“Roddy had been gone for a while at that point—it had been two years. The Jim Bakker thing was hot, and we were looking for the perfect guest for Brother Love for WrestleMania,” remembered Bruce Prichard. “Vince calls me into his office one day, and he says ‘I’m not going to do Brother Love at WrestleMania,’ which broke my heart. But he says, ‘I’ve got another idea. What if I had the three biggest mouths out there? What if I had you and Morton Downey Jr.’—and I’m thinking wow, because Morton Downey Jr. was the hottest thing on TV at the time—’But wait,’ he says. ‘And what if the biggest mouth was the host—we bring back “Piper’s Pit” for one night?’”
Prichard thought, “Holy shit, I get to work with Roddy!” He had missed out on Roddy’s first run in the WWF by just a few months. When Vince told him to go meet Roddy and sell him on this idea, maybe do a little test run to see if they had chemistry, Prichard got worried. He didn’t know Roddy personally. His brother, Tom, had gotten to know him a little in Charlotte, but Tom’s crazy stories about his encounters with the wrestler only made Piper’s legend more intimidating.
“Aw, you’ll all get along fine,” said McMahon. He’d booked Roddy for a show in Denver, and Prichard flew out to meet his new colleague. When Roddy arrived at the arena they chatted for a few minutes, and Prichard explained the Brother Love segment he wanted to do with him. He tried to break the ice with something he’d become good at and was pretty proud of, his imitation of Roddy.
“I had this whole scenario worked out where I would interview him but I would answer in his voice with his kind of stuff while he sits there with his thumb up his ass in the ring. And I’m pitching this idea to him, and I’m looking at him, and he’s just kind of smiling.” He didn’t know Roddy hated to be mimicked.
Roddy didn’t just smile at Prichard. He petted him. It was an old habit. If you were talking to Roddy and he liked you he would absent-mindedly put a hand on your arm or your shoulders and gently pat, like you were a cat gazing up at him in hopes of a treat. The impulse was meant to be reassuring, but it could be intimidating instead. Roddy’s hand on your arm made you think very carefully about what you said next.
“So really cool, okay, so you’re gonna do that. And I’m doing what?” asked Roddy, staring at him. “I’m just…? I’m just watching. Okay, okay. Go ahead.”
A little spooked, Prichard tried to explain further before Roddy interjected.
“Ya know, let’s just go out there and have some fun,” said Roddy. “You do your thing; I’ll do my thing. Let’s just see what happens.”
Roddy and Prichard worked out a finish for the segment, but they left it up in the air how exactly they’d get there. They got in the ring and Prichard, in his glaring white suit and red makeup, his hair slicked back, started asking Roddy questions. Roddy tried to answer but each time, Brother Love pulled the microphone away and answered the question himself, in a full-out imitation of Roddy.
“And right in the middle of the damn thing,” said Prichard, “the third time I did that, he hauls off and knocked the living fuck out of me.” He laughed to remember it, but he wasn’t laughing at the time. “I caught myself on the second rope, and I’m looking up at him, and he’s smiling. I was pissed.” Prichard got back on his feet and came back with more questions and they finished the segment. Afraid Roddy had thought the idea was terrible all along and had just used the segment to tell Prichard to get lost, he approached Roddy backstage.
“I’m thinking he’s gonna just be a raving maniac,” said Prichard. “And instead he gives me a big hug, and he goes, ‘I thought that was great!’”
The Denver show warmed up the duo for the in-ring return of “Piper’s Pit” at WrestleMania V in Atlantic City. There, Brother Love appeared in a kilt, held up with bright white suspenders, but the segment quickly turned into a confrontation between Roddy and the second guest, Downey. Roddy asked the talk-show host repeatedly to stop blowing smoke in his face, then when he kept doing it, blasted him with a fire extinguisher. The boss was back—again.
McMahon booked Roddy to do match commentary through autumn of that year. After WrestleMania he sent Prichard to meet with Roddy and start planning more segments and storylines.
