“We’re trying to find him.”
After the shoot was over, Roddy pressed the matter.
Opitz found the two assistants cleaning up backstage. He said, “Here’s twenty bucks. Go get some beer and go hang out in a parking lot somewhere.”
He again told Roddy the bully was nowhere to be found and hoped he’d forget about it. Roddy didn’t. Opitz woke up the next morning to his phone ringing. Roddy wanted to see that kid.
Opitz and his producer partner had been working on the show for the better part of a year. It was too much of an investment in the project to screw it up over a white lie, but he couldn’t shake the sense that he needed to come clean with their star.
“I had this overwhelming sense of guilt,” said Opitz. “It’s like George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. It’s like I felt like I had to tell the truth to Dad.” Opitz took a deep breath and told Roddy the whole story. For fifteen seconds the line stayed silent. “Roddy?” he said.
When Roddy finally spoke, he thanked Opitz for telling him the truth. But even as he finally let the matter drop, Roddy couldn’t shake the feeling. “There’s still something going on with that kid!”
“There was this sense that he had,” said Opitz, still moved by the story. “He just brought out the truth in everybody.”
If one of those truths could be bullies understanding the hurt they really cause and turning themselves around, Roddy realized he could be a powerful influence in the lives of many children.
The talk show didn’t proceed. Between Jerry Springer, Maury Povich and Steve Wilkos, that corner of the television dial was full to bursting. But bullying segment had lit a fire under Roddy, and in 2015 he appeared as a spokesperson for the Stand for the Silent anti-bullying campaign, which had begun after an eleven-year-old boy named Ty Smalley took his own life. Roddy discovered that his passion—helping people—might be his next calling.
He’d always done charity work, with a soft spot for children’s causes. For decades, Roddy visited the cancer unit at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland to cheer up the kids. He promoted annual Christmas toy drives in Portland and involved Ariel in a blood drive at the Children’s Hospital in LA. Maybe if people knew more about who he was and what he’d overcome, his story could be a way to expand the good he could do.
—
In February 2015, Roddy decided to write a new book. “I want it to tell the truth,” he said. The problem was, he didn’t always know what the truth was anymore. So he flew to Vancouver to begin a week-long journey to re-discover his own past. As he walked into the parking garage at the airport to collect his rental car, he paused.
“Last time I drove anywhere in a Jetta the driver amost killed me.”
He ferried to Vancouver Island and drove up and down its lone highway, visiting his sister Cheryl, and his mother. On his second morning, he woke up feeling terrible, struggling to breathe. He’d been dealing with a blood clot in his lung, and it was sucking the breath and energy out of him.
Roddy went to a walk-in clinic in Nanaimo, BC. He was given penicillin and an inhaler, a treatment to open his lungs. The doctor stopped before administering a needle. “This is a steroid. Will that be a problem?”
Roddy smiled. “Got anything in a harpoon?”
Just a week before, he’d been on a flight to LA from an appearance in Tennessee when the lady sitting beside him on the plane asked to get past him. He stood in the aisle to let her out and decided to stay up and stretch his legs. He passed out, fell and hit his head on the way down. When he came to, he got back in his chair and refused to let them land the plane early. When they disembarked, his manager, Bill Philputt, found him on a paramedics’ gurney. Worried a particular paparazzo was lurking, he got Roddy out of the airport and into a cab. Just another day, another bump in the business of being Roddy Piper.
On June 11, 2015, days before Roddy set out for Canada, Dusty Rhodes died, aged sixty-nine. As Roddy travelled through BC he was reading tweets from old peers attending the funeral in Orlando. “I should be there,” he said quietly.
Feeling well enough after visiting the doctor in Nanaimo, Roddy continued on to Edmonton, where he saw Cam Connor. The reunion was sweet, and agonizing. Connor knew more about Roddy’s old ghosts than pretty much anyone, having been there when some of them entered his life. Roddy knew his story could help people who’d been through some of the same things but hadn’t been as fortunate to find direction in life. But how much to tell? He leaned on his old friend for guidance. Cam’s wife, Sherilyn Connor, was a psychologist who dealt with victims of childhood trauma. After an hour in her office, he and she both realized just how raw so many of his old wounds still were.
