Paul Wight Reveals Why He Pretended to be Colorblind for a Year

Paul Wight is opening up about one of the most heartbreaking stories from his childhood — revealing he once spent an entire year pretending to be colorblind because he was too embarrassed to admit his family couldn’t afford new shoes.

While speaking on the High Performance podcast, Wight reflected on how difficult life became growing up unusually large at such a young age. According to Wight, constantly standing out physically turned him into an easy target for bullying and fights throughout his childhood.

“It was brutal. I got in a lot of fights when I was a kid. A lot of fights. And I wasn’t fighting kids my age. I was fighting older kids and adults.”

Wight explained that many of those problems were connected to how quickly his body was growing, especially because his family struggled financially to keep up with replacing clothes and shoes fast enough. He then shared the painful story that eventually led him to fake being colorblind at school.

“I remember going to school with one blue shoe and one green shoe in the wintertime because my feet were growing so big I was blowing my shoes out faster than my parents could buy them. But those were the only two shoes that didn’t have holes in them.”

Instead of admitting his family couldn’t afford matching shoes, Wight came up with another explanation to avoid being embarrassed in front of classmates.

“So then I told everybody I was color blind. Then they made fun of me for being color blind. I wasn’t color blind—I just didn’t want to tell them I was poor.”

The lie eventually snowballed into something much bigger because Wight realized he actually had to learn how color blindness worked in order to convincingly fake it every day at school.

“So then I went to that school for a year, and it was like, ‘Oh, what color is this?’ And then I had to learn about being color blind—what colors you can’t see and what you can see—so I could fake it.”

Looking back now, Paul Wight says moments like that reflect the emotional pressure kids often put on themselves when they feel different or isolated growing up.

“Those are the things you go through as a youth where you put this pressure on yourself, and you think everyone’s coming after you, and you get wrapped up in your own bubble.”

Bottom line — Paul Wight says the bullying and embarrassment he experienced growing up became so overwhelming that he spent an entire year pretending to be colorblind just to avoid admitting his family couldn’t afford new shoes while his body rapidly changed from acromegaly.

Do you think stories like this help fans better understand the personal struggles many wrestlers dealt with long before fame and success arrived? Drop your thoughts below and let us know.

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