Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  Ackerman called the WWF and McMahon allowed the pilot’s “fixed” match to be filmed before an actual WWF card at the LA Sports Arena. When it was announced to the audience that the opening match would be Roddy Piper and Jesse Ventura against the Orient Express, featuring Pat Tanaka and Akio Sato managed by Mr. Fuji (playing Tojo Samurai and Soji Samurai, managed by Mr. Saki), the crowd went wild.

  “Roddy was really close with Mr. Fuji, and he asked me afterwards if we could try to get him a SAG card,” said Ackerman. “I don’t think he ever worked again, but we got him a SAG card.”

  The pilot was picked up to go to series, with a minimum of twelve episodes. To celebrate, Roddy and the rest of the cast, producers and executives gathered at The Palm restaurant.

  “Roddy was always famous for going to The Palm and ordering a seven-pound lobster plus a steak,” said Ackerman. Roddy loved shellfish, but he wasn’t keen on the muck and guts of pulling one apart. “You guys cut up the lobster,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with that.”

  In July, the cast and crew were in LA to start shooting the series. At 4:30 the afternoon before shooting was set to begin, the phone rang. The head of ABC, Bob Iger (now CEO of Disney), had read the scripts and didn’t like them. Shooting was postponed. For several days, the cast and crew stewed, until the network pulled the plug and cancelled the show.

  “We had spent all these weeks preparing. Directors were hired, writers were hired, cast members were hired,” said Ackerman. “The network had to pay us seven million dollars of money that we had already spent—not to do the show. We said, ‘We don’t understand it. At least do one or two shows and see how it comes out. As long as you’re spending that much money.’ But they didn’t. It really was one of the big disappointments of all of our lives, me, Roddy, Jesse.” Ackerman still bemoans the opportunity lost. “I’ve talked to Jesse,” he said. “If that series had gone on and been a success, he may never have been governor of Minnesota.”

  And we both have sometimes wondered, if our dad had enjoyed a few successful seasons with a prime-time television hit, would he—like “Tricky” Rick McDonald—have walked away from wrestling and stayed away?

  —

  By the time Roddy had arrived in the McMahons’ New York promotion, he’d set a high bar for himself. WrestleMania VI in Toronto, April 1, 1990, was as close as he came to not clearing it.

  “Oh, Rod. What were you thinking?” he said, casting his mind back to a meeting in 1990 with McMahon, Pat Patterson and Allen Coage, a wrestler who went by the name Bad News Brown. Coage was from New York City but became a Canadian citizen and adopted Calgary as his hometown. A top judoka (he won gold as a heavyweight for the US at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, and gold at two Pan-Am Games), he became the first African American to win a solo Olympic medal outside of boxing or track and field. He quit amateur judo after the Montreal games, citing his distaste for the sport’s internal politics and found his way into pro wrestling.

  Already into middle age, Coage hadn’t taken the usual track toward wrestling fame. His sense of being an outsider, alone in a world that didn’t give him the respect he felt he deserved, played into his wrestling persona: an angry heel who refused alliances and picked fights with anyone, babyface or heel. The obvious differences aside, he sounded a bit like the guy he was supposed to wrestle in Toronto.

  Maybe it was the parallels between Harlem and rough-and-tumble Glasgow that jumped into Roddy’s mind. Or, given his own background, maybe he couldn’t stomach attitude about growing up hard from a guy who had spent time in the US Olympic program. Either way, Roddy had a problem to solve. How do you play the babyface against a heel who identifies himself as a black tough guy with a racially charged chip on his shoulder without appearing to position yourself against black people generally (especially when your own gimmick is grounded in your own Gaelic and Caucasian identity)? The answer that struck Roddy in that meeting was to paint himself half black, expressing his desire to champion all people. Besides, in his words, Brown “wasn’t a real pizzazz-y pro wrestler.” With numerous promos to do in advance of the match, they’d need something to fight about.

