“Amigo, you know, I felt bad.”
“You didn’t have to do that, I was just fucking with you.”
“I know, but I just…”
“Anyway,” reflected Chavo when we spoke, “that was Roddy.”
—
In September 1976, Gory Guerrero invited Roddy to Juarez, Mexico, to wrestle with Chavo. The twenty-two year old from Saskatoon had incited brawls and riots, but he really had no idea what to expect from wrestling in a Mexican bullring. Knowing wouldn’t have stopped him.
Juarez took the first shot, though, laying Roddy up in the afternoon with a rotten stomach. “The beautiful Mrs. Guerrero made a special chicken noodle soup for me,” he said, ever reverent. Whatever was in that soup, it worked wonders. Roddy was at the bullring that night, ready to brawl. He knew who he’d be wrestling, but who he’d be brawling with remained to be seen.
“The place is packed. I had a new style of trunks, they were pure white with little bagpipes on the side. Which really looked like little cockroaches. They come down to just above my knee.” Decked out for his first fight in Mexico, Roddy wasn’t feeling particularly welcome in the dressing room. Chavo was a friend and understood Roddy. If anything, in Los Angeles Roddy’s antagonism in the ring—which often involved antagonizing Mexicans—was helping grow Chavo’s own celebrity. But here in the heart of Mexico, the other wrestlers weren’t as inclined to forgive a young punk badmouthing their country.
Surrounding the bullring were hard benches. The audience could rent small pillows to sit on. Roddy and Chavo were wrestling in the main event. “Everything’s going hunky dory,” recalled Roddy. “Come intermission, here comes the torrential flood. God decides to make it rain. The people go for shelter. The rain stops and I’m on.”
Soaked with rain, the pillows weigh several pounds. And who would want to sit on wet pillows anyway? “I get in the ring and I start wrestling Chavo. A pillow, upside the head. Hit me like Earnie Shavers.” One soaking pillow gives way to another. “Another one. Pom! Finally it’s so bad, I need to get out of there.” The pillows are coming down like rain. From such close range, many are finding their mark. And what security exists is interested in making sure the audience has paid to get in, not in protecting wrestlers from Los Angeles. Realizing his friend is getting hurt, Chavo tries to dissuade the audience the only way he can. “Chavo was trying to help me by beating me up.” Maybe if the crowd saw Roddy taking lumps from their hero, they’d lay off. If the match were to swing the other way, the crowd would rush the ring. So Chavo grabbed Roddy and wrestled him close, hoping the fans wouldn’t want to hammer him with wet pillows too. It didn’t much help. In a harbinger of the career to come, the fans seemed to hate Roddy more than they loved Chavo.
Chavo explained that the pillows are a habit at the end of the bullring matches: “Any bullring really, the bad guys or the good guys, whether you win or lose, whether the heel wins or the baby loses—especially if they don’t like you—they start throwing. It was windy and dusty and a little sprinkle so it made it even nastier. I told him, ‘Get out of the ring, buddy.’”
Getting beaten up by Chavo Guerrero was fun if you were a strapping young professional wrestler who included the Mexican-American great as your close friend. Getting beaten up by Chavo and hammered by wet pillows while recovering from a rotten stomach was too much. “He started messing with the people,” Chavo said. “I said, ‘Get out of the ring, man.’ He said, ‘I ain’t getting out, brother, I’m getting it on!’ I said, ‘Get out of the ring. Here they come, man. Boom! He was buried in pillows.’”
Chavo warned him of something else as well. In the tunnel to the bullring, the wrestlers were vulnerable to a hostile crowd as they came and went. Chavo warned him to look the crowd in the eye when he wanted to exit, then run for it. Roddy didn’t. He sauntered, proudly, slowly, and continued to get pelted, including by a bag of shit.
Once they were safely out of sight of the audience, Roddy turned to Chavo.
“Amigo! Why didn’t you tell me?!”
“I told you to get out, dude.”
“Why didn’t you tell me they were going to throw pillows?”
“I don’t know what the people are going to do!”
There were no showers, so Chavo led Roddy to a bathing station for the bulls. “He was steaming hot!” recalled Chavo. “What do you want to do, you want to stay like that,” Chavo said to him, “or you wanna take all that shit off?” After Roddy cooled down, he allowed himself to laugh it off, too. “Yeah, he was pissed. Not at me, he was just pissed that he got caught in a situation.”
