Many fans treat pro wrestlers like modern rock stars. They believe that they’re larger than life and are able to heal quicker and live longer compared to a normal person. They don’t realize that wrestlers are human just like everybody else. They spend nearly 300 days of the year on the road. They get very little sleep while travelling and are separated from their loved ones for extended periods of time. The years of taking steroids, painkillers, sleeping pills and abusing alcohol/drugs have left many wrestlers depressed and suicidal. Many wrestlers have entered rehab on multiple occasions. Some have made poor life decisions or poor financial investments that have forced them back into wrestling when they should be retired from the ring. It’s no wonder that certain wrestlers snap under pressure or bring their excess baggage with them and cause a controversy wherever they go. Here are a bunch of pro wrestlers who lived life beyond the edge outside of the wrestling arena.

-The Dynamite Kid’s personal life is scary to say the least. He often woke his wife up in the morning with a gun under her chin saying ‘one day it will be loaded’. She said it made her life so miserable that she contemplated suicide and possibly killing all of her children so that they all wouldn’t need to abused by Billington anymore. Billington got addicted to cocaine and abused steroids. There’s allegations that he slipped sedatives into his wife’s glass and sexually assaulted her while she was asleep. Billington was known to pull off childish pranks early in his career. When he arrived in the WWE, his pranks began to get more mean-spirited and not as funny anymore. These pranks involved cutting up wrestlers clothes whille they were in a match, stealing towels, or even dumping in the personal belongings of others. Dynamite Kid once filled up his partners steroid syringe with milk, and convinced him it was steroids. Another time, he punched a guy straight in the mouth as a ‘prank’, damaging some of his teeth. In Calgary, Billington even broke the nose of his future brother in law, Bret Hitman Hart, in their very first match because he didn’t get along with Bret. Billington’s departure from the WWE occurred after Jacques Rougeau punched Billington in the face with the help of a bunch of quarters in a bag as revenge for slapping Rougeau a week earlier and mocking the Rougeau brothers inside the locker room. Billington lost two of his front teeth and quit the company only to return to his native England. His physical condition got worse and he was unable to wrestle anymore. He left a bitter man and was jealous that his friends and family became more successful than him. The years of abusing steroids and drugs took their toll on Billington and he’s now confined to a wheelchair and has very little contact with the rest of his family.

-Many fans will remember Jake Roberts as the man who would put his pet snake ‘Damien’ on his opponents. But Roberts lived a very horrible personal life outside of the ring. His dad was dating his grandmother when he had sex with her 13 year old daughter. His dad was an alcoholic. While his father was on the road, his step-mother tried to seduce him. He then moved in with his mother and step-father. His younger sister had several children at a young age and eventually married a middle aged man while she was still in her teens. She was murdered by the man’s ex-wife and her body was never recovered. At a ‘Heroes of Wrestling’ PPV that featured several old wrestling stars, Jake took his snake and put the reptile between his legs and began to make lewd and sexual gestures to the audience. In 2008, Roberts self-destructed during a live benefit event in Ohio. He was found passed out backstage after having had drank several bottles of Vodka and had to be picked up and brought to the ring where his speech was rambling and incoherent. After a verbal assault by another wrestler on Jake, he pulled down the front of his pants and exposed his penis to the crowd. Backstage, he punched a wall and broke his hand. He’s had an acrimonious relationship with his own daughter and the two have have not spoken to each other on several occasions as a result of Roberts’ cocaine and alcohol addictions. Recently, Jake the Snake has been helped by fellow retired wrestler Diamond Dallas Page who has let Roberts stay at his home to sober up and lead a healthier lifestyle. Roberts now does DDP Yoga and has lost weight and looks to be getting his life back on track.

