How Good Was Roddy Piper Actually?
How good was Roddy Piper: do you know the answer to that question?
The experience of watching WWE Hall of Famer Roddy Piper does not necessarily align with the way that he is idolised. That’s if you’re a millennial-aged wrestling fan who has seen Royal Rumble 1992 and might just have pretended to watch WrestleMania 1.
The thing about the WWF Golden