Roddy had fought his way out of some tense situations with fans looking to make it real. He wasn’t impressed that he so nearly allowed himself to fall into a situation he might not have gotten out of. Violence was becoming strangely ordinary, and he needed to make sure he never found himself on the wrong end of it. Still, he was young enough to take away more of the thrill than the terror.
“We had a great time,” he recalled. “It was dangerous, but…holy cow. I lived.”
—
LA drew a large weekend house, but the rest of the week was filled with smaller gigs. One was up north near San Francisco against an opponent Roddy hadn’t heard of before.
The San Francisco promoter, Roy Shire, invited Roddy up and he accepted. Shire, after all, was supposed to have been his boss when he drove out from New Brunswick, and Roddy often popped up the coast from LA for a match or two.
Roddy had fought all kinds by now. This fellow, “Victor Bear,” couldn’t be any worse than he’d seen so far.
Roddy was wrong. He wasn’t fighting Victor Bear. He was fighting a de-clawed bear named Victor. As Roddy sat slack-jawed in the locker room before the match, the animal reared up and made short work of a bottle of Wild Turkey. It dropped the empty bottle, which shattered on the floor, and the trainer handed it a bottle of Coke, which it drained and smashed just like it had the bourbon.
The bear’s owner and trainer, Tuffy Truesdell, laid down the ground rules for Roddy. “Now, Victor’s fang teeth have been taken out for your protection, but his back teeth are about an inch and a half long, so don’t get your fingers back there or he’ll bite them off. Don’t pull Victor’s fur or punch him in the stomach, because if you do he’ll slap you upside the head and break your neck.”
Roddy was looking at Victor, still wondering how he was going to survive this, forget about putting on a good match.
“Obviously he doesn’t know I’m the light heavyweight champion of the world,” Roddy quipped. He went to the weigh-in, not comforted by the knowledge shared by Truesdell. The trainer was finished dispensing helpful advice and moved on to clear directions.
“Now, Victor don’t like standing on his hind legs unless he’s been drinking. So when the bell rings I’m gonna jab him in the bum with this stick and that oughta bring him up. You get under him.”
Victor weighed roughly twice as much as Superstar Billy Graham and about 150 pounds more than Andre the Giant in the mid-’70s (Andre never stopped growing—and Victor’s proportions fluctuated as well, depending which wrestler is recounting his long minutes in the ring with him). His size aside, the bear presented a unique set of problems to a slender young wrestler. First, Victor had just guzzled the largest mixed drink in the history of professional sports. Second, it would be difficult to communicate during the match with a bear. He’d have had better luck pacifying German shepherds while stealing farmers’ gasoline in northern Minnesota. Third, and most important, this was feeling like a very bad idea, and a very good way to have his spine snapped in front of an audience.
Rod was deliberating whether to actually fight Victor when wrestler Jay York walked up behind him, slapped him on the bum a few times and said, “Go get him, kid,” with a big laugh.
Roddy took a deep breath and got in the ring. Good to his word, Truesdell jabbed the bear with a stick and Rod locked up with him, as wrestlers do. Unfortunately, a bear has no shoulders to hold on t
o. Bears being natural wrestlers, Victor got behind Roddy and he hit the mat. The bear went straight for his trunks. Forgetting Truesdell’s instructions, Roddy kicked, punched, and tried everything he could do to get the bear off him—“I’m snout-pullin’, fur-punchin’.” His trunks went down and the bear put its substantial snout where nature had not intended. The crowd was shrieking at the sight of the bagpiping wrestler getting mauled.
This was not Victor’s first time in the ring. Truesdell had been touring him all over the US and Canada, wrestling professionals and wannabes both. Neither tended to fare very well against the bear. In 1970, at halftime of an NBA game between the Chicago Bulls and Golden State Warriors, Bulls general manager Pat Williams tried his hand at wrestling Victor. It was a short bout. At the end of each match, Victor’s handler quickly rewarded the bear with another bottle of Coke. But a soft drink wasn’t about to distract him from the buffet he had on the mat in Fresno. When Roddy’s posterior lost its appeal, Victor, like any bear raiding a bee’s nest, put his very long tongue to work, going deeper, seeking more. Roddy started screaming for his life.
