Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  Roddy nodded off, which wouldn’t be a big deal except that Cam knew what he was like when anyone tried to wake him up. “When I’d go to his house to call on him, his mother would say, ‘Rod’s in his room, go wake him up.’ I’d go up in his bedroom, he’d be sleeping and I’d shake his shoulder, ‘Get up!’ And fuck he’d start swinging, Holy…I’d barely get out of the way. Every time, he’d just start swinging. So then I started shaking his feet.” With Rod dozing and beginning to lean toward Tom Luck, the seating arrangements in the pickup were becoming uncomfortable. “I told Tom Luck, ‘This guy here?’ He goes, ‘Yeah?’ I go, ‘Toughest guy I ever fuckin’ met. When he sleeps, I try to wake him up, he starts swinging, right away.’” Tom Luck decided to let Roddy sleep, and Cam soon fell asleep against the passenger-side window. When he woke up an hour or two later, Roddy was still unconscious, with one arm draped over the driver’s head. “Tom was still driving, with a very worried look on his face. I go, ‘Why don’t you move?’ He goes, ‘Oh no!’ I laughed my ass off. Tom Luck. He was a good guy. We’d still be in Wawa today without him.”

  Winnipeg to Wawa was a good twelve hours. Toronto was nearly that far again. When Tom Luck let Cam and Roddy out of his truck—to his considerable relief—they headed for its liveliest and grittiest commercial street. Home to record stores, strip clubs, head shops, massage parlours and more than a few unmarked doors, Yonge Street was an urban mecca for those who weren’t easily spooked. “This speaker came on that said, ‘We’re going out of business, we’re selling lighters for five cents and cameras for this much and watches and come on in here.’ So we go in,” Cam recounted.

  They mingled with other curious bargain seekers inside. Shelving behind a long counter held all sorts of trinkets and goods. Once the store was full of people, a few men locked the doors and pulled down the blinds. They got behind the counter and announced to the crowd that they’re going out of business and selling everything off cheap. “So, first the guy holds up a camera and says, ‘Who’ll give me forty bucks for this camera?’” Roddy and Cam look at each other, puzzled. Why would they pay forty dollars for a camera that looks like it’s probably worth forty dollars? That’s no bargain. “Then one guy in the front row goes, ‘Well, I need a camera, I’ll give you forty bucks.’ So they say, ‘Put it on the counter.’ The guy puts his forty bucks on the counter and the guy puts the camera on top of the forty.” The salesman moved on to another product, then stops. “He goes, ‘You know what, buddy, you’re the only guy who wanted this, here, here’s your forty back and here’s the camera.’”

  The salesman went through the same routine a few more times with other items. Each time Roddy and Cam wondered why other people were getting excited about paying what they were sure was a regular price. And why, each time someone put their money on the counter, the salesman gave their cash back. “And then he comes up with watches. He said, ‘Who’ll give me twenty bucks for this, they’re worth a hundred.’ And we go, ‘Oh, it does look pretty good.’” The pair thought about it. “There must have been fifty twenty-dollar bills on the bar, and he put a watch on each one. Then he goes, ‘Anybody else want in?’ But he’d run out of watches and he says to the other guy, ‘We got some more watches for the next crowd, bring ‘em out here and we’ll get rid of them all.”

  The helper grabbed another box of watches and they started placing them on more twenties placed all down the length of the counter. Everyone in the store had seen this same pattern repeated over and over, and they were pretty sure they were going to get their money back. “And then he said, ‘Now who’ll give us twenty bucks for this empty bag?’ So Rod and I, we dig into our pockets, and the guy says, ‘I’m gonna fill that up with way more than twenty bucks’ worth.’”

  He didn’t. The bags Cam and Roddy were left with were filled with worthless trinkets. “When it was all over he just took everybody’s money, put it in his pocket and he left. Rod and I started laughing. We just got conned.” The first people to put their money down had been in on the scam.

  They walked to the police station and complained. The police didn’t care. The deceit played people for suckers, but it wasn’t against the law. Chagrined and broke, Roddy and Cam decided they’d get their money back themselves.

