Face and heel turns are significant to a WWE character’s curve not only because they imbue an endearing freshness to their ring lore, but also because they root them to the inherently human quality of moral and emotional turbulence. Exaggerated and monotonous portrayals of selected Superstars for the sake of better audience reaction, however, have been mainstays of the product.
Yet, the inflated sense of morality that WWE tends to adhere with does not deter the ugly truth from pulling aside the curtain. There is a wall and these characters are illusionary. Though there have been instances when life outside the squared circle has bled into a wrestler’s character inside it, for the most part, they are shadows of their other selves.
Heroism inside the ring is written for the sake of audience response and connection while any such act outside the chalk circle of a “sports entertainment product”, in the face of real danger and harm, is indeed laudable to a fault.
I don’t mean to deride the generosity of the WWE which has been involved in numerous charitable events over the last few years. The work and its scale are equally commendable, but hardly unbecoming for a company that is as influential and powerful as the WWE. Therefore, Make-A-Wish and the like are not subjects of this list. Neither are locker-room veterans who are known to be considerate and benevolent to up and comers in the business.
Instead, the focus is on isolated incidents of Superstars both past and present, whose bravery, benevolence and commitment outside the ring are worth taking note of.
Honourable mentions
CM Punk’s kindness to Joey Mercury
The Straight Edge Superstar is known for his unwavering loyalty to friends and family alike. In 2007, his longtime friend Joey Mercury, following his release from the WWE, had spiralled into poverty and substance abuse.
The former MNM member was on the verge of losing his house to a foreclosure deal, had Punk not stepped in to save his friend from a certain derailment. Paying for the house in an amount close to six figures, Punk secured Mercury’s home and later helped Joey wean himself off his drug habit.
Daivari stops a violent drunk inside a public transport
Shawn Daivari was a notorious heel, though his gimmick was racially motivated in a cheap attempt to draw heat. Despite that, his act of heroism on a lightrail train in October 2012 did not go unnoticed by media around the country. En route to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, a drunken lout, shouting racial slurs, had threatened to kill every single passenger in the car.
When the police did not respond to emergency calls, Daivari grabbed the belligerent man from behind and used a rear naked choke hold to subdue the threat before dumping him out of the train at the next stop.
5. Chris Masters saves his mother from a burning house
Considered by many, including John Cena, to be one of the strongest men in the WWE locker-room, “The Masterpiece” had a Hellenic physique and an unbeatable full-nelson submission lock to justify the claim. Chris Masters’s stint with the WWE started with a glare so bright that after a certain period, it had consumed itself into smoke.
Leaving the company in 2007 on account of Wellness Policy violations and rehabilitation spells, he joined again in 2009, but for all his improved ring technique and hard work, failed to make a mark, exiting for good in 2011.
In March 2013, Masters rescued his mother from her burning house and out of the jaws of a demented neighbour who had actually started the fire. This person had locked himself in the apartment with Chris’s mother Diana still holed up inside. Amidst securing every point of entry to the house with wooden barricades, the man warned arriving police personnel to maintain their distance lest he set the place on fire. By the time Masters had been informed by his uncle, the house was already ablaze.
However, that did not stop the former WWE Superstar from coming to his mother’s aid. Seeking a sturdy object to ram open one of the sealed windows, Masters uprooted a ten-foot tall tree with his bare hands and charged headlong in a momentum of frenzy and terror.
He succeeded in breaking through and having located his mother, carried her out of the smoking apartment. The perpetrator was handed over to the police and subsequently charged with arson. Masters tweeted the entire episode with pictures both of the house and his bruised arms, to welcoming attention from the media and fans alike.
4. Bam Bam Bigelow rescues three children from a house on fire
“The Beast from the East” is one of the most unsung heroes in wrestling history. Standing over six feet and four inches tall, the monster athlete was surprisingly agile and alert for a man of close to 400 pounds. When not hurling opponents out of the ring and selling moves in masterly fashion, Bigelow, despite his big man frame, would perform somersault sentons and rolling moonsaults with such fervent and sprightly movements that audiences could not help but be amazed. An intricate flaming tattoo on his scalp and flame motif gear on his bulk, this man was an intimidating force in both looks and ring ability.
