Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  —

  In August, Roddy beat Chavo for the NWA (Los Angeles) Americas title. But he had yet to develop into the kind of indispensible draw he could be and he knew it. So did Mike LeBell and Leo Garibaldi. Still, a hard working kid with an unusual gimmick, great mic work and a bottomless desire to succeed was worth investing in. For about a week. Roddy lost the belt back to Chavo on August 18. Roddy’s loss was a safe bet on the promoter’s part. The re-match was a loser-leaves-town match. Just to make sure he knew his immediate future lay elsewhere, Roddy lost another loser-leaves-town match the next night in Bakersfield. The California audiences had been given notice. Roddy Piper wouldn’t be seen for a while.

  The LeBells’ promotion in Los Angeles, like most wrestling circuits around the US, Mexico and Canada, had agreements to swap talent with other promotions in other territories. The LeBells were connected to a fledgling wrestler-run promotion called New Japan Pro-Wrestling. It was time Roddy stretched his legs again, though LeBell and Garibaldi weren’t giving up on him. This was just a loan to a very distant place.

  To make sure Roddy didn’t get lost in translation, he was contracted for a six-week tour of Japan in the company of a couple of very big Texans, one of whom, Stan Hansen, would enjoy their tour so much he’d spend much of his career there.

  On August 26, still in a daze from jetlag and culture shock, Roddy debuted in Kiryu, Japan, as a tag-team partner to towering Blackjack Mulligan. They lost to Riki Choshu and their new boss, Antonio Inoki, the wrestler who’d fought Muhammad Ali.

  A heavyweight champion himself, Inoki was a square-jawed six-foot-three. Though born in Japan, he’d lived and trained in Brazil as a teenager before returning to wrestle in the dominant Japanese promotion, All Japan Pro Wrestling, run by the six-foot-ten Giant Baba. Inoki broke away in 1972 to form the rival business, New Japan.

  Hansen would eventually fight with both promotions. “Both companies were run by strong, great, individual wrestlers that were really good,” Hansen said. The style of wrestling was less gimmicky than in North America, with less focus on angles and more on shoot, or legitimate, fighting. Inoki in particular liked “strong style,” influenced by American pro wrestling but with much more forceful contact. “It’s punishing. The Japanese were tough,” Hansen said. “They chopped hard, they hit hard and they did everything hard. It was twice as physical as the United States. I mean, it was tough. From getting in and out of the ring to everything. It could be brutal.”

  Roddy had bulked up since arriving in LA, and had trained enough with Gene LeBell that “brutal” was happily within his wheelhouse. “I think he enjoyed it,” said Hansen. “The competition between the people in the ring was…I’d say the closest thing to real there is. You might know where you’re going to start and where you’re going to finish, but what you did in between was really up to whoever was aggressive enough to lead the match. That’s where the real competition came in. Roddy fit into that really well.”

  That’s high praise from a man who stood three inches taller than Roddy. Mulligan was almost a half-foot taller than Hansen, and both men weighed over three hundred pounds. If Hansen found Japanese wrestlers that tough, it’s a testament to Roddy’s aggression and evolving skill that his next tag-team partner in Japan thought he thrived against the local talent.

  Roddy recalled the ultra-physical nature of wrestling in Inoki’s promotion in similar terms. “When you got in the ring, you just beat them with everything you had. You just beat the dog out of them. I was partner of a guy named Stan Hansen on his very first tour. He’s blind as a bat. He had a lariat, which was just a big piece of leather. But when Stan took his glasses off, he couldn’t see nothing, half the time he was hitting me. But he’d make the Japanese wrestlers run and he’d beat them.”

  Japanese audiences weren’t sure what to make of a supposed Scotsman piping his way into the ring every night. He fought in gymnasiums and community centres that held at best three or four thousand people. The wailing pipes would have echoed brutally off the high ceilings and stone walls. Japanese audiences weren’t inclined to make much noise of their own, like crowds did back home. “In those days, they didn’t cheer or boo or nothing. They just were polite, would sit there and watch the matches.” And they took their wrestling very seriously, which was all the more reason to disdain the strange and villainous foreigners, or gaijin.

