Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  That might be true. But we grew up with another story. A better story. And it signalled the beginning of the end for Roddy Toombs’ tumultuous years in the city that gave birth to Rowdy Roddy Piper.

  3

  The Jesus Years

  Merv Unger and Al Tomko ran into trouble with a Winnipeg card just a few days after Rod’s twentieth birthday. “Somebody from Verne Gagne’s promotion, maybe it was Buddy Wolff, somebody couldn’t show up, got sick, missed the plane, whatever it was,” said Roddy, “and Verne needed a substitute. Merv said, ‘Hey,’ ‘cause I was in the gym…”

  It was a big American Wrestling Association card at the Winnipeg Arena on a Thursday night. Verne Gagne’s AWA was the big time. Roddy’s previous television appearances were in a Brandon studio and the other fights had been small gigs in smaller towns. Suddenly Tomko was asking him to fight in front of nine thousand people. And he was going to get paid $25, which was a lot more than he’d been getting to fight in Brandon or the likes of Grand Forks, North Dakota.

  He thought he needed to make an entrance, but he hadn’t seen much in the way of big-time pro wrestling. Left to his own devices, he went to the one extracurricular element in his life that he’d held on to, much to his mother’s relief. And he went large. “I went to my pipe band. I said, I don’t know what to do and they said, ‘We’ll play you in.’ So I had four bagpipers in full regalia, bass drummer, fully decked out, kilt, big furry hat—there’s a big hole in that hat, where they keep a pint of Scotch—and two snare drummers, and then me.”

  Cam added a twist to Dad’s first professional entrance. “Rod had no money, so we picked dandelions and he put them in a basket”—stolen from the Marlborough Hotel— “and as he’s walking to the ring he’s throwing dandelions at everybody.” Rod had wanted roses, but they were more than he could afford. He was wearing plaid trunks and high-topped green boots.

  Roddy remembered himself being a little bigger for his big-time debut than Unger does, but the extra pounds wouldn’t have made a difference. “I’m a hundred and sixty-seven pounds. And the guy that I wrestled was Larry ‘The Axe’ Hennig. Three-hundred-and-twenty pounds of Nordic Viking.” Wrestling fans from later years will recognize the name Hennig. The Axe was the father of “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig. “The concept of upstaging someone, I didn’t understand that concept. Didn’t take me long to learn it. Larry ‘The Axe’ Hennig was in the ring and I come down with these bagpipers. Holy cow. Lightning bolts came outta Larry’s ass, and the fire in his eyes. The announcer didn’t know who I was. I was a substitute. Nor did he give a damn. So, as I’m coming down, the announcer’s looking, and he’s gotta announce something. He sees the bagpipes and he goes, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, from Glasgow, Scotland’—he’s hummin’ it—and he looks over at me, he knows my first name’s Roddy, he sees the bagpipes, and he goes, ‘Roddy the Piper!’ That’s how I got the name. The ‘the’ just got dropped.”

  Hennig’s displeasure showed as soon as the bell rang. He crossed the ring and hit Rod hard. Rod began falling backwards through the ropes and was headed for the floor when Hennig grabbed him by the hair. He yanked Rod back into the ring and delivered his infamous finishing move, “the Axe.”

  “Larry just came over and creamed me. Busted open my eye, broke my nose. It lasted ten seconds. And that’s with a one-two-three count. Seven. Took a second to get over to me, I’m sure. Or two. Now we’re down to five seconds I lasted.”

  Afterwards, Rod sat in a dressing room, holding his bleeding and broken nose. The pipe band was long gone. Disappointed in himself, he was probably already reducing in memory what records show to have been a two-minute match to the moment-long massacre since enshrined in his own personal legend.

  Roddy was excited to be owed $25, but wondered if he’d really need to go through another beating from the likes of Larry Hennig to make that much again. “I’m in the dressing room and my nose is broke and the blood is getting in my eyes,” said Roddy. The promoter walked into the dressing room in penny loafers. He remembered the shoes because he couldn’t bring himself to look the promoter in the eye. “I think he’s going to dupe me out of my twenty-five bucks.” The promoter was Al Tomko. And he paid up. “Kid, you did great! How’d you like to go to Kansas City?” “Will he be there?” asked Rod, meaning Hennig. “Don’t worry,” said Tomko, “we won’t overmatch you again.”

