12 Things We Learned From Dark Side Of The Ring: Saving Paul Orndorff

Speaking of which.

Orndorff's brother Terry called him one night from a bar and said he was being pressured by 2 sheriffs. Furious, Paul stormed in and started beating on them, so they called for backup. Despite the fact he was outnumbered, Orndorff didn’t stop and wrecked another 5 cops like it was nothing. Basically, Haku and Paul Orndorff in a bar fight would consume the earth.

Paul would often fight to pay his bar tab as well. If he couldn't afford the drinks he'd consumed, then he'd start throwing hands as a knockout artist to make some money. He got into lots of fights and “had a lot of anger”, but Travis reckons a lot of that had to do with the atmosphere at home.

 “My dad was forged in hell”, he told VICE. The Orndorff's experienced poverty, anger and violence on a near daily basis, so it's perhaps no wonder that Paul was so ready, able and willing to use fists instead of words. The dude writing this once had 4 pints aged 18 then stubbed his toe on a table in the bar and had to go home.

It wasn't quite the same sort of upbringing.

Seriously though, this was just one of many wild stories wrestling fans probably didn't know about Orndorff's youth. It turns out he was quite the wild child, but it was 'fight or flight' if the latter word was deleted. Put another way, there was no running away. Fighting was a bare (knuckle) necessity.