  “You were definitely the villain,” Hansen said, “because you were wrestling mainly the Japanese. Over time, there’s a few guys that went long enough that people ended up enjoying them…but we were the heels.”

  The tour was packed tight with matches in different cities, night after night. Through six weeks, it got to be a grind. And it was hard on the visiting wrestlers, socially. They didn’t speak the language, they weren’t in one place, or even one city, long enough to make connections, and a phone call home, if you could get a clear line, cost several dollars a minute. Fortunately for Roddy, he had the Texans to keep him company. “Roddy and I, we enjoyed going to the movies,” Hansen said. Most places they’d wrestle had a movie theatre, and many of them showed American movies with Japanese subtitles. The wrestlers needed something to kill time, because they showed up in each new town around noon but didn’t need to report for their matches until about five o’clock. They stayed in business hotels with small rooms and nothing on television that they could understand except sports. Roddy had a habit at the movies to help him feel at home. “I can remember one of his favourite things was he’d buy these Goobers. I think they’re chocolate covered peanuts. And he’d get popcorn. The popcorn was never hot. He’d pour these Goobers into the popcorn and say, Ah, this is my favourite way.”

  They also killed a little time in yakiniku restaurants, eating Korean-style barbeque. Steak and most meat was very expensive, so the promoters took the visiting wrestlers out for yakiniku once a week. The Westerners, accustomed to a lot more protein in their diets, would feast.

  But Goobers and occasional big meals weren’t enough to keep Roddy’s tumultuous mind entertained, so he, Hansen and Mulligan entertained themselves. Since people already regarded them warily as big, nasty gaijin, the threesome decided to have some fun with it. Doing laundry was expensive in Japan, which made an excuse for a contest to see who could go the longest without changing his clothes. These were not small men, and they fought every night for a living. “It started out as a rib,” Hansen said, “but after two, three days, we’re going, eww man, this is getting a little old. But we all hung in there for about five or six days, maybe longer. But eventually Mulligan and I said forget it.” Roddy won. “He was always joking around. He enjoyed life. It was a new experience.”

  Public baths were a particularly new part of that experience. The warm indoor pools drew all variety of people at the end of the day to unwind among their neighbours and peers. To many Japanese, “skinship” was considered part of proper socialization. To a prairie kid in his early twenties, especially one socialized in a rapid-fire series of very questionable circumstances, the sober-minded benefit of group nudity was a tough sell. “Public baths,” remembered Hansen, “it’s really a nice thing. But for somebody new that’d never been to one, it was always a little…they were thinking, Wow what is this? Because a pat down or a massage in the States meant something completely different from an actual muscle massage at a bath house.”

  Roddy went for a massage. A few minutes later, Hansen heard loud moaning coming from the room where the massage tables were. The moans escalated into yelling and screaming—obviously Roddy. Bathers were getting upset and the masseuse came running out of the room, furious. Hansen laughs, “It wasn’t any kind of a sexual deal”—though it was meant to sound like one—“it was just him being crazy.”

  —

  Through Roddy’s time wrestling in LA for Aileen Eaton and Mike LeBell, he lived in the same low-rise, low-rent motel whose back alley hosted its fair share of beatings and murders. The last time most people saw the Flamingo West Motel was in the
Wesley Snipes/Woody Harrelson/Rosie Perez movie White Men Can’t Jump. It was torn down in the early ‘90s. But when Roddy returned from six weeks overseas, settling back in at the Flamingo felt like coming home.

  “I had a special suite they built for me. They put a built-in cigarette lighter in the wall and bars on the windows. It was wild.” Wild enough that Roddy got in the habit of carrying a .357 magnum. Jay York taught him how to load the gun so he wouldn’t shoot anyone by accident.

  “It’s a revolver so there’s room for six cartridges,” explained Roddy. “It’s a pin hammer, and if you drop it, the pin hits the cartridge and there’s a good chance of it going off. So I always left the first chamber empty. The next chamber was a .357 blank. The rest of them were the real deal. If you had people coming at you, you could let a round off with no one getting hurt. One time I come home from the gym, and of all people the maids were looking at it and they fired it. Nobody was hurt. God bless Jay York.”

