Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  Roddy got in the car and drove away. Ackerman made the call to Bloom. The manager said there was no bad blood; he still had great respect for Roddy. The next day, numbers were exchanged and Roddy said he’d contact Bloom soon.

  —

  Roddy looked at his phone. He opened a text to find a picture of himself, shaking hands with an enormous toy rabbit.

  “Oh, you finally got to tend to those rabbits, champ,” wrote Snoddy beside the picture. They’d watched Of Mice and Men together, and Snoddy knew the ending always got to him.

  “Asshole,” Roddy texted back. He was hoping to be back to Toronto before too long, he added, to continue work on the book, maybe go see his other sister, who lived in Ontario. They’d meet again soon.

  Roddy had been reaching out to a number of friends lately. Even Virgil, Ted DiBiase’s former “bodyguard” (who’d also menaced Roddy as a member of NWO) heard from him, just to say he loved him and he hoped everything was alright.

  —

  On the evening of Thursday, July 30, Colt received a text from Roddy:

  “Hey son, I miss you. I love you. Can’t wait to see you later.” Colt replied a half hour later, “I love you too, Dad, have a good night’s sleep. Get some rest. Can’t wait to talk to you tomorrow.”

  —

  On Friday morning, Bruce Prichard had a message, too. His phone hadn’t rung and he’d been having some trouble with the device. It didn’t show who’d called, and when he checked his voicemail the message wouldn’t play. Annoyed he set it aside. A little later the phone rang again.

  —

  Earl Skakel was looking forward to the afternoon of Friday, July 31. Since Roddy was exiled from his own podcast, Skakel asked him over to his house to do one with him—maybe they’d reverse roles for a while until the situation worked itself out. Skakel sent him a reminder late in the morning: “I got your water. I’ll see you at two.”

  Someone replied, texting, “He’s not coming over.”

  —

  Prichard answered his phone.

  “Hey man, that’s something about Roddy, huh?” a friend said to him on the other end of the line.

  Prichard thought, What’d Roddy do now? thought Prichard. They’d just spoken a few days earlier.

  “Wow, you don’t know, do you?”

  His friend explained.

  “Fuck you,” Prichard said and hung up. He called Roddy but the phone went to voicemail.

  “Motherfucker, you better fucking call me back, ‘cause I just heard some fucked up news.”

  —

  Bill Philputt was at home. “A number I didn’t recognize kept calling me,” he remembered. He wouldn’t normally answer unknown calls, but the phone kept ringing. When he answered it was someone from TMZ asking for a statement. Philputt was puzzled. What did the caller mean? “I’m so sorry for your loss,” the caller continued. Philputt’s ears began to buzz, blocking out any other sound, like his body had figured out what his mind couldn’t yet admit.

  “I put him on speaker and went to their site. There it was. I don’t know what I said to him, but my ears were ringing. I sent him a text: ‘Rod?’ From then on, the phone blew up. Stupid TMZ.”

  —

  Prichard sat tinkering with his phone, desperate to hear the message.

  “I’m just crying, fucking with my phone…and the message plays. And it was just him. Calling to tell me he loved me,” said Prichard. “But it—the uncharacteristic part—was this: ‘Man,’ he goes, ‘I’m not feeling real well. I’m really fucking tired, man, but I just wanted to call and tell you I love you and talk to you because I’m going to bed. And I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’”

  There wouldn’t be a tomorrow. Sometime over night, Roddy’s blood clot—a condition known to be aggravated by stress and air travel—did what knives, bullets and so many other things had failed to accomplish. He had a heart attack in his sleep. Kitty went into his room late in the morning and found him. He always had Hot Rod shirts around and he’d worn one to bed.

  Kitty tried to reach all the kids as quickly as she could. At a gym in Corvallis, Falon was the first to answer. Over the phone, she heard the paramedics arriving in the background.

  “No one knows yet, you need to wait,” Kitty told her. “You need to let me break it to them.”

  “I felt so bad because when she first called me she was so distraught I couldn’t understand what she was saying. For a good ten minutes, I thought she meant someone else had died. I was just trying to calm her down.”

  Eventually, Kitty made it clear:

  “No, Falon, your dad died.”

  Ariel was the last to learn. It didn’t sink in immediately that Roddy was dead. Colt had reached her with the news: “Ariel, you know I love you, right? Everything’s going to be okay. I love you…Dad’s dead. Mom’s at the apartment with the paramedics.” In shock, she thought for a moment that their presence meant there was still a chance Roddy could pull through. She drove from her house in Van Nuys to Roddy’s Hollywood apartment—her apartment, once upon a time. Ariel knew Roddy hated for his family to see him in a weakened state; she couldn’t bring herself to see him now. When her husband, Phil arrived, the brave face she’d been putting on for Kitty gave way and the reality of the moment hit her full force. Phil went to the bedroom and removed the T-shirt and Roddy’s jewellry so Ariel or Kitty didn’t have to see him. The thought of the shirt ending up in an auction was too morbid to contemplate so we destroyed it. Knowing Roddy was supposed to be on Earl’s show at three o’clock that afternoon, we all set that as a deadline to reach family, because word would surely get out by then.

