As Valhalla, a wrestler who wears antlers and whose face is spray-painted black down to the nose, enters during the WWE streaming event Royal Rumble on Jan. 27, the familiar guitar strums of someone else’s music interrupt.
The camera pans from the menacing Valhalla walking toward the ring to R-Truth jogging behind her. R-Truth gives Valhalla a confused look as he passes to take his place in the Royal Rumble match, an annual battle royal to decide who will go on to get a heavyweight championship match at the pro wrestling company’s marquee event, WrestleMania.
After R-Truth slides into the ring, he has a befuddled look. He motions “timeout” like an NBA coach. He then comes face-to-face with Nia Jax, a former women’s champion. “Where are the guys?” R-Truth yells to no one in particular.
R-Truth has accidentally entered himself into the women’s Royal Rumble match.
After Jax quickly removes him from the match and Valhalla yells at him for ruining her moment, an on-screen executive tells R-Truth that he’s in the wrong Royal Rumble.
“So you’re telling me all those are women in there?” R-Truth asks, unconvinced.
The moment is typical R-Truth: a well-intentioned act followed by confusion leading to hilarity.
But just 12 months before this year’s Royal Rumble, it wasn’t certain that he’d even be participating in a WWE match. It wasn’t even certain last year that R-Truth would even be able to walk the same.
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R-Truth, real name Ron Killings, is one of WWE’s longest tenured and most adored active wrestlers. He debuted in 2000 as a hip-hop character named K-Kwik, who rapped his entrance music and was also one of the most athletically gifted wrestlers during the peak of WWE’s popularity. R-Truth has found his lane as a comedic wrestler, engaging in Dumb and Dumber-like hijinks weekly.
R-Truth’s character is a pro wrestler who doesn’t understand how pro wrestling works. A few years ago, after he cut a promo about what he planned to do at the Money in the Bank streaming event, which is highlighted by a ladder match, he was reminded he was not in the match. During the 2016 men’s Royal Rumble match, R-Truth grabbed a ladder before entering the ring, climbed it, and reached up in the air expecting to grab the Money in the Bank briefcase, mixing up the concepts of the two matches.
“My bad,” he said, a normal retort for his mistakes.
At age 52, R-Truth has found a way to continually reinvent himself and adapt to every new era of pro wrestling. R-Truth is in one of the most successful runs of his 24-year career, complete with a spot on WrestleMania card in Philadelphia on Saturday with partner The Miz in a six-team match for the Undisputed WWE tag team championship.
Fan support for R-Truth has soared, which makes him seem primed for what the company likes to call a “WrestleMania moment,” where a victory is met with widespread joy and cheer.
But this almost didn’t happen.
During a match against Grayson Waller on Nov. 1, 2022 on NXT, the WWE’s developmental system television show, R-Truth ran toward the ropes that surround the mat and front-flipped over them to the outside ring area into the arms of his opponent. This is a move R-Truth has probably done thousands of times, except this time something went wrong.
“As soon as I planted,” R-Truth told Andscape. “I felt the lightest thump in my thigh.”
With just milliseconds to spare before he reached the ropes, and no power in his left leg to push off to get over the ropes, R-Truth pushed off from his toes to keep from running face-first into the ropes.
R-Truth got the height needed to get over, but not the distance, so instead of Waller catching him, R-Truth essentially did a backflip straight onto the floor. In video from the match, R-Truth immediately reaches for his left leg.
R-Truth had torn the patellar tendon in his left knee early in his career, so he immediately thought it was that. His knee was tight, but he could still bend it, so he figured he could finish the match, mostly so Waller wouldn’t have to settle for an incomplete finish. There are many examples of wrestlers finishing matches after suffering major injuries — “Stone Cold” Steve Austin won a match in 1997 after bruising his spinal column — but by the time the referee came to check to see if R-Truth was OK, he had no strength in his leg. He demanded to be allowed to finish the match, but WWE’s medical staff refused.
“I stood up and it felt like there was nothing there,” R-Truth said.
“I charged it [injury] to the game; it’s what I do. We don’t deliver mail for a living.”
— Ron “R-Truth” Killings
By the time he got to the back, his knee was swollen to the size of a grapefruit. R-Truth stayed overnight in Orlando, Florida, where NXT is filmed, and got an MRI the next day. The diagnosis was a quadriceps tendon tear — the muscle in his quadriceps was detached from the kneecap.
R-Truth was disappointed because he wouldn’t be able to finish his storyline with Waller. He believed he had been on a good run through most of 2022, appearing regularly on NXT and Main Event, a streaming-only WWE show. He was the most popular 24/7 champion — a title that could be defended any time of day — during the belt’s brief run from 2019 to 2022. R-Truth knew this injury would put him on the shelf.
“I was smokin’ then,” he said. “I was like, ‘Let’s run this.’ ”
R-Truth was also reflective. He had signed with WWE in 1999 as a 27-year-old former drug dealer. At the time of the injury, he was 50 years old and married with five children. Aside from injuries including a shoulder injury that kept him out for a year, he had been going nonstop for the last three decades. He took the injury as the universe telling him to slow down and sit still for a minute.