  Jay “The Alaskan” York—he of the honey on his hands—was a six-foot-five bearded mountain of a wrestler, about sixteen years older than Roddy. He and Roddy became fast friends. “He used to have a twelve-foot bullwhip around his neck. He took cigarettes out of my mouth with that bullwhip. Never once got my skin.”

  York found himself in the middle of some very unlikely trouble, thanks to a local serial killer. “On a telephone post, just down the street from the Flamingo, was one of the saddest posters I ever saw,” said Roddy. “A photo of a little gal, it was written in blood, or to look like blood. ‘Help me. Have you seen me?’ The Hillside Strangler had got her.”

  The Hillside Strangler was a nickname given by the police and press to whoever had abducted a string of girls and women who turned up raped, tortured and strangled to death in the hills above LA. The Strangler’s fourth victim, an actress named Jane King, had been killed just days before, on Thursday, November 10.

  Jay’s brother Ned York, an actor who’d appeared on Bonanza and a few other shows, hung around with Jay and Roddy from time to time. He and Jay showed up Sunday night at the Flamingo. “Ned came over and they had an ounce of this smokable stuff. It was called angel dust.” Ned had recently worked with Jane King. He talked about her a lot that evening and was in a bad state over her murder. Finally he went home, taking his remaining portion of the drugs with him. “Ned finally picks up the phone, calls the police and says, ‘I’m the Hillside Strangler.’”

  Wearing just an undershirt and boxers, he went into his backyard. For reasons having almost everything to do with angel dust, he got to playing with a ball. The ball went over the fence and when he tried to retrieve it, the neighbour’s dog tore into his left hand. “He had that hand bandaged up and when the police came he was just sitting on the curb. The police started questioning him, and he knew things about this girl who had just been snatched.” No doubt York would have had trouble articulating why exactly he knew so much about Jane King. The fresh blood on his hands played into the police’s urgent need to make an arrest. That same night two young girls had been killed by what appeared to be the Strangler. The police were desperate to bring in a suspect. Ned York, a big mess of a man, high as a kite and covered in blood, had just fallen into their laps. They arrested him.

  Then his brother showed up at the police station.

  Roddy woke up late the next afternoon. “I saw it on TV: Jay York going in with a buck knife on his hip to go bail out his innocent brother. When Ned finally started to come down he goes, ‘What am I doing here?’ It had made the AP. The police were positive. But it wasn’t the Hillside Strangler. It was Ned York. I wasn’t sure what they gave him a ticket for, trespassing? I’m not sure.”

  Life in LA was proving a little more colourful than in Roddy’s previous stops. Sometimes that meant he kept out of trouble, sometimes it didn’t. But he was also meeting varieties of people he’d never met before. One of those people surprised him more than most, and taught him another lesson about how fragile his limited fame really was.

  —

  Roddy was back in his little dressing space at the far end of the hall in the basement of the Olympic Auditorium, which he usually shared with guys like Crusher Verdu and Red Shoes Dugan. He’d been gone only a few months, but he couldn’t just walk back into the O after dropping all those loser-leaves-town matches against the Guerreros in August. So, come November, he appeared in a red-and-white mask and a white shirt with long red sleeves that read “CANADA” across the back over a red maple leaf as the Canadian (sometimes the Masked Canadian). In a promo for one of those masked matches, where he said little more than “si, maestro”—yes, teacher—the voice was distinctly his, even if the language clearly wasn’t. He flexed and strutted like a Mexican wrestler while an actual Mexican wrestler, Black Gordman, the Canadian’s erstwhile manager, ranted into Gene LeBell’s microphone in Spanish about what his champion would do to the likes of Hector Guerrero or Pat Patterson. In another promo Patterson can barely stop himself from calling out Roddy beneath the mask.

  “When you wear a mask, facial’s gone,” recalled Roddy. With his facial expressions hidden from the audience, he had to learn to use body language to pick up the slack. “You gotta learn a whole different way to get over and a whole different way to sell.” Roddy did learn, and became adept enough at it that he was made champion again, winning the NWA Americas (Los Angeles) title from Chavo Guerrero almost as soon as he returned to the ring.

