Remembering Rowdy Roddy Piper

There was something unsettlingly real and unhinged about Rowdy Roddy Piper, who died on Friday at age 61 from cardiac arrest. He was liable to go wildly off the rails at any second. He was, in a word, dangerous. But not just dangerous in the wrestling ring, where he worked a brawling style, mostly as a notorious cheater in the Hulkamania era, but especially on the mic.

There were numerous examples of this, but the one that instantly comes to mind is from this grainy bit of footage from the 1980s. In it, you see a young, pale pro wrestler with an unopened beer bottle in his right hand, psyching himself up to smash it into his forehead. The announcer gravely assures viewers that this is a real bottle before the man interrupts him nearly mid-sentence by crushing the bottle violently on his forehead. There's a clatter and the crowd gives a quick yelp. The camera zooms in. Then the blood begins to pour. The crowd murmurs in all too real shock, unsure of what they're seeing, as the wrestler cuts his promo.

Piper's career would come to be defined by these types of moments.

He made his biggest mark as a talker, and it's important to be very clear about what that means. He was good, damned good, one of the best ever. There was a manic edge to his best promo work as he tittered and yelled. Piper didn't so much cut promos on his opponents as much as he needled and annoyed them to death. His words, when he worked himself up into a real life frenzy, took on lives of their own, dancing and punching whoever was on the receiving end. Sharp, nearly wheezing intakes of breath would punctuate his speech when he really got going, which made it seem like he was so pissed off that the promo could only end with him hyperventilating. He always seemed on the verge of going over the edge into forbidden territory.

And sometimes he did. In the wake of Hulk Hogan's implosion last week, much has been said about the WWE's problems with race and homophobia, and Piper serves as a central figure in that discussion. There was the coconut incident with Jimmy Snuka, in which he taunted the Polynesian Snuka with tropical fruit to "make himself at home" before smashing a coconut onto his head. There was the time he cut a promo on the African-American wrestler Bad News Brown wearing what appears to be blackface. Piper's feud with 90s gay panic character Goldust culminated in a particularly vicious street fight after Piper spent weeks belittling his opponent's manhood (Piper, it should be noted, was the face in this instance).

None of this—and I want to stress this—is meant to disparage the now sadly departed Piper. But it bears mentioning that the best heels, the ones we remember for decades, frequently cross a line of taste, and that it is perhaps written into the job description of a wrestling heel to at least tiptoe up to the edge. Piper was so great because he seemed to relish his role as a bad guy storyteller, a role which sometimes necessitated throwing caution to the wind to whip the crowd into a frenzy. He relished it so much, in fact, that even when he was a good guy, he was still sort of bad.

Piper went to Hollywood and became arguably the first pro wrestler to star in a movie worth a damn—preceding the Rock's arrival by several years. John Carpenter's "They Live" is a true cult classic, the sort of thing which pro wrestlers trying to make the crossover into mainstream film would kill for. Piper is, simply, marvelous in his role as Nada, a drifter who figures out that the world is run by aliens who use marketing and politics as a means of control. Piper's combination of swagger, vulnerability, and meathead cool (and sex appeal?) take the movie to a different level, sprinkling the sci-fi/horror hybrid with just the right amount of action movie sheen for the age.

It remains heady stuff in these bank bailout, neoliberal consensus times. And starring in what is arguably the prolific Carpenter's best work is a header for any resume, much less a legendary pro wrestler. It was partly his status as a well-regarded movie star—albeit one with a limited filmography—which launched him into his last great feud with the now heel Hollywood Hogan in the WCW during the late 1990s.

Eventually, Piper drifted in and out of wrestling, because that's what he did. He had a knack for pissing off WWE brass from time to time, but they always welcomed him back because wrestling was simply who he was. Piper—born Roderick George Toombs—started wrestling at age 15, and I imagine that he needed wrestling as much as it needed him. You don't become Rowdy Roddy Piper during your adolescence and just slip out of character when it's convenient. Roderick George Toombs was Roddy Piper, and vice versa.

This authenticity made him an all-time great. He was, by all accounts I'm familiar with, a legitimately good guy with the family and friends who loved him dearly. Piper was the sort of guy who would wear his wedding ring during matches. That he could morph away from this good guy and inhabit the weird, unhinged, and sometimes offensive figure of The Rowdy One is what we love about wrestling and the greatest wrestlers.