Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  The ensuing match concluded with a debacle of proportions as grand as its eight-man roster. Wiskoski accidentally elbowed his pinned teammate Brooks in the head, ending any chance of victory for the unsteady alliance of bad guys. Roddy, usually tag-team partner to Brooks, immediately sensed conspiracy and accused Rose and Wiskoski of sabotage. They brawled, and Roddy eventually chased them out of the ring and away from the prostrate Brooks.

  The feud was on, and it drove fans into a frenzy for as long as Roddy stayed in Portland. Fans were treated to his ever-expanding arsenal of one-liners, one of which he’d utter infamously on national television several years later: “You don’t throw rocks at a guy who’s got a machine gun!”

  —

  Rose’s confirmation as top heel in Portland hardly made Roddy a babyface by default. Another feud, and a very peculiar one, kept a dangerous edge in his relationship with the audience. Roddy found himself nose-to-nose with former NWA women’s tag-team champion Vicki Williams (who’d wrestled on a card in Brandon with Roddy in 1974). Two years younger than Roddy and nearly a foot shorter, she confronted him during an in-ring interview wearing what looked like a modest one-piece bathing suit with ferns on it. Costumes anywhere in wrestling in 1979 were modest affairs, but Williams’ uninspired garb looked like an office assistant had scooped it from a JC Penny bargain bin ten minutes before airtime. Her attempts to get a word in edgewise with Roddy were brief. “You come down here and burn your bra, thinking you’re getting in there with men and wrestling with men?!” he shouted.

  She shoved him and shouted back over the buzzing crowd, “I’m a woman, and a little boy is what you are!”

  After a brief pause to let her insult sink in, Roddy lost it, infuriated by her choice of words. “Little boy?!” He picked her up by the hair and howled, “Listen to me, woman, I’ll tell you what I am. Little boy? This is why men wrestle and women don’t!” With that, he steered her across the ring and tossed her into the corner.

  It’s easy to watch the old clip and understand why, years later, teachers who’d watched this younger Roddy Piper on Portland television presumed he was an abusive husband and father. The rage he channels as he holds Williams with her feet off the ground (if you look closely, she’s actually holding herself up by gripping his arms) feels unchecked, too fluidly pouring out of him to be a put-on. His voice is different than usual—raspier and crueller than the usual squeaks and high-pitched spikes in tone that were part of his charm when he got worked up for the camera. For a few seconds, he sounded like he’s ripping his vocal cords with every word.

  The bra-burning reference cleverly made the ruse all the more believable. Middle America, wrestling’s audience, felt as superior to feminism’s challenge to the status quo as they did to LA’s Mexicans—the kind of superiority that isn’t as certain of itself as it likes to think. America had turmoil in its gut, and Roddy instinctively tapped into it and played it out in a way that sold tickets. Many tickets.

  On her short-lived talk show only a few years later, the comedienne Joan Rivers would call Roddy “camp.” She was right. From his outsized verbal assaults on the interview cameras, to his inexplicable Scottish trappings without any trace of an accent to match, to the cardboard cut-out of a set that was Piper’s Pit, and even in the brawling style in which he wrestled, like the most memorable of his WWF peers—Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, the Iron Sheik—Roddy’s persona was total camp. But that was a few years away. There’s no trace of camp in the promo with Vicki Williams.

  Defying anyone who tried to tell him what he could make of himself had been the ongoing struggle of his entire life to date—I’ll tell you what I am! And he was still young enough to remember the little boy Williams invoked, gripped in the hands of the raging alpha male of his youth. As much as Roddy was attacking his father’s estimation of him—what he was and what he was worth—the beatings and the bitter disappointment lived on inside him. Roddy wasn’t channelling his rage in that promo, he was channelling his nightmares.

  When Roddy finally showed Williams “why men wrestle and women don’t,” he tossed her as gently into the corner of the ring as he could without looking fake. Whatever old aches he drew on to inflict and imitate pain, Roddy was in charge of Roddy, and he wouldn’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it—his opponents excepted, of course.

  That would serve him well in a few years, when that turn toward camp would begin in New York after he’d dealt with another woman in the ring—with many more people watching.

  In the meantime, there would be other trips to New York, and they’d start with one that was much less successful.

