None of the ninjas spoke English, but one realized he and Roddy shared an interest.
Roddy was working out on a rowing machine one day when Chiba approached and offered to share some tea. They settled in for a cup and a few of the ninjas joined them. Eventually Chiba and the ninjas left, except one. “I spoke zero ninja. Zero. He spoke zero wrestler, zero English; me, zero Japanese.” Roddy tried to communicate that he was going back to the hotel to smoke a joint.
“He figured it out and he came to my room.” Roddy had security watching outside his door, making sure nobody bothered them, and ready to give a head’s up if anyone important approached.
“We start to smoke a joint, you know. Going on maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, back and forth, you know, and we’re talking. He’s going to have a drink of beer and I’m having a Coke, and we’re talking about the difference between Japan and America. And about thirty minutes in I’m talking to him about some stuff I got, whatever was going on. And all of a sudden out of the clear blue sky he goes, ‘Why are understanding each other?’ And then we couldn’t understand each other.” However they had been able to communicate—if in fact the joint hadn’t just relaxed the martial artist enough to try his English—the experience had made Roddy a friend. “He had my back after that.”
Younger than the reigning action heroes, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Roddy was in a good spot, demographically, to take the next step in his acting career. “He was in great shape and he looked good and everything was right,” said Miller. But the next step collected dust. “We’d have a really good run with films, and then he’d go back and do wrestling and then we’d be back to square one with the films,” said Miller, leaving Roddy unable to shake the wrestler-slash-actor label.
Miller thought Roddy was taking career advice from too many wrestling fans who wanted him to keep wrestling without concern for his best interests. But those people were frustrated that he wasn’t finding roles with more established filmmakers, which in turn forced his lucrative returns to wrestling.
He loved to work and, rather than idly wait for the perfect project, he would take what was in front of him, like his guest spots on the TV show Highlander (filming his final scene with the star of the show, Adrian Paul, Roddy broke Paul’s sword and badly cut the actor’s finger—or as Roddy put it, “cut his finger off with a sword”). Most importantly, he couldn’t forget what it was like as a kid to scramble for his next meal. Income, no matter the source, was a greater investment in his family’s security than no income. Sometimes, it was as simple as that.
—
Bret Hart was right about Roddy’s hip.
“What finished it was the match with Bret,” Roddy said. “He came off that turnbuckle and I put my foot up. You can see me grab my hip.”
The pain had become so intense that during the subsequent filming of a movie called Marked Man he needed to support the joint to be able to move properly on set. “I literally took white jock tape, tried to tape my leg to my body. The pain…un-fuckin’-believable.”
In 1994, Roddy scheduled a titanium hip replacement. He allowed himself enough time for something more important to happen first. Kitty was pregnant with their fourth child. Falon was born December 1, giving Roddy a perfect record of attendance at his children’s births. But he couldn’t stay in Portland long. He had the surgery two days later in Los Angeles.
While Roddy was recovering in the hospital, two rehabilitation therapists entered his room, a younger and an older one. “One said, ‘You’re Roddy Piper. I hated you my whole life.’” The physiotherapist might have meant it as a compliment, but Roddy was in no mood. He grabbed his lunch plate and threw it toward the younger man’s head. The plate continued out the door and crashed loudly in the hall. The physiotherapists got out of the room.
“The doctor comes in, ‘What the fuck?’ The guy came back in, the older guy, and I said, ‘Hey, bud, let it go. Fuck it, come on.’” Ground rules established, Roddy went ahead with his physio. It didn’t last long. “I was the fastest guy ever to get out of a hospital.”
For all of Roddy’s strengths, his record for hiring personal assistants was questionable. Most were aspiring wrestlers for whom life with Roddy went more or less wrong. His assistant at the time joined him for the trip home—less than a week after the surgery.
“We’re on first class Alaska Airlines, LA to Portland, Oregon, to get my ass home. I got the crutches, hips. He starts drinking.” By the time the plane began its descent, the assistant was drunk enough to stand up and start pulling their bags out of the overhead compartment before they were on the ground.
“Sir, sir, sir…” The flight attendants begged him to close the compartment doors and sit down. Roddy grabbed his tie and pulled him into his seat.
