PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2016 Ariel Teal Toombs, Colton Toombs and Kitty Toombs
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Toombs, Ariel Teal, author
Rowdy : the Roddy Piper story / Ariel Teal Toombs, Colt Baird Toombs.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-345-81622-1
ISBN 978-0-345-81623-8 (ebook)
1. Piper, Roddy, 1954–2015. 2. Wrestlers—Canada—Biography. 3. Motion picture actors and actresses—Canada—Biography. 4. Entertainers—Canada—Biography. I. Toombs, Colt Baird, author II. Title.
GV1196.P5T66 2016 796.812092 C2016-903205-1
Ebook design adapted from book design by Andrew Roberts
Cover photo © 2016 courtesy of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.
v4.1
a
To Dad
and the Toombs Clan
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION This Isn’t Supposed to Happen
1 A Very Active Child
2 Concede or Get Up
3 The Jesus Years
4 Thanks for the Blood and Guts, Kid
5 Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You
6 Flair and the Family Man
7 A Despicable, Disgraceful Display
8 All Outta Bubble Gum
9 Frats
10 Finish
Photo Insert
Acknowledgements
A Note on Sources
Photo Credits
INTRODUCTION
This Isn’t Supposed to Happen
It’s 1986 and Roddy has seen enough of this guy.
Mr. T, a celebrity drop-in recruited to sell tickets and pay-per-view to the first ever WrestleMania at Madison Square Garden in 1985, had been dining out for months on some choice moments from that groundbreaking show. The day after the biggest main event in the history of professional wrestling, newspapers around the world ran a photo of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, the most hated villain in wrestling, suspended over T’s shoulders in a classic fireman’s carry. The audience that night slavered for what followed: the mouthy, cheating bad guy bouncing hard off the mat and receiving his just desserts for all the pain and aggravation he had caused Hulk Hogan, the champion, and Mr. T, Hogan’s famous tag-team partner.
Though Mr. T had acted as the mouthpiece himself opposite Sylvester Stallone in Rocky III, as a guest wrestler he stuck more to the strong, silent type of role he’d been playing recently on TV’s The A-Team. His choice was part necessity. Caught in the middle of the expertly improvised bombast of the world’s most famous professional wrestling feud, actor Laurence Tureaud was without a script and in danger of leaving audiences cold.
Roddy Piper had been wrestling professionally for over a decade. He’d learned the art of antagonism from masters of the business, and he’d taken knives, cigarette butts, and even the threat of bullets for his trouble. WrestleMania promised to vault him and his peers to fame and fortune, so Roddy pushed his boss, the World Wrestling Federation’s Vince McMahon Jr., his peers and everyone involved not to blow this chance. He argued that letting Mr. T pin him for the win would diminish not just his own reputation, but the reps of everyone in the business.
Fans bought tickets because they believed wrestlers were the toughest of the tough (often they really were). If you could just borrow a TV star and let him beat up the seasoned trash-talker who was biting mercilessly at the ankles of the beloved All-American champion, Hulk Hogan, how would wrestlers of lesser fame look? If Roddy lost to T, the smallest guy in the ring, or even to the enormous Hogan himself, there was a lot less reason for the audience to come back.
In the end Roddy didn’t lose—not exactly. “Mr. Wonderful” did. Paul Orndorff, Roddy’s tag-team partner, was pinned by Hogan, not by T. The crowd got their cathartic victory over the bullies, but it took their favourite wrestler to beat them. The good guys still hadn’t gotten Piper, not shoulders-down for a three count, fair and square. Now, a year later, Roddy and T find themselves in New York again, on Long Island this time, at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale. The success of WrestleMania has made pop culture icons of the WWF’s top performers, Roddy and Hogan foremost among them. Yet Roddy still has a real chip on his shoulder about the TV star who landed in his world. Roddy respects his peers. He knows intimately the work, stress and pain they have all gone through to survive in their business. Every time Mr. T is mentioned in the same breath as pro wrestlers, that chip grows bigger. McMahon, has a promoter’s intuition for guessing which scores the audience will pay to see settled, so he’s given T a chance to knock that chip off for good—or for Roddy to put an end to the celebrity’s dalliance with professional wrestling.
WrestleMania 2 plays out in three locations around the US, each with its own main event. In New York’s finale, Roddy and Mr. T step into the ring—to box. Arriving in a plaid robe in place of his usual kilt, Roddy berates T, reminding the actor he’ll be on his own this time. While the two literally but heads, the crowd is so loud it’s impossible to say which competitor they’re cheering on, but the commentator’s assumption holds: Mr. T is the good guy here and everyone hates Roddy.
In a post–WrestleMania grudge match, Mr. T had boxed Roddy’s real friend and “bodyguard,” “Cowboy” Bob Orton (a wrestling lifer and the son and, later, father of wrestling stars). T was getting the better of him—until Roddy crashed the ring, setting up tonight’s fight at WrestleMania 2. T is announced as eleven pounds heavier than he was the year before, and his fuller chest and shoulders seem to bear that out. He also weighs exactly one pound more than Roddy’s announced 235. Roddy’s boxing background—and his martial arts training—don’t get a mention from the commentators. It’s T who is portrayed as being at home in a boxing ring. But the fact remains that Roddy is a pro wrestler at a pro wrestling main event. Week after week, he is the reason people watch. Even if convention demands that fans hate him for the role he plays, they’re smart enough to know he’s the one who gives them what they want.
