“Hulk Hogan on Andre the Giant:
…people don’t get it. There was never a fork or a knife, even a bed! There was never a situation where he could be comfortable. He was a seven-foot-four giant. With all the injuries and everything he shrank down to under seven feet.
I watched him when he’d walk ahead of me at the airport. I heard people say horrible things and make fun of him.
He lived in a cruel world.
If you really understood what he went through and what he was all about, he was a gracious person with a kind heart. But he didn’t put up with any games or chicanery.
Most people don’t understand the big picture.
It turns out that being a giant kind of sucks. For the giant. For everyone else, it’s sort of awesome. Rob Reiner has to explain Andre’s $40k bar tab from a month of shooting in London, sure, but it’s a great story. Samuel Beckett drove a young Andre to school after he grew too much and wouldn’t fit in the school bus. Luckily, Beckett owned a truck and Andre could sit in the bed. Again, a pretty great story.
On the giant’s side, there’s a lot of pain, a lot of problems, and you’re just about guaranteed to die young.
What I liked about this book was that it was an unvarnished look at a man’s life. If you google around for Andre the Giant stories, lots of stuff about what a great dude he was, so kind and generous and all this. But the truth is that he pissed some people off. He was an ass more than a few times.
Andre’s memory might be a case of widespread AJ Syndrome.
AJ syndrome is a term I coined based on this kid who died at my junior high school. I certainly wouldn’t ever ever ever wish death on someone that young. Even then I didn’t. But when I heard the kid died…well, I could only conjure memories of the kid being a complete jerk. Because that’s the way he acted.
It’s unfair to respond to the death of a teenager by saying he was a jerk. Because so was I, and I was lucky enough to have time to build new opinions of me. Now people can hate me in a much more informed way, and I’m able to be a more adult, more mature type of jerk to them.
However, what’s also a bit unfair is to remember the dead as something they weren’t. To manufacture niceness from someone because they are now dead. Especially when we’re talking about an adult, even if that adult had a difficult life in a lot of ways.
This book, more than most of the other things I’ve read about Andre, seems to present the truth. Andre the Giant was a guy. A giant guy, a guy who drank over a hundred beers in a sitting, after which he passed out and was tucked under a piano cover, the only thing big enough to accommodate him. And he was also a guy who could be kind of a dick sometimes.
Yes, he’s dead, and there’s not a lot of point in saying bad things about the dead. EXCEPT that it makes me wonder…well, if a dead person is unassailable merely because he or she is dead, then what point is there in leaving a lasting legacy of goodness? We’ll all die eventually, and by dying we ascend to a certain level of sainthood? No thanks.
So I appreciate this book for what it is. Painting the sometimes ugly portrait, but not without empathy for the giant’s plight.
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