Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  Roddy’s first choice had refused. It’s difficult to get a handle on Roddy’s relationship with his father. One moment he was reaching out to his dad, trying to rebuild burnt bridges between them, blaming himself for being a bad son; the next, he was reliving the horror of being six years old and thrashed with a vengeance for being a “pervert” in The Pas.

  Roddy had asked his father to be his best man. Stanley Toombs had declined.

  “Knowing his father, and the Victorian ways, I think that in his father’s mind it wasn’t proper for a father to be his son’s best man. I would like to think that that was the reason,” Kitty said.

  Perhaps Roddy’s request was too unconventional, or maybe there was too much bad blood between the men—it’s hard to say why Stanley said no, because he and Eileen did attend the wedding. They were living on Vancouver Island by that time and once they ferried across the Georgia Strait to Vancouver, it was only a day’s drive to Portland.

  They met Kitty for the first time the day before the ceremony. She worried that they didn’t approve of their son marrying her. “They wanted him to marry a Canadian,” she said, with a laugh.

  Being in Portland meant being in Don Owen’s territory, and Roddy was hard pressed to take a day off, even to get married. He spent his wedding evening firmly in the sweaty grip of his old nemesis Buddy Rose. He wrestled several dates that week across the Pacific Northwest before returning to Georgia in the company of his wife, Kitty Toombs.

  —

  Marriage might have grounded Roddy, but the pressures on a top young wrestler in one of the hottest territories in the United States were relentless. Pressure was mounting on him also to provide for his family—his wife and the child they were soon expecting. Also mounting were the injuries and the temptation to bury all that worry and physical pain with something that wouldn’t slow him down.

  Promoters knew what kind of pressure they were putting on their wrestlers, and they understood that these bundles of testosterone and ambition were only human. Staff slipped painkillers, sedatives and uppers to Roddy, anything to make sure he made it to the arena, on time and fit to fight.

  One of the young men who’d witnessed Roddy’s first tour through Texas, back when he’d saved the national anthem by playing it on his bagpipes, was Tom Prichard, who had then started wrestling professionally himself. In time, he would also witness Roddy’s ravenous need for pills and drugs to keep up the torrid pace.

  Prichard first met his wrestling hero one afternoon at the Wilson Theater in Fresno, California.

  “I’ll never forget this ‘cause I remember he was working with Andre that night,” he began. The Fresno theater was well suited to wrestling: faces and heels used separate entrances and their dressing rooms were located on opposite sides of the building.

  “Roddy came in and I can’t remember the office guy but Roddy said to him, ‘You left me last night, and I want my fuckin’ money now!’ And went off on this guy. Then once he stopped, he just came over and said, ‘Hi, Roddy Piper,’ and introduced himself.”

  For all the sweet talk about the way Roddy treated people with respect and dignity, he made sure nobody took that as permission to screw him over.

  He and Prichard crossed paths again when Prichard came to Atlanta.

  “I must be twenty-two years old around that time. Again Roddy was a great, great guy to everybody in the back. Never treated the young guys like some of the top guys did. If we go out to eat, which we did when we were on tour, he would usually pick up the tab. Of course he was top guy, but he wasn’t making WWF money back then, for sure. But he was making good money. He took care of the younger guys…”

  Prichard hesitated here in the story he was telling about our dad. Wrestlers, even rivals, make a living by not crossing lines. There were lines in the ring that kept people from getting killed. There were also lines outside the ring, like not mentioning real family in their interviews (unless they were part of the work). But one line they cross frequently is privacy. Wrestlers aren’t known for keeping each others’ secrets. So when Prichard hesitated, we knew it was a sign of the genuine respect he had for our father. What he eventually told us was that Roddy was picking up the tab for more than dinner.

  “If he had coke, he shared coke. If he had pills, he shared pills….

  “Piper was known for his consumption and being able to just function like nobody else could. I had a party with Roddy,”—Prichard mentioned another wrestler he was training with at the time, also known for his ability to handle uncommon quantities of drugs and alcohol—“I couldn’t keep up with either one of them. But I tried my damnedest.”