“I charged it to the game, it’s what I do,” R-Truth said. “We don’t deliver mail for a living.”
R-Truth had surgery to repair his quad on a Tuesday in November 2022, in Orlando. By the next day, he was in physical therapy for three days straight before flying back home to Charlotte, North Carolina, on Friday. After he completed another week of physical therapy, one of the doctors noticed that blood was leaking from the sutures on his leg.
The doctor cleaned and rebandaged the wound, and told R-Truth it was about time to get the stitches removed. R-Truth scheduled in Alabama with the same surgeon who had repaired fractures in his shoulders in 2017. As he lay on his back on the examination table and the doctor removed the stitches, they both noticed a hole the size of a thumbnail in his knee. He had developed an infection from the surgery. R-Truth said the infection had been caused by five different bacteria.
“Including MRSA, staph and they kinfolks, too,” he said. “… You could see through my leg and see the tendon.”
The physician called in two of his colleagues to further examine the hole. They asked him what he was planning on doing that afternoon. He told them he only needed to pick up his youngest daughter to take her to dance practice. The doctors, concerned that the infection would spread, asked him if someone else could get his daughter to dance practice.
He was in surgery within three hours.
The procedure consisted of cutting around the infected portion of his leg, washing the area out, and pulling the skin together around the incision with more stitches. After completing the surgery, the doctor told R-Truth they’d need to get the infection under control because it was very serious.
R-Truth is a naturally upbeat person, the same as his character on television. Throughout our interview, when going into the most grisly details about his recovery, he’d find a way to crack a joke. “They said you infected from the roota to the toota,” he said, describing what the doctors told him about the infection. So, of course he attempted to lighten the mood when coming out of surgery, extending a dap to the doctor before leaving the room.
But he had never had an infection and didn’t grasp how serious it was. The doctor didn’t return his dap.
“If we can’t get this under control, we’ll have to start thinking about other options,” the doctor told him.
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R-Truth didn’t understand what he was hinting at. The doctor looked down at his knee, and that’s when it finally clicked: He was in danger of needing his left leg amputated.
“He didn’t want to say it, shouldn’t have to say it,” R-Truth said. “Like, ‘We grown, you know what I’m talking about.’ ”
Postoperative care for the infection surgery included R-Truth being hooked up to a wound vacuum and having a peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) line placed into his arm.
The wound vacuum is a motorized device placed and sealed over a surgical wound to help it heal more quickly. The device ran for 24 hours a day, for eight weeks, which meant that R-Truth could not bend his knee for two months. He couldn’t return to physical therapy.
The PICC line was a tube placed in his arm to administer his antibiotics while the incision healed. Since he chose to return home to Charlotte rather than recover in Alabama, he’d have to administer the drugs himself through an intravenous line into the PICC three times a day, each time taking about an hour. He once had to administer the drugs in the middle of his son’s college basketball game in Pennsylvania.
After eight weeks of recovery from the second surgery, he had an appointment in Charlotte to get both the womb vac and PICC line removed. While R-Truth believed this was the end of his ordeal, as the womb vac was being removed there was still blood leakage in his knee. He asked the doctors what this meant.
They asked R-Truth what he was planning on doing that afternoon.
This led to a third surgery — the second for an infection — in less than three months. Afterward R-Truth had another PICC line inserted, this time in his other arm. He was able to resume physical therapy in March 2023.
As possibly the most in-shape 52-year-old in the country, all that time off from working out ate at him. That, mixed with the antibiotics, contributed to a weight loss of nearly 40 pounds.
He had to rewire his mind to get through everyday tasks. Climbing stairs took twice as long because he could only use one leg. Getting dressed wasn’t as simple as putting on a shirt and pants. Using the bathroom was an entire ordeal.
“Have you ever did No. 2 with one leg straight?” he asked. “I had to learn how to stand like a flamingo.”
R-Truth believes he handled the mental aspect of it all pretty well, though he said his wife, Pamela, would argue that he was in “bad moods here and there.” R-Truth’s time in recovery made him dependent on his family. His wife had to take on more parenting duties, which made him feel uneasy.
The worst days were when he had to administer the antibiotics, but it forced him to reflect on the seriousness of his injury. He considered what life would be like if his leg were to be amputated — how he wouldn’t be able to wrestle again or how the simple things in life would no longer be as simple. He called this time the “most testimonial experience” of his life, when he constantly searched for the reasons the injury had happened to him.
“It sent me on a roller coaster,” he said, adding that he didn’t allow himself to stop and wallow in it.
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A form of escape was making music in his home studio. R-Truth was a rapper before he was a pro wrestler. There’s a photo of him standing next to fellow rapper Tupac Shakur sometime around the time the movie Juice came out in 1992. R-Truth still performs his entrance music live every show, something no other WWE wrestler does.
The first song he recorded while in recovery was “Better Play,” a track dressed up in trap-heavy lyrics that is about finding a different purpose in life and making the right choices.
He leaned on his love for his family to pull himself through the dark times. He also leaned on his faith.
In Matthew 17:20, it reads: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” R-Truth called his mustard seed “gigantic,” certain that his faith in God would carry him through. He was worried but convinced there was a reason for all of this.
