Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  The WWE did issue a press release saying that if it was true that Roddy was ill, as reported, they would pay him tribute on Monday Night Raw, the WWE’s flagship program on USA Network. Everyone in Roddy’s life had something to say about the news, but nobody could reach Roddy to confirm it.

  Noelle Kim called Ariel, flustered. Did she know if the rumours were true? When Roddy had departed Los Angeles a few weeks earlier, he had instructed his manager to cancel his contractual obligations for medical reasons; she could expect to see him back in about a month. She did as instructed, not knowing what exactly was going on. Word must have gotten around that he was ailing, someone presumed his cancer was back and the rumour took on a life of its own.

  Ariel knew where Roddy was. He was in Florida at rehab, and he didn’t want anyone but family to know. He’d explained to them that this was something he needed to do for himself, and he’d left it at that. What worried Ariel was the possibility that he had used rehab as a smokescreen. Saying he was going to rehab when in fact he was wasting away in a cancer hospice was too much like something Roddy might do. He hated anyone seeing him vulnerable. After his near-fatal car wreck in Los Angeles, he had warned us not to visit until he came home over a week later, black, blue and concussed.

  Roddy’s first two weeks in rehab were rough. He’d quit drinking cold turkey—he’d wanted to do that, and given a little help, his will was stronger than his addiction. But the tightly controlled living conditions of the rehab centre aggravated his lifelong grudge against authority. When he wanted to work out in the evening and the gym was closed, he’d get angry. If he was hungry in the middle of the morning, he’d go looking for food, no matter what the dining schedule demanded. The fact that he was detoxing couldn’t have helped his patience.

  The centre was geared toward high-profile clients and wouldn’t call the police under any circumstances, but the staff didn’t dare try to contain Roddy. He wasn’t violent, but he was stubborn, irritable and menacing enough to make them nervous. Staff called Kitty at home sometimes to talk him down.

  After the first couple of weeks, Roddy settled in and put in the rest of his month at the centre without incident. Word eventually trickled out that he wasn’t ill. The relapse rumour never exactly died; people often told him how impressed they were that he’d beaten cancer twice. He smiled and thanked them, and he never corrected them. Before leaving the centre, a therapist told him only a very small percentage of patients would succeed in never drinking again. She’d put it to him exactly as he needed to hear it. Challenge accepted.

  —

  As if to show everyone for themselves that their former star wasn’t dead, WWE brought Roddy in for a Monday Night Raw appearance in November. The storyline had him challenging Vince McMahon to a street fight at Madison Square Garden. An aggrieved Randy Orton showed up instead. He’d just lost his title and was supposed to be seething about it. Much like Roddy when Rick Martel came back for that final match, Orton didn’t need his reputation rebuilt so much as shored up.

  He confronted Roddy in the ring and beat him up, though Roddy got a few licks in and ended the confrontation on his feet. The scenario was a familiar one. The older generation had just borrowed from its deep well of audience affection and credibility to help a younger guy maintain his reputation. For the son of his old friend “Cowboy” Bob, Roddy was happy to oblige.

  Back in 1985 “The Living Legend” Bruno Sammartino had done something very much like that for Roddy during a “Piper’s Pit.” Roddy had great respect for the retired superstar, but he didn’t show any that night.

  Roddy recalled their encounter in the ring: “I said, ‘You know what, Bruno? I drove here and I got a flat tire, and all the way here the car went, wop, wop, wop.’ That comb-over stood straight up, those eyes…!” Sammartino slugged him for the comment but most of what followed was Roddy hitting him with a chair.

  Roddy hadn’t had to show respect in the ring. That was the deal between the old guys and the young guys then, and it was in 2009, too.

  After the show at Madison Square Garden, Roddy ran into Sammartino again, with Colt alongside. “Mr. Sammartino,” said Roddy, “I’d like to introduce you to my son, Colt.”

