Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  Kitty spent much of July and August enjoying Hawaii with him before heading home, but quit the graveyard shift at Jo-Jo’s shortly after she returned. She found a new job, one suited to her interest in animals, working with show horses at Maxon’s Stables several hours east near Walla Walla, Washington. As much as she loved Roddy, they were a long way from settling down and making something serious of their relationship.

  By October, Roddy was back in Portland. But that brief summer in Hawaii led to a number of connections. Martel had left Hawaii as well and returned to New Zealand. He wasn’t there for long before Luke Williams of the Sheepherders called him and asked if he’d like to come to Portland.

  The Sheepherders were a tag team from New Zealand who’d wrestled with Roddy in Hawaii. “Saved us from that island of Oahu,” remembered Williams with a laugh. After returning to Oregon, Roddy had called them to say they needed another tag team in the territory. They were interested so he’d hooked them up with Don Owen. Now they were passing the favour on to Martel.

  Despite the invitation to join Williams and Miller in the Pacific Northwest, Martel wasn’t very keen on the idea. Portland seemed isolated and wasn’t a big promotion. “Then he told me Roddy was there,” said Martel. “I said, ‘Ah man, here I come!’”

  —

  Roddy watched with his hands in cuffs. A few feet away, Rick Martel was taken down, kicked, punched and stomped. Roddy didn’t mind. He loved these crazy Kiwis. So did Martel.

  The Sheepherders had first come to America in 1965, brought into the NWA by Steve Rickard, who booked them in Hawaii and sent them to Don Owen in Portland at Roddy’s request.

  Shaggy haired, bearded and missing a few front teeth, Butch Miller and Luke Williams tromped around the ring with a certainty to their backwoods Kiwi shtick that fast made them crowd favourites wherever they wrestled, and over the course of three decades together, they wrestled pretty near everywhere. Loud, heavily accented and comically brutish, they were the perfect foil to the youthful charm and camera-friendliness of Piper and Martel. “They’re one of the greatest tag teams ever, in history,” said Roddy. And as men, he knew few he’d consider so solid.

  In Salem, Oregon, they’d handcuffed the vanquished Roddy to the corner post and were taking turns beating up Martel in the middle of the ring. The night was going well. Then someone, maybe a fan who’d taken the scene a little too much to heart, ran to the back office and told Elton Owen what was happening. “He comes back to the ring,” Williams said, “he fines us. And by now Butch is pissed off.”

  The Portland tag teams were coming through Salem every week, and the post-bell beating being delivered by the Sheepherders was intended to build up some heat with the audience that would carry the feud over to next week. Not seeming to get the fundamentals of his own business, Owen and his $5000 fine threw cold water on everything the wrestlers were getting warmed up. “Butch goes and grabs the belts and he tells me to grab him from behind. So I grab Elton from behind. Butch comes and whacks him over the head with the belts.” Elton goes down in a heap, his toupee skewed sideways and his glasses on the floor. The temperature ringside was back up to where the crowd wanted it, but at the expense of the promoter’s pride.

  After the matches, the wrestlers sat in the dressing room, too nervous to go into Elton’s office to collect their pay. Nobody wanted to be first. “In the end, Butch went in there and he said, ‘Elton, what a hell of a job you did. But next time Luke’ll tell you to duck and I’ll hit Luke with it and you’ll get out of the way and fine us then.’ And Elton said to Butch, ‘One hell of an idea.’ And he gave him extra money for a good attitude.”

  Elton Owen really didn’t seem to get that wrestlers were trying to rile up the crowds. One night in Salem, Roddy was marching around the ring, playing his bagpipes. The crowd was booing, throwing things, calling him names. He played louder. He played worse. Suddenly Elton appeared in the ring. “I can’t play them,” he shouts into the microphone, “you can’t play them. Give it up! Give the guy a break!” The crowd relented and a few people applauded. Roddy looked on in wonder. Elton Owen really didn’t understand.