  The shop closed at eight o’clock. Roddy and Cam waited in the lane behind it for the guys who’d run the scam. Eventually they emerged and locked up the shop. But they weren’t alone. Two big men with a military bearing appeared as well. “Rod and I said, ‘We don’t care, we’re gonna go over and confront these guys.’”

  They approached the four men and Cam immediately lit into the scam artists. “You fuckin’ took our money!”

  As usual, Roddy took the opposite approach. “Rod, he’s the civil guy, and he’s talking polite to these guys. The guy said, ‘You know what, you guys gave me the money, you thought you could get something for nothing, like everybody else in there. I did it legitimately. I’ve been in prison for five years and I sat there for five years thinking how I could perfect this. And you guys, you were suckers.’ The guy said to Rod, ‘Well, I like you and you guys said you were hitchhikers and you don’t have any money left, so here, I’ll give you twenty bucks.’ He gives Rod twenty. ‘But you! You get fuckin’ nothin’!’ So, another lesson learned from Rod.”

  Cam learned yet another lesson from Roddy on that trip, one about perseverance.

  “By the time we come back from Toronto, he could play the mouth organ!”

  —

  A trained boxer and now training with pro wrestlers, packing on muscle with determination: Roddy’s course seemed set. But all the turmoil in which he’d grown up still made for some unsettling moments, outbursts that belied his usually diplomatic ways. Too many years of not knowing where he was sleeping at night, too many beatings at the hands of the mentors and authorities in his life—the anger, frustration and pain could boil over. “In high school there was a skinny guy and he was on the basketball team,” Cam began. “He was sitting at a bar with his fiancée, the bar Rod bounced at.”

  The drinking age in Manitoba had recently been lowered to eighteen. At a rough bar called the Windsorian, Rod got a chance to try his diplomatic ways with an older clientele than he and Cam had managed at the Burger Bar—and get paid for it, too.

  Cam joined him there one night when Roddy was off duty. The basketball player, who wasn’t very tough, needed to call on Rod’s services anyway. “This guy came up to us and said, ‘Rod, I might need you guys to help me out.’ Rod said, ‘Why?’ He goes, ‘See those guys over there?’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘They come over and told me I gotta let my fiancée dance with them and she doesn’t wanna dance with them and I don’t want her to, or else they’re gonna just grab her by the hair and beat me up.’ Rod says, ‘Ah, don’t worry about it.’ So Rod walked over as polite as always and he said to these two, ‘Guys, don’t embarrass this guy. This is his fiancée, you know, he can’t have you dancing with his girl and she doesn’t want to dance with you. So just give him a break and I apologize if he’s done something to offend you.’ And that’s it. He sat down. One of the guys walks over to where Rod’s sitting and taps him on the shoulder. Rod looks over and the guy just fuckin’ drills Rod right in the face. Knocks him off his chair.”

  The fight was on. Roddy beat him in the bar and then he and the other bouncers threw him into the parking lot. The troublemaker hadn’t had enough.

  “’You want to go again?’ he asked. “Rod says, ‘All right, you just committed professional suicide.’” Suicide by professional was more like it. “By now Rod’s wrestling, and of course he can box, and he kicked the shit out of this guy.”

  Roddy and Cam got into more fights than either could count. It would be naïve to think there weren’t some ugly moments. This turned out to be one of them. “When it was over, Rod says, ‘You broke my watch.’ Rod went over to the guy and gave him a couple more shots and then reached in the guy’s pocket and took out whatever amount of money he needed to fix it. One of
my friends said, ‘Rod, you’re gonna kill this guy.’ Rod just backhanded my buddy right in the mouth. So my buddy goes, ‘Fuck, go ahead then.’”

  Cam knew the sickly high a fight could give a young man. “Once you start fighting it’s hard to stop.” He wasn’t so troubled by the memory, though. Underestimating his friend on account of his initially diplomatic approach was a mistake he relished seeing bullies make. “Reach for a rabbit, grab a bear. I always love seeing those punks that pick on people that they think they can beat up. Well, you did that with Rod, just like that guy, he didn’t know what he was getting.”

  —

  In June 1973, Roddy began wrestling with the pros in front of an audience. In his earliest matches, he fought his teachers and some of the locals, men like Condello and Tomko, John Campbell, Jason Myer. “We were in southern Manitoba, very early times,” remembered Merv Unger. Roddy was wrestling against Dave Muir, who was managed by Unger. “I jumped off the top rope. I had a big cane at the time, and aimed it at Roddy. He ducked out of the way and I nailed my own guy.”