  “Bad News Brown wasn’t real happy with me,” he said, thinking back to the moment he suggested the paintjob. But McMahon responded positively and they went with it. During one promo, Roddy said he could be black and sang Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” then turned his face to the unpainted side and said he could be white and sang Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe through the Tulips” in mock falsetto. Conscious that this whole effort could easily be misinterpreted, he tried to be an equal-opportunity offender. Then he got in the ring and tried a few Michael Jackson dance moves. It didn’t fly.

  Roddy was a great heel because he wasn’t afraid to go to any level to piss everyone off. But how do you piss off a black opponent by painting yourself black without understandably pissing off every other black person watching you? Times were changing, and anything so reminiscent of blackface (and oddly prefigured the Scottish war paint made famous in Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart just a few years later) wasn’t a tool that could be wielded well, no matter Roddy’s intentions. As a heel or babyface, Roddy’s strategies didn’t change much, but this was one way to antagonize his opponent that was unappealing any way you looked at it. When he’d baited the largely Hispanic crowds in LA and they flocked to the Olympic Auditorium to see him take his licks from their hero, Chavo Guerrero, Roddy had been vulnerable. Fans rushed the ring to get at him. They stabbed him and threw cigarette butts at him. Then to their delight Chavo beat him up (sometimes). Playing fast and loose with racial politics wasn’t the same when the crowd was supposed to be on your side.

  Ultimately, the gimmick sucked the life out of the match. Promoted as a battle of two brawlers, it contained little wrestling artistry or ring psychology. The crowd struggled to get into it until both wrestlers were counted out of the ring and took their brawling all the way to the dressing rooms. But Roddy wasn’t content to just walk away from a bad idea. He couldn’t walk away from it even when he tried.

  Vince McMahon had provided him with a black paint that wouldn’t run when he sweated, but would wash off with a particular solution of solvents. Roddy went to the dressing room after the match and started scrubbing the paint. The black didn’t budge. He scrubbed until he was raw. His skin was going to come off before it came clean.

  In one of the cruellest ribs in wrestling history, Andre the Giant and WWF staffer Arnold Skaaland had dumped the solution and replaced it with water.

  “I’m half-black and half-white, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So I went out drinking,” said Roddy. He woke up in his Toronto hotel room the next morning unsure what he’d done the night before. His clothes were on his bed and his door was off its hinges. A cowboy hat he’d never seen before was sitting in the middle of the floor. A giant souvenir he’d bought for one of his daughters was sitting in the corner. He’d woken up in worse circumstances. Roddy packed his bag and headed to the airport, still unable to wash off the paint.

  “I’m half-black with a cowboy hat on, about two hundred and forty-five pounds, a four-foot Mickey Mouse under my right arm and a Halliburton in my left hand,” he said. “Even customs, they just want you to get the fuck outta there.”

  As he boarded his connecting flight to Portland in Chicago, an airline attendant told him he had to check the doll. Whatever contrition he had been feeling melted into petulance. He bought the doll a first-class seat. “Me and Mickey, we drank all the way to Portland, Oregon. It took me three weeks to get that shit off.”

  Roddy wasn’t done with racial politics. It took a lot of nerve to wade back into those waters, but if he was going to draw from his own past as a social outcast to identify with others, he had to drop the funny stuff. Instead, he’d cut to the heart of the matter: wealth, power and privilege. Fortunately, the WWF had a heel whose character positively dripped with these qualities, as well as his recently fired black bodyguard who needed a little help g
etting over.

  —

  Not since “Ace” Orton had watched his back had Roddy been anyone’s idea of a team player. His character didn’t fit neatly into group storylines. He worked best alone. So when “Virgil,” the bodyguard of “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase, turned on his arrogant employer and the two were slated for a master-and-servant showdown at WrestleMania VII in LA, Roddy got the call to tutor the former servant on how to be a solo act.

  On “Piper’s Pit,” DiBiase described the feud from his perspective, saying of Virgil, “He’s a gutter rat, that I took out of the gutter. I put clothes on his back. I put money in his pocket. I made him somebody…Virgil only could respond to orders.”

  Virgil—born Michael Jones—wasn’t a great talker. For McMahon to cast him adrift of a veteran partner like DiBiase was a risk. Putting Roddy in his corner as a sort of friend/mentor/unofficial manager loaned the feud some verbal creativity. In an interview with Virgil and Gene Okerlund, Roddy got started with “a lesson in human rights.”

