Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  Valentine refused. “No. I ain’t going home.”

  He thought it was funny, letting Roddy suffer in the elements. They were friends, and Valentine’s insistence on seeing the match through was a rib, but Roddy wasn’t happy and he didn’t feel like having his nose pressed into puddles for any longer than necessary.

  Roddy backed Valentine into a corner and punched him in the face. He punched him again. He did it twice more—“It looked like Muhammad Ali beating the hell out of Sonny Liston,” said Valentine. He grabbed Valentine’s head under his arm, turned toward the ring, empty except for the torrential rain bouncing off the canvas, and ran toward the opposite corner. Roddy hopped into the air with his feet out in front of him and crashed Valentine’s head into the mat—a textbook Bulldog.

  “Are we going home now?” said Roddy.

  From beneath their tangled limbs, Valentine answered, “Yes.”

  After drying off in his own dressing room, Valentine came to Roddy’s. Roddy looked up at him, a sheepish look on his face. He had been a little rough.

  Valentine started laughing. “I deserved it!”

  It’s good that they both got accustomed to suffering in one another’s company. In a few months, they’d be doing a lot more of it.

  —

  In Georgia, Roddy cut a particularly creative promo for a feud he had going with a Florida-born wrestler named “Mad Dog” Buzz Sawyer. In the video, Roddy crawls through a heavily wooded park, birds chirping in the background. He scuttles on all fours from behind one tree to the next, getting closer to the camera as if sneaking up on his prey. He’s wearing a shredded jean jacket and a chain around his neck, since the upcoming match is a dog-collar match in which both wrestlers will wear a collar attached by this chain. His breathing is fast and shallow.

  “I’m looking for you, Mad Dog,” he says from behind a tree. The video cuts to him bursting through the surface of a swampy pond. “Where’s that Mad Dog?!” he growls as he slaps the water manically from his face. It cuts again to a shot of an old truck while George Thorogood plays in the background. In a moment of very DIY video editing, the truck rolls forward fifteen feet and stops. Roddy jumps out and lights into more standard promo fare (two young women walk past in the background, looking curiously toward the shoot) before it cuts again, and the idea of standard fare goes right out the window.

  Wearing a shirt that reads “Buzz Sawyer R.I.P.,” Roddy bottles himself for what seems to be the third time in his career. Except for the suds running down his face, it’s a bloodless example of the art, and he speaks clearly after pounding the glass against his forehead. It’s a hell of a thing to get good at doing, but it gets attention, and that’s the business he was in, which is maybe the only thing that explains where he takes the promo next.

  Roddy reaches into the bed of the old truck and produces Kitty’s Chihuahua, Feather, in a T-shirt that says “Mad Dog.”

  “By the time I’m finished with you, Sawyer, this is exactly what you’ll look like!” He tucks the little dog under his arm as soon as he’s made his point, and the dog looks bemusedly up at him. The dog is a funny touch, but the humour ends there.

  One last time, the scene cuts to a shot of Roddy’s legs, dangling above the park grass. The camera pans up and Roddy, still in the “R.I.P.” T-shirt, has hanged himself using the chain and dog collar. He snatches a black bag from over his head to deliver his last line. His face is scrunched by the force of the leather around his neck. He is visibly straining and his face is red. “Move it on over, Sawyer, ‘cause the mean old dogs are moving in.” He tries to growl but can barely produce a sound.

  That he didn’t break his neck is a wonder, and testament to the shape he was in. But hanging himself at 230 pounds was tempting fate, tempting it to destroy him where nothing had so far succeeded—or tempting it to take its wildest gamble on him yet.

  In another promo from this feud, Roddy chides Sawyer for going to college to become an amateur wrestler while Roddy was already fighting pro. He says, “The only thing that kept me out of college, brother, was high school. Went to the school of hard knocks. Black and blue’s the colours, Jack!” From nearly killing himself in the promo to the language he used in others, he was aggressively writing the story of Rowdy Roddy Piper. (In fact, Roddy did finish high school.)

