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.

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We continue our series on wrestling’s craziest superstars by taking a look at some of wrestling’s ‘in-ring madmen. Some promoters and performers looked for ways to heighten audience excitement. Early no-holds barred matches and cage matches would be replaced by hardcore matches that involved lots of blood and foreign objects being used. Hardcore wrestling is often separated into distinct levels based on the graphic nature of the match. Promotions in Japan such as FMW escalated the violence to legitimately dangerous levels with gimmick matches that involved barbed wire, explosives and fire. These matches and gimmicks soon became popular in North America. Many of the wrestlers in these matches put their health and well-being on the line. It’s a weird dynamic to see that these guys are seriously injuring each other but everyone in the audience thinks that it’s fake. It’s completely moronic what these guys would do for virtually no money and no prospect of ever making any money from doing this. It’s sado-masochism at its finest. Some of the wrestlers on our list liked to dish out pain while others would put their bodies on the line and take extreme amounts of punishment in order to entertain the crowd and go home shocked at something that they’ve never witnessed as a wrestling fan before. One would argue that this isn’t a wrestling match. It’s simply two guys inflicting pain on each other more than anything else. Here’s a roundup of some of the wrestlers that we chose on our list…

-He is nicknamed the ‘Sudanese Madman’ and sometimes referred to by his most faithful fans as ‘Abby.’ His weapons of choice were sharpened pencils that he would rake over his opponents’ foreheads as well as a fork that he would use to stab his opponent in the head with. While he enjoyed seeing his opponents spill blood; he also enjoyed seeing his own blood and would sometimes taste his own blood to the shock and disgust of wrestling fans. Abdullah had some truly bloody battles with Carlos Colon in Puerto Rico as well as Cactus Jack in America. Many of his matches went away from the ring area and into the crowd. There wasn’t a weapon that Abdullah wouldn’t use in a match. If Abby could get his hands on something, he would use it and this included microphones, the ring bell and the fans own chairs they were sitting in. Not even the refs were spared. If a ref tried to take his trademark fork away from him, Abdullah would stab the ref with the fork as well. As if his carnage wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that Abdullah the Butcher was diagnosed with Hepatitis C and was sued by another wrestler who believed that he got the disease from Larry. If true, it just shows what a crazy person in the ring Larry truly was if he would risk giving someone a serious disease just to entertain the fans in the arena. While Abdullah was psychotic in the ring, he was a soft spoken, intelligent and friendly man outside of wrestling. A switch would go off in his head as soon as a match would start and he would change from a mild mannered restaurant owner to a complete madman in the ring.

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Professional wrestling is a form of sports entertainment loosely based on competitive wrestling. It’s a type of soap opera to many male fans. Even though the sport is fake, the entertainers that work in the industry are known to be some of the more unhinged individuals that work in modern society. You must constantly put your body and life in jeopardy and do things that wouldn’t even be considered normal. There’s no off season in pro wresting and many wrestlers get injured and need to continue wrestling in order to keep their top spot in the company and help support their families. There have been more wrestler deaths in pro wrestling compared to any other sport. This is a direct result of abusing pain killers, sleeping pills, and steroids in order to recover faster from injury, stay awake to reach your next show and to keep your body looking built up in order to have the physique of a pro wrestler. But, how do you define crazy in pro wrestling? Something that might appear crazy to one fan might be perfectly acceptable to the person sitting next to them at a wrestling show.

We’ve decided to showcase some of wrestling’s crazier superstars by breaking them into three distinct categories. The first category is ‘In-Ring Lunacy’. In this category, we’re going to highlight wrestlers that took things too far inside the ring. These are individuals who broke the conventional wrestling code and put their lives on the line in the ring and did things to their opponents that most fans would cringe at. The second category is ‘The Voices’. These are wrestlers who took their wrestling promos too far and said things that shouldn’t have been said inside and outside the squared circle. As wrestling fan, you had to ask yourself whether what was said was all an act or whether these individuals truly believed in what they were mouthing off to other people. The last category is ‘Outside Madness’. This category is reserved for pro wrestlers who took things too far outside the pro wrestling business and into their personal lives. Many of these people had underlying problems beyond the pro wrestling industry and made mistakes that they shouldn’t have made and some resulted in another individual’s death. We’re going to start our series off with ‘The Voices’ of professional wrestling. These wrestlers on this list put our attention in a choke hold from their first crazy word. There were no such things as scripts or script writers. When a professional wrestler lets loose on a microphone, it’s safe to say that absolutely anything and everything is bound to happen. Some wrestlers can give interviews that sound like Shakespeare while others will go off on such a maniacal departure that viewers can only be left in amazement at the insanity that they just witnesses before their own eyes.

-The Ultimate Warrior (James Hellwig) has produced so many crazy promos that he could fill this entire list. He often talked about making sacrifices and taking things to another level that we’re sure involved planets and spirituality. He would often deliver his promos away from the camera and would be all over the place in terms of direction. When warrior quit the WWE over payment and royalty issues, He legally changed his name to ‘Warrior’ in order to own the rights to the name ‘Ultimate Warrior’ so that Vince Mcmahon couldn’t legally own the rights to the same name and profit from it. The WWE and Vince Mcmahon hated Hellwig so much that they released a DVD entitled ‘The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior’ that highlights what a neurotic individual Hellwig was to do business with. Outside of the ring, James Hellwig is a right-wing conservative commentator that has toured several universities discussing politics and attacking left-wing politics. He has made several controversial comments about gay people and mentioned that ‘Queering doesn’t make the world work’ where he said that the world wouldn’t exist if there were only gay people living on the planet. When an Iranian student asked the Warrior a question at a University funded event , Warrior told the student to ‘get a towel.’ He’s known to have made racist and homophobic comments at several public speaking events. He has a nasty persecution complex and has sued many publications that have insulted what he believes in. While the Warrior might be misunderstood to many, he’s also a known self-help guru with plenty of inspirational speeches that he delivers to his fans that are posted on YouTube.

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