Tellingly, aside from a few wordless hoots, Ruuk stayed silent. Not only was there no space to get a word in, he couldn’t possibly have made the promo more entertaining than Roddy was already doing. He was belittling his wrestler’s opponent and flattering Ruuk’s strength and brutality. By contrast, Guerrero, after he chased Ruuk and Roddy out of the shot and began his own promo for the upcoming title match, seemed to be chasing to keep up with the pace of language that had just been gushing from his antagonist’s mouth. It wasn’t any shortcoming of Guerrero’s that was exposed. He was simply up against a man who was fast becoming one of the best talkers their business had ever seen. Nobody knew that yet—but Garibaldi had a hunch, and he ran with it.
—
With the go-ahead from the booker, Rod began to assert himself as an antagonist in the ring. One night when he and Java Ruuk stormed onto the mat for a tag team match, Roddy decided he’d slow things down a little. He was the manager, after all. He took control.
As Ruuk was pacing the ring—“OO-OO-OO-OO”—Roddy asked announcer Jimmy Lennon to request that the audience stand for the Scottish national anthem. He blew up his bagpipes and waited for the crowd to be quiet. Lennon made the request and after several minutes the raucous crowd calmed down. Roddy started to play “Isle of Skye” while Lennon held the ring microphone next to the bagpipes. To everyone’s surprise, the music was lovely, and the crowd perhaps suddenly appreciated Roddy a little more. The cooling of hostilities was brief.
Even the most tone deaf of wrestling fans must have noticed some notes being held for an unpleasantly long time, turning a fine composition into a racket. The crowd lost it. Cigarette butts and drink cups rained down. Then Roddy corrected the song and people grew quiet again. Then he screwed it up again and they got angry again. He teased the crowd back and forth until they could barely stay in their seats. When wrestlers talked about “heat,” this was it. Few wrestlers could turn up the heat like Roddy was learning to do. The Roddy Piper school of ring psychology was open for class.
Roddy’s presence in the spotlight became a constant. Fight the first match, referee another, manage someone in a third, then wrestle the final: Was this success? Maybe, but some nights it sure didn’t feel like wrestling. Mike LeBell handed him a plastic gold watch and sent him into the ring to act like he was hypnotizing wrestler Keith Franke. “I’m going, ‘You are getting sleepy,’”—he laughed—“‘you will wrestle for free.’”
The gag was embarrassing. The company backstage that day made it worse. “Who’s behind camera watching? Harley Race, the world champion. Andre the Giant.”
The next week at the Olympic someone from the office chased Roddy down in the halls. “Hey, Piper, LeBell wants you.”
“I didn’t do nothing!”
“Get up now.”
Roddy found a line of fans in the hall outside the balcony. “There’s about twenty people, Hispanic people that have problems, and they want to be hypnotized. They want help. There’s a table that’s teeter-tottering, and one of those red glass candles with the fishnet stocking around it, lit. I say, ‘What?!’”
Word got around and fans—sometimes hundreds—began lining up at the Olympic to get Roddy to hypnotize their troubles away. It ended when a middle-aged man began weeping in the candlelight because his wife had cancer and his kids were having troubles. Realizing the gimmick had gone far enough, Roddy stopped the charade then and there. Fans were pleading in all sincerity for his help. Kayfabe extended deep into the lives of wrestlers, but it had just over-extended its reach. LeBell wasn’t happy with Roddy, but he had other ideas. “He said, ‘What if we got you to swing into the ring from the balcony? We’ll get Batista,’—who was the janitor—‘to rig it up.’”
Roddy could see that rope ending up around his neck. There was another, more immediate problem with the idea. Anybody flying laterally as fast as a rope secured in the rafters would carry him would have to let go long before he was over the ring in order to land in it. If he didn’t, he’d fly over the ropes and miss the ring. As for letting go before he hit the ring…anyway you look at it this was a promoter letting his imagination get the better of his judgement. It seems entertaining in this instance, because it didn’t happen. “I think what killed it was this,” said Roddy, “What if he goes out the other side and hurts somebody and we get sued?”
Refusing LeBell was a brave move, given that Roddy’s career was finally starting to gain serious traction, and that LeBell and Garibaldi controlled the stage where it was happening. Roddy was taking the lumps and whipping up the outrage of the fans, but those two allowed him out there every night to do it. There was a balance to be struck between promoters and wrestlers, and if the promoter held up his end Roddy swore he’d hold up his. With LeBell and Garibaldi, that was good enough.
