Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  “I asked him for some Winstrol, and I believe some Deca Durabolin, and I’m not sure, maybe an anti-inflammatory, too.”

  “Did you receive the anabolic steroids you ordered from Dr. Zahorian in California?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Zahorian was found guilty on twelve charges, including the illegal distribution of steroids, and then acquitted on two counts of possession with intent to distribute. After the trial, the WWF began testing for steroids. Roddy never failed a test (Vince McMahon later admitted trying steroids himself and said 50 percent of the WWF wrestling stable initially tested positive), but he hated taking these tests. When the office sent someone down to watch him fill a cup for a urine sample, he drove the man’s head into the washroom wall.

  In 1992, a pair of veteran wrestlers—one having left the WWF at the time, the other retired—came forward in the LA Times to point fingers: Billy Jack Haynes at the promoters, Ivan Putski at the hazards of the profession. “Valium, Placidyl, acid, pot, steroids, cocaine, alcohol are all a major part of professional wrestling,” said Billy Jack Haynes. “It’s all brought on by the promoter because he asks too much of you. You’re only a human being, but you’re just a number to him.”

  Ivan Putski: “It’s something you have to do. I didn’t want to take them but I had to because I didn’t want the other guy to look better than me….It’s a vicious circle until you retire.”

  It’s hard to say how much the steroid scandal increased tensions between Roddy and his primary employer. With a sexual abuse scandal erupting (young men who worked around the rings were coming forward with stories of being exploited by office staff), Roddy might actually have been one of McMahon’s most reliable assets. Either way, the boss put a good portion of the business on Roddy’s shoulders—or more accurately, around his waist—in the all-important lead-up to WrestleMania VIII.

  In January 1992 Bret Hart lost his Intercontinental Championship belt to a heel known as The Mountie. The kitschy French Canadian held the title for only a few days before Roddy won it away from him. The ensuing storyline played into the real-life friendship between Bret and Roddy. Far more memorable than how Roddy won the belt was how he would soon lose it. For all the wrestling knowledge he had taken with him to the movies, something he’d learned filming They Live was about to pay dividends in his wrestling life: the high drama of a fight between friends.

  —

  At an out-of-the-way table in a quiet restaurant in Moncton, New Brunswick, Roddy and Bret Hart sat down to a salmon dinner. More than sixteen years earlier, Roddy had separated himself from the wrestling flock as it migrated west from here for the winter to wrestle for Stu Hart and his sons in Calgary. Roddy had gone to LA instead, missing Bret entirely during his formative years. Tonight, he and Stu’s most famous son put their minds to a spectacle that would be worth the wait.

  Almost since that first meeting in Toronto, Roddy had been encouraging Bret and advising him whenever asked. When Bret and Jim Neidhart were not getting the recognition they deserved as a high-energy new tag team, Roddy had told Bret to ask McMahon for more promos; if they didn’t learn how to talk, they’d never convince the WWF brain trust they could play a major role. Bret asked, and they got the chances they needed. They won the tag belts, which was nice, but not considered terribly prestigious. Roddy’s encouragement continued. “It’s a step, it’s a big step,” he’d said. “It’s not a small thing. It’s an accomplishment. You’re one of the main events.”

  “He pushed me to work hard,” said Hart, “to be conscientious of being tag champions, even though it’s not like the big matches.” Bret was getting into those big matches now, solo. In April, he would reclaim his Intercontinental Championship belt from Roddy at WrestleMania VIII. That he was going to take it away from a friend and mentor should have been reassuring. Bret’s stock was rising rapidly in the WWF, and Roddy’s insights had helped him make some of the decisions behind that rise. But Roddy’s participation also worried him. They had to plan this match together, and Bret had been giving it a lot of thought. What if he didn’t like Roddy’s ideas? What if Roddy—whom he loved and respected—envisioned a match that served Roddy’s interests more than Bret’s? Roddy was smart enough to lose a belt and still leave the ring looking like the better man.

  As they tucked into dinner, Bret asked Roddy how he thought the match should go. Roddy spoke for about twenty minutes, explaining the attitude of the match and its shifts in momentum, how it would favour one guy and then the other. Hart never interrupted. He didn’t have to.

