I disagree with that statement, I know people routinely trading that amount.
The current position limit on AMR is 75,000 contracts. Individual trades at 4500 contracts probably weren't hitting any position limits back in 2001, though I don't where to find that kind of historical position limit information.
But the recent average volume for AMR is only 4,500,000 shares, or 45,000 options contracts equivalent, so assuming the volumes are roughly the same today, trading 4500 contracts would be equivalent to trading 10% of the daily volume. That's a reasonable chunk, and that would get any broker's attention; you are starting to run into other limits when you are getting into that kind of size, certainly if we are talking about retail customers.