  Without hesitating Sammartino said, “Last time I saw your father, he called me a wop.” The indignation ran long, but it didn’t run deep. Sammartino spent a couple hours that evening talking with Colt about wrestling, our father and whatever else he thought worth sharing. Roddy always called Sammartino one of the cleanest wrestlers—not a drinker, didn’t medicate that he knew of—and also one of the strongest. Even in his fifties, Roddy could appreciate a role model when he needed one.

  Later that night, Roddy and Colt attended a gathering of Roddy’s old wrestling buddies. As soon as they sat down, one of the other wrestlers put a shot in front of each of them. This wasn’t good. Colt wanted to get the drink away from Roddy. He had stayed sober since getting out of rehab, but this was one circumstance that could test his willpower.

  Colt threw back his shot, looked at his dad, then grabbed Roddy’s drink and knocked it back, too.

  “You are your father’s son,” said the wrestler who’d bought the drinks. He left them alone.

  A few hours later, shots began appearing again in front of Roddy. As he sat at the table full of his friends, gripping his Diet Coke while he eyed the shot glasses in front of him, he appreciated the position Colt was in. His son wanted to help protect him from temptation and peer pressure without embarrassing him. There’s a time and place to stand up for a proud man. Roddy looked at him, as if to say thank you. The permission was in his eyes. Colt reached out and picked up the glass.

  The drinks kept coming. Colt had a hard morning ahead.

  —

  Comedian Steve Simeone spent Christmas 2009 on the USS Nimitz, entertaining American troops in the Middle East. Email was hard to access as he moved from that ship to the next, so he didn’t know about the Christmas present waiting for him back in Los Angeles. When he was finally able to check in at the airport in Dubai, he found an email titled “Rowdy Comedy.” It asked if he’d like to appear in a stand-up show at the Improv in Hollywood with Roddy Piper on the bill. Astonished, he said yes.

  Comedians tend to like wrestling, but Simeone was the only one on the bill with actual wrestling material, stories about staying up late to watch wrestling with his brother, calling his friend about Roddy Piper’s mid-80s antics: “Somebody’s gotta stop this Piper guy, ‘cause this is getting ridiculous!” Excited as he was about the show, Simeone didn’t know if he’d even be permitted to meet his wrestling hero backstage that night. He needn’t have worried. He not only met Roddy, he got a big hug from him after his set. Roddy liked his material and went to see him soon after at the Comedy Store in LA. The family-friendly nature of Simeone’s comedy appealed to the tough guy who called The Sound of Music his favourite movie, and Noelle Kim called the comedian a few days later to ask if he’d help develop Roddy’s stage show.

  “I was his training wheels in that world,” said Simeone. In the beginning, Simeone warmed up the audience then turned over the last ten minutes of his fifteen-minute set to Roddy. Soon they were each doing fifteen minutes, back to back, and before long Roddy was telling stories for his own fifteen minutes with no warm up, training wheels off. “That’s a difficult environment. He mastered that,” said Simeone. “Then we did the podcast together.”

  Many retired wrestlers found a life after wrestling on the air—the digital era’s version of it, anyway. Roddy had wrestled his final match in 2009, a handicap elimination match against Winnipeg-raised Chris Jericho in which Roddy teamed with Ricky Steamboat and Jimmy Snuka. Roddy started the bout and was eliminated when tossed out of the ring. He was fond of Jericho, but not the match. It was mostly a PR exercise for the film The Wrestler (after eliminating each of the three legends in turn, Jericho was punched out in the ring by Mickey Rourke, the film’s star). It wasn’t how Roddy had imagined himself going out. But he was a
lready thinking ahead to a venue where he could put his mic skills to work without having to take his clothes off in a ring surrounded by twenty thousand people.

  The Rod Pod was a simple operation. He set up audio equipment in various cities and chatted with old friends for the better part of an hour. As his producer, Simeone offered prompts, much like how they’d approached Roddy’s stage routine in the beginning, when Simeone would sit on the edge of the stage and suggest topics for Roddy to riff on. After about thirty episodes, Roddy’s constant travel away from LA made it too difficult to continue and they set The Rod Pod aside. The idea of a podcast, however, was one that stuck.