The hypnotizing gag also signalled Roddy’s growing distaste for the wresting term “marks.” He thought it belittled fans who bought wholeheartedly into the fictions of the business. A fan who bought a ticket to see him wrestle had placed a level of trust in him, and he had learned not to betray that trust. Besides, you could piss off the most domineering promoter, but if the fans are buying tickets to see you, no promoter could afford to get rid of you. But you had to find a way to sell those tickets.
Roddy had yet another match coming up against Chavo Guerrero in Los Angeles. “We wrestled so many times,” Chavo said. “What are you going to say that’s going to bring the people to buy a ticket to see you guys again?”
Roddy was mulling over that question. Audience interest sold tickets. Tickets sales put a wrestler at the top. With a fresh handle on getting into the audience’s heads, Roddy moved to see how far he could push the boundaries and do his part to fill seats. “They allowed me to get creative,” he said.
During commercial break while filming Wednesday’s television, the big backstage doors opened and Roddy appeared with a donkey. “What the fuck’s going on?” Chavo said to himself.
Roddy knew the largely Hispanic crowds at the auditorium would always cheer for Chavo. He and Chavo had a heel/babyface dynamic they couldn’t reverse if they tried. He’d have to up the ante if he wanted to get the audience’s attention. Enter the donkey.
“Tijuana zebras” are a tradition that began in the 1930s when Mexican burro cart owners attracted tourists to take pictures with their animals. Pale-haired donkeys didn’t show up well in black-and-white photography, so the owners painted stripes on the animals. It struck Roddy as a good place to start his next bit of ring psychology. “So Roddy comes out and he holds the donkey and he puts a little hat on him,” Chavo said. “And he says to the donkey, ‘Now, Mrs. Guerrero, let me tell you about your kids.’”
Roddy remembered the promo with fondness and a touch of sheepishness. “I did this interview on a donkey painted like a zebra. I had a sombrero on and a stick with a carrot on it.” He started complaining about lazy, uneducated Mexicans and threw language around that would be considered scandalous today.
It wasn’t the use of stereotypes that got under Chavo’s skin, it was the invoking of his mother. To top it off, Roddy was wearing a T-shirt that read, “Conquistador of the Guerreros.”
“And I’m hot, brother, I am fuming,” remembered Chavo. “And I’m right across the hall and I’m ready to jump this guy, man. You know, he’s insulting my mom!” All the wrestlers tolerated a lot of ribbing in promos, and sometimes it hit pretty low, but this was a blow Chavo had not seen coming. “Fuck it! He’s calling that donkey Mrs. Guerrero! So, man, they got me hot, and of course he was hilarious in his promos. Then it was my turn. I defended my mother and I was actually really, really hot. I rushed him right after the promo. He said, ‘No! Amigo, amigo!’ I said, ‘Nah, just joking, brother. But that was good, that was good.’ We’d come up with some crazy shit. That was all Roddy, man. He had a knack. He was just entertaining.”
If Roddy’s heel act seems like a politically incorrect horror show in retrospect, at the time he just seemed like a jerk�
��a jerk Hispanic wrestling fans paid good money to hate. Of course, this was a time when kids watched Speedy Gonzales rescue his drunken Mexican compatriots as their Saturday-morning cartoon fare. (In the ring against Chavo Roddy wore another T-shirt reading “White Is Right” across the back.) “The president of the network, he was going to shut us down,” said Roddy. Mike LeBell was afraid Roddy with his donkey interview might have just gotten them thrown off Hispanic television, a contract that saw Wednesday’s Olympic wrestling broadcast across the United States and Mexico, wherever there were enough Hispanic viewers. “So during the first interview [after the donkey] I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize, I’m very sorry. I’m going to learn how to play the Mexican national anthem on the gaita,’ the bagpipes in Spanish.”
