Wilmington Star-News – March 13, 1977
By Lee Weisbecker, Staff Writer
Billy (R) and Bennie McGuire dwarf Wulff’s owner Gene Pontius.
Benny McGuire sat staring at a wrestling magazine, his 724-pound frame supported by two chairs.
His brother Billy, who weighs 747 pounds, was chatting with the ever-expanding group of onlookers that crowded into Wulff’s newsstand at 125 Princess St. Saturday afternoon to see the world’s heaviest twins.
“If I had my choice,” Billy began, “I guess I’d be like other people. Bet we get to travel and do a lot of other things that most other guys never get to do.”
The McGuire twins who will never be like other people were at Wulff’s yesterday to autograph copies of the new paperback edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, which recently went on sale. The brothers are listed on page 23 as the world’s heaviest twins and, according to Billy, there’s little chance that their record will ever be broken.
“There was a year of research with a computer before our title was given to us,” he explained, pausing a moment to spit tobacco juice into a paper cup. “The closest to us are twins who live in London and who each weigh about 450 pounds.”
Billy and Benny McCreary (McGuire is an alias) were born in Hendersonville in 1946 and at birth each weighed about five pounds. At age 10, Billy said, both contracted measles which affected their pituitary glands, causing them to gain weight rapidly.
Both twins are married to women who weigh less than 135 pounds.
As Billy continued on about his pituitary, Rosetta Johnson, one of the onlookers standing in the narrow aisles of the newsstand, clapped her hand to her forehead and exclaimed:
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. I feel like I’m going to faint. You two guys are really heavy-duty, aren’t you?”
The twins own a cattle farm in Hendersonville, but most of their time is spent flying around the world from one tag-team wrestling match to another. In December they returned from a trip to Japan; next week they’ll be wrestling at Camp Lejune in Jacksonville.
In the ring, the twins have a special move they call the “splash.” They simultaneously fling their bodies against an opponent, “and then one of us have 700 pounds coming down on you, you don’t get up for a while,” Billy said, adding:
“We hold more team titles than any other team in history.”
As could be expected, Billy and Benny McGuire have large appetites. They eat three, sometimes four, meals a day and an average breakfast for each twin consists of 12 eggs, a loaf of bread, three pounds of bacon and a half-gallon of orange juice.
Dinners are equally large. In a single sitting each McGuire will consume three or four 12-ounce steaks, six baked potatoes, four large bowls of salad and half a gallon of ice tea. Dessert is a half-gallon of ice cream.
But the McGuire twins don’t like to be called fat. “That word bugs me. I like to refer to it as overweight. We are way past the stage of being just fat,” Billy said, reaching again for his paper cup.
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