This fourth season of Dark Side of the Ride has been notably marked by a more historical, less controversial approach to telling stories from wrestling’s past. In its telling of the wild life of Matt Borne, the original Doink the Clown in the WWF, it acts more like a “classic Dark Side” episode; like it’s an extended preview video before the guests would come out on The Jerry Springer Show to yell and fight with each other.
The show picks up in Arkansas, 2012, with Matt Borne putting on his Doink gear for an indie show before catapulting us back 27 years prior to the first Wrestlemania where Matt Borne is taking on Ricky Steamboat. We meet Teagan Osborne, Matt’s daughter, who is filled with evident pride as she talks about her dad’s accomplishments and presence. There’s also Michelle James, who met Matt in 1993 and was married to him from that year until 2004, and there are more family members to come.
Among wrestlers, Borne was respected, but those featured in the episode knew to keep on eye on him due to his erratic behaviour. Mick Foley admits he was hugely motivated by Borne; Tom Prichard says that Matt could be abrasive; Jim Duggan didn’t get along with Borne, and thought he was a bully. Brian Blair, who gets the lengthiest story to tell, had heard of Borne but didn’t know much about him before he met him. Blair details how Borne attacked him from behind at a bar filled with wrestlers, and Blair bit Matt’s bottom lip off and had to beat him down again and again, describing it like fighting a zombie. “If you have the right drugs in you, that can make you superhuman,” Blair reasons.
While Borne, a second generation wrestler as the son of Portland mainstay “Tough” Tony Borne, was making his name in territories around the country, an incident with a fan started a pattern of self-sabotaging behaviour. Duggan, who was part of a heel faction with Borne and Ted DiBiase, Jr. in Mid-South Wrestling, recalls getting punched by a fan and punching him back before moving on to the backstage. Borne, though, followed Duggan up by kicking the fan while he was down, severely injuring the fan’s face and, as Matt describes in archival audio, he’s fired by Bill Watts as a means of making an example to the wrestlers.
In an up-and-down time after that, Borne is hired, then fired by the WWF for drug use, before landing on his feet again in WCW as the lumberjack Big Josh. This is when he met Maria Straley, and they were married from 1991-1993. They had a daughter, and Borne lands his second shot at the WWF as Doink the Clown. Although Doink may be ultimately remembered as a comedy bit, Borne’s version was dark, twisted, and, according to Foley and Prichard, perfect for Matt (Prichard tells the story of Road Warrior Hawk likening a smoking, haggard-looking Borne as Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons before the Doink gimmick). When Foley heard that Borne was doing an evil clown gimmick he thought it suited him perfectly, and he liked it more than about anything that the WWF was doing at the time.
At the same moment as Borne is finding success, however, he, perhaps alongside fate or luck, finds a way to lose it. At WrestleMania IX, when a second Doink character emerged to help defeat Crush, Straley recalls that Borne was suspicious of being replaced. He was soon fired again for drug use, and Straley ends their relationship as Borne, who had always been explosive, became abusive. The character of Doink, however, continued on through new wrestlers, first Steve Keirn, and then Ray Apollo.
Borne takes Doink with him to ECW, billing himself as “Borne Again” until Vince McMahon sought to stop him from using the character. Borne makes a deal to receive residuals from the WWF, but had to stop using a clown gimmick of any kind on the indie circuit — although it didn’t seem to stop there. Now married to Michelle James, they have a son and daughter, but Borne’s drug use becomes more and more extreme, with James describing taking a beating from him which he didn’t remember doing. He moves to Texas after meeting Connie Cook in 2011, who says they were the right amount of crazy for each other, and when he dies in 2013, Teagan is convinced that Connie killed him.
Connie, for her part, remembers Matt acting strangely before she’s woken by neighbours who say they found him outside on the ground. She helped him into a chair in the house where he slept, hearing him snore throughout the night. In the morning, she hears him gurgling with foam coming out of his mouth. Connie addresses allegations that she neglected him in his last hours, insisting that she did all she could for him. Michelle adds that she recalls Matt telling her the night before he died that he was going to leave Connie.
There was no evidence of foul play or negligence on Connie’s part found by investigators, but that doesn’t change Teagan’s mind one bit.
The episode returns to Arkansas in 2012, with Borne eking out a living by constantly working and re-working the Doink gimmick. With all of the frightening, abusive tales told by the women in this episode, each of them remain fiercely loyal to his memory, while Foley sums up Matt Borne’s career as someone who gave more to wrestling than the business gave back to him.
Stay with SlamWrestling.net for reviews of future episodes of Dark Side of the Ring.
RELATED LINKS
- June 28, 2013: Matt Borne, original Doink the Clown, dead at 56
- Slam Wrestling’s Dark Side of the Ring story and review archive