Wrestling legend André the Giant is associated with some pretty big numbers: He weighed 520 pounds, and stood nearly seven and a half feet tall.

His most famous match, meanwhile, a headlining tilt against Hulk Hogan at 1987’s WrestleMania III, helped set a world indoor-attendance record (93,173), and was touted the most-watched pay-per-view event in history.

André’s face is so iconic that Shepard Fairey swiped it for his late-eighties street art campaign, which evolved into the logo for his OBEY clothing brand. The entire WWF Hall of Fame was created just so André could be inducted into it.

There’s no doubt that the man born André René Roussimoff was a natural performer, beloved by fans and peers alike. But one of his strangest show-biz encounters came years before he ever stepped inside the ring or in front of a camera. If you found yourself in rural France in the late 1950s, there’s a chance you might have seen it, too: a gargantuan, preteen André being chauffeured to school by future Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett.

Back then, life was pretty good for the famously dour playwright. His masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, had premiered in France in 1953 to rave reviews, making the 47-year-old an instant celebrity. That same year, Beckett and his wife bought a plot of land in Molien, a hamlet about 30 miles outside the hustle and bustle of Paris. It was there, in the idyllic commune of Ussy-sur-Marne, that the couple hired a local handyman to build them a cottage, and over time he and Beckett became friendly.

One day the handyman, a Bulgarian farmer named Boris Roussimoff, told Beckett about the unusual predicament his son was in. Twelve-year-old André was bright, the handyman said. Especially when it came to math. But the boy’s gigantism was causing troubles for him at school — and more specifically, on the school bus. André literally couldn’t fit inside it. At age 12, he was already six-two and weighed 240 pounds.

When Boris told Beckett about André’s predicament, the playwright was sympathetic. Not just that, he realized he might actually be able to help. See, the big-city refugee happened to own the only convertible in Ussy-sur-Marne, and therefore the only vehicle that André could comfortably fit inside without hunching over or smashing his head against the doorframe. Beckett offered to drive the boy to and from school, and his father agreed.

It’s an image straight out of a bad improv sketch, isn’t it? The frowning modernist genius in the driver’s seat, next to the ebullient gentle giant holding his schoolbooks. But it happened. Now, on to the obvious question: What on earth did Beckett and André talk about? As it turns out, mostly cricket. Which is a little surprising, given the sport’s relative obscurity in France.

But Beckett grew up a cricket nut in Ireland, and continued to follow it in the sports pages. He also played the game as a young man, and to date is the only Nobel laureate in literature to appear in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack — although I wouldn’t put it past Bob Dylan to take a run at it, just for kicks.

So far as we know, Beckett never publicly discussed this unlikely friendship. (He was admittedly pretty occupied with investigating the depths of human misery and the heights of black turtlenecks.) André, however, brought it up decades later while filming The Princess Bride, as he and costar Cary Elwes swapped stories about their respective childhoods. Elwes loved the story about Beckett so much that he relayed it to another cast member, Billy Crystal — who later cowrote and starred in 1998’s My Giant, a movie partly inspired by his own friendship with André.

By then, the former wrestling sensation had died of heart failure (in 1993, at age 46), so Crystal turned to an even larger athlete to fill his oversize shoes: seven-foot-seven NBA player Gheorghe Muresan. Perhaps tellingly, the film bombed. Because while there may be other giants out there, there’ll only ever be one André.

Photo: Getty Images / Jeffrey Asher