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Rowdy Roddy Piper’s legacy lives on with new book

Posted: Nov 7th 2016 By: www.postandcourier.com

A few years ago I asked Roddy Piper if all the fame and fortune he had amassed over several decades in the wrestling business had been worth it.

Pausing a bit before flashing that familiar million-dollar smile and devilish wink, he said he had no regrets. But then he admitted that the fame hadn’t come without a price.

“The business has taken a toll on me,” he said bluntly. Piper had battled and beaten Hodgkin’s lymphoma, suffered spinal injuries, been stabbed several times and sported a titanium hip as a result of more than 30 years of taking bumps.

“I’m not as sharp as I used to be. But if the creek don’t rise ... I think I’ll be OK,” he added.

Everyone else was hoping the same for Roddy. A street kid who rose to prominence in the wrestling and film industries, his working career was now in the rear-view mirror and he was embarking on a new chapter in his life. He was searching for his true identity — not as Rowdy Roddy Piper, the consummate entertainer and pop culture icon, but as Roderick George Toombs, the son, the father, the husband.

Fighting poor health and a career of injuries, he began his journey in an attempt to find answers and put his life story into words. The mission was as therapeutic as it was creative for Roddy. All those years of working in the surreal world of professional wrestling had left the lines blurred between fantasy and reality. Even Roddy himself had gotten to the point where he had trouble separating the two.

It was the reason for his trip to western Canada last year where he attempted to rediscover his largely forgotten youth. He had never talked much about that part of his extraordinary life, and there were many blanks to fill in. Most of all, he wanted to write a book for his family. Little did he know then that it was a book they would ultimately write for him.

Just months after returning from that journey of self-discovery and looking for the truth, Roddy Piper passed away in his sleep at the age of 61. His death was attributed to a heart attack caused by a pulmonary embolism. He left behind a loving family, countless friends and millions of fans.

Roddy also left the book on his life unfinished. Countless interviews had been done and information had been documented. But the journal was far from complete.

That’s where two of his children, Colt Toombs and Ariel Toombs, came to their dad’s rescue. At the suggestion of Piper’s Canadian-based book editor, the siblings agreed to finish the work their dad had started.

What resulted nearly a year later was “Rowdy: The Roddy Piper Story,” a monument to the living legacy of Roderick George Toombs as well as to Rowdy Roddy Piper.

“He had started the book,” said Ariel Toombs, 31, an actress and musician in Los Angeles. “The first book he had written years ago was pretty much thrown together. He almost died in the middle of making that book. It was never something he was really that proud of. So he wanted to write this book to set the record straight.”

Setting the record straight, she says, was shedding more of the Rowdy Roddy Piper persona.

“He was getting older, and a lot of what he was doing was for himself and for the family,” she explained. “He wanted us to have a complete actual picture of him. A lot of what we were told over the years were some of the wrestling stories and not necessarily the actual stories.”

For Piper, she said, the time he spent in Canada shortly before his death on July 31, 2015, was vital to the memoir.

“He met with old friends and family that he hadn’t seen for a long, long time, and he recorded all these conversations and took tons of notes. I’m just so happy that he was able to take that time to do that even if he didn’t get to finish what he wanted to do with it, which was the book, because it was like coming full circle in a lot of ways with his passing.”

The 400-page biography, published by Random House Canada, flowed as if Piper had written every word of it.

“Obviously that was kind of challenging because we didn’t want to write it in his voice,” said Ariel. “It was very rewarding in a lot of ways. It was helpful for the mourning process. It was a neat experience to learn more about our dad after he had passed because I don’t think a lot of people get that opportunity.”

While Roddy Piper’s sudden death sent shock waves throughout the wrestling community, many of his friends in the business recalled what he had stated years before. And that prophetic message was that he didn’t plan on living past retirement age. It was as though he knew his ultimate fate long before
it befell him.

It was a message he had telegraphed to his family as well.

“Growing up I remember he was always trying to prepare us for his death,” said his daughter. “I used to be mad at him for that all the time. But now that he’s passed, I understand where he was coming from. He was always afraid that we wouldn’t be prepared for him passing.”

