You sure about this? wondered Roddy. Maybe his coach was just trying to scare him—and maybe Father O’Malley’s warning became more colourful over the years with each time Roddy told the story—but the priest probably wasn’t that far off the mark.
Rod’s involvement in petty crime wasn’t letting up. Being an effectively homeless teenager targeted by gangsters and on the outs with police was keeping him desperate. He was hanging his hat in whatever place would have him, trying to stay warm and safe. “There was some lady with an enclosed front porch on her house and there was a bed in there and a little toilet and electric burner. I don’t know what I had to pay for it. Well, I do know. Don’t know in money, but I had to…I kinda slept where I could.” Roddy also hustled billiards. To get enough money to get in a game, he worked with a group of thieves who would take him to new car lots at night. “They’d have someone sneak in and take all the lug nuts off the tires and jack up the front. The tires came off. I could do two tires, one with each hand. Roll them out, around the corner, and into a U-Haul truck with a ramp. Twenty-five bucks. Boom. So I had money to go play pool and make what I could make.”
Until that point, Roddy had been a hungry kid who broke the law so he could eat. But where do you draw the line between petty crime and the real thing? “I think that I was real close to becoming a career criminal. I didn’t steal just to steal…yeah, I did.”
One friend would follow him into variety stores. Roddy would go to the cashier and pretend he couldn’t talk while trying to communicate interest in something. While the clerk was distracted, his friend would loot the back of the store. Rod wasn’t always so strategic, impulsively grabbing the cherry lights off the top of police cars, for instance. But the constant misadventure was becomingly increasingly dangerous—to him and others.
He found himself outside a house one night with a BB gun. He didn’t remember exactly why he shot out a window, but was pretty sure somebody had paid him to do it. The idea was just to intimidate whoever was inside, but the window shattered and glass landed near the woman who lived there. Her husband ran outside and came after Roddy in a car, with a few teenagers also giving chase. “I just ran. It was dark, running in this field and there’s telephone poles.” In the darkness and his haste, Roddy didn’t see a guideline for one pole. “Bam, I hit the fuckin’ wire. Motherfucker.”
The other teenagers caught him and roughed him up. The man caught up and put some more fear into him, but for some reason he took pity on Roddy. “You’re going to pay back every penny it takes to replace the window,” the man said.
For all his thieving and fighting, Roddy wouldn’t back down on a promise—though trying to make things right didn’t necessarily make them better. He stole from church collections and showed up to the man’s home with a bag of coins to pay his debt. The man looked at the bag, imagining where the loose change had come from, and shook his head. “I never want to see you again,” he said. And he didn’t.
Cam got up to his share of trouble with Roddy. Still, some happier memories endure.
Cam was already a serious hockey player, with great potential to pursue the game at the highest levels. He wanted to join the Winnipeg Junior Jets, but in order to complete a necessary course in time he had to attend a particular high school. He and Rod went to the school to see if they could talk the principal into accepting Cam’s transfer.
Roddy told Cam to wait outside while he went to the office. Cam waited a few minutes and Roddy emerged with a big smile. Perplexed, Cam asked him what had happened. Roddy had told the principal that his friend, who was too shy himself to come in and ask to transfer, had cancer and was only going to live for another six months. “You start Monday!”
—
Winnipeg was getting much too hot for the troubled teenager. At one point Roddy took off. He headed east, alone. “Toronto, I don’t know why. I think I just ended up there. I stayed in youth hostels.”
Hostels were cheap, and he made some money busking with his bagpipes on street corners. But cheap isn’t free. “I robbed a dry cleaners, and I took off and went to Cheryl’s.”
Cheryl was living in New Brunswick and had recently had a baby daughter named Samantha. Roddy missed his sister. They hadn’t seen much of each other during the two years after she left Port Arthur. He hadn’t met his niece. It was a chance to get far away from all the trouble he’d endured—and caused.
Along the way, he lost his high school ID while hitchhiking. The driver who’d picked him up reported the missing ID, and Roddy’s parents figured out where he’d gone. He stayed in New Brunswick with his sister only briefly and was soon in Winnipeg again. “I got back, and then it was a little rough there. I lost fear of reprisals.”
