Officials unveiled a roadside marker Thursday in Ellerbe, North Carolina, honoring Andre the Giant, the larger-than-life wrestler who lived on a ranch just outside the small community and helped make professional wrestling a global draw.
Andre the Giant was born Andre Rene Roussimoff in France and was billed at 7-foot-4 and 520 pounds during his years wrestling for WWE in the 1970s and 1980s. He later faced Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania III in 1987 and appeared that same year in The Princess Bride as Fezzik.
The marker gives a tiny Richmond County community of about 1,000 people a public reminder of a man whose fame stretched far beyond North Carolina. Roussimoff bought his ranch about 60 miles east of Charlotte and raised cattle there, building a home base in a place that was otherwise far removed from the arenas where he made his name.
That mix of showmanship and local ties is what made the marker feel overdue to wrestler Vladimir Koloff, who said Roussimoff deserved it because he turned wrestling from a regional pastime into a huge international business. Koloff’s judgment fits the numbers behind the legend: a 7-foot-4 giant who was still pulling crowds long after most athletes would have faded from view.
There was one final act in 1990, when Roussimoff taped TV and radio spots opposing a possible low-level radioactive landfill nearby, using his celebrity for a fight that mattered to the area around his ranch. He died in 1993 at age 46 in France while visiting for his father’s funeral, and his ashes were later spread at the ranch he loved.
The marker does more than memorialize a wrestling star. It fixes Andre the Giant to a place that still remembers him, and it makes clear why Ellerbe is claiming a piece of the story: he was not just a name on an arena poster, but a neighbor whose life and death were tied to that land.