-Chris Benoit is a two-time world champion: a one-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion, and a one-time World Heavyweight Champion in WWE. He wrestled a very technical and stiff style of wrestling. He would often perform the top rope headbutt as one of his finishing maneuvers which led to multiple concussions and a main indicator of the brain damage that he suffered from later on in life. Benoit and Nancy Benoit fell in love in WCW while Nancy’s husband was head booker, Kevin Sullivan. In a strange bit of irony, Sullivan put Nancy and Benoit together in a storyline only for the on-screen relationship to develop off-screen and lead to Nancy leaving Kevin for Benoit. In 2003, Nancy filed for divorce from Benoit, citing the marriage as ‘irrevocably broken’ and alleging cruel treatment. She claimed that he would break and throw furniture around. She later dropped the suit, as well as the restraining order filed against her husband. In 2004, Benoit murdered his wife and son and subsequently hanged himself. Many explanations have been given as to what could have caused the incident to occur and the most likely explanations are a failed marriage, roid rage from steroid abuse, and brain damage. Coroners don’t believe that steroids played a role in the murders because of the low level of steroids found in Benoit’s system at the time of the murders. Tests were conducted on Benoit’s brain by Julian Bailes, the head of neurosurgery at West Virginia University, and results showed that Benoit’s brain was so severely damaged it resembled the brain of an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient who had an advanced form of dementia.

-Frank Goodish (Bruiser Brody) was an American professional wrestler who helped to develop the brawling style of wrestling and is credited for being one of the pioneers of early hardcore wrestlers. Brody wrestled with such reckless abandon that he was banned from a couple of promotions for wildly swinging chairs and chains at anyone unfortunate enough to get too close to him, including the fans at ringside. Brody developed a reputation for not being cooperative with fellow wrestlers and management. He was trying to protect his wrestling persona and was unwilling to lose to other wrestlers to make his character look bad in front of the fans. He would flat out refuse to lose to other wrestlers and was deviating from pre-scripted outcomes in the ring. It was the cardinal sin of the industry and made him immensely unpopular with his colleagues and management. Many of his wrestling peers describe him as bad for business and not worth the trouble he brought with him to a territory. Rather than walk out if he didn’t like a situation, he would do what he could to wreck it instead. One example involved Brody against Lex Luger. Brody didn’t feel like making Luger look good. He never liked Luger, and he didn’t want to work with him in the first place. He refused to sell Luger’s moves in the ring and worked stiff against Luger to help the promoter and himself protect the wrestling code and not allow younger wrestlers to disrespect the veterans on their way to another promotion. Luger was so scared that he climbed out of the cage himself to avoid finishing the match with Brody.

Another example is in Japan where Brody faced Antonio Inoki. Both men refused to lose to each other in order to protect their own image and thus many of their matches ended in disqualifications or count outs. Brody’s life would take a turn for the worse while he worked for WWC in Puerto Rico. He went in the shower before his match and was joined by José Huertas González, a wrestler known as Invader #1. After a series of real-life confrontations between Brody-Gonzalez, both men had an argument and Brody was stabbed several times, with enough force to piece his lungs and liver, and the big man was left bleeding and moaning until he eventually passed away while on the way to the hospital due to blood loss. González, who always maintained his innocence, was initially charged with first-degree murder but was later reduced and tried for involuntary homicide. Many wrestlers refused to testify due to safety concerns and fellow wrestler Tony Atlas initially told police that González had stabbed Brody but refused to return to Puerto Rico to testify against him. In January 1989, without any expert testimony, González was acquitted on all counts, citing self-defense. Carlos Colón testified against Brody during the trial.