Truesdell had to tranquilize Victor (more than a bottle of Wild Turkey already had), but it took a few minutes to kick in. Roddy managed to get up, but Victor kept taking him down. Knowing a bear’s ring strategies is a very different thing from defending yourself against them. Eventually Victor passed out. Not one to stand on ceremony, Roddy hustled out of the ring while trying to get his trunks up where they belonged. He tripped on his way through the ropes, landing face-first on the concrete with his trunks still low enough to give the crowd its money’s worth.
Victor wrestled thousands of people over the years, but he never did to anyone else what he did to Roddy. The reason for that, it turned out, was simple. Before slapping his young pal on the backside prior to the match, Jay York had smeared honey all over his hand. Victor had been the object of some good old-fashioned bear baiting. Gene LeBell had been training Roddy to defend himself against liberties in the ring, but even the toughest man in the world couldn’t have prepared him for what he suffered that night in Fresno.
Fortunately for Roddy, his days wrestling bears and being treated like a disposable part of anyone’s promotion were nearly over. He was about to be asked to try a few new things. One would do great things for his career. The other was a first step in leaving it.
4
Thanks for the Blood and Guts, Kid
Gene LeBell had taken a liking to Roddy. He spent every free moment he could in LeBell’s dojo, working on wrestling technique, toughening up. LeBell wasn’t gentle, but neither was Roddy. LeBell knew what he was doing on the mats, and a mischievous sense of humour made him hard not to like.
One Sunday, Roddy called him and asked if they could spend some time wrestling at the dojo. LeBell turned him down. Sundays had a much more important purpose. He told Roddy to join him and Chavo Guerrero in indulging his true passion. “Being Gene’s friend,” said Roddy, “I had to ride motorcycles.” Since LeBell paid most of his bills working as a stunt man, riding motorbikes was a crucial skill, and one he’d make any excuse to practice. He sold old bikes to Roddy and Chavo. “You can’t be a good wrestler until you can ride motorcycles,” LeBell says. “You get your hands and legs in coordination.”
They loaded up their dirt bikes and headed for the hills outside LA.
Roddy hesitated to cross a small river on his bike. A more experienced rider, Chavo urged him to ride through. Roddy was still hesitating. With a shake of the head and a twist of the throttle, Chavo decided to show him how it was done. He was immediately up to his neck in water. Roddy laughed so hard, he wasn’t able to help his friend pull the bike back onto dry land. LeBell directed them to the bottom of a notoriously steep hill. LeBell dared Roddy to try his luck. By this point in their relationship, if Uncle Gene asked Roddy to do something, he did it. Of all the things about wrestling Roddy was learning from Gene, he didn’t yet understand how completely Uncle Gene had mastered the wrestlers’ art of “the swerve,” the practical joke. “He damned near killed himself,” said LeBell.
The way Chavo tells it, Roddy tried again and again to climb that hill. The other two were at the top, watching. “No! I’m not giving up,” shouted Roddy. “Nobody’s going to beat me, especially not Guerrero!”
“I was chanting for him,” says Chavo. “Roddy, Roddy, Roddy…”
Chavo and Gene were also sweltering in the sun in their riding gear, and they urged him to get it over with, one way or the other. Roddy hit the gas, crossed a little creek at the bottom of the hill and hit the rise. He made it to the top, but kept going over the crest of the hill and out of sight—until he was caught in a fence strung to protect people from falling off the steep backside of the hill. “I was so scared,” said Roddy. “The hill was so tall. I started going backwards off the motorcycle but I hung on and crashed into a bunch of barbed wire.” Laying in the dirt tangled in the fence, Roddy looked down—several hundred feet down. In the valley far below lay a rusting old motorcycle. Presumably, crashed by someone who had made the same mistake before the barbed wire went up. “I remember it very clearly—the spokes and a wheel and a cow’s head, the white skull.”
When Gene found him, he stared at him, amazed. “You goof,” said LeBell. “What did you do that for?”
“You told me to, Uncle Gene.”
Chavo laughed as he remembered Roddy emerging from the backside of the hill, his gear shredded. “He had all these scratches where he fell on the barbed wire and where he was bleeding. But he couldna been prouder. That was the moment of the day. We would compete for the moment of the day, and that was the moment of the day, brother.”