  —

  “I was selling out the Cow Palace,” began Roddy. It was a curious place to begin the story of his New York debut, given that he was working in Portland at the time. But Roy Shire, the San Francisco promoter, had long benefitted from Roddy living within a day’s drive of the Bay Area. First, he’d stolen a few days from Roddy when he was in LA, then he brought him down for quick tours from Oregon. After a big weekend, Shire and other promoters around the country got on the phones to boast about gate receipts and guys who’d drawn the crowds. Roddy’s name had been coming up for a while. Mike LeBell in LA had good things to say, too, and Roddy was still making the occasional run from Oregon to Southern California. In New York, Vince McMahon Sr. had been listening, and now he wanted to see the supposed Scotsman for himself.

  “The very first time I was invited to Madison Square Garden,” remembered Roddy, “I was still in Portland and living with Killer Brooks from Waxahachie, Texas; hair everyplace except the top of his head, little cigar. We made a great tag team. I bought a better jacket. I wanted to look better for New York.”

  Roddy had Brooks give him a ride to the Portland airport. But Roddy froze when they got to the drop-off. “I said, ‘Leave.’ He says, ‘What?’ I went home. I lied to them. I told them that there happened to be some kind of a storm some place, and I lied to them. Because I was scared. I was scared that MSG was always known as a big man’s territory…I’m just this little guy. I knew in my heart…I could feel it that I just wasn’t good enough, I just wasn’t there yet.”

  The excuse worked too well. McMahon invited Roddy to try his luck with the weather again. Three weeks later he was on a plane to New York City. “I come to MSG in a limousine…Captain Lou Albano comes out.” Albano greeted him with a bear hug and a characteristic bit of noise and slapping and pinching of his rosy cheeks. Roddy was overwhelmed by the reception.

  The Spanish-language broadcasts of lucha libre wrestling from the Olympic Auditorium reached New York, where they found a large Puerto Rican audience in particular. To Roddy’s surprise, the New York wrestlers knew very well who had just landed on their turf—and why he’d been invited. “Freddie Blassie come with a cane, hitting me on my shins, ‘Ah, ya pencil-neck geek, we don’t want you here, we been watching ya, dumb kid’…that’s wrestler love.”

  Roddy was scheduled for the third match that night. In the dressing room he was tuning up his bagpipes. Satisfied they were good to go, he set them down and went into the hall for a few hundred pre-match push-ups, trying to make himself look as big as possible before getting in the ring. He’d been working out hard in preparation to fight in New York, where men like Andre the Giant and Superstar Billy Graham were pushing the business to an unprecedented level of interest. “I said to the announcer, ‘Tell them to stand for the Scottish national anthem.’” When the announcer responded with bewilderment, Roddy insisted. He might have been intimidated by the lights and size of everything—and everyone—in New York, but he wasn’t going to back down. The announcer did as he was asked. “I got this great plan, I’m gonna play them like Jack Benny used to play the violin.” This was the same routine he’d used in LA when tag-teaming with Java Ruuk. He’d begin with something nice, then just as the crowd started to buy into his shtick, he’d start stretching out the worst notes, until he’d annoyed the crowd into an angry fit.

  The crowd took a few m
inutes to settle, and when it did Roddy blew up his pipes and began to play. Nothing came out. He tried again. Same result. After a very uncomfortable few moments of this, he tossed the pipes aside and raced at his opponent, a jobber named Juan Rivera who went by the name Steve King. The only angry person in the arena was Roddy. It didn’t matter that he won the match, he’d blown the opportunity—if not his pipes. “I fell on my face.”

  The message was delivered from Vince McMahon Sr. to Roddy, as he sat humiliated in the dressing room, avoiding the other wrestlers. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

  On the plane back to Portland, he examined his bagpipes. An enormous wad of toilet paper was stuffed into the chanter, courtesy, he’d later discover, of Freddie Blassie.

  He’d let his guard down when he was met with the placating smiles and teasing welcomes of the New York wrestlers. Maybe he’d believed a little too much of his own press. Maybe he’d taken the camaraderie of the wrestlers on the West Coast for granted. Either way, Blassie’s rib about them not wanting him there was no joke. The old guard felt threatened by all the new talent forcing its way into New York, and they weren’t about to roll over and let some kid in a skirt take their jobs.

