Exclusive: Jake "The Snake" Roberts on his forthcoming book and podcast and DDP's possible next product
Simply put, few people have accomplished anywhere close to as much within the wrestling business as Jake "The Snake" Roberts. Not only is he in rare company as a WWE Hall Of Famer who main-evented events all over the world, but he continues to work in and around the wrestling business over 45 years after his in-ring debut.
These days, Jake "The Snake" Roberts is not only on weekly television via All Elite Wrestling and its Dynamite program, but he is also regularly on the road doing spoken-word performances and appearing at major Comic Con-style events. Meanwhile, he has a book slated for release in 2020 and plans to launch a podcast in the near future.
The recent career renaissance of Jake "The Snake" Roberts is largely tied to the Diamond Dallas Page-produced documentary known as The Resurrection Of Jake The Snake documentary. Released in 2015, the film chronicled Roberts' road to recovery and among other accolades, it won the Audience Award for "Best Documentary Feature" at the 2015 Calgary Underground Film Festival.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Jake "The Snake" Roberts by phone on March 23, 2020, as previously published on Sportskeeda. Then one day later, Roberts called me back to tell me more about DDPY Labs' upcoming Jacked product, his book and his podcast, which is embedded and partially-transcribed below.
Jake "The Snake" Roberts, of course, remains in close contact with Diamond Dallas Page and the DDPY team. As told to me by DDPY instructor Garett Sakahara about the aforementioned Jacked product: "There’s a lot I can’t talk about. Dallas is super-excited about this new product!
Dallas wanted to take DDPY to the next level and I’ve tried it firsthand, and MAN, I was in the RED on my heart-rate monitor for over 50% of the time and I was DRIPPING sweat! Look for it to come soon in the latter part of 2020!"
About Roberts, Sakahara added: "It blows me away that despite all the demons and addictions that Jake had, how sharp he still is. He still is amazing at psychology and he can still cut a promo and there’s good reason why they used to AND we still call him, 'One Take Jake!'" He also noted: "I also think the thing that people don’t realize, is how funny Jake is. People associate Jake being intimidating and scary; however, he’s hilarious!"
Our March 24, 2020 phone call showed a bit more of that "hilarious" side, of course. More on Jake "The Snake" Roberts can be found online at www.jakethesnakeroberts.com.
On his forthcoming book and how that ties into starting a podcast:
Jake "The Snake" Roberts: "I wrote it all myself. I spoke into a recorder and a friend of mine, his name's also Jake, he transcribed it for me. The people that are basically dotting the I's and crossing the T's and checking the grammar are going over it right now. There are people a lot of changes there because whenever I get on a rant, I just go for it. (laughs) That's the way the book was done.
I took a lot of time doing the book because I wanted it all to be from my heart, not out of my head... This is 100 percent raw Jake. I can't wait till it hits because I know people are gonna love it. This covers my career up until the point I go to WWF.
One thing I'm doing is starting a podcast and doing the second part of the book all on the podcast. Once or twice a week going on the podcast and just talking about what I was going through at that time with the WWE and my life and everything else. Throwing in a few stories here and there to make people giggle, you know?
But most of it talks about the life that you live. How horribly hard it was. At that time I was going 100 miles an hour, I was getting 2 or 3 days off every 4 or 5 months, I wrestled Ricky Steamboat 93 days straight, and twice on Sunday. That's the way it was, man. If we get injured, we didn't take a day off, we kept going because we knew the guy we were wrestling was going to take care of it.
I blew my pancreas against Andre [The Giant]. It just exploded because he ran through my clothesline. I went down to the mat and separated my shoulder. I was just trying not to pass out. He reached down with one hand and jerked me by my arm to my feet. That's when I did pass out. (laughs) He held onto me in a bearhug till I came back to. We went ahead finished that match and that was in Philadelphia in the afternoon and that night we wrestled in Scranton. (laughs) That's why so many guys got into the drugs, just to keep going.