In this in-depth interview with The Sidearmer’s Jason Fink, the WWE Hall of Fame and the Master of the Diamond Cutter discusses his career, legacy, and what lies ahead
By Jason Fink | June 9, 2026
“Yo Jason, it’s DDP.”
For more than 30 years, I had heard that voice on television, wrestling pay-per-views, and documentaries. I never thought I would hear it on my own personal cell phone. That trademark gravelly voice belongs to none other than pro wrestling legend and CEO of DDP Yoga and PowerCuffs, Diamond Dallas Page, otherwise known as DDP. If you look up the words “relentless,” “overachiever,” and “tenacious” in the dictionary, Dallas Page’s photo should be next to all three of them.
Page, who just turned 70 last month and seems to choke the life out of every second of the day from the moment he gets up to the moment he hits the pillow, said not every day is as bright and shiny as it seems on his social media.
“There are mornings, I’ll be honest dude, where I go, fuck, I do not want to get out of this bed,” he said. “I travel so much still and the more I say the less I’m going to do it, the more I end up doing it because my wife loves to travel.”
Page went on to say there are times where he literally doesn’t know where he is because he spends so much time on the road.
“I literally woke up in my bed and thought, oh god, whatever hotel this is, I gotta check and see what kind of bed this is. This fucking bed, I don’t want to get out of it. It was my bed and I was in my house.”
It takes a village and Page doesn’t run short of one when it comes to his company. His wife Payge, who he married five years ago, has been a huge part of building DDPY over the last few years and she helps keep him active.
“She’s been such a trooper building our retreat down in Panama City Beach. We call her ‘Corporate Payge’ because fucking ‘Corporate Payge’ is a different person. ‘Corporate Payge’ when she dials in on shit, she’s hyper-focused and she doesn’t want to be ‘Corporate Payge.’ She’s like, let’s go hiking, let’s go mountain climbing, and travel.”
Page didn’t take the conventional route when it comes to his life and career. The eldest of three children, he was born Page Joseph Falkinburg on April 5, 1956, in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, to mother Sylvia and father Page Falkinburg Sr. He was raised by his dad after his parents divorced when he was young. When Page was eight, his father took him to live with his grandmother, who ultimately raised him.
While Page would eventually find success in the nightclub business and later professional wrestling, school was a different story.
“I was reading at a third-grade level at the age of 30, man. I really felt at some point I was going to do some acting,” Page stated. “I was running clubs at the time, and I just thought, fuck, I’m going to freaking learn how to read.”
Put an obstacle in front of Page, and while many people look for 100 different reasons something isn’t possible, he finds the one reason it is. He was determined to read, and a friend sent him to a woman in California who worked with people who have dyslexia.
“She was like 85 at the time, and the drills they put you through, the drills that they put you through,” Page said. “I went to see her for six months, and I still have some of the same issues, but I’m reading at about a sixth or seventh grade level, pretty much like our country, most guys don’t read over sixth grade. It’s crazy.”
Growing up, Page was an athletic kid who gravitated toward football and hockey. Especially the pigskin. Unfortunately, an untimely argument over footwear at age 12 led to a day he wouldn’t forget and would ultimately change his sports preference plans.
“My grandmother raised us, and her and I were in a huge fight about wearing boots, especially galoshes,” Page said. “I fucking argued and argued, and finally she won, and I put the boots on and tied them so fucking tight.”
The debate over boots delayed Page’s trip to the bus stop, and while walking across the street to catch the bus, he was hit by a car.
“I walked out in front of the car, and it hit my right knee. My face bounced off the hood, and I flew across the street about 40 feet. When that car hit me, it took me right out of my boots.”
After the accident, Page went to see one of the top orthopedic surgeons. He had operated on sports legends like NBA Hall of Fame center Willis Reed and NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath. After examining Page’s knee, he told him if he continued to play contact sports, he would need a cane to walk by the time he was 40.
Page didn’t accept that diagnosis and took his amateur sports career in a different direction. Hoops.
“I played basketball because you can get fucking good just by yourself. You can get better on the court, find out the mistakes you make, and go practice them. You know with the drills they have today, holy shit, man. Every year I would work the summer so I could go to Willis Reed’s basketball camp, and I was good, but I was never going to be a pro.”
After a short stint in college, Page decided it wasn’t for him and went back home to New Jersey and worked.
“In the beginning, I’m a cleanup guy at 17, then I became a bouncer at 18, and by the time I was 19, I had my own painting business. I was working for this guy for three summers, and I was like, fuck this, I can do this myself. So I started Page’s Painters,” DDP replied.
From painting, Page went into the bar and nightclub business.