Wednesday’s television matches often served to set up Friday’s matches at the auditorium. They sold out that Friday, with Roddy’s promise to play the anthem. He entered the ring and asked Jimmy Lennon to have the people rise for the Mexican national anthem. People rose and stood hand over heart. Lennon brought the microphone down to the chanter. “I blew up my bagpipes and I started to play—’La Cucaracha.’ Here come the chairs that were bolted down!” Riots weren’t expected every night, but they happened often enough that they were no surprise when they occurred. “Amigo, you’re on your own!” said Chavo from across the ring. “The night never got started. Holy cow, one of the best riots,” Roddy recalled. “It was a hell of a house,” he added, as ever with his mind on business. “It got over.”
Chavo marvels that Roddy had pulled this off with nobody knowing he was going to do it. “Nobody knew about this,” he said. “He starts playing ‘La Cucaracha.’ I’m going, ‘What!? If I’m hot and I know him, can you imagine the people at home?’ Mexicans, they don’t wear the flag on their ass. The flag is sacred. Much less saying it’s the national anthem and playing ‘La Cucaracha’! Oh, my brother, that was serious heat.” Chavo laughed. “These were things that only Piper could come up with. Nobody told him to do that, he just did it. That was Piper.”
The stunt worked. Nearly too well. Roddy was trapped in the ring as the crowd erupted, and he had to kick charging fans off the apron as they lowered their heads to climb through the ropes. Wrestlers called the practice “punting.” Despite the police’s attempts to keep rioting fans at bay, by the end of the night, he’d been stabbed, punched, scratched. “And that’s when Vince McMahon Sr. got wind of this kid in LA,” Chavo recalled.
Far away in New York, McMahon took his time. Southern California had been a moribund territory before the Piper-Guerrero feud. But he kept listening to the noise building on the West Coast.
—
Roddy had stirred up a hornet’s nest to put himself over with the LA crowds. Getting stung was inevitable.
“One of the fan favourites was, they’d get lit cigarettes and they’d flick them on your back. ‘Cause you’re sweating, they’d stick. But if you dare acknowledge it you’d get twenty of them. So you just let them burn off.”
Cigarette burns were a lesser concern. Another technique for getting at the heel they loved to hate sprung from the most innocuous of sources. “They used to put a knife in the popcorn. Coming down the aisle, it’s a tough fuckin’ crowd. As you’d come by they’d catch you.”
The knives would disappear into the popcorn boxes as quickly as they emerged. If Roddy was quick enough to identify the culprit, the fan who’d slashed him would slip in between others and disappear. Leo Garibaldi approached Mike LeBell about moving the seats away from where the wrestlers entered the floor. “Mike says, ‘Why?’ ‘Cause that’s where they’re stabbing Roddy. And Mike says, ‘That’s why they buy those seats.’”
Soldiers, cops, politicians: people in high-risk jobs often go through life wondering if somewhere there is a bullet waiting with their name on it. One night in Los Angeles, Roddy stopped wondering.
Coming down the aisle at the Olympic, he was getting booed and the drink cups were flying. Both were signs of an engaged audience, and reason enough to give the night his best effort. Strangely, he noticed Jimmy Lennon stepping down from the ring. Roddy didn’t pay the announcer much mind. He was more concerned with the crowd and getting himself into the ring without being cut or struck by flying objects.
From his vantage point in the ring, Lennon had noticed a man forcing himself to the front of the crowd, in anticipation of Roddy’s appearance. Lennon, in his sixties, placed himself between the man and the oblivious wrestler. The man was carrying a .45 handgun. He began yelling, “Move! Move!” at Lennon, who started looking around like he was confused. “Jimmy Lennon saw what was going on and he pretended he didn’t know and gave the cops just enough time. They got a high sign and they got undercover cops and they got the guy.”
Roddy was still unaware that someone had been trying to shoot him. Lennon, a staunch believer that the show must go on, climbed back through the ropes and announced the match.
In the dressing room after, a cop approached Roddy and asked him to follow him to the office. Roddy still didn’t know anything out of the ordinary had taken place. “I go up to the office and there was a .45 and a bullet. The guy had carved my name in it: P. I. P. E. R.”
—
Stoking antagonism is a dangerous way to make a living. Wrestlers had a lot of steam to blow off, and they tended to play hard.
