Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  Denton continued working with Roddy, selling merchandise and generally assisting while he was on the road. After a week at a similar convention in LA, they were preparing to go to England when Denton received an unexpected call in his hotel room. His daughter was pregnant, and when her water broke she wouldn’t be consoled until she knew her father was on his way home.

  “I packed my bags and I went down and I knocked on Roddy’s door and he goes, ‘What are you doing? Are you leaving?!’” Apologetically, Denton explained why he couldn’t continue on the trip. Roddy looked at him for a moment. “He goes, ‘You know what, Lenny, brother? Family comes first. Go see your grandbaby be born.’ Gave me a big hug and says, ‘God bless you. Get your ass outta here, boy.’ That’s the kind of guy Roddy was.”

  The other kind of guy Roddy was, was a wrestler. And when an opportunity arose for him to get in the ring again, he was hard-pressed not to answer the bell.

  —

  Before WWE’s annual Cyber Sunday event in November 2006, fans had voted online for who would join Ric Flair as his tag-team partner against members of the Spirit Squad to contend for the championship. Dusty Rhodes, Sgt. Slaughter and Roddy were their options. Roddy was declared the winner, receiving just under half of the announced fourteen million votes cast from around the world. He climbed in the ring and won the title with Flair. That night in Cincinnati began a short reign—one that in a weird twist of fate saved Roddy’s life.

  Winning this championship meant hitting the road to defend it. Roddy was fifty-two years old. His physical conditioning had slipped. But he was with an old friend, and some other good company, each familiar in their way. The night after they won the title, Roddy and Flair travelled up Highway 71 to Columbus where they wrestled Edge, a young Canadian, and Randy Orton, the son of Roddy’s old bodyguard, “Ace.” From Ohio, they went to the UK, where Roddy and Flair defended their belts in Glasgow.

  Roddy Piper in Glasgow, his professed hometown, was a special opportunity. The intense rivalry between Glasgow’s two soccer teams, Celtic and Rangers, reflected the city’s troubled history of Catholic-Protestant antagonism. Roddy decided to bring a little unity to the Old Firm, as the rivalry is collectively called. He hiked down to the ring wearing two scarves: one was Rangers red, white and blue, and the other Celtic green and white. When he joined Flair in the ring, Flair shed his usual sequined robe to reveal he was wearing a kilt, too. If ever there was a moment when Roddy proved he was as adept a babyface as he was a heel, this was it. They were joined by the Highlanders to wrestle the full complement of Spirit Squad in a four-man tag match. The crowd was manic.

  Wrestling hurt. A dull pain in Roddy’s back grew sharper and more intense every night after Glasgow. As they worked their way through packed houses in England, he could barely stand up straight. His ability to compartmentalize pain had astonished friends and colleagues for decades, and he made a good show of each match on the tour. But as they pulled into Manchester, he couldn’t rally himself past the agony. He had to back out of the match.

  Adam Copeland had grown up near Toronto in the eighties as a Roddy Piper fan. As “Edge,” Copeland, in his early thirties, was in the prime of his pro wrestling career in 2006 and would go on to set records for the number of times he held certain titles. That morning he and Randy Orton got the word: they were taking the belts that night. Roddy couldn’t wrestle—but he also couldn’t leave town without a fight.

  Edge had enjoyed seeing the veterans wear the belts. It had been a long time since men in their fifties had enjoyed such high stature in professional wrestling. He was surprised they didn’t run with the title for longer than the two weeks since they’d been crowned. He was told Roddy was hurt, but he hadn’t noticed him complaining or showing any sign that he was injured. He and Orton knew the work would be delicate, because whatever was bothering Roddy had to be serious. Wrestlers didn’t drop out of a tour unless they were in real danger.

  “Roddy felt comfortable with us,” said Edge. “He knew we wouldn’t do anything stupid to put him in jeopardy.”

  “I completely trust you guys,” Roddy told them before the match. “I know I’m in good hands.”

  “When someone who’s injured, especially at that stature and at that point in their career, says they’ll be okay with you,” said Edge, “it’s pretty much the biggest tip of the hat you can get.”