  When Roddy was done, he looked expectantly across the table.

  “That’s exactly what I was going to tell you,” said Hart. The only thing he hadn’t imagined was the finish, which Roddy had seen in a match a long time ago and filed in the back of his mind. The reason he hadn’t used it yet was obvious to Bret. It would end with Roddy’s shoulders pinned to the mat, something he hadn’t allowed since before those early debates over his feud with Hogan.

  Roddy knew when he won the belt that one day he’d need to give it up. You can’t lose a belt by being disqualified or counted out while unconscious or bashing someone’s manager over the head with a folding chair, which were Roddy’s usual ways of losing. He didn’t value a WWF title as much as he valued the cachet that came with having never lost by pinfall. Taking the belt while knowing full well that he’d have to let Bret pin him was a gift, “a very generous act,” in Hart’s words.

  “He was still a main character and a valuable character,” said Bret. “But I think he recognized, ‘Here’s an opportunity for me to insert myself and lift this guy up. I can see the future and I know this guy needs someone to elevate him, give him credibility, to give him a little boost right now at an early part of his career.’”

  There was just one thing that would make the fight really pop, Roddy added. He suggested it to Bret, but left it up to him to decide; a guy could get himself in trouble.

  “I can do it,” said Hart. “It’ll look like an accident. No one’s gonna know.”

  Roddy needn’t have worried. Once again, Bret was thinking the exact same thing.

  —

  The promos and interviews ran through late March. “Bret Hart, nice guy. Don’t particularly wanna fight ya,” Roddy says in one. Then he breaks one of his cardinal promo rules: don’t say you’re going to do something to your opponent that you can’t literally do. “But I’m telling you right to your face, I’m gonna rip your throat out if you show up April 5 in the Hoosier Dome.”

  The fighting-friends storyline meant Roddy couldn’t engage in his usual creative character assassination. The reason for the match had to be business, plain and simple. “I feed my kids this way. I made it real clear to ya, I like ya. I like everything about ya. But this is what I do for a living!” Fury and disrespect were Roddy’s baselines. He usually began his promos already in a lather over his opponent. Could the wrath of Rowdy be turned off?

  In an interview with Bret and Gene Okerlund, Roddy shows up wearing pants: “The only time I wear my kilt is when I’m gonna fight.” He and Hart sit down and Roddy tries to explain that he doesn’t want to fight him. He says he’s known Bret so long he might have changed his diapers. Hart briefly but visibly struggles to keep a straight face. Then Roddy says he’s going to back out. “I can’t find it in my heart to go out there and fight you. So I’m not gonna.” Bret makes the point that if Roddy won’t fight, he has to forfeit the belt. Roddy refuses, the temperature rises and the fight is on.

  When the day arrived, the match went back and forth from one’s favour to the other’s. It got dirtier as it progressed. The crowd cheered when, after both went over the ropes and fell on the floor, Roddy held the ropes open for Bret to climb back in. The audience bought into the sportsmanship of the contest; they loved seeing two bad boys play nice out of mutual respect. As they were applauding Roddy’s act of grace, the referee pointed out to Bret that one of his bootlaces was undone. He bent down to tie it up and Roddy
reached around the ref to give him an uppercut. Then he kicked him in the face while he was down. By the time Bret was getting back up blood was running down his face and across the mat. Gore smeared both wrestlers as the street fighting took over. Roddy had made a show of keeping up with Hart’s exalted scientific wrestling skills but suddenly the match was looking like a typical Piper brawl.

  Hart changed the momentum of the match with a series of high-energy moves, ending with a backbreaker. He climbed to the second rope while Roddy lay prone in the middle of the ring.

  “I jumped off and Roddy stuck his foot up and caught me in the jaw with a straight leg,” said Hart. “I took a good bump. But I think I jammed Roddy’s hip. If you ever watch it, you can see Roddy grab his hip right away.”