In the first round, Roddy is aggressive while T plays peek-a-boo, waiting for his opponent to abandon his defenses and then cutting loose on Roddy’s midsection. When T’s gloves find their mark, low or high, Roddy sells it. His head snaps back and forth. Sometimes his reactions to head shots look comical up close on television, but tonight he’s doing it for the guy in the back row who can’t even see T’s reactions when Roddy returns fire.
They break dirty, they keep fighting after the round is over, Roddy pushes the referee out of the way so he can kick T when he’s down—the match is a lot of what you’d expect, and if you’re a wrestling fan, it’s a lot of what you pay to see.
Round two goes mostly Roddy’s way, round three T’s, including a roundhouse left that lights a fire under Roddy, even though T misses by a substantial margin. Roddy still falls under the ropes and onto the
floor as if he’s been hammered but he’s embarrassed. A pro at his level would rather take that punch square on the jaw than allow it to look so fake. This moment is the culmination of everything about T’s presence that frustrates Roddy. During the next break he throws his stool across the ring and hits T in the leg. T doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. Pro wrestling is often about capitalizing on chaos, and T seems lost when the script goes out the window.
But that doesn’t matter. It’s what happened in the second round that’s still on Roddy’s mind.
After a flurry of shouts in support of Mr. T, a chant rises from the many thousands in the stands, and on the floor. “Roddy, Roddy…”
This isn’t supposed to happen. There are always a few nuts and die-hards who cheer for the heel—the bad guy—but for a few moments it sounds like half of Nassau Coliseum has turned on Mr. T. They want wrestling, pro wrestling, even with boxing gloves on. T might be cast as the babyface—the hero, in wrestling terms—but he’s not their guy. And with these few moments of roaring approval for his opponent, they let T know it.
There was something about Roddy Piper: the villain who did his job so well that fans often liked him more than his babyface opponent. It wasn’t unprecedented. Fans had long turned out in droves to community centres and small-town arenas to see the cruel and overconfident men who strutted into the ring, insulted the crowd and humiliated their heroes. But America had entered a new cultural dimension, one where a hero like Hogan was worshipped in part because he was morally uncomplicated and easy to love—who wouldn’t want their kids to say their prayers and take their vitamins, like Hogan urged kids to do? Piper, though, was the fly in the ointment. He was fun. He was small, by wrestling standards, so he fought dirty. He went with his gut, even when his gut told him to do things that were very, very bad. Nobody watching WrestleMania 2 paid good money to say their prayers and eat their vitamins. Suddenly a heel is becoming a hero while still acting like a bad guy. The WWF’s moral universe just got complicated. And the master of that new universe is giving them a night to remember.
The crowd roars, too, when Roddy is fed up and the match comes to a sudden and undignified end. Frustrated, Roddy body slams Mr. T, drawing the trainers and corner men into the ring, and finally giving the screaming crowd what they really came to see: Rowdy Roddy Piper creating chaos and laying waste to the best-laid plans of his bosses and society.
Yep, that was our dad.
—
In June 2015, our father took an unusual trip. He used to travel constantly for work. Even years after he’d stopped wrestling he still flew around the continent and overseas for appearances, acting gigs, and most recently a one-man stage show. As much as the travel exhausted him, he grew antsy if he wasn’t working. But this trip was different. He didn’t fly every leg of the trip in first class; there wasn’t a driver waiting at every gate; he didn’t stay in a suite in the nicest hotel in town. This time he was researching a book, the story of his life told from the beginning. And he thought the project should start with a trip to Vancouver Island and Alberta, where he would see some family and old friends, and begin the business of rediscovering who he had once been, a very long time ago.
Dad told plenty of stories, and had once published a book of them. But he had left many others untold. Many of those untold stories were about who he was as a person, not as a personality. There’s a fine line between the two, of course. But the differences between fact and fiction in Dad’s life were hazy, even to him. Roddy Piper shared much more in common with Roderick Toombs than most wrestlers did with the person they were at home. But since interviewers were always asking him for stories about himself, he tidied up complicated truths into uncomplicated and entertaining anecdotes, which he told dozens if not hundreds of times. Looking back over his sixty-one years, the truths behind those stories were hard to untangle. So he flew from LA to Vancouver, got in a car and set out to visit those friends and family, some of whom he hadn’t seen in many years. Maybe they could help him remember.