  “Rod didn’t like to let anyone else have the lead,” Kitty said, to describe Roddy’s self-mythologizing. He seeded that story every chance he got. “Just like the back of trading cards say born in Glasgow, Scotland, you build this image and it doesn’t even need to be factual. Then it becomes the image and you don’t change the image.”

  Those promos helped advance another narrative Roddy was building. His left ear was bandaged. “I can’t hear outta this ear no more. It don’t work!” he says. That ear would play an important role in his last hurrah for Mid-Atlantic, and in his grand return to the biggest territory of them all.

  —

  In 1972, Vince McMahon Sr. had put on a major card at Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets, with a main event featuring Pedro Morales and Bruno Sammartino. He did it again in 1976, with the infamous Inoki/Ali match in Tokyo serving as a main event by closed-circuit television. Sammartino fought Stan Hansen in the undercard. In 1980 McMahon truly set a new standard for what was possible in the presentation of professional wrestling. He stuffed that year’s Showdown at Shea with thirteen matches, showcasing some of the best wrestlers at the time, including many who’d worked with Roddy: Andre the Giant, Rene Goulet, Johnny Rodz, Chavo Guerrero, Inoki, and budding star, Terry Bollea, who’d been convinced by Vince McMahon Jr. to adopt the name Hulk Hogan (McMahon Jr. didn’t take control of his father’s New York promotion until 1982).

  The 1980 Showdown at Shea was a major volley in a turf war to determine who in the old territories could expand his regional fiefdom into an international empire. McMahon Sr. had pulled his then-called World Wide Wrestling Federation out of the NWA, the national alliance of territory promoters that ruled the wrestling business in North America, thereby dismissing any boundaries on his promotion’s potential for expansion.

  Crockett fired back. He put together a supercard of his own for November 24, 1983, and to one-up the McMahons’ gambit at Shea Stadium he arranged for the card to be available across the country on pay-per-view, a first in wrestling.

  His main event would be the culmination of a long-standing feud between contender Ric Flair and champion Harley Race. Starrcade ‘83: A Flair for the Gold (today we’d call that title a spoiler) featured the title bout and seven others, including Piper wrestling Valentine.

  Crockett approached Roddy and asked him to come up with the most brutal match he and Valentine could conceive. Fresh off his Georgia feud with Buzz Sawyer, Roddy had an idea.

  “We talked about it for about five minutes and we went out and did it,” said Valentine. “Because it wasn’t planned, we were taking it off the cuff, and Roddy had worked with it before, so I followed him….We just said screw it, we’re hurt already, let’s just go out and steal the show from Flair and Harley Race. And we did.”

  Their dog collar match became a classic.

  The fifteen-foot chain had a black leather studded dog collar on each end. To ramp up enthusiasm, Crockett had the collars and chain showcased in the lobby of the Greensboro Coliseum before the evening started. Crockett had asked the wrestlers for brutal, and looking at that chain it would be easy to imagine that the result would live up to the request.

  “I got this bright idea of putting sheep’s wool inside these inch-and-a-half collars,” remembered Roddy, with a groan. “The problem was, you get sweating with that inch and a half of sheep’s wool…”

  The match began with Roddy and Valentine pulling with their necks on opposite ends of the chain, because if they closed in on one another they could grab the slack and use it as a weapon. It’s a great moment of ring psychology. The brief tug-of-war with their necks not only emphasized the danger to the most fragile part of the body,
it gave fans a chance to clue in to the danger Roddy was about to exploit.

  After a few moments of pulling against the chain, they advanced carefully. Roddy gathered a loop of chain and struck the first blow, lashing Valentine across the shoulder. After a few more sequences, Valentine took Roddy’s lead and went to work himself, getting Roddy on the mat in front of him and wrapping the chain around Roddy’s eyes. And of course, he hit Roddy on that left ear every chance he could.

  “I can remember it getting to the point—it went a long time for that kind of a match—getting to the point where everything was numb,” said Roddy, as he and Valentine reminisced about the match in 2015. “I remember getting hit by you, and I would feel the shot kinda, but you were numb….You had that chain wrapped around me, twice, my teeth, my ears and my eyes, and you were pulling on it, and then you drop an elbow on my head.”