  Genuinely smarting, Roddy shoved Hart at the referee, knocking him temporarily out of action. Roddy left the ring and returned with the timekeeper’s bell. Holding it above Hart’s head, he scanned the audience, picking up on their disapproval, encouraging their feedback. Never mind sportsmanship, this was the old Rowdy Roddy Piper, reaching into his bag of dirty tricks, heedless of the damage he’d cause his friend in the name of victory. He waited, let the crowd give voice to what they were feeling, that two friends should have an honest match. “Don’t do it, Roddy!” people screamed. Roddy was more of a babyface at the time than Bret, so as he looked over the crowd, their pleading grew louder. He tossed the bell out of the ring and the crowd cheered. Of course, the brawler’s concession to grace was his fatal mistake.

  Roddy next applied a move that had rarely failed him, his signature finisher, a sleeper hold in the middle of the ring. Hart had nowhere to go and was too badly beaten up to believably turn the match’s momentum again. But then, even as he faded in Roddy’s grip, Hart inched them both toward a corner post. In a last-ditch burst of energy, he ran his feet up the post and flipped over Roddy’s head, crashing them both to the mat and turning Roddy’s sleeper into a pin of his own shoulders. The match was over.

  Still playing with the crowd’s desire, Roddy placed the belt around Bret’s waist and raised his friend’s bloodied hand, then helped him stumble out of the ring and back to the dressing room. The match and the narrative around it were a resounding success. But the storytelling wasn’t over.

  Behind closed doors, Bret straightened up, and in front of their peers, he shoved Roddy. He yelled at him for being too aggressive, too reckless, kicking him in the forehead and breaking his brow open. Before their good sportsmanship in the ring could degrade into an old fashioned punch-up in the dressing room, Jay Strongbow grabbed Hart by the arm and pulled him away.

  “You got some fuckin’ problem? Let’s settle it right here!” Roddy yelled back.

  After several minutes of shouting and threatening, the other wrestlers calmed them down. Roddy’s temper lowered, and he apologized. It was an accident; he would never have cut Bret open on purpose. The matter seemed settled. The others left them.

  Roddy and Bret sat down. They looked at each other. As they made certain they were alone, smiles crept onto their faces. They burst out laughing.

  “It was a little drama for everybody in the back,” said Hart. The fight in the dressing room had an important purpose. “We went to great lengths to make it look like it was real”—first the cut, and then the argument backstage.

  “Colour”—intentionally causing yourself to bleed in the ring—was forbidden. The WWF wanted to keep its product family-friendly, and in the midst of AIDS paranoia the transmission of a blood-borne illness between competitors was potentially a major legal liability (Abdullah the Butcher was successfully sued after infecting another wrestler with hepatitis C in 2007, after cutting himself and his opponent with the same blade). “Vince asked me, ‘Was that on purpose or an accident?’ I said, ‘He kicked me and it busted my forehead open.’ I had a little tiny cut about an inch long on my eyebrow, and he believed me,” Hart said.

  The other wrestlers had left the simmering friends to watch the next bout, a heavyweight title match between Randy Savage and Ric Flair. They were either inspired after seeing the bloody mess left by Roddy and Bret, or they’d had the same idea. Where Hart had been as discreet as possible in cutting himself with a small blade (in front of sixty thousand pairs of eyes), Flair cut himself in full view of the cameras. McMahon fined him and Savage five hundred dollars each.

  “Roddy’s always told me that it was his favourite match of all time,” said Hart. “I love the story. I love the match. I love the intensity of it.” The psychology of the match had brought out the best in both their characters while still transferring the belt. It accomplished another goal: raising Hart’s stock with the audience. “Roddy was one of the only guys, maybe the only guy, that comes to mind from that generation that reached down and grabbed my hand and said I’m going to help pull you up.” Roddy hadn’t known when he’d planned the match that it would become a classic. He’d just wanted to pay forward the favour Andre the Giant had once done for him. “A huge leap in my stock,” said Hart, “and he did it all for nothing where he was concerned. Just for being a guy who wanted to help.”

  —

  Looking to stay sharp on the mats while spending many of his days on movie sets, Roddy called Gene LeBell. He was going to visit the dojo. LeBell recalled, “Roddy wants to work out. He says, ‘I don’t have a gi,’ which is the uniform. I say, ‘I’ll give you a uniform. I got a size six uniform, brand new, and you can wear it.’ He says, ‘That sounds good, but let’s have some fun.’” Roddy didn’t explain any further.

