CANOE -- SLAM! Sports - Wrestling - The resurrection of Jake Roberts
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The resurrection of Jake Roberts
By JAN MURPHY - Kingston Whig-Standard
Life has never been easy for Jake Roberts.
Sure, it has seen its ups and downs ... successes and failures. He did, after all, put together one of the most successful professional wrestling careers in history, all while earning a reputation for being an innovator when it comes to the psychological side of pro wrestling. He's also credited as the inventor of the DDT. To this day, he's a wrestling legend in the eyes of many people.
But life has never been easy, according to the man himself. In fact, rarely, he says, has he even been happy during his life.
Born Aurelian Smith, Jr. in 1955, Roberts was the son of former wrestler Aurelian "Grizzly" Smith. While wrestling proved to be a family tradition, with Roberts and his half-siblings Rockin' Robin and Sam Houston also forging careers in the sports entertainment industry, anyone who even entertains the notion that Roberts shared a like-father-like-son bond with his dad has another thing coming.
"It was negative," Roberts said over the phone, when asked about growing up the son of a pro wrestler. "It was negative," he reiterated. "My father ... he didn't raise me. And I'd see him once, or twice a year," Roberts added, trailing off.
"There were a lot of problems in my childhood. Living with my grandparents, the kids were getting tossed around. My brother was adopted by my aunt, and things like that. To grow up, and your dad's a ... 'star,'" Roberts said sarcastically, "and yet you don't live with him, and you're wearing clothing made out of loophole curtains, and stuff, you know ... it's pretty humiliating."
Roberts pulls no punches when discussing his unhappy childhood.
"I always blamed wrestling for my father not being there," he said. "I thought if he wasn't a wrestler, I could have a dad. That's just the way a kid thinks. Then to see him wrestling, and getting hurt, or so I thought, I thought it was very cruel. I thought my father was very cruel because he never wisened us kids up ... he played it out at home, or whenever we'd see him. He'd have cuts and stuff. I had no idea he was the one doing that. I didn't know that it was a business. I would cry myself to sleep at night, a lot of times, thinking my dad was not ever going to be able to see me because he was going to die in the ring, or something else was going to happen. So I did not like wrestling."
Oddly enough, Roberts wanted so desperately to win over his father that he eventually turned to the very thing his despised.
"I finished high school and I had really good grades. I wanted to be an architect. That was my dream," Roberts said.
"I was the first one in my family to graduate high school," he said proudly, adding "and I was going to be the first one that ever went to college."
But the beaming father Roberts so yearned for was nowhere to be found.
"My father never came to my graduation," he said, "or ball games, or any of that. After I graduated, I wanted to get him to pat me on the back, and say he (was) proud of me. That's what I really wanted. So I went down to see him, and I said 'Hey, I graduated from school,'" and he said, 'Well, I hope you don't want anything from me.'"
Not long after, Roberts said, he attended one of his father's wrestling shows when, in a drunken state, he says it dawned on him how he earn his father's love and approval.
"My young brain said, 'If you want your father to be proud of you, why don't you get up there and challenge one of those wrestlers, beat that guy up, and then your dad will be proud of you?'" Roberts recalled. "Well, it looked good on paper. I went down to the ring, banged on the mat, and I challenged this old guy ... and he brought me in the ring."
What unfolded next was ugly. Really ugly.
"He knew who I was," Roberts said, "because if he didn't, he probably would have crippled me. He let me run my mouth, and I made a total ass of myself. He brought me in the ring, and for the next 15 minutes, he put my body into positions it has never been in before .... and not since! Basically, I p----d myself. I was screaming like a little girl, crying, because he was hurting me," Roberts said, sombrely, as if reliving that beating. "After that experience, I crawled out of the ring, (went) to the locker room, and my father was standing there. He looked down on me and he said 'I'm ashamed of you, you're gutless, and you'll never amount to anything.'
"That's not what I wanted to hear," Roberts said. "That night I cried ... I was insane with anger. I gave up my dreams, and I was going to become a wrestler ... come hell or high water. Just so I could shove it back in his face."
And he did, with all the vim and vigour of a true Texan.
