It’s 10 years since I happened upon Rowdy Roddy Piper at a party high in Portland’s posh southeastern hills. Fans were crowding around; I joined the scrum for the novelty. But then I launched into an impromptu interview. The professional wrestler, that extremely rare commodity known as the heel everybody loves, would be dead by July of the following year, 2015.
“Have you always been a ‘bad guy?’” I asked, wanting to know if at sometime in his career he’d played the heroic crowd favorite. “You’ll have to ask my wife,” Piper quipped with a smile.
Piper’s heyday with the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling (1984-2000) occurred decades after I lost interest in pro wrestling in early-adolescence, but he’d made such a name for himself that I instantly recognized him. Ask me about Andre the Giant, Curtis “the Bull” Iaukea, Ray Stevens, and Pat Patterson, and I’d remember well because I’d seen them all in live action. My recollections of the kilt-clad, Canadian-born Scotsman came chiefly from my young nephews, when I overheard them ranting about Piper vs. Hulk Hogan for example, which would go down as one of the great matches.
On the night I met Piper in person (he looked great, with an end-of-summer tan) I knew of his film career, the most well-known role his lead in John Carpenter’s 1988 cult favorite They Live, in which Piper says the undying phrase, “I have come to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubblegum.” But I didn’t know that his youth was troubled, that he’d stayed in youth hostels after falling out with his father, hung around wrestlers at various gyms, and had become proficient on the bagpipes.
“Are you still actively wrestling?” I asked, as Piper moved through the throng around him, preparing to make his entrance in the living room of our host, as if he were entering an arena for an installment of WrestleMania.
“Name the time, the place, and my opponent,” he replied. The comment struck me as odd in retrospect, as his various bio pages all list him as having retired in 2011. Perhaps that’s just the kind of answer a man like Piper would give to such a question, any time, any place.
My final question: “What does the future hold for Rowdy Roddy Piper?”
“Stay tuned, brother,” he answered.
I didn’t. My focus in the mid-2000s was on writing I was paid for, to critique the final two years of Barack Obama’s presidency and write the final chapters in the legacy of the Tea Party. This focus crystalized when on June 16th 2015 Donald Trump came down the escalator. A month and a half later, on July 31, less than one year since I’d spoken with him at the party, came news that Piper had died from cardiac arrest resulting from hypertension.
Pro wrestling inevitably leads to discussion about how it’s not real, just an orchestrated show. The kicks to the stomach, eye gouges, leaps from top ropes onto throats, the sleeper holds, aren’t real. They couldn’t be without devastating injuries. But watch the Piper/Hogan match linked above, and it’s evident that an extreme form of violent athleticism is on display. It’s no leap to understand that performance-enhancing and pain-managing drugs have a place in the careers of many wrestling legends.