To many of his fans, the thought of Rowdy Roddy Piper not being a vibrant force in the universe would never even be a passing thought. Piper had survived a rough-and-tumble, often-lonely youth and decades fighting his way out of wrestling arenas. He was a force of nature.

“He obviously had a lot of close calls over the years,” said Ariel. “As a result, you kind of begin viewing him as immortal. But he was always telling us, ‘Oh, I don’t know how many fights I have left in me,’ that kind of thing. He was always overcoming obstacles. When he actually passed, it was the most bizarre and surreal thing.”

Roddy, though, had found himself in an unusual and uncomfortable position in recent years. He survived a bout with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his bones were disintegrating, and he had wound down his ring career. A warrior whose better days were behind him, the WWE Hall of Famer was at a
transitional place in life.

“He was dealing with things both internally and physically,” said Ariel. “He was tired of being on the road. He was on the East Coast at least once a week the last month or two. He shouldn’t have been flying. I love him to death, but my God, he was stubborn about his health. You’d tell him to go to the doctor, but he would never put it down as a priority on his list. Ultimately I think he was very tired and was at a place in life where he was a retired fighter who, on top of all his injuries, didn’t really know what to do after that.”

Scars remained

The fact that Hot Rod was one of the wild boys of the business was not lost on anyone in the profession. There was a vicious 20-year cycle in his wild, freewheeling life that included alcohol, painkillers, cocaine and steroids. He had lived through 30-some auto accidents. While he settled down
in later years, the mental and physical scars remained.

The wrestling business, with its fame and corresponding adulation, had a great entrance plan, he told HBO’s Bryant Gumbel in a 2003 interview, but “it’s got no exit plan.” Piper, though, was still working because he couldn’t get anything from his pension until he turned 65, and “I’m not going to make 65,” he said.

It was a cruel twist of fate, to be sure, but nobody can ever say Roddy Piper didn’t live life to the fullest. He lived “10 lives in one lifetime,” his daughter said.

Roddy, who headlined the first Wrestlemania, was a natural in the ring and on screen. The bombastic performer could play the role of good guy or bad guy with equal aplomb. “He was always very good at getting people to hate it,” said Ariel. She believes her father was so good at being a bad guy because his frenetic, big mouth and cockiness got him into trouble when he was younger.

But pro wrestling had given the Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-born Roderick Toombs something to cling to. He once had been a teenager battling poverty and homelessness, and playing his bagpipes on the streets for quarters to get into youth hostels. Inexperienced and undersized, he broke into the
rugged mat business while still a teen. Wrestling gave him a shot at being somebody.

“I wasn’t a big guy, and I guess God was just taking care of me,” he’d say.

Finishing touches

Ariel Toombs, one of three daughters, and brother Colt reached out to numerous friends and colleagues of their dad to gather every piece of information they could while working on the book.

“Along the way we got fatherly advice from people and various stories from when he was young. It was really a cool way of keeping him living on. It was also a really nice gift to give to our sisters and members of our family so they can have those memories of those stories as well.”

Ariel and Colt, an amateur mixed martial arts fighter before embarking on a wrestling career himself, both learned a lot through the process.

“I actually didn’t know that much about his early fighting days, especially coming down from Canada to L.A.,” Ariel said of her father. “He trained under Gene LeBell (a legendary Hollywood trainer and stunt master under whom he earned a judo black belt) and we learned some of those details. Dad loved boxing after a workout. I didn’t realize he had trained as a boxer.”

There also was a period in Piper’s life, and a chapter in the book devoted to it, that was referred to as “The Jesus Years.” It was a time span in which little was known or documented about the wrestler.

“It was an inside joke that I always had with Dad — Jesus is born, he was a child, then they skip over years and then he dies. There was a part of his life that Dad just didn’t remember. It was a decade or so in the Bible where we don’t know what happened to Jesus. I used to joke with Dad when things got brought up and I’d asked him if something was true, and he’d say, ‘Honestly, honey, I don’t remember. It must have been the Jesus years.’ There was a block of time that he just didn’t remember or everything was all muddled. That was one of the hardest chapters to get factual information about.”

It was Ariel and Colt’s job while finishing this monumental task to separate fact from fiction.