  Valentine suggested the dog-collar match was the first hardcore match—wrestling with no disqualifications and flagrant use of ultra-violent gimmicks and foreign objects—and Roddy elaborated on what a vicious match it was. “His fingers are like sausages, his hands are so big. And he had a chain around them. And it was my left ear and it was bleeding and bleeding and he was working on it and working on it. It broke the eardrum.”

  The eardrum was already broken, though how much it had healed and how much worse it got after this is anyone’s guess.

  “Thank god I got a thick neck,” replied Valentine. “And you always had one too, so we survived it.”

  By the end—in a bit of a replay of the match in which Roddy lost the belt to Valentine—Roddy was stumbling against the ropes, bleeding profusely from his injured ear, and commentator Gordon Solie was laying it on thick about Roddy’s lost equilibrium. Roddy won the bout, but immediately after the pin, Valentine took off the collar and choked him with it.

  “The orders that we had was, ‘Go out and have the most brutal match possible so people would come back and see it.’ I think I missed the last part,” said Roddy.

  “They were so happy with the results of it,” said Valentine. “‘You guys are going to do it in fifteen more towns!’ There’s no way those following matches were as good as that one, because we’d already beat the hell out of each other. They were good, but oh my god!”

  Roddy and Valentine replayed that match in over a dozen cities. The pain they inflicted on each other every night was bad; the itching of those wool-lined collars was worse. They developed rashes on their necks that were rubbed raw every night. With a baby daughter at home, Roddy was putting baby oil on his. Valentine wore turtlenecks.

  “I remember you being down on your knees, hitting me hard, and you were screaming at me,” said Roddy. “And I can’t tell what you’re saying, and I pull the blood clot out of my ear, and you were saying, ‘Only an idiot would put wool in a dog collar!’”

  The booker George Scott suggested Valentine pour rubbing alcohol on his chafed neck. He did. Roddy meanwhile tried hydrogen peroxide. It was a rough few weeks. Both already had chests striped with welts and scars from Wahoo McDaniel’s chops. “On the left hand side I got scars to this day where he just kept peeling the meat off,” Roddy said. Both men were miserable with the constant itching and pain.

  It took them thirty-some years before they could joke about it.

  “Your ear looked like the ear on the Elephant Man,” said Valentine.

  —

  The Yellow Canary was gone. Roddy had given it to a wrestler named Ron Ritchie. He was driving a Cadillac again and he was getting ready to drive it north. Vince McMahon Sr. had called Crockett to say that he wanted to use Roddy when he was done in Charlotte. Distinguishing himself from the run-of-the-mill promoter—the hated “P”—Crockett shared the news with Roddy of McMahon’s interest.

  He’d accomplished as much as he could in Mid-Atlantic. Flair was still riding high, much as Buddy Rose had been when Roddy had left Portland. And Flair wasn’t leaving. New York had the added allure of being the one territory Roddy had failed to win over. There was no place else left to refine his trade. If he wanted to get over, truly over, it was time to step up to the bright lights of Broadway.

  Many of Roddy’s Mid-Atlantic peers were headed there as well, some with new gimmicks, others with the tried and true. Roddy wasn’t changing, though. Whatever the magic of that kilt and the bagpipes that chimed him in (he didn’t play them ringside anymore—too many whacks in the teeth from ornery fans), his brawling Scotsman persona had gotten him this far. He’d trust it to get him the rest of the way to the top.

  Tom Prichard had watched Roddy with astonishment in Texas. He’d done the same in Georgia. He watched closely enough to realize the simplest secret to his hero’s success: “Roddy got over by being Roddy.”

  Roddy was about to see if being Rowdy Roddy Piper was enough to take Manhattan.

  7

  A Despicable, Disgraceful Display

  Canadians have a way of finding each other. Sure, Roddy was in Toronto, but the dressing room might as well have been in Charlotte. Never mind its distance from North Carolina, Toronto was Ric Flair country. The talent coming through Maple Leaf Gardens every week was largely American and the fans weren’t much interested in locals, only greats.