  With Muir levelled and his manager apoplectic over KO’ing his own wrestler, Roddy had what may have been his first victory. Unger chuckled, remembering the night. “That’s all that makes up the game.”

  Roddy learned the game in Winnipeg and places within a day’s drive like Brandon, Manitoba—home base for Condello’s promotion, West Four Matchmakers, with local TV and seating in the arena for two thousand fans. Unger hosted the television broadcast from Brandon. “That’s where Rod got his first microphone experience, which of course was the highlight of his whole career, how he could talk. He was a natural right off the bat.” Unger gave the kid pointers on how to come across well, but he drew the line at any notion that he was responsible for Rod’s success on camera. “I would never say I trained him. Either the guy’s a natural or he isn’t.”

  Unger would also take Roddy aside and discuss the matches coming up in Brandon. The beginner practiced his promos over and over, refining his verbal assaults on upcoming opponents until he was convinced viewers would be engaged. “Being in front of a microphone is just feeling comfortable and then being able to reach out to the people so they listen to you. Right off the bat, Rod could do it.”

  Roddy held to one piece of advice throughout his career. Viewers would never catch him threatening opponents with acts of violence he would never really commit: I’ll rip your throat out, for instance. He was much more inclined to belittle his opponents, which angered their fans. That in turn drove the fans to the match to see the mouthy upstart get the beating he was due. “Wrestling is psychology,” Unger said. “You’ve got to psychologically reach the people in your audience. That’s what he was good at doing. Whether he was the young guy getting beaten up by Al Tomko, or if he was winning matches he would go in a different direction. It’s inborn. It’s not something you teach.”

  The young Roddy wrestled as far east as Dryden, Ontario, and across the border to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he was beaten by a young American from Memphis, Tennessee. About five years older than the kid from Winnipeg, Ric Flair was barely more famous than the young jobber he pinned for the win.

  Some of the matches gave Roddy a view of where wrestling could take him. Others made it clear that he had a long road ahead. Still, it beat trading punches with drunks at the Windsorian, which he could finally give up. Money was still tight, but wrestling was the only chance at a livelihood the world was holding out to him, and he’d gladly go hungry to pursue it. “Rod was always a happy kid,” Cam said. “Gonna pay whatever price he’s gotta pay to be successful in the wrestling world. He fought in the shittiest places.”

  One of those places was a logging camp in northern Manitoba. “Al Tomko kinda liked me,” said Roddy. “Used to bring me perogies when I was hungry. So he hires a twin-engine plane and brings two midgets, two ladies and four guys. The midgets went, the ladies went, then the four guys, they had single matches. Then the four guys tagged up and had another match. That was the card.

  “Well, the plane takes off. We’re looking down and it’s just pure forest. All of a sudden one of the midgets taps me on the shoulder and points to the left engine. I see oil coming out of it. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Pilot, there’s oil coming out of the left engine.’ I swear to you, the pilot says, ‘Yeah, she leaks a bit.’

  “It was a pontoon plane. And it came down in a lumberjack camp. We got off the plane and there was no ring. There was a dining hall. They pushed all the chairs away and put a mat in the middle of it. And we wrestled. Tough crowd! Baby Jesus…We didn’t do much hitting the ropes! However, we did what we could. As we’re coming back to the plane, the pilot is filling the left engine with oil. But by the grace of God, we pontooned into wherever we had pontooned out of. We get in the van, all of us, and Al Tomko pulls into a park and that’s where we slept that night. The girls got the van and I found a picnic bench.

  “There was a PortaPotty and some bears.” He rolled his eyes at the unending chaos. “I knocked over a PortaPotty.”

