? And they didn't recognize him at first, but they did recognize Jean Fair, their favorite wrestler who had just shown up on their doorstep and said, I'm your son. They had been watching him all this time and Andre the Giant had changed so much they didn't

recognize him. They just became fans of Jean Fair. I really want to believe that. I do too. Even if it's BS, it's still a pretty great story, but it'd be like if like Stone Cold Steve Austin showed up on your doorstep and was like, I'm your son. It's basically the same, the same thing. It's just a different person.

That's right. He's really trying to keep it together here, everybody. Oh, this is good. Florida's forgiving. God, this didn't happen in Maine. We have to cut that part out. Those Mainers don't come for us. I've seen that.

I know what you did last summer. I saw at least four people asleep in the audience in Maine. We've seen that before. It's very disconcerting just so you know, if you're in the first five rows, please just stay awake. I'm used to it. You don't even have to laugh. Just stay awake.

That's your job tonight. Yeah. That's it. If you see your partners start to fall asleep, just give them one of those. It's very disconcerting. Basically we're watching you is what we're trying to say. So around 1970, Andre was working with a man named Edouard Carpentier, the flying Frenchman, and he was a wrestler, believe it or not, turned promoter, and he claimed, and there

are a lot of tall tales in this story, and we're not sure which ones are true, but he claimed that he met Andre when he was driving down the road in France, and there was a redwood tree that had fallen, and Andre emerged and moved the tree. I think that one might not be true. Sounds pretty good though. That's a good story, but that's not true. But he figures in very important to Andre's life because he took him to Quebec to wrestle with Jean Faire and made a very important introduction to a man named Vince McMahon Sr.

Yes. Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, okay. So Vince McMahon Sr., for those of you, the five of you who don't know who he is, he was a big time wrestling promoter at a time when wrestling in America was regional, right? It was not a nationwide thing. The country was cut up into different regions, and Vince McMahon was the head of the World

Wide Wrestling Federation, the WWWF, because apparently Vince McMahon didn't know that worldwide is one word. They put it on marketing materials and everything. He would go on to shorten that later. Yeah. Later on, his son would correct the massive spelling error that his father had started years before, but before that, Mr. McMahon had this really great idea. He said, you, Jean Faire, we're going to change that name in a minute.

You are really something special. Rather than put you on one circuit or one town or whatever, just sticking to one region where you're going to be huge at first and then just become whatever, just a so-so guy, I'm going to take you from region to region around the country and promote you. He did, and in doing so, Andre the Giant became one of the nation's first wrestling stars because he went from town to town, and it was a big deal when he came to town every time. Yeah, it was a really big deal.

He started promoting the storylines ahead of time because, as we said, wrestling is fake, so they would drone these stories about this giant that would come to town because all the heels were getting out of hand and Memphis or in Jacksonville or wherever, and so they would bring in Andre to get them all in line, and the big giant's going to come into town. He's a good guy, and he's huge, and no one's ever seen anything like him, and that really got people in the seats in a big, big way. Like the promos would charge more than was normal because they knew that people were

going to pay it to come see Andre, set the universe right again, right? In America, he finally got the name Andre the Giant. I believe it was Vince McMahon Sr. who gave him that name, and he debuted in 1973 at Madison Square Gardens as Andre the Giant, and he was billed as the eighth wonder of the world at seven feet four inches, five hundred and twenty pounds. He wrestled, I think, between 450 and 520, 550 for most of his career, except at the end, in WrestleMania III, there were reports that he weighed as much as 650, and you could tell he was not in the best of shape at that point.

No, well, he was 650. Yeah, this story will get sad at some point, so just get ready. His height, sorry, his height is in dispute. Basically there are people who have dedicated entire websites to trying to prove that Andre the Giant was seven feet four inches, but most credible sources say he's about six feet seven inches. Some people say maybe he was toward the end of his career, but he underwent back surgery in 1986, and they removed some vertebrae there, so he was seven foot four inches, and they

shrunk him down to six foot seven inches. Most people say, you live in your mom's basement, don't you? And that ends the argument every single time. I'm not a back surgeon. I don't think that's how that works. I don't think that's how one vertebrae out, Dean, let's get another one out. The good news is your back won't hurt, but your eight inches shorter. I don't think that's how it works.

So he was truly enormous, though. There are other great stories. One is that his wrists were nearly a foot in diameter, right? We're like, so everybody, this is just plainly obvious, an enormous wrist, but we had no frame of reference except for my tiny wrist, which we know is not a foot. Mine's not either. So we went to the slender wrist.com and that is a real website. We said, what is the average human man's wrist circumference?

And we found out it's seven inches, 7.4 inches. So his is about five inches bigger around than the average man's wrist, which is huge, which I guess we should have just stuck to a foot in circumference. And I shouldn't have explained that into the ground. Well, I just like knowing there's a website called theslenderrists.com and then I'm not on it. So he wore a size 26 wrestling boot just for comparison. And Shaquille O'Neal is a very large man, started out his career playing for a little

team called the Orlando Magic. He wears a 22, Andre wore a 26. So what else? There were other legends. He could pass a silver dollar coin through his rings. And then another one that I don't think is true, that he had two hearts and multiple rows of teeth, like a monster. And apparently Rick Flair, the nature boy, knew that was coming.

