Six months before the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, former WWE wrestler and heavyweight world champion Kurt Angle fractured his neck. But he competed in the games despite the excruciating pain, shooting novocaine to land himself a spot on Team USA. Angle won the gold in an overtime call, neck still broken, body beaten down.
That's around the time when Angle started depending upon painkillers, eventually graduating to "65 extra-strength Vicodin a day." Sixty-five a day—that's when he knew it was bad, according to an interview with ESPN.
"I was desperate. I was spending a lot of money on medication, and it took control of my life," he recalled. "It was the worst time of my whole entire life—those three years when I was really really deep into it.
Vicodin is an opioid and highly addictive. Angle was addicted—again, 65 pills a day.
"The only thing I could do was eventually go to rehab and try to fix my life again," he told ESPN. "But I actually beat it on my own. I stayed in my house for about 10 days and didn't leave, and I was able to get through the withdrawal." If true, that's incredible self-restraint. Unfortunately, it didn't completely work.
Angle continued wrestling in the WWE, and he continued abusing drugs, messing with his doses and drinking at the same time. He landed himself four DUIs over the course of five years, and finally checked into rehab in 2013. He said he's been clean since.
And all due to a broken freakin' neck.
