“He’ll Shake Your Hand, Then Cut Your Throat”: Dan Spivey on Waylon Mercy in WWE

There are wrestling books that are basically just lists: matches, belts, towns, a few wild road stories. Dan Spivey’s book, The Dangerous Truth isn’t one of those. From the first few pages, it hits with a very different energy. It’s bleakly funny, self-deprecating and brutally honest about the years lost to drink and drugs, the broken relationships, the chaos of the business. At one point in our chat, he sums up his old lifestyle with a single, savage line: “I probably snorted a couple of Rolls Royces in my day, you know.” He’s not boasting. He’s almost bewildered that he’s still here. Spivey hit rock bottom at 56 (he's 73 now). That, he says, was when everything changed. “I finally hit rock bottom with my drugs and alcohol, I was 56 years old when I had a spiritual awakening, and started a road of sobriety.” The book came later, and it wasn’t about ego or legacy. It was about making that wreckage mean something. “[The] Reason I wrote the book is people wanted me to tell my story and… if this book and my story helps anybody get sober, then it was worth the time and effort of it.” You can feel that purpose running through the pages, but there’s something else threaded through it too, a quieter story that sneaks up on you. For more visit: https://www.soundspheremag.com/