  The ruse continued through February 1978. The Canadian lost the belt to Mando Guerrero (no lightweight in the T-shirt game himself, Mando appeared in a shirt declaring himself “Illegal”). Roddy quickly won it back again, then finally forfeited it to Hector before dropping another loser-leaves-town re-match decision to Hector in San Diego. Then it was back to Japan. Oddly, he appeared throughout March in Japan still masked as the Canadian. The reason is anyone’s guess, but this time he was wrestling with All Japan, the promotion run by the towering Giant Baba.

  On Roddy’s next return to LA, things were going okay, but he wasn’t satisfied. His days as a jobber were well behind him. He was a good heel, ratcheting up the crowd’s fury and drawing heat on himself to great effect. But he still feared those jobber days could return if he stopped trying so hard. He spent long hours at UCLA, studying reel-to-reel tape of old matches, anything to improve his technique and broaden his strategies. Fortunately, Roddy wasn’t the only one who had confidence in his own future popularity—or in his case, popularity’s entertaining opposite. “So Leo [Garibaldi] come up and looked at me. I got bagpipes, I’m playing my way down to the ring. He comes up to me and says, ‘Kid, I’m gonna give you a break.’ All right, he got my attention. He said, ‘You see that guy over there?’ I looked at him, and the guy I looked at was called Java Ruuk.”

  Java Ruuk was a New York City–born wrestler named Johnny Rodriguez. Also sometimes known as Johnny Rodz, in mock Arab headdress that looked like someone stole the curtains at the Days Inn, he’d screw up his eyes to seem unhinged in front of the camera. In the ring, the mania seemed less of a put on. Though well under six feet tall, he had a good twenty or thirty pounds still on Roddy. He was notoriously vicious, scratching and clawing and generally making life as miserable as possible for his opponents. He also didn’t say much. “He went OO-OO-OO-OO and he just beat the shit out of people,” said Roddy.

  Garibaldi said, “I want you to go into the ring with that guy. Don’t lay a hand on him.” Then he walked away. Roddy wasn’t pleased, but he was in no position to complain. “This is Wednesday, on TV. I’d had so many people jerk me around, it was just another day. So I went in there, played my little bagpipes down, got in there and this guy came and just whupped the dog out of me for as long as he wanted to.” Ruuk’s boots had curly toes, like those made infamous years later by the Iron Sheik. At one point he came off the ropes, caught his curly toe on the rope and stumbled, planting an accidental knee in Roddy’s ribs. “He pinned me and I left the ring. Well, he left the ring and I slithered out. Of cou
rse for me, it was just another shot.”

  Popular at the time was an ad campaign for Tareyton cigarettes. Billboards showed a cowboy with a black eye, magazines showed sisters with matching black eyes, and the ads all said, “I’d rather fight than switch.” Also popular at the time were T-shirts with custom messages in iron-on felt lettering. Garibaldi put the two together and found a way to put Roddy to work, capitalizing on his strongest asset. “A week later, it’s TV again, and I see the booker again, Leo Garibaldi. He gave me a T-shirt, and he said, ‘Put it on.’ The T-shirt said, ‘I’d Rather Switch than Fight.’ And he made me Java Ruuk’s manager. All of a sudden, I was a young, young bad guy and could say anything I want. And that changed the world.” Garibaldi was known as a very creative booker, sometimes wildly off the mark but sometimes bang on. He wanted to put Roddy over, and he finally figured out how to do it.

  When it came time for Roddy and Ruuk to cut one of their first promos together, Roddy did all the talking. He levelled threats against Chavo Guerrero. Still boyish-looking at age twenty-four, Roddy’s mic work was well-developed: the breathless rant, hands and head in constant motion, mimicking an Hispanic accent (which Texas-born Chavo barely possessed), and constant repetition of the opponent’s full name—“No disqualification for the Americas title, Chavo Guerrero. I just was talking to the man, Chavo Guerrero, the man is complaining, the man is crying, Chavo Guerrero…”—and reminding Guerrero (or the fans, more accurately) that the only time Guerrero and Ruuk fought previously, Guerrero had his hand raised (Roddy won’t say “won”) when Ruuk was disqualified, but he was nonetheless soundly beaten by Ruuk.