Lesson learned.
—
Roddy was growing in confidence and style as he travelled with Gagne’s wrestlers through Minnesota and central Canada, and getting swapped in and out of the Midwest promotions. He was learning the tricks of the trade, too. The most enduring was a simple manoeuvre familiar to anyone who ever watched him wrestle, because he learned it at the beginning and never stopped using it. It proved particularly useful at the age when his body was no longer up to his own punishing high-energy style. “In the Winnipeg Arena there’s two guys, shooters, one guy’s name was Horst Hoffman, from Germany, and Billy Robinson,” he explained. Shooters routinely hurt less experienced wrestlers in the ring for their own pleasure as much as the crowd’s entertainment. “The guys are pretty fucking handy. They get in that ring and if you don’t know how to defend yourself, you could be in a world of fucking trouble. They’re bad guys and they enjoyed doing it.”
Hoffman and Robinson and a few others had hooked up with some young women the night before. Too young for Larry Hennig’s liking. The Axe was a family guy. Sitting across from them in the dressing room, he got quickly fed up with hearing about their exploits. According to legend—Roddy claimed Al Tomko told him this story and that it happened only months before Roddy started wrestling pro—Hennig told them to shut up about the girls. Hoffman didn’t appreciate the advice. “They start having words. Horst Hoffman starts walking slowly toward Larry. The words are getting less and a little quieter, and Larry stands up and pokes Horst Hoffman right in his eyes. It’s over and they just sat down.”
In a wrestling repertoire that included endless punches, kicks and basically strangling his opponents until they passed out on the mat, Roddy’s eyeball poke was comically quick and subtle. The move was usually over before the audience even knew it had happened. He still cracked up to think of its origins. “Everybody thinks it’s the three stooges! HH is a big shooter,” he laughed, making the trademark two-finger jab to show how little it had taken Hennig to subdue the braggart.
He was learning, and bit by bit he was also putting on the muscle he’d need to put all that learning to good use. In January 1975, Rod got his first taste of life in a distant territory. “When Rod wanted to go someplace in the bigger time, Verne Gagne got him booked into one of the other territories,” said Merv Unger. “Once you start going from one territory to the next, you build up a reputation and that’s how Rod did it.”
Gagne sent him to Dallas, Texas, where Fritz Von Erich and his family ran Big Time Wrestling out of the Sportatorium. Von Erich was born Jack Adkisson. He’d left Texas in 1957 for Edmonton, Alberta, hoping to land a job in the Canadian Football League. He didn’t make the CFL, but he did run into Stu Hart, who taught him to wrestle and helped him conceive his Nazi villain character, Fritz von Erich. His sons adopted the surname when they followed him into the family business.
The Dallas accommodations that Von Erich afforded the twenty-year-old from Canada left very little to be desired. “I stayed in the Alamo Plaza Hotel,” said Roddy. “I’m the only guy ever to get kicked out. Nobody gets kicked out of the Alamo Plaza. They don’t even clean the rugs, they just put another one on top of it…”
It was while wrestling in Texas that Roddy first met Kerry, the Von Erich brother with whom he would bond most closely. “The boys were in school,” Roddy said. “We would hang around and drink together.” Kerry was the fourth son in the Von Erich family, and still a high school track and field star at the time Roddy was working Texas for Fritz and the family’s booker, Red Bastien. Kerry Von Erich kept a surprising secret in later years after joining his father’s wrestling promotion. He had lost his right foot after a motorcycle accident and went so far as to shower with his boots on to hide his prosthesis from the other wrestlers and staff. Getting to know Roddy so young developed a trust that lasted the rest of Kerry’s short life. “I loved him so much. An incredible athlete. Because I’d known him—he had heeled a room with me, meaning one guy gets a room and two guys split it—he didn’t mind taking his leg off with me.”
Years after Roddy’s first trip to Texas, he and Kerry were rooming together at the Miami Marriott—or Merry-rot, as they joked—after Kerry had joined the WWF in the ‘80s. Using an old wrestler’s trick, they’d extended the security latch on their room door so it would stay ajar. That way they wouldn’t need to get out of bed when room service arrived. It wasn’t room service that saved them that night, thanks to the open door. “I don’t know really what we were thinking. There was allegedly a joint around…” The pair climbed out their window and onto a ledge barely wider than their feet were long. “I remember having to push back, ‘cause the wind was really strong up there.” Then the wind slammed the window shut, locking them outside.
