“When there was Hogan and Piper—and that was it, just Hogan and Piper—there was nobody else. There was Junkyard Dog and there were all kinds of other names, Orndorff and this guy and that, but it was Piper and Hogan. Hogan sort of broke all boundaries, but whenever you picked up a Hogan doll you picked up the Roddy Piper doll, too. So Roddy had a lot of clout, he had a lot of power. He was very valuable to them. Vince needed him really bad.”
—
Like Starrcade and McMahon’s two previous supercards at Madison Square Garden, the WrestleMania undercard had been worth the price of admission, filled with talent Roddy had wrestled over the previous decade in all parts of North America and Japan: Andre the Giant, Ricky Steamboat, King Kong Bundy, Junkyard Dog, Greg Valentine. Even Roddy’s old Portland friend and nemesis Buddy Rose had been wooed to New York, appearing in a mask as The Executioner, versus Tito Santana. Cyndi Lauper was back, “managing” Wendi Richter.
The only question left to answer was where do you go from there?
The question became more pressing for Roddy when he tried to get out of Madison Square Garden. After he and Bob Orton had showered—the victorious Hogan and T were nowhere to be seen—they realized they were all but alone in the basement of the arena. The car they expected hadn’t materialized. When they asked a policeman on horseback if he could hail a cab since so many fans lingered outside, he told them to hail one themselves.
—
Orton became Roddy’s most visible friend in the business, given his role on “Piper’s Pit” and ringside as Roddy’s bodyguard. He didn’t say a lot, which suited Roddy’s style, since Roddy said quite a bit. Like Greg Valentine, Orton was the son of a wrestling legend, in his case Bob Orton Sr.
“Orton Jr. was a tough-ass pistol,” says Len Denton, who’d worked with Orton in Charlotte. Roddy was of the same mind. He’d tried amateur wrestling with Orton and couldn’t budge him.
Spending weeks travelling the continent was hard: Roddy and Orton were husbands and fathers now (Ariel, Roddy and Kitty’s second daughter, was born in the months after WrestleMania). Substance abuse remained a response to the emotional rigours of their busy schedule and the relentless pain of their bouts, but on the road they tended to hang out in one another’s rooms with a handful of other wrestlers they could trust, trying to stay out of trouble. As Orton joked, they “filled the tub with beer and told our lies.” Bret Hart was one of the few new guys they let into their social circle.
“We were like a little gang,” he said. “Roddy’s gang would have been Roddy, Adrian Adonis, Cowboy Bob Orton, Don Muraco, Jim Neidhart and myself, and maybe the Iron Sheik would tag along. There was nobody else. They wouldn’t let anybody else hang with us.”
Roddy’s gang would sit together in the bar after the show, watching each other’s backs. Then they’d head to Orton’s hotel room to tell stories and pass the night away.
As Bret recalled, “I was real honoured to be in that gang, allowed to hang around them. I learned so much, talking with Cowboy Bob Orton at three in the morning drinking beers. Bobby’s always got beers in his bathtub. We’d just sit on the bed and talk wrestling. I would learn so much about psychology, who to trust, who’s no good. Adrian Adonis would talk about territories. They would talk about, ‘Oh, I went down to Florida and I worked with the Grahams…’ Roddy would talk about Charlotte and Oregon, and I would talk about Stampede, and Don Muraco would talk about Hawaii and Japan….We could stay up all night telling these old stories.”
One of Roddy’s best was still recent history during the months after WrestleMania.
Roddy and Hogan were pursuing their grudge in matches all over the United States, matches that weren’t broadcast and no one but the audience in attendance that night would ever see. If one of those matches stands out still, it was for reasons that had nothing to do with Hogan and everything to do with just how much Roddy had gotten under the country’s skin.
In September, he and Hogan met in Cincinnati. Before the match, Roddy was told that the youngest mayor in the history of the city wanted to make a presentation. The mayor—former mayor, actually, by this point—got into the ring before a packed house and said some nice things about Hulk Hogan, the usual all-American stuff, and then began lambasting Roddy, calling him every no-good, lowdown name in the book.