  One night in Georgia, Roddy and a few of the other wrestlers pulled the ring truck into an empty parking lot. Everybody piled out and set up the ring and began play wrestling. “Everybody’s drunk and just having a great time,” recalled Prichard. Then Roddy climbed into the truck and started driving it around the empty lot with the ring down. “Just like a mad man,” he said, laughing.

  “Piper wrecked a couple rental cars when I was in Atlanta. With Nick Patrick and Brad Armstrong, Tommy Rich, that crew. It was a pretty wild time,” he said. “You hear about rock stars partying, but in reality, wrestlers back in the seventies and eighties, even the nineties—I don’t know that anybody could keep up with Piper or a lot of the guys back then.

  “I never saw him mess around on the road with any women or anything like that. I never saw that. But he drank and drugged and lived his life the way he wanted to live it, that’s for sure.”

  Whether he was living wild because he wanted to or was tamping down as much anger and pain as his limited frame would bear, Roddy mostly kept the lid on his duelling natures. The wrath of Rowdy had grown out of a timid son, a boy who’d been picked on at school and beaten at home. If he’d grown into a sort of avenging terror, fighting to set free a frightened kid who no longer existed, he was swinging wide of the real mark. Roddy didn’t have the heart to turn on his father, but heaven help anyone who offered—no matter how unwittingly—to take his place, in the ring.

  —

  Between the roar of the crowds, the money (which was good, finally), and the importance a man can invest in himself when others around him are willing to break the law to keep him working, what happened next to Roddy was unthinkable.

  Wrestler Tommy Rich had become a good friend. He and Roddy had wrecked a few cars and at least one boat together. But on their way to a match one afternoon in Chattanooga, they wrecked Roddy’s career. They took a wrong turn and didn’t realize it. By the time they got straightened out, they were hours late for the matinee. They got in the ring and had their match, thanks to some delay tactics by the other wrestlers, and afterward Ole Anderson fired Roddy.

  Not only was Roddy out of a job, he was blackballed, his good name potentially struck from the rosters of every promotion across the United States.

  Fortunately, Ric Flair was familiar with one place in the world Roddy had never wrestled: Puerto Rico, where the culture around the business and its fans was as wild as it had been in Mexico. In January 1983 Roddy asked, “Do you think I could start going to the Caribbean with you?” Flair got some bookings for himself and Roddy, packed his rival and friend onto a plane, and, as was Flair’s custom at that age, got up, put on his wrestling robe and started serving the other passengers drinks.

  Flair came by his ring name honestly. He turned every flight into a party bus, and he had a genuine knack for generating heat in the ring. Ric Flair could really piss people off, and he did it a little too well on that tour through Puerto Rico.

  In Santo Domingo, Flair was booked against a local hero named Benítez. The crowd was so hostile to the visiting Americans—no one knew or cared where else Roddy might have actually been from—soldiers bearing short sticks with chains on the end escorted them to the ring. Astonished at the diminutive size of Benítez once he set eyes on him, Flair told Roddy to run around the floor beside the ring and grab at the Puerto Rican’s ankles during
the match. He knew it would infuriate the crowd. He was right.

  Roddy’s interference worked so well that the soldiers stopped holding the crowd back and turned on Roddy themselves. Even Flair, up in the ring, realized he would have to stop wrestling professionally any second and start punting for his life.

  Another wrestler intervened and somehow ushered them to the dressing rooms. It was two o’clock in the morning before an ambulance successfully extricated them from the stadium.

  As Roddy liked to say, just another day in paradise.

  —

  Back in the US, Roddy found work in Florida. He told Kitty he’d go alone, as it was supposed to be a brief stay, just a few weeks, maybe a month. But Kitty was seven months pregnant. She was by herself enough as it was. She wasn’t interested in spending the final months of this pregnancy alone.

  “I said, ‘No, I’m not going to be left alone in Decatur.’ So I went with him to Tarpon Springs,” she says. When the Florida stay was done, they packed their belongings into a U-Haul and drove back to Charlotte, where their first daughter, Anastasia, was born in April. She arrived on a Monday night, and her dad went to work Tuesday morning.

