While Kurt Angle‘s professional wrestling career in WWE and, eventually, TNA, has largely been remembered for his incredible in-ring work – even if Dave Meltzer never gave him a 5-star match for his efforts – and his exceptional comedic timing, his story can't be told without touching on his addiction to painkillers, as you don't get the nickname “Perc Angle” without taking a lot of drugs.

Fortunately, Angle was ultimately able to beat his addiction before it truly ruined his life, and he has become increasingly open about discussing it both in general and in the context of his wrestling career, including in a special appearance on the True Geordie Podcast.

“Yeah, I’m not proud of it. I’ll tell you this. This is something that the doctors don’t tell you,” Kurt Angle said via Fightful. “When I broke my neck the second time, the first time in WWE, I met a doctor, and he introduced me to painkillers. He said, ‘These things are the greatest things in the world, you’re gonna love them.’ So I started taking one every four to six hours. After a while, your body builds a tolerance, and one doesn’t cut it. Then you take two, then two leads to four, four leads to eight. Before I knew it, I was taking 65 extra-strength Vicodin a day. This was within a six-month period of time. I mean, we’re talking almost enough to kill a horse, it was that bad. My focus was not wrestling anymore. My focus was, when am I gonna get the drug next? I became a druggie. I became an addict right away. 65 extra-strength Vicodin a day. The reason why I was taking them was not because of the pain anymore. It was because I was going through withdrawal. So if I took 15 painkillers, a few hours later they would wear off, and I’d start having withdrawal again, so I was taking more all day. More and more all day long every single day.”

Goodness gracious, there's no wonder Angle is making a movie about his life, his story really is fascinating. Unfortunately, this chapter would probably fall into the late Act 2/dark night of the soul territory, as per the “Olympic Hero” himself, things got so bad that he had to keep a calendar just to make sure he could consistently feed his addiction.

Kurt Angle reveals just how many pills he took at his worst.

Discussing his addiction further, Kurt Angle revealed just home man pills he would take on any given day and explained just how far he would go to get them, which would require trips to a dozen doctors and a dozen pharmacists in order to keep his ecosystem going and avoid detection.

“I was taking more, more, more. All I was doing was trying to hide the pain, physically and emotionally, and it got out of control,” Angle said.

“I’ll give you an example of what I was doing. I had 12 different doctors that were giving me 12 different scripts of medication. I had to set up a calendar because you couldn’t go to the same pharmacy, so you had to have 12 different doctors, go to 12 different pharmacies. So I had all these different pharmacies on my calendar, and then it still wasn’t enough, so I had to buy 500 of them illegally from Mexico. So I was buying 2,000 painkillers a month just to keep my addiction going.”

Asked how much money he was spending on average to keep his addiction alive, Angle gave a number before admitting that, for him, it wasn't about money but instead about feeding the beast to avoid withdrawal.

“$7,000 a month, but remember, I was making a lot of money [laughs], so the money wasn’t really an issue,” Angle said.

Over the course of his wrestling career, armature and professional, Angle had to deal with an extensive array of injuries, from breaking his neck, to hurting his back, to absolutely decimating the interior of his knees to the point where he's had to undergo multiple surgeries and still has a few more on the proverbial docket in order to improve his quality of life. While taking that many pills has more to do with the potent combination of gradually building up a tolerance and becoming chemically dependent on the substance in question than a lack of willpower or enjoying the effects of the drug, imagine just how much pain Angle had to have been in to get to that point, all the while working some of the greatest matches of his professional wrestling career. Needless to say, this movie is going to be an incredible watch.