Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  Roddy’s resilience worked its magic on the crowd. As Ole Anderson had insisted, he became fully the brawler he really was—the tough-as-nails street fighter who was too vicious to lose. Whether he was working heel or babyface, the crowd respected him.

  “That’s where Roddy started working, psychological wise,” said Denton. “That fit his name, his gimmick. Now he stood out from everybody else.”

  In July 1982, Roddy took the Mid-Atlantic title from another great talent, Jack Brisco. Brisco was a renowned pro wrestler, and though his skill never translated into the type of mainstream celebrity enjoyed by his Mid-Atlantic peers like Roddy and Ric Flair, his reputation as a performer in the ring was sterling. (So was his knowledge of the business. Only a few years earlier, he and his brother Jerry, who also wrestled Roddy a handful of times in Mid-Atlantic, discovered a hulking young talent named Terry Bollea, though it would be a few years yet before he entered Roddy’s story.)

  After a match that had gone largely Brisco’s way, Roddy took a wild swing at Brisco’s jaw and something exploded across the ring. Roddy covered Brisco and got the three count. He rolled out of the ring and collapsed in exhaustion against a wall, where the host confronted him about that exploding something. The camera zoomed in to show several coins and pieces of torn paper wrapper scattered across the mat. He’d clearly decked Brisco with a roll of quarters. “People threw those in there,” said Roddy between deep breaths. “I don’t know where they came from…”

  The reference Roddy made to his torn rotator cuff reveals a simple fact of life for wrestlers in that era—maybe in every era. Short of being stuck in hospital, or worse, there were no excuses for not getting in the ring. A business built on clashes between personalities meant that those personalities were what fans paid to see. Substitutions were a last resort.

  Roddy had wrestled Wahoo McDaniel in Greenville, South Carolina, and during the match had badly hurt his right wrist. He put his arm in a sling to help it recover. On a flight to Savannah, Georgia, for the evening matches, McDaniel called him a sissy for wearing a sling. He shamed Roddy into taking it off, and he wrestled that night with an injured wrist. If he did it one night he could do it again. Before he knew it, he was just living with the bump on his wrist. For the next thirty-five years, until his death, Roddy had that lump, the size of a goose egg, because he hadn’t taken care of the injury.

  As if the injured wrist wasn’t bad enough, on that same flight the plane dropped sharply when it hit an air pocket, sending the wrestlers onboard tumbling hard around the cabin (it was a small chartered flight). Roddy struck his head on the cabin roof and added the resulting neck strain to his list of untreated injuries. Stumbling disoriented off the plane, he had two very valid excuses now to sit out the evening’s match. He didn’t use either.

  —

  Maybe the wrestler who stood to lose the most from Roddy’s success in Charlotte, Ric Flair was becoming a rival in the ring but a close friend away from it. He and Roddy partied mercilessly throughout the territory, dragging their peers out on the many towns throughout the Carolinas for nights they wouldn’t remember. They got to be close enough that Flair could get away with the occasional swerve.

  “We’re in Asheville, North Carolina,” began Flair. “I go up to Piper and I go, ‘I promise, there’s no way that Jack [Brisco] will find out, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that you can’t take down Jack Brisco.’”

  Roddy looked at him. “You mean to tell me that you’re not going to say a word and you don’t think I can take him down?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “You’re on.”

  As Roddy’s getting ready to go to the ring, Flair found Jay Youngblood.

  “Go over there and tell Jack that Piper’s gonna try to take him down.”

  As Roddy and Brisco headed to the ring, the other wrestlers, all of them in on the rib by now, gathered around the dressing room curtain to watch.

  After about ten minutes, Roddy finally got a grip on Brisco’s leg. This was no small feat. Both Brisco brothers were excellent technical wrestlers. Brisco hopped around the ring on one foot as Roddy tried to kick his other leg out from under him until Roddy let himself get too close for his own good. Brisco grabbed him and the match was as good as over.

  “Piper came back and said, ‘I’m gonna kill you, Flair.’”