During their visit in 2015, Cheryl asked, “Weren’t you ever afraid of jail or criminality?” She’d left home by the time Roddy had seriously fallen out with his father and started getting into real trouble. Even decades later, hearing about some of the trouble into which he’d gotten himself as a kid, she was astonished. “No,” he replied. “I don’t have that fear in me.” He added one of his patented contradictions to help her grasp his state of mind: “You’re scared of so much that you fear nothing. You become comfortable with danger.” He ended the story of the trip to New Brunswick with a hint of why he’d run in the first place. “I got in a lot of trouble with the law. I had to go to court. My father was pretty humiliated.”
Roddy knew his father was disappointed in him, but to hear it out loud—that moment scarred him as deeply as the death of his dog or the woman in The Pas calling him a rapist. “I don’t know what I did wrong with this boy,” Stanley had said.
Ultimately, it wasn’t fear of reprisal that straightened him out. It was a particularly successful rip-off that made him realize he’d crossed a line. His shame over victimizing the innocent—or the undeserving, at least—proved to be his saving grace. “There was a bar in Winnipeg. I could slip in and out of wherever I wanted to. Everyone kinda knew me.” The bar would be the opening scene of an act Roddy called “the last illegal thing I ever did.” He would do plenty outside the law, but nothing targeting the innocent. “I’m not very proud of this,” he said, “but I did it. “There was a guy, he was being a real asshole. I saw him open up his wallet. He had a ton of cash in it.” Roddy didn’t say what else the man was doing to raise people’s ire, but flashing a wad of bills was never a good idea in Winnipeg’s grittier bars. “I backed off and watched him. When it was time for him to go home, I followed.” The man left the bar on foot and Roddy kept pace at a distance. “He decides to head to his back door. Well, it was dark back there and it was perfect timing. I was really, really fast. I’ve never seen anybody faster. I snatched him. This guy let out a sound like he knew he was going to die. It was chilling. I got his wallet and I was gone, but that sound bothered me. It bothered me a lot.”
Roddy’s empty stomach was bothering him, too, so he got in a taxi. “I went and bought a steak. I was hungry.” That night the man’s terrified cry kept playing over in his mind and wouldn’t let him sleep. “So the next night, I went back to his house and I snuck in through the back door, and with the exception of the cab money and the steak money, I put his wallet back.”
—
Merv Unger had arrived in Winnipeg from BC in 1971. He was an editor at the Winnipeg Tribune. He also helped local promoter Al Tomko run Manitoba for the Minneapolis wrestling promoter, Verne Gagne. The territory run by Gagne’s American Wrestling Association stretched from Las Vegas to Chicago, and included Manitoba and parts of western Ontario. Winnipeg was Gagne’s top location north of the border.
Unger remembered a skinny teenager walking into Al Tomko’s gym. Father O’Malley’s young amateur champion had come looking to train with the pros. “He showed up at the gym and wanted to become a wrestler. He was all of a hundred and thirty-five pounds.”
Roddy was soon spending his nights sleeping on the wrestling mats in Tomko’s gym. The gym was a regular training spot for pr
ofessional wrestlers, and Roddy was eager to learn from them. They didn’t exactly ease him into his education.
To pay some sort of rent to the gym, Tomko asked Roddy to do some chores. One was to maintain the dumbbells, the fixed kind that are a single piece of iron. “My job was to weigh them, paint the weight on the side.” It wasn’t much to ask a kid squatting in your gym to help tidy up the gear. Roddy had a mischievous side, though, and he didn’t fit comfortably into any sort of structured environment. “I don’t know what it is. I’ve had something in me since I was born. I thought it would be pretty funny. I took the eighty-five-pound dumbbells and painted sixty-five pounds on them. I adjusted all the dumbbells. Then the professional wrestlers came into town, from Verne Gagne’s camp.” While touring, Gagne’s wrestlers trained in Tomko’s gym, along with the ones who lived in Winnipeg. When they hit the weights that day, many of them found their strength lacking. “I laughed quite hard, until they put it together—it didn’t take a genius.”