Wow, we're in the right place. He believed both of those, the heart one and the teeth one. And whenever he was talking to Andre the Giant, he said that he was like kind of try to look into his mouth while he was talking. We've met Rick Flair. He totally believed that. We can attest. He, for some reason, was a guest star on our TV show that we had.

Maybe that was one reason why it wasn't so great. No, I think he was the reason it wasn't totally terrible. Really? Yeah. It was a good little guest appearance. We found out the day of that he was coming to shoot. That's right. It's a weird day.

So he was ridiculously strong though. He would do with this little party trick where when his friends were in a bar, he would move their cars. It's little small European cars and not with the keys, he would pick it up and move it. He also, there's footage of him lifting a 2,000-pound weight. You try to lift 2,000 pounds, you can't do it. Has anyone ever tried to lift 2,000 pounds? I've not tried to.

Well, believe me, you can't do it. I've not tried to lift 20 pounds. He said they're picking up a 2,000, I mean, I presume it was a 2,000-pound weight. It was a weight that said 2,000 pounds on it and what weight lies, you know? And it wasn't a cartoon. The thing is, he was feared because of his strength by other wrestlers. Not because he was known to be like a malicious, brutal guy, but because just one slip in wrestling, he could really injure somebody, but he almost never did because he had, he was a genuinely

good wrestler. That's one of the things about Andre the Giant. Confetti. Yeah, there's confetti. There's been this steady stream of confetti just kind of falling the whole time. The flaming lips might have played here last night. So Andre the Giant was a legitimately good wrestler. Oh, sure.

Into that paragraph. So his English was never great, you know? He was born and raised in France and could speak English, but not the greatest. And he also just put a pin in this. He had a medical condition that we're going to get back to later, but because of that condition as well, enunciating was a little difficult for him. So a lot of people thought that he was just this big dummy, this big brute, and that was not true at all.

He was a very smart guy, very savvy businessman, a great showman, very observant, very shrewd. He was not just some big oaf in a singlet. Right. No, he wasn't. To help him though with that language barrier, when he moved from Quebec down in North America or down in the United States, I guess technically Quebec is in North America, technically. He hired a guy named Frank Valois, and Frank Valois was a referee on the Quebec circuit who served as his interpreter.

And he hung out with him for a few years, and then he just became like a friend of his rather than somebody he worked with. And that was kind of par for the course with Andre the Giant compared to other sports stars. He had a very small, if nonexistent entourage. He didn't have the hangers on and the totes and the lackeys and the agents and like the drug dealers or whoever else you have hanging around you if you're a star. Or took steroids. No, no.

He was a bit of a loner, but the friends he had were like true, legitimate friends. So he was kind of an anomaly in that sense in the sports world. Yeah, and apparently he did have a very pretty strict list, and you were either a friend or you're an enemy. And once you were on that list, you were kind of on it for life. His list of friends was very long because he was a good guy and really loved people. But he did have a few enemies in the wrestling world. One was Big John Studd, who was another very large man who wrestled.

And he allegedly called Andre a circus freak once. And as you will see as we go on, Andre was a very sensitive guy about his size. And he didn't want to be called a circus freak. Who does? That's a good point. He also had a thing with the iron chic for reasons that are unclear. And he also had a very long standing beef with Randy the Macho Man Savage. That's right.

And this one boils down to the fact that Randy liked to oil up. He would baby oil himself, which was a common thing in wrestling, because I guess shiny muscles read on camera. I don't know. I'm not sure. And that's not why I oil up, but apparently it looks better on TV. And so Randy would oil up in a big way, baby. And people would tell Randy, like, Andre doesn't like the oil in the wrestling match.

So like, can you just, when you wrestle him, can you not oil up? And he said, no, I got to oil up. Right. As an aside, by the way, everybody, it's one of the tragic unknown facts of Randy the Macho Man Savage's life that he was physically incapable of snapping into his own slim gym. Because his fingers were so oily, he had to walk around on the street begging common strangers to snap into his slim gym for him, just denigrating himself. It's sad.

Apparently that's good. Apparently years later, Andre has a daughter named Robin, and she wasn't super close with her dad. And we're going to get to that a little bit more. It's very sad, but she was trying to get information about her dad and get stories from wrestlers and friends. And she went to Randy Savage, and he said, I wish I could tell you more, but your dad just didn't like me.

I had nothing but the utmost respect for him, but he just didn't like me. And then he just slipped and slid down the street and that's the last anyone ever saw. That was great. So when Andre was wrestling one of his enemies, he would dole out like a little more punishment than was normal. And one of the punishments he had reserved for Macho Man in particular was he would throw him down to the mat, step on his hair, and then yank him up and leave like tufts of hair on the mat behind him.