“It was my mom’s boyfriend from years gone by, and he had this restaurant, and he had a bar downstairs, he said, ‘Do what you want with it, and I brought in some bands three days a week’.”
When asked how having dyslexia at the time affected his ability to run bars and clubs and eventually own them, DDP said it had no bearing on him whatsoever.
“You don’t need to know how to read. If you’re a social person, which I am obviously, you figure shit out, and I’ve always been really good at that.”
While he was in the bar business and running his painting business, Page was bringing in a nice income. With that came a vice that ultimately caused him to lose quite a bit of it.
“I was making great money and lost so much of it gambling that it fucking made me stop gambling,” he said.
The tattoos Page has on his body are symbolic to remind him of a life he used to lead.
“On my left arm, there’s the dead man’s hand, a king kicker, for the people who are superstitious, a black cat, 13, I have the flaming dice on the back of my triceps, and on the other one, there’s an eight ball, and there’s a caricature of me as a wild wolf with a dollar sign in my eye. I’ve always been behind the eight ball. I have a cocktail glass, a martini glass off to the left, a cigar in the mouth, and that same tattoo that’s on my left arm is on the wild wolf’s left arm, and he’s got a star on his chest like I do.”
People would always ask him, “Why did you get those kinds of tattoos?”
“Because I’m done gambling,” Page replied. “I’m only gambling on myself.”
He also finds the hypocrisy of gambling in the sports world comical.
“You’re telling me you’re not going to put Pete Rose in the fucking Hall of Fame, but ESPN, you might as well call it DraftKings. I mean, it’s in fucking stadiums, it’s everywhere.”
Always a personality who was able to connect with people, Page learned how to hone that skill when he was running and owning nightclubs. That personality eventually drew him back to the world of professional wrestling after a knee injury he suffered after three matches when he was 22. He loved wrestling since he was a kid. When he attended a World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF) house show in 1978, the promotion would later become the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and eventually World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), he saw future WWE Hall of Famer Greg “The Hammer” Valentine standing outside the venue. Page asked Valentine how he could get into professional wrestling. Valentine responded the way a heel would be expected to respond.
“Fuck off,” Valentine told him.
Fast forward to WrestleMania 6 in Toronto, Canada on April 1, 1990. A pink Cadillac came rolling down the aisle towards ringside. WWF fans didn’t recognize the man driving his personal Caddie who happened to be wearing a pair of sunglasses and donning a chauffeur’s hat. That man was Diamond Dallas Page. His passengers in the car? The Honky Tonk Man and Greg “the Hammer” Valentine.
“How crazy is that?” Page said when asked about coming full circle with Valentine. “I mean, how crazy is that?”
After a short stint in Florida Championship Wrestling, later named Professional Wrestling Federation, as a manager and color commentator, where he worked alongside the legendary play-by-play announcer Gordon Solie, Page would eventually find himself in World Championship Wrestling, where he would start out as a manager, a role he had filled since first breaking into the industry. He was 6-foot-5 and almost 250 pounds, attributes more suited to a wrestler than a manager. At age 35, Page made the decision that would forever change his life, which would eventually catapult him to superstar status in the wrestling world. He decided to become a wrestler.
Before he could actually work in the ring on television, Page earned his stripes at the then famed WCW Power Plant. It was a wrestling school in Atlanta, Georgia. The school eventually turned out several wrestling superstars, including Bill Goldberg, Kevin Nash, and Diamond Dallas Page.
“I can’t tell you how many times I hit that mat, I thought to myself, this fake stuff hurts like hell,” Page said in regards to his time at the Power Plant. “I can’t tell you how many times I fucking said to myself, are you sure you really want to do this? Just from the wear and tear on your body from that.”
Even though his body was taking a painful toll, Page continued to grind. While he saw himself as a main eventer on the wrestling card one day, others didn’t share the same belief. Michael “P.S.” Hayes, who Page managed when Hayes was in the legendary tag team “The Fabulous Freebirds,” gave Page a reaction he didn’t expect when he told his friend Hayes he was going from managing to becoming a full-time wrestler.
“He laughed right in my face,” Page said.
Were there times when Page questioned whether he was making the right decision to become a wrestler at that stage of his life?
“No, I knew I already had it. I’d seen me in the ring. I didn’t see me being a fucking mid-card guy. I saw me getting into the ring and having a match with Sting or Ric Flair down the road that I could say when I was in there with them, I freaking left them dry and kicked the shit out of them,” Page responded. “I was a heel. I could lie about everything, so that was my only vision of how I was going to do this. They’re not going to tell me I can’t. I’m going to surprise everybody, and I’m going to work my way up.”