Upon landing Roddy awkwardly took their bags and hobbled to an escalator himself. He was furious. The assistant followed. “He tumbled all the fuckin’ way down to the bottom of the escalator. I’m so fuckin’ mad. I get to the bottom, I got the crutch and I’m stabbing it in his fuckin neck. ‘You stupid, fuckin’…Get up, you buffoon!’”
When Roddy realized someone was calling the police, he hobbled out the door of the Portland airport, hailed a cab and went home, leaving the assistant to sober up and find his own way to the house, nearly an hour outside the city.
—
Roddy was in his forties now, and apparently middle age looked good on him.
WWF president Gorilla Monsoon was getting over an injury, so Roddy was brought in as acting president (mostly just a reason for him to return to the fold for a while). When early in 1996 wrestler Razor Ramon (Scott Hall) got into a contract dispute with McMahon, Roddy stepped into his role in an upcoming storyline. The pending feud was an important one, as it was crucial to setting up WrestleMania XII. It started, as Roddy’s feuds usually did, when he was in front of a microphone.
A younger wrestler named Goldust (Dustin Rhodes, son of wrestler Dusty Rhodes, working a gold-painted transvestite gimmick far more lascivious than anything wrestling had seen in a very long time) became smitten with Roddy’s new-found authority. When Roddy refused his interest, Goldust slapped him in the ring. The feud was on, but its culmination at WrestleMania wasn’t going to be a simple affair. Fans wouldn’t even see the first half of the match live.
The Hollywood Backlot Brawl was exactly what it sounds like: a fight in a parking lot. Three weeks before WrestleMania, with a few dozen Disney employees watching, Roddy waited behind a building at the Disney Studios in Burbank, gripping a baseball bat. In jeans and a black leather jacket, he looked the picture of straight, red-blooded American self-assuredness. In fact, he was anything but sure on his feet. He’d recently broken both feet in multiple places while jumping off a lifeguard stand for a TV movie called Daytona Beach.
When Goldust pulled up in a gold-painted Cadillac, Roddy smashed its windows and dragged him out of the car. He landed a pair of audible punches to Rhodes’s bleeding scalp and immediately flexed his right hand in pain. The second punch had broken a knuckle.
Goldust got the upper hand long enough to jump back in the car. He accelerated straight at Roddy. Standing in front of a dumpster with the bat, Roddy watched Goldust’s eyes widen in disbelief. Roddy was supposed to be getting out of the way. As the car slammed into the dumpster, he jumped just high enough to land on the Cadillac’s hood. The Disney people looked on in shock. They couldn’t imagine why Roddy had let himself get grazed by a car, but he was just returning a favour.
Before the shoot began, Roddy had handed six-year-old Colt off to a senior member of the WWF office who was on location. The executive walked the child to a chair in front of several monitors from which they could watch the proceedings together. The executive was Vince McMahon. For all the friction between him and Roddy, McMahon had offered to babysit. The wrestler returned the favour by taking a bump from a gold-painted Cadillac—an outrageous idea that Roddy knew full well would keep tongues wagging about the match for years.
&n
bsp; Roddy rolled off the car. Goldust sped away. The titanium hip groaned from the impact. He climbed into a white Ford Bronco and tore away in pursuit. Using footage from the actual OJ Simpson highway chase—in which Simpson tore through Los Angeles in a white Bronco—WWF producers pieced together a chase scene that would appear on-screen at Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim during WrestleMania XII, followed seamlessly by Roddy chasing Goldust through the arena to finish the fight in the ring, without a referee. No one would know the parking lot scene had taken place nearly a month earlier.
After shooting the backlot scene, Roddy came up to Colt. “Hey, champ. How are you?” he asked. “Do you need a drink? Do you need anything?” Dripping blood, his own and Goldust’s, with a broken hand and a throbbing hip, he was worried first and foremost about whether his son wanted a juice box.
The storyline of the match meant also shooting a scene in which the Bronco catches up to the Cadillac behind the Anaheim arena. Roddy had taken the extra hit for the match, but he took it easy on the Bronco. Instead of ramming the Cadillac straight on, he ran a corner of the front bumper along the Cadillac’s length, doing more damage to the car than the truck. He liked the Bronco, and after WrestleMania was over he asked McMahon if he had any plans for it. He didn’t. Roddy drove it home to Portland, where he’d treasure the clunker for years.