From Edmonton he headed south to Calgary, for no reason other than it had better flights to Los Angeles. Then it dawned on him. He put up the batlight and texted Bret Hart, wondered if they’d be able to meet when Roddy pulled into town. Maybe they could watch the WrestleMania VIII match together and break it down beat-by-beat for the book. Hart loved the idea, but he was flying to the UK that day. The near miss seemed to be Roddy’s loss, but Bret was sincerely disappointed. He’d been thinking about putting up the batlight himself of late.
When Roddy returned to Los Angeles, all hell broke loose. The old villain had played a joke that wasn’t well received when it finally saw the light of day.
—
By 2014 Roddy had been in a better place to commit to a weekly podcast. He was still flying frequently for appearances around the country, but they were almost always on the weekends. The carrier PodcastOne seemed a perfect venue for his hour-long Piper’s Pit talks with wrestlers new and old, and other personalities his fans might want to hear from. He relived the behind-the-scenes drama of They Live with director John Carpenter and got fatherly with the most famous fighter in America, and now his namesake, UFC star “Rowdy” Ronda Rousey, who’d lost her father when she was young. She had phoned Roddy at Gene LeBell’s suggestion to ask if he’d mind her using “Rowdy” herself, as people had started to call her by Roddy’s old nickname. Impressed, he’d invited her on the Piper’s Pit podcast and was even more impressed when she showed up at the studio without an entourage. Permission was granted, gladly.
In 2015 Roddy also picked up a podcast sidekick in comedian “Inappropriate Earl” Skakel. They’d met at the Comedy Store when Roddy was working out the kinks in his stage show. Like Steve Simeone, Skakel was a wrestling fan, but one with an inexhaustible knowledge of the history of the business.
“The comics at the Comedy Store were all wrestling fans. So when he would pull up in his Mercedes, it was like a superhero was coming in,” said Skakel. “He’d get on stage and do mostly stories and a couple of jokes, then he would open the floor to questions. Which was probably a big mistake. ‘Cause late night at the Comedy Store, it’s like the bar in Star Wars. Every unsavoury character in LA is there. A lot of the comics were in awe of him. ‘Cause it really was like watching Batman do comedy. They’d be shy in asking him questions, so I would lead the way…I would start off with a wacky question: ‘Hey, Roddy, was Abdullah the Butcher really from the Sudan?’ He would tell a half-hour Abdullah the Butcher story about how he would do a tag-team match with him and he wasn’t in the ring, so he would run out to the van and Abdullah the Butcher was eating doughnuts.”
Roddy recorded more than sixty podcasts in that studio, with Skakel by his side for the later ones. But it was an interview recorded before Skakel’s tenure that ultimately buried the show. Canadian comic Will Sasso does a mean impersonation of wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Roddy had him do it on Piper’s Pit and they maintained the ruse that he was the wrestler for much of the episode. The real Austin wasn’t impressed. Austin had a podcast on the same network, and Roddy had credited him with recommending Roddy to the network as a host in the first place. Austin complained to PodcastOne about the Sasso gag, though he claims he didn’t insist they kick Roddy off the air. They did anyway, then quickly reversed t
heir position, worried about a backlash from Roddy’s fans. Roddy couldn’t accept working for someone who didn’t have his back. He’d done that for decades and bore too many scars to show for it.
Roddy moved the show to another podcast network, SoundCloud, but could only produce a couple of shows before he was served by PodcastOne with a cease-and-desist order, citing his still-active contract with them.
The sources of stress were mounting, as was Roddy’s need to take better care of himself. His steady diet of Coke and energy drinks was not doing him any favours.
—
Falon had stayed close to home for her first year of college at Portland State University. She enrolled in communications and one of her professors had an inspired idea for a guest lecturer. “Not how you want to start college,” recalled Falon, recounting the day her father walked into class. She’d asked him a few days earlier what he was going to talk about. “I haven’t even thought about it,” he replied.