The pair weren’t particularly phased by their predicament. “We really didn’t mind. We were just talking for a long time.”
Looking out over the Miami skyline at night, they had a lot to talk about. Two of the six Von Erich brothers had committed suicide. Roddy might have been shy, but he never had trouble talking privately with a friend. He knew enough about the darkness in men’s souls to relate to the turmoil that haunted the Von Erich boys. Kerry took his own life in 1993, but for that night he’d found a good listener in Roddy. Fortunately, their high-risk conversation was interrupted by friends. “Big Boss Man and Curt Hennig came by for a beer and pulled us in.” Roddy told this story in 2014. “Out of all those guys, I’m the only one alive.” Wrestling drew rough men. It encouraged them to live hard and it put them under great pressure to perform or be replaced. Even the toughest could crack.
Like everyone else, Texans would come to know Roddy in a big way a decade after his first trip to the state, but to those who were watching he endeared himself during that first trip. One Friday night at the Fonde Recreation Center in Houston, it was time to stand for the national anthem. The record skipped. A local newspaper described it in comically overheated terms: “a raucous sound that blared out of the City of Houston owned p.a. system did not resemble a demonstration of respect for our nation.” (As Merv Unger did in Winnipeg, promoters and their staff often wrote the local wrestling dispatch, which explained the entertaining language.)
Seeing a hall full of patriotic Texans standing with hands over hearts and looking none too pleased about the anthem, Houston promoter Paul Boesch sensed an opportunity. Boesch called Roddy up to the ring, pipes in hand. In a stroke of luck that suggests more to do with wrestling angles than wrestling’s angels, Roddy just happened to have been practicing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
In the audience that night, and every Friday night in Houston, were two brothers who were fanatical wrestling fans, Tom and Bruce Prichard. They saw every match Roddy fought in Houston, usually at the Coliseum, except nights like this when concerts bumped wrestling to the Fonde Center. “Everybody stood up and clapped for him. Roddy couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-one years old. He played it very well. I do remember that,” said Tom. As a heavily decorated veteran of the Second World War, Boesch was greatly esteemed locally, and the idea of a Scottish kid saving the night by playing the national anthem on his bagpipes was irresistable to Boesch’s audience. “Paul being a war hero, of course very patriotic and very ingrained in the community—it was great.”
In an added bit of good fortune, Roddy won his match against Don Serrano that evening, which didn’t hurt his future value as a draw with the Houston audiences.
He wrestled throughout Texas until mid-April. He acquired three things of great personal value. One was his white 1973 Chevy Vega. The second was a piece of insight that he held near to his heart for the rest of his career. In the Houston dressing room, Johnny Valentine, a legendary wrestler and father of future star Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, grabbed Roddy when he accidentally got in his way and pushed the young guy against a wall. “I can’t convince you wrestling’s for real,” Valentine said, “but I can sure as hell convince you I’m for real.” Roddy would use
that same line in countless interviews.
The third thing he found in Texas was someone to watch his back and keep him company at night, a pit bull he named Kayfabe. The dog had a problem with seeing its own reflection and Rod had to throw a sheet over the mirror in his room at the Alamo. The dog also had a problem with the hotel owner’s poodle, which he beat up one day. This is why, in what had to be a first for the run-down Alamo, the owner kicked the boy and his dog out. Likely this is also why Roddy took to sleeping in the car, a habit he’d find very useful in the weeks to come, because his modest but successful run in Texas was done.
—
Winnipeg was still home, though Rod was weaning himself from his roots. When he got back in April, he stayed at the Marlborough Hotel. But Kayfabe wasn’t exactly housetrained and soon got them tossed out of a second horrible hotel, this time for shitting in the halls. The dog hadn’t spoiled Rod’s good name at the Windsorian, though. This was good, because they needed some place to park the car while they were living in it.