One of the wrestlers in Tomko’s gym that day was George Gordienko. “They were calling him Boy Wonder. He’s what we call a real-deal shooter.” Meaning that if the wrestling were totally real, he’d be one of the last guys standing. “He was kicked out of America for being a communist. “He went to Italy and met a woman who had horses. There was this one horse that was cantankerous, nobody could ride it. George actually got into the stall, very slowly. He got his arms around the horse, and just by slow pressure he choked the horse down. The lady fell in love with him and that’s who he married. Gives you an idea of the power of this guy. I don’t know much about horses, but a guy who can choke a horse out, he can choke me out.”
In the middle of stories about fighting, Roddy would sometimes pause, worried he was coming off like a boastful thug. “Please, none of this was a guy trying to enhance his reputation, none of this was trying to be a tough guy. I was just wild. I was wild. I wasn’t trying to build a reputation. Those terms didn’t mean much, especially when you get beat up by George Gordienko.” That day in Tomko’s gym, he got seriously beat up by George Gordienko.
Gordienko, who died in 2002, began his career as a weightlifter, found himself a tag-team partner in Stu Hart (father of Bret “Hitman” Hart and the late Owen Hart) and competed through the 1950s in Hart’s Stampede Wrestling organization in Calgary. In the early 1970s, he had nearly a hundred pounds on Roddy. And he knew how to use every single one of them to punish a man. “George was one of the guys who noticed I was being a smart aleck,” said Roddy, “and he took me on those mats for forty-five minutes. I broke my foot. He suplexed me off the mat, onto the concrete. It was the first thing he did. He did it belly to belly, and as he did it, he threw me, and I ended up off of the mat so my foot hit the concrete, but with one hand still holding my wrist, and he very slowly dragged me back onto the mat. Beat up, let’s qualify the term. Most guys don’t really know what it is to get beat up. There’s a hold called the Sugar Hold. After you get good at it you can almost do it with one hand. And what would happen is, they put their arm behind your head and between your arms, then lay on you, and of course the force…the blood has to go someplace, so some of the blood goes down toward your belly button and some of the blood goes toward your head. Comes out your eyes, your nose, your mouth, your ears. They’d hook you in that hold, then, like George was saying to me on the mats that day, I’m going to let you breath for ten, nine, eight, seven…two, one. I’m not going to let you breathe for thirty, twenty-nine…You’d pass out. Sometimes when he let you breathe, you could just come back. After forty-five minutes, you’d defecate yourself. That’s called being beat up. Broke another couple bones.”
A beating by an accomplished shooter like George Gordienko—administered while the other wrestlers looked on—would send most teenagers running. Roddy stayed. “As much as they beat me up, they kinda went, you know, the kid’s got balls.” Tomko and other wrestlers and coaches, like Unger, Tony Condello and Fred Pelloquin, began to train him.
—
Even when Roddy and Cam were trying to have fun, trouble found them.
In the prairies, a “social” was a party thrown for an engaged couple to help raise money for the wedding and give them a small financial push to get started in life. Bands played and of course there was lots of liquor to help separate guests from their paycheques. Young women and men flocked to these parties. The mix of booze, unattached young women and testosterone led inevitably to one thing.
“I fought five weekends in a row at these things,” said Cam. “I remember one guy I fought, his name was Buckles. I fought him the year before, too, at a social. He was a tough dude. But I cleaned his clock.”
A lost fight wasn’t forgotten. Even with Roddy riding shotgun for his best pal, Buckles wasn’t ready to leave well enough alone.
Roddy and Cam attended a social at a church one weekend. There was a weightlifter who used to try to intimidate Cam in the hallways at school. It never worked. Cam was on the dance floor with Sherilyn, his girlfriend, when the guy approached. Some guys were giving the kid working the door a hard time and the weightlifter figured Cam, who never backed down, would be a good person to ask for help. When there was trouble, Cam and Roddy weren’t far behind. “So there’s a fight going on. There’s a big guy on top of a little guy. I said, ‘We gotta stop this, Rod, cause this guy’s had enough. If I was on the bottom I’d like someone to break it up.’” Cam leaned in to the clearly beaten man on the ground and asked if he’d had enough. “He says, ‘Yeah, I’ve lost.’ And I said, ‘Okay, let him up.’ The guy on top says, ‘No fuckin’ way.’”