  Jim Crockett had faith in Roddy and ignored his blackballing. There was a job he wanted Roddy to help him do. Crockett had designs on much more of the American wrestling market than just his Mid-Atlantic territory. With Roddy included, he had one of the best rosters, if not the best roster, of wrestlers in the world. He set his mind to how he could put them to work expanding his territory and winning him the market he coveted.

  —

  Early in his Mid-Atlantic tenure, Roddy was introduced to the son of a wrestler he’d run into in Houston. Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, son of Johnny Valentine, was a stout, powerfully built wrestler from Seattle. He’d worked in Charlotte for some time before Roddy arrived, but had been on a run through the McMahons’ New York territory until late in 1980, when he came back to Charlotte and fought a six-man tag-team match with Roddy and Bobby Duncum against Ric Flair, Sweet Ebony Diamond and Blackjack Mulligan (one of the Texans with whom Roddy had spent his first tour of Japan).

  Roddy and Valentine worked well together, so Crockett had made them frequent tag-team partners throughout 1981 and early ‘82, usually lining them up against some combination of Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Mulligan and Charlotte booker George Scott. Later in 1982 and into ‘83, Roddy and Valentine started working against one another until April in Greensboro, when Roddy won the NWA (Mid-Atlantic) United States belt from him. It was, said Kitty, “the only title he ever cared about.”

  In early May, Valentine won it back in a long, ugly match that looked more like a street fight than pro wrestling. Roddy spent much of the time against the ropes, taking hit after hit from Valentine while commentator Gordon Solie explained that Roddy had an ear injury that was keeping him from mounting any sort of a comeback. Eventually, Crockett himself entered the ring to examine Roddy, who on his hands and knees was trying to crawl after Valentine and continue the fight. Seeing the shape Roddy was in, Crockett called the match.

  Those matches established something special about their rivalry. Few wrestlers could combine for such brutality in the ring as Piper and Valentine. They could pound on one another constantly and keep the crowd riveted. It was a talent that served them well, and would soon help vault both to the kind of fame nobody had foreseen for wrestlers.

  Roddy left town for a week-long tour through the Pacific Northwest, where he faced yet another son of a wrestler who’d beaten him up in the past, Curt Hennig, son of Larry “The Axe.” Then Roddy headed even farther west again, for the last time.

  —

  “I would go over to Japan and they would hate us,” said Roddy. “Because they were still mad about the bomb—not kidding at all.”

  Whether he was kidding in retrospect, he was certainly not laughing at the time. Upon checking in with All Japan Wrestling, who had brought him over, he had to hand over his passport to them. The idea was that wrestlers were prone to getting drunk and losing things, and losing a passport was a major hassle. But to Roddy, it represented a loss of freedom. He might not have noticed if he’d been content with the tour, as he was when touring with Stan Hansen years earlier. But this time, his patience for life and work abroad was short. “Well, I got into this thing,” said Roddy, “and I’m saying to myself, this is horseshit.”

  Dick Slater, who had been wrestling with Roddy off and on in Mid-Atlantic for a year, and Chavo Guerrero joined Roddy and a few other North Americans for the six-week tour. Roddy wasn’t alone on the tour, but married and far from his family he felt like it. He was a father now—feeling all the anxiety that role carries—and he was an ocean and a continent away from his newborn daughter. Japan’s entertainments—mostly drinking over Korean BBQ at night—had amused him when he was younger. Now they were just a means to express his frustration.

  “I’m starting to get a little reckless. In Japan, where you’d see a soda pop machine, they have beer machines out on the street. You’d just put in, I don’t know, two hundred yen or whatever it was, and you’d get a Sapporo or whatever. I’m drinking, trying to get through, trying to get my passport, trying to get out. Nobody’s listening to me, can’t get phone calls out, can’t get nothing. Drinking.

  “One night I got this bright idea when I saw this fire extinguisher, and I knew that this guy”—a trainer who had been making his life miserable—“I knew where his room was. I got that fire extinguisher about two in the morning—there were no cameras in the hallways then—and I let it go under the door.