  —

  Randy Savage hadn’t been feeling well. At fifty-eight, the “Macho Man” suffered the same sort of chronic pain as other retired wrestlers. On May 20, 2011, he collapsed at the wheel of his Jeep Wrangler while driving down a four-lane street in Seminole, Florida. The vehicle hopped across the median and his wife, Lynn, had to steer it out of the way of oncoming traffic before it stopped against a tree. Somewhere between his passing out and arriving at the hospital, Randy Mario Poffo died of cardiac arrhythmia.

  —

  Life after rehab was treating Roddy well—and his family, too. Whatever cravings remained, he didn’t drink again. “That is something that I know he was very proud of and I was very proud of for him,” said Falon. She had grown up with our father around home quite a lot and knew how much he’d needed to stop. “It almost seemed like he found a peace in himself after rehab. He was able to change the way he looked at life, change his attitude, and wanted to spend more time with the family, wanted to help us more. He was just happier.”

  Some of that time with family was spent back in North Carolina, where our big sister, Anastasia, was settling in to married life. Roddy’s appearance schedule often pulled him back across the continent to the east coast, and when he was close enough that meant dropping in on some new relatives.

  “He would always make time to come see his grandkids and me,” Anastasia said. “He was a totally different person, too, with the grandkids. It wasn’t Dad, it was Grandpa. They got all the goodies. No lectures.”

  Roddy hadn’t been a strict parent. That had been Kitty’s lot—necessarily so, with Roddy away so much. Besides, he disliked rules too much to enforce them. “I could really relate to him with regards to being a free spirit,” Anastasia said. “My dad always made it very clear, as long as you have your heart on the right side of life, period, then that’s all he cared about. So, I may have gotten in trouble—skip school or something and Dad finds out. But at the end of the conversation with Dad, it would always be, ‘I love you, I get it, I understand, just try not to let your teacher find out next time.’ He understood. He wouldn’t force us to be people we weren’t.”

  If Roddy was finding joy in his family, he still wasn’t what he’d call happy. He couldn’t settle at night. When he took part in WWE Legends’ House in 2012, a reality show about retired wrestlers living together for a month, the others wondered why he roamed the halls until so late. He dreaded waking up in the morning, if only because it meant spending the whole day anxious about going to bed the next night, when the old ghosts would close in again. He used to keep them at bay by watching old movies or history documentaries or googling aliens and conspiracy theories with Ariel in LA, anything to distract himself until he nodded off.

  He bonded with his roommate, “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, during that show, a friendship that led to Duggan being one of only two wrestlers ever to visit our Portland home (Sgt. Slaughter—Uncle Bob—was the other). Roddy finished the show, surprised to have made a good friend, and headed to Atlanta, where he reconnected with another new friend, a young Canadian musician named Alan Snoddy.

  Snoddy had met him at Toronto’s Comedy Bar, where the two had spent an evening talking about music. Snoddy sent him a copy of some original songs, which Roddy liked, and he asked Alan if he could write a song for a documentary Roddy was hoping to make. He did, and Roddy liked it. The song was called “Off the Top Rope,” and Roddy flew to Toronto to record it. Then they played the song in Niagara Falls at Light of Day, a Parkinson’s disease charity concert. They played with the house band, which included Bruce Springsteen’s saxophone player, and made a video out of footage from the performance. Roddy used to build trust with people through sharing extreme experiences—like his binge with Bruce Prichard in Connecticut. Clean now, he developed trust through creative endeavour, and he trusted Snoddy enough to ask him to come on the road with the one-man stage show he’d developed with Simeone and Barry Kolin—The Tour to Settle the Score: An Audience with Rowdy Roddy Piper. Through Ireland and the UK, Snoddy sold merchandise and kept track of ticket receipts. He also joined Roddy on stage at the end of each night. In the film They Live, Roddy plays “La Brea Tar Pit Blues” on harmonica. He played it at the end of each show accompanied by Snoddy’s quiet, bluesy shuffle on guitar.

  Mostly he brought Snoddy along as someone to have dinner with and talk to. Roddy wasn’t comfortable in the company of strangers; he was never sure which version of himself to be for people. He’d offer Snoddy a drink, but abstained himself. “I’ve abused my privileges,” he said.