  Not surprisingly, the houses in Salem and Eugene fell a little short of the constant sell-outs in Portland. The promoter had something to do with it. He was a drinker, which didn’t help. “He’s the only guy I know to shoot himself in the Niagara Falls,” laughed Williams. For reasons that Owen has long since taken to the grave, Elton called testicles Niagara Falls. “He’s coming out and he’s got the money,” explained Roddy, “and he’s drunk and he thinks he has to protect things.” Owen didn’t just have the night’s take to dole out to the wrestlers, he had a gun. Drunk, he wasn’t handling it very expertly. Juggling the bills and the handgun, he lost his grip and grabbed the thing he cared the most about. Bad decision. “And he shoots himself in the testicles. They brought him to the hospital and the doctor asked him, ‘Did you try to commit suicide?’ [and he says] ‘By shooting myself in the balls?!’”

  Yet another night found Roddy and Rick Martel in the ring with the Sheepherders. “We got some heat up,” said Williams. “Real heat. Fans are throwing drinks into the ring.”

  As long as there had been professional wrestling, people had thrown plastic drink cups at heels and lacklustre performers. If you couldn’t negotiate a puddle of Orange Crush on the mat, arguably you should be doing something else for a living. So it was all the more confounding for the four men in the ring when Owen’s wife climbed into the ring while the match was on, carrying a mop and pail. A wrestler couldn’t be faced with a more confusing circumstance in the middle of a match. The wrestlers steered themselves to one corner and put a hold on each other to slow things down while she finished mopping up the puddle of soda.

  In Roseberg, the wrestlers had to wash up after their matches with the leftover hot dog water from the concessions (there were no showers). The spartan facilities set a tone. The wrestlers would try to piss off Owen by lining up and clicking their heels like Nazi officers while he played a grand piano on the auditorium stage after the shows. The ribs, screw-ups and hijinks were relentless. “This is just about nine months of the Bushwackers, Roddy Piper, Rick Martel, Killer Brooks, Buddy Rose,” remembered Roddy. “Every night, something!”

  Roddy and Williams laughed at memories of the shortcomings of life with Elton Owen, but in the end Portland was the seat of a small circuit and its rough edges weren’t to every wrestler’s taste. Many great wrestlers passed through the territory in those years. Andre the Giant and Jesse Ventura joined Roddy and Martel in a six-man tag-team match, while Buddy Rose or another local joined the Sheepherders to fill out the opposition. Chavo Guerrero came up the coast for a week, thrilled to be reunited with his good friend from Los Angeles. Chavo’s run didn’t last long. As a wrestling territory, Portland was a far cry from California—but more importantly so was its money. “Why are you leaving?” Roddy asked Chavo, distraught to see his friend packing up after only a week. “Making a hundred dollars a night?” replied Guerrero. “That was okay when we started, but no.”

  Another wrestler from LA settled in Portland for a little longer. Adrian Adonis and Roddy weren’t Twenty-Twos any more, but they still knew how to have fun.

  Elton had just secured a new high school gym to use as a venue in one of his southern Oregon towns. “I don’t want anything damaged here,” he said, having called his wrestlers to order in the middle of the gymnasium floor. “I’ve just got the building.”

  As the promoter was speaking, Adonis got down on his hands and knees behind him. He started barking and biting Owen on the ankles. Owen shook his leg and kicked his heels back, but didn’t look down so as not to lose eye contact with the group. “Elton’s trying to be serious,” laughed Roddy. Adonis was gripping the hem of Owen’s pants in his teeth. “He literally thinks it’s a dog. ‘Get off me!’”

  Looking back, Williams and Roddy weren’t surprised that Elton Owen didn’t catch on to the fact his leg was being chewed on by a
250-pound man. “We had full houses. It was full except for Elton’s towns.” says Williams. “He didn’t even know who the champions were.”

  —

  Roddy and Martel were cooling their heels at the Bomber Motel over a few drinks.

  The Bomber was a wooden, one-storey roadside motel with a totem pole out front. Like the Alamo and the Flamingo before it, the Bomber had a reputation. But more famous than the motel was the gas station attached to it. The owner was a WWII veteran, and he’d bought a B-52 bomber after the war and had it mounted above his pumps. Word was he’d taxied it down the roads outside Portland to his property before having a crane lift it into position.

  “Hey,” Martel asked Roddy, “What do you think about that thing The Beast did, you know with the beer? Why don’t we try it, see if we can do it.”

  “Yeah, let’s go try it,” said Roddy.