  The problem wasn’t being overmatched. He’d wrestled Superstar Billy Graham. The problem was that for all he’d learned about being in the ring, Roddy didn’t know how he fit in outside it. That was a dilemma. He wanted to be accepted by the established wrestlers, but he didn’t want to accept the place they had in mind for a kid whose trunks still stank like the high school gym.

  —

  The only other wrestler left in the dressing room was sitting to Roddy’s left. Bald headed with a thick black beard and his lower front teeth missing, he wasn’t as tall as Roddy, but he was a lot scarier. Black hair covered every inch of him save the top of his head. Carrying a good fifty pounds more than Roddy, he thoroughly intimidated the quiet kid bleeding in the corner. “Dog,” said Tomko on his way out, “Kid needs a ride.”

  Roddy remembered the man Tomko asked for the ride as “one of the toughest street fighters—ever.” A seventh-place wrestler at the London Olympic Games in 1948, Maurice Vachon won gold for Canada in the 1950 British Empire Games (they became the Commonwealth Games in 1954). For all the dignity that the pomp and ceremony of international sport should have lent the man looking him over in the bottom of the Winnipeg Arena, Roddy was much more aware that the guy’s nickname was Mad Dog.

  Tomko was gone. “Cocksucker?” Mad Dog said, in a thick French-Canadian accent.

  Rod froze. He stayed silent on the bench, eyes forward. Did Vachon mean him? “Stupid cocksucker?”

  There wasn’t anyone else in the room. “Cocksucker, we get in the car or not?”

  The ribs—the teasing and hazing of the new kid—had begun. “Mad Dog is a helluva guy,” remembered Roddy. “He became one of my dads.” Having such a poor relationship with his own father, he showed his affection for the wrestlers who taught him how to be a man by calling them his dads. “I fell in love with those guys. They’d teach me. Like they’d tell me to get naked and they’d put me in the trunk of the car. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to learn there, but that’s what they did. The jack’s sticking in my kidneys….These sons of bitches go eighty miles an hour over every bump, hill and valley, any deer they could hit!”

  The ribbing was relentless and it got a lot less comfortable before it got better. It was meant to prove something good about the new recruit or else weed him out. And it gave the old hands someone to take out their frustrations on.

  As for sticking him naked in the trunk, the joke was that another wrestler would open the lid unsuspecting, and there would be the new kid, not so ready to impress.

  —

  Tomko sometimes smuggled Roddy across the border himself. Roddy didn’t have proper ID, so he feigned sleep in the back seat while Tomko griped to the border guards that his lazy son wouldn’t wake up. The guard would sympathize and wave them through. The fact that the promoter himself drove Roddy the 504 miles to Minneapolis says a lot about the value he saw in his young wrestler’s future.

  Other times, Roddy caught rides with whoever would take him. “I lived, breathed and ate as the lowest on the rung,” Roddy said. “One story, I’m being driven from Winnipeg to St. Paul, Minnesota. We had to be there on Saturday morning, so we would leave at six o’clock Friday night and drive all night. It’s cold, it’s like thirty below. I had a baloney sandwich and a bottle of 7 Up. The two guys driving, one was Dave Muir and the other was Bobby Jones. They turned the heat off. I was really getting cold in the back seat. I was a really quiet guy. I said, ‘Sir, could you just turn some heat up?’ They started getting mad at me, saying, ‘We’re sweating up here.’ It got cold to the point where all of a sudden my bottle of 7 Up [froze and] exploded in th
eir car.”

  Much of this driving across the broad stretches of Manitoba and the northern states was taking place during an oil crisis. In the US, gas rationing came into effect. If your license plate ended in an odd number you could buy gas on only odd-numbered dates of the month. If it ended in an even number, you could buy it the next even number. This was a problem for wrestlers driving big cars full of heavy men for six or seven hours a day. Roddy was fast, and his young legs came in useful under the circumstances. “I remember having what they called a six-foot credit card. Six feet of water hose. As they’re going, every farmhouse had on stilts a big tank of gas for their tractors. They called it ‘pink gas.’ It had a pink stain in it because farmers got it cheap. You got in trouble if you were caught with it in your car. But that wasn’t my trouble. They’d give me the gas cans and they’d drive down the road a bit and I’d go suck some gas with the garden hose. Every farm had a German shepherd. I’d be running back with cans of gas, whipping the hose back behind me. I didn’t speak any German, and this German shepherd didn’t look like he liked me much, trying to bite my ass. I don’t know how many times I did that. This was a daily occurrence for a while.”

