Modern Drunkard Magazine

[Pierrot le Fou]

The Modern Drunkard Magazine (http://drunkard.com/index.html)

A Sample:
Forget mom. Forget apple pie. The game of baseball is the single most recognizable symbol of our national heritage and character.

For well over a century the game has been our companion, through times both lean and fat, and has kept a country with a never-ending thirst for heroes well-stocked. Even those who have little interest in the game are familiar with its exemplars: Babe Ruth; Ty Cobb; Mickey Mantle; Jackie Robinson; Willie Mays. Children are reared on the game, its players, and their exploits.

Most of their exploits, anyhow.

Throughout the summer, ESPN highlights clutch hitting, long drifting dingers, shoestring catches, wild pickoffs at second and well-turned double plays. Players are justifiably esteemed for their amazing feats of athleticism. But when the subject turns to off-field behavior the tone gets all snarky. This is especially true when talking about what athletes put in their bodies. Take steroids. Major league players are routinely vilified for stepping even an inch out of line, despite the near total lack of evidence that steroids improve a player’s batting average—Barry Bonds was a serious hitter long before he went on the juice and turned his head into a pumpkin.

It boils down to this: of the four big-time American sports (football, basketball, and hockey being the other three) baseball is viewed as the one with the most class. Unlike football and hockey, baseball isn’t a brawl, it’s a chess game, a finely-tuned merger of athletics and smarts, a competition as much cerebral as physical. Football players are expected to be violent. Football is a violent game. Baseball, apart from the occasional collision at home plate, or bench-clearing tussle, isn’t. Baseball players are supposed to carry themselves with an air of calm, with a certain degree of stoicism, and with a kind of quiet arrogance designed to inspire confidence rather than disenchantment.

Getting regularly liquored-up doesn’t fit the image we’ve assigned ball players. But this hasn’t always been the case.

It wasn’t all that long ago that everything the average fan knew about his favorite player was encapsulated on the back of a baseball card. Personalities took a back seat to statistics. What happened on the field was paramount. Except for certain rare circumstances (e.g. Joe DiMaggio’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe, or Lou Gehrig’s illness), fans were not privy to players’ private lives. As a result, players were able to ditch their uniforms after a game and act as they wished, safe in the knowledge that, for the most part, no one was paying attention.

These days, it’s a whole other, uh, ballgame. In line with our ever more intrusive culture, ball players are scrutinized as never before; scrutinized, analyzed, and vilified for stepping out of line. Entire television programs are devoted to unearthing the foibles and follies of our athletes, and then subjecting suspect behavior to a critique by a panel of “experts,” most of whom have no more business engaging in psychological speculation than Mr. Ed has entering the Kentucky Derby. This is why so many professional athletes appear to be cardboard cut-outs; mannequins in uniforms mouthing tedious clichés, vanilla and boring as dirt.

It’s enough to make a fella wish it was 1986.

Now there was a year for baseball. It was the last year that a bunch of unabashed party animals were front and center on a major league baseball team. The New York Mets of that summer were, collectively, and with very few exceptions, drunkards without peer. They were also about as talented a team of ball players as has ever prowled the diamond.

Opponents called them “arrogant,” “insufferable,” and “a bunch of assholes.” They weren’t far off the mark. The ’86 Mets swaggered. They strutted. They punished other teams and smiled while they did it. Over the course of that storied season, they were involved in four bench-clearing fights—not light rounds of pushing and posturing, but full-bore mob scenes, complete with blood, torn clothing, and dark intentions. The team earned the wrath of the entire league when they recorded a rap song (Get Metsmerized). It went double platinum. Angry moral posturers shrieked when several players lit cigarettes in the dugout, and when many more took the field with noticeable hangovers. Pitcher Bobby Ojeda summed up the team when he said: “We were throwbacks. We were like, ‘Gimme a steak, gimme a fuckin’ beer, gimme a smoke, and get the fuck out of our way.’” Compared to today’s bland players, the Mets were monsters, the antithesis of everything the game has become.

