We are back with another Dark Side of the Ring review! This week’s episode talks about Buff Bagwell, a wrestler in the ’90s and early 2000s. However, over the last few years, he has negatively remained in the spotlight. So how was this episode of Dark Side of the Ring? Let’s review!
The episode starts with Buff, his father, and his childhood friend Slick telling us about Buff’s childhood. His mother owned a successful lumber farm and his dad was also a famous race car driver so Bagwell and his two brothers were spoiled rich. By the time he reached 18, the lumber business was going under and the Bagwells were going broke. This led to his mother and father arguing constantly and his mother trying to move out of the family house.
The first part of the episode focuses on a story where the mom was trying to leave and the father kept yelling at her. Buff shot his father four times for not leaving his mother alone, and he had to get a growth plate in his arm because of it. Buff ends up moving out and moving in with his high school sweetheart. Missy Hyatt ends up discovering Buff at the apartment complex where she was living and she tells him to become a wrestler. At this point, the deal was made that Buff’s girlfriend was going to work to put him through wrestling school and then once Buff became rich she would never have to work again.
After training on the independent scene for a couple of months, Hyatt gives one of his matches to WCW to help him get signed. After two years of being a singles star, he then was in three different tag teams (with 2 Cold Scorpio, The Patriot and Scotty Riggs) before joining the most famous wrestling faction of all time, the NWO. While he was in these tag teams Bagwell was upset with his appearance decided to get calf implants. Unfortunately, his body was rejecting the implants and he had to get them removed before the doctors were forced to cut his legs off.
When he won his fast tag team title only being 21, he started to realize that he was not ready to settle down with his first wife and he cheated on her leading them to get a divorce. He then marries another woman, but that did not work out either, until finally settling with Judy who was his third wife. When he joins the NWO he decides to hire his whole family to keep them employed while also getting all of his work done. During a match with the Steiner Brothers, Bagwell gets hurt and he was almost paralyzed, but luckily all he did was break his neck and he just needed two plates to fix the injury.
While recovering from injury Bagwell turns to pills to help him with the pain. His friends and wife begin to worry about him since that is all he is relying on to have a good time. After he returns from injury WCW makes his mom Judy Bagwell a character on TV that fights with Buff until WCW is bought by WWE in 2001. WWE decides to bring Bagwell to their company and sign him to a deal, but right before his debut, he gets into a fight with Shane Helms at a training session where Helms calls him a drug addict and Bagwell threatens to beat him up.
After Bagwell slaps him Helms hits him in the bag of the head with an ice-cold water bottle which cracks his head open. He did not tell anyone and went to his doctor to hide the fact that he had 25 stitches in his head. Since no one in WWE liked the match with Booker T on Raw they decided to fire him and since Bagwell slapped Helms first in the fight this was another reason for him being let go. For 11 years he was on the independent scene and he was also trying to stop doing drugs. In 2012 he had a withdrawal-induced seizure and he got into a car accident that almost killed him. Since his bills kept on coming in he decided to do the show Gigolos where he would be paid $25,000 to do so. Not knowing what he signed up for he was pleasantly surprised when he showed up on his first day.
After doing the show Bagwell ended up on a website where you can rent a Gigolo for a date or a weekend. On the first date he ended up doing, he falls in love with the woman and leaves Judy for her, even though in the present day she is not in his life anymore. In 2018 things with Bagwell’s addiction got worse and he truly hit rock bottom resulting in multiple DUIs and another car accident where he crashed into the back of a mall. After his mom died of Alzheimers Bagwell was forced to get cleaned by his family. With the help of DDP and his loved ones, he was able to get clean and help Scotty Riggs get out of his depression. Now with his fourth wife, he is focused on sobriety and hopefully getting back in the ring at one point or another.
Overall: Compared to last week’s episode this was a more darker episode since it focused on Bagwell’s struggle with addiction and his goal of getting sober. I thought this episode was good and also chaotic as we learned the different parts of Bagwell’s life including his rather interesting childhood.
