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

Back home away from the bright lights of the WWF, problems were mounting for the Orndorff clan too.

Ronda was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in the late-80s. Travis described it as “genuinely severe”. She'd spend a lot of the money Paul sent home on drugs, pills etc. Looking back, Trav remembers that his mother failed to wake up on time to take him to school. She was totally dependent on pain medication. Then, things got even worse.

Whilst Ronda was battling that, Travis “got deathly ill”. He dropped significant weight in around 3 weeks and couldn’t walk. To this day, he still doesn't really know what was wrong with him (“The best answer I’ve gotten is a complex regional pain syndrome”), but doctors said he might have a brain tumour. Paul was understandably cut up about that.

In an angry fit, the wrestling megastar pinned some poor doc up against the wall because he was angry and scared of losing his son. The Orndorffs were fighting nightmares on all fronts. Paul's injuries were going to force him from the ring eventually, Ronda was in a lot of pain and discomfort so self-medicated to the extreme, and now Travis faced an uncertain future on top of all that.

As if that wasn't enough, one of Paul's other sons Buzz (Paul Jr) was a rebel who eventually got himself into serious trouble with the law. That isn't something VICE ignored on 'Dark Side', but they didn't really get to explore what Paul thought about it all, so that issue was skirted over a little more than others.