Jake Roberts Recalls WWE Feud He Felt Was In 'Poor Taste'

Jake "The Snake" Roberts' struggles with sobriety have been the beating heart of his own redemption story, but they've also been the source of crass parody. The most infamous of those disgusting instances was his feud with Jerry "The King" Lawler in 1996. Trying to put his life together, and being born again, Roberts was put in a feud that saw him constantly mocked by Lawler.

"Absolutely was in horrible taste," Roberts said on a Q & A episode of "DDP Snake Pit." Roberts' co-host DDP had no idea about the tasteless angle. "They made fun of me for being an alcoholic," Roberts continued, bringing DDP up to speed. "He wound up pouring a bottle of whiskey down my face, burned the s**t out of my eyes." Conrad Thompson and DDP were flabbergasted by the fact that the bottle of whiskey was not gimmicked or diluted in anyway.

"Ask Jerry he'll tell you the same damn thing," Roberts continued, "because whenever it came time for me to pour it on him he goes 'you can't pour that on me,' and I go 'what do you mean? You poured it on me.' He goes 'well Vince wanted it poured on you.' That motherf***er, you know?" Roberts says he was really struggling at the time, and that Vince McMahon wasn't the only instigator. "I can't say 'boys will be boys' because boys will be assholes. They were constantly putting things in my bag that shouldn't have been there, taking chances with my damn well-being because they were putting drugs in my damn suitcase that I didn't know were there, and I'd find s**t in there y'know? Paraphernalia and stuff. It was just horrible, man." 

According to Roberts during the same episode of "DDP Snake Pit," none other than The Undertaker used his unusual sleeping arrangement to Roberts advantage. Undertaker would apparently sleep in the luggage compartment under the WWF tour bus, and during a European tour heard some of "the boys" ragging on Roberts for his faith and sobriety. "He had the bus pull over, and he got up and cut a promo in my favor. Told us, 'guys you don't want him going back to the guy he used to be, he'll kill every f***in' one of you.' It was pretty rough man." Roberts summed the whole ordeal up as "a real bad angle."

"Even Lawler didn't want to do it. I didn't know it at the time that Lawler didn't want to do it, I thought he was enjoying it too much. I had some harsh feelings for Jerry until we sat down and talked about it. Now we're good." Sadly, WWE has continued to use onscreen storylines to make fun of the real-life addiction struggles of its wrestlers, including with the late Road Warrior Hawk in 1998, and more recently with Jeff Hardy during a long feud with Sheamus in the Thunderdome-era.