Every time I see a photo of the great Andre the Giant, I just stare at it. My eyes go from one side of the picture to the other and just wonder what it would have been like to be him back in his day.

Andre the Giant was born in France as Andre Roussimoff. He was always listed as being from ‘Grenoble in the French Alps’, but the new HBO documentary put that claim to rest. Grenoble was a ‘worked’ hometown as Andre was really from a town outside of Paris.

Due to Andre having acromegaly, many of his features were enlarged (especially his head, hands and feet). His pituitary gland produced too much growth hormone and many with this condition suffer from other issues that lead to a shorter than normal life expectancy.

We list some photos of Andre the Giant that you may have never seen before. We tried to picked many that were rare, as we didn’t see many of these before we did a deep dive to find some new pictures of Andre the Giant.

We picked pictures from a lot of events. There are pics of Andre in Japan, him with celebrities, some of the pics are of him as a young man.

I wanted to describe one specific event that a few of these pictures came from, his match against boxer Chuck Wepner. 

Remember in Rocky III when Rocky Balboa faced Thunderlips (Hulk Hogan) in a boxer vs wrestler match? Well, Andre the Giant had a real-life boxer vs wrestler match against boxer Chuck Wepner in 1976. Sylvester Stallone has credited Chuck Wepner as being an inspiration for the Rocky character (but hasn’t exactly come out to say that he was 100% the reason he wrote ‘Rocky’). Also, Muhammad Ali faced wrestler Antonio Inoki around this time as well, so it was a popular gimmick to do. I just wanted to make sure people knew about this event and was curious why Andre the Giant was in photos with this random guy you may not know.

Enjoy! – Click on the photo for a larger/full view!

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About the Author…

Bobby Roberts (otherwise known as Sweetbob) is the creator of ‘America’s White Boy’ and contributor at Project Shanks. His writing has been featured on ESPN’s ‘SportsNation’, Sports Illustrated’s Hot Clicks, Guyspeed, and various other sites. You can follow him on Twitter at @Sweetbob.