“When we were little, he would have us kind of stick to the wrestling stories. A lot of times he would just tell us those because it was easier when people would ask us at school. He didn’t want to confuse us. As we all got older, we’d find out these things. That also was part of the reason for the book … setting it straight for us.”

“For me, it was about finishing the book — he was just an amazing person. It was neat to fill in gaps for the rest of the family and discover things about him,” she said.

While he was one of wrestling’s most famous villains (WWE named him the top “bad guy” in wrestling history), to Ariel and Colt Toombs, Rowdy Roddy Piper was just “dad.”

“He was a hated guy for a while there,” his daughter laughs. “That’s exactly why he kind of sheltered us from it. Some people really had a hard time separating him from the villain ... especially in those early days. Thus they would view us in a certain way. There were a couple of reactions. Either we were like his evil spawns that were here to help him destroy the world, and they hated us residually, or they viewed us as his victims — poor children who were raised by Rowdy Roddy Piper. Even some of our teachers would have a hard time or they’d be mad.”

But, as times changed, so did Piper’s role in the wrestling business. Whether hated villain or beloved babyface, the kilt-wearing, bagpipe-playing trash talker made a mark in the industry that would eventually cross over to Hollywood where he would star in a number of movies and action films.

One of wrestling’s all-time great interviews known for delivering borderline manic diatribes against his opponents, the charismatic Piper has a memorable line in the 1988 John Carpenter cult classic “They Live” in which he ad-libbed: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick (butt), and I’m all out of bubble gum.”

Loving father

Even though the business had dramatically changed during Roddy’s lengthy run, he was always on guard against fans who might want to do his family harm, according to his daughter.

“He would still be nervous, and he wanted to keep us away from it. He didn’t want us going to the rest rooms alone when we went to Wrestlemania even though we were in private areas. It was interesting to me because I saw some of the newer, younger wrestlers talking to him, and you could kind of tell that they were from two different worlds of wrestling in many ways. He was very concerned about how much
it had changed.”

But one thing never changed, and that was Roddy’s devotion to his family. “The highlight of my life is my four children,” he would say.

“He was a dad first, but he also was the most fun person I’ve ever known,” says Ariel. “And as fun as he was, when he was mad he could bring you down just as quick. But he was a very special person. He could take anyone’s bad day and make them feel like everything was going their way. He had this
way of making people happy and could entertain you on a personal level.

“It’s hard to describe, but it transcended into the ring for him. He just had that personality that could really manipulate you in a good way ... unless he was really mad at you, and then he could ruin your day and make you feel terrible. He was one of my best friends and the person I’d go to for everything. He was a really loving father who always put us before everything.”

Small mercy

During that last year, says Ariel, it was as though her dad sensed that he was entering his final act.

“I was happy that he went back to Canada because I knew he wanted to reconnect with his family. I know he was bummed out that his trip got cut short, but I’m glad he was able to do what he was able to do. I think that he was feeling spiritually lost at the time.”

There was a void when Roddy returned home.

“He was retired and in a lot of pain but he was still working. He was doing his signings and still doing acting, so it wasn’t like he wasn’t traveling. But he was home more. All of us kids had moved out. My sister’s on the East Coast, I’m in L.A., my other sister is in Oregon, so everyone was kind of spread out. So he was sad that he was home and none of his kids were.”

It had been much that way during Piper’s entire wrestling career. In the early days, it wasn’t uncommon for him to be gone weeks at a time. It was the life of a wrestler back then. But the business gave him the financial means to be able to support his wife and four children.

“It was a little different for wrestlers from that era. He was on the road almost every day but Christmas. He felt like he missed our childhood. He really wanted a family. I think that as he was going through this time of spiritual confusion in his life toward the end, he was very sad that we were all adults now. It’s not that he wasn’t happy for us or proud for us, but he was very sad. He was depressed. I think all of those things lead you to feeling sicker. That’s where his head was at the time, and his body was all over the place. He took so much pride in everything he did, but he didn’t know what to do next.”

In some ways, says his daughter, his passing was a small mercy.