Cam pulled the man off anyway, ending the fight. But the guy on top wasn’t alone, and his friend didn’t like Cam breaking up their fun. The friend was Buckles. “Buckles comes in, pushes me and goes, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, buddy?’ Now, when you street fight enough, you know—I’m going to have to fight this guy.” Still Cam began talking to Buckles, making conciliatory overtures to calm him. They were at a wedding party in a church basement, after all. Buckles didn’t care and kept advancing, “and I just drill him right in the mouth, as hard as I could.”
Buckles was bloodied but unmoved. “He just stood there and said, ‘I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you.’”
Cam had given Buckles his best shot. Aside from a split lip, Buckles was ready to fight. “I go, ‘Well, you know…and I hoofed him right in the balls as hard as I could.’”
Still standing, Buckles warmed to his theme: “You’re dead,” he growled.
Cam shot a worried look at Roddy. “I hit him hard as I could, I kicked him square in the balls. Rod’s standing there and I’m saying to myself, Rod, fuckin’ hit him!” But Roddy wasn’t planning to intervene; he would never want Cam stepping in before he needed him. Roddy respected the rules of engagement enough to let his friend fight his own battles. Fortunately for Cam, his two hard shots finally took their toll. Before he could come after Cam, Buckles groaned and finally collapsed. “I’d be the one scrapping, Rod would just be the cool guy all the time,” Cam said.
All these fights were won by paying a price in the gym. Cam was committed to conditioning in order to excel at hockey, even though he didn’t yet have a pro career in mind. And Roddy, his ambition ignited by the opportunity wrestling was offering him, was taking their workouts a step further. “Back in high school, we were the old school,” Cam recalled. “When you’d think you were done, we’d do another set. Every time, Roddy would push me to my limit. And I was game. But he would have me working so damn hard—and he would work just as hard—that as soon as I’d finish I’d have to go off to the side and puke. He would say, ‘Do you want to be average or do you want to be better than average?’ Well, I wanted to be better. I never wanted to be average and that was the same for Rod. It was a mental toughness, that’s what it gave us. We just knew that this was the right thing to do for the future.”
—
There were other escapes from Winnipeg. Not all were getaways. As a hoc
key player, Cam had summers free and the two friends hit the road. “You don’t want to hitchhike for three or four days with someone,” Cam said with a groan, “who says, ‘I wanna learn how to play the mouth organ on this trip.’”
Roddy had the Anderson family’s knack for music. And he sometimes learned a new instrument the hard way—maybe hardest for those who had to listen to him practice.
At eighteen, he and Cam hitchhiked from Winnipeg to Toronto, a couple of young men throwing their fortunes to the currents of summer one last time before their lives and careers got too serious. Rod practiced harmonica the whole way. “On the side of the road—he was brutal.”
There’s one route between Winnipeg and Toronto—the TransCanada Highway. On the first half of the journey there are very few places to stop. On the north-east shore of Lake Superior, clear across the lake from Port Arthur and right around the halfway mark from Winnipeg, is a tiny mining town called Wawa that developed a large reputation in hitchiking’s heyday. “Reader’s Digest said that was the worst spot to ever be caught hitchhiking,” said Connor. “That’s where we were stuck.”
Roddy and Cam decided to take four-hour shifts standing at a fork in the road. With a hand-drawn sign reading “Toronto” and a thumb stuck out, Cam tried in vain to solicit the generosity of passing drivers. At the fork in front of them, the TransCanada veered to the west over the lake and a side road led north into town. Thousands of hitchhikers had been stuck on that same narrow strip of gravel and grass. They weren’t much welcome in town, and picking up a couple of unshowered, brawny eighteen-year-olds would have appealed to very few passing drivers. The friends were in for a long wait. “I did my four hours and I’m looking forward to lying in the ditch, relaxing. I go, ‘Okay, Rod, your turn.’ He walks across the street to the gas station to talk to a driver at the pumps. I remember the guy’s name. Tom Luck. And I see Rod talking to the guy, and he goes, ‘C’mon!’ I go, ‘What? I want to lay down for four hours.’ He’d talked the guy into giving us a ride. Rod could talk a bird out of a tree. Tom was heading to Montreal, so he took us to Toronto. Rod sat in the middle and I sat on the outside. Rod fell asleep.”
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