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Book Reviews - By Trinka Porrata
“WALKING A GOLDEN MILE”: BY WWE’S WILLIAM
REGAL
Brit William Regal (Darren Matthews really)
grew up wanting to be a professional wrestler. His obsession took him from
wrestling to the global entertainment world of wrestling. And it took him into
the world of steroids, drinking and pain pills…………..and eventually the biggy---GHB.
Regal started in the mid 80s at Blackpool, a
holiday resort in Europe with a giant amusement park known as Pleasure Beach.
There was an area called The Golden Mile (hence the name of the book,
“Walking a Golden Mile”), filled with arcades, games and wrestling
entertainment. Regal toyed with steroids from a fairly early age to put bulk on
his skinny frame. But it wasn’t until 1993 that he turned up the alcohol
input. Along the way he had also found hydrocodone for the pain of inevitable
injuries in the business and Valium for sleeplessness. It adds up.
In 1995 he hurt his knee in Japan and had to
go to the doctor, who prescribed hydrocodone. He had already been taking Valium
and by then wasn’t only taking it only for sleep, but also “in the day when I
had nothing to do. …….I started drinking a lot of wine at home. I was telling
myself that red wine was good for your health. Cobblers, of course—complete
nonsense. One glass a day might be good for your heart. But I was drinking a
gallon a day—and taking downers with it too.” And so it began.
I had been told that Regal talked about his
addiction to GHB in his book. When I got the book I wondered if I could spot
the GHB chapter even if GHB wasn’t in the title. Easy as pie. I saw the
chapter title “My New Friend,” and I knew. He ends the previous chapter,
detailing his general drug addiction downfall with these words: “I didn’t think
life could get any worse. Wrong again.”
In late 1997, full of drugs and bedraggled, he
experienced a blow out, ending up in an Atlanta hospital with his lungs nearly
full of blood and in terrible shape. Despite advice from the doctors, he headed
back to England, ditched the antibiotics and went to an old pal, looking for
drugs at his old gym. He was offered GHB and latched onto it. In his words,
“Of all the things that I’ve taken, GHB has caused me the worst problems. It’s
a horrible drug and anyone who tells you different is a prick for saying so.
People in bodybuilding magazines will write that it’s misrepresented. It
isn’t. It has no benefits whatsoever.”
He continues: “It is a very strange drug.
Its supporters make it sound like a wonder drug. And if you don’t abuse it,
maybe it is……………….very few people take it in the way they should. That’s
because if you don’t take enough of it to go to sleep, it gets you high. You
get a euphoric feeling. Then when you get used to GHB it doesn’t make you sleep
but you speed on it instead. And if you take a little too much it acts as a
muscle relaxant and you pass out. Either that or you black out, when you can do
some really weird things and have no memory of them afterwards. Half the time I
would have no idea what I was doing. That used to happen to me a lot.”
He describing waking in the hospital after
flipping out, threatening to hit his father-in-law and anyone else for that
matter. “I had stopped breathing several times, so they’d called me an
ambulance.”
He also talks a lot about his addiction to
Nubain, a painkiller that is not tracked by law enforcement or medical
regulators it seems, but is very commonly overused and abused in the athletic
world. I’ve heard it over and over from GHB addicts in the gym scene.
Regal describes his complete downfall at this
stage and notes something else common to GHB addicts---isolation. “By now I was
a complete hermit who did nothing but sit in his bedroom and drink Renutrient
(GHB).” Staggering around his room, he broke his ankle and leg. After a brief
family holiday, “When we got back, I shut myself up in my bedroom with my new
friend, Renutrient. And I went insane.” Boxes and boxes of the drug were
shipped to him. He was a recluse, as so many G-aholics describe.
Regal got to the point where sleep wasn’t
possible (typical of GHB addiction). “I actually lost my mind. I used to sit
there with a writing pad. In between drinking Renutrient, passing out and
waking up, sometimes an idea popped into my head and I wrote it down. I
scribbled pages and pages. One time, I thought I had solved all the world’s
problems. . . . . ..When I woke up I looked at my discovery. It was complete
nonsense. There were pages and pages of this shit lying all over the room. It
was all total gibberish.” He even fell and busted his face (another common
experience) and wouldn’t accept help from anyone. “There’s nothing wrong with
me. Leave me alone.” Sooooooooo typical!
Finally the wrestling world pushed him into
rehab but he stayed only two weeks and headed back to England, pounding down the
booze and pills. His wife was distraught and his father shocked by his
downfall. Early 1999 he again went into the rehab center. This time he stayed
for ten weeks but in a moment of weakness once he was allowed to go out, though
still in the program, he drove to a “health food store” and bought more GHB,
which was still sadly on some shelves at that time. He guzzled some and went
back to the center. He had to report to a doctor, who noticed nothing about
him. He drank some more to go to sleep and felt that nothing was happening.
But, “The next thing I knew, I was sitting naked on the couch in the front room
of the apartment, surrounded by people and ambulance men. I hadn’t a clue what
had happened. The next memory is waking up in the hospital with tubes in me.”
He said that is when the light finally dawned, despite his intense denial up to
that point.
Regal got back on track and was allowed to
stay in the wrestling world. He thanks Vince McMahon at WWE for pushing the
rehab issue and those who allowed him back in. He had a good run left in him.
In February 2003 Regal was slammed hard and
suffered a concussion. He also started swelling up and no one seemed to have an
answer. Finally the diagnosis came—congestive heart failure. With talk of even
needing a heart transplant, Regal managed to get through that one too. They
literally stopped his heart and restarted it. It worked. Needless to say, he
didn’t take kindly to being told his wrestling days were over. He actually did
make it back to wrestling.
I didn’t expect to read the entire book. I
planned just to read the GHB part. But “Walking a Golden Mile” provides some
interesting insight into the wrestling entertainment world, something I don’t
really follow, and into the Brit side of it as well. Interesting. I greatly
appreciate his openness about his drug experience………….and especially GHB. It’s
such an invisible drug. Any light focused on it is helpful to our work and
saving lives.
We know he isn’t the only one in the WWE and
comparable organizations, plus sports in general, who have encountered GHB.
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