If you see a six foot tall grotesquely muscular man wearing a feather boa and hot pink underwear, you are either a Republican senator doing something you hope nobody ever finds out about, or you are watching professional wrestling.
(Fun Fact: Gay prostitutes on Craigslist look forward to Republican conventions because business goes through the roof when they are in town. I didn’t make that up. That is an actual thing.)
People do some crazy shit for fame and money, but if after weighing all your options, you land on grappling with sweaty men in a speedo for the delight of adolescent boys you are probably a little left of “normal.” I’m not hating. I’d probably give it a go but I don’t like going to the gym. I’m just saying, if you take somebody with that mindset, feed them a steady diet of steroids and painkillers, and hit them on the head with a steel chair every night for twenty years you shouldn’t be surprised when something goes wrong.
Well here’s what happened when it went wrong.
Kevin Nash
Wrestling fans know Kevin Nash by his stage name “Big Sexy.” Non-wrestling fans know him as that one guy in Magic Mike that never really dances. He also played Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Secret of the Ooze. In 2015 Nash was arrested after his 18 year old son got drunk, roughed his mom up, and spit in Nash’s face. Nash choke-slammed the 6’5” 200 pound little shit and they both got arrested. That’s pretty tame compared to the other people on this list. I just think it’s funny, and I’m a big Kevin Nash fan.
Super Fly Jimmy Snuka
James Reiher Snuka gets overshadowed in wrestling history by legends like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. That’s a shame because he was right there next to them helping build the WWE into the franchise it is today by throwing himself into the business, literally. He pioneered the art of jumping off of shit and landing on people. Wrestling might be fake, but gravity isn’t. In hindsight, falling on his head for a living probably wasn’t a good idea.
In 1983, Snuka called an ambulance to his hotel room for his girlfriend who wound in the hospital and died from “undetermined craniocerebral injuries.” The official determination from detectives and pathologists was, “That dude totally beat her to death. We should definitely arrest him and charge him with murder.” Then for some reason they just forgot to do it. 32 years later someone was like, “Oh shit, I forgot to arrest that one dude who killed his girlfriend back in the day,” and they arrested him. In those 32 years the whole falling on his head thing had taken its toll and he was deemed unfit to stand trial due to dementia. He wound up dying like twelve days later at the ripe old age of 73.
Chris Benoit
Chris “The Crippler” Benoit got his name after accidentally breaking fellow wrestler Sabu’s neck during a match. He felt really bad about it and despite often being billed as a villain, it was common knowledge that he was a really great person. Benoit enjoyed a long and illustrious career, holding several titles and generally making a shitload of money. But as Charlie Sheen has proved, money is no cure for brain damage.
In 2007 Benoit strangled his wife and seven year old son to death. He spent a few days moping around the house before he put some bibles next to his dead family’s bodies and used his weight bench to break his own neck.
Razor Ramon
Scott Hall aka Razor Ramon and long-time sidekick of Kevin Nash put the “Bad” in “Badass.” In 1983 Hall was arrested after he got in a fight with a guy outside of an Orlando nightclub. The dude pulled out a gun. Hall snatched it out of his hands and shot him with it. He was charged with second degree murder but got off due to “lack of evidence.” Despite getting away with it, Hall was tormented with guilt over killing the dude, leading to a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse.
Normally, when you are a hopeless substance addict you tend to get fired from your job. Fortunately for Hall he was good at his job and the audience loved him. The WCW wrote his substance addiction into the storyline for his character so when “Razor Ramon” was stumbling around the ring drunk, people thought they were seeing a guy playing a character instead of a man in pain, crying for help.
Hall got arrested after: assaulting a comedian at a Roast for the Iron Sheik, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after cussing out a bunch of people at a bar in Florida, and for choking his girlfriend (That one got dismissed, again, for lack of evidence. He didn’t kill her. He just choked her a little bit.). Hall hit rock bottom and was pretty much on the verge of death when Diamond Dallas Page took him in and nursed him back to health by threatening to perform his signature “Diamond Cutter” on Hall if he didn’t get his shit together.
The Ultimate Warrior
The thing you need to understand about James Brian Hellwig aka the Ultimate Warrior, is that he is completely batshit insane. He’s like Gary Busey crazy. Even before you factor in steroids, drugs, and a grueling and violent work schedule; that motherfucker should have been on ALL the anti-psychotic medication. In 1993 he legally changed his name to “Warrior.” Just one word, like Madonna. His whole name was Warrior. His fucking kid’s last name is Warrior because that was the only word in his name, so that’s all the people at the hospital had to use when they filled out the birth certificates.
After wrestling he tried being a professional speaker for conservative politics but nobody took Warrior seriously despite his family oriented messages like, “Queering doesn’t make the world work.” Yeah, he said that during a speech at the University of Connecticut. He also said the destruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was no big loss because those people are fat. He said we shouldn’t celebrate Martin Luther King because he didn’t really do anything. He also said nobody should give a fuck about Heath Ledger dying because he was a drug addict but also said he watched Brokeback Mountain at least 45 times.
He had his own comic book that focused on the concept of “Destrucity,” which is:
"Destrucity: tri-fold in its definition, therefore meaning... 1. The name of the Galaxy in WARRIOR wherein the "Terrain of Testament" lies. 2. The Living of one's life in the Way of a Warrior according to a Warrior's 8 Disciplines. Those are as follows: 1) Physical, 2) Beliefs, 3) Moment of Mastery, 4) Attitude, 5) Commitment, 6) Association, 7) Integrity, 8) Wisdom, 9) The creating of a truce between one's Destiny and one's Reality. Promising to stay true to what one is destined to be, yet accepting what is the now... one's reality."
…Yeah, so that happened.
He tried to tap into the Tae Bo craze with his own fitness program, which was a 75 minute audio recording of him yelling about how you should want to exercise. There are no actual exercises.
Jake the Snake Roberts
This is so awesome and random that I won’t be mad if you don’t believe me. When I was 21 I was working night shift at a porn store in Austin, TX and the wrestler “Doink the Clown” came in and we wound up talking all night. I asked him who other wrestlers actually hated when the cameras were off. Without missing a beat, he said, “Everyone hated Jake the Snake. He was always stealing shit out of people’s bags.” Jake the snake famously traded in his wrestling earnings for crack cocaine and smoked away his entire career. In 2012 he moved in with Diamond Dallas page, who offered to help him kick his addiction. Apparently DDP is the Elton John of Wrestling. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Elton John takes in celebrities and helps them get over their addictions. Notable clients at the John clinic include Robert Downey Jr. and Eminem.