  Discussing later the WrestleMania VI debacle, Roddy often mentioned how much he respected Nelson Mandela, who had been released in 1990 after serving twenty-seven years of prison time. The fact that Mandela had greeted his guards every morning by shaking their hands and thanking them for their care had mesmerized Roddy. Mentioning Mandela could sound like a wild swing by a man trying to talk his way out of politically incorrect trouble, but his “lesson” for Virgil revealed that he understood more about human rights than people might have guessed.

  “There’s a difference between being a friend and a fool. And I does hate a bully,” he began.

  He asked Virgil to repeat after him: “Roddy, my back’s hurt. Would you mind, friend, shining my boots for me?” Roddy handed him a cloth to hand him back as he delivered his line. Virgil did, and Roddy got down on one knee and shined his shoe.

  “It’s a pleasure, you know why?” Roddy asked him, looking up. “’Cause I’m your friend.”

  The next step of the lesson was for Virgil to say, “Roddy, kiss my feet.” When he did, Roddy jumped in his face and yelled at him, “Stick it in your nose!” and then urged Virgil to slap him in the face.

  They went back and forth like this, becoming ever more heated, until Virgil shouted a forceful NO into the mic.

  “What are you?!” yelled Roddy, like a coach firing up an athlete.

  “A man!” he responded.

  “When I see you, I don’t see a black man, I don’t see a white man, I don’t see a yellow man. I see here a man!” said Roddy.

  At the end he asked Virgil how he felt. “I feel like a million bucks,” replied Virgil.

  Until Roddy’s “lesson,” the racial aspect to the DiBiase-Virgil relationship was mostly implied. But as soon as Roddy opened that box full of trouble, he slammed it shut with his closing line, citing the classic Sidney Poitier–Katherine Hepburn film about race in America.

  “Hey, DiBiase, at WrestleMania, guess who’s coming to dinner?”

  On WrestleMania VII’s massive fifteen-match card, McMahon held back the Virgil-DiBiase fight until the thirteenth slot, treasured real estate for any wrestler, and deeper in the card than he’d placed Roddy since WrestleMania 2.

  Roddy had made lemonade out of the previous year’s lemon, suggesting that even at the age of thirty-six his best moments in the ring might still be ahead of him. In a year, he’d prove it.

  9

  Frats

  Wearing a tuxedo jacket, bow tie and no shirt, with his hair slicked back and dark sunglasses, Rick Martel looked more like a Chippendales dancer than the champion wrestler he’d always been. If the gimmick wasn’t clear to everyone, an enormous button hung from his jacket reading, “Yes, I am a model” and he carried a DDT sprayer–sized cologne dispenser into the ring, with “ARROGANCE” printed down its length. With his genial disposition, good looks and bright smile, Martel was a tough man to dislike, but it was as a heel that “The Model” finished his distinguished wrestling career in 1990. Or so he thought. In early 1991, Vince McMahon asked if he’d wrestle one more time, to put Roddy over.

  “Business-wise, I had no advantage in doing that,” recalled Martel. But he didn’t think about his own business. “I said, ‘For Roddy, whatever I can do, I will.’ I came back for that one show.”

  After WrestleMania VII, Roddy had filmed an episode of Zorro on location in Spain, his second guest spot in the TV series. He was still wrestling part-time, including one run through Ireland and the UK, where he also filmed the video for his upcoming single, “I’m Your Man” and then filmed a fitness video, “Fighting Fit.” For all his extracurricular activity, Roddy’s star still shone bright in the firmament of WWF stars, and McMahon wanted to make a statement with him on television before beginning a new storyline.

  So, in May, 1991, Roddy wrestled Martel—the two had rarely worked against one another, and there was no mention of their youthful history in McMahon and Randy Savage’s commentary that night. This match wasn’t about Roddy’s past. It was about sharpening his wild image for what was yet to come. “Look at those eyes,” commented the “Macho Man” after Roddy had decisively won the match. “Those aren’t the eyes of a sane individual.”