Despite mostly branding himself as a heel and almost never breaking kayfabe, Bigelow was involved in a self-endangering act of rescue in July 2000. In his neighbourhood at Asbury Park, New Jersey, a building had caught fire while still housing three children inside. Recounting the incident at a later interview, the wrestler had said, “You see a house on fire, you hear kids screaming. What are you gonna do, run away?”
Wasting no time, Bam Bam rushed inside, picked the children and came out scalded, wheezing and a hero. The act caused almost 40 per cent of his body to get charred, leading him to spend the next two months at a hospital and majorly contributed to his hanging up his wrestling boots for good. But the selfless performer would not give up this for anything in the world. “The best move I ever made”, was how he would proudly reminiscence the moment.
Touted as a phenomenal heel for most of his career, “The Bammer” matched shoulders with some of the greatest in the ring, yet could never get the highest WWF honour around his waist. Respite came at rival wrestling promotions such as ECW and WCW, where he mowed through most competition to secure and retain his world titles.
3. Perry Saturn stops a rape and gets assaulted in the act
The former Airborne Ranger underwent a tumultuous struggle to get his life back on track after an injury in 2004 had rendered him on top of a hospital bed. This injury was the consequence of intervening and stopping the rape of a young woman by two gun-wielding men, who eventually shot Saturn with their .25 pistol. The incident occurred in April 2004, when the former Radicalz member was driving through Atlanta with his girlfriend and stumbled upon the heinous crime in progress.
Without hesitating for a moment, the wrestler overpowered and fought off the perpetrators, who in return emptied two cartridges into Saturn’s neck and shoulder before scurrying away. In his YouShoot interview, he claimed to have mistaken the bullet for a punch and had not even realized the extent of his injury before the police informed him of the same.
Nevertheless, this moment set rolling a downward spiral for him. As a means to cope with the pain, trauma and despair, Saturn took to methamphetamine and quickly became a sore addict to the drug. Consequently, he fell off the grid, became homeless for two years and maintained zero contact with family and acquaintances for an extended period. Saturn reemerged in 2009, clean as a slate and with renewed vigour resumed his career in the independent wrestling scene in 2011.
While by no measure as successful as the rest of the Radicalz, Saturn was every bit as talented and hardworking. Sturdily built, heavily tattooed and hardened to a fault, Saturn had come a long way from his ECW tag team days. Seeking to forge a name in the slowly rising vaults of the WWF, he jumped ship from WCW in January 2000 after being told by Kevin Sullivan that he was incapable of getting over with fans.
In the WWF, Saturn set up memorable feuds in the Hardcore and Tag Team divisions, often teaming up with fellow Radical Dean Malenko. Though the pair failed to secure any gold, Saturn became a two-time Hardcore Champion as well as a one-time European Champion in the company. One ludicrous yet popular gimmick later, as punishment for legitimately hurting a jobber, Saturn was eventually released by the company in 2002, beginning his stint in the independent circuit till 2004.
2. Curt Hennig rescues his friend from bleeding out in a remote forest
Hennig was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on March 31, 2007, by close friend and Red Sox legend Wade Boggs. In a DVD about him called “The Life and Times of Mr. Perfect”, Boggs recounts one particular incident where the former Superstar had saved him from a slow and certain death while on a hunting trip in 2001.
Prior to his return to the WWF as “Mr.Perfect”, Hennig had appeared in a number of promotional vignettes with other athletes, arrogantly exhibiting sporting skills which transgressed the limits of a wrestling ring. One of them was Boggs, whom he had met in 1983, and the two had developed a fast friendship over shared interests of hunting and fishing.
In 2001, Hennig and Boggs were hunting game inside a thick patch of woods when the latter got entangled in a barbed wire fence. Immobilised due to deep lacerations on his leg, Boggs would have certainly bled to his end had Hennig not interfered. Uncoiling the jutting steel of out Boggs’s limb, Hennig carried his injured friend over his shoulder through dense and impassable vegetation all the way to their truck which was parked nearly a mile outside. Curt then drove the bleeding man to a hospital immediately, reaching before any substantial blood loss and thus, saving his life.
An incomparable technician and a rigorous worker throughout his career, Curt Hennig blazed a trail for countless Superstars to walk on. He was an efficient heel, cutting sharp promos and an entertainer capable of arousing a gamut of emotions. Despite all his talents, he never held any World titles when with the WWE.
