Last Friday I read some really sad news on a friend’s Facebook page. One of my heroes, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (birth name, Roderick Toombs) passed away in his sleep at the age of 61. If there’s ever any way to go, I’d say that would be the way. There’s no pain, you just don’t wake up.
When Dusty Rhodes passed away a few weeks ago, I talked about how he wasn’t one of my favorite wrestlers, but I still wanted to pay tribute to the man who had done so much for the wrestling business that I have drawn so much enjoyment from watching. Roddy, on the other hand, WAS one of my favorites. Actually, he was my all-time favorite wrestler. No celebrity death, outside of Charles Schulz’s has hit me as hard as his. Of course I’m going to talk about him.
I started watching wrestling in the summer of 1986. In those first few weeks, Roddy Piper returned to the ring after a short absence. In wrestling parlance, he was a babyface, or good guy. He vowed he could beat his opponent with one hand tied behind his back…and then proceeded to do exactly that. His cocky bravado made me an instant fan. Little did I know that a few months prior, before his absence, he was one of the most reviled heels (bad guys) in the industry. I suppose I was introduced to him at just the right time. In those days, I pretty much followed the script. I liked the good guys and hated the bad guys. If I had first seen Roddy at the height of his run as a bad guy, who knows if I would have liked him as much when he turned. As it was, when I went back and watched some of the older tapes (I rented every wrestling tape I could find at the local video stores), I was already such a huge fan that I could only marvel at how good he was at being a bad guy and it made me like him all the more.
Piper had only been back for a few months when he announced his imminent retirement from wrestling. His final match would come at Wrestlemania III against “Adorable” Adrian Adonis. After that, he was leaving for Hollywood to try his hand at acting. I was sad, because back then I believed that when someone retired, they’d stay retired. I later found out that in many cases, including Hot Rod’s, retirement is fleeting. A little over two years later in fact, the WWF announced an upcoming house show in the Montreal Forum. The main event was scheduled to be Randy “Macho Man” Savage against…”Rowdy” Roddy Piper? How could that be?! Well really, the hows and whys weren’t really all that important. The fact was, this would possibly be my only chance to ever see Roddy Piper live. So we went and sat three or four rows from ring side. Really great seats actually. And I enjoyed every minute of it. Incidentally, this marks the one and only time I ever went to the Forum.
As it turns out, Piper never really hit it big in Hollywood. He filmed a couple of B movies and returned to the ring shortly after the house show in Montreal (one of his many returns actually). He did wrestle in Montreal again, but I never got to go back to see him. To be honest, as much of a fan as I am of Roddy as a wrestler, I didn’t really bite for his movies or television work. I love They Live and I wish the pilot for Tag Team (which starred Roddy and Jesse “The Body” Ventura as banned wrestlers who end up going through police academy to become cops) would have been picked up by ABC, but that’s mostly it. It’s selfish, but I would have much preferred if he’d stayed in the WWF.
For all the years that I watched him on television, Roddy was a good guy. He had entertaining feuds with amongst others, his former bodyguard, “Cowboy” Bob Orton, “Ravishing” Rick Rude and the Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase, but he never really reached the main event level that he had known as a bad guy, which is a shame. I feel money was left on the table in not giving him a championship run at the height of his heel run. The heat he could have generated parading around with the belt would have been unbelievable. He would have inevitably lost it back to Hulk Hogan but the crowd would have erupted like never before. While he didn’t really need to be involved in the title hunt to be over with the crowd, he certainly would have done great business. Part of that is on Roddy though, as I later found out.
As so many others did, Roddy left the WWF for WCW in the nineties. I wasn’t a big fan of WCW and I don’t know that Roddy enjoyed himself during his time there. He didn’t have that same zing. While he popped back up in WWE now and then, his days as a full-time wrestling talent were over after his run in WCW.
A few years back I bought and read Roddy’s autobiography. It was a real eye-opener and not in the best of ways. I discovered that my hero had his demons and wasn’t always the nicest or best guy in the world. He partied hard and being somewhat straight edge myself, that bothered me. The shine came off the penny so to speak. But really, nobody’s perfect (I certainly am not) and it wouldn’t have been right to condemn a man who had brought so much enjoyment to my life for succumbing to weakness. I made peace with it and decided to just enjoy his work.
Montreal Comic Con makes a point of inviting professional wrestlers every year. In the years that I’ve attended Sergeant Slaughter, “The Model” Rick Martel, Kevin Nash, Bret “Hitman” Hart, Mick Foley, Hulk Hogan, Lita, Trish Stratus and Chris Jericho have all been guests. For that reason, I held hope that someday they’d be able to lure ol’ Hot Rod to attend. Sadly, that will never happen now.
I can’t really think of a good way to close this entry other than to say that as much as anybody can love a person they’ve never met and only watched on television, I loved Roddy Piper. I watched quite a few Youtube videos of him over the weekend. With so much of his wrestling career available to be watched online, I’ll enjoy his work for years to come. I’ll still miss him though.
RIP Hot Rod 🙁