"The things that I've done to my body over the years ... wouldn't have been done had I been nurtured," Roberts said. "Even years later, when people came up and said 'You know, your dad is so proud of you,' I always said, 'Well he's never told me that.'"
A very tough childhood was but a precursor to many other personal battles Roberts would wage during his life, battles that would include the kidnapping and murder of one of his sisters, and a lengthy, and at times very public, battle with addiction.
"You've just gotta survive, man," he said. "And survival takes on a lot of different looks."
As a wrestler, Roberts would shine, becoming legendary for his two runs with the then World Wrestling Federation. He would also star with World Championship Wrestling and made appearances with Extreme Championship Wrestling and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling. He built a reputation for intense and cerebral promos, his dark side and his great use of psychology inside the ring.
But as famous as Roberts would become as Jake "The Snake" Roberts, he would become nearly as well known for his personal struggles with drugs and alcohol, culminating when he was featured prominently, and negatively, in the wrestling documentary Beyond The Mat in 1999.
Drugs and alcohol, Roberts says, were his escape from, quite frankly, himself.
"People would say 'Well, why did you do (cocaine)?' and I would say 'Because I like that s--t!' 'Well, why do you drink?' 'Because I love being drunk!' The reason I liked drugs was because I liked medicating myself to the point where I wouldn't remember where I was, who I was, and what I had came from."
Even his wrestling gimmick, in which he carried a python ringside, often dumping it on prone opponents, was an escape from being himself. Believe it or not, Roberts is scared to death of snakes.
"That's the whole reason I came up with the snake idea was because I knew if I carried a snake around in that damn bag, people wouldn't want to talk about me. They'd want to talk about that damn snake. So that got the attention off of me."
If death and drugs and addiction weren't enough, a divorce from his second wife in 2000 topped things off. The downward spiral that was Jake Roberts' life and career continued downward. Roberts knows when he hit rock bottom.
"When I didn't want anybody to see me," he said. "When I couldn't get off the chair by myself, when I got down on the floor, and you had to help me up, because I couldn't get up. When my hands wouldn't straighten out anymore. I had been hit in the head so many times that my toes were curling under, because of the brain injuries. And when I would walk, my toes would roll under my foot, and I'd step, and I'd break my toes. You know, that's not comfortable. My hands would not straighten out, and I was getting firing ... it's like a hot needle being shoved up underneath your nails. And you never know when they're coming. It would just happen. And when it would happen, of course, the first thing you would do is you would jump and you would scream. You know, if you had something in your hand, guess where it went. It went flying. That was probably my darkest moment. It was to the point that I was wishing to hell that I would not wake up."
Death, Roberts admits, was inevitable. He was a defeated man.
"I think I did give up," Roberts said. "I did give up. Six months ago, I was in a dark, dark place, man. I would wake up, and I would be disappointed I wasn't dead. You know that? It sucks. I'm just being honest with you. I would hear that some other wrestler died, and I would be jealous."
Then, as quickly as Jake The Snake -- the legend -- would devastate an opponent with his DDT, Roberts' life changed, forever.
That's when one of Roberts' proteges and lifelong friends, Diamond Dallas Page, helped steer Roberts out of the darkness.
Page, who trained under Roberts, reached out to his former mentor in his darkest hour. The timing, Roberts now admits, couldn't have been better.
"The bottom line was," Roberts said, "he called me on the phone, asked me how I was doing, and I lied my a-- off. I just wanted to get him off the phone, so he'd leave me alone, so I could do my dope, (drink) my beer, and get high."
Page wanted his longtime friend to clean his act up, and to help him, Page wanted him to try his DDP Yoga program.
"I was like 'Yeah, yeah, I'll try whatever you say,'" Roberts said. "'Yeah sure! Send me that s--t! Thanks for your help, yeah sure!'" Page went ahead and sent it.
"I guess I was coming off of a high, at the time, and I said 'I can't do this bulls--t ... eating plan. I'm sorry. You know, giving up the gluten,'" Roberts said.
"And he told me it would help me with my hands, and my feet. Well, okay, I want that."
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