And work his way up he did. While working opening matches with “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan on a WCW tour of Germany, Page caught the eye of the biggest star of the industry, Hulk Hogan.
“This is about the fifth or sixth night I’ve worked with Duggan on the tour,” Page said. “I walk through the curtain after my match, and Hulk grabs me, and he says, “How are you doing it?” I said, doing what? Hulk said, “You’re getting so much better.”
Even though Page had Hogan’s endorsement, others in WCW disagreed. During a phone call with the then executive producer, Eric Bischoff, who also happened to be his friend and neighbor, Page once again was presented with another barrier: the executive committee.
“Bischoff told me he talked to the committee,” Page said. “He told them what Hulk said and told Bischoff they don’t see it. That’s when I said I’m going to shove my fists so far up the booking committee’s ass, when I move my fingers, their mouths move.”
Page was at a crossroads, and he was frustrated. He talked to the one guy who he knew would understand, his mentor, “The American Dream,” Dusty Rhodes. Rhodes would be the guy along with Jake “The Snake” Roberts who never gave up on Page’s potential. He would show him the ropes of the business behind the scenes.
“Dusty would bring me into booking meetings and freaking ask me, what do you think about this, Dallas?,” Page said. “I’m in a room full of fucking guys who have been in the business 20-30 years.”
During those meetings, Page would also find out what a backstabbing business wrestling could be.
“I would watch these guys, whoever it was, bury him and try to fuck with him behind his back, and I would just say, man, how the fuck do you not sell this shit?” Page said. “He said, never let them see you sweat, D, never let them see you sweat. Fuck them, they can do whatever they want, but I’m still gonna be here.”
While on a phone call one night with Rhodes, Page vented that he would never be a star along the lines of Hogan, Flair, or even Rhodes himself. He then went on to tell Rhodes he would never be world champion. Rhodes stopped Page mid-sentence and gave him a heart-to-heart that would be the catalyst for what Page would eventually become in the world of professional wrestling.
“Then what the hell are you doing it for?” Rhodes demanded of Page.
While Rhodes was giving him tough love over the phone, Page was writing down his career goals. As he says in his powerful book, Positively Unstoppable: The Art of Owning It, Page says, “Don’t just think it, ink it.” He wrote he would be the world champion in five years or less. Four years, 14 months, and 14 days later, Page was hoisting the WCW world heavyweight championship over his head after pinning Flair in a Four Way Dance against fellow WCW stars Hogan and Sting.
Page had finally made it.
“The people who say, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ never see shit. The people who say, ‘I believe it because I see it,’ those are the game changers,” Page said.
While wrestling’s outcomes are predetermined, the physical punishment is very real. In 1998, Page suffered ruptures to his L4 and L5 discs in his back. While he was recovering, his then-wife Kimberly introduced him to yoga. He was originally opposed to the idea. As he got settled into it, he found that his back was feeling better to the point he could wrestle again. While yoga definitely was a game changer for his back, Page says he has to stay on top of it, or he will certainly feel the result of what happened to him 28 years ago.
“Is it great? No,” Page said. “I’ve got bone on bone in L4 and L5, but as long as I’m doing what I’m doing, I’m good, and if I start to get discomfort, I know how to hit the mat and eliminate it as fast as possible.”
After his career originally ended in 2005, he wrote ‘Yoga for Regular Guys Workout’ with his business partner, Dr. Craig Aaron. A year later, Page turned the book into a series of workout DVDs called DDP Yoga, which was previously YRG (Yoga for Regular Guys Workout). Early on, it was Page and a skeleton crew who were taking orders and shipping the DVDs to customers. Page would also add his own personal touch by emailing each customer who purchased a set of DVDs. While he was working on getting DDPY off the ground, it was a six-question email that Page sent to Arthur Boorman, which would put DDPY on the map.
Boorman was a disabled veteran of the Persian Gulf War. He was told by doctors he would never walk without the assistance of crutches again so he reached out to Page to see if he could help him.
“He answered the questions so thoroughly that I had to call the guy and I said, it looks like you need some help,” Page said.
With Page’s help and Boorman’s determination and never-give-up attitude, Boorman was able to lose over 100 pounds. Page posted the video of Boorman’s success in 2007, but it didn’t get the attention of the health and wellness community until five years later, when fellow wrestling superstar and Fozzy frontman Chris Jericho shared his own personal success with the program around the same time that Page’s business partner Steve Yu re-edited Boorman’s video.