  —

  For all the work, and all the drugs and free-flowing alcohol, Roddy knew there was a hole in his life, and he knew only one person who could fill it. He and Kitty had tried to stay in touch after he left Portland, but both were moving around the country and had lost track of each other during the past six months.

  In April 1982, Roddy picked up the phone and called Kitty’s mother, hoping to track her down. “He called me out of the blue,” recalled Kitty. She had moved on from working in Washington, first to Kentucky and then home to Oregon, working with show horses in Wilsonville. “He said, ‘I’m living in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s very good here, I’m getting successful, but it doesn’t mean anything to me without someone to share it with. I’ve never met anyone like you and I want you to come move out here with me and we’ll get married.’

  “I said, ‘Sure.’ I knew I was crazy about him. The next morning I gave my boss two weeks’ notice and headed out to Charlotte.”

  Roddy bought her plane ticket—along with passage for her dog and cat. She was taking a big risk. The risk felt even bigger when she landed in Charlotte and didn’t find him at the airport. “Oh my god, he didn’t mean it,” she thought. “He’s rethinking it. What am I doing? I’m stuck here.”

  Hours late, Roddy arrived, full of apologies. He’d forgotten the arrival time. He bundled her bags and small menagerie into the Yellow Canary and took her home.

  The learning curve was steep for Kitty. Life with a professional wrestler meant, for one, many days and nights spent alone. His road schedule was gruelling, wrestling every day of the week, and twice on Saturdays. Throw Canada into the mix—Mid-Atlantic ran Toronto and Southern Ontario—and the travel schedule was relentless.

  Kitty learned something else: not to say too much about her fiancé’s past. She was approached one day by someone from Roddy’s wrestling life—it might have been a fan or a journalist, maybe a colleague, she couldn’t recall—who asked her what she knew about him growing up in Canada. Roddy and she had talked about his childhood, something he’d shared with few others, and she knew the answers to a few of these questions. Overhearing her reply, Roddy took her aside and asked her to be careful.

  “I remember him saying, ‘You need to separate what we know about how I was brought up from the story I built that I want people to know.’ His wrestling persona.” Roddy had learned to give audiences what they wanted, and how to get them to come back week after week for more. Now he was learning that this character needed depth if fans were going to continue caring about his fate. Roddy was building that depth one interview, one promo, one story at a time.

  —

  At the studio one Tuesday morning Roddy was introduced to Atlanta promoter Jim Barnett, because Anderson and Crockett had agreed to let Roddy work Georgia, too. This commitment would add two matches on Sunday to his already packed Mid-Atlantic schedule, in addition to frequent forays north to Toronto.

  Toronto’s Maple Leaf Wrestling was run by Frank Tunney and his nephew Jack, who partnered with NWA territories to fill the historic Maple Leaf Gardens for cards that regularly drew over 15,000 people.

  “I wrestled in Maple Leaf Gardens a ton of times,” Roddy remembered. “They had a bell. You’d hear a little bell shot and everybody’s starting to get revved up. And that ramp that they had there. Ring high.” After years of being punched, stabbed, sliced and burnt on his way to the ring, a ramp that took him from the dressing rooms to the ring was a much-appreciated luxury.

  “We used to fly all the time from Charlotte to Toronto, work in Maple Leaf Gardens and fly back,” said Roddy. Mid-Atlantic wrestlers would frequently work the ma
tinee opening match in one city, then jet to another for the evening’s main event. On at least one occasion, in July 1982, he drove back to North Carolina to fit in a few extra matches in Michigan. Given the sensitivities of the time and the company he was keeping, he was soon wishing they’d flown.

  The 1979–81 Iran hostage crisis made the early eighties an awkward time to be an Iranian in America. Or at least it was if you were a professional wrestler working an Iron Sheik gimmick, and you kept up the ruse when crossing the border.

  Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri was a former bodyguard of the Shah of Iran. The Shah had been overthrown by the same regime that had idly watched as more than sixty Americans were taken hostage in the capital city of Tehran. Vaziri had once been an avowed enemy of that government, but most North Americans didn’t know the difference. Or care. And if Vaziri was crossing the border with a carload of buddies just as inclined to screw around with border officials as he was, and one of them happened to boast an unapologetic Soviet attitude, they might be in for a rough day.

  Especially the young guy in the back seat.

  Roddy didn’t have a green card, and by this point wasn’t bothering any longer with the H1 and H2 visas that allowed him to work in the US. Strictly speaking, he should have shown work visas when crossing the border, but this was twenty years before Canadians and Americans needed passports to travel between their countries. Unless a customs official really didn’t like the look of someone, crossing the border usually meant slowing down long enough to smile nicely, show ID and say thank you.

  “There are four of us in the car,” remembers Roddy. “The gentleman driving was Rene Goulet.” Goulet was a French Canadian who used to pretend he was in the French Foreign Legion. “In the front passenger seat was a man, a very nice man, but a very big, ex-Olympian from Russia, named Nikolai Volkoff. And the Iron Sheik, Khosrow Vaziri, was behind the driver in the backseat. And behind the large Russian gentleman was me, Rod.”

  As they approached the border, Roddy wasn’t worried about his papers. He was worried about the quarter ounce of hash in his pocket. Figuring the stop would be a routine minute or two, he quietly tucked the hash in his cheek, like chewing tobacco.

  They stopped and the US customs officer asked Goulet what his name is.

  “My name is Rene Goulet.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I am from Quebec.”

  “Uh…citizen of?”

  “I am from Quebec, Quebec, Canada.”

  “Do you have working papers? Do you have a green card?”

  This was where the border crossing became complicated. Unless the customs official was a wrestling fan, all he saw were four large and in some cases strange-looking men packed into a single car trying to cross the border. No wives, no children. If they weren’t such an openly odd collection of men, they might have made the official suspicious.

  “I don’t need a green card,” said Goulet. “I come back and forth for years. I don’t need it. They never ask me for the green card.”

  The customs official paused. He leaned down so he could see across to the front passenger seat.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name is Nikolai Volkoff.”

  “So where are you from?”

  “Mother Russia.”

  “Do you have a green card, working papers?”

  “I do not need working papers! I’ve been living in the United States. I go back and forth for years.”

  The official was sensing a theme. He went to the back window and knocked on the glass. The Sheik rolled down his window.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I am the Iron Sheik, Khosrow Vaziri.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I am from Tehran, Iran.”

  “You got papers?”

  “I live in the United States! I am the Iron Shiek, world’s champion! I do not carry papers with me.”

  The official never got to last guy in the car, the quiet one in the far backseat whose mouth was starting to water.

  “Everybody out of the car,” the officer said, standing back. “Open the trunk.”

  They got out. Goulet opened the trunk and the official rustled around their four wrestling bags. He didn’t say anything, though by this point he knew the four men in the car were—or claimed to be—professional wrestlers. Without a word or any display of temper, he turned around and started walking toward the office.

  Volkoff went to the back of the car and slammed the trunk shut, saying as he did, “It’s like the Gestapo.”

  The officer stopped. He turned on his heels.

  “What did you say?”

  Roddy continued the story: “Next thing I know, there’s four of us in their little building. And in their little building they have an interesting room. It’s all concrete. There’s no toilet. There are no doors, just the one to get in and out. There’s no window. No place to hide. It’s just a room. And the walls were white.”

  Herded into the room with the others, Roddy was taking their circumstances more seriously than the rest. “I’m standing in the room. I’ve got Rene Goulet from Quebec, I’ve got Nikolai Volkoff from Russia, I got the Iron Sheik from Tehran, Iran, and I got myself. I’m the only one who’s illegal! I don’t have working papers. I know these guys got papers. I don’t have any. Plus, I got a quarter ounce of hash in my lip. I thought it was going to be a three-minute stop.”

  The other three, instead of thinking maybe they should start behaving themselves, started getting mad. Roddy, meanwhile, had yet to say one word. He was getting higher by the second.