“He comes into the class and gives this great lecture about public speaking and what you should do and not do, breathing exercises, how to capture the audience. He even tortured people and made them come up and say a sentence or two off the top of their heads to practice things. He was very exuberant about everything. You know how you think about a crazy professor? That’s what he was!”
The class of forty freshmen thought they just had a cool celebrity come to class. They had no idea she was his daughter—until he told them.
The next year, Falon had moved schools and was living in Corvallis, an hour and a half south of Portland. On Wednesday, July 22, 2015, Roddy and Kitty were passing through on a drive to LA and stopped in town to have breakfast with their youngest daughter. Roddy was visibly ailing.
“He was definitely not himself,” said Falon. “He was having a hard time focussing. He seemed really sick to me at that point.” He promised he’d see his doctor when they got to LA. He’d been excited about his shoulder surgery. A surgeon had recently removed a number of bone splinters that inhibited his doing anything much with his right arm. He could throw a jab for the first time in years. He’d always taken Falon to the gym when she lived at home and instilled a strong fitness ethic in all of us kids, and now he could get excited about spending time in the gym himself. “He kept saying, ‘I haven’t done my best work yet.’”
Almost immediately upon arriving in Los Angeles, with the Austin fiasco still very much in the air and his podcast still suspended, Roddy witnessed an old friend’s lifetime of work being struck from the record. A recording of Hulk Hogan unleashing an angry tirade filled with racial epithets had surfaced. The WWE terminated his contract and removed all mentions of him from its website and stores.
Hogan responded to the uproar with a single tweet: “In the storm I release control, God and his Universe will sail me where he wants me to be, one love, HH.”
Roddy knew Hogan’s comments were indefensible, but the backlash struck him as unbalanced. Hogan had inspired many people and suffered many of the same ailments as Roddy after years of abusing himself for the delight of wrestling fans (Roddy was two inches shorter than in his prime, and Hogan was visibly reduced as well). That all of that should be swept away by a few words—horrible as they were—spoken privately in anger eight years earlier seemed to Roddy to be just too cruel.
One of the reasons Roddy and Kitty had driven back to LA that week was so he could make a Friday appearance on The Rich Eisen Show. His segment went off the rails quickly. He seemed short of breath. Roddy was always given to lengthy tangents in his speech, but where he usually found his way back to the original subject, with Eisen he struggled. When Eisen asked him about Hogan’s troubles, Roddy tried to give a thoughtful answer, but he lost track of what he was saying.
The television appearance reminded us at first of what it was like talking to him in the early morning, when his thoughts wandered loosely and his stories led themselves astray. The crucial difference here was his inability to pull himself together in front of the camera, something we’d never seen before. The show released the interview, and rumours abounded that he had been drunk or high. He wasn’t either. He was dying.
Outside the studio, Roddy taped an interview for TMZ about Hogan’s comments. The gossip site sent a very young man who didn’t seem to understand the situation well enough to properly interview Roddy.
“We talked about doing it,” said Sam Perlmutter, Roddy’s lawyer and one of his most trusted confidantes. Getting involved in the Hogan controversy could be dangerous for an older white man in the current political climate. “He did it on his own. He said, ‘Look, he was my friend and I’m standing up for him.’” They had to send the videographer to Roddy’s apartment to re-shoot it because he hadn’t gotten any useful quotes.
“His son was going through a really tough time. He’s trying to take care of his daughter. He’s trying to keep his family together,” said Roddy to the camera, on the sidewalk outside his LA home. “Do I condone it? No. But I think Hulk Hogan has done a whole lot more for society than he has done negative to our society.”
Bill Philputt was pacing worriedly in the background. After the shoot, he walked Roddy inside to the elevator and said goodbye, expecting that they’d catch up soon.
—
Mitch Ackerman sat waiting in a restaurant in Ventura where he and Roddy often met to discuss business, Ackerman’s so-called “managerial duties.”