  “So we went to the parking lot, you know, we’re both hanging on to the garbage can. Okay? You ready? One, two three, GO!” They drove beer bottles into their foreheads, just like they had seen The Beast do in Hawaii.

  With foam and blood running off their hair they froze for a second to take stock. Much to their surprise, they were all right—keeping in mind that for professional wrestlers in the 1970s, a little blood and dizziness were a small price to pay to pull off a spectacle as rare as this. Of course, audiences would speculate whether the bottle had been cracked beforehand or somehow fixed. It wasn’t. The only trick was to use a full, capped bottle of beer and commit to the hit. Backing off at the last second would result in a concussion and a badly sliced scalp.

  Roddy pulled the stunt on television twice, at least. One was a pre-Christmas promo for a 1979 steel-cage match against Buddy Rose. In his own promo, Rose smashed ripe tomatoes into a ring post to inspire red, gushing nightmares in his opponent. In the Crow’s Nest, Roddy responded with a different tack. Wearing a Santa hat, he threw money at the audience to shame them into giving to needy kids at Christmas, then bottled himself in reply to Rose. Wrestlers Matt Borne and King Parsons held a towel behind him to protect the audience and television crew from flying glass. “Showdown, you bet,” he concluded, “and I ain’t even saddled my ponies yet!” The promo is one of the first times he refers to himself as Rowdy Roddy Piper (a few ads from LA advertised him with the nickname, but he hadn’t used it consistently).

  Throughout 1980, Rick and Roddy wrestled the Sheepherders over a dozen times, swapping back and forth the NWA Pacific Northwest Tag-Team title and the NWA Canadian Tag title (Vancouver was a frequent stop on the PNW circuit). “I’m the first man ever to get licked by the Bushwhackers,” Roddy used to boast. Supplementing their crazed bushmen gimmick, Miller used to take a long, ugly lick of his opponents when he had them at his mercy. Crowds thought he was insane, which was the whole point. (For his part, Williams claimed he would put his hand on the back of an opponent’s head and lick his hand. Miller, however, lapped at opponents like a “puppy dog.”)

  Before one of those matches, Roddy bottled himself again, this time ringside with Rick Martel looking on. He fumbled his lines a little after breaking the beer over his head. Bottling hurt, and he’d nearly knocked himself senseless.

  Something about the stunt suited Roddy’s wrestling persona. And it sold tickets, which was tied directly to his own well-being. But that ring persona wasn’t much removed from the real Roddy Toombs. It never was. The turmoil of his youth might have found an outlet in wrestling, or it might have found a lifestyle rough enough, exhausting enough and unrelenting enough to bury that anger good and deep. Times like this, it leaked through, flavouring the show he put on with notes of self-destruction. The crowd loved it. Watching Roddy nearly knock himself out (Martel would do it, too, in Montreal), fans found it easy to believe that anything was possible when these two took to the ring—and that everything was truly and painfully real.

  —

  In the early months of 1980, Martel and Roddy got an apartment together. “We spent about close to five months as roommates. What a time. When you live with somebody, you spend twenty-four hours together, you get to know someone.”

  That proximity gave Martel some insight into his friend’s professionalism. At twenty-five, Roddy was entering his prime, for an athlete. But for a professional wrestler he was ahead of the curve, main eventing now in Portland as he’d done in LA, much younger than promoters usually allowed.

  Saturday afternoons were given over to preparing for the night’s card at the Portland Sports Arena. “We would take our showers and then he would go into his room and get ready for his interviews. He would put on his favourite music. Leadbelly, the blues singer.”

  Martel would rib Roddy for his eclectic taste. Roddy gave it right back to him about not appreciating real music. “He’d put that Leadbelly on and think about his interviews. I used to be so entertained by the way he would do things, his interviews and stuff, he was great.”

  Roddy held himself to a high standard, and he knew that such standards were inseparable from his conduct around the arena when he wasn’t in the spotlight. “He was a stand-up guy. He didn’t take no bullshit from anybody. He didn’t take any stuff from the promoters or the boys. I admired that. Some guys in this business, some guys are bullies. They try to take advantage of the weaker guys. Roddy didn’t. He would defend them and say, ‘Quit this shit.’”

  It was one thing to be a stand-up guy in a professional environment, even one as wild as pro wrestling in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It was another to maintain that quality of character when there were no safety nets.