-Tonga Fifita is a semi-retired Tongan professional wrestler, known for his appearances in both WCW as ‘Meng’ and WWE as ‘Haku’. Haku was viewed as a legit tough guy by his peers. His one time manager, Bobby ‘The Brain’ Heenan said in a shoot interview that Fifita was the toughest man he’d ever met in his life. Arn Anderson cites an event in his book where Fifita pushed a cowboy through two sets of doors with one hand while Rick Rude said that Fifita once jumped over a bar table and headbutted a guy for disrespecting a woman sitting at the bar. He once lifted Brutus Beefcake up in a hangman’s hold for complaining about Fifita working too stiff only to let go once Hogan told him to since he respected Hogan as a person. In 1987, Fifita had a backstage fight with Jesse Barr (who wrestled at the WWF as Jimmy Jack Funk) which resulted in Fifita gouging one of Barr’s eyeballs out, causing Barr to later wear a glass eye. After this fight, Fifita had a reputation that steered wrestlers away from backstage confrontations. Haku’s most famous violent incident comes from an interview that he did with Alex Marvez. In the interview, Fifita was asked about one of his legendary fights. Fifita stated his favorite was one that ‘cost him a lot of money.’ He was at the Baltimore Airport Hilton bar with Sivi Afi when five men started laughing at them and said, ‘You guys are the fake wrestlers on TV.’ In response, Fifita replied, ‘I’ll just show you how fake it is,’ and reached over and grabbed one man while three others jumped on him. As they repeatedly punched him he knocked Three of them out and then applied the Tongan death grip one of them and then Fifita bit the nose of the man he initially grabbed and spat it out. They saw him spit out their friend’s nose, and before he could fight them, they quickly evaded. Months later, he saw on the news that he was being sued $2.5 million for the incident.

When angry, Fifita has resisted arrest and it reportedly took 6 cops to take him down and one stun gun which left him unfazed. Despite his arrest, Haku is viewed as a celebrity on his island and is well-liked by fellow wrestlers. Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts once spoke of Haku and said ‘If I had a gun, and I was sitting in a tank, and I had one shell left, and Haku was three hundred yards away, he’s mine, right? Well, the first thing I’m going to do is jump out of the tank and shoot myself – because I don’t want to wound that son of a bitch and piss him off.’ In an interview, ‘The Big Show’ Paul Wight said that if he had a burger and Meng walked over and said that he wanted it, then Big Show with a big smile on his face would hand it over to him. When everybody was being laid-off in droves by the WCW at their end – Haku/Meng was able to last 2 more years than his peers. Terry Taylor said it was because ‘the suits’ were afraid of him too much to fire him. Moral of the story…Haku is one nice guy but don’t get on his bad side and don’t piss him off.

-Scott Hall is best known for his character ‘Razor Ramon’ in WWE and his role as one of the founder’s of the NWO in WCW. He has won several titles for both wrestling companies. In 1983, Hall was charged with second degree murder after shooting a man with his own gun (after wrestling it away from him) in an altercation outside of a nightclub. According to Hall, this was done in self-defense. The charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. During Hall’s rise to fame in WCW, he became a drug addict and writers used his real-life drug addiction as a story line where Hall would often come down to the ring looking inebriated. His real life battles with alcohol and drugs were the main reason for his wife divorcing him. In 2010, Hall was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting a police officer. In addition, he attacked a comedian at a wrestler’s roast for making an inappropriate joke about a dead wrestler. The comedian said that Hall was drunk at the time of the altercation. In 2011, Hall showed up for his appearance at a Top Rope Promotions Indy show intoxicated. Hall, still wearing a hospital bracelet, was helped into the ring by two men because he was struggling to walk on his own. According to medical reports, Hall was being treated after overdosing on both opiates and benzodiazepines. On May 8, following a worrying and confused telephone conversation with his ex-wife Dana, Hall abruptly ended the call. Dana alerted police to her concerns for his safety, and Hall allegedly had a verbal altercation with them (and her) when they attempted to enter his house. His ex-wife cut-off any remaining ties with Hall. ESPN’s E:60 featured a documentary detailing Hall’s experience with drugs and alcohol and featured several interviews with wrestlers about Hall’s recent problems. The WWE has attempted to get Hall sober in their sponsored rehab programs many times but Hall has continued to relapse. In 2013, former wrestler Diamond Dallas Page has tried to help Hall get sober and has mentored Hall alongside Jake Roberts to try and get both individuals back on the right track in life.

This wraps up or 3-part series on wrestling’s craziest superstars. We hope that you enjoyed reading each article and learned a couple of new and interesting facts about your favorite wrestlers. Whenever someone tells you that wrestling is fake or isn’t real, bring them over to this website where they can read about some of wrestling’s crazier people and perhaps they might just change their opinion slightly and make them realize that some of these guys are legitimately over-the-top personalities and borderline nonsensical people.

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