Because he also needed to wrestle Ramon’s scheduled matches ahead of WrestleMania, Roddy didn’t put his injured right hand in a cast. The impact had sunk the third knuckle a half inch below his others, which is where it stayed for the rest of his life.
The Backlot Brawl was one of the earliest appearances of that leather jacket, which over the years would become as much a part of Roddy’s image as his kilt. The coat wasn’t as it seemed. Lined with Kevlar, it weighed as much as a small child (when we were acting up he’d put it over our shoulders as a “favour,” effectively immobilizing us). Ever nervous about getting stabbed, he was always relieved to have it on in public. Not only was it nearly impenetrable, it hid a multitude of zippered compartments—one for his money, his passport, his knife, his keys, his gun (back when he carried one). Living on the road, wrestlers knew the value of being able to get out of someplace quickly. With that jacket fully loaded, if worse came to worse he could throw it on and go.
—
After WrestleMania, Roddy went far afield to film a movie called Last to Surrender. Filming in Indonesia meant facing one of his least favourite things: snakes. In a dressing room, he’d once pulled a gun on Jake “The Snake” Roberts when Randy Savage told Jake that Roddy loved snakes and he should introduce Roddy to his python, Damien. When Roddy looked up to see the snake a foot away from his face, he jumped off his seat and grabbed his handgun out of his Halliburton. Roberts’ python made many of the other wrestlers nervous as well, though it wasn’t really big enough to harm most of those men. The same couldn’t be said about the cobra Roddy met in Indonesia.
The shoot in Indonesia was all creatures and none of the creature comforts Roddy was accustomed to. He almost drowned in a scene shot in a river—a river filled with dead rats. At dinner one evening, someone brought a monkey. Roddy might have got a kick out of that one, if they hadn’t stuck it through a hole in the middle of the table, cut off the top of its skull and started serving its brain. “I don’t care how tough you are,” he said when he got home, “no one wants to eat that!” He was also served a snake-based wine, which he was equally uninterested in consuming. For whatever reason, Roddy just hated snakes.
—
With political unrest causing riots across the country, his hotel had the brief distinction of being the second most bombed hotel in the world. He was so afraid that he’d die he faxed Kitty a hand-written will. But still, snakes worried him even more. He had a scene in which he’s running and falls down and a cobra rises right in front of his face. He had to shoot the scene repeatedly because he kept jumping up so quickly the camera couldn’t follow the expression on his face. “Roddy,” the director shouted at him, “we need the reaction to the snake on camera.”
Everybody wanted to challenge Roddy Piper. It was tough for Dad to go to restaurants or bars. Sometimes when he was in Portland he’d take Colt out, just to get out of the house for a bit. Colt would sip a root beer and they’d talk, and sometimes men would approach and pick fights. Roddy wouldn’t fight in front of us. He’d let the aggressor yap and yell and even push. He’d quietly walk Colt out of the restaurant. Then, if the car wasn’t close to the door, he’d pull it into the handicap spot. It wouldn’t be there long. Before Roddy went back into the restaurant alone, he told Colt not to unlock the car door for anyone but him and to honk the horn if anyone bothered him.
Colt loved sitting in the front seat. He’d pretend to drive the car, turn on the seat warmers, change the radio station. He had no clue what his father was up to. Then Roddy would come hustling out of the restaurant, jump in and drive them away, leaving some corrected attitudes in his wake. Those tense situations from Roddy’s private life might seem familiar to wrestling fans. They witnessed him caught in the same bind, once with much the same result.
In the late nineties, World Championship Wrestling (WCW) was stealing the WWF’s lunch money by stealing its great personalities. WCW even resurrected wrestling’s signature feud in the form of a running argument between Roddy and Hulk Hogan—their babyface/heel positions now reversed—over who was wrestling’s greatest icon. McMahon hadn’t been thrilled to see Roddy wrestle for a rival (the WWF’s first real competition in over a decade), but he’d been on short-term contracts for so long now that McMahon had little recourse.
During a segment where Roddy brought Colt into the ring for a chance to experience his father’s world from the inside, Hogan—accompanied by members of his gang, the NWO (New World Order)—crashed the happy moment. Surrounded by friends, he threatened to beat up Roddy in front of his son. The result was testament to just how well the two veterans could play together.
Compromised by his responsibility for his child, Roddy—the most determinedly old school of wrestlers—cleverly broke kayfabe in order to preserve it. “I’m not out here to do anything. Terry, I’m asking you from the bottom of my heart, don’t do nuthin’. Just let me go home.” Calling Hogan by his real name emphasized for the audience just how serious the situation was and how genuinely he wanted to get his son to safety. It appealed to a relationship fans had to presume existed behind the scenes, no matter the years of antagonism between the two stars. Colt snugged close against his father’s hip.
Earlier in the day, Roddy had asked Colt, “Hey son, would you be comfortable going in the ring with me?” Excited, Colt agreed, but as the moment drew closer he got nervous, so Roddy sat him down. “Son, would I make you do anything where I thought you were going to get hurt?”
“No, sir.”
“If you’re scared, just get close to me. Okay?”
Colt got very close, very quickly. He had met Hogan once or twice in dressing rooms, but he hadn’t talked to him that day. So he was not comfortable when Hogan started berating Roddy, forcing him to concede that, yes, Hogan was the real icon, even slapping him in the back of the head twice as Roddy gingerly led his son toward the ropes. Of course, Roddy talked Colt’s way out of the situation without violence, then came back on Bischoff and Hogan with a leather belt and cleared the ring, setting up a future moment fans thought they might never see.
As for Colt, he didn’t need kayfabe broken to think the matches were real. In another encounter, members of the NWO beat up Roddy and spray painted “nWo” on his thigh. We all bawled our eyes out watching it on television. We had just watched him go through four months of excruciating rehabilitation from the hip replacement.
Falon walked in on Roddy one morning after he’d returned on a red eye from a Friday spent wrestling for WCW. She wasn’t usually allowed to watch wrestling on television but had somehow caught one storyline in which the NWO hit him over the head with a chair and spray-painted his back in silver
paint. It upset her, but it was on television, it wasn’t real, and the upset didn’t last.
“I remember running into the room the next morning and he wasn’t wearing a shirt and he was turned around looking out the window and he still had the spray paint all over his back. I broke down crying, because it clicked in my head that my dad was just beat up on TV.”
Roddy hugged her and told her not to worry, he was “a box of fluffy ducks,” as he liked to say to mean he was fine. “Don’t worry, I’m tough,” he assured our little sister.
At some point, Kitty had to make each of us stop watching wrestling.
After the confrontation in the ring, Hogan came by to shake Colt’s hand and said, “Good job, champ.”
Colt had done a good job outside the ring, too. At his father’s direction (and possibly also his father’s pre-arrangement) he negotiated his own appearance fee with the WCW office. When officials offered him a thousand dollars, he refused and asked for three thousand. He got it.
WCW had absorbed the old Mid-Atlantic Wrestling and turned Jim Crockett’s Starrcade into its own premier annual event. It took place in December, far from McMahon’s early spring WrestleMania. In the 1996 edition, Roddy Piper settled the old score once and for all. He caught “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan in a sleeper and won Starrcade’s main event. During the bout, Hogan had put him in an abdominal stretch, which made Roddy’s large hip-surgery scar fully visible to the cameras. Roddy had asked him to do that, and also to hike up his trunks to show it off clearly. At another moment, Roddy hopped around on that leg to further make an important point. Not McMahon nor any other promoter could ever cast doubt on Roddy’s ability to wrestle on that titanium hip.
Before Roddy put the sleeper on Hogan, an imposing new member of the NWO had tried to interfere in the match, attacking Roddy and lifting him several feet off the mat for his signature chokeslam. The Giant was the biggest wrestler to hit the big time since Andre (in fact, Roddy escaped his grasp by dipping into his old giant-fighting toolkit, biting him on the nose to make him let go). Behind the scenes, the seven-foot rookie and the much smaller veteran had made fast friends.
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