  Not yet.

  —

  Very few restaurants in Portland served prime rib 24/7. Most Saturday nights after the Portland Sports Arena emptied Roddy and a few other wrestlers would drive down Sunset Highway to Jo-Jo’s, where they could order a substantial plate of beef at any hour. The late-night meals were no problem for the restaurant. The wrestlers were. The table was always loud, sometimes with a few young women hanging on for a free meal, and it was obvious that they had all been drinking, or getting into something a little harder in order to keep them going late into the night. The older waitresses didn’t want anything to do with them, so wrestler duty fell to the youngest woman on staff, a nineteen year old named Kitty.

  Kitty was a country girl with deep roots in the Portland area. She regularly worked the graveyard shift at Jo-Jo’s. Every morning after work, she drove to high ground so she could watch the sun rise over the hills to the east. She found the best view on Skyline Blvd, and it just happened to be in a graveyard. To this day she laughs at the thought of this quirky routine, spending dawns in a graveyard at the time when she met her future husband, a man named Toombs.

  Kitty took one look at the new regulars and figured they were some sort of team. They were big, muscular and obviously popular. The leaner young blond one wore a huge ring in the shape of a man’s torso, its arms holding a flaming torch. Looking at it, she wondered if he was a boxer. Little by little, she got to know them, and the blond one got to wishing he knew her better. Kitty recalled, “After about a month, Roddy took me aside and he said, ‘Hey, I can’t help but notice you’re really sweet, and I was wondering if maybe you’d want to go out with me.’” Female wait staff tended to get propositioned from time to time, and Kitty laughed off Roddy’s request for a date. She could tell he was a little older than she was and didn’t take him very seriously. Besides, given his and his friends’ raucous behaviour, she needed more than a pleasant request as an incentive for her to go out with this guy.

  Roddy was quite serious, though. As she walked away from the table one night, he leaned over to Killer Brooks and said, “That’s the kind of gal a guy could marry.”

  After a few more weeks of dismissing Roddy’s interest, Kitty found herself face to face not with Roddy, but Brooks. “Killer Brooks, who always came into the restaurant with these tire chains around his neck, was just a gnarly looking guy,” she said. Brooks was a little shorter than Roddy, but heavier and wore his straggly black hair long so it flowed into his wild black beard. Wrestling fans knew that the hair on the rest of him pretty much followed suit. “He pulls me aside and he says, ‘Hey, come on, you got to go out with him. He’s my tag-team partner and I’m getting killed out there because all he’s thinking about is you. Would you please go out with him?’”

  “Fine,” Kitty relented. “I’ll take his number and I’ll call him.”

  A few days later, she phoned and they agreed to get together.

  Roddy didn’t know how to plan a date. All he ever did was drive, fight and party along the way. Come Sundays, exhausted by the cycle of wrestling, recording promos, driving, drinking hard and popping pills to pry himself out of bed for the next day, he really did need a rest. Meeting anybody other than the guys in the ring and the odd hanger-on was all but impossible. But Roddy always pushed himself when it counted. He kept the planning simple, and as usually happened when he went with his instincts, he got it right.

  He met up with Kitty behind an elementary school on a Sunday evening, where they sat on the swing set and talked the night away. They hit it off immediately. Roddy was no country boy, but he knew a few things about growing up with small-town values. Sure, he was packing a 9mm handgun under his jacket and had smoked a joint on the way there to settle his nerves, but Kitty didn’t know that and didn’t see trouble in the big grinning guy swinging beside her. The trappings of a wrestler’s lifestyle didn’t taint her view of Roddy then—and they never really would.

  They dated off and on for a few months, both too busy to make a regular thing of their relationship. They grabbed time when and where they could. And when Kitty mentioned to her family who she was spending that time with, Roddy’s notoriety finally caught up with their budding romance. Her grandfather was one of the many thousands of Pacific Northwesterners who had been riding the roller coaster that was the Piper-Rose feud, and he thought he knew a few things about the big-mouthed heel in the kilt. At her mention of dating Roddy, he was beside himself. “Roddy Piper!” he cried. “No, you can’t go out with him. He’s a much older man and he’s very bad. He’s evil. He’s a wrestler!”