  Fortunately the wrestlers didn’t often have to fight on the floor. Merv Unger described their ring truck, a cleverly devised trailer they towed to the smaller locations within driving distance. “One of the rings was actually the floor of the trailer. When we got into town the sides flopped down and we put on the ring posts and put on the mats and the canvas and the ropes and away you go.” The portable ring was a cozy sixteen-by-sixteen feet, four feet short of today’s standard. “I remember things weren’t going too well,” Unger said. Someone was helping Rod pay for a room at the Marlborough Hotel across the street from Tomko’s gym, but the small-town fights weren’t bringing in much money. “One night at the gym we had a gathering of all the guys. Did they want to continue? Rod stood in the middle of the ring and said, ‘I don’t care about you guys, but I’m gonna be a professional wrestler.’ I figured, of all the guys there, [he had] about the least chance. Well at that weight, he was skinny. But he worked hard at it.”

  Roddy worked into the new year of 1974 and soon found himself facing another wrestling legend. Unfortunately, this one was in his prime. “We’d go in on Friday nights,” said Unger, of the cross-border haul from Winnipeg, “to do the studio TV show in Minneapolis on Saturday afternoon. He’d wrestle on TV along with two or three other Winnipeg boys.”

  Rod made the trip south with a few of Tomko’s wrestlers for a Minneapolis TV broadcast on Saturday, February 23. He wouldn’t be fighting any Winnipeg boy. Superstar Billy Graham was a giant for his time. At a hefty six foot four, Graham fighting a nineteen-year-old Rod would have looked—as Jesse Ventura described it—“like a father beating his son.” Graham was a champion bodybuilder, and weighed well over 300 pounds at his peak. “It was brutal,” recalled Roddy. “And then he had the nerve to say to me—he was trying to make me feel good—’Listen, I was a little short of time or I would have given you more.’”

  Roddy made the trip to Minneapolis a few times while working for Tomko. “He got badly beaten by Mad Dog Vachon,” said Unger, “and Pat Patterson, Nick Bockwinkel….Those were three-hundred pounders and here’s this guy. He was a bit of a rag doll at that point.”

  After filming the weekly matches on Saturday night, the wrestlers packed up Sunday morning and drove the five-hundred-plus miles home. “And then,” said Roddy, “I just kept on going.” The trips continued—south, east, west, north—as did the lopsided defeats.

  —

  If you’ve heard the story of Roddy Piper’s first match, you might be wondering at this point if we missed something. He often said he fought his first match at age fifteen. He has called his fight with Superstar Billy Graham his second professional match, but it took place two months before the one he called his first. He was nineteen when he faced Graham.

  Wrestlers in that era needed a story. With no Internet to provide constant correction, they devised more or less elaborate histories, and Roddy’s fed nicely into his undersized, angry, picked-on persona. The chip on
his shoulder made sense, the way he told it. But his story had other benefits. It erased all the trouble he got into in his late teens. If he had been on the road and in the gym from the age of fifteen, his teenage years of criminality couldn’t have happened.

  The idea of turning pro at fifteen is also impressive. It suits the Brawler, the guy with no past who lives for the fight, the giant-killer—all the tropes Roddy played for the camera in the years to come.

  To call our father’s made-up history a lie, though, is missing the point. He was selling a character—it was how wrestlers of his time made a living. Since wrestlers were so recognizable when out in public, they couldn’t break with those stories when they were away from the arena. Kayfabe—the wrestlers’ code that demands fictions about their characters and feuds never be exposed—kept the drama feeling real. Kayfabe kept a crowd’s disbelief willingly suspended when a move in the ring or a recovery from a beating didn’t look entirely true. It kept the vitriol at full volume, the seats full and the popcorn selling.

  That’s not to say that Roddy’s origin story was all a fabrication. It might well have evolved over the years, blending true elements—living on the streets, coming fifth in a world bagpipe competition—in ways that got him through whatever reporter’s question, promo or work he was facing. He owed his fans and his business convincing entertainment, not autobiography. Over the decades, fact and fiction fused, and he forgot the lines between them. Add a few undiagnosed concussions to the mix and chronic pain from a litany of injuries, and whenever he was asked for a story, he found it easier to just tell the story he’d been telling for almost forty years.

  Merv Unger believed that even Rod’s adopting the name Piper wasn’t as he’d told it. “Pro wrestling was really big in Winnipeg in the 1950s,” said Unger, “when they had the Madison Boxing and Wrestling Club. One of the top boxers in Manitoba was Dave Piper. That’s where the name came from. That’s the one Rod adopted.”