  “The reason I mention that the walls were white was that there was no place to spit, there was no place to place anything. It was a contained unit. If I spit, they woulda saw it. If I peed, they woulda saw it.”

  After maybe half an hour in the room, while officials checked the driver’s licenses of the other three—Roddy didn’t have one—an officer came to usher them to another room.

  “Now they bring us out and got us in a line. We seem to have got the attention of a good eight, nine of them. And the other three guys, they’re not showing any kind of serious respect at all. They got our backs against the wall and they’re kinda surrounding the head guy, who’s questioning us.

  The other three wrestlers appeared finally to be coming to their senses. “Rene Goulet—he was a good man—he was saying, ‘Listen, I have many years come back and forth, I work for Verne Gagne. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina.’”

  Next, the official began questioning Nikolai Volkoff. “Nikolai’s sincerely a really nice man, but ‘the Gestapo’? Dumb. The Sheik, every night—they were a tag team—every night he’d come by and say, ‘Nikolai, you are the stupidest man I know.’ And this night he was correct. I used to feel sorry for Nikolai until this night.

  “They’re hitting Nikolai with the same things. Nikolai has an address, also in America. Rene was in Charlotte, Nikolai was in Pittsburgh, and I don’t know where the Iron Sheik was living. Maybe Charlotte also. So, they’re not happy campers, but they’re starting to get a sense of who they have in custody. But these officers are pissed from the Gestapo comment, and with the rather frivolous way they were taking these questions. And these officers’ egos were being bruised a little bit. They’re pretty powerful men when they want to be.”

  When the official questioned the Iron Sheik, astonishingly he came up with the same rant. “I am the Iron Sheik, from Tehran, Iran. I am the world champion.”

  For the first time, the official pointed his finger at Roddy and said, “Where you from?”

  The senior officer had been grilling the wrestlers for about five minutes. Roddy still had remnants of that chunk of hash in his mouth. When the officer pointed at him, Roddy, whose attention tended to wander under the best of circumstances, found himself intensely focussed on getting out of trouble.

  With the “chew” tucked far back in his cheek and in the best Southern accent he could muster, Roddy answered, “Charlotte, No
rth Carolina.”

  The official didn’t let a second pass before asking his next question.

  “What school did you go to?”

  In a split-second’s inspiration, Roddy took a wild shot at an answer.

  “Saint Mary’s.”

  The official looked at him for a long moment. There’s a St. Mary’s school in almost every town in North America.

  “That’s the only one I believe,” said the officer. “You, you can get out.”

  Roddy hiked over to the parked car while the other three squirmed their way out of trouble. Finally they joined him and crossed into Michigan. Relieved, Roddy picked up a newspaper that had been sitting the whole time in the middle of the back seat. Beneath it was a little bag containing an ounce of pot.

  —

  In October 1982, Roddy got on a plane with Kitty and took her home to Oregon. Kitty Dittrich would not be returning to the East Coast.

  They’d lived in Charlotte for about six months, then relocated to Decatur, Georgia, where they lived in an apartment owned by one of the Brisco brothers, Jack or Jerry. From there, Roddy could make his dates for Jim Barnett without spending quite as much time on the road. “He was gone so much,” Kitty said. “I didn’t anticipate how lonely I would be. I had to get a grip on that and not let it crush me.” She had spent so little time with Roddy before moving in with him, she was surprised to miss him so much when he was gone, except that now, of course, when he was gone, she was alone.

  Kitty wasn’t getting cold feet, though. “I definitely knew I had made the right decision,” she said. “Especially when you’re young, your feelings are just so intense for each other. I always felt very cared for, even though I was moved away from what I was used to and knew.”

  Near Portland, Roddy and Kitty assembled with a few close family and friends at the Tualatin Plains Presbyterian Church (also known as the Old Scotch Church) and got married.

  Roddy often referred to the men who mentored him as his “dads.” One of them stood up that day as his best man—Red Bastien, the only wrestling personality to attend.