“It was unpleasant, it was uncomfortable, but I dealt with it. I took it, I ate it, I rode the ride,” he said. “And I rode it because I wanted to find out what was at the end of this ride.”
This wasn’t typical R-Truth.
He’s normally the loud and chipper one, the person who makes everyone laugh just by his mere presence. He’s the locker room leader who takes people under his wing and acts as a big brother, as he is to Jey Uso. Jey and his twin brother Jimmy, the sons of former WWE star Rikishi, have been signed to the company since 2009. The wrestlers usually drive rental cars from event to event, and the twins usually travel together or with their cousin, wrestler Roman Reigns.
One day, R-Truth just made his way into the Usos’ car. Eventually it was down to Jey and R-Truth in the car, and as the veteran, R-Truth made sure to be the main driver on those overnight drives.
“He was like, ‘Nah, Uce, you relax, I’ma drive,’ ” Jey Uso said.
R-Truth is the type of person a wrestler would lean on during those down times from being injured, Uso said.
“There’s just something about him when you see him at work you just smile,” Uso said. “Your day gets brighter.”
WWE
R-Truth returned to WWE on Nov. 25, 2023, almost a year after his first surgery, during the company’s Survivor Series: WarGames streaming event, in a non-competitor role. On an episode of Monday Night Raw the next night, during a backstage segment, R-Truth breaks into the clubhouse of The Judgment Day, a villainous gothic stable of wrestlers. The group walks into the room to discover R-Truth eating jelly rolls, with powdered sugar on his face. R-Truth greets the group with “What’s up, dog?” before offering himself up as the fifth member of the team for the WarGames match. The match had taken place the night before.
The segment was supposed to be a one-off, but the television ratings were so good that WWE decided to insert R-Truth into The Judgment Day’s storyline full time. He immediately brought a lightheartedness to the story arc. The Judgment Day was your prototypical bad-guy stable — beefing with all the babyfaces, insulting the audience, at one point holding three different sets of championships — and R-Truth’s earnest ignorance of the group’s rejection was both charming and funny.
As the weeks went by, R-Truth would just keep popping up to annoy the group. A week after the jelly roll incident, The Judgment Day found R-Truth again in its backstage clubhouse, this time with an old-school box television he’d promised them the week before. The Judgment Day had a T-shirt that listed the first names of its five members: Damian Priest, Finn Balor, Rhea Ripley, JD McDonagh and Dominik Mysterio, the son of legendary wrestler Rey Mysterio Jr., and who R-Truth confuses for two different people named “Tom” and “Nick.” R-Truth, not getting the hint that they didn’t want him around, attached a strip of duct tape with “R-Truth” written in black marker to the bottom of the shirt. He would eventually illegally sell replicas of the shirts in the parking lot. (WWE turned his version a T-shirt and sold it. The shirt became one of the company’s bestsellers.)
“It was a good, even relationship,” he said of working with The Judgment Day. “… It was just the moment that time was waiting to give me.”
As R-Truth tried to further shoehorn himself into The Judgment Day, its newest member, McDonagh, resisted. That eventually led to the two feuding, setting up for R-Truth’s first match in more than 12 months.
On the Dec. 18, 2023, episode of Raw, R-Truth took on McDonagh in a Christmas-themed, Miracle on 34th Street fight.
R-Truth went into the match with no hesitation or doubt. He wasn’t afraid of how his knee would hold up, nor was he reluctant to do all the dangerous moves he’s attempted in his career. During the match, R-Truth hit the splits, a scissors kick, and for the finish he and McDonaugh jumped off the turnbuckles simultaneously onto a table for a R-Truth victory.
“It was everything I waited for,” he said.
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He’s grateful for the fans’ response to his return and current run. Whether it’s the roar of his entrance music or the chants of “We. Want. Truth” even when he’s not even in the building, R-Truth never forgets the moments when he steps into the ring. The time off has made him more aware of not taking any of this for granted.
He looks back on what he’s accomplished these past two decades to help push him forward, to keep perfecting his craft, staying relevant, and desiring to excel. I ask him to tell me his favorite moment since he got back.
He doesn’t have an answer.
“It’s almost like someone asking me to pick a favorite match,” R-Truth said. “There’s no match I can pick as my favorite, because I’m enjoying myself, if not more, morerer, each and every time I’m out there.”
Nearly losing his leg brought much-needed introspection. He seems more appreciative of life, though that shouldn’t be misconstrued for caution. R-Truth works in a dangerous profession, and sometimes these things happen. At WrestleMania, he’ll likely jump from a 20-foot ladder or go crashing through a table.
When asked if he’d ever attempt the move that led to his three surgeries, he immediately replies yes. The move is a part of his arsenal, it’s who he is.
The reception he’s had since returning has made all of this worth it. The down times were rough, but that purpose and reasoning he was searching for just a day after tearing his quad has been found. The chanting from the fans, the T-shirt sales, the chants, the WrestleMania moments — he’d go through three more surgeries just to feel how he’s feeling right now.
“I’m 52,” R-Truth said, “and I’m the most popular that I’ve ever been in my career.”
