The resurrection of Jake 'The Snake' Roberts

[trpwl]

The resurrection of Jake 'The Snake' Roberts

SMYRNA, Ga. – In the tiny second-floor bedroom, there's a pile of Jake "The Snake" Roberts action figures on a table, plastic muscles ripped and bulging, snarls on tiny faces. Above them, on the wall, are signed comic-book-style cartoons of Jake The Snake fighting atop the Empire State Building and deep in the heart of the jungle. All around the room are photographs of Jake The Snake wrestling in some of the world's largest arenas against fellow iconic wrestlers.



It'd be a hell of a tribute to the man, were it not for Jake the Snake himself writhing in the bed in the center of the room.

It's a summer morning outside Atlanta. Jake Roberts, unshaven, his long hair matted, is lying in the bed, devastated, alone. He'd been clean and sober for eight months, drying out and cleaning out and trying to resurrect his life and his career. But he's just fallen.

Two airline bottles of vodka. That's all it was; that's all it took. Two tiny bottles, boom boom, downed in a parking lot. He drank to blot out the image of an old friend who'd fallen on hard times, the same way he used to drink to blot out the thought of his own fallen image.

And now that he's stumbled back into one bad habit, every seductive, self-loathing instinct in his body is telling him to get back in touch with another: when life gets hard, pack your [stuff] and run.

But on this morning, he doesn't run. He stays. He's got a control over his body and his mind now that he didn't have even eight months ago. He's hating himself for falling – "It was like hitting me in the head with a ball-peen hammer," he says – but he's getting back up to face what he's done. He's got friends now, people pulling harder for him to win now than they ever did back in the ring.

And in a twist so perfect it almost seems like it's scripted, the guy now tasked with helping Roberts save himself is the same guy Roberts once hoisted to wrestling stardom: Diamond Dallas Page.

This is Page's house, and with Page's guidance, Roberts might just be on the way to a peace that's eluded him for six decades.

This, then, is a story of fame and fortune, addiction and recovery, snakes and yoga. It's what happens when lives go off-script, for better and for worse.

Had he entered the wrestling game any earlier, Diamond Dallas Page might be somewhere working a forklift and punching a time clock today. Page was running a nightclub in Florida in the 1980s, dabbling with wrestling management on the side, when he first met Roberts. At that point, Roberts was well into his career as The Snake, and Page, then in his 30s, mentioned that he was considering getting into the ring himself.

"I wanted to do it, but I assumed I was too old," Page says. "I started managing at 31, but didn't even get into the ring until I was 35."

"Thank God for his day job," Roberts says, shaking his head at the state of Page's early wrestling game.

But Page piqued Roberts' interest with stories of doubters, of people who thought Page was too old to make a go of it as a wrestler. "They told me I never could do it, either," Roberts said. "I said to him, 'I'll train you my own damn self.' "

At one point, Roberts moved in with Page, and that lasted a few months. "I left because he had three cats and I, uh, lost a snake in his house. I ran."

But the friendship survived that, as well as the repair of the walls that had been torn down to find the snake. Page consulted Roberts on the elements of wrestling psychology, the mind games and performance flourishes that take you from no-name cannon fodder to headlining star.

"He didn't just tell me, 'Here's what you do,' " Page recalls. "He'd suggest. He'd give me bait to fish with, and then a little more bait."

Page remembers proudly bringing tapes of his matches to Roberts, eager to show him new moves. Sometimes, Roberts would approve. Sometimes, it wouldn't go quite so well.

"That's never been done before!" Page would say, proud of a new move.

"You've never seen a dog walk into the ring and take a [crap] before, but you don't want to see that, do you?" Roberts would snarl.

That kind of teaching, plus the occasional chair to the back of the head, gets you to improve in a hurry. And with his attitude, his before-Jay-Z diamond hand sign, his Sammy Hagar-after-a-workout looks, and his Diamond Cutter finishing move, Page rocketed to the heights of the wrestling world. Here's his clip reel from his glory days:

"It's sports, but it's also entertainment," Page says. "It's predetermined. So how do you get over when they – the bookers, the writers – don't see you as a top guy? You've got to go out there and do [stuff] that makes people give a [damn]. Even if you're losing. Then they see you, and they get with you."

Page was in on some of the most notable fights of the era, including celebrity matches. He teamed with Karl Malone against Hogan and Dennis Rodman, and later teamed with – yes, this is true – Jay Leno against Hogan and Eric Bischoff. He played along with the storylines, doing the occasional heel turn to keep the crowds on their toes. And the positive attitude that had served him well on the way up kept him on top in his 40s, an age when most wrestling stars have creaked off to comfortable chairs.

But even as his star was ascending, Page could see his onetime mentor sliding. The whole world could.

"When you're ashamed of yourself and you hate where you come from, you learn to lie pretty quick," Roberts says. "You learn to put on a mask. Getting into wrestling, I was given an opportunity to be something other than what I was. In a way, this crash would have happened a lot sooner. Wrestling allowed me the privilege to delay it."

Roberts, now 58, hid his demons behind a mask of aggression and psychological warfare. The son of a wrestler – his real name is Aurelian Smith Jr. – Roberts began climbing into the ring while in his teens, running the Southern circuit of Mid-South Wrestling, Georgia Championship Wrestling and other local leagues. A snake became a staple of his act – not the same snake; snakes didn't tend to have lengthy careers working with Roberts – whether used as a weapon or a noose.

Buoyed by both his snake gimmick and his sinister demeanor, Roberts worked his way upward through the ranks to join up with the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE) in the mid-80s, the exact moment when wrestling's popularity first crested. Roberts fought against and alongside the era's icons, including Andre the Giant, Jerry "The King" Lawler, Hulk Hogan and, later, Stone Cold Steve Austin. Check, for instance, this classic moment where he goaded Macho Man Randy Savage into fighting, and then set a snake loose on him:

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