When Mando Guerrero was getting married, some of his wrestling buddies decided to throw him a bachelor party. Mike LeBell footed the bill and invited all the wrestlers and police who regularly worked the arena. The Olympic Auditorium ring was a second home to all of them. With tequila flowing, Mando’s brothers coaxed him onto the ring apron. With promises of a bachelor’s proper send-off into the fidelities of marriage, they used one officer’s handcuffs to tie Mando to the second rope and sat him down to await his parting gift from bachelorhood. “It was about one o’clock in the morning,” remembered Roddy. “Here I come down, with just my kilt on. I come up to Mando. They’d put a bag over his head.” Mando felt the fabric of the kilt and realized it wasn’t the dancer they hired standing over him, it was Roddy. “Sasquatch couldn’t have beat him. Everything was moving, everything was punching.” Roddy got as close as his legs before a dancer hired for the evening took over the show.
Roddy had endeared himself to Southern California’s first family of wrestling—occasionally despite himself. He was remarkably professional in the ring, and the more he and Chavo fought, the more in sync they became. But it was in one of his first ring encounters with the Guerrero clan that he’d set himself up in the audiences’ minds as the family’s number-one enemy. Looking back after a few years in LA, it surprised him that the family didn’t feel the same way as the fans.
There was a clock at the Olympic that counted down backwards. Televised matches were on a tight schedule, so the wrestlers would watch it closely, knowing exactly how long each match was supposed to last. On this night, as Roddy and Chavo were getting close to their finish, Roddy lined up Chavo against the corner post. He rushed Chavo, Chavo moved and Roddy slammed into the post. On the floor behind the post was Gory Guerrero, Chavo’s father, who was appearing that night as his son’s manager. Looking to wrap up the match with a bang, Roddy reached down past the post and slapped Gory across the head. In a slight miscue, the slap broke the older man’s eardrum. “That brings my dad up and the referee goes to put my dad down and Roddy knocks me out and one, two, three,” said Chavo. The match finished on time, and by slapping the esteemed Mexican-American wrestler in front of the Olympic’s Hispanic audience, Roddy lit a fire beneath the feud he and Chavo had been brewing. “I felt horrible,” said Roddy, about the injury. “You didn’t fool with Mr. Guerrero. But, you know, it worked.”
“He was so sorry,” says Chavo. “He apologized and apologized. My dad said, Don’t worry about it. I love it. That’s the only way to do it.” Even the senior Guerrero wasn’t above a good rib, and the young Canadian was easy to shame. “I can’t hear but tha
t’s all right,” Gory said. “You did me a favour—I don’t have to hear my grandchildren for the rest of my life.”
Chavo kept it going. “Roddy, he was all red. Later on I’m ribbing him: ‘You did that to my dad on purpose, you son of a bitch.’ He still would fall for it.”
Gory Guerrero became a mentor to his sons’ friend and archenemy. “In wrestling, timing is of the essence. Roddy would know when to throw a punch,” Chavo said. “He would know when to pull the hair. We would correct him. My dad loved Roddy, too. My dad would tell him, ‘Come here, why did you pull the hair in front of the referee?’—yessir, no sir. ‘Let me tell you why. If you do it in front of the referee, he’s watching you. If you do it with the referee not watching you, then you get the heat.’ I was learning also myself. Roddy would always listen to him.”
The slap set up a future six-man tag-team match designed to let the Guerrero clan settle the score. “All of a sudden there’s a whole bunch of people come to see me get my butt kicked,” recalled Roddy. “It was a six-man tag. There’s Hector, Chavo and Mando in one corner. There’s me, Crusher Verdu and I think it was The Hangman, in the other corner.” LeBell billed the card as Guerrero Night, and unbeknownst to the wrestlers, he’d flown the whole Guerrero family in from El Paso to Los Angeles, including their mother, father, two sisters and their little brother, Eddie. “Not only do I have to wrestle one Guerrero,” Roddy said to Chavo. “Now there’s two, now there’s three, now there’s four, now there’s a little one looking in ringside with mean eyes. There’s no hope for me!”
“You’re doomed, baby, you’re doomed!” Chavo laughed.
Mrs. Guerrero entered the ring with colourful handmade vests and presented them to her sons. In case her sons needed to be reminded, the family’s name was at stake. “They put them on, they’re sobbing, there’s tears coming,” said Roddy. “I’m looking like, boys, we’re gonna die. I spent fifteen minutes in the air. I was going to give them my frequent flier number.” Roddy had come to love Mrs. Guerrero; she’d been kind to him. Her appearance, rallying her sons against him, even as “a work,” had made it very clear where his night was going.
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