More to Love : His bod’s larger, his mane’s tamer. But Fabio spoof Flabio has made it big-time.

The casting call went something like this:

“Wanted. Male Caucasian. One-hundred to 200 pounds overweight. Must be willing to wear a Speedo in the surf.”

After going through 75 portfolios, they found their man: 38-year-old Michael Glover of Redondo Beach. He measures 6-foot-6, 400 pounds, has deep blue eyes and apparently looks good in a Speedo bikini. Of course, when Glover arrived in Santa Barbara last January so they could photograph him wearing skivvies in mid-50-degree weather, he thought the whole gig was a bit strange. After all, here he was, a former truck driver with a 58-inch waist. And all of a sudden he’s got a photographer telling him to flirt with the camera?

“They give me $150 an hour, tell me to strip down to my chones , and take pictures of me,” Glover says. “They didn’t tell me what it was about.”

Looking back, Glover knows it was a historic day. For one, it was two days before the Northridge earthquake (“They said I might have been the main reason for it,” he says). But more importantly, it was the making of Flabio.

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Flabio on women: “I think at first a woman wants a man to be good looking, exciting, talented. But in the end, they want someone to love them, take care of them and respect them. A lot of the time it’s the same guy.”

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Flabio was the brainchild of Eric States, a 34-year-old Santa Barbaran who owns a kayak accessories company. It was the fall of ‘93: “I have a little bit of a gut,” he says. “One day I walked out of the shower, and I said to my wife, ‘What do you think, honey--Fabio? Nah . . . Flabio!’ ”

Flabio, he thought, would be the perfect, cuddly counterpart to the buff bod of cover-stud Fabio. After an unsuccessful try at making a Flabio doll, States decided an easy way to market his idea would be with a poster. After the casting call and the beach shoot, he was still applying for a trademark. He was afraid the concept might get stolen, so he didn’t tell many people, including Glover, until the day of the photo shoot.

Soon, States says, he faced a bidding war for the rights to distribute the official Flabio poster. It features Glover in a beach-bathing pose borrowed from the pages of Fabio’s own popular chest-exposing calendar. These days, the $7.50 poster is sold out at the seven Xtra-Xtra Big & Tall stores throughout Southern California. Store workers, who display a copy behind the counter, say it’s been a hot item for the holidays. And at the Brea Xtra-Xtra store, it always seems to elicit comment.

“Yuck,” says a large woman shopper. “I know I wouldn’t do that.”

“Fabio probably has a few more women around him,” says another.

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Flabio on men versus women: “Men look at the cover of a book; women read it.” *

Fabio’s people have taken the parody in good humor. In fact, Steve Raimondi, publisher of Fabio’s Healthy Bodies magazine, has enlisted Flabio. He says a book is in the works--”Flabio’s Healthy Diet”--that will both parody Fabio’s soon-to-come “Fabio’s Healthy Diet” book and be a serious exercise book for the overweight.

“There has not been a spokesman for that market,” Raimondi says. “Imagine a guy like that running,” he says, “the impact on his feet, on his lower back. There’s just a lot of exercises that he cannot do.

“So we’re going to start him on a regimen and get him shaped up, so he can say, ‘If I can do it, anybody can.’ He’ll go from Flabio to fabulous.”

Raimondi plans to have the book in bookstores by late next year. A workout video, he says, is also a possibility.

Fabio’s manager, Peter Paul of Beverly Hills, finds the parody amusing. “If people are interested in seeing a Flabio impersonator of Fabio,” he says, “then Fabio wishes him the best of luck.”

Fabio friend Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, had this to say: “Fabio does what is called stopping traffic. He’s got this long hair. I feel he’s a palomino. I dare say Flabio might be stopping traffic also, but for different reasons.”

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Flabio on himself: “I look at myself as a big ol’ cuddly bear. I think I’m a fairly good-looking guy.”

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Glover is pretty good-humored about the whole thing. During the last year, he has been featured in People, on CNN and on Jerry Springer’s syndicated TV talk show. Sometimes kids even recognize him on the street. Says Glover: “It’s cool to be big, you know?”

Of course, the parody has yet to make him rich. While Fabio’s been known to drive a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, Porsche and Jaguar, Glover drives a Chevy Astro van. And while Fabio is known to spend time in Manhattan and the Hollywood Hills, Glover lives in his mother-in-law’s Redondo Beach house.

His last brush with this much attention was when he was a lineman for Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, he says. “Notre Dame, USC, Ohio State, Nebraska were checking me out,” he says. “Then I got a knee injury in the middle of my senior year. I was junk, they said.”

So after a lifetime of lowbrow jobs--Caterpillar operator, truck driver for a guy named Yokohama Flash, full-time dad and acting student--Glover found himself in the spotlight. He’ll take it as far as it can go, he says, “as long as they don’t ask me to go bare naked.”

“I’m not going to demean myself,” he says.

Good thing--for all of us.