Roddy, looking on with a warmup towel around his neck, didn’t appreciate the mayor inserting himself into the story. They were professional wrestlers doing wrestling business, and this skinny little mayor shouldn’t presume he could step in and not pay his dues for shooting his mouth off. Even Cyndi Lauper had taken a bump for the business—no matter how gingerly applied.
Roddy charged the ring and beat the mayor with the damp towel, whipping him with it until he squirmed out of the ring. The politician, looking on in astonishment, had been given a lesson he’d soon put to work on his own wildly successful television show, one that took many cues from “Piper’s Pit”: The Jerry Springer Show.
Bret Hart hadn’t been included in the undercard of WrestleMania but his star was rising, especially as a member of the Hart Foundation, his tag team with former football player Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart. Bret’s star was about to rise a little faster. In April 1986 the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago hosted one of three main events in WrestleMania 2. The sequel was a bold next step for McMahon. Instead of moving out of his home base of Madison Square Garden into a larger facility, he expanded the sequel out from the New York area to stops in Chicago and Los Angeles. Each of the three locations would host a main event and a full undercard.
Hart remembered the mixed emotions in the lead up to WrestleMania 2. The wrestlers worried that lightning couldn’t strike twice and the sequel would flop. “There were a lot people that thought maybe Vince was losing his mind.”
McMahon knew he couldn’t milk the Piper-Hogan feud forever. He needed his champion to be under threat from other contenders, and so he moved Hogan out of New York and into Hollywood, a natural fit, and paired him for the main event with King Kong Bundy. A steel cage with the bald-headed 450-pound Bundy was a dire enough threat to make the most jaded of wrestling fans nervous for the champ. But another threat lingered; if Roddy didn’t have a shot at Hogan, he’d go after his friend.
Mr. T had boxed Orton at a Saturday Night Main Event in March, which ended with Roddy getting in the ring to whip T with his belt after Orton lost. Fans slavered for some violent retribution, so Roddy and Mr. T would box in New York as one main event in WrestleMania 2.
McMahon might have overshot, but he certainly hadn’t lost his sense of showmanship. A twenty-man Battle Royal in Chicago featured a number of jumbo-sized NFL players, in particular William “Refrigerator” Perry of the Super Bowl championship–winning Chicago Bears, a three-hundred-plus-pound defensive tackle who was enormously popular with Chicago fans. The Battle Royal came down to Andre the Giant and the Hart Foundation, the match ultimately going to Andre after he tossed Bret out of the ring. And of course Hogan beat Bundy on the west coast. But it was the rivalry playing out on Long Island that has best withstood the test of time.
Each of the three main events had been pulled out of wrestling’s bag of gimmicks: a steel-cage match, a battle royal and a boxing match. Only one of them had the benefit of a long-standing rivalry, two men whose personalities were not easily placed on the traditional axis of babyface and heel. Roddy was immensely popular, despite his crowd-baiting and badmouthing of opponents and fans, and Mr. T was ennobled by his proximity to Hogan but clearly relished the bad-guy role he’d taken on in Rocky III; even his B. A. Baracus character on The A-Team took morally suspicious pleasure when unloading on the bad guys. Further, in the boxing match with Roddy Mr. T would be alone. Hulk Hogan and his golden aura would be thousands of miles away. Fans had embraced T as a friend of their champion. Would they do the same when T was alone?
“I needed some—even if I could mistranslate—permission,” recalled Roddy. He was hoping McMahon would give him some sign before th
e match, some hint that it was okay to break with the script and knock Mr. T out. Why not send T out the way Roddy had set up so many rivals when he’d left territories? Put them over with a resounding victory and move on. He didn’t get the sign he was hoping for.
Roddy and T weren’t friendly. That’s never been a secret. But Roddy wasn’t about to mess with the program. “Because here’s the law,” he said. “If you and I had a fuckin’ problem, then [fine]. But in the ring, it’s business. Don’t bring your bullshit in there. Don’t bring your stuff in the ring. That’s cardinal law.” No matter his feelings about the actor, or at least about the actor’s role in the wrestling ring, Roddy wasn’t going to try to settle any personal scores on company time. But he left himself a small opening. “Now, something happens in the ring, that’s a whole different thing.”
It had been a long time since Roddy had trained to box. So he got to work.