  Rick Martel and Roddy didn’t see much of one another after that match. But whenever they crossed paths, it was immediately like old times, something many of the wrestlers we talked to noted about our dad. A decade could pass, but the warmth of his presence made the years apart dissolve in an instant. “It was a pleasure for me,” Martel reflected on his final match, “to do that for my friend.”

  The match helped set up Roddy’s feud with Ted DiBiase—a carryover from the work with Virgil—but the long game revolved around another old friend of Roddy’s, one of his gang. Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart had wrestled their final match as the Hart Foundation at WrestleMania VII. Despite winning the Intercontinental championship, Hart found himself in a position a lot like Roddy’s during his early years in LA (though on a much grander scale); he had a belt, he could wrestle main events, but he just hadn’t yet cracked that top echelon that drew fanatical audience interest. The following year, Roddy would be enlisted to help get him there. The months in between threatened to be interesting for another reason, one that began in a doctor’s office in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

  —

  In June 1991, the recently retired “Superstar” Billy Graham walked into a Pennsylvania courtroom, leaning on a cane. He had come to testify in the trial of urologist Dr. George Zahorian, indicted in July 1990 on multiple counts of distributing controlled substances—most notably anabolic steroids—to wrestlers and weightlifters. Having recently undergone ankle and hip surgery due to degenerating bone and muscle tissue, Graham was there to speak about the debilitating long-term effects of steroids. The drugs not only helped build more impressive physiques, they sped up recovery times for sore and injured muscles—crucial for aging wrestlers who needed to perform night after night. But as Graham’s crumbling joints attested, steroid use came with a terrible price.

  The Zahorian trial was small news until the doctor’s attorney hinted at the stature of the athletes who’d been buying from him. “[Steroids are] used throughout the WWF,” he said. “Wrestlers either use them or they don’t participate.” Suddenly every news outlet up to the New York Times was reporting on the trial and several WWF wrestlers were subpoenaed to testify.

  WWF headquarters urgently produced a legal argument to keep the most famous of those wrestlers, Hulk Hogan, from having to appear, citing potential personal and professional damage. They got the face of the WWF off the hook, but not Roddy. Compelled to take the stand, he was angry that the WWF didn’t extend the same effort to protecting him as it had Hogan.

  For a few years, Roddy had been calling Zahorian’s office when he was struggling with injuries or severe muscle soreness. He had always worried about being a smaller wrestler in New York, so the bulk added by anabolic steroids was a major plus. Accounts of how the many differe
nt drugs were delivered to wrestlers vary—some say they picked them up at his office in brown paper bags—but it was FedEx records that ultimately connected the doctor and a few patients’ home addresses.

  The day Zahorian’s lawyer let the cat out of the bag about the WWF connection, Roddy was wrestling The Undertaker. The office told him to lose. Roddy hadn’t been pinned since before WrestleMania in 1985. This was a minor match in a small venue—not the sort of situation in which a wrestler of Roddy’s stature would be asked to take a fall. The order aggravated his suspicion that he was being hung out to dry.

  He told The Undertaker to piledrive him on the floor—off the mats. The Undertaker complied, aware that Roddy was known for handling some hard knocks. When The Undertaker picked him up, Roddy manoeuvred his head toward his opponent’s knees, where it would be less protected when he was dropped to the floor. His head struck the concrete and he collapsed, and he was counted out; appearing legitimately injured, he avoided the pin. Later, he had to be helped to the plane that was waiting to fly him to Harrisburg for the next day’s testimony. He was stumbling and seemed to experience multiple seizures on the flight. The next day, he gave his deposition in a fog from the “accident,” exhibiting difficulty focussing on the questions asked, much to the chagrin of the prosecutor. Roddy wasn’t obstructive on the stand, but he wasn’t eager to co-operate. He believed that the doctor had helped a number of wrestlers cope with the very real pressures and damage of their business. Outside the law or not, Zahorian hadn’t preyed on wrestlers any more than the business had.

  “Did you have occasion to call Dr. Zahorian on March 23 of 1990 and ask him for anabolic steroids?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Yes,” Roddy said. “I did.”

  “And what did you ask him for?”