The 1986 Mets roster reads like it was lifted from an All Star Game program: Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, Keith Hernandez, Lenny Dykstra, Bobby Ojeda, Mookie Wilson, Gary Carter. By anyone’s estimation, this is a serious line-up. They had power hitting, acrobatic defense, and white-hot pitching.

They played hard and, well, they played hard.

We’ll disregard Gooden and Strawberry’s well-known cocaine problems, and also the fact that baseball players, in those days, ate speed like candy, and concentrate on their massive intake of alcohol. They were drinkers, these guys; mostly beer, but they’d tipple about anything. And they did it right out there in public, too, often gathering after games at Shea at a blue collar watering hole called Finn MacCool’s, where they drank with their fans and bought rounds for the house. If you stopped by Finn’s around three in the morning after a home game, you’d likely see a gaggle of Mets staggering along the sidewalk, carrying another teammate between them, trailed by a giggling swarm of female groupies. The owner of Finn’s once claimed that the ’86 Mets single-handedly kept his bar in business.

But the boys didn’t need a regular saloon to get their drink on. No, they could, and did, drink just about anyplace.

They kept a refrigerator stocked with beer in their locker room at Shea. After games, players stayed late into the night emptying it. Many times the team trainer arrived the next morning to find men passed out all over the floor, half-naked, surrounded by crushed Budweiser cans. The trainer would get them on their feet and into the showers. When they were awake, a shot of B-12, a couple of cigarettes and a six-pack got them ready for the day’s double-header. These guys played with hangovers so often it began to seem like their normal physical state.

Not every member of the squad boozed it up regularly (Gary Carter was something of a teetotaling publicity hound), but the men who did more than made up for the others’ lack of effort. First among the diehard boozeheads was the trio made up of Danny Heep, Jesse Orosco and Doug Sisk. Together, they were known as the Scum Bunch. The rest of the dugout feared their practical jokes (a hot foot given to a coach on national television was one notable example), with rookie players and the more straight-laced team members as preferred targets. Their primary motivation was, according to sportswriter Jeff Pearlman, “to corrupt as many Mets as possible.” They were very good at it.

It was on road trips that the Scum Bunch really let themselves blossom. They inhabited the back of the plane, and you entered their domain at your own risk.

First, you’d hear the noise. Hooting, belching and hysterical laughter, punctuated by the steady double thwack! of a baseball bat connecting with a can of beer and the can ricocheting off the wall. Then you’d catch the smell—post-game sweat, cigarette smoke and fart gas, intermingling with the odor of spilled beer and Fritos. Then there was the Scum Bunch themselves, surrounded by as many cohorts as they could attract, playing drinking games with one eye on the lookout for potential victims. There were few short-term visitors to the Bunch’s den. You came to play or you stayed away.

Among the many drinking games they played, the simplest and most popular required only a deck of playing cards. Anyone could follow the rules. When your turn came around the next guy in line held the deck out and you began selecting cards off the top. A red card meant you picked again, while a black meant you drank. Each participant went through an entire deck, then it moved on to the next. The Scum Bunch and their guests might play ten or fifteen decks each on a flight. When they ran out of beer they used mini bottles. The stewardesses quickly learned that they should venture into Scum Bunch territory only when it was absolutely necessary—it was scary back there.

In October of 1986, the Mets, led by the Scum Bunch, pulled off two amazing feats, one on the field and one off.

Although the Mets had pretty much steamrolled most of their opponents, in the NLCS they ran headlong into a feisty Houston Astros team who steadfastly refused to believe that the Mets were the Chosen Ones. For a time all looked lost, and for a team as powerful as the Mets to fail to go on to win the World Series would be a failure of mammoth proportion. So they got serious, or what passed for serious with these guys, and eventually body slammed the Astros in Game 6 to take the NLCS pennant. They were off to the World Series.