“Six weeks before that fight, fuckin’ McMahon,” he sighed. “Next thing I know I’m on a plane to Reno, in a ring with Holyfield, Braxton, Tyrell Biggs, Spinks and somebody I can’t remember. Running five miles a day all of a sudden. Six weeks! And Lou Duva training me.”
Lou Duva had managed and trained numerous champion boxers in his long career. It was his job to put some polish on Roddy’s jabs. So there was Roddy, the mouthiest heel in wrestling at a time when everybody knew who he was, training with some of the greatest boxers in the world, all of whom were black. He had enormous respect for these men, but for the sake of business he’d done his share of racially charged baiting of competitors, even snipping a Mr. T–style mohawk into the hair of the black midget wrestler The Haiti Kid just in advance of WrestleMania 2. He was a good boxer, as wrestlers went, but this was intimidating company.
“Great White Hope!” he said with a self-deprecating snort. He’d taken some lumps for his craft.
—
In the Nassau Coliseum dressing room, WWF officials taped up Roddy’s hands for the match.
“They said, ‘Come here, mister, make a fist.’ They put boxing tape all around my fist instead of wrapping my hand.” Normally, a boxer’s hand is taped across the palm and below the thumb. The bones in the hand come under great pressure during repeated punches and without support can easily break. “You got a boxing glove, you put your hand in, get ‘er deep, and you kinda get ‘er down to fingers, right, and then you curl your fist…” Roddy’s fingers were curled into a fist and then taped, so the boxing glove would cushion his punches, rendering them less potent.
“But I can still take him out,” said Roddy. He was sure he could beat T for real, if only McMahon gave him the nod.
In the end, Roddy took a bump when T threw a roundhouse at him that was supposed to look so devastating that the fight could have been over. T missed the punch by a greater distance than expected and Roddy, forced to sell the shot, became so frustrated he threw his stool at T during an intermission, scraping his leg. The match ended with Roddy body slamming Mr. T, which should have surprised nobody. McMahon surely realized by this point that Roddy’s great drawing power lay in his open-ended brawling finishes, which never gave anyone, even the crowd, the satisfaction of seeing him beaten fair and square.
But it wasn’t the end of the match that changed Roddy’s career. Roddy went against script without even trying, and through his pure dedication to the art of professional wrestling, through perfecting the art of giving the crowds what they wanted, he won them over. In the second round, they began chanting his name.
At some point after the fight, he ran across McMahon, who smiled and said he’d thought Roddy would take out T in the second round. Roddy couldn’t believe his ears; that was exactly what he’d wanted to hear McMahon say before the fight. He just shook his head and grimaced at the lost opportunity.
—
The celebrity count at WrestleMania 2 had again been impressive. But sitting wide-eyed beside Billy Crystal in one of the closest rows to the ring was a man whose time in the spotlight had ended. Cam Connor, Roddy’s teenage friend from Winnipeg, had just retired after nearly a decade in and out of the NHL. He’d spent his final season as an assistant coach on a minor league team. They’d stayed in touch as much as any two constantly travelling athletes could and Roddy had secured him choice seats at Nassau Coliseum.
When Roddy had come into Connecticut to wrestle a few years earlier, he’d tried having Connor paged at the New Haven arena—Connor was playing for the New York Rangers’ minor-league affiliate New Haven Nighthawks. Connor wasn’t there, but Roddy had all the wrestlers sign his stick in the players’ dressing room then tied Connor’s laces into so many knots he’d need to cut them off. They’d gotten together a few times in New York City, and Roddy had taken him out drinking with the other WWF guys. That had made for some punishing mornings, given Connor weighed barely two hundred pounds. But Connor noticed a more serious punishment taking its toll on his friend.
“He was a little man in a big man’s game,” said Connor, “and he paid a price.” When Roddy visited Connor in New York, they’d sit and have a drink, then decide to go out on the town. “He’d go, ‘Could you help me up?’ I’d have to go over, pull him off the couch to get him up. He’d always be hurting.”
Roddy wasn’t just taking abuse in the ring. He was electrocuted around this time in Los Angeles. He slipped on a wet dressing room floor and, reaching out for something to break his fall, inadvertently stuck his finger in an empty light socket.