  He’d been watching Roddy wrestle on television for so long that he figured he must be at least ten or fifteen years older than Kitty. And all those Saturday nights of Roddy’s playing the heel left little doubt about the deficiencies in his character. Fortunately, her parents were a little more open-minded, figuring she was smart enough to know if a guy was bad news. Besides, she wasn’t a girl who could be told who she could see and who she couldn’t.

  One morning Kitty walked out of Jo-Jo’s and found a photograph of Roddy on her car windshield. Scribbled across his promotional shot were the words, I love you. “That’s the first time he had said that to me,” says Kitty. “But that was also when he left for Hawaii.”

  —

  Buddy Rose had taken a shine to his new rival. In 1975 in Texas, Rose had met another wrestler with whom he’d become fast friends, a French Canadian named Rick Martel. Martel was a rare specimen in those days, with the chiselled physique of a bodybuilder in the years when wrestlers’ appeal came from how dangerous they looked, not how well-suited they were to the cover of a magazine. Martel’s square jaw and radiant smile didn’t hurt his popularity. He wrestled in New Zealand but took the summer of 1979 to work in Honolulu, where he did double duty as the booker for promoters Steve Rickard and Peter Maivia (grandfather of future WWE superstar and actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). Martel brought Rose to Hawaii, and Rose brought word of a guy Martel should consider bringing to Hawaii too.

  “He told me about this young guy, Roddy Piper,” Martel said. “‘You should bring him in, he’d be great.’ We were all young guys, I was twenty-three. I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I brought him in.”

  Roddy arrived and got straight to work. “Man, the first night I saw Roddy in the ring, the interviews and all that, I said, ‘Ah man, that guy’s great.’ The way I saw the talent, I recognized how great he was.

  “Then we got to spend a little time together and man, we clicked right away. It was an instant bond that was created between him and I. That was fun. Professionally and outside, we really got along great.”

  Roddy spent time with another new friend in Hawaii. He called Kitty one day, out of the blue, and asked her to join him in Honolulu. A visit to Hawaii meant ta
king a month off from Jo-Jo’s, but Roddy was going to fly her out and put her up, so she said yes.

  Meanwhile, Roddy and Rick Martel picked up a few new wrestling tricks, one from a wrestler Roddy had gotten to know during his time in the Maritimes, the Cormier brother known as The Beast. “We used to do the interviews every Wednesday morning in the studio,” Martel said. They were doing the interviews for an upcoming event at the Blaisdell Center arena in Honolulu. Martel was promoting his cage match against The Beast. “We had the heels on one side, the babyfaces on the other side. I was beside Roddy. We saw this guy, The Beast, come in with a beer bottle in his hand.” Puzzled, they figured Cormier was going to chug the beer to make a point about how little he was worried about wrestling Rick. “We saw him do the interviews, and then BOOM!” Cormier drove the full bottle of beer against his forehead, where it exploded into a shower of suds and shattered glass. “We were both like, ‘Wow.’ The blood’s going, the brew, we’re just, ‘Man, that’s great!’”

  Only a madman would shatter a bottle over his own head. Except they both knew The Beast was quite sane. When Martel had started his pro career in the Maritimes as a seventeen year old, two summers before Roddy, The Beast had shown him the ropes just as he’d do for Roddy. “These guys were really strict: respectful, you had to be respectful,” said Martel of the Cormier family. “They showed us the right way to do things. How to behave and all that.” If the Beast could bottle himself, it couldn’t be as bad as it looked. They’d file that trick away for another day. In the meantime, they were enjoying themselves, but Roddy was encountering a crowd reaction familiar from California.

  “I went as the Great Haole,” said Roddy. Haole was a Hawaiian term for white people. Being a haole wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless you boasted about it. Enter the heel, Roddy Piper. “One of the things that they used to do in Hawaii, those Samoans, I’d be fighting for my life, literally, with Peter Mai via, Chief Peter Maivia, great man. They’d break the antennas off of cars, and then when you’d come down the aisle they’d bring them out and whip you with them.” Car antennas telescoped into a very small piece of metal and were easy to hide. “Really?!” he said, remembering the stinging slashes across the arms. “How much money am I getting for this?”