  Wrestlers often found themselves in uncomfortable spots in public. Simultaneously the objects of public fascination and scorn, they could be enjoying a quiet beer together one minute, and a moment later be fighting for their lives. Coming home from an out-of-town card with Chris Colt—who spent much of late 1979 and early 1980 wrestling with Rick and Roddy—they walked into one of those moments. “We get back in Portland,” Martel recalled. “Before we go back to our hotel we say, ‘Let’s go for beers.’” They drove around and saw a bar they hadn’t tried before. There were a few Harleys outside and they could hear a band playing. They went in. There were more bikers inside than bikes outside. “It looked like a rough place. So we just sat at our table and had a few drinks. But Chris Colt was…if he’d had a few beers and some Jack Daniels, he’d get loud.” Colt was a loose cannon, even by wrestling’s standards. A rare out-of-the-closet gay man who was working an Alice Cooper look at the time, he reputedly took his name “Colt” from the title of his favourite gay porn magazine. Excessive drinking and drug use made him unpredictable and fascinatingly transgressive (he once freaked out from a drug-induced hallucination during a steel-cage match in Phoenix, thinking giant spiders were entering through the bars; he climbed out in a panic, entered the crowd swinging wildly and started a massive riot). “He got up to go to the restroom and then a couple bikers got in front of him. We could see it was a bad situation. Chris Colt insulted the guy—’Hey, fuck, get outta my fuckin’ way.’ It was not the place to do it.”

  The rest of the bikers in the bar smelled blood. They stood up and gathered around. Roddy and Rick could see where this was headed, so they went to stand with Colt. The atmosphere was incredibly tense. The wrestlers were tough men, but they were hopelessly outnumbered by guys who certainly weren’t pushovers themselves.

  One biker, who seemed to be the boss, reached out and grabbed Colt’s whiskey and spit in it. “Chris went, ‘You…’ right away Roddy took that drink and drank it.”

  For a moment, nobody knew what to do. Depending on whose account of the story you believe (or prefer), Roddy then slammed the empty glass down in front of the biker and said, “Your turn.”

  The bikers just looked at the wrestlers and the wrestlers waited to see what their futures held. And then the bikers started laughing. “You guys are all right!” Everybody stood down and the bikers spent the rest of the night buying Roddy, Rick and Chris Colt drinks. “
Wow, what a move. What a gutsy move. He defused a situation that could have been a very bad situation. He was that kinda guy,” said Martel. “He was just that kinda guy.”

  —

  Rick Martel had arrived in Portland without a car. That bugged him because he had a brand-new Pontiac Firebird Trans Am collecting dust in Hawaii. He had it shipped to Portland, and in April 1980 he and Roddy were finally able to pick it up. Martel might have wished he’d waited a little longer.

  On May 18, Mount St. Helens in Washington state erupted. Hours before, the two wrestlers had gotten into the car on a beautiful, bright spring day in Portland and hit the road.

  As they sped along the highway toward Tacoma, Washington, the sky grew dark and a grey powder filled the air, like a blizzard of charcoal dust. They heard a large boom. Cresting a hill, they came upon an eighteen-wheeler that had jackknifed trying to stop suddenly in the deepening murk. “We went right beneath that eighteen-wheeler, right up to the windshield,” Martel remembered. “We were stuck. There were cars in beside us. The doors wouldn’t open.”

  Knowing more cars and trucks would come over that same hill and crash into the pile-up from behind, Roddy tried kicking out his passenger-side window. Martel was in shock, and couldn’t believe his friend was kicking his precious Trans Am. “Ah no, my car. Don’t do that, Roddy!”

  The Firebird had a sunroof. As reality set in, Martel opened it so they could get out of the car and out of the way of any more oncoming vehicles. As the pile-up ended, they helped a number of people out of cars bent as badly as the Firebird. They dealt with the police who were taking stock of injured people and ruined vehicles. Then, with nothing more to do but do their jobs, they grabbed their wrestling bags and pulled out a towel. Once traffic was re-routed around the crash, they wrapped one half of the towel over each of their faces to filter the ash and stuck out their thumbs. “An eighteen-wheeler stopped and he brought us to the building in Tacoma. We made it to the show but we were late.”