Andre the Giant
In 1946 in the little town just 40 miles East of Paris, a man was born to a family of Eastern European immigrants (specifically Bulgaria and Poland). Andre Rene Roussimoff weighed thirteen pounds at birth and carried the nickname Dede. Right from the start he was taller and bigger than all the other children in his village and while a trained clinician might have diagnosed gigantism at an early age, the family lore held that his grandfather had been 7’8” tall, so no one thought it was anything other than the family gene pool. At age twelve he stood 6’3”. By contrast, at age twelve I think I was something like 5’3” which is well over average. Dede spent his adolescent years working on his father’s farm doing what was deemed as the work of three normal men and growing to a height of 7’8” and slightly over 500 pounds in weight. He was, what you might say, a big boy.
At the age of eighteen he made his way to the big city lights of Paris where it took no time at all for a local promoter to latch onto his bulk and potential in the realm of professional wrestling. All of his training was at night while during the day he moved furniture for a living. By 1970 he was wrestling globally under the name of Andre the Giant. My son Roger is the wrestling enthusiast in the family, so I will not pretend to chronicle Andre’s wrestling career and will also refrain from any commentary about pro wrestling as a sport. It clearly takes a degree of physicality and coordination and it operates like a sport, but it is unclear that it follows any of the other true to form aspects of other more mainstream organized or professional sports.
It took me some time to come to grips with the reality that my oldest son found great passion for something I, as a larger and more obviously similar person in stature to a pro wrestler, found silly and over-the-top burlesque. At first I thought it was a childhood fixation and that the “phase” would pass. Over time I realized it was not passing and that Roger was a true enthusiast of pro wrestling. I think the moment that I stopped criticizing it (at least in my own head) was when I had a young derivatives trader who kept small pro wrestler figurines on the top of his computer screens. That young trader, who was always one of our best, went on to be the CEO of a major European investment bank. I ride motorcycles and collect small model motorcycles for fun. Roger is passionate and follows pro wrestling. I now acknowledge that there is little difference.
As little as I know about pro wrestling, including the business end with Vince McMahon, WWF, WWE, WrestleMania and all the permutations the pro wrestling marketing machine has rolled out, The things I do know are Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan. And naturally, it was Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan that paired off in a goof grudge match at Shea Stadium in NYC. It turns out the Kabuki of pro wrestling is such that grudge matches and feuds are the stuff of great promotion and it brings in the crowds, who may well know its all a show, but love the theatrics anyway.
I am drawn to the story of Andre the Giant for several reasons. Let’s be honest, I rarely encounter men who are bigger than I am and usually they are just taller, not taller and bigger. Andre Roussimoff is both taller and bigger than I ever was, even at my peak. And given the physicality of his profession, this was not a 600 pound person stuck in the bedroom of a farmhouse somewhere unable to walk to a cattle scale for a physical examination. He was a regular guy (extraordinarily large, but otherwise functioning in the world in normal manner) and he was much bigger than I was, which somehow made me feel more normal. The second reason is his name. I cannot hear the name Andre without thinking about my father. He was born Silvano Andre Prosdocimi and then changed his name around 1962 to Andre Silvano Marin. Changing out the mouthful of a last name as a newly minted American citizen (by virtue of marriage to my mother) was to be expected, but swapping his first and middle names to the more American mainstream was a tad showman-like. Silvano sounded serious and more foreign than intriguing. Andre sounded dashing and exotic while more normal by American standards. Andre sounds like someone who looks like Errol Flynn (strange since the name Errol is totally distinct and unique and yet somehow seems very Americanized at this point thanks, mostly, to the man himself and his notoriety).
I wrote a story about my father called “Too Big To Box”. It was about the machinations I went through as his oldest son in preparing for and executing the rituals of his funeral services after his death. The play on words had to do with the cremation ashes and their inability to all fit into the brass box provided by the funeral director who managed the Mission where he is interred. But the other double entendre was that to his children, and perhaps especially to me as his oldest known son, he seemed larger than life. In reality he was 6’1”, so tall for a man of his generation (born into The Greatest Generation in 1923), but no one would call him a giant in stature. On the other hand, I was often referred to as a giant both in my youth and in adulthood. I do not suffer from gigantism or acromegaly, the medical disorders that cause excessive growth hormones to excrete from the pituitary glands. Andre, however, suffered from the excessive enthusiasm for life and sexual profligacy that caused him to marry at least six or seven times and father a known array of nine children and counting (we just added two to the array in the past year).
This past weekend I threw a holiday party for all of my fellow siblings and I coined it as a gathering of Andre’s Kids. There were only five of the identified and acknowledged nine that we know exist, but those five represented three different nuclear families. He had been married to two of the mothers and not so much with the third. The age range of the siblings was between sixty and seventy years old. There were three spouses in attendance and one of Andre’s grandchildren (actually, his oldest known grandchild). All of the attending and at least seven of the nine children of Andre have given him grandchildren (I am just not certain about the other two, but they may have as well). By my count, his legacy is these nine children and the fifteen known grandchildren and, so far, eleven great-grandchildren (its early days on the procreation timeline for that generational cohort).
The gathering served two purposes, to give us all the chance see one another (all those who attended live in California) and or get to know one another better. We have two more in Southern California, one in Las Vegas and one in Mexico City. The gathering also allowed us to swap stories to add to our collective knowledge of the great man. He may have been mostly an absentee father to most of us, but when you live a large life, which he did, your motorboat wake wobbles all the canoes on the pond. That is why I find myself calling him Andre the Giant, not so much in stature or bulk, like me, but certainly in terms of impact on the human race in this part of the world as we know it.