20 Wrestling Facts You Probably Didn't Know
3. André The Giant Used To Be Driven To School By A Literary Legend
André Roussimoff began showing symptoms of his gigantism at an early age. At twelve, he was already six foot three and weighed well over 200lbs - and apparently he was too large to catch the school bus with the other kids his age. His father Boris couldn't afford a car, but even if he had, André was already getting too big to fit into one.
However, Boris' neighbour, a writer named Samuel Beckett, had heard of young André's problem, and offered a solution: the back of his truck. Boris had helped Beckett build his cottage the year before, and the neighbour felt he owed him one; so every morning, Beckett urged André into the back of his truck and drove him to school.
A decade or so later, Samuel Beckett would win the Nobel Prize for literature, having been cited as one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of his generation.
His masterpiece, Waiting For Godot, remains a key text in the formation of the notorious Theatre Of The Absurd... but I'd imagine nothing in that description is so darkly humorous as carrying a boy the size of a large full-grown man, dressed in school uniform, in the rear of his truck like a Roman Emperor.