  The tour was a return to the UK for Roddy. In 2012 he’d done a few “Piper’s Pit” sessions on the Legends tour, organized by wrestling Hall of Famer Kevin Nash. Roddy’s star had been set with his own Hall of Fame induction, but in 2012 it was gilded by a more recent declaration of his role in wrestling history. The WWE released its ranking of the top fifty villains in wrestling history. Roddy was number one.

  When the Legends tour went to Scotland, he and Colt took off after the Edinburgh show to do some sightseeing. Roddy still had his gear on—Hot Rod shirt, kilt, leather jacket and wrestling boots—so he asked a photographer to follow along. They got to Edinburgh Castle and figured it was too perfect a moment not to take some pictures. Colt sat on a stone lion, figuring that would be better yet. Immediately security guards started yelling at him to get down. Not one to bend under pressure, Roddy told everyone to stay put and made the nervous photographer take the picture. The greatest villain still knew how to misbehave.

  —

  In Hollywood, Roddy gathered talent around him as quickly as he’d done in wrestling. He just drew people; they wanted to work with him, and for him. They wanted to find him that perfect post-wrestling project that would help him rally his talents to a lucrative future. One of those people was television agent Adam Opitz. “He had told me once that if he wasn’t doing what he was doing, he thought he would have made a great psychiatrist or psychologist. He just had this ability to bring things out in people, and you could really open up to the guy. Such a sense of showmanship as well. It was just born in him. He knew what to say, how to set people off, when to take it to the right level, when to drop it.” In describing Roddy, Opitz described the perfect talk show host.

  Opitz had a number of show ideas for Roddy. One was a Bar Rescue approach to small-time wrestling promotions; Roddy would help refine the contenders’ characters and storylines, and generally advise them on putting forward more complete and successful events. Another was a Curb Your Enthusiasm–style scripted comedy in which he played himself as a motivational speaker and actors played the family and his work associates (he’d already done a pilot for a reality TV show with us, his actual family). He liked the scripted show a lot, but the pilot was too low-key for the tastes of USA Network, and Opitz had to take it back to the drawing board. A third idea seemed perfect for Roddy, hosting a talk show in the vein of the chat-show champ he’d once knocked off the throne with a fire extinguisher: Morton Downey Jr. Opitz sat Roddy down to watch a documentary about the late controversy-courting talk-show host, called Évocateur. “It couldn’t be a right-wing or very political show, but we could just take real topics that resonate with middle America, and he could totally be that guy,” Opitz said. Roddy knew how to incite an audience, whatever the subject, and he didn’t mind doing it. “He l
oved the idea.”

  They brainstormed segments for a pilot, and Roddy mentioned how much he hated seeing bullying online, things like the “knock-out game,” in which teenagers were filming themselves punching elderly people in public. They planned a segment on bullying in which they were going to use real grown-up victims of childhood bullying and a couple of teen bullies from a nearby school. The kids backed out an hour before the show. Opitz hesitated to hire actors—which was always possible in LA, even on short notice—because Roddy wanted to use real testimonials from real people.

  The solution came in the form of a pair of magician’s assistants. The North Hollywood studio where they were shooting was also home to a magic act, and the assistants and the magician happened to be there that day. The magician assured Opitz that the kids, in their late teens, could act. One was medium height and skinny, the other was tall, and built perfectly to play a bully.

  “The segment goes off like you can’t believe,” said Opitz. “Roddy gets so pissed off at the one guy who’s pretending to be the bully, he grabs him by the collar, just shaking him on the stage. And the audience is really kind of feeling this energy. He doesn’t even know this kid is acting.”

  On break after the segment, Roddy approached Opitz. “There’s something going on in that bully’s head,” he insisted. “Something happened with his dad or something like that. I can see it in his eyes. Go find me that boy.”

  Opitz had a problem. If Roddy saw the kid, he’d know he was an actor. He’d be furious. They shot the next segment on a different subject and afterward Roddy asked if Opitz had found the kid yet.