  That night, when Roddy was announced, Edge and Orton (collectively, “Rated-RKO”) were waiting for him in the ring. As Roddy neared, they jumped off the mat and surrounded him on the floor. A few quick blows followed, including one with a chair from Edge into the back of Roddy’s thigh.

  “I remember specifically trying to stay away from his upper body,” said Edge. How, then, to take Roddy down? They had to make some form of contact without getting close to his injured back. The blow to the leg knocked him to the ground and then it was all up to the boots. Flair fought the match alone—and lost—while Roddy was helped back to the dressing room.

  Later Edge and Orton caught up with Roddy behind the scenes.

  “My first concern was, is he okay? Especially when you know going in that somebody’s dinged up,” said Edge, “your first stop is to check and make sure everything’s good.”

  “Nah, you guys you took care of me,” said Roddy, “Thank you. I love you.”

  “He was super gracious,” said Edge. “You hear ‘I love you’ from Roddy Piper and your heart just goes, ‘Aw, man…’”

  Roddy said he was going home, but Edge had a job to do first. He and wrestler Tommy Dreamer snuck into the props collection, pried the nameplate off Roddy’s belt and gave it to him.

  Without treatment, Roddy flew back to Portland, where he went to St. Vincent hospital. A surgeon noticed him in the ER waiting room. He asked the registration nurse why Roddy Piper was there. Something more than Roddy’s celebrity had caught the doctor’s eye, and he had Roddy brought in immediately. An MRI revealed just how close Roddy had come to permanent damage.

  Three pieces of bone had broken away from a fracture high in Roddy’s spine. The fragments were so close to his spinal cord that they were threating paralysis. One hard bump in the ring from the wrong direction and he could have spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair—and the rest of his life could have been very short. While Roddy was on the operating table, the surgeon noticed an odd-looking lymph node. He ordered tests. The results came back: non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Roddy had cancer.

  There was no telling when the initial fracture had happened. Roddy’s high pain threshold meant he could have been putting up with the fracture for weeks. Getting back in the ring either caused it or made it worse, pushing those chips inward and turning the dull constant ache into pain he couldn’t ignore. Had his fans not voted for him, getting him into the ring again, the cancer would have gone unnoticed much longer, maybe long enough to spread beyond the reach of treatment.

  Ariel, twenty one at the time, flew to Portland from her new home in Los Angeles. Her siblings were at the hospital already, visiting their maternal great-grandmother, who was on another floor with a bad flu that at her advanced age was very dangerous. Kitty ushered Ariel straight in to see her ailing grandmother. Within moments she died. Shocked at the suddenness of her passing, they all went upstairs to their father’s room. He had something he wanted to tell them. The timing couldn’t have been worse, but it couldn’t be avoided. He told them about the cancer.

  Colt, seventeen, looked at his father. “No, you can beat this, Dad,” he said. “This is nothing.”

  A tear welled in his father’s eye. Roddy looked at his son, then at all the members of his family. “Yes, we will, champ.”

  Over the months to come the disease would barely slow the patient down, and it was yet another Canadian who kept him busy.

  —

  An ex-pat Canadian named Noelle Kim worked in the office for Gene LeBell. She’d gotten to know Roddy because Gene talked to everyone on speakerphone, and she and whoever else was around woul
d get drawn into his calls. Being more aware of the online world than her boss and his cohort, she was on an MMA message board one day when someone opined that wrestlers weren’t really tough. She used Roddy as an example to prove him wrong, and he replied by asking what level belt he had. She’d been told he’d gotten his black belt from Gene, so she asked Gene over her shoulder when he’d awarded it to Roddy. Unsure, he hit autodial and got Roddy on the phone.

  “When did I give you a black belt?” LeBell asked.

  Roddy didn’t answer for a moment. “Either you choked me out too many times or I really have lost my mind,” he finally answered, “but I didn’t know I was a black belt with you, Gene.”

  “That’s terrible!” said LeBell. “I’ve been telling people for years you’re a black belt with me.”

