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| - For more than a decade, an image containing a quote attributed to professional wrestler and actor André the Giant — the stage name of André René Roussimoff — has circulated online. In the alleged quote shared in the posts, André the Giant insulted fellow pro wrestler Terry Bollea, better known by his stage name Hulk Hogan, as follows:
I don't like to speak badly of people. I have grown up thinking and being told that if you cannot say something nice about someone, you should not say anything at all. But I must break that rule in this case because I hate Hulk Hogan very much. He is a big ugly goon and I want to squash his face.
(X user @briangaar)
The image appears to have first circulated online in November 2012, when it was the subject of multiple Reddit posts. In the years since, it popped up on Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and in at least 19 separate Reddit posts, as found by the Reddit-focused reverse image search page Karma Decay. In a handful of instances, the quote has also circulated on its own, without the image.
Readers hoping to verify the authenticity of the quote, however, will be disappointed to find that none of these posts contains any information about the original context of the quote or the image in which it is most frequently shared.
In July 2024, some X users began to question the quote's veracity following a popular post featuring the image that had, as of this writing, received around 14,000 retweets and 107,000 likes. Other users were quick to point out that the wrestlers were reported to have been friends in real life, and the animosity sometimes expressed between André the Giant and Hulk Hogan was an example of kayfabe, which Merriam-Webster defines as "the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine."
the quote itself is most likely an in-character one promoting an upcoming match between the two.
but, that being said, many in the industry do not exactly have a high opinion of the hulkster for a very wide variety of reasons. hogan was an egomaniac grifter diva
— gatlin (@gojiraTimelord) July 19, 2024
Although kayfabe is a plausible explanation for the quote in that it could clarify why André the Giant would have said these words, it in no way proves that he actually did.
Some commenters, particularly on Reddit, have noted that the image containing the quote appears to be a clipping from an "Apter mag," one of the multiple wrestling magazines for which Bill Apter served as an editor in the late 1970s and 1980s. These magazines, which included Pro Wrestling Illustrated, The Wrestler, and Inside Wrestling, were known for playing into kayfabe storylines.
Snopes agrees that the formatting of the text from the widely shared image very closely resembles that used in "X-Ray," a regular feature of The Wrestler, one of the magazines Apter worked on. The feature consisted of quotes about individual wrestlers as solicited from figures in the pro wrestling world. Below, for example, is a screenshot of one such feature about Hulk Hogan from a May 1982 issue of The Wrestler.
(Internet Archive)
The André the Giant quote from the claim, however, does not appear in that issue's "X-Ray," nor does it appear in any of the dozens of other issues of The Wrestler magazine we've able to access so far.
We've reached out to Apter to ask if he's able to point us toward a secure citation for the André the Giant quote, and will update this story if and when we hear back. For now, Snopes rates this claim as "Research in Progress."
We've previously covered multiple claims of photos purporting to show André the Giant.
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