Work intervened and he had to cut the trip short, but he was looking forward to picking up the trail very soon, driving across the country, seeing the old places and people, jogging long-forgotten memories—getting to the truth he wanted his book to tell. He saw the book as both a legacy for his family and a chance to figure out who he was if he wasn’t “Rowdy” Roddy Piper anymore. He had dropped the “Rowdy” from his acting and even wrestling credits a decade earlier—it no longer felt right for a father and grandfather who made his living in Hollywood to call himself “Rowdy.” He even gave his blessing to star UFC competitor Ronda Rousey to use his nickname. By the time he set about writing his book, he was looking to drop the “Piper” as well.
His attempt to shed his adopted names pointed to a deeper struggle. Retired from wrestling and having parted ways with the WWE (the WWF changed its name in 2002), a major part of his identity was gone. What remained in its absence? The gap he felt inside was more than just an athlete’s diminishment by age. Wrestling had given him the means to feed himself as a teenager and then have a family, and it taught him how to protect them. Despite his outward confidence, as he kept turning on that million-dollar smile for fans and business partners, he felt himself drifting. “You can be lost and walk around, I guess,” he told one of his sisters during that trip. “I’m lost right now.” The lost feeling had always been there, but he had always been able to ignore it. The demands of work and family, and his relentless ambition to try new things had kept it at bay. Looking back, it’s no surprise he used to sign his name, “Ever forward, Roddy Piper.” To slow down was to let the past catch up with him—he hadn’t been ready for that to happen, until that trip.
In his mind, that gap between past and present was leading to distance from his family. Part of that feeling came from the fact that we, as well as our other siblings, Anastasia and Falon, had all grown up and left home. He’d missed much of our childhoods in Portland, Oregon, where our mother grew up, and her mother before her. He had been on the road up to three hundred nights a year. The house was empty now, his job was over, and the job at home was done as well. “You don’t know what comes next, what your name is,” he said, musing about his future. “I’m lucky and grateful to get the accolades I have, but how’d I get here? What am I doing?”
A sense of home always eluded him: “The kids went to the same school as their grandma. Oregon is home for them. They don’t see why Rod’s got no home. Home is the place where the hole is filled.” To hear your father say the place where he raised you was not his home was a difficult thing. We’d argue with him about it, but you can’t tell a person what he feels—not our father, that’s for sure.
He was grateful for his success, but his life had been a blur. If he was going to fill that hole where Roddy Piper used to be, he had to figure out who Roderick Toombs was. There was no better place to start than at the beginning. So he took that trip and started compiling many of the stories you’ll read in this book. Sadly, though, wrestling and the lifestyle that went with it had taken a terrible toll on his body. Its debts came due before he could finish the book, and he passed away in his sleep early on the morning of July 31, 2015.
—
Our family has always been private and we’ve cherished our personal lives outside of our father’s spotlight. As kids growing up in the presence of a huge personality like Roddy Piper, we all found that too much time around his fame could make you feel like you didn’t have an identity of your own. How many times have we each been introduced as “Roddy Piper’s kid”? When you’re young, that can leave you feeling like you have no value as an individual.
That feeling changed over time. We both came to appreciate what an exceptional thing our dad’s life was. His accomplishments were profound enough that they carried through to all his children. They weren’t really ours, of course, but even when he shielded us from the spotlight we shined a little brighter because of him. The older we became, the more of him we saw up close
. The more we saw, the more we appreciated just what a mountain he’d climbed to become the man he was.
Our family members have remained private people, except the two of us; we went a little bit our father’s way. That’s why it’s us you’re reading now. Ariel headed to Los Angeles in her late teens to pursue an acting and musical career. Roddy worked in LA often and would bunk in at her apartment. As his focus turned to film work, they became roommates for a while. Colt got the athlete genes. He fought as an amateur in mixed martial arts through his early twenties and then trained with Roddy for his more recent pro wrestling career. For many years, Colt had travelled with him to matches and appearances, then worked for him as a bodyguard when he was older.
Between us we met most of our father’s friends and colleagues. We sat up late at night with him and heard his stories, learned what interested him when he wasn’t thinking about work. But of course we didn’t know everything. His youth remained a mystery that he rarely discussed with anyone. We used to joke that the time before he met our mother were his “Jesus Years,” after the gap in the Bible’s account of the life of Jesus. Not to get carried away with the comparison, but Dad seemed to have gone through the same thing at the same age. Until his late twenties, what was he doing? We knew bits and pieces, but far from all of it.
Our father often felt misunderstood. That was no surprise. He was a generous man who played a villain, a private man who had an enormous public profile, a quiet man who had started riots for a living. He’d had such an unusual life, he was hoping if he shared more of what made him who he was, people would relate to him better. People’s misunderstandings really were an issue.
How many times were we and our sisters pulled aside and questioned by teachers at school who had watched our father in some crazy storyline on television and been convinced that he must be an abusive parent. They would grill us, and we would assure them that nothing was further from the truth. Sure, his voice could rattle the rafters when we made him cross, but for the record, he never raised a hand. His own childhood, we discovered, had taught him the terrible price of violence against children; there was no way he was going to pass that down to his own family. “Family first” was another expression he used a lot. He meant it. He forgave many people many things because they’d had to put the interests of their family ahead of their business with Roddy Piper.
Rowdy Page 1