Cam Connor explained: “Rod would take his Vega, park it at the edge of the parking lot, roll the back window down, take his dog food and pour it all on the floor of the car and leave a big tray of water. And that dog lived in the car.” The pit bull jumped through the open window to come and go as it pleased until Rod returned from the road. Nobody touched the Vega. It was just as well, because it’s tough to find someone willing to dog-sit a pit bull belonging to a homeless wrestler, even his best friend. “I had a dog,” says Cam. “He woulda eaten it.”
Or so you’d think.
When Rod drove to Cam’s home one day, Pepper, Cam’s cocker spaniel, was outside when the Vega pulled up. Kayfabe leaped out and made a beeline for her. Roddy couldn’t act quickly enough to get between the dogs. Pepper started barking and, for whatever reason, the incoming pit bull turned tail and jumped back in the Vega. Cam didn’t get many chances to upstage his buddy, but he was proud of his dog.
Rod had brought one more thing home to Winnipeg. A recommendation.
In Dallas, the Von Erichs’ booker, Red Bastien, was a small, quick wrestler himself, who had grappled with the likes of Verne Gagne in the fifties. Bastien knew a few things about talent: as a trainer, he would later help groom both the Ultimate Warrior and Sting. Bastien had been impressed with the quiet, lanky kid in plaid trunks, who lit up like a pro in front of the camera. An almost entirely losing record over Roddy’s final month in Texas suggests he was also willing to play his role and pay his dues in order to earn a shot.
Bastien had called a friend in Los Angeles, Leo Garibaldi, who was booking the legendary Olympic Auditorium. Garibaldi had an eye out for new talent. Texans had liked the kid, win or lose. With his beaming smile and blond hair, Rod struck Bastien as an ideal babyface for California. Garibaldi agreed. He’d give Piper a try if he stopped in Los Angeles for a few days on his way to San Francisco, where Bastien figured Rod could season for a while in Roy Shire’s Northern California promotion. That would give them all a clearer sense of the young wrestler’s talent. There was no need to rush. In those days, main event–calibre wrestlers were usually in their late thirties or early forties. Younger men weren’t trusted with that burden.
Winnipeg had been a tough place to come of age, and Rod was done with it. It was time to get out. California was waiting. If he was ever going to be a star, where better to make it happen? He was a long way from great, but he had been good enough to get in, and he was committed. One commitment cost another.
For all his wandering, Roddy’s girlfriend was still in the picture. She’d found an apartment her boyfriend could afford, now that he was earning some legitimate money. On the streets of Winnipeg, Rod had come face-to-face with the worst direction his life could take, and now the only things between him and a huge opportunity were hard work and endless miles of highway. He could handle the pain and he could handle the miles. He couldn’t handle the idea of settling down. He had seen enough of domestic life to know the heart he would break by leaving would be broken worse if he stayed.
As spring turned to summer, he packed up the Vega with a head full of California.
“He left Winnipeg and didn’t take anybody’s phone number with him,” Cam said. Guilt nagged him, but it didn’t stop him. “He went out and accomplished what he wanted in life.”
California would have to wait for the new year, though. First, Roddy was headed back to the Maritimes. This time he wasn’t there to stay out of trouble. He wanted trouble, and he wanted to get paid for it, too.
—
On Sunday, July 13, 1975, “Rod Piper” debuted against Rick Hamilton at the North Sydney Community Forum in Nova Scotia. In the Maritimes, a young guy who entered the ring in a kilt and playing bagpipes was bound to go over well with audiences—Latin for “New Scotland,” Nova Scotia comes by its name honestly.
One local paper reported his debut: “Rod Piper, a newcomer from Scotland, electrified the fans with his speed and wrestling ability, taking the measure of seasoned Rick Hamilton at the seven minute mark. Piper caught Hamilton in an airplane whirl and finished him off with a body press. Both wrestlers showed a lot of class but Piper was the darling of the fans.”
Roddy was in yet another new place, but with familiar company. Bulldog Bob Brown had fought him in St. Louis (Unger speculated that he might have been the person who saw Rod in Winnipeg and suggested he be brought down to Kansas City). Brown and another familiar face, Lord Alfred Hayes, appeared on almost all the same Maritime cards as Rod. Community centres in New Glasgow or Fredericton were a step down from the Midwestern cities where he had cut his teeth, and they were certainly small-time after places like Dallas and Houston. But the kid suddenly had a chance to be a bigger fish in a small pond, especially a pond with an ingrained crush on anything Scottish. He was learning, honing all he’d been taught since he’d come into the business only a couple years before. And despite their rocky introduction to each other, Roddy had a mentor in Hayes. “I loved him,” Roddy told Kayfabe Commentaries in 2014. “He never swore. He taught me the piano. He taught me where to put the fork. He taught me about England and Scotland, and he would correct my grammar. We would talk about Shakespeare…In this dysfunctional family, he taught me honour, he taught me class.” It would take years for that relationship to develop, but for now what they were developing beat getting chased naked around the dressing rooms of the Midwest.
Best of all, in the Maritimes the drives were shorter than trucking back and forth from Winnipeg to Minneapolis. Roddy made some of those drives with the boss, Emile Duprée. “Emile Duprée, when I wrestled for him, would buy twenty-four bottles of Schooner that we would all chip in on. As Emile would finish his third beer, he would take the beer caps that he had kept in his top pocket, count them, then take what was left of his six so nobody else would get them. In case you didn’t get it folks, he was the promoter.”
As much as Roddy was learning at the sides of more experienced wrestlers, he was always smart enough to learn the most valuable things by just watching and listening. “The best time I saw with Emile was one night, driving with Don Leo Jonathan and Emile, and Emile said, ‘I don’t know, Don, it was a helluva house, but I think I deserve some of the credit too.’ Don Leo said back to him, ‘Emile, you can have all the credit. Just give me the money.’ That was about the hundred and fourth wrestling lesson I learned that day.”
At six foot six, Don Leo Jonathan was a giant for his time. He was a little smaller when he first broke into show business. “Don Leo Jonathan was one of the Little Rascals,” recalled Roddy. Jonathan actually had a small role in Our Gang. He was a Little Rascal like Cam Connor was “captain” of the Montreal Canadiens (as Roddy often mistakenly described him)—it never hurt your professional reputation to be a friend of Roddy Piper. Jonathan continued with film and television but, according to Rod, was kicked off a movie set by John Wayne because Jonathan overshadowed him.
Also critical to the success of the Maritime circuit, as pr
omoters and wrestlers, was a family named Cormier. Its most famous son went by the ring name Leo Burke or Tommy Martin when touring the States (French-Canadian names didn’t help a wrestler connect with fans in the likes of Missouri or Texas). His brothers fought as “The Beast” and Rudy Kay. “Leo Burke was a real fine man, from a fine family,” said Roddy, “and his brother The Beast took me under his wing.” In Halifax, Rod wrestled “Mad Dog” Michel Martel, who would die after a match in Puerto Rico in 1978, a year before Rod befriended his younger and much more famous brother, Rick. Rod was too young and too full of steam to notice a trend yet, but the number of friends in the business who were dying young would become hard to ignore.
Roddy also wrestled the great Lou Thesz in the little studio of Halifax TV. When the bell sounded, he made the mistake of antagonizing one of the most devastating wrestlers of his time.
“Come on, ya old bastard,” he said.
Lou Thesz took offense, as you’d expect, but surprised his young opponent with how he expressed it.
“Referee, you tell him to watch his language,” he said.
The match didn’t last long, but Roddy did manage to cover Thesz for a one count. As a result he remembered the match with some pride, but ended the story with a note of humility.
“I’m a fast man,” said Roddy. “I’m a fast cat. I covered Lou Thesz, he kicks out. And I winged up to my feet, and there he is standing looking at me. Okay…It was just downhill from there. I was so happy when the three taps on the mat came. I’m still alive. It’s quite an honour.”
Come November, International Wrestling—the promotion in the Maritimes before Emile Duprée founded Grand Prix Wrestling in 1977—shut down for winter. Snowfall through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia is notoriously heavy, rendering the highways too unreliable for a travelling roadshow working back-to-back dates. The other wrestlers packed up and headed west, where Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling ran through the other half of the year.
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