“There’s a story Big Show tells in front of God and everyone,” said Roddy (The Giant would change his name to Big Show when later wrestling in the WWE). Big Show told us the story himself.
“I was green as grass. I was driving in on a Sunday night into Wisconsin and I got in really late.” Tired from the road, he went to the hotel’s front desk. The lady working the night shift said, “You’re so big, I’m going to give you a suite.” Grateful, he went up to the room. It was large and full of amenities. He went to the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water. “I was drying my face and I look and there’s a leather jacket hanging on one of the chairs.” Figuring a previous occupant had left the jacket, he dismissed it and went to the bedroom. As he opened the French doors he heard somebody snoring, “like the entire room was being sawed in half.” On the nightstand was a bottle of NyQuil, and face-down on the bed, butt naked, was Roddy Piper.
Oh my God, he thought, that’s Roddy Piper. This is awkward. They’d never met, but he’d grown up watching Roddy on television.
“So I quietly shut the doors, took my bags, meandered back downstairs. I said, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s somebody in that room.’” She apologized and gave him another.
The next day he went to the WCW Nitro set and saw Roddy backstage.
“I think nobody understands what an incredibly nice guy he was all the time,” said Show. “I mean so very humble, so very polite, and just set an example of what a superstar should be…the kindest, nicest person you could ever be around.”
“Hi, I’m Roddy Piper,” he said to the towering kid.
“I met you last night,” said The Giant.
“You did?! When?” said Roddy, slapping his head in embarrassment for forgetting.
The Giant told him the whole story and Roddy smiled at him. “Ah, brother, you could have had me last night!”
“I remember thinking to myself as a young kid, about twenty-four years old, I go, ‘Oh…whaaat?’” As The Giant settled into the business and got to know the habits of his fellow wrestlers, he realized what Roddy had meant. “I could have ribbed him to death. I could have stolen his jacket. I could have written all over him with a Sharpie.”
Every time they saw each other for the next twenty years, Roddy would wag his finger at him and smile, “Brother, you could have had me!”
“As I got older in the business, there’s no way in hell I would have ever ribbed Roddy Piper anyway,” he said, because the payback “would have probably put me in therapy! You don’t mess with the old-timers like that.”
A middle-aged wrestler, now, the kind of star who used to beat him up many years ago, Roddy was instead winning fans among the new generation, even as he was losing the very first of the generation that raised him.
—
In 1997, Stanley Toombs was dying. Roddy went to BC to see him in the hospital. Roddy never forgot leaning over his father, who had wasted away to nothing from cancer. He never forgot how the tiny gold cross Roddy wore around his neck came to rest on his father’s skin as Roddy leaned down to say goodbye. For all the tension between them, for all the pain they’d caused one another, Roddy respected the man who’d fought his way across Canada for the sake of his family. He never lost a fight, Roddy often said, and he’d had his fair share of them. Roddy learned from his father’s unintended example to never lay his hands on his children in anger. He also learned that there was never an excuse to not provide. When he could afford it, Roddy paid off his parents’ mortgage.
In October, after a long and brutal bout with the disease, Stanley succumbed to the inevitable. After his funeral, his ashes were spread in several different places. That his father had no gravesite troubled Roddy. He thought a family should have someplace to visit their father.
A week after the funeral, Roddy was back in the ring for WCW’s Halloween Havoc, where he was fighting Hulk Hogan in a cage match. Roddy won, strictly speaking, but Randy Savage got involved before it was truly over. He jumped off the cage to drop his famous elbow on Roddy with the full force of his 240 pounds. He missed his mark and broke Roddy’s ribs.
Just another night in paradise.
—
In the WCW, Diamond Dallas Page famously returned to the dressing room after his matches by hopping the ring-side barrier and walking right through the audience. After a match one night, he suggested Roddy join him. He didn’t consider how many times Roddy had been targeted and stabbed by fans. Roddy followed him through the crowd anyway, luckily without incident.
Fate had come for so many of his friends. If fate had its eye on him, he’d prefer that it take its shot sooner than later. He used to say that if someone threatened him, he’d never let the person walk away. There was no better way to confront fate than to wade right into a riled-up crowd of wrestling fans.
Roddy played with fate outside the ring as well. He was still driving the white Bronco from the Backlot Brawl, but Kitty wasn’t fond of it. She had a new GMC Yukon Denali better suited to schlepping four kids around the countryside near Portland. Roddy liked the Denali as much as she liked the Bronco.
“I’m driving it and I got in one of my moods,” said Roddy. “I’m going through a place called the Slough. It’s a swamp on both sides. I just took a hard right with that Denali. It went off about ten feet in the air.”
The SUV crashed through a stand of trees and splashed into the water. Roddy climbed out of the half-sunk truck and started swimming for shore. It took him a little time; he tended to underplay the debilitating effects of being in a car crash. “All of a sudden police are up there. ‘You okay?!’ ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Thank you very much. I’ll be fine.’” At first he couldn’t imagine how police had discovered that he’d swamped the truck. “Damn thing had OnStar.”
In 2000 he crashed another car only half a mile up the hill from home. Kitty was called by a neighbour who realized whose car was surrounded by police and paramedics. Falon was too young to leave behind, so Kitty took her with her to the scene. When they arrived, Roddy’s bottom lip was nearly torn off. He didn’t like wearing a seatbelt because it meant somebody telling him what to do. Independence came with a price that day.
“That was a horrifying experience to see,” said Falon. “His face was ripped off. His lip was hanging.”
It took extensive plastic surgery to put Roddy’s bottom lip back in place. Unpleasant as the experience was, Falon had grown up with Roddy’s sense of humour. “Forever after that, he and I would joke. I’d go up to him—’Ugh! Look at me!’—and pretend my lip was hanging off.”
—
As Roddy’s wrestling career wound down, he had the luxury of a little more time at home, which meant more time for his kids. Two weeks before baseball season, Roddy took Colt to a batting cage. Roddy had liked the game as a kid; Colt was eager to give it his best.
“Hop in there, son, you can do it.” Roddy set the machine to throw fastballs.
To his father’s delight, Colt connected on the first pitch. But it nicked his hand and really hurt. Roddy encouraged him to keep going. Of the twenty-five pitches he hit four. Not bad for a nine year old.
“My thumb really hurts, Dad.”
The thumb was blue and swelling quickly.
“Ah, yeah, you mighta broke it.”
Colt had to sit out the first half of the season. Kitty never let Roddy live it down. “Don’t break his thumb this time, Roderick,” she’d say, whenever Roddy took him somewhere.
Life with Roddy as a father could be rough, in an enjoyable way. That year Colt realized the upside of everything he’d learned from his dad—even when Dad was the reason he needed to know it.
In fifth grade the biggest kid in school decided something Roddy had done on television needed to be sorted out with Colt and confronted him. Bullies often gave Colt a hard time, but he could usually shrug them off. He’d never even been in a fight. That was about to change. When the kid pounced, Colt hip tossed him, and he landed him so hard on the ground he was stunned i
nto silence. Colt’s first fight was over as soon as it had begun. Strangely, before this he hadn’t really connected what his father was teaching him on the basement mats with actual schoolyard scrapping.
“Colt,” said Roddy that evening, when his son told him what had happened, “that’s how you stand up for yourself.” Violence was a last resort, Roddy taught him, which was maybe why all that mat work had seemed like just abstract exercise. A gentleman might have violence in his playbook, but he avoided using it. He should speak, and speak well. “Cussing is for the illiterate, it’s for the dumb man,” Roddy lectured. “It’s the dumb man’s weapon. Smart men talk.”
After dinner, Roddy took Colt out and they talked over ice cream.
Being on the road as many as three hundred days a year meant home had to run smoothly without Roddy around. Our mother managed that so well that when he did have time at home he could spend it making up for his absence. He used it to bond with us the way wrestlers usually bonded—practical jokes. Late one night when Ariel was in her teens, she walked home along a mountainside road after spending the evening at a neighbour’s house. She passed a deer in the pitch black without seeing it until the last second and was still jittery as she made her way up our long driveway. As she passed the cars parked outside, three figures wearing ski masks raced at her out of the dark. She screamed. She screamed as loud as she could for ten seconds or maybe longer. Long enough, anyway, that her father and brother and his friend were rolling on the ground laughing by the time she stopped.
A few years later, Roddy took Ariel to Las Vegas for the annual gathering of Cauliflower Alley Club, a get-together of professional wrestling alumni where retirees and veterans of the business celebrate their peers and accomplishments—and eat and drink for a few days like they’re back on the road in their prime, tearing up every highway from Raleigh to Roseburg, Orlando to Oshawa. Still a teenager, Ariel hadn’t often been out of Oregon. It was time, Roddy thought, that she experienced a bit of the luxury to which he was accustomed.
When they got to their hotel room, she asked what the second porcelain fixture was in the bathroom. He said he didn’t know; maybe she should turn it on to see what it does. To his teary-eyed delight, the bidet soaked her to the bone.
Being the fun parent was a break from the stresses of work and the ghosts that lingered in the back of Roddy’s mind, but there were moments of frustration and anger when the strength of his own hands was hard to restrain.
We were forbidden to be disrespectful to our mother, and when he thought we had broken that rule he’d call us kids to the table for a blistering talking-to. The power of our father’s voice froze us in our seats, but his lectures could wander away on tangents. We’d become petrified that he’d ask one of us a question, because we couldn’t always follow what he was angry about. He did punch a hole in a wall, once, and pulled a bedroom door off its hinges when one of us kept locking it. These might not be extraordinary events in the life of the average American family. But there’s one other moment that stands out in memory, something most dads couldn’t do.
When Roddy came home from wrestling trips, he often went straight to bed to sleep and recover. When he emerged, sometimes days later, he was usually the playful father we’ve described. There were days, though, when all that butting heads with wrestling promoters and trying to figure out Hollywood producers weighed on him. He got up one day and sat down with us at the kitchen table, cranky for some reason he didn’t explain. We were goofing off and arguing, and we could see the annoyance creeping into his face. He raised his arms and slammed them onto the table. It broke.
We froze and stared at him for a long moment. He looked back at us, just as shocked. Like the proverbial bull in a china shop, a wrestler in a family home could do a lot of damage if he wasn’t careful. “Well that was extreme,” someone said, and we all just started laughing, Roddy included.
Kitty didn’t replace the table right away. Roddy’s place at the table was the sharp, jagged end, a reminder of how careful he needed to be.
These moments were blips, though. Affection was the norm with Roddy. No matter how old we got, he’d take our calls anywhere short of on a stage or in a ring. He hugged us every chance he could. What could be more reassuring for a man who spent his working life pressing his face into the enormous biceps of his friends and enemies than wrapping his own big arms around the people he loved? Our heads got petted, our hands were held. It was embarrassing in high school, but we loved his affection.
Hug your kids, he urged his friends and people he met. Because you never knew when it might be your last chance to tell them you love them.
—
Roddy and Bret Hart used to call it shining the batlight. When one of them wanted to talk to one of the few people in the world who would understand the anxieties of their business and lifestyle, he sent up the signal. When Hart won the world title, Roddy was the first person he called. Roddy reminded him that every guy in the dressing room—good guys though they may be—wanted what Bret had. That was treasured counsel.
In 2002, Hart couldn’t send up the batlight. He suddenly couldn’t do much of anything. While riding his bike home from the gym in Calgary, he suffered a massive stroke. A local wrestler visited regularly, but otherwise Hart saw only one of his WWE peers while recovering at the hospital. And it was a major recovery effort. “I lost everything on my left side,” said Hart. “Right from the top of my head. It just cut my whole body in half, like a chain saw. My whole left side was dead.” Within a week of the accident, Roddy showed up. Bret was in a wheelchair, and he was already sick of it.
