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Rowdy... The Roddy Piper Story...a biography of their father

Posted: Oct 6th 2016 By: www.cbc.ca

Rowdy: The Roddy Piper Story – A Biography of Their Father
By Ariel Teal Toombs and Colt Baird Toombs
Random House Canada
416 pp; $34


You can overthink hugging an emotional wrestler goodbye.

In a dark Calgary hotel room in June 2015, I said my farewell to Roderick Toombs, a man better remembered as Rowdy Roddy Piper, the brawling professional wrestler and actor. After a week together on the road working on his book, I assured him we’d see each other again. Roddy bowed
his head solemnly and smiled. It wasn’t his usual camera-ready grin, perfected while posing for thousands of selfies with fans in restaurants and convention lineups. This was grim, in an I-appreciate-the-thought kind of way.

Roddy was right to be doubtful, though I meant it: We had a lot of work to do, and the past week had proved how much better we could do this job when we spent time together. It would be difficult, though.

Roddy lived in Portland, Oregon – but spent more time at his Hollywood apartment – and I lived and worked in Toronto as an editor for Penguin Random House Canada, which had just moved into new offices. Thanks to Roddy, I’d barely sat at my new desk. I wasn’t just Roddy’s editor, my usual role, I
was ghostwriting his autobiography. Over four decades, he’d become one of the most famous wrestlers in the business, named wrestling’s greatest villain by the WWE, and he’d starred in many films, including director John Carpenter’s anti-Reaganomics classic, They Live. Roddy had a lot of life
to tell. And what he’d told in the past wasn’t always accurate.

Before the Internet ruined all their secrets, wrestlers cultivated their ring personas on and off the job, and Roddy had so often repeated fictions about himself that he couldn’t always remember the truth. In combination with a deadly stew of concussions, pills, drugs and alcohol, the past was a haze out of which his real self made only brief appearances.

In that Calgary hotel room, he’d knelt beside his bed and searched “Roddy Piper RIP” on YouTube, where so much of his life stared back at him. He turned his laptop toward me so I could watch a memorial montage posted after he’d disappeared briefly in late 2009. When he’d tried to take a break from the public eye for a month, rumours circulated that the lymphoma he’d survived in 2006 had returned, decisively. But even before then he’d predicted his premature death on HBO Sports: “I’m not gonna make 65,” he’d said in 2003. “Let’s just face facts, guys.”

We wouldn’t finish our book. Six weeks to the day after I left him in that hotel, Roddy died of a heart attack in his sleep, and I was left holding the keys to a life that had touched millions but been understood by precious few.

I was deeply affected when Roddy died, but not terribly surprised. During the week we spent travelling Western Canada it was pretty clear what a terrible toll his life had taken on his body and spirit. The pain had been evident from our first conversation when, sitting in my car outside my kids’ school, I called the number I’d been given by Roddy’s manager. The grey and slush of Toronto in March weren’t
doing much to boost my optimism. From more than halfway across the continent, could I focus a personality as notoriously wild as Roddy Piper on something as arduous as writing a book together?

The voice that answered was deep, clearly awakened from sleep. It was 11:00 a.m. in Los Angeles.

Roddy’s voice had aged since I’d watched him chirping at his opponents on Saturday afternoon TV. I was barely a teenager when the original WrestleMania launched him and his archrival, the All-American Hulk Hogan, into superstardom.

Then the sleepy voice grew more familiar as he focused. Roddy took business seriously.

“Let’s try this,” he said almost immediately and launched into an account of his childhood, catching me off guard. I sat parked outside the school because the only time we were both free had been shortly before I had to pick up my kids. I was expecting about five minutes of his time, long enough
to make a few vague plans about getting this job done before he hustled off to do something that paid better.

I learned Roddy wasn’t that kind of celebrity, and I was soon scribbling notes furiously against the steering wheel. Roddy’s father had been a CN Rail cop who had to move his family to a different town every few years. He was a tough, firm man. In that job, he had to be. And he’d been hard on his rebellious son. So had some of the bagpipe teachers who were happy to rap his knuckles when he made a mistake, as had one of the organized pipe bands he’d joined, in which hazing was a fact of life for the younger members. Roddy had four grown children of his own. Mine were much younger. We
talked about them.