This does not discount the amount of respect he commanded among his peers. Hulk Hogan had the following to say of the towel wielding, gum slapping gem of a human being. “Everybody would check their egos at the door when they came to a building that Curt Hennig was in, because you couldn’t out-work him, you couldn’t outshine him and you couldn’t out-perform him. He was the best of the best.”
1. Diamond Dallas Page brings Jake the Snake and Scott Hall back to a healthy life
“The Original People’s Champion” had maintained significant title reigns in WCW, though in the WWE he could never get past the European and Tag Team Championships. One of the top performers in WCW, he had switched companies during the Invasion only to be buried under WWE's enormous mounds of abysmal booking.
Nonetheless, it is mostly outside the squared circle that DDP cemented his legacy as one of the most generous, positive and committed individuals to have been around in a while.
Even before his retirement in 2005, Page had been dabbling in motivational speaking and yoga inspired fitness programs. Discovering the health benefits of yoga from his erstwhile wife Kimberley, Page developed a fitness routine which incorporated the discipline in a major way. “Yoga for Regular Guys Workout” was published in 2005 and soon evolved into a series of workout videos called “DDPYoga”.
One of the most cited stories of rehabilitation through DDP’s yoga regime is that of Arthur Boorman. A Gulf War paratrooper who remained disabled for fifteen years, Boorman approached DDP after coming across him following a random search result on the Internet. The medical opinion was that he could never walk without leaning on canes again, just like he had for those difficult years of his life. Accumulating weight in alarming levels, a helpless Boorman sought a hand to lead him out of this agony and bleakness.
Though a note of skepticism rang through the situation about its outcome, both men exerted themselves to their mental and physical limits. DDP, in his position as mentor and guide, directed a resilient Arthur towards safer shores by following a strict standard of dieting, exercise, and control.
By the end of numerous sessions, Arthur was not only able to take strides unaided, but also make a run for it. Today, he stands without any physical duress, a testimony not only to the incredible power of yoga but also to DDP’s benevolence, guidance, and persistence.
DDP has also been instrumental in bringing former WWE Superstars back to a prime state of health and being. Jake the Snake and Scott Hall, two of the most iconic wrestlers of the 1980s and 1990s, had slipped into a bottomless abyss of drug and alcohol abuse. Each had struggled with addiction at some point in their careers, coming off and relapsing numerous times but their days took a sharp turn in the late 2000s. Rehabilitation efforts by the company had proved futile to both in the face of trauma induced demons, strained family relationships, and career distresses. Vices from their chaotic pasts returned to haunt and further drive both Hall of Famers into irredeemable depths.
Jake was the first of the pair to be approached by Page in 2012. In fact, Jake had been one of the most influential mentors to DDP during his in-ring days. Offering him a room at his house in Atlanta, Page ensured that Jake’s travails to recovery transpired under his careful auspices. Inside the “Accountability Crib”, Jake partook of DDP Yoga to lose over sixty pounds and abstain from any sight, smell, and taste of alcohol for over a year.
When he finally made an appearance in 2014 for an “Old School” episode of WWE Raw, looking neater and stronger than before, the cheers erupted were thunderous. Jake was inducted into the Hall of Fame by DDP in a heartfelt ceremony, fondly remembering in his speech the role the latter had to play in pulling him out of the flotsam into calmer waters.
By the time Page and Jake had reached out to Hall, the latter was reportedly “drinking vodka for breakfast”. A living wreckage of a man, Hall had collided and crashed through domestic violence allegations, PTSD episodes, overdoses, hospital visits and occasional relapses along a headlong course towards a painful, certain end. It was only with the intervention of Jake and Dallas that “The Bad Guy” felt a warm glimmer of hope.
Seeing the results of DDP Yoga on Jake, Hall acceded to staying at the “Accountability Crib”, and under DDP’s watchful eyes, transformed into a healthy and spirited human being after five months of clean living, meditation, and exercise. Page even initiated a fundraising campaign for Hall’s hip replacement surgery and dental treatment. In 2014, Hall was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame and has made sporadic appearances on both the WWE ring as well as NXT’s developmental stage.
Page’s generosity is not limited to the insides of his yoga program and motivational speeches. In one instance during his time with WCW, Page helped out fellow wrestler Goldberg by footing his medical insurance when the latter had burned himself from a pyro during his entrance. Goldberg had initially bypassed Ted Turner’s offer of insurance but was brought abroad the company plan once Turner found out about DDP’s aid. Page, however, refused any reimbursement from Turner for his noble act.