And he did this for two reasons. One, clearly it hurts to have tufts of hair pulled out of your head. But also he knew Macho Man was very sensitive about losing his hair. So he would yank it out by the foot full. The foot full. Kind of meat. That size 26 foot full. Right, exactly.

That's a lot of hair. His friends he liked to mess with too, because he was a very fun guy in the ring. And you know, what are you going to do to Andre the Giant? Like he kind of ran the show when he was in there. So he would mess around with his buddies. Hacksaw Jim Duggan told a story one time about Andre choking him with a strap. He had that, he was very famous for that one single old school wrestling singlet. He choked him with that strap and then would wring out the sweat into his mouth.

Oh, just wait. So good. Are you going to make me say this? He also would like push his opponent down, sit on them, and fart. And that sounds pretty bad. But it turns out that an Andre the Giant fart lasted apparently no joke for like 30 seconds. Like they would cut to commercial break and come back and he'd still be farting on this

person. And somebody just Google Andre the Giant fart and there are like dozens of stories. Yeah. Someone, I can't remember who said it, but somebody in an interview called it an event. Yeah. I think this is going pretty well, don't you? I think so far. You guys think it's going all right?

Well, that means that we might release this, which means then that we have to work in message break. So we're going to do that. If you guys will bear with us. We will be right back after these messages. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

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And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're back, everybody. That's how that works magic, magic of editing. So I don't know if you remember where we left off, but Andre, the giant was parting on people. Right. And we went to commercial break. We went to commercial break.

Just like I said. So what happened in his career was he got really famous for being what's called the king of the cage match. And if you don't know what wrestling is in cage matches are also called a battle royale. It's when they would literally put a cage around the ring and they would put 20 dudes in there and they would all just fake hit each other until no one could fake hit anymore. And then the last man standing was the victor and Andre really dominated these matches. Right.

And he was king of the cage match, actually. That's right. That wasn't a joke. So once he hit the American circuit, his star rose very, very quickly. By the mid-70s, he was the highest paid wrestler in the world. He was listed as such in the Guinness Book of World Records. They said that he made a smooth 400K that year in 1974, which is a lot of cheese back then.

Which is now, but it's cute now when you look at athletes are taking it. Right, exactly. But he was one of the highest paid athletes period in the world. He was. And he was also one of the most famous. There was a 1981 profile of him in Sports Illustrated that said that with the possible exception of Muhammad Ali, he was the most recognizable active figure in sports in the world.

That's super famous. That's right. And so what are you going to do when you're a super famous wrestler, you're going to start being on TV. And he did this a lot. He would show up. And if you were around in the 70s and 80s and you watched network television like the rest of us did, you might see him pop up on BJ and the Bear.

Right. Yeah. People in Maine had no idea what BJ and the Bear was stunned silence. He was in a two-parter of BJ and the Bear. He played Bigfoot a little on the nose in an episode of the $6 million man. And there was this one scene where Lee Majors, a star of $6 million man, was supposed to get thrown across the room by Bigfoot, Andre the Giant. And he was a little worried that he was going to get hurt.

And he was very pleased to find out that Andre the Giant was, like we said, a very skilled athlete. Right. And knew how to do this stuff. Right. He sold the pounce, basically. And if you really stop and think about the subtext of that, it strongly suggests that Lee Majors thought pro wrestling was real.

Yes. It's quite possible. I thought he was just going to injure me. I mean, he jumped on me from... What else was the end? He was in Conan the Destroyer. Sure. Alongside Schwarzenegger, Wilt Chamberlain, and Grace Jones.

Weirdest cast in movie history. It was a weird cast. But it holds up. Does it? Sure. I mean, it didn't hold up originally, so it hasn't gotten any worse. How about that? It holds up as well as it ever did, isn't it?

Right, exactly. Yeah, he was on a very famous honeycombs commercial where he played a giant, but wait for it, a medieval giant, invading a treehouse full of kids because he was hungry for a big honey taste. That's why Andre the Giant press is pretty terrible. He gets the honeycombs, by the way, in the end. And there was also a very weird time in the 80s where the singer Cindy Lauper somehow got involved in pro wrestling and would have, she would go to events and take part in some

events and then would have wrestlers be in her videos. The 80s were weird, everybody. It was a very strange time, but it just sort of signifies like what a big pop culture icon Andre the Giant was. He really was. He got the big hoist at the end of the Goonies theme video. Oh, he did? Yeah.

That's like, that's the big shot. That's the one you want, you know, the hoist. Everything Cindy Lauper, everybody's going to pay attention to that one. He also liked the ladies, but by all accounts he was a true gentleman. There's a quote here from one of his friends that said, everywhere he goes there are women, women, women who range wildly in socioeconomic level, age, and even interest in pro wrestling and he treats them all the same, splendidly. Andre simply enjoys the company of women and they enjoy his.

So he seems like a good dude. He was. Even by today's standards. So, um, as wealthy and famous as he was, he had extremely simple tastes like don't forget he was raised a farm boy in France and he definitely never lost his roots. So his favorite things to do were like hanging out with friends, unless he wanted to be alone. Playing cards and specifically Uno and Kribbage were his games big time. So, so much so.