  The LAPD sent the chief and several officers to make sure the coroner’s collection was handled properly. A celebrity death was sure to draw unwanted attention. They stayed a long time to help Ariel and Kitty figure out what to do next, for which they were grateful. Even as they were making arrangements with the coroner, Ariel’s phone was ringing already with people wondering if the rumours were true. Secrets didn’t keep in Hollywood.

  Falon stayed in Oregon, refusing to miss work Friday or Saturday. Roddy had told her once how he’d learned of his own father’s death just before going into the ring. He’d taken a moment to collect himself, then gone out and done his job. Only after that had he gone home to make preparations. Falon didn’t want to let him down.

  After work on Saturday she drove to Portland, picked up Colt and his wife and drove them all to Los Angeles. As soon as they got there they packed up the apartment and returned with Kitty to Oregon.

  Portland Wrestling fans were busy putting together a memorial service, but with the funeral to arrange, Roddy’s family wasn’t able to attend. The funeral was private, for family and close friends only. They’d do their public grieving later, in Los Angeles, at a memorial at the place that felt most like home now that the apartment was vacated: the Comedy Store.

  —

  Bret Hart had been one of the first friends to get a call from Kitty. Or maybe he is family; we don’t suppose that will ever get sorted out. It doesn’t matter. He’s family in one way or the other. He had been planning to call Roddy that weekend. After Roddy’s trip through BC and Alberta, Bret had had a biopsy that later confirmed he had prostate cancer. He’d learned the result about a week before Roddy’s death, but hadn’t told him about it.

  “There’s only one person I can talk to,” he’d thought, “and that’s Roddy. Then I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to bum him out. I feel kinda lousy about it myself.’ I wasn’t quite ready to talk to him yet. So I put it off.”

  When we spoke with him, the regret was clear. “The only guy I felt comfortable talking to. I say that with all honesty….It was Roddy. I couldn’t believe it when I got the news. He was always my…when you got a real problem you call Roddy. I was shining the batlight that day, and he wasn’t there anymore to take it.”

  —

  Ronda Rousey was finishing her weigh-in Friday afternoon for a Saturday UFC bout when s
he got the news about Roddy. The next night, she dedicated her match to him and her late father. She had promised Roddy she’d do him proud when he’d given his blessing to use “Rowdy.” She won that match in thirty-four seconds.

  There was a rumour that former WWE star Chyna had “crashed” the funeral in Portland. She hadn’t, of course. She and Roddy shared a lawyer in Sam Perlmutter, and Roddy had been very supportive as she got her troubled life and career back on track. She was sober, a process he knew very well. They’d had several intense conversations as she struggled her way back to a good place. She missed him greatly. (Sadly, Chyna died in 2016.)

  Friends worried about what finally killed Roddy. Was it stress, work, worry, lingering health problems from so many years of abusing “his privileges”? Had they been themselves responsible, in some small way? Had they pushed him too hard when he needed a rest? Had they not defended him when someone else had pressed him? In a life as complicated as our father’s, it would be impossible to say for certain what pushed his health to the breaking point. But that visit with his mother during the Canada trip probably identified the most likely candidate.

  While cleaning dishes after dinner, mother and son got to talking about food. A mention of bacon grease prompted Roddy to ask, “Coronaries? For your brothers?”

  “Yes, three of them,” she replied. Three of Roddy’s uncles had died of heart disease.

  He looked pensive for a moment, staring at nothing in the middle distance before speaking. “I think a heart attack would be a good way to go.”

  —

  Roddy had declared in his Hall of Fame speech what Falon had always heard him say: we hadn’t seen his best. Several people we spoke to echoed that sentiment. The simple fact was, Roddy never stopped trying. Maybe there would have been film roles that would eclipse anything he’d done before. His role in planning to get the nascent Classic Wrestling Revolution in Las Vegas off the ground might have led to a vibrant and successful wrestling promotion. He was recording more music, something he’d long wanted to do. His best probably was left unfinished, not because his potential was unfulfilled but because he always raised the bar for himself.

  He’d survived his years in the madhouse of the wrestling territories by learning from his mistakes and the mistakes of others who went before him. But he didn’t try to improve just so he could survive, he did it because, to him, doing less than breaking new ground for yourself was a waste of the gift of being alive. “He was the first wrestler to do a podcast,” said Steve Simeone. “He was the first wrestler to do a storytelling show in person.”

  Ever forward. Ever better.

  Roddy was always trying to be someone he wished he’d had in his own life. He was a gatherer of lost sheep. Chyna was one, but there were others whose stories we won’t tell to protect their privacy. He wanted to throw a protective blanket over everyone he knew and loved, and by the time he’d reached the age of sixty-one that was a lot of people. He’d broken the cycle of abuse he’d grown up with, something that he seemed to know probably wouldn’t have happened—odd as it seems to say—if he hadn’t found a life in professional wrestling.