The lessons weren’t all for Roddy. As LeBell learned that day, the more something scared his new student, the more likely he was to try it.
—
Roddy’s parents had worked multiple jobs all through his childhood, and now he needed some extra income himself to get out of the Flamingo, the motel he was living in. It was a dump, and a dangerous one at that. Working in the movies, Uncle Gene knew how a wrestler with a fresh face and screen-friendly physique could make a few bucks on the side.
LeBell was running the stunts on a film called The One and Only, a story about a struggling actor who boosts his career by wrestling. To get noticed, he takes on a series of outrageous ring personas. The lead was played by Henry Winkler, who was enjoying huge television success at the time as the Fonz in the sitcom Happy Days. LeBell got Roddy work in a scene in which Winkler’s character was working a sort of Hitler gimmick with a spiked German war helmet. Roddy’s character was a GI named Leatherneck Joe Grady, a crowd favourite—though for some reason the filmmakers left Roddy’s usual plaid trunks on him. They were shooting in the ring at the Olympic Auditorium.
“What am I supposed to do?” Roddy asked LeBell.
Gene went into the ring and approached Winkler. Roddy followed. The actor didn’t know what he was supposed to do either. LeBell had worked with both men before. He couldn’t resist the swerve. “We’re looking at each other,” said Roddy, “and Gene LeBell says, ‘Come here, come here,’ to Henry Winkler. He gets pretty close. Gene just starts slapping me in the head.”
LeBell was saying, “See this kid?” Bop, bop. “This kid here? You can’t hurt this kid.” Bop bop.
Roddy went to his corner. He knew he was supposed to take a bump in the fight—fall down hard, that is. There was a camera positioned low along the edge of the canvas to catch him hitting the mat.
Winkler wasn’t sure what LeBell was suggesting. “You have a German helmet. You take it off and you hit him with it.”
“Well, how hard should I hit him?”
LeBell knew Winkler was a nice guy but figured he was a method actor, so LeBell laid it on thick about hitting Roddy over the head with the helmet. “You got it?”
“I got it,” said Winkler.
Roddy watched quietly. He knew LeBell couldn’t resist a prank, but this was Roddy’s firs
t day on a new job. He assumed people in the movie business knew what they were doing. “I didn’t say nuthin.’”
The director called action. “The bell rings, Henry’s in his corner, I’m in mine. Boy, he took Uncle Gene serious. He took that helmet off and just plowed me. I wanted to get up and just beat him like a baby seal.”
The director called cut. Roddy got up. Holding his head, he approached LeBell. “He knocked the shit outta me! What did you tell him?”
“You know, just miss him or something.”
Even with his head ringing, Roddy thought that was unlikely.
On his way out of the ring, Roddy passed the director, Carl Reiner. “You got another Robert Redford here,” Reiner said to LeBell.
“Okay, sure,” Roddy scoffed.
“Do you want to do some movies?” Reiner asked Roddy.
The experience really hadn’t inspired Roddy to say yes.
In the film, the Roddy and Winkler characters travel by train from town to town, repeating the match. The filmmakers liked Roddy’s twitching collapse into the mat so much that they show it over and over, interspersed with shots of the train whistling through the night. If you watch the movie, you’ll see Roddy hitting the canvas again and again and again. “That was my big movie debut,” he said ruefully. “I never went to see it. To this day I don’t think I’ve seen it. I think Uncle Gene showed me where I took the bump for this guy. For four or five years I’d been fighting every night trying to get this wrestling thing done. I didn’t have much interest in movies. I think Uncle Gene was the one who got me my SAG card—Screen Actors Guild. But I had never in my life thought of being in front of a camera or doing an interview—I just never considered them. Now I’m accidentally in a movie. But it wasn’t a big enough part for me to think about my part or my character. I was a wrestler getting the shit kicked out of me! I’d been preparing for that for five years. I didn’t need much coaching.”
Chavo Guerrero made his film debut in The One and Only as well, playing wrestler Indian Joe—“I was the only one that beat the Fonz!”—thanks to Uncle Gene. Guerrero did a few more movies, but stayed focussed on wrestling, though his brother Mando did start a career as a stuntman, also thanks to LeBell. Roddy took the job for all it seemed to be, a payday. He didn’t think he’d be back in front of a movie camera again. “I didn’t know who Carl Reiner was. I wish I’d taken his offer.”
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