He still helped Roddy find screen work, and had accompanied him to a meeting not that long ago about a They Live TV series. Ackerman had asked two young writers to come up with an outline for a pilot and direction for the series. Roddy loved the idea, as did John Carpenter and Sandy King. As it turned out, film producer John Davis was considering a remake of the movie anyway, so his team put some effort into further conceiving a direction for the series.
“What it was going to be was, at the end of They Live, you don’t know whether Roddy lives or not,” said Ackerman, “so it was going to be Roddy does live, but he becomes a recluse. This group of younger people are taking on the aliens and go to find Nada, and he becomes their mentor in fighting the aliens.”
Ackerman, Roddy, Carpenter and some of Davis’s people and their agent had gone to Syfy network for a meeting about putting the show together. Ackerman thought the meeting was going well. Roddy was excited. The writer was pitching their story ideas and responses and concepts were flying back and forth.
“All of a sudden,” said Ackerman, “John Carpenter gets up and says, ‘Okay, hope this thing goes. Nice to meet you all,’ and he walks out.”
No one else in the room had thought the meeting was over.
“We get up and we say our proper goodbyes. Roddy and I go out and Roddy says to me, ‘I guarantee you, he had to go out and have a cigarette.’ And sure enough, we go down the elevator into the garage and there’s John smoking a cigarette.” In the end, unfortunately, four different entities claimed ownership of the rights to the show concept. The momentum from the meeting slowly dissolved amidst the bickering, and Syfy let it drop.
Roddy and Ackerman hadn’t seen each other in a few weeks so they arranged to have dinner. Roddy always walked slowly because of his hip, but when he finally came into the restaurant he seemed to be dragging himself to the table.
“Are you okay?” said Ackerman.
“I’m just beat,” said Roddy.
“Well, Rod, you gotta go see somebody about it,” said Ackerman.
“Yeah, I know, I haven’t had the time.”
“Rod, you’re best friends with doctors…”
Roddy had doctor friends he texted regularly at three o’clock in the morning. He didn’t want to see doctors any more than he could help it, but there were so many signs that his body was collapsing, it was tough to avoid.
Roddy ordered soup, which was a few thousand calories short of what he usually considered a meal. He was having a hard time breathing and swallowing.
“Rod, this is serious,” Ackerman insisted
.
“No,” said Roddy. “Let’s talk business.” He wanted Ackerman to approach an old manager named Barry Bloom. He had managed Jesse Ventura, Chris Jericho, Mick Foley and a few other wrestlers, including Roddy himself, briefly. Ackerman got to know Bloom well when Ventura had been part of the Tag Team pilot and series planning. Roddy wanted to make sure there was no bad blood from his having moved on to another manager after Bloom, and wondered if Bloom could help him find some more work. Ackerman promised to make the call.
The dinner was hard for Ackerman. He wasn’t comfortable seeing his old friend like this. They were not old men. As they left the restaurant and approached an escalator, Roddy stopped to rest. The escalator wasn’t working.
“Do you want to take the elevator instead of walking down?”
“Yeah,” said Roddy, a concession Ackerman would never expect to hear from him.
Concerned, Ackerman walked him to his car. He wasn’t crazy about the thought of Roddy driving, but he wasn’t going to stop him.
“Did you listen to my last podcast?” Roddy asked as they crossed the parking lot.
“No, I didn’t.”
“I had Lanny Poffo on.” Poffo—aka The Genius—was Randy Savage’s brother. Their father, Angelo Poffo, had been a famous wrestler also. He died only a year before his most famous son.
“He told some really interesting stories,” said Roddy. “Did you know that their father paid for Gorgeous George’s funeral?”
“No.”
“Listen to the podcast.”
“Okay.” Then Ackerman ran an idea past Roddy that he’d had for a while. “Speaking of podcasts, Roddy, you’ve told me I’m your best friend, right?”
“Yeah.”
“How about one time when you can’t find a guest, have your best friend on the podcast, ‘cause I’ve got a million stories to tell about you.”
“That’s a great idea,” said Roddy. He smiled. “We’re going to do that.”
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