  “The WWE, they allowed me this, the greatest thing that’s happened in my life,” he said during his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, naming our mother and each of his children, one by one as we looked on. “They’re all my family, and it’s all because of this family here.” He gestured around the stage at his peers. Violence had been his problem growing up. He crashed headlong into a life of it—real and pantomimed—and somehow by mastering it, he released its grip on his bloodline. No amount of stress, no substance he’d abused, no choices from the past that nagged at him as he tried to fall asleep could make him betray himself by betraying us. The fact that we laughed when he broke a kitchen table says a lot about how little reason he’d given us to fear him the way he’d feared his own father. The fact he’d honoured his father by passing on his name and visiting him at his deathbed says equally as much about Roddy’s ability to forgive and see past the failings of others. We started this journey wondering what made Roddy rowdy, but it was in keeping his demons at bay that our father scored the most impressive victory in his life.

  We did many interviews in writing this book, and often, at the end, Ariel asked Roddy’s friends what they would want his fans to know about him that perhaps viewers never would have realized from watching him on television. We asked them because it’s not fame that fills the hole Roddy talked about with his sister Cheryl on that trip through western Canada. It’s the self-respect that comes with being loved, a gift he gave to us in endless amounts. A few of their answers bear repeating.

  Mitch Ackerman: “He was what made life interesting for me. There were so many things that I did in my life that were because of him that I never would have done, nor anybody else in the world would have ever done. Whenever you were with him you never knew what was going to happen.”

  Earl Skakel: “Just the most kind-hearted man I’ve ever met. Not just celebrities, but in life. I cried more when I got that phone call confirming that he’d passed than I think I did at my parents’ funerals.”

  “Judo” Gene LeBell: “The world was a better place when he was here. How many people in your life can you really trust? That aren’t fair-weather friends? When I was no longer wrestling, no longer able to do things for him—’You gotta be on my program. Only for about five or ten minutes.’ I think we were there for about an hour and a half, teasing back and forth.”

  Marilyn Robertson: “He was so bad, but he was so good, and I loved him to death.”

  Noelle Kim: “His earnestness. He was always trying his best all the time. Even at the times he was down he was trying his best to not be. He was always trying.”

  Steve Simeone: “I don’t think I’ve ever met a better person. I’ve never met anybody that cared that much about other people. Your dad went through so much and I think that’s what made him so compassionate. There were times that I wish he would have shown that compassion to himself. There were times he was hard on himself, and I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re the best person I’ve ever met.’ Honestly, I don’t know if the general public knows that, but I think they felt that. I think that’s part of the reason why he was so…I don’t know if mesmerizing’s the right word. There was something about him. There’s a reason why people connected to him.”

  —

  So where do we end the story of a man who relished new beginnings? Where do we disconnect and how many stories can we leave untold? Some, we just want to brag about (our dad body slammed Big John Studd!). How many names can we leave unmentioned? Lonnie Mayne, killed in a car crash while champion when Roddy was in Los Angeles in 1978? Eddie Guerrero, Chavo’s youngest and ultimately most famous brother, who died the year Roddy entered the Hall of Fame? Art Barr and Rick McGraw, whose deaths haunted him? Our father worked almost every day for forty-two years, from those first matches in Winnipeg in 1973 to the week he died in 2015. We could write another book and not tell the same stories twice. The beauty of all those open-ended wrestling finishes was that you never knew when to look away; every ending was already a beginning of something else. Of course, like any professional wrestler, our father was always baiting the hook for next week’s show. He did it in the movies, too: did Nada die?

  We shouldn’t worry about the ending. As usual, Dad already had it figured out. The end of his book was one of the few parts of this story written before he died. It was something that anyone who knew him had heard him say many times. It was all he thought the world really needed if it were to become a better place. So we end with a few simple words of Roddy’s advice.

  Hug your kids. Tell them you love them. Tell them to do their homework and to come in on time. Don’t get mad at them. Talk it out. And listen to them. Listen close.

  They might be trying to tell you something.

  Roderick George Toombs, Saskatoon, 1954.

  The wedding of Eileen Anderson and Stanley Toombs.

  The To
ombs family.

  Roderick and Tammy.

  Roddy’s first Toronto pipe band (tallest boy in back row, second from left).

  Visiting the Andersons in BC.

  Ready for baseball season in Port Arthur.

  Father and son.

  165-pound champ, “Ron” Toombs (front row, fifth from right, in jeans).

  Starting out in the pros.

  “Ronnie” Piper heads out for the territories.

  Credit pai1

  Wrestling hurts, bloodied by “Blackjack” Lanza in Houston, Texas

  A “Scot” in a strange land.

  Jay “The Alaskan” York in Los Angeles.

  “Killer” Brooks in Portland.

  Hair match with “Playboy” Buddy Rose.

  Filming an unusual promo in Georgia.

  Before the other Mr. T came Tire Iron.

  Nineteen-year-old Kitty Dittrich.

  Best man and booster Red Bastien.

  Roddy, Kitty with families, married in 1982.

  Visiting Cam and Sherilyn Connor.

  Anastasia arrives.

  One last trip to Japan.

  New Year’s Eve 1983 with Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat.

  Credit pai2

  Setting the stage for WrestleMania, with Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff, “Cowboy” Bob Orton, Mr. T, Hulk Hogan and Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka.