10 WWE Stars Who Made Amazing Recoveries From Drug Addiction

1. Kurt Angle

For years and years, I thought Kurt Angle was a lost cause. He got cut by WWE for refusing to go to rehab, responded by publicly claiming in many interviews that he got clean on his own months earlier when they REFUSED to send him to rehab, and was slurring his words badly in his first interviews in TNA. He settled down a little bit over time, at least to the point where he was not quite the mess he was when WWE fired him, but he was still in rough shape. He was arrested for driving drunk and/or high on several occasions and TNA didn't put their foot down until after his last arrest in 2013, giving him the same ultimatum that WWE did: Go to rehab or you're gone. He went to rehab. To put this into perspective, Angles issues predate pro wrestling, going back to his Olympic gold medal win in 1996, especially if you want to blame his neck injuries for initially getting him into painkillers. That's 17 years of addiction with who knows how little sober time, and had never been in rehab. Like with Regal, it clicked. Earlier this year, Angle poured his heart out in a guest column in Fighting Spirit Magazine (which was reprinted in their free sample issue) that's among the most emotional pieces of pro wrestling writing you'll ever read. "I realized in rehab that I was taking drugs and drinking alcohol not because I needed it, but because I was depressed and wanted to hide the pain," he wrote. But what pain do I really have, besides my neck? I can deal with that; physical pain is nothing to me, it's the emotional pain. I put myself in that position." Angle identifies his Olympic gold medal win as the root of his problems: He kept chasing the feeling he had at that moment, and he always came up short. Drugs became the most simple way to try to revisit that high. Thankfully, he's had an epiphany, and I hope this is the beginning of a wonderful second half of his life.