“I never saw anybody that had a higher threshold for pain than he had,” said Mitch Ackerman, who had been waiting for Roddy outside the LA dressing room that night. “He was taking a really long time, and he finally came out, and he was dragging.”
Roddy and Ackerman had become close friends, and Roddy bunked with him on occasion. Ackerman attended several WrestleManias as his guest, and they often met after matches for dinner.
“I said, ‘You’re alright to eat?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ So we went and had something to eat, but he didn’t seem himself. He had to catch a seven a.m. plane. So I said to him, ‘Let me take you back to your hotel.’” Roddy caught his morning flight, but was so disoriented he got off at the connection in Kansas City and went to the hotel he usually stayed in there. Staff found him wandering the halls and called an ambulance. It took him several days to recover, and for years he experienced numbness on the left side of his body.
“I knew that my body was taking such a beating,” he said, looking back. Roddy was only thirty-two years old when he decided that maybe he’d taxed his body enough. He was about to make the most difficult decision of his young life.
—
WrestleMania’s promise as the “Super Bowl of professional wrestling” was holding up. McMahon couldn’t devise a third installment any more complicated than the second, but he could supersize it. WrestleMania 3 was going to take place in front of more people than all three events in 1986 put together. Hogan would once again take centre stage, and Roddy would do everything he could to steal the show.
Roddy took a break from wrestling for three months after WrestleMania 2. It was his first real time away since he’d begun in 1973, fourteen years earlier. In his absence, his old Twenty-Twos partner from Los Angeles, Adrian Adonis, stepped into the wrestling talk-show breach with a segment called “The Flower Shop” (Jesse Ventura also hosted, briefly, a segment called “The Body Shop”). Adonis, now known as “Adorable” Adrian Adonis and tipping the scales at over three hundred pounds, was working a half-hearted drag gimmick that saw him dressing in floppy sun hats, flowery dresses and comically misapplied make up.
“I loved him,” remembered Roddy. “He would pump iron all day long. He looked horrible. But he could do anything in the ring. Then he’d eat tuna fish and he’d go, ‘How do I look?!’”
At Adonis’s weight, the gimmick went from strange to comically grotesque. Flowers hung off the latticework walls of the Flower Shop set and adorned the microphone. “Welcome to the highest-rated show on television t
oday, ‘The Flower Shop,’” Adonis boasts at the beginning of one episode.
Wrestling’s main audience were middle Americans who exorcised their own misgivings about their rapidly changing world through the spectacle’s weird and wonderful morality plays. Few were weirder or more wonderful than “Adorable” Adrian.
“Even when Adrian was doing ‘The Flower Shop’—he had the Minnie Pearl hat with the price tag, big old dress on—he’s the only guy that can go in drag and it’s not a drag,” said Roddy.
Positioning Roddy against Adonis’s new gimmick solidified what the crowd had decided in New York. After setting the gold standard for heels, Roddy was about to turn babyface.
After his return to the WWF at the end of July, Roddy arrived on the set of “The Flower Shop” in place of the expected guest, Don Muraco. Surprised to see Roddy, Adonis welcomed him like an old friend. Roddy replied in kind, but not for long.
“I would like to say that you have been doing a tremendous job in my absence,” Roddy said, “and I would like to thank you for taking it over. But I am here to take my show back, and the first thing that has to go are these damned flowers.”
Citing a contract that makes the show his for good, Adonis shot back at Roddy: “I’m no summer rerun!” And then Orton appeared in his familiar bodyguard pose—but behind Adonis. His cowboy hat was now pink.
“Hi, Acey,” said Adonis to Orton over his shoulder.
“Peanuts,” Orton said to Roddy. “You were paying me peanuts compared to what Jimmy [Hart] and Adrian are paying me, man. It’s money, plain and simple.”
In the end, Roddy and Adonis agreed to a debate—their flimsy talk-show sets arranged side by side—to determine which show would continue, “The Flower Shop” or “Piper’s Pit.” Roddy’s quick wit served him well when the day came—until it served him too well. His guest, Don Muraco, sensed he was being used as a stooge in a battle of egos and helped Adonis and Orton jump Roddy. Men who were in reality three of Roddy’s closest friends held him down and smeared his face with red make-up while appearing to bang up his knee.
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