  “Next morning, even I was surprised. It looked like there was a blizzard—it had just covered the room in thick, white stuff.

  The trainer confronted him. “I didn’t do it,” Roddy replied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, I see, one of our Japanese boys did it.”

  “Anyway, give me my passport back.”

  “No.”

  At night, North American wrestlers stood out in a restaurant, and people started to figure out who they were. Some of those people were members of the Yakuza—the Japanese mafia, for lack of a better term.

  “You knew who they were right away—one, they had tattoos all over them, but two, when they made a mistake, in front of the boss, they had to cut off a piece of their finger at the knuckle. Another mistake, a piece of the finger at the knuckle again. There were guys with three fingers and a thumb, two and half fingers, whatever. They all wanted to arm wrestle,” said Roddy. “They didn’t stand a chance.”

  Even if the Americans greatly outweighed the Japanese, the encounters could be unnerving. These were organized criminals, after all, who got a kick out of trying to prove themselves against the Westerners. But in the end they were mostly just like overly assertive fans back home, one of those things Roddy had to put up with.

  “We had a lot of fun at night,” remembered Chavo. Not surprisingly, Chavo recalled the tour more warmly than Roddy did. As was so often the case, Roddy went through life beneath a dark cloud that no one else could see.

  “We tagged up that tour. Won a match,” said Chavo. One habit of the Japanese fans got under his tag partner’s skin. “They threw a roll of toilet paper and hit Roddy in the head. He was so pissed and I was laughing. He came up and says, ‘Please, Amigo, please don’t laugh.’ I didn’t think anything of it, but he took it as ‘You stink,’ or the Japanese people…” His voice trailed off, suggesting that the Japanese fans equated him with something normally handled with toilet paper.

  Roddy wasn’t in the mood. His third Japanese tour was about to become his final Japanese tour. He wanted his passport, and he wanted to go home.

  “I started getting edgy and mean,” Roddy said. “I made it real clear: I want out. A guy can get pretty desperate and nothing mattered anymore.”

  Making his way to the ring each night, Roddy kept noticing the silence of the crowd following a little polite applause when he was introduced. H
e tended to swear a lot in the ring, and had to watch himself there, where every word was audible. It gave him an idea.

  “In the ring with these guys I’d say, ‘Come on, you okama,’ which is ‘faggot’ in Japanese.” Even against their top wrestlers, like Fujinami, I remember, I’d say, ‘Come on, you okama.’ The promoters asked me to stop saying that. So I’d say, ‘Give me my passport back,’ and they wouldn’t.”

  One night after work, Roddy went out by himself. It was late. He’d hit up every beer machine he could find. As he approached one of the Korean BBQs he frequented, he happened upon an empty taxicab parked at the curb. The door was open and the cab was running.

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  He jumped into the car, threw it in drive and stomped on the gas. He hadn’t realized the steering wheel was turned all the way to the left. The car jumped the curb and leapt across the sidewalk. “It went right through the wall, right into the restaurant. Next day, they gave me my passport back. I’ve been barred from the country ever since.”

  Chavo learned exactly what happened only after the tour was done. “The night that he did the damage, I had gone to my room. He was gone the next day. What happened to Piper? In Japan, nobody tells you anything.”

  Roddy’s use of “barred” probably didn’t reflect any diplomatic prohibition against his entering Japan. But it was pretty clear that the wrestling promotions were done with him. He was a very successful wrestler in the territories, and no doubt All Japan had considered itself fortunate to have him. It’s hard to believe that with all he was about to accomplish in the next five years, no Japanese promotion ever asked him to return. But they didn’t.

  —

  Back in the US, Roddy found himself in familiar company, wrestling Greg Valentine outdoors in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the rain. It was raining so hard, in fact, fans were climbing under the ring to stay dry.

  The wrestlers locked up, punched, kicked and rolled around the sopping wet ring. “Go home!” Roddy urged Valentine. He wasn’t enjoying himself wrestling a man who hit as hard as The Hammer while also getting soaked.