“Vince had a love/hate relationship with Roddy,” explained Prichard. “While he loved his talent and appreciated him, sometimes Roddy could be a little difficult to work with. But to me, he was never any more difficult to work with than anybody else.” In Prichard’s experience, if you told Roddy straight up that an idea wouldn’t work, he’d respect your opinion and move on. Following up on McMahon’s order, Prichard was about to get a whole lot of that experience.
He called Roddy, who was staying at the Westin Hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, to meet for a drink. Roddy asked him to come to the hotel.
“I get there and he’s in his jammies, and he doesn’t want to go out. He says, ‘Why don’t you just come up to the room. I’ve taken the liberty to order some refreshments.’
“I go up to his room and he’s got a case of beer—light beer—on ice, and he’s got shots, and about a dozen hits of a white substance, lined up,” recalled Prichard.
“We can always get more, but this should get us started,” said Roddy.
Wide-eyed, Prichard suggested they just smoke a joint to break the ice. Marijuana helped Roddy with his aches and pains, not to mention anxieties, so he gladly agreed.
“I break out what I had, and he looks at me and kind of pets me, ‘Son, you go ahead and put that away. You save that for when there’s nothing else in the world to light up. I visited the old man on the hill.’ Roddy always had the best pot. So we sat there. I smoked this shit with him, and did shots, and I looked at him and said, ‘What is this?’ He goes, ‘Aw, it’s nothing that’ll kill ya, son, just go ahead. Cheers!’
They drank and smoked and got obliterated. The time together wasn’t wasted, though. Roddy didn’t easily trust his bosses or the people who worked for them, and the long day and night in the hotel room with Prichard helped him get over those reservations. “I think he was used to getting the con and the bullshit and people trying to swerve him,” said Prichard. “We just slowly built up that trust, and built up that relationship.” Roddy even coaxed him into the Gold’s Gym in Stamford, where the wrestlers went. Prichard was a big man, but he didn’t possess the kind of physique typical of McMahon’s top talent. Roddy got him up at five a.m. to work out. “He was the only person ever to get me to where I could actually do chin-ups.”
That fall, Roddy made several appearances on “The Brother Love Show,” setting up a feud with “Ravishing” Rick Rude and introducing his Survivor Series’ team Roddy’s Rowdies, which included the Bushwhackers and Jimmy Snuka (who was still wary around a semi-conciliatory Roddy). Roddy even took over one segment, leading Prichard, bound and gagged, onto the set with a rope, a sheet thrown over him and a diaper on.
“Doing anything with that maniac was fun,” said Prichard. “He loved it when you threw shit at him that he didn’t expect, because you knew you were getting it back…that was the beauty of working with him….I never was quite sure what he was going to hit me with.”
Sometimes literally. And sometimes Roddy didn’t pull his punches, which wasn’t helping with his ongoing effort to make a living outside of wrestling.
—
One of the less-helpful screen roles Roddy took was that of a wrestler-turned-henchman on The Love Boat. The movie-length special, “A Valentine Voyage,” was filmed in June 1989. It was a payday on a popular television franchise, but playing a thug named Maurice “The Beast” Steiner wasn’t going to improve anyone’s sense of Roddy Piper as an actor. The role exemplified the sort of typecasting that hindered his career.
“A man can drink a lot on a boat,” Roddy said, recalling the weeks at sea, shooting the episode. One night he was wandering the ship and happened upon a dance hall. A live band was performing and, with a few drinks warming his belly, Roddy decided to check it out. As he was walking in, so
meone took exception to him.
“I don’t know what I did wrong. I kinda walked in and I’m looking—all of a sudden, boom, somebody kicks me in the ass. I turn around. Seriously?! I don’t know if I got in front of him or something. But I didn’t care.”
Roddy dragged the hapless passenger outside to the railing. “This is nighttime, and I said to him, ‘You’re going to apologize to me, and if I don’t like it, I’m throwing you overboard.’”
Roddy didn’t realize it, but one person was watching closely—the show’s director of photography.
Facing the cold black waters several storeys below, the offender apologized.
“Ain’t good enough,” said Roddy. He hiked him up the railing and the apologies piled up quickly. Roddy wasn’t trying to fake him out. But he hadn’t considered that if he did toss the guy over to teach him a lesson, the ship couldn’t just turn around and collect the man from the ocean. “Woulda killed him.”