“Freaking Jericho, he broke his back, and he couldn’t even sing, and he got 85 percent pain-free in five weeks, and three months later, he’s headlining WrestleMania with CM Punk. Our sales doubled after that month,” Page said. “But then Arthur’s video came out, and it just exploded. I didn’t even know what viral meant, so Arthur has always been a guy that if he could do it, what could you do?”
Arthur Boorman and Chris Jericho aren’t the only people Page has helped transform. There is a long and distinguished list of well-known people who have benefited from Page’s program. Former boxer Butterbean came to Page with two bad hips and was barely able to stand. After working the DDPY program, Butterbean lost over 60 pounds and had both hips surgically repaired. He can now walk without crutches and enjoy time with his family, time he didn’t think he had much left of in his previous state. Also, his journey inspired former wrestling superstar Lex Luger, who was wheelchair-bound and unable to walk until he also worked with Page.
“He’s been one of those guys who’s so grateful,” Page said. “He always puts over what we’re doing, and Lex would not be out of the chair if he didn’t see Butterbean working out in the chair.”
One of Page’s biggest success stories is his other mentor, Jake “The Snake” Roberts. Roberts is one of the greatest wrestling minds to ever grace the business. But years of the road, wear and tear on his body, and a mix of drugs and alcohol had him facing rock bottom. Many people had written Roberts off, except for his friend, Dallas Page.
Page extended his hand to Roberts and let him move into his Smyrna, Georgia, home, or the “accountability crib,” as Page likes to call it. While there were a few bumps in the road, Roberts slowly started conquering his demons and found a new life, one which he had expected to end before he found sobriety in 2012. Roberts’ motto is “my history is not my destiny.” That has never been truer than the life he has lived since Page helped transform him.
“It’s mind-blowing. Think about this: that Jake Roberts outlived Macho Man Randy Savage, Roddy Piper, The Ultimate Warrior, Hulk Hogan, and Scott Hall,” Page said. Roberts also rekindled a flame that had never burned out completely when he reunited with his ex-wife, Cheryl. He never stopped loving her, and she never stopped loving him through all the dark times.
“Never,” Page said. “When he got his life back, she said this is the guy I wanted to be with.”
Mr. Rogers once said, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” Dallas Page is one of those helpers.
“If you want to feel good about yourself, help somebody,” Page said.
Page is a big proponent of visualization. It’s what helped him achieve the success he had in his wrestling career. He finally got to see the fruits of his wrestling labor when he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2017. He was told by WWE he had to keep his speech to 15 minutes, which put a wrench into his plans.
“Two days before, I had written a 27-minute-long speech, and I had to go back and rewrite it, and right when I get it finished, my writer said, “I want to hear what you really wanted to say.” I said, “Dude, I just rewrote it”. He goes, “No, I want to hear the first one.”
His writer told the WWE powers that be how powerful Page’s speech was, and they let him do the original 27-minute speech with the tiny stipulation he not go over 30 minutes. Page could have let all the last-minute audibles affect him, but he chose to go another route. He chose to breathe and visualize.
“I could have been in my head with all the things that could go wrong, but it wasn’t. The only thing I was saying to myself is this is gonna be the best thing I’ve ever done in professional wrestling. I’m gonna blow everyone away. I’m gonna make them laugh. I’m gonna make them cry. I’m going to inspire them.”
Page also believes many people spend too much time in their own thoughts.
“Cornell did a study, and they followed a large group of people for a significant period of time, and they found out that eighty-five percent of the shit we worry about never happens, but it went deeper than that,” Page said. “They said of the fifteen percent that was left over, seventy-nine percent of the people whose freaking worries came to fruition handled them way better than they thought they could.”
That philosophy continues to shape how Page approaches his own future. Rather than dwelling on what could go wrong, he remains focused on growth, improvement, and the opportunities that still lie ahead.
What does the future hold for Diamond Dallas Page? He plans to continue traveling the world while building DDPY into an even bigger success. The recently released DDPY app features hundreds of exercises, healthy recipes, a positive mindset section, and fitness-tracking tools, which can be used with a Bluetooth heart monitor.
Page issued me a challenge of his own. He challenged me to use the new app for 30 days, and I gladly accepted. As someone who has dealt with my own various back issues recently, I am excited to be doing this again after a long layoff. As someone who does programs for a short time and then abandons them, I can learn a lot from Page.
“I got intense work ethic, discipline, and I can breathe,” Page said. “Those are my three superpowers.”
As Page also added, repetition is the mother of learning, which is why he never stops doing what he’s doing. While others his age are content relaxing and enjoying retirement, Page has other plans.
“I’m not training for 70,” he said. “I’m training for 80 and 90.”
When it’s all said and done, how does Diamond Dallas Page want to be remembered?
“My legacy? The guy who gave a fuck.”
