Think your drinking stories are epic? Well, while we're all impressed by that time you drank a six-pack of Zima and passed out on your lawn, Andre the Giant will forever be the undisputed champ when it comes to having an insanely high tolerance for booze.
Tales involving how much liquor the legendary professional wrestler could put away have circulated since the height of his career in the 1980s. But now Floyd Gerald Brisco, one half of the professional wrestling team the Brisco Brothers, offered up two more stories for the history books in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times on Monday.
"Andre used to ask me to get him six bottles of Mateus wine and ice them down," Brisco, a 69-year-old Oklahoma City native, remembered. "He would drink those before we went to the ring and no one could tell."
The retired wrestler also recounted a night on the road when Andre annihilated 24 tall boys.
"One night in Sarasota, Andre is traveling with us," Brisco continued. "So we pull over and get two cases of tall boys. By the time we get from Sarasota to the Tahitian Inn on Dale Mabry, the two cases were bone dry."
While it helped that Andre was over seven feet tall and weighed roughly 500 pounds, that's an ungodly amount of alcohol for any man to consume on his own. Andre suffered from acromegaly, a condition which causes the body to produce too many growth hormones, resulting in his above-average size, according to his website. With that kind of body mass, it makes sense that the wrestler could stomach more drinks in one sitting than most men could probably handle in an entire month.
When Andre appeared on the Late Night with David Letterman in 1984, he claimed to have consumed an even crazier amount of beer in a single night. The magic number? 117.
"Were you drunk at the end of that?" Letterman asked in awe. "I couldn't remember," Andre chuckled. "I think I passed out."
Andre was never a mean drunk, but that didn't stop the occasional inebriated fool from approaching him for a fight.
"He was one of the nicest guys but I have seen idiots in bars all over the country challenge him," Brisco said. "With one little shove they'd be 10 feet away."
[via Tampa Bay Times]