Hey, Kribbage fans. Kribbage fans here. So get this. Andre the Giant loved Kribbage so much that he would be playing it backstage constantly and sometimes he would put off going out into the ring during a televised match because he hadn't finished his Kribbage game yet. He had to finish that first before he went out there. So he was like Kribbage for life.

See Pharrell is Kribbage with a C. Yeah. Okay. Let's make sure when a K have to cut that part out. Yeah. So now we're going to get to the part where we talk about Andre the Giant's drinking. If you know anything about the guy, if you saw the documentary on HBO, you know that he drank a lot. A lot.

Because he liked to drink and he was humongous. Put those two things together and you get statistics like this. He was estimated to have consumed about 7,000 calories of alcohol per day. That's right. Somebody went, whoa. Blood break, Toto, I remember you. An average day or an average beer drinking sesh, he would plow down 52 cans of beer. This is a normal day.

Yeah. Or 11 bottles of red wine. One wrestler talked about one match where Andre drank six bottles of wine before he wrestled the match and like no one could tell. Literally nobody could tell. Yeah. He was famous for drinking planes dry of their mini bottles. Like just gone.

Like, sorry, everybody. You can't have your Bloody Mary because Andre the Giant's here and he drank all the liquor on the plane. And as far as beers go, the most beers he ever drank in one sitting, the highest number we've seen is 156 in one sitting and some people, more cautious souls are like, don't be foolish. Of course he didn't drink 156 beers, he drank 119. Somewhere between 119 and 156 is the truth. That's astounding.

It is astounding. And he could hold it, but none of this is to say that he didn't get drunk because he would definitely get drunk. You can't drink 119 beers. Maybe it's going to affect even the largest cow in the field. So there were stories of him, one time he and Dusty Rhodes stole horse-drawn carriages in New York City and rode them around the park. A couple of stories about him passing out like he would make it back to the hotel and

just flop on the floor of the lobby. And what do you do? Bellhop, move this man. Nope. So there are two stories, one that they just threw a piano cover over him, and another one, and this is the best, that they just made him a feature. They just put a velvet rope around him, the eighth wonder of the world right there. In charge of the nickel per visit.

Hear him snore, smell his fart. It's an event. Amazing. So it wasn't all salad days for Andre the Giant while he was wrestling. When he was in Japan, when he was first starting out, back in around 1970, he made a rare visit to the doctor. He hated going to the doctor, hated medicine, hated anything like that. But he went to see the doctors in Japan, and while he was there they diagnosed him with

a condition, the condition Chuck was referring to earlier called acromegaly. And acromegaly is a pituitary gland disorder that causes gigantism. So Andre the Giant was by definition a giant. And while he was there at the doctor's office, they said, you know, this is actually something we can easily correct, we just need to kind of get in there, and you have a lesion or a tumor on your pituitary gland, we can treat it, and this will cease, this will stop. And he said, nah, that's okay. And they said, well, wait a minute, if you don't do this, you're probably not going

to make it past 50. He said, I said that's okay. And he leaves. And 12 years later he goes to the hospital again, and the doctors do the same thing. Different doctors at Duke University, they diagnose him with acromegaly, and they say we can treat this. And he said, no, I'm all good. He said, if this is the size God wanted me to be, then this is the size I'm going to

remain. Very sweet. He might have thought he would shrink or something because part of it was a business decision. He thought he couldn't lose his wrestling career by having a surgery. I don't know if they didn't explain it to him well or not, or maybe he was just a little younger because he continued to grow into his 30s. He was still growing.

Right. And with acromegaly in particular, it causes, obviously it's a runaway growth hormone that's being produced by your pituitary gland because something's leaning on it. And from this, you keep growing and growing well into your 30s. And your bones grow too, and it's often in strange ways. So your facial features just change. Your bones get way denser and bigger than would be normal. You also have secondary stuff like carpal tunnel and arthritis and diabetes and things

like this. So it's not a good condition to have. And it also can be very psychologically damaging too. And you could say that it definitely had an impact on the psyche of Andre the Giant as well. It's very sad. He was, you know, you think about the world as sort of made for average sized folks. And you don't think about the fact that being seven foot four or seven feet tall or six

eight and 500 pounds and what that does to your life and just moving around in the world. And it was tough on him. He would find himself seated like on the floor of a van because he couldn't sit in the seat. Think about when he's flying on a plane. There are pictures of him on airplanes where he's occupying three rows of seats, which is great because he was rich and famous and they could accommodate him. But think about going to the bathroom. Like I can barely fit in an airplane bathroom.