  A half dozen judo students were working out when Roddy arrived. They weren’t wrestling fans and didn’t recognize him, even in his kilt and carting his bagpipes.

  “I want to fight!” Roddy said in his best Scottish brogue. “I want to wrestle!”

  The students looked on, wondering who the crazy guy was. Roddy produced a photo of a highland games competitor tossing a caber. “This is my last opponent!” he said of the twenty foot wooden pole. “I wanna get on the mat and wrestle.” LeBell took training his students very seriously, but this was too rich to shut down.

  “You gotta take your shoes off,” Gene said, playing along.

  Roddy kicked off his sandals and stepped on the mat.

  “Wait a second,” said LeBell. The students in their gis looked on, bewildered that this Scottish madman hasn’t been shown the door. “You’re not going to wrestle in that.”

  “That’s what we do,” insisted Roddy, and he showed the picture of the caber toss again to the students. “This is my last opponent. He weighs two thousand pounds and I threw him down!”

  LeBell offered him a gi to wear, but Roddy turned his nose up at the idea. “What’s a gi?! This is a kilt, and this is what I wrestle in.”

  LeBell turned to one of his black belts. “Ask him if he’s got anything under the kilt.”

  “You do it!” replied the student.

  Roddy finally agreed to put on the gi and then drove the students to distraction by consistently besting them on the mats. LeBell didn’t say a word. After changing back into his kilt, Roddy marched back into the gym from the change room and said, “When you really enjoy yourself, you gotta give them a goodbye.” He played the bagpipes as a thank you to the perplexed judokas.

  “That guy’s a great wrestler,” they said when Roddy was gone, “but he’s strange.”

  LeBell looked unfazed by the visit. “I didn’t see anything strange about him.”

  —

  As January 1993 passed, one of wrestling’s most important names faded into history. Andre the Giant died in his native France. The tally of Roddy’s lost friends continued to grow. With each fallen wrestler, he had one more reason to get away from wrestling and stay away.

  Two years earlier, Roddy had met a British talent manager at a reception in Los Angeles. Freya Miller said that next time Roddy was in the UK she would arrange some non-wrestling business for him. Included in that was her promise of a recording deal. She was the on
e who convinced Sony to take a chance on recording Roddy’s single, “I’m Your Man.”

  When Roddy went to London for SummerSlam in 1992 Miller continued making good on her promises. He didn’t wrestle, but played “Scotland the Brave” with the Balmoral Highlanders pipe band before Bret Hart’s Intercontinental title match against English wrestler Davey Boy Smith—and he extended his stay for the release of the single, which made a brief appearance on the UK and Irish music charts.

  “In Ireland they loved Roddy,” remembered Miller. “North and south. We went there when we were promoting the record. Roddy wanted to go out and have a few drinks. I lost him completely one night—he was out drinking with a leprechaun.” Miller explained that she was tired and didn’t feel up to drinks, so Roddy offered to take out their diminutive driver, whom he’d taken to calling his leprechaun. “I said, ‘Right, but don’t come back late.’ About seven o’clock in the morning, the two of them come back, and he’s holding the leprechaun under his arm….He couldn’t drive. The leprechaun couldn’t even remember where he’d left the car.”

  Miller—whom Roddy took to calling “Buttons” and who responded by calling him “Grumps”—estimates she arranged roles in a dozen movies for Roddy during the nineties. It was a prolific time for his acting career. He started taking classes again with another Hollywood acting coach, Ivana Chubbuck, determined to hone his craft.

  Roddy had worked with many tough guys, but few as truly deadly as Japanese martial artist and actor Sonny Chiba. The film star had been working on his English in hopes of breaking into American films. “He was right there,” said Roddy, “the words just couldn’t come.” Casting Roddy alongside Chiba in Resort to Kill (released on video as Immortal Combat) gave the film and its action star a practiced actor who could also keep up physically with Chiba—and his posse of ninjas.

  “Real-deal ninjas,” said Roddy. “No bullshit. I watched these guys, they did a scene, real-deal samurai swords, Sonny fighting them. These guys”—he mimicked the sound of blades slicing through the air in front of his face—“that close, a minute and a half, full bore. Holy cow, if Sonny Chiba had a broomstick in his hand, I’d fuckin’ run.”