  Wrestlers indeed made good teachers, but what exactly they were teaching was questionable. Big men coached in the art of hurting people, all in on a carefully guarded secret, often baiting thousands of frothing fans at a time, wrestlers didn’t make much money and were used to getting nickel-and-dimed by promoters. The education suited the environment.

  On another trip, Roddy got a ride with a wrestler known as Ivan the Terrible. Juan Kachmanian broke into the business twenty years earlier, and he seemed to have done all right for himself. He dressed well and drove a Cadillac. Roddy got in the back seat. No complaints about the heat this time. Just the radio. “He turns on the radio, AM radio, and it starts talking about aluminum siding—put it on the side of your house, your house will never get wet again! For a hundred and fifty miles this guy talks about aluminum siding.”

  After an interminable drive listening to this, Ivan pulls up to a roadside diner. “He stops the car and just leaves me.” Roddy had $25 in his pocket—Canadian. He didn’t expect the diner would accept it. But hunger was gnawing a hole in his stomach and he eventually followed Ivan inside. “By the time I make my way into the diner, he’s at the counter. He’s eating a salad, soup. I come in and…” Ivan didn’t like the idea of the rookie sitting near him in public, and suggested in not so many words that he sit a little farther down the counter. A waitress—a real Polly “Flo” Holliday type—soon approached. Roddy ordered a glass of water. “I don’t know what happened to this guy, but all of a sudden he looks over and says, ‘Oh, little boy. You hungry?’” He speaks loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear, and then orders me steak and everything else he’s having. “All of a sudden here comes salad and soup and steak…I’m eating like a king. He’s eating like a king and he’s talking to me like I’d known him all my life.”

  When that food was finished, he ordered lemon pie, so Roddy did too. Ivan’s demeanour suddenly turned. He started yelling something about fighting in the war and Roddy disrespecting a veteran. Bewildered, Roddy watched as Ivan’s face reddened and his mouth began to foam and he grabbed at his chest.

  Sure Ivan was having a heart attack, Rod asked a waiter to call an ambulance. Ivan muttered, “No, you stupid shit, get me to the car.” Somehow Roddy muscled the 285-pound man out of the restaurant and into the passenger seat. Panicking, he shut the door on Ivan’s ankle, which caused him to erupt in more shouting. Roddy didn’t have a license, but he got behind the wheel and took off down the highway.

  The emergency ended as quickly as it began. Ivan stopped his choking. He flipped down the sun visor and wiped his mouth clean. He tidied himself in the mirror. He also spit out the remains of an Alka-Seltzer.

  Roddy kept driving. The stunt to get a free meal was like something he would have done. After these painful years of wandering, could it be that in the carnival-like world of pro wrestling he’d finally found a home?

  —

  Promoters knew enough to inject fresh blood into their cards. Verne Gagne would swap wrestlers with the promoters of other territories so the new faces and angles—storylines, in wrestling terminology—would keep his audiences intrigued. By late 1974, Roddy had several dozen pro matches under his belt, piping his own way down to the ring each time. Gagne started sending him farther afield to places like Waterloo, Iowa, and Kansas City, Kansas, and to St. Louis, where he was curiously billed as Ronnie Piper. In all likelihood it was an oversight on a promoter’s part. If a preliminary’s name was spelled wrong, a promoter was hardly going to replace his posters for the sake of correcting it.

  “They put me in a van with six other wrestlers, including two ladies—they were all as hairy as Larry—and snuck me over the border. I became expendable. I didn’t have a social security number. I didn’t have a name. Nothing. I was very handy for a gypsy organization like professional wrestling at that time. And they hated me, the wrestlers. It wasn’t like I had my first match and then became a star the next day and I’m throwing around Andre the Giant.”