The plane ride back to New York turned into a scene of such drunkenness and debauchery that it became the stuff of Major League legend. Putting it baldly, the Mets ate their chartered plane alive and sucked the marrow from its still-shivering bones.

In violation of long-standing policy, many of the players brought their wives and girlfriends along for the trip. Mets management had laded the 707 with three times its usual compliment of alcohol and food. It was to be a celebration. All totaled, the celebration cost United Airlines and the Mets franchise tens of thousands of dollars, including bills for the damage done to the plane.

Some players were already loaded when they boarded. Everyone else (even the straight-laced Gary Carter) got that way quickly. The Scum Bunch was in full frenzy. Players, coaches and various wives and mistresses, careened up and down the aisle toasting, whooping and dancing, while the airline’s crew attempted to serve the special post-win meal of steak and lobster. There was also a large cake with congratulations done in Mets’ blue and orange frosting. It was the first casualty. Moments after its appearance it was put to use as weaponry for what might be the most spectacular food fight in the history of professional sports. People, seats and walls were plastered in gooey frosting, and the party was only ramping up.

Darryl Strawberry, who was about as nasty a drunk as you’re likely to find, decided he wanted to lay down, convinced, in his stupor, that the seats turned into couches. They didn’t, but that didn’t stop Straw from breaking a good half-dozen in his attempt to make them lay flat. Rafael Santana peed down the back of Ed Hearn’s shirt. Wives and girlfriends, those who weren’t otherwise involved in topless shenanigans, yarked in seat pockets. The Scum Bunch started up a game of beer-can baseball. Dented cans sailed through the air, foam spraying like geysers. Guys strapped steaks to their feet and went skiing. There were antics that bordered on public fornication. Several players got into fistfights, then made up and drank to each others health. People did things in the restrooms that defied logic and the laws of physics.

When they landed in New York to the cheers of thousands of fans, the players looked so horrible that spectators could only gape in astonishment, but that didn’t stop Darryl Strawberry from emptying a bottle of Andre Champagne over the head of Mayor Ed Koch.

The next morning at the team meeting, manager Davey Johnson reamed the players in a tirade that lasted several minutes, waving the bill from United in one fist for emphasis.

Then he paused.

“Well,” he said, “do you know what I think? I think in the next four games you’ll put enough money in these guys’ pockets to cover this. So fuck this bullshit.”

The team cheered.

About two weeks later, the Mets beat the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series.

Today, the ’86 World Series is remembered mostly because of Bill Buckner, who committed one of the great errors in baseball history when he let Mookie Wilson’s soft grounder roll between his legs, allowing the Mets to win the game. But let’s not remember it for that alone. Let’s remember it because of the arrogant, swaggering, drunken Mets. They were the last of a long line, and when they passed, the glory days of professional baseball passed with them.

There are too few ball players these days who live their lives without the guidance of public opinion and potential public outrage. A team like the ’86 Mets couldn’t exist today. Guys don’t fuel themselves with liquor anymore. They use steroids and protein shakes. It’s sad.

In closing, let’s hear from the great Keith Hernandez who said, “You don’t win a World Series drinking milk.”

—Rich English

(Note: The Author is indebted to the work of Jeff Pearlman.)
A time killer for you drinkers. It's a wonderfully written magazine.

[xinster]

post the whole magazine faggot

[Decade]

If I'm drunk, how the fuck do you expect me to read all that, much less at all?

:watson: You owe me a round in beantown

[Y.T.]

Read all you can..

Once the Moral Majority (or radical Islam) have taken over (Puritans of all kinds'll outbreed the rest of us, and then finish off democracy by weight of numbers - how many kids do you think Bible thumpers, Wahhabis or Haredi Jews have? Not one, but eleven .. ), old copies of magazines and homebrew liquor'll be the totality of all things in which you drunkards'll be able to find solace..

For the intellectually challenged few .. here's a link.
Surprisingly, you can find modern drunkards at http://www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/

[Micah the Great]

post the whole magazine faggot

Haha, i lol'd at work.