  A wrestler just a few years Roddy’s junior was standing inside the entrance to the arena floor, just out of sight of the fans. The Gardens crowd was going crazy as Roddy and Greg Valentine beat one another into bloody messes with a fifteen-foot chain. It was December 1983.

  The young wrestler wasn’t well known yet, but his family was. Bret Hart was a son of Calgary promoter Stu Hart, who had trained many of the men Roddy had wrestled during his career. His Stampede Wrestling drew talent from all over the world.

  “My conversation with Roddy was very brief,” recalled Hart, “but very cute, in a way. ‘Hey, little Canadian guy, how you doin’?’” In the Gardens dressing room that day, Roddy was pleasantly surprised to meet another wrestler from Western Canada, so close to where he’d grown up himself. For Bret, who was just beginning to build his name, meeting Roddy was a big deal. At twenty-nine, Roddy had been a star in the territories for several years. Very few names were placed higher on the marquee than Roddy Piper’s. The two Westerners met again in the months that followed. This time Roddy let his infamous mouth get ahead of his judgement.

  “There was a story that some wrestlers had made up about my dad,” Hart said. “You still hear it sometimes from people.” Repeating the stories in full—there were two—would be just another way of perpetuating a cruelty, so we won’t. In essence, they involved Stu Hart not knowing or caring enough to wash his hands before he ate.

  “Roddy told me this story,” said Hart. “Wrestlers would howl at how funny it was.”

  It was never Roddy’s way to mock somebody upon meeting them, let alone mock another man’s father—that was our experience, anyway. Roddy was young still, though, and he had won the respect of his peers the hard way. Respect was a commodity he gave willingly to those who deserved it, but he didn’t part with it easily.

  “That’s not funny. That’s not even true,” Hart said to Roddy.

  Roddy tried to laugh it off, but Bret stayed serious.

  “I know you’re a big name, and you’re a big star, but keep that stupid story to yourself.”

  After the matches that night, Roddy apologized.

  “You know what, you’re absolutely right. It was a stupid story.”

  Roddy had made one of his lifelong friends, maybe his first true friend, after fighting him in a garage. He made another when Bret Hart stood up to him in a dressing room. “The fact that I shot that story down and got offended by it,” said Hart, “probably was the bridge to a respect and friendship that never, ever wavered after that.”

  By the time of their second meeting, Roddy had packed up Kitty and their infant daughter and relocated to New York, where he’d been hired by the World Wrestling Federation (formerly World Wide Wrestling Federation), whose owners’ designs o
n dominating the wrestling market were accurately reflected in the promotion’s grandiose name. The kind of expansion Jim Crockett desired in Charlotte was already underway in New York. It was the world’s greatest media market and one of the world’s most storied sports facilities: Madison Square Garden. If there was an ideal focal point for the territory to end all territories, New York was it.

  After his blackballing in Atlanta, Roddy wasn’t interested in signing another contract with a promoter. Vince McMahon—Sr. and Jr.—were gathering top wrestling talent like collectors buying up old comic books—and the nature of that talent was very comic book–like. Big men with outsized characters. The three-hundred-pound wrestlers Roddy had been dealing with for the past ten years were men who, despite their considerable muscle, tipped the scales with a healthy dose of body fat. But wrestlers like “The Incredible” Hulk Hogan looked like they’d just climbed out of the weight room at Venice Beach. Smaller men like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff possessed chiselled physiques the likes of which eluded Roddy no matter how much time he spent in the gym. And then there were the giants: Andre, of course, Big John Studd and King Kong Bundy. Roddy was right to worry about being a smaller man. He had the confidence now, however, to work without a contract. Thanks to his starring role in Starrcade and a strong endorsement from Sgt. Slaughter, the McMahons were eager to have him in New York, but he wasn’t eager to belong to anyone.

  Roddy and Kitty rented apartments in Connecticut—the actual home state of the WWF offices—and New Jersey, before settling in Woodbridge, New Jersey, where another daughter was soon on the way.

  The loss of equilibrium that had followed Roddy’s eardrum injury continued to hamper him in the ring, so upon his arrival in the WWF, he appeared as a manager to Orndorff and David Schultz. He was so good on the microphone that his new boss saw another opportunity to put Roddy to work.