  Kim started writing up the diploma then and there. She had a background in television (she started as the matchmaker on The Dating Game) and in talent management. As she got to know Roddy, she began noticing roles in the theatrical breakdowns—a sort of industry news wire that shares descriptions of upcoming projects—that she thought suited him. Kim knew his wrestling, of course, but admired him primarily as an actor. So she started sending him parts she thought he should audition for, only to realize that no one else was doing this in North America. Roddy said if she could find him roles, he’d make sure she got a management cut. On that informal arrangement, Roddy had the American film-and-television agent he’d always needed—keen, connected and utterly convinced that his potential as an actor had barely been tapped.

  In 2007, while Roddy recovered from his spinal fracture and surgery, and radiation treatment for his lymphoma, he remained eager to work. He loved acting in particular and didn’t want to slow down any more than he needed.

  For four months after the surgery, Colt remained glued to his father’s side. He drove him to the hospital every Monday for his treatment and waited beside the radiation booth. Roddy would emerge, groggy and weak, grateful for the shoulder to lean on—more grateful yet that it belonged to his son. He’d be on his feet by Tuesday morning, when they’d fly to wherever he was shooting or doing a “Piper’s Pit,” then fly home Sunday. Monday the routine would start all over again. They also had a morning ritual of getting up early and going to the gym before the workday got started. Roddy took only two weeks off work once his treatments began and he kept up his gym schedule, too.

  After the months of treatment and then a year-long wait to ensure the cancer was in remission, father and son celebrated with root beer floats and filet mignon.

  “We did it,” said Roddy.

  Colt was proud to have helped. His days of celebrating with root beer floats, however, were just about done.

  —

  In 2008 Roddy found himself back in a Winnipeg bar. He had one more day of shooting a film in town and he and Colt settled in for a relaxing evening at the Viking Inn. They played pool with the locals, talked to fans and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

  At around eleven, they climbed into their car. Colt had been making good use of the lower drinking age in Manitoba, but Roddy was sober because he had to work in the morning so he took the wheel. The rental was a two-seater sports car, and he hadn’t had a chance to open it up. His belief that rentals were essentially disposable hadn’t much changed since the mid-80s, back when New Jersey rental companies had stopped renting to wrestlers. On the way back to their hotel, Roddy stepped on the gas. Hard. The needle soared past the speed limit. They saw no other cars on the road, so when they pulled into the hotel parking lot he was surprised to see red lights flashing behind them.

  “Sir, have you had anything to drink tonight?” asked a police officer.

  “No sir, I haven’t,” said Roddy.

  “You were speeding back there, you know that?”

  “I’m just real tired and trying to get home in a hurry.”

  He looked at Roddy for a moment. “Sir, are you Rowdy Roddy Piper?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “Do you realize you were going over a hundred kilometres an hour?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you realize you blew through about a dozen stop signs?”

  That one got Roddy’s attention.

  “I did not know that,” he said. “I apologize, sir. I did not see a single stop sign.”

  “You were probably going too fast to see them.”

  The officer decided to forego a ticket in favour of a picture and an autograph.

  As the police car pulled away a guy was watching from his balcony a few floors up. “Damn,” he called down. “I thought he was going to give you a medal of honour.”

  The officer wasn’t done with Roddy and Colt. The next afternoon, after Roddy’s final day on set, they drove down the same road. From each stop sign along the way hung bright orange streamers, flapping in the breeze. Their appearance didn’t seem to be a coincidence, a suspicion confirmed when Roddy and Colt got to their hotel room. On the door was a note: “Thank you so much Mr. Piper for the picture. I hope you’ll notice the stop signs now.”

  —

  Tammy Perschmann came home from work late the afternoon of April 28, 2009, and found her husband dead. Diabetic and overweight, “Playboy” Buddy Rose had retired to Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, where he’d worked the majority of his career as a professional wrestler. The Pacific Northwest was one of the few territories small enough that a wrestler could sleep in his own bed almost every night.

  Roddy missed another funeral.