“Would you let your 10-year-old son go away with a pipe band?” he said, still astonished he’d found himself in the care of grown men when he wasn’t yet a teenager himself. He hadn’t come home from those trips a happy boy.

That call showed me that 50 years later, he couldn’t keep these old wounds secret any more.

“You sitting down?” Roddy asked one of the next times we spoke, a hint of mischief in his voice. It was April. We’d had a few phone calls, but needed a closer connection if we were to get past the professional-wrestling version of himself. “How about you and me get on a train in Vancouver, and we’ll go right across the country? We’ll talk, just the two of us, and we’ll stop along the way at all the places
where I grew up.” He laughed at the simplicity of it. “We’ll eat train food!”

The train plan wasn’t practical, but we figured out a week’s schedule of flights and rental cars. I didn’t yet know that Roddy had a blood clot in his lung, a condition aggravated by air travel. (He made a living on his reputation as a tough guy. He wouldn’t so much as take an aspirin in front of fans, let alone admit a potentially lethal heart condition to someone he barely knew.) So the Rowdy Road Trip was on.

I arrived in Vancouver first and waited for Roddy at the U.S. arrivals gate. Though he was 61 now, and I’d been a wrestling fan back in the 1980s, when he turned the corner in sweats and his iconic black leather jacket (it was made with Kevlar, inspired by one too many fans stabbing him) there was no mistaking him. I had tucked a copy of his first book under my arm, ready to signal him discretely. I didn’t need it. Ever adept at reading an audience, he’d picked me out of the crowd before I stepped forward to greet him.

In the parking garage, we approached the black Jetta I’d rented to drive around B.C. He stopped at the passenger door. “Last time I got in one of these, somebody tried to kill me,” he said. One of many stories of stabbings, fights and other misadventures he’d tell in the coming days.

I spent a lot of time listening to Roddy talk in that car. We drove up and down Vancouver Island, at one point visiting his 92-year-old mother. Long a widow, she still lived alone in the house she and her husband had bought in 1978, four years after Roddy “Piper” had hit the road for good. Tiny and fragile, but remarkably self-sufficient, she made us a salmon dinner, expecting her son but forgetting that he was bringing a friend.

With Roddy’s prompting she shed a little more light on where he’d lived as a kid: Saskatoon, The Pas, Dauphin, Port Arthur, Toronto, then, fatefully, Winnipeg, where he learned to wrestle and was swept across the border and into the business by legendary Minneapolis promoter Verne Gagne. They
talked about who in the family was healthy and who had died young. Roddy told her about his blood clot.

At one point, he needed a break. His mother’s laughter over his many childhood follies was punctuated by Roddy’s own memory of his father’s frequent disappointment. I followed him downstairs into a wood-panelled rec room, where he absent-mindedly played a piano with one hand. A very old newspaper photo of him in his early-career wrestling regalia and bagpipes adorned the wall beside us.

He spoke very quietly to me, like a teenager making sure his parents don’t overhear. He talked about the pain of silence in their rigidly Victorian household, his voice shaking to remember it, and he wondered if he’d bitten off more than he could chew with the book. “So in the morning,” he said,
trying to explain just how haunted he still was, “when my eyes open, my first thought is, I gotta go back to sleep tonight. Pretty f—ked up, huh?”

A tune caught my attention. “Bring in the Clowns.” Even here, ripping open old scars, knowing he had a time bomb ticking in his chest, he knew enough to create a little atmosphere.

I awoke the next morning in Nanaimo to the ping of a text. “I’m dying over here,” he said when I went to his room. He’d been up for hours, sick. I took him to a walk-in clinic, a “Doc in a box,” he called it.

The doctor, a tall, strapping man with an Australian accent, gave Roddy back to me after treatments to loosen his chest and combat infection.

“He’s a jock,” said Roddy, conspiratorially, as we left. “He gets it. I told him, ‘Give me all you got.'”

When the doctor had offered a steroid, he asked Roddy if that would be a problem. “Got anything in a harpoon?” his patient quipped.

It was in part because of Roddy’s history with steroids that his body was shutting down so young. His bones were disintegrating. By his own assessment he was two inches shorter than the 6’1-1/2″ plaid-wearing pit bull who’d dogged Hulk Hogan for 20 years. Never one to think of myself as tall, I’d been shocked to find I was slightly taller than Roddy.

Back on the mend in the hotel, Roddy had tried to give me a dose of what Hogan had felt when their battles began. “The heel runs the match,” he explained of the villain’s role. He told me to stand perfectly still across the room from him, hands at my sides. “No tough-guy bullshit,” he assured me,
to preface this demonstration in starting a match. Then his demeanour changed.

His eyes opened wide and the old glare – one that had supercharged the air in entire arenas – was suddenly right there in a tiny hotel room with me. “You’re a hockey player?” he said, trying to get me to open my mouth. “Shut the f—k up.” As he slowly crossed the room, he held me with an unvarnished look meant to cow his opponent, to let him – and the crowd – know that the usual protocols of sport were not to be respected. The only thing dividing this moment from Roddy’s savage attack was the ritual removal of his kilt and T-shirt.

“Stop moving your hands,” he said, catching my nervous twitch without ever taking his eyes off mine. He dressed me down in language that he’d had to quit using when television started to mic the rings. Now only three feet away, with a killer’s gaze, he whispered without moving his lips, “Move,” and rushed at me.

I stepped aside as he brushed past with a quickness that belied his usual slow, aching gait. He spun around and cocked his head to one side. “And that’s how you do it!” he said.

No tough-guy bullshit. Roddy had earned his judo black belt from the legendary Hollywood trainer and stunt master Gene LeBell, who became one of his dearest friends. He’d learned to box as a young
teenager in Toronto’s Lansdowne Gym, home at the time to the great George Chuvalo. It took great familiarity with violence for a man to be as convincing as Roddy in that hotel room, then to suddenly declare the lesson complete with such good humour.

But the testing wasn’t over. Though Roddy was sharing his deepest anxieties and hurts, we were still strangers. As we sat later in his room, he decided it was time to take my measure. Specifically, he worried that behind a thin veneer of professional interest I was repulsed by him, believing that all the childhood misery I’d been hearing about had left him a morally damaged man.

“Really,” he said, as we worked the memories loose, “would you let me babysit your kids?” He was deadly serious, as if daring me to say yes, which I did. That million-dollar smile was gone again. He didn’t break eye contact for a good fifteen seconds as he searched for any inkling of insincerity, any wise-guy bullshit. Then, like a guard dog that has determined a visitor nonthreatening, he turned away
with a grunt, satisfied that I was being straight with him.

I breathed.

He spun around on the bed, visibly unburdened, “I am really good with Lego!”

For all Roddy’s pain, he truly preferred being happy.

The Nanaimo doctor had him back on his feet. But he was in constant pain, something I didn’t fully appreciate, and he hated to bring attention to it. For thirty years he’d wrestled through injuries, leaving them to compound or heal badly. His pain threshold was legendary, but sometimes the pain of just being awake grew unbearable. Back on the mainland, craving some relief, Roddy was stuck with the only guy who didn’t know how to score him a joint in Vancouver.

We spent a night in Horseshoe Bay at a quaint motel. Our rooms were on the second floor, and I asked him if he wanted help lugging his two large bags up the stairs. He shook his head and hefted them in front of him. Sore, but still incredibly strong.

After three days of Tim Hortons, we treated ourselves to surf and turf by candlelight at a waterfront restaurant.

During the meal, our waitress asked as politely as possible if he was Rowdy Roddy Piper. He folded his hands in front of him. “Yes, ma’am. I am.”

She told him how her teenage son had been inspired by wrestling to take up bodybuilding, and that the focus had kept him out of trouble. He’d seen Roddy’s sneak attack on Hogan and Vince McMahon at WrestleMania XIX in Seattle and loved it.

No photo. No autograph, just a few kind words of appreciation.

Roddy hated being hounded when he was with his kids, but the pleasant talk with our server, a woman mature enough not to be star-struck, buoyed his spirits. When she left, I turned back to the table. I was surprised she’d recognized Roddy in the dim light. His good manners should have been disguise
enough for his infamously villainous persona. But there, propped against the other end of our booth, was my copy of his old book, his picture emblazoned on the cover. We’d brought it with us to check if any of the old stories were told wrong.

As we left the restaurant, I caught glances from the kitchen staff. They poured into the parking lot after us, wide-eyed.

Roddy leaned in happily for selfies with them all in turn. “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts!” he laughed into their
cameras.

The next day, we missed our flight to Edmonton. Roddy had made good on a note he’d taped to my door our first night: “Warning, not a morning person.”

Roddy travelled first class. I didn’t. So he turned on his smile at the first-class help desk, talking the attendant into changing my coach ticket for free. “I’m Mr. Toombs’s assistant,” I said, warming to his theme. As we made our way to the first-class lounge, he promised to smuggle me inside. It was the first time all week he’d walked in front of me. “Here,” he said, shoving his carry-on toward me, “take my
bag.” If I were going to convince anyone I was “Mr. Toombs’s assistant,” I’d need to stop acting like his editor.

As we waited for our flight, he told me some difficult stories that hurt him to recount. A man in his thirties walked up and asked for a photo. Roddy wiped something out of his eye, smiled his big smile and obliged. When we walked down the ramp onto the plane, he head-butted the wall in frustration. This unburdening wasn’t easy for him, I thought. He was probably cursing the fact he was getting on
another damned plane.

In Edmonton, we spent time with his oldest friend, Cam Connor, a former NHL enforcer who’d scored a double-overtime series-ending goal for Montreal to sink Toronto en route to the Habs’ 1979 Stanley Cup. After several days in the company of a stranger, joy transformed Roddy’s face as he stood to greet his friend with hugs and playful punches.

Connor straightened out a few stories from Roddy’s later teens in Winnipeg, where they’d met. The next afternoon, we set out for Calgary, where we wanted to catch up with another of Roddy’s closest friends, Bret Hart, but Bret was flying out of his hometown just as we were pulling in. I’d hoped we could watch their match at WrestleMania VIII together, what many people call Roddy’s greatest match, and get their commentary. Roddy loved the idea, but it wasn’t to be.

Instead we ate a late burger at the hotel and talked about how to properly wrestle the legendary Andre the Giant. They’d also been good friends, and Andre hadn’t been close to many other wrestlers. Then Roddy showed me how he did his famous eye poke without blinding anyone. “No tough-guy bullshit,” he assured me again, before jabbing his enormous fingers just to the right of my face.

Roddy noticed I was tired, and so was he. Exhausted by the emotional journey into his past, spending time with family he hadn’t seen in years, thinking about old cruelties he’d never gotten over.

He wasn’t done, though. In his room he opened YouTube, trying to find moments that could help explain the man behind the persona, so I could get it straight in the book. That’s when he searched out the RIP video of his great moments, which left him feeling like he’d attended his own funeral. He gazed into the screen, lost in his thoughts, too fatigued to put them into words for me.

When I tried to collect him for breakfast, he didn’t answer his door so I ate alone. We were both flying home that day.

It didn’t seem right to leave without saying goodbye. The stress that dredging up so many painful memories had put on his already overtaxed health had me worried about more than missing out on a collegial farewell. I was afraid he had succumbed to that blood clot overnight. I tried his door again. He answered, roused out of bed, his hair tousled and his eyes rimmed red.

I’d forgotten my notebook the night before, he said, and stepped into a corner of the dark room to get it. I moved forward and grabbed it quickly, looking like I didn’t want to be caught in the corner with him, like he’d finally caught the trepidation he’d been searching for days earlier.

“There it is,” he said, and not of the notebook. His shoulders dropped a little. I opened my mouth to explain, though explain what, I wasn’t sure. He shook his head, not interested.

“Sit down for a minute,” he said. He was worried about what he’d been telling me, what people would think of him, about his health and his rough history. But he’d decided. We were going to do this.

It was time to say goodbye.

“Hug your kids. Tell them you love them,” he said. Standing in an old T-shirt and boxers, he offered me his hand. After our journey, I knew what the hand meant. It’ll be all business now. I didn’t mean for it to get all emotional like this. I refused his hand, stood and hugged him.

Roddy’s days of hurting people were done, no matter how many old regrets nagged at his conscience. But as he leaned in, his hands folded intuitively into one another against the small of my back, one wrapped around the other the way a wrestler grips his opponent before lifting him off the mat. This hug was looking a lot like a front suplex. Old habits and muscle memory.

He let go and smiled. Grim, still, but sincere now. And so I told him we’d meet up again, resume our effort to tell his story as truly and fully as we could. He offered his hand once more. This time it meant something different, and I took it.

Roddy Piper died in the early hours of July 31, 2015. Months later, Craig Pyette asked Roddy’s daughter Ariel and son Colt if they were interested in finishing the job their father had started. They said yes.