“I burst into tears. I couldn’t live like that,” recalled Hart. “When I saw Roddy, I was pretty fed up with that wheelchair. ‘I don’t care what happens, I gotta get out of this wheelchair….’ We talked about that. It was pretty emotional for me to tell him, show him, the heartache that I was feeling from my stroke and how devastating it was….Through that whole time he was a big source of comfort and inspiration.”
“You can beat this, cuz,” Roddy told him. “Don’t quit.”
Roddy had called Bret “cuz” since they figured out they might be cousins. Generations back, the Harts were related to a family with Roddy’s last name in the northwestern States, but the name turned out to be spelled “Tombs,” not “Toombs.” Roddy liked the thought of Bret and Owen being his cousins, regardless, and continued using the nickname. (Given how inconsistently family names were spelled in the 1800s, they might have been related after all.)
“He gave me all kinds of support that I never got from anybody else,” said Hart.
Bret was down, but he wasn’t going out. Still, the reminders of a wrestler’s mortality were constant.
—
Roddy was in the passenger seat of a Volkswagen Jetta, an assistant’s car. He was thinking about the book he was working on, telling the story of his life. He’d never met the writer. There had just been many phone calls, stories being shared, opinions being given. They were a long way from finished.
Driving through LA, he and this personal assistant weren’t getting along. They approached an underpass. “Should I hit it?” the assistant asked. Roddy thought he meant the gas. “Yeah, hit it,” he said. The car swerved hard off the road. They collided with the concrete wall. The passenger side took the brunt of the damage.
When the dust settled, Roddy took stock. “My foot literally went through the floor to the cement,” he recalled. By the time police showed up at the scene, he was leaning against a telephone pole. He couldn’t stand on one foot and a pain in his gut made it hard to stand at all. Emergency crews got the driver out of the car and into an ambulance. Roddy leaned against the pole and watched. A tow truck came and collected the wrecked Jetta. He asked the police for help getting home, but with no visible injuries suggesting how badly he was hurt, the police told him sorry, but we’re not a taxi service.
He finally hailed a cab and got himself the two miles back to the Oakwood Apartments, where h
e was staying. The cab driver went inside and asked an assistant in the apartment to come out and help collect Roddy. Roddy had been injured before, so he fell back on the tried and true.
“I said something like, ‘Leave me alone. I’m going to take a shower.’ They fix everything, right?” he said. He couldn’t remember much about the accident or the hours after. But he remembered that once he got in the shower, standing on one foot, he couldn’t compartmentalize the pain.
“Hey, hey!” he shouted from the bathroom. “I’m going down!”
The assistant at the apartment called 911. Another celebrity passing out in the bathtub didn’t inspire much hustle in Hollywood paramedics. They came in and took his blood pressure. Then everything changed. He was 60 over 20. He was going down all right. The paramedics rushed him to Cedars-Sinai hospital.
“I died on the table,” said Roddy. It would be days before he was fully aware of what was happening. Mitch Ackerman snuck into his room. They had a conversation, but Roddy was in and out of consciousness. He didn’t remember the visit. The tally of injuries, though, was burned into memory. “It busted my right ankle, four ribs. One rib went into my liver, my spleen and my back in two places.”
You can see why we thought he was invincible.
The book, to be called In the Pit with Piper, was finished while Roddy recovered. It adhered closely to Roddy’s kayfabe version of his early life. When it was published in the fall of 2002, he bought Colt a PlayStation so he could join him on the promotional tour bus. “I did a hundred and seven pieces of media in thirty towns in twenty-five days,” said Roddy. By the time he went home, he was ashen from the effort, coming as it did so quickly on the heels of his injuries. “They said I was grey.”
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