  —

  Giving the next generation a boost was a gesture Roddy didn’t reserve just for wrestlers. With Ariel pursuing film work in LA, he knew she could benefit from the exposure she’d get accompanying him to industry events. So one night at the Kress nightclub in Hollywood, she arrived on her father’s arm, and they headed to the rooftop bar, where they were expected.

  Ariel hadn’t spent much time in public with her father. She hadn’t really seen Rowdy Roddy Piper up close and in person. At the Kress, when an older producer-type with hair slicked back in a ponytail started talking her up and put a hand on her leg—an annoyance she was becoming familiar with in Hollywood—she got her first good look at her father’s alter ego unleashed.

  As Ariel was hoping her eager suitor would get bored and go away, she heard someone say her name then pull her off the couch and out of the way just as her father caught her eye. He was approaching, fast.

  Roddy grabbed the man by the collar while uttering a full-throated roar like she’d never heard from him. Roddy threw him hard against the glass wall that surrounded the rooftop patio. As she watched, dumbstruck, Ariel saw some kind of realization suddenly wash over her father’s face. As he later confessed, it hadn’t occurred to him that the glass was there.

  She had witnessed Roddy before in what the family called “pitbull mode,” when someone he didn’t like the look of came too close to his kids and he’d start to growl without realizing it. If she ever met with a casting agent or director who had a bad reputation, he’d call her after to make sure he didn’t need to pay a visit to the agent’s office. She knew mentioning her father was a good way to shut down unwelcome interest, too, but she hadn’t thought his reaction would be this extreme.

  Security staff intervened within seconds, with apologies to “Mr. Piper,” and hustled the man out of the nightclub. Like a switch had been thrown, Roddy turned to her and smiled. She was shaking and near to tears. It was upsetting to see a parent lose his cool like that. She apologized for the drama.

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he said, his good cheer restored. “Do you want to get another drink?”

  —

  When Roddy was a young wrestler driving through the territories day and night, hard drinking was the norm. Police had treated drinking and driving on a no-harm-no-foul basis. But as the first decade of the new century neared its end, Roddy’s taste for alcohol was increasingly at odds with the world around h
im.

  Noelle Kim had secured him a role in a Las Vegas production of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding. One night in Vegas, over dinner, she watched as doubles of Grey Goose darkened his ebullient mood. Memories of his childhood spilled out, memories of being hit so hard with a belt he went to school for two weeks with a bruise across his face and no one said a word about it. Alcohol subdued the physical pain that racked him constantly in his fifties, but allowed the old ghosts to occupy his thoughts.

  Ariel got in an argument with him one night when he wanted to drop her off on the way home from an evening out. She hadn’t been drinking and wanted him to let her drive. He refused and she eventually got in. The car was swerving as they headed to her apartment, and she got pissed off. He took offense to her anger and they fought some more when she got out. The next day on TMZ, there he was—a photo of him having been pulled over later for drinking and driving.

  He knew it. His family knew it. His hard-partying days had slowed when the wrestling stopped, but as he struggled to cope with the constant pain and what he realized was a deep sadness that he had missed so much of his children as they were growing up, he couldn’t divorce himself from alcohol. He wanted to stop drinking, and now he wouldn’t have a choice.

  In Los Angeles, the law can come down on celebrities with less mercy than on ordinary people; no judge or police officer wants to be accused of sucking up to an athlete or a movie star. The DUI Roddy got that night was added to a prior from Oregon, which put him in a bad spot. Roddy’s lawyer, Sam Perlmutter, reached out through his contacts with the city attorney’s office and they struck a deal. Roddy got lucky. The LA attorney’s office would settle for Roddy going to rehab.

  —

  Early in October 2009, cancer re-entered Roddy’s life. Soon everyone knew it—except him.

  He hadn’t been seen in weeks when a wrestling fan site reported a rumour that he had suffered a relapse. Bleacher Report’s coverage typified the media reaction. “Beating cancer twice would be great to see from Piper, but it doesn’t look likely this time around,” the sports website reported on October 7. “It is being reported from a very good source that WWE Chairman Vince McMahon has told the WWE creative team to be prepared to cut a few segments on Raw next week, as he would like to do a video tribute in Piper’s honor if Piper were to pass away this week.”