They're terrible. Andre the Giant couldn't even think about it. So he had to suffer indignities like getting flight attendants to hold up curtains so he could urinate in a bucket on a flight, like on a long flight if he couldn't hold it that long. And everyone on the plane would just suddenly talk very loudly about anything but the fact that Andre the Giant was peeing into an ice bucket right over there. Oh, by the way, Randy the Macho Man Savage could pop right into any airplane bathroom

you please. Write it. I slipped right in. Oh, man. Nice callback. But like I said, he did have money and he was famous so they could accommodate him as much as possible. So I went and bought this extra large van that was super beefed up and it had the roof popped

up and an extra large couch inside. I know this is Florida, so you're all like, so a van, right? He had a party van is what you're saying. Yeah, there's like a wizard writing a unicorn painting on the side, you know, a van. They're driven by man. But there's one very sad quote he had where he said, I would give much money to be able to spend one day per week as a man of regular size. I would shop, I would go to the cinema and I would drive around in a sports car or walk

down Fifth Avenue and stare at other people for a change. Yeah, all is right. Because here's the thing, he had two choices every day or really one choice. He could either hide or go out and endure the spotlight because I think it was Hulk Hogan said, you know, other wrestlers can put on a disguise, can go like find a dark corner in a bar or restaurant, just kind of lay low. Andre the Giant couldn't do that. Whether he was a famous wrestler or not, the world felt entitled to gawk at him whenever

he was out on the street. And because he was famous, that actually didn't help. It actually made things worse because when he went to bars, drunks would try to pick fights with them or pull knives on them and he'd have to like break their ribs just to get them to go away, which he did actually. And then even people who didn't pull knives could still get to him. Like they would just be like, geez, look at that guy, he's huge, you know, that kind of stuff as he's walking down the street and he would actually cry in private.

Like he was a very sensitive guy and that kind of stuff got to him. Jerry, we'll retake this in the studio. He loved kids, but kids were afraid of him, which was very heartbreaking. He was very gentle with kids. He said, I try to be very soft with children, I don't want them to fear me, but often when I go to the homes of people who have kids, they will run for me even though they've seen me on television. I understand why they do this, but it's a sad feeling for me even so.

So it's a pretty surprising paradox that somebody who's like the sum total of their issues would be found in this condition and who had such trouble making it through the world would choose pro wrestling as a career because he had to travel all the time. Like during the 70s, he would wrestle 330 to 340 nights a year, almost always in a different city every night. Like this is someone who really valued a leap year. You know what I mean? Like it meant something to him.

When he got breaks though, those rare breaks that he would get, he would go home, and his home in the United States ended up being in North Carolina in a town called Ellerby. He bought a ranch there in 1977, a little ranch house, and 49 acres wasn't over the top. It was kind of a modest home, but he loved the land. He had bratwilers, and he had cattle, and he had horses, and he had a Honda ATV that he would ride around. There was this couple, Frenchie and Jackie, that were some of his best friends, and they

kind of took care of the place while he was gone. That was really where he went to just be Andre the Giant, where he knew that he was among friends and loved ones, and wouldn't be stared and caulked at. He also, get this, I didn't realize this, Yumi told me this today, he had a fish camp called Giants Fish Camp in Saffner, Florida, near Sarasota. Has anybody ever heard of it? Yeah? Well, apparently that was Andre the Giant's fish camp, and it turns out my father-in-law

and Yumi's grandpa, who's my father-in-law's dad, regardless. Your grandpa-in-law? Yeah, yeah. They would go fishing at this fish camp with Andre the Giant. My father-in-law used to go fishing with Andre the Giant, and he said Andre the Giant used to carry this custom-made Adirondack chair with special cushions around in the back of his pickup truck, because this was the chair he could sit in, it was his chair. He would sell rings off of his giant fingers that he'd autographed, and apparently he gave

one to my father-in-law. What? Yes, and he doesn't know where it is. Yeah, a man is right. We'll find him one day. I just pictured him telling you the story of her dinner as he takes this napkin ring off and just sets it on the table, and nobody knows that's it. Or a bracelet just kind of slyly slides off of his hand.

I don't know where that thing went. I thought that was pretty cool. Oh, and so Yumi's grandpa and Andre the Giant would speak Polish to one another. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Got some Polish people in the audience like this?

Yeah. All right. I thought you were going to say it was like Yumi's prom choker or something. Right. So. You know, the classic prom choker. From Andre the Giant's sweaty fingers. So he also shopped on KVC a lot, one other little fact about him.

Very cute. So by the early 1980s, by this point, it was the WWF. It was a really, really big spectacle in the US, and they had Andre the Giant to thank for a lot of this. Everywhere he went, it was a big deal. It was getting TV viewers from around the world more into wrestling, and wrestlers benefited just from wrestling with him. Even losing against him was a big deal, because you know you'd be on TV in front of the biggest

audiences or at Madison Square Garden to a sold out show, and no one benefited more from this relationship than a wrestler named Hulk Hogan. Right. So Hulk Hogan, did you guys know that he started out as a heel? As a bad guy? He was a bad guy, of course. I had no idea. Well, he finally made the conversion over to a face, and when he did, he became the

WS biggest star at a time when the WWF, by this time they dropped that third W, was as big as it ever was, as a matter of fact. So he was huge, and he had Andre the Giant to thank for that largely. And there was this ongoing, kayfabe, fake rivalry friendship between Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan. They were kind of frenemies on the WWF. And then Russell Mania II came, I think in 1986, and Andre the Giant won a 20-man battle royale, and he said, you know what, that's it, I'm good, I'm going to go into summer

retirement. I'm not going to officially retire, but my body's breaking down from acromegaly. I drink 52 beers a day on an average day. I think I'm good, I'm just going to go off and rest a little bit. And rather than wrestle, I'm going to focus on a little film I just got hired to be an actor in called The Princess Bride. I saw people pre-clapping when you said a little film, this lady on the front row went ...

