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Piper Takes World Of Hurt To Heart

Posted: Aug 15th 2011 By: CMBurnham

In the Pit with Rowdy Roddy Piper, a live taping of the reality show World of Hurt takes place at the Acadia Recreation Complex Thursday at 7 p.m. Visit primeboxoffice. com for tickets.

"I have never, ever taught anybody how to be a prowrestler," says Rowdy Roddy Piper quietly. "Nor do I have any interest in it."

This may seem a peculiar opening line for a conversation about World of Hurt, the Calgary-shot reality show currently filming its second season with Piper as the new trainer of 12 aspiring wrestlers.

On the phone after the first day of filming, the man born in Saskatoon as Roderick George Toombs is much more subdued than his famously madcap "Hot Rod" persona would suggest.

But World of Hurt, he insists, is serious business and the mat veteran is eager to emphasize the show's most distinct quality. This isn't pro wrestling's answer to American Idol. He signed on to share his knowledge and experience with 12 young athletes who were already in the business. Ultimately, he plans to guide them to either superstardom or the sobering realization they should find a new line of work.

"It wasn't a bunch of kids that have watched pro wrestling and want to become a pro wrestler," he says. "It's about people that are established pro wrestlers that are stuck and can't figure it out. That interested me on a couple of levels. For one, you know what they have to do, at least some of them? Go home and get a job. Let me save your life. I started when I was 15. And I've seen a lot."

Separating the wheat from the chaff is a common sentiment during the conversation with the 57-year-old WWE Hall-of-Famer.

Season 2 of World of Hurt will air on the Cave some-time next year. But for now, Piper is at a makeshift gym in Pyramid Production's Calgary studio for a twoweek run that will climax with the taping of a live event Thursday at the Acadia Recreation Complex. It's an evening that Piper says will be a "do-or-die" test for the 12 young wrestlers.

The ring veteran has replaced Season 1 trainer Lance Storm, a Calgarybased wrestler who left the show amicably to spend more time with his family and at his gym. And while it's hard to imagine that Piper's participation was much of a secret in the insular world of "sports entertainment," he says his unannounced arrival on the first day of shooting was a surprise for the participants.

Right out of the gate, he gave them all a tough-love, one-on-one interrogation that he hopes set the tone.

"They were scared to death," he says. " . . . we had a real serious talk. It was like: 'Yeah, but where's the lights and where's the music?' No, there ain't no lights and music."

Piper was already a ring veteran in the mid-1980s when professional wrestling made its seismic shift from a collection of scrappy, regional promotions to worldwide sensation under Vince McMahon's WWF promotion (Now WWE). Piper, sporting a kilt and playing the bagpipes, was one of a handful of early stars who soon found themselves on lunch boxes.

There were plenty of ring villains at the time.

But it was Piper, with the crossover help of MTV and singer Cyndi Lauper, who became the chief heel for wrestling's fastgrowing fan base to rally against; a rock-'n'-roll-hating cad who battled hero Hulk Hogan. Piper was the main antagonist in 1985's first WrestleMania at Madison Square Gardens, where he fought Hogan and Mr. T. He was the only professional wrestler named in Wizard Magazine's list of 100 Greatest Villains of All Time, ranking higher than Mr. Burns and Leatherface. There's no denying he was great in the ring. But in front of the camera he was electric: funny, unpredictable and prone to sudden fits of rage. But as a hero or villain, Piper says the key was authenticity.

"I don't believe much in characters," he says. "I wear a kilt because I played the bagpipes. That's it . . . Playing somebody who is really away from yourself, which I know is done - I'm not teaching that. I think that may be one of the problems in watching prowrestling today. That magic has been lost. What I'm trying to do is find the magic in each of them individually."

That said, Piper was also a pioneer in using his industry's inherent theatricality to kick-start a career on the silver screen. Now it's fairly common for modern stars such as Jon Cena and Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson to parlay their ring success into film roles.

But Piper was among the first to leave the squared circle in favour of Tinseltown, hitting an early peak with the lead in John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi hit They Live. Recently, Piper showed up in an episode of the sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He played a grappler who was more-or-less a parody of the has-been Mickey Rourke played in 2009's Oscarnominated The Wrestler.

Piper, perhaps half-jokingly, suggests that Rourke based his role on Rowdy Roddy rather than the other way around. ("I'm what happens when you don't die," he says with a chuckle.)

But The Wrestler was a tragedy about a once-famous, drugaddled and injury-prone grappler who had been abandoned by the wrestling world. If nothing else, it made a compelling case that the industry could use a better retirement plan.

Piper, on the other hand, is still signed with the WWE and continues to make appearances as a revered "Hall of Famer."

Still, he said the pitfalls of the industry shown in The Wrestler are "something we've been working hard to correct."

Which brings him back to his original point: the best way to ensure survival is to ensure you're the fittest, he says.

"We see these kids and we don't want that movie repeated," he says. " . . . This is why I'm here at World of Hurt. It's so extremely difficult for them (to be successful). It's almost impossible unless someone really cares. I say to Hogan, I say to Ric Flair - I have a lot of respect for both - 'We're Hall of Famers. We need to carry ourselves as Hall of Famers. We need to come back into our business and get the impostors out and correct the situation.' "