How DDP is helping Jake "The Snake" Roberts

Former WCW World Heavyweight Champion Diamond Dallas Page has worked with several pro wrestlers on their aches and pains via his DDP Yoga system.

But Monday he begins perhaps his biggest challenge when Jake “The Snake” Roberts moves in with Page in a home Page recently bought in Atlanta. Roberts, whose wrestling career was derailed multiple times by substance abuse issues, will train with Page while cameras roll for a planned documentary. The idea is to get Roberts, 57, back in good enough shape for one more run in the wrestling business.

Page, 56, told newsday.com Sunday that he called Roberts -- whose weight had ballooned up to 302 pounds -- in Roberts’ hometown of Gainesville, Texas three months ago.

PWMania.com previously reported that WWE Legend Jake “The Snake” Roberts was moving in with Diamond Dallas Page on Monday. The plan is for DDP to use his yoga program to help get Roberts back in shape for one more run in the ring.

Roberts was booked for an independent show in La Marque, Texas on Saturday night for the Coastal Wrestling Federation where he was set to face a wrestler named Johnny Blade. According to fans in attendance, Roberts had been drinking and got upset when he felt his opponent was getting too much attention, more than Roberts himself.

Roberts reportedly confronted Blade during a mid-show promo in the ring. The story goes that Roberts ordered a confused referee to the ring, hit Blade in the head and then fell on top of him for a quick, sloppy pin. Roberts then reportedly walked straight from the ring to his car and left.

There were about 300 fans in attendance and the promoter issued an apology for Roberts’ action.

On his recent inebriated appearance at an Indie Event: “When I got down to Atlanta, DDP was like ‘OK, the first thing we need to talk about is your drinking…why do you drink?’ and I was just like ‘Well, I like it’…so I’m like OK,OK,OK I’ll play your silly f*cking game and I said well how about a couple of beers? So he agreed, we’ll try sticking to two beers. Well that lasted about a week…

“I went out on an autograph thing on Rhode Island. Did really well, didn’t drink for a two or three days during the signing, and I spoke to a lot of people and they were just patting me on the back, saying how much better I looked with all the weight I had lost, saying ‘damn Jake you haven’t looked this good in years, keep up the good work’…well, you shouldn’t tell a drunk or an addict these things. Like everything else in life, I use whatever situation I am in to get drunk or get high. In this instance it was ‘man you deserve a reward’. Man, I’m not a god damn dog that did a trick, but that’s the way I treated myself. The next thing I know, I’m getting off a plane in Atlanta…and Dallas is there, I don’t know why Dallas is there. We get back to the house and I find out I had been pretty stupid and ridiculous, and basically had gone through a four hour blackout. Blacked out. Didn’t know what I had done, what I had said, who I had offended…thank god I wasn’t in jail. I think if Dallas hadn’t been at the airport I would have ended up in there.

“Next morning, we get up and Dallas is saying ‘last week you did really well, then you go out this week and totally screw up…so here’s the new deal. Absolutely no alcohol. And at that point I’m like, you are absolutely right…because the sh*t isn’t doing you any good. Then he was like ‘you should go back to A.A…so two days later I went back…but then I went to Dallas and was like ‘I agree with the no drinking thing, but you’re gonna have to help me’…so we went to a doctor and got set up with something called anti-buse. Brother, if you drink alcohol with that stuff it will drop you like a gunshot. It will make you so violently ill, that you will not think about drinking. But it’s a crutch for me. It’s a safety line, and being here with Dallas, he’s making me change my way of thinking about things.”

On this Monday morning, the news of Roberts’ friend’s death is tough, but it doesn’t overshadow all the good things that are happening. Roberts had just returned the day before from an appearance at a pro wrestling show in Las Vegas. A couple of weeks before Roberts had suffered a setback – an alcohol-induced blackout returning from an appearance in Rhode Island -- and he wasn’t taking any chances in Sin City.

When he got off the plane in Vegas, good friend and fellow grappler Sinn Bodhi – who portrayed Kizarny briefly in WWE – met Roberts at the airport and watched him take antabuse, a drug that makes a person violently ill if he has any alcohol.

“A lot of this is making sure you do the right things when you’re stepping into the danger zone,” Roberts explains. “I’m not going put a gun in my mouth anymore, spit in the chamber and see if I get lucky. I wanted to have all the cards stacked against failing.”

Roberts laughs when recalling the scene of him drinking water with his friend in a Las Vegas club.

“I’m in Vegas drinking water,” Roberts said. “I’ve ruined my life.”

To confirm that Roberts is clean, he will travel with Yu that afternoon for a drug test – and Roberts can’t wait.

“I’ll get high by passing this test in a way, in a good way,” Roberts says. “Instead of hiding from a drug test I’ll be dancing when I go there.”

On his sobriety and the struggle: It's really cool, you walk into my bedroom here at the Accountability Crib, that's what we're calling it (DDP's house), and right to the right there's a big frame, a real nice frame, no money spared on that, and inside is my first drug test that I've passed. And I've got many more. Many more. I'm sixty-seven days clean and I'm not missing it at all, man- there's been a couple of moments where I'm like "Sonofabitch, I'd like to have a drink," you know. One was yesterday, I had to do an MRI, and I'm claustrophobic... you're in the gigantic machine, it drops down to about an inch above your face, and all the noises start, it's really horrible, man. It's really funny, when you hit something that really bothers ya, damn, it bothers ya, clean or dirty. And those things bother me. It'd been twenty-something years since I had the last one. It was a tough moment for me, and I shouted "gosh darn it, I need a drink.' But I didn't mean it. I was just playing with my mind. 'Cause sometimes you gotta lie to yourself to keep from running from the truth.