  It was in St. Louis that he first traded blows with a wrestler nearly thirty years his senior whom WWF fans came to know as a sidekick of Vince McMahon, the Oxford-accented and properly English Lord Alfred Hayes. Hayes would become a friend and mentor to Roddy, but there were dues to be paid first. These dues weren’t pretty, but Hayes and the other wrestlers thought they were at least good for a laugh.

  Thinking he was alone in a dressing room, Roddy was changing after a match when a toilet stall burst open. Sitting on the can with a handful of himself was Ken Ramey. When you make a living blowing into bagpipes, a gesture like this could be taken the wrong way. And if it was a joke, what’s the point if there’s no audience? There was no one else around. For a kid off the streets, being molested is an ever-present threat avoided only by constantly, ferociously watching your back.

  Roddy didn’t think the jerk-off humour was very funny. He was a long way from home, and home itself was hardly home. “I got nowhere to go,” he remembered thinking. The jokes were only getting started.

  Another day, another dressing room, Hayes came running buck naked and swinging his penis like a club, charging Rod as he was getting out of the shower. Hayes took it a step further one night in Kansas City. Roddy was having a rare talk with NWA president Bob Geigel. Listening intently to Geigel—“Yes sir, Mr. Geigel”—Roddy leaned over a massage table on the back of his hands to better hear what Geigel had to say to him. “And while I’m listening, I don’t know, something’s wrong.”

  Something dropped into one hand, but Rod, like any eager young professional talking to a boss, wanted to show Geigel he had his full attention and ignored whatever someone had handed him. Geigel appeared distracted, and Roddy finally looked down. The thing in his hand was Hayes’ penis, sitting in his palm like a rolled-up diploma bestowed on a college graduate. “I turned around. My face was red, and there was nobody in the place I could beat up.”

  He didn’t know it yet, but he was graduating—in pro wrestling’s peculiar way—from the fraternity’s school of hard knocks. Or at least he was being accepted to study with the graduate class.

  For the moment, though, Roddy was fed up. He started waiting in the car for his matches. He went looking for the gym at every arena so he could shower somewhere other than the dressing room. He went so far as to carry his wrestling bag to the ring and leave it there for the show, then collect it at the end—anything to avoid older, naked men. He didn’t always find a gym. He started to stink. The other wrestlers had no idea how hard their ribbing was impacting the skinny kid from Canada.

  Finally Geigel told him to relax, they were ribbing him because they liked him. The hazing was their own way, albeit a sexually deviant way, of accepting him. And soon things changed. The pros started teaching him all he could absorb about wrestling and life on the road. And the fresh-face
d young athlete was also proving useful. Women hesitated to approach the beat-up–looking giants at the end of the bar, but if they were as nice as the good-looking blond kid chatting them up and suggesting they go meet these fine champion wrestlers, maybe the women could be convinced to go say hello.

  It was during one of these Midwestern swings that Roddy learned to be cautious of a much graver threat to his professional well-being than the pseudo-sexual hijinks of his co-stars.

  For whatever reason, in the bowels of an arena in the Midwest, a promoter began screaming at one of the older wrestlers, a black fighter weighing over three hundred pounds. The promoter—or the “P” as Roddy was learning to call them—was a much smaller, pot-bellied white man. “You stupid fucking nigger,” he berated the wrestler. Wide-eyed, Roddy awaited the P’s comeuppance, which he presumed would be immediate and bloody. It never came.

  The wrestler, a man Roddy respected and liked—another of his “dads”—accepted the verbal barrage with slumped shoulders and a hanging head. Rod looked on, angry but silent—if the wrestler wasn’t standing up for himself, he wouldn’t want a kid barely half his size opening his big mouth in his defense. Roddy’s anger soon dissipated. This was just depressing. He’d guarded himself against domination by others on the street as studiously as he’d avoided sexual exploitation. Letting someone get the better of you without a fight was just a recipe for further suffering. Something was going on, he realized, but he couldn’t understand what it was.

  What sank in finally was that the wrestler had a family. Getting thrown out of a job just to preserve his dignity in an encounter witnessed by no one but his peers—most of whom had been through a version of this themselves, if minus the racism—meant going home to his family empty-handed. Wrestling was his job. He needed the money. Suffering the P’s bullshit sucked, but the hulking wrestler put his family first.