He eventually let the man walk away.
“The next morning I’m in the sauna, trying to get some of it out. Aaron Spelling comes into the sauna with his clothes on. ‘Hello, Roddy.’” One of the biggest producers in Hollywood, fully dressed, was visiting him in the sauna. This could only mean trouble.
“’So, were you going to throw somebody overboard last night?’” Roddy recalled him saying.
“Yeah…yeah, I was.”
Spelling asked if he realized it would have taken a mile just to stop the ship, and even then the man would have been impossible to find in the dark, if he hadn’t already drowned.
“No,” answered Roddy. “But I’ll tell you something. He kicked me in the ass.”
“What?”
“He kicked me in the ass.” Spelling let the matter drop. Roddy went home after the filming ended.
In August that year, Colt was born. Roddy now had two daughters and a son, the same family structure he’d grown up in. The parallels didn’t end there. Not only had Roddy and Kitty decided to give their son his paternal grandfather’s middle name, Baird, Colt was born on August 5, Stanley Toombs’ birthday.
We rarely saw that side of the family, and our father was always anxious when we did talk to them. But whatever bad blood lingered between Roddy and his father, Roddy respected the institution of family too much to break the tradition of passing down family names. Even if affection had eluded them, he found it in himself to respect what Stanley had endured to provide for his family.
—
Twenty-nine-year-old Len Denton began booking in Portland for promoter Don Owen in 1987. Owen hadn’t had a strong run of sell-outs since Roddy left for Charlotte in 1980 (where he’d first met Denton, aka “The Grappler”). McMahon had stayed away from Portland for longer than most parts of the country out of respect for his father’s long-time friendship with the Oregon promoter, but the WWF soon encroached on the old NWA territories, so it was tough to draw wrestling fans to anything less sensational than the New York–based big league.
“Don’s a big ol’ bastard,” said Denton, his Texan twang still evident nearly three decades after moving to the Pacific Northwest. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved him to death. But he’d just get under your skin. ‘Hey, you sawed-off Texan, I thought everything was big in Texas. You got this big reputation as a booker. Harley Race taught you and all this. How come you can’t sell out the Sports Arena?’ I go, ‘Damn, it hasn’t been sold out in ten years.’”
Like most of the promotions around the continent, Owen’s promotion had its own weekly television show, which set up storylines developed at the live shows around Oregon through the rest of the week. So I say, ‘Tell you what’—’cause he and his son Barry would monitor everything I did on TV—I said, ‘You let me run the TV show for six weeks and do whatever angles I want to, and if I don’t sell it out…I tell you what, I’ll shake your hand and go back to Texas where I belong.’”
It was a deal. Denton not only sold out the Portland Sports Arena, they turned away six hundred fans at the door. Afterwards, Denton figured he was due an extra cut. Owen handed him his regular pay only. “I go, ‘You owe me at least another grand, come on. There were three thousand people here.’ He says, ‘You take that money and be happy with it or kiss my ass.’ I said, ‘You know what, Don, that’s fine if that’s what you want to do. But I’ll get my money one way or the other.’”
A few weeks later, Owen sent Denton to wrestle a three-week tour in Japan, including a world title match against Tatsumi Fujinami. “I called my lady three times a day from Tokyo on Owen’s bill.” When Denton got back to Portland, Owen told him to meet him for lunch. Denton arrived at the restaurant to find him sitting with the phone bill in his hand. Also at the table were his son Barry and Roddy. Seeing him here with a furious Don Owen, Denton knew he was about to get fired.
“Don starts saying, ‘Let me tell you something, Roddy Piper’s taking your place. You think you’re funny, you sawed-off Texan? You think you got even with me, huh? Your ass is fired.’ I go, ‘All right.’ I start to leave and he goes, ‘No, sit down, you can eat lunch with us.’”