“To me the sweet part about his passing the way he did was, as much as I hated it, I think that he didn’t want to live that much longer. Not in like a suicidal way, but he was always afraid of being in a wheelchair and not being able to take care of himself as he got older with his injuries. He was always afraid of not being able to take care of the family or even carry his own bags. His dad had died a slow
death, and he had always been afraid of dying of cancer. I think he passed the way he would have wanted to. I don’t think he wanted to age at that point in his life where his injuries got the better of him. I kind of take comfort in that.”

Piper, says his daughter, was relatively healthy until the moment he passed. “He was going to the gym, he was in good spirits, he had high energy. It’s not like he had a slow decline.”

Playful parent

Her parents, she says, were polar opposites in many ways. Piper and his wife of 32 years, Kitty, were from very different backgrounds and, due to Roddy’s excessive time away from home, employed different parenting strategies.

While he was an affectionate, “playful parent” who urged everyone he met to hug their kids, he wasn’t a strict parent, a responsibility largely left up to his wife.

“My mom (Kitty Toombs) has always been very responsible and logical,” says Ariel. “My dad was always the family wild card. Mom was the one who always brought him down to earth. She was always very good at being independent. She has always been OK to just be on her own. She loved my dad, but she was very good at dealing with having a husband on the road. I’m sure it was very hard for her, but at the same time I think that it takes a very unique and special type of lady to be married to a wrestler, especially back in those days.”

To stay busy while her husband was on the road, Kitty immersed herself in hobbies and activities with the children.

“We had horses and hobbies, and my mom was very good at balancing the both of them, and balancing the chaos when Dad did come home. He’d have like three days until the next thing, and everything would kind of get uprooted. She had to take care of them and make sure he was taken care of.”

Kitty now lives in Las Vegas, only five minutes from son Colt, says Ariel.

“She still has no idea what she’s going to do,” says Ariel.

“The only good thing in my eyes is that she was used to living alone because Dad was always on the road. In a lot of ways it’s like she’s used to him not being around. For all of us it still kind of feels like Dad is just on a long road trip. Obviously there’s not a lot of people in the world that can relate to that, but wrestling families sure do. You feel like he’s just a phone call away. For me that’s when it
hits the hardest. I’ll get ready to text Dad this joke or I’ll want to call him. My last voice mail was on my birthday last year. I still haven’t listened to it all the way. I can’t get through it. I backed it up and saved it everywhere.”

Next chapter

For the past year, Ariel Teal Toombs has gone about the business of living without her dad.

“I’ve actually been dabbling in some reality show stuff,” she said. “Dad and I used to say that wrestling was the first reality show. I think that in 20 years people will look back on today’s reality shows just like wrestling. They’ll wonder how people bought into that. My heart’s always been in acting. I’ve been working on my first album. My dad was actually going to do a song with me on the album
because he’s always loved music. We were going to do a cover or a duet or something together. He was really excited about that.”

Colt Baird Toombs, 28, an undefeated amateur MMA fighter, is looking to get into the wrestling business in Las Vegas with an upstart company.

“Colton definitely has a lot of Dad’s spark in a lot of ways,” said Ariel. “He’s his own person, but he definitely has a lot of what made Dad so much fun on camera. At the same time I don’t want to see Colt where Dad is, but I guess the industry has changed a lot. Hopefully he won’t be so bad off physically.”

Completing their father’s legacy in print has been cathartic for both. It has given them the chance to get close to their father one more time. Ariel says she helped finish the book because she wanted readers to see another side of Roddy Piper — a genuinely kind, thoughtful and caring man, a
loving father and husband.

“I hope that if people aren’t wrestling fans and if they aren’t Rowdy Roddy Piper fans, that they become Roderick George Toombs fans, because really that was what this book was about and who it was for. He had an incredible life and was an incredible person outside the ring. That’s the story
I want people to read about.

“Everyone’s heard so many of the wrestling stories. I wanted to share who he was to me with everyone. I think what Dad would want people to get out of the book, especially his fans, was to read about how he overcame so many things in his life — the cancer, the rehab, his childhood. I think he
would want his fans to get inspiration from that in their own lives — to stay strong in whatever they’re going through. He always cared about people. I think he would want his fans to draw inspiration and hope from this book.”