Yeah, that's The Princess Bride, he said it. So yeah, fans of that movie, anyone? Clearly. I've never met anyone that's like, eh, sucked, totally fake. You know, a few weeks ago they announced they were remaking it. Yeah, you told me that. People are going, yeah, right? People are going nuts, and then other people are like, who cares, it doesn't take away

from the original. No, it does. People are arguing on the internet, if you believe that. This is no, normally I do see, I am kind of like, it doesn't do anything to attract from the original. Don't go see it. This one violates the laws of the universe, remaking The Princess Bride. This one matters, everybody.

Totally agree. Let's get out on the streets. I know that Fezik is going to be like The Rock or somebody, and I like The Rock. He's fine. He'll try a little too hard, he couldn't be Fezik, now I'm worried The Rock is going to be Fezik. Who else? I'm not going to sleep tonight.

Oh, there's a fruit fly gene, did you know this, it's called the Fezik gene, because if you remove it, it produces fruit flies of an unusual size. That's right. That's not a joke. The last part was a joke. It wasn't really a joke, it was a little one yap on the end of it. I wish I was not here right now. This part was supposed to be funny.

The middle part, sort of be a little sad, and then be funny again at the end. Yeah. We can cut all that out. Yeah, we will. Can't cut reality out right now, though. No, that's all right. They love you. They love you.

This is your second home. See? Just say another insider joke about the billboard guy or whatever, if you feel like you're losing them. Oh yeah, we know enough to stay away from Daytona Beach, am I right? Oh, that's great, I don't even know where I am now. Princess Bride, that's where we are. So Rob Reiner hired him on the advice of the writer of the book.

And he said, there's this guy, you should hire Andre the Giant. Rob Reiner had never heard of him. Which he's like, what? I know. He's like more famous than Muhammad Ali, but Rob Reiner, I don't know where he was at the time. He was on drugs. It's not true.

It could be true. So he was on all of the family, that's what he was doing. So he didn't know who Andre the Giant was. They sent him into audition, and he couldn't understand what he was saying. And he was like, what am I supposed to do here? And they said, just hire Andre the Giant. Trust me, he fits the part, and he's one of the biggest stars in the world. And he went, okay.

Yeah. And it was kind of that easy. He said, we needed a giant. This guy was a giant. I just hired the giant. So Andre did not stop drinking during the film shoot. He continued on his normal ways, and there were three gentlemen named Chris Sarandon, Kerry Elvys, or Elvis apparently is how you really pronounce it.

Really? Yeah, I've been saying Elvys my whole life. Yeah, I've been saying Elvis, not Elvis, he's riding the king's coattails. And Mandy Patankin all thought that they could hang with Andre the Giant at the bars. They were dead wrong. And they could not. So many, many days on set, there were reports of those three guys, Andre showing up being like, let's go, let's do this.

And those three kind of dragging their heels is probably the nicest way to say it. He also, when he checked out of his room at the London Hyatt after the end of his shoot, he had a $40,000 bar tap to pay to settle up, which means that he drank nearly all the contents of the mini bar in his room. Hotel Hummer? Yeah. See, so that began as a fact, and then I added a joke at the end. Oh man, it's so much more fun than in the studio.

So I mean, no offense, we have a good time. I didn't take offense until you said that. I hadn't even crossed my mind. I didn't want to make it sound like we don't have fun in the studio, but when you add 800 people, it's always more fun. No, I know. I'm there. I know we have fun.

We have a butt break up in here. There's a lot of towel snapping in the studio. We have a good time. A lot of miso. A lot. So Andre was really very sweet through this whole production and very nervous about his performance. He really, really wanted to do a good job because he was on a movie set and it was a

big movie and it was a really big deal to him and he was very nervous. When he went to Toronto, I can say Toronto here. Yeah. Toronto, apparently. Just in Toronto. Yeah. Everywhere else is Toronto. In Toronto at the premiere in 1987, his friend Tim White said he was actually shaking, nervous

during the premiere of the movie because he wasn't sure how the other actors were going to accept him. Afterward, when they cheered and patted him on the back and everything, he was the happiest guy in the world and so was I for him. Yeah. He's very sweet. Yeah. He's a good friend, huh?

He loved this character so much. He would carry a VHS copy of The Prince's Bride around with him, not like in his bag or in his hotel room, like around with him, right? He would say, look. Right. It's probably to scale, actually. Then he wouldn't remember his VHS tape. Right.

You got me with that. Man, just threw me off. Oh, oh, oh. So when he was on tour, well, like wrestling afterward, he would invite fellow wrestlers up there who he was friends with to like hang out in his room. And while he was there, he'd be like, hey, here's the room service, man. You want to order anything you want to eat or drink and he'd wait till it arrived and then whoever was there would start eating and drinking and he'd be like, hey, you want

to watch The Prince's Bride? Now that I have you, Trap. Yeah. Apparently, so Lanny Poffo is Randy Savage's brother and Andre was good friends with Lanny Poffo. He did Randy, loved Lanny. He did this to Lanny six times on one tour. By the end of the tour, Lanny was like dodging and like hiding behind plants when he saw

Andre because he didn't want to get invited up to watch The Prince's Bride again. I can't believe he kept falling for it. Like after four times, he was like, all right, I'll order the steak, but we're not going to watch the movie. Right? No, no, no. Here, have dessert. Have dessert.

All right. But he said, he said Andre would point at the TV like when his part was coming up and then when his part came in, when he'd laugh and clap and ask how he did every time. So cute. Like he loved that movie and he loved that he had had a part in it. Love it. So during the shoot, his body was breaking down pretty bad though. There's that one scene where he has to catch Robin Wright who jumps into his arms and Rob

Reiner, when he hired him, thought like, this is great. We have this athlete and this wrestler and we won't have to hire a stunt person and he can do all this stuff. Turns out he couldn't do any of it because of his back. And they had to lower Robin Wright down who weighed like a hundred pounds on cables that they then had to Greek out, interesting term. Did you hear that? Ooh.

It was pretty impressive. And yeah, so it was a big deal. His body was breaking down. He was in really bad shape. He kind of soldiered through because it was important to him. But he found himself at the end of Princess Bride in pretty rough shape physically. He did. He also found himself being visited, a surprise visit by Vince McMahon Jr. who would by then

drop the W from WWF, just made it WWF and had overseen like its meteoric rise. And he showed up in England trying to convince Andre the Giant to come back to wrestling. And Andre was like, no, no, I really shouldn't do this, probably the worst thing I could do. My body's breaking down. I'm in bad shape. I can't even hold a hundred pound Robin Wright pen. It's terrible.

I was paraphrasing him. And Vince McMahon wouldn't take no for an answer and finally managed to break down his resistance and talked him into getting back surgery and arranged for it in England. And that is, I said before, Andre the Giant didn't even like to go to the doctor's office, wouldn't take pills, wouldn't take medications, didn't even take illicit drugs in the 80s, in wrestling. Like he just, all he did was drink. That was his medication, drinking.

So the fact that he agreed to undergo back surgery, it's pretty baffling, but he did. He underwent back surgery in 1986, like I said in England, and there's some urban legends about the surgery, like that they had to use oversized surgical tools meant for a large animal veterinarian, may or may not be true, or that the anesthesiologist had to guess at how much anesthesia to use. I'm sure that's super correct. Sure. But he did it based on how much alcohol Andre the Giant drank.

Like how much does it take for him to fall out in the lobby of a hotel? Exactly. What they call a piano cover night. How much does that take? So it depends on who you're talking to, to see how this is viewed, Vince McMahon and big wrestling fans think they did him a big favor by revitalizing his career and bringing back in the spotlight. Other people, like us, who are a little more contrarian to that point of view, say, no,

you took advantage of this guy who's obviously breaking down just to sell more tickets and to exploit him kind of till the end of his life. And then kicking him out into the cold when you're done with him. And some people say, boo, Vince McMahon. Boo. There you go. So now we get to, what? We have to take another message post to just realize the spirit of the lizard on the toilet

just spoke to me. I said, Josh, don't blow it. This is a really good one. You may release it. You got to get a second one in there. So everybody don't pee on me. If you'll bear with us, yeah, really, it's a pretty dangerous spot. If you'll bear with us, we will be right back.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. It was AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist. So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're back again, everyone. You guys like that every time, huh? To, uh, to recap where we left Andre the Giant, body breaking down, Vince McMahon brings him back, and now we stumble upon a little event called WrestleMania three, which if

you're a wrestling fan, it's this legendary event. It was held in Detroit at the Pontiac Silver Dome. They had plenty of smoke, trust me, 90,000 people at the Pontiac Silver Dome in Michigan. And it was one of the biggest sporting events sort of in history up to that point. And for this match, which Hulk Hogan wrote, and when Lee Majors heard that, he's like, wait, what? He, uh, Hulk Hogan wrote the match, but Andre the Giant was, was toying with him for weeks leading up to it because in the match, Hulk Hogan wins and becomes like the champ of the

WWF and it's a big deal. But when he would say like, Hey, Andre, have you, have you seen the script? Are you good with it? Andre would just say something like, Yeah, yeah, don't worry about it. We'll work it out in the ring or whatever and would not tell Hulk like, yes, you're going to win. We'll go along with your script. And in fact, Hulk Hogan didn't know he was going to win until the very end of this match

when Andre the Giant calls for a body slam and a leg drop. And apparently when Hulk Hogan body slammed Andre the Giant, he pulled a bicep and a quadricep trying to pick him up. And Andre the Giant was even like pressing off of him to help him and Hulk Hogan still injured himself, which you're going to do when you pick up Andre the Giant and it's just part and parcel with it. But he did win and the crowd went nuts. That's right.

After WrestleMania three, he continued wrestling because the WWF sort of kicked him to the curb. It was very sad. So he went back to where he started. He went to Japan and to Mexico and wrestled on those circuits for a little while. He fought his last match in Japan just one month before he died. And by that time, he had wrestled more than 5,000 matches in his career. 5,000 times.

It's crazy. Yeah. So toward the end, he was like, nobody kicks Andre the Giant to the curb. I'm going to wrestle on my own terms. And he started touring all over the place and he became a little more of like a booster. So he was like big time in the tag team matches by them because one, he could walk out to the ring with his arms long over his tag team partner, which, you know, people in the crowd was like, oh, that's great.

They're like total teammates, but really Andre was using the guy as a cane. And then also he could just kind of stand in the corner and like play up the drama, but not actually wrestle. And the fans though, they were, they were just happy he was there. Yeah. They didn't care. Just having him in the building was enough. Yeah.

It was really, really pretty cool. Yeah. So here we are at the end. Very sadly, Andre's father Boris was approaching death in January of 1993 at the age of 87. And Andre went to see him in France before he died. He stayed there for his father's funeral and then he would die two weeks after that. Yeah. In France.

So on the last day on earth for Andre, the giant, he did what he loved more than anything else. He hung out with his oldest friends from his childhood in France. His family there played tons of cribbage and drank lots and lots of really good French wine. That's right. Farted on everybody. Yep.

And he got dropped off at a hotel in Paris that he was staying at and he went up the stairs and that was the last time anyone saw him alive. The next morning when he was supposed to be picked up, they went up to his room and knocked when he didn't appear and finally opened up the door and found Andre, the giant, dead in bed. He had died in the night of heart failure because the thing with acromegaly is most of your body grows and grows and grows, but the heart doesn't and the heart gets taxed over, you know, 46 years in the case of Andre, the giant, until it just can't beat any longer.

And so that's what happened. Andre, the giant, his heart just gave out. So there wasn't a crematorium in France that could handle his body. So they flew him back to North Carolina in a giant custom built coffin and apparently did the WWF steal the coffin? That's a word you could use. Yeah. After they flew him back?

Yeah. Yeah. They didn't like, like roll his body out mid-flight or something. They just basically waited until he was cremated. I'm going to steal it to fly him back. No, no, no, no. Okay. They flew him back and then stole it.

Yeah. Basically take the headquarters to put on display. Ah. You see? Okay. You see, Chuck? You see? We're working it out.

Midshow. So in 1993, the WWE at this point established its Hall of Fame and Andre, the giant was the very first and only inductee in that inaugural class and every year now the WWE still holds a battle royale named after Andre the Giant in his honor. Which is, if you stop and think about it, the pinnacle of human existence. To have a battle royale held in your name every year, like each one of us in this room should aspire to that in this life. Okay?

Let's make it packed right now, everybody. We can do it. So, I mentioned his daughter, Robin, earlier and the fact that they weren't closed and this is sort of one of the sad parts of his life was that, you know, when you're wrestling 5,000 times in a career and 330 nights a year, you're not like anyone in the entertainment business who tours and travels a lot, you're not going to be around your family much. So he had a daughter that he did not get to see that much. He had an ex-wife that he did not get along with at all, which didn't help matters.

I don't think they were ever actually married. Oh, no. Just an ex. Okay. So an ex that he didn't get along with. They weren't like working it out so he could see Robin. There was one time where he tried to have her flown to North Carolina and she was sort of scared to fly.

So he sent his good friend Jackie to go collect her and meet her at the airport and at the last second she kind of backed out. Yeah, because she was like, I'm going to hang out with my dad who I've met twice and my mom's not allowed to come and I'm nine years old and I'm a little freaked out. That's right. So that trip didn't work out. They did keep in touch, mostly over the phone, but like whenever he came through town for a wrestling, like she would come and hang out with him backstage.

And Jackie McCauley, one of his two closest friends, later said that no matter what it looked like from the outside, Andre really, really loved his daughter. And when he died, he left a sum to Jackie, a sum to his other best friend, Frenchie, and then the rest was left to Robin. Yeah, including the rights to his likeness and image, which I think we all know is where the real money sat. Right. That's the sweetest plum.

So I think she was trying to do a documentary or something about him for a while, with the very least interviewing like old friends of his so she could learn more about him. Right. It's very sweet. So he had a quote toward the end of his life, I'm sorry, at the height of his career, where he said, I've had good fortune and I'm grateful for my life. If I were to die tomorrow, I know I've eaten more good food, drunk more beer and fine wine and had more friends and seen more of the world than most men ever will.

I've had everything in life but a family and I hope to have that one day. For now, I know a family wouldn't work because of my traveling, but one day, who knows, I might myself have a giant for a grandson. That is Andre the Giant, everybody. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.