Lunch wasn’t a courtesy. It was a chance to continue lambasting Denton for his act of subterfuge. He remembered it going something like this:
“Roddy’s going to take your place, Roddy’s a better booker. He looks better than you, he’s more popular than you—”
“You guys, stop,” said Roddy. “Don, you know I’m working for Vince. I got a contract. You know I’m doing movies in Hollywood. You know I got a lot of irons in the fire and tons of obligations, and you want me to be a booker here and run this TV show?” Roddy was willing to moonlight for Owen. So long as he kept a low profile, McMahon would turn a blind eye to the side work, not least because Roddy was wrestling only part-time for the WWF. But Roddy couldn’t do all Owen wanted by himself. He told the promoter that he needed an assistant.
Like a man attending his own funeral, Denton finished lunch as Roddy worked out his deal to take over his job.
“Good,” said Owen. An assistant made sense. And they agreed on the assistant’s pay.
“I’d like to hire Len Denton.”
“Son of a bitch,” muttered Owen, realizing Roddy had pulled a fast one on him.
“That’s Roddy Piper,” mused Denton. “I loved him to death. He didn’t need that job. But he made Don keep me on. We did good houses after that for years.”
By the end of 1992, Don Owen had sold Pacific Northwest Wrestling and retired. At a Christmas farewell in the Crow’s Nest, Roddy joined the festivities to honour Owen, who was led onto the stage by Denton. “The Grappler” had already started celebrating, and after he popped a bottle of bubbly, he leaned into Roddy’s microphone and launched into a breathless plug for a venture that would pay his bills in lieu of Portland Wrestling.
“Hey, this is the festive season. Everybody knows it!” yelled Denton.
“Get out of here,” Owen grumbled from behind his scene-stealing assistant booker.
“It’s just like at Piper’s Pit Stop transmission centre, 156 and Division, brother!” continued Denton. “We’re always having a good time. And we’ll treat you so many ways, you’re bound to like one of ‘em!”
With Portland wrestling changing hands, Denton had figured he was headed back to Texas. Then Roddy approached him with an alternative. He was making a lot of money and wanted to invest some of it in a small business. He trusted Denton and knew Denton had a young family that might not hold together if he hit the road again, living out of his car on a wrestling circuit in whatever part of the country wanted him. So Roddy told him to pick a small business that he’d like to run and let him know what it would cost.
Denton had been doing commercials for a local transmission shop and saw the money was pretty good, so he suggested they open one of those. They shook hands on a deal to co-own the venture. Roddy paid for it and Denton would run it. “I said, ‘Roddy, I promise you one thing, I won’t take off until I have this place paid for if you invest your money
in it.’” He didn’t take a day off for two years. Finally, he asked Roddy if he could take a break.
“He says, ‘Okay, I’ll handle it. How long you going?’ I said five days.”
Every morning, the shop put a call in to its local supplier for auto parts. The guy who made the parts run called Denton during his vacation. “’Lenny, you need to get home. Roddy’s sending cabs to get parts.’ I said, ‘What?!’ You had to be there at eight forty-five in the morning to call them in so the shit comes on time. Roddy’d get there at nine or ten, he done miss it. ‘Send a cab to get it.’ He was doing it like he was at the five-star places. This is a podunk, trying-to-make-it transmission shop, friend!”
Denton’s vacation lasted three days.
—
Mitch Ackerman continued to help Roddy find film and television work. But with all the wrestling and “Piper’s Pits” he was doing, his public image was stuck firmly to his wrestling roots.
One project that held some promise was a Disney-backed buddy-cop TV series with Jesse Ventura called Tag Team. They’d play wrestlers—“Tricky” Rick McDonald and Bobby “The Body” Youngblood—who are blackballed after refusing, of all things, to fix a match. Breaking up a robbery in a grocery store inspires the unemployed wrestlers, and they enroll in the police academy. Ventura was signed already, and the network expected to pair him with an actor. Ackerman caught wind of this and went to the casting director and creator. “I’ve got a wrestler who’s an actor who’d be great for this,” he said. They agreed to meet Roddy, liked him and gave him the part.
Before filming the pilot Roddy went for his insurance physical. The doctor had a grip-testing gadget. “It’s an old thing that you squeezed and a needle went up and it told you how much strength you had,” Ackerman said. “Roddy broke it.” Hollywood doctors hadn’t seen many wrestlers yet.
Rowdy Page 26