[amg]

Modern Drunkard Mag rocks. Their profile of Andre the Giant is fantastic and inspiring

[Televisions_Nick]

Modern Drunkard Mag rocks. Their profile of Andre the Giant is fantastic and inspiring

Indeed it is, so I'll post it.

Do you have a favorite drunkard?

Some amazing man or woman, past or present, who stands colossus-like atop the Big Keg, the ground below littered with crushed empties and the blacked-out carcasses of lesser beings? A verging demigod, whose prowess with a bottle leaves you shaking your head in pop-eyed adoration? Lots of us do.

In addition to their wrist-raising abilities, we deify great drinkers because they indulge their lust for intoxication while simultaneously operating at the peak of their powers in whatever their chosen profession. In other words, great drunks are also great writers, actors, athletes, scientists, statesmen, philosophers, and so on.

I have a favorite drunkard. He was an athlete—a professional wrestler in fact—but he was also a gifted entertainer and a true artist. His parents named him Andre Rene Rousimoff, but we knew him as The Eighth Wonder of the World, Andre the Giant.

For two decades, from the late 1960s through the mid 1980s, Andre the Giant was the highest paid professional wrestler in the business and a household name across the globe. Promoters fought tooth and nail to book Andre, as his presence on a card all but guaranteed a sell-out. Fans cheered his every move, and mobbed him on the street as if he were a great big Beatle.

For proof of his drawing power, look no further than Wrestlemania III in 1987. The main event was Andre vs. Hulk Hogan. The show drew the first million-dollar gate in wrestling history, set a pay-per-view record that lasted a decade, and set the all-time indoor attendance record for any live event ever—78,000+ butts in seats at the Pontiac Silver Dome in Detroit—destroying the previous record set by some rock band called the Rolling Stones. His rematch with Hogan two months later, broadcast live on NBC, attracted 33 million viewers, making it the most watched wrestling match ever.

Known to his friends simply as “Giant” or “Boss,” Andre was born on May 19th, 1946, in Grenoble, France, the child of Russian immigrants. Shortly after his birth, he was diagnosed with a rare glandular disease, acromegaly, which caused his body to over-produce growth hormones. As a result, Andre grew to a height of somewhere between 6’11” and 7’5” and a weight of over 500 pounds (his actual height and weight have been speculated about for decades—the business is notorious for inflating wrestlers’ statistics—but Andre’s illness sometimes made him slouch or bow his shoulders, so he might well have been the advertised 7’5”). He first wrestled as Andre the Butcher, but it was Vincent J. McMahon Sr., owner of New York’s World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF), who christened him “Andre the Giant.”

While it can be argued that a miniscule handful of professional wrestlers matched Andre’s in-ring achievements (Gorgeous George back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, perhaps; Dusty Rhodes in the ‘70s, and Hulk Hogan, without a doubt, in the ‘80s), no other wrestler ever matched his exploits as a drunkard. In fact, no other human has ever matched Andre as a drinker. He is the zenith. He is the Mount Everest of inebriation.
As far as great drunkards go, there is Andre the Giant, and then there is everyone else.

The big man loved two things: wrestling and booze—mostly booze—and his appetites were of mythic proportion.

First, consider the number 7,000. It’s an important number, and a rather scary one considering its context, which is this—it has been estimated that Andre the Giant drank 7,000 calories worth of booze every day. The figure doesn’t include food. Just booze.

7,000 calories.

Every day.

I don’t know about you, but it makes my brain turn somersaults. Hell, it makes my brain perform an entire floor routine, complete with colored ribbons.

When Andre arrived in New York to begin his long working relationship with the McMahon family, his reputation as both a serious student of the nightlife and an extravagant spender was already a topic of speculation and wonder among East Coast wrestlers and promoters. Andre might make $15,000-$20,000 for a single appearance at Madison Square Garden, and a substantial amount of that went to settling the bar tabs he piled up as he boozed his way up and down Manhattan until sunrise. Andre’s generosity matched his size. He often invited a gang of fellow wrestlers along for the ride, as he disliked drinking alone, and picked up some truly staggering tabs. Andre was going to have a good time and went out of his way to make sure everyone else did too.

Worried about his headliner, Vince McMahon Sr. assigned a “handler” to the Giant—long-time wrestler, manager, and road agent, Arnold Skaaland, whose only job when Andre was in town was to keep him out of serious trouble and get him to the arena in time to wrestle. Skaaland was an old-school drinker in his own right, but Andre blew his mind. On one occasion he could only watch goggle-eyed as Andre went about demolishing a dozen or so quarts of beer as a “warm-up” for a match.

With Skaaland on the job, Vince Sr. knew Andre was in capable hands, but the promoter still worried about how the Giant would cope with the insane amount of travel required of a wrestling superstar. Andre loathed flying—no commercial airliner could accommodate such a massive man without resorting to the luggage compartment—and his opinion of most cars wasn’t much sunnier, because aspects of his disease caused intense pain in his knees, hips and lower back when he remained too long in a cramped position. When a tight schedule left a plane or car as the only option, Andre eased his discomfort by getting good and hammered.

Vince Sr. pondered the situation and arrived at a novel solution. He wanted to keep the big man happy, so he bought a trailer and had it customized just for Andre. With plenty of room to spread out and relax, Andre could now travel in a semblance of comfort, which allowed him to do some serious boozing. During trips Andre consumed beer at the incredible rate of a case every ninety minutes, with bottles of vodka or top-rate French wine thrown in for variety.

Sadly, the trailer wasn’t available outside the WWWF territory; Vince Sr. wasn’t about to do the competition any favors. Andre didn’t expect other promoters to pony up a trailer just for him, so he commissioned a customized Lincoln Continental. With the front seat now positioned about where the back seat would normally be, Andre had a little leg room. He carried his luggage and wrestling gear in the trunk and towed his necessities in a trailer. Lined with plastic tarps, the rickety trailer was filled with ice and cases of Budweiser tallboys. As he cruised the nation’s highways, Andre kept a case on the seat beside him, stopping only for food, more ice, and another case or two if he ran low.

As famous as Andre was in this country, he was even bigger in Japan. He spent a few months out of every year over there, where he was treated like a living god and pocketed five-figure payoffs for a single night’s work. That being said, Andre didn’t really like Japan. Everything was too small. Hotel beds were like bassinets and it was all but impossible for him to shower or go to the bathroom in their Lilliputian facilities. He was known to rip the door off his hotel bathroom and make use of the toilet by sitting sideways with his legs sticking out into the main room.
Getting from show to show presented its own problems. Japanese promoters preferred to transport the gaijin wrestlers by bus, vehicles which steadfastly refused to house giants. In order to placate their star import, promoters removed several rows of seats from the back of the bus, creating something of a private cabin for Andre, a place spacious enough for him to stretch out or catch a nap. Mostly, though, Andre used the space as a comfortable spot to do his drinking.

A very green rookie wrestler named Hulk Hogan toured Japan several times with Andre and witnessed the Giant’s alcohol consumption first hand. According to Hogan, Andre drank, at a minimum, a case of tall boys during each bus ride. When he finished a can Andre would belch, crush the can in his dinner-platter-sized hand, and bounce the empty off the back of Hogan’s head. Hogan learned to count each thunk, so he could anticipate when Andre was running low. Whenever the bus stopped, it was Hogan’s job to scamper off to the nearest store, buy as many cases of beer as he could carry, and make it back before the bus departed, a sight that never failed to make Andre roar his bassoon-like laugh.

On one tour, Andre’s Japanese sponsors rewarded him with a case of expensive plum wine. Andre settled down in the back of the bus and started drinking. Four hours later, the bus arrived at the next venue, and Andre was polishing off the last bottle of wine.

Sixteen bottles of wine in four hours is a considerable feat, but it gets better. Andre proceeded straight to the ring and wrestled three matches, including a twenty-man battle royal. The 16 bottles of plum wine had no discernible effect on Andre’s in-ring ability. By the end of the evening, Andre had sweated off the wine and found himself growing cranky. He dispatched Hogan for a few cases of beer. Hogan hurried to do as Andre asked, knowing from painful experience that a drunken Giant was a happy Giant, and a happy Giant was less likely to fracture some vital part of an opponent’s anatomy in a fit of grumpiness.

In 1977, “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes wrestled Andre at Madison Square Garden. Afterwards, the old friends went out on the town. They adjourned to one of Andre’s favorite watering holes and took stools at the bar (Andre occupied two). Several hours and some 100 beers later (around 75 of them were Andre’s), they decided to head back to their hotel. Andre looked at taxis with the same scorn as most other conveyances and announced that he and Dusty would walk, which was problem because Dusty was having trouble maintaining a vertical position. Andre studied the situation, and a twinkling grin blossomed across his huge face. People who spent any time with the big man quickly learned to watch for that grin. It was a harbinger of danger. It meant that Andre was contemplating something risky, something with potential legal ramifications, but also, most assuredly, something fun.

A moment later, the two huge wrestlers attacked a pair of horse-drawn carriages. Dusty threw a handful of paper money at one driver while Andre hauled the other from his seat with one hand. While one driver cursed and the other scrabbled around on the ground collecting his windfall, Andre and Dusty thundered off in the carriages. They raced through the Manhattan streets, dodging cars and pedestrians for fifteen blocks before ditching the carriages and lathered horses a block from their hotel. By the time the cops arrived, Andre and Dusty were enjoying snifters of brandy in the hotel bar, appearing as innocent as angels. The next day, they main-evented another card at the Garden. Another sell-out. Two pros at the top of their games.

Another time, in the ‘70s, Andre was holding court at a beach-front bar in the Carolinas, boozing it up with fellow wrestlers Blackjack Mulligan, Dick Murdoch, and the inimitable Ric Flair. They’d been drinking with gusto for hours when Flair goaded Mulligan and Murdoch into some slap-boxing with Andre, who had poured over 60 beers down his gullet. One of the two “accidentally” sucker-punched Andre. The Giant became enraged, grabbed both Mulligan (6’5”, 250 lbs.) and Murdoch (6’3”, 240 lbs.) and dragged them into the ocean, one in each hand, where he proceeded to hold them under water. Flair intervened, and Andre released the men, assuring them he was only playing around. Murdoch and Mulligan, who had nearly drowned, weren’t so sure, but neither messed with Andre the Giant again. They also picked up the tab.

On another occasion, Andre was touring the Kansas City territory and went out for drinks after a show with Bobby Heenan and several other wrestlers. When the bartender hollered last call, Andre, slightly annoyed, announced that he didn’t care to leave. Rather than risk an altercation with his hulking customer, the bartender told Andre he could stay only if he was drinking, imagining, surely, that he would soon be rid of the big fella. Andre thanked the man, and proceeded to order 40 vodka tonics. He sat there drinking them, one after another, finishing the last at just after five in the morning.

When ill health forced Andre to largely quit wrestling in the late ‘80s, he accepted the role of Fezzik in Rob Reiner’s movie The Princess Bride. Everyone on the set loved the big man, with the possible exception of Reiner himself. Ever the sociable fellow, he kept fellow cast members Mandy Patinkin and Carey Elwes out night after night, drinking and otherwise goofing around. The actors were incapable of matching Andre’s intake, but certainly gave it a serious try. As a result, they often showed up on set still loaded or suffering from the sort of hangovers that make death seem a pleasant alternative. Reiner tried to get Andre to leave the actors alone, but Andre could only be Andre, and the other cast members continued to pay the price.

The shooting schedule required Andre to be in England for about a month. When his part wrapped, Andre checked out of his suite at the Hyatt in London and flew back to his ranch in North Carolina. His bar bill for the month-long stay?

Just a shade over $40,000.

Now, if everything I’ve described so far isn’t proof enough that Andre the Giant was the greatest drunkard who ever lived, these last two stories should set my claim in granite.

You won’t find it in the Guinness Book of World Records, but Andre the Giant holds the world record for the largest number of beers consumed in a single sitting. These were standard 12-ounce bottles of beer, nothing fancy, but during a six-hour period Andre drank 119 of them. It was one of the few times Andre got drunk enough to pass out, which he did in a hallway at his hotel. His companions, quite drunk themselves, couldn’t move the big man. Fearing trouble with cops, they stole a piano cover from the lounge and draped it over Andre’s inert form. He slept peacefully until morning, unmolested by anyone. Perhaps the hotel people thought he was a piece of furniture.

Think about it: 119 beers in six hours. That’s a beer every three minutes, non stop. That’s beyond epic. It’s beyond the ken of mortal men. It’s god-like.

Giants are not made long for this world, and toward the end of his life injuries and health problems caused by the acromegaly caught up with Andre. It became difficult just to walk, let alone wrestle, so he retired to his North Carolina ranch to drink wine and watch the countryside. He declined myriad requests for a comeback, despite promises of lavish payoffs. He was simply in too much pain to perform at the level he demanded of himself. Then he received a call from Vince McMahon Jr.

McMahon was in the midst of taking his WWF promotion national. He’d scored big-time with his Wrestlemania events on pay-per-view, and as Wrestlemania III approached, Vince Jr. was hot to make it the biggest thing yet. To make that happen, he needed Andre the Giant.

Andre was in France visiting his ailing father when the call came. He thanked Vince Jr. but said there was no way he could get back in a ring, even though he very much wanted to. Not willing to give up, Vince Jr. flew to France to speak with Andre in person. He took Andre to see doctors specializing in back and knee maladies. Radical back surgery was proposed. If successful, the procedure would lessen Andre’s pain and perhaps make it possible for him to get in the ring for Wrestlemania. If Andre was game, Vince Jr. agreed to pay for the entire cost of the surgery.

The time arrived, and the anesthesiologist was frantic. He had never put a person of Andre’s size under the gas before and had no idea how much to use. Various experts were brought in but no solution presented itself until one of the doctors asked Andre if he was a drinker. Andre responded that, yes, he’d been known to tip a glass from time to time. The doctor then wanted to know how much Andre drank and how much it took to get him drunk.

“Well,” rumbled the Giant, “It usually takes two liters of vodka just to make me feel warm inside.”

And thus was a solution found. The gas-passer was able to extrapolate a correct mixture for Andre by analyzing his alcohol intake. It was a medical breakthrough, and the system is still used to this day.

Five months later, Andre the Giant wrestled a “body-slam” match against Hulk Hogan and brought down the house.

Two liters of vodka. Warm and fuzzy. Side by side like that, the two sentences hardly make any sense. For most of us, two liters of vodka means a one-way ticket to Blackout Island aboard the good ship Regurgitania.

After Wrestlemania, Andre retired for good. His beloved father died in 1993 and Andre returned to France to be with his family. He was still there when, on January 26th, 1993, Andre died in his sleep of heart failure at the age of 47.

The key to Andre the Giant is this — even as a youth he knew that his disease would dramatically shorten his life. He knew there was no cure, and lived every day with the understanding that death could shamble around the very next corner. Knowledge of this sort can darken a life.

It did not darken Andre’s.

He chose instead to pack his days with as much insane, drunken fun as they could hold. Instead of languishing in the darkness, he chose to walk in the sun.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now. Andre the Giant was an inspiration. I would pay a fortune for the opportunity to go back in time 30 years to watch such a master practice his craft, in the ring and at the bar.

Andre the Giant was the very embodiment of what being a drunkard is all about.
—Richard English

(Note: The Author is indebted to the works of Brian Solomon, Ric Flair, Terry Funk, “Superstar” Billy Graham, Dave Meltzer, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, and Hulk Hogan.)