By some estimates, about 117 billion humans have lived on Earth. That’s a lot of people.
Which means, out of all those billions of humans, someone was the tallest. Someone was the fattest. Someone was the best at this or the best at that.
And out of those 117 billion humans, someone could drink more booze than anyone else.
With apologies to Guinness, we might not know who the tallest or fattest human in history was — the B.C. era wasn’t exactly known for its meticulous record-keeping — but we have an excellent idea who our biggest drinker was.
That’s because distilled spirits are a relatively new invention. While its exact origins are unclear, it seems to have caught on in the Middle Ages. Wine, beer, and mead have been around for thousands of years, but higher-proof spirits haven’t.
Which clarifies our timeline for the world’s greatest alcoholic, because alcohol tolerance is driven by consumption. Nobody is born a great drinker: It takes years and years of pounding your liver into oblivion.
Seems reasonable to assume that someone who had access to distilled spirits — vodka, whiskey, tequila — could out-imbibe those who hadn’t.
So let’s exclude everyone who was born more than a thousand years ago. They lacked the “training tools” to compete. (It’d be like trying to be a bodybuilder before the invention of weights.)
Additionally, not all body types are conducive to heavy alcohol consumption. Purely for biological reasons, women usually can’t drink as much as men. (This removes about half of the population from our sample.) And larger people can consume far more booze than smaller people: “Since alcohol travels through the blood stream, the more someone weighs, the more alcohol it is going to take to get that person drunk,” explains Student Health and Counseling Services at UCDavis.
Therefore, we now have a template for the world’s greatest drinker:
- He's a man.
- He was born within the last thousand years.
- He was very, very big.
Some of y’all have probably figured out his identity. But if you haven’t, here’s your final clue: Exactly one week from today — May 19 — would’ve been his 80th birthday.
If you want to drink like him, you better start drinking now!
Because we’re talking about a man who consumed 7,000 calories EACH DAY just from booze — and once drank 119 beers in six hours. Stories of his drinking prowess are legendary. Many defy comprehension.
When he stayed one month in an English hotel to film The Princess Bride, his bar bill was over $40,000.
André René Roussimoff was born in northern France on May 19, 1946. Better known by his pro wrestling name — Andre the Giant, a.k.a. “The Eighth Wonder of the World” — he was billed as standing 7-foot-5, weighing 520 pounds.
Whereas wrestling heights and weights are routinely embellished, Roussimoff was unquestionably an enormous man. (Photos of him standing next to 7-foot, 1-inch Wilt Chamberlain show them of similar height, albeit Andre was far heavier.)
#tbt to one of the rare moments I felt completely puny, with Wilt Chamberlain and Andre the Giant. I absolutely loved the HBO documentary on Andre this week and it was an honor to be part of it. He was bigger than life. pic.twitter.com/04xn6jRbgU
— Arnold Schwarzenegger (@Schwarzenegger) April 12, 2018
His fellow wrestlers — hardcore drinkers in their own right — were in awe of Andre’s liver. On the WWE’s Legends of Wrestling, Mike Graham and Dusty Rhodes claimed they watched Andre drink 156 16-ounce beers in a single sitting. The Fabulous Moolah wrote in her autobiography that Andre downed 127 beers in a Pennsylvania hotel and took an impromptu nap in the lobby — and because of his size, the hotel staff couldn’t move him.
Hours before Andre’s most famous match — his WrestleMania III showdown against Hulk Hogan — he allegedly drank 14 bottles of wine!
His size (and tolerance) also led to a medical breakthrough: When Andre needed back surgery, the anesthesiologist didn’t know what to do: He had never anesthetized someone of Andre’s immense proportions.
Modern Drunkard Magazine (yes, that’s a real publication) told the rest of this story:
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.
It’s tempting to applaud Andre’s unrivaled capacity to metabolize ethanol, but his drinking belied a darker, uglier truth: He suffered from gigantism (acromegaly) and was in chronic pain. His body never stopped growing, and eventually it killed him.
He died of heart failure on Jan. 28, 1993, in Paris, while visiting family for his father’s funeral. Andre the Giant was just 46.
But in his prime, he could outdrink any other human who’s ever lived.
This is André the Giant’s hand holding a 12-ounce can of beer. pic.twitter.com/XGZul2WCMW
— Meredith Frost (@MeredithFrost) May 19, 2020
It’s been said, “It’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years.” According to those closest to him, Andre was well aware of his mortality. Doctors told him his gigantism was a death sentence.
Andre refused medical treatment to alter it, deciding that God made him this way for a reason. His friend Jackie McAuley remembered him saying, “If this is the size God wants me to be, I’m going to be this size.”
So instead, he drank, he celebrated, he laughed — and oh, how he lived!
Happy 80th birthday, Andre. Cheers! We raise our glass in your honor.
Wish you were still here to celebrate with us.
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