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Rowdy Roddy Feels All Canadian

Posted: Oct 30th 2006 By: CMBurnham

When Rowdy Roddy Piper gets off the VIA train in Ottawa on Nov. 14, he will be looking for someone special in the crowd at the train station...his real-life sister Marilyn Robertson (Toombs), who lives in Perth.

Piper got together with his sister at WWE's 24/7 Canadian launch last year. He says it'd been 28 or 29 years. And he can't wait to see her again.

"Maybe I'll get her on the train with me," he says. "She's very special. She really helped me out."

Piper, who will also sign autographs at the St. Laurent Toys R Us that day, will be riding the rails to promote a WWE/VIA partnership for next year's Wrestlemania in Detroit. And Piper couldn't be happier that he's been asked to ride VIA from Quebec City to Montreal to Ottawa to
Kingston to Oshawa to Toronto to London to Windsor, all from Nov. 13-17.

"I'm darn proud of being Canadian," he says. "I was born on the Canadian National Railways. I lived in The Pas ... Manitoba. They had a little red shack by the tracks. (his dad was a railway cop). I call it a shack, but it was home for me for seven, eight or nine years of my life. I was always around the tracks ... I used to jump trains all the time."

Technically, Piper was born in Saskatoon, but he also spent time in The Pas, Flin Flon, Dauphin, Port Arthur (Thunder Bay), Scotland, Australia and Toronto.

"I was given the key to the city in Winnipeg," says Piper. "And I was asked where home was. I said I'd never really had a place I call home. I was embarrassed. But it's true ... when people ask, 'Where are you from," ... I say, 'I'm from Canada.' "

At the age of 15, after living in Winnipeg for about a year and a half, Roderick George Toombs was at a crossroads. He played the bagpipes and he was learning boxing and amateur wrestling.

"The youth hostel closed at 9 p.m. sharp and I was always late," Toombs said over the phone earlier this week. "My trainer said to me one night: 'You're going to be late ... you're going to get cold and hungry...then you're going to go to jail, get raped and die. But I can get you $25 if you want to go to the Winnipeg Arena and wrestle.'

"My pipe band played me in. The ring announcer had no idea who I was. So he announced me: 'Ladies and gentlemen, here comes Roddy the piper.'"

And the road to stardom began for Rowdy Roddy Piper, who on that night lost to Larry "The Axe" Hennig.

"I lost the match in 10 seconds," says Piper. "I was 167 lbs., he was 320. My nose was broken, my eye was drooping. The promoter came to me and said: 'Kid, how would you like to go to Kansas City?'

"I got in a van, crossed the border and I've been going ever since."

Piper's on and off tenure with WWE is on again. He's appeared alongside Ric Flair twice recently on Monday Night RAW.

And with a new DVD out soon...Born to Controversy: The Roddy Piper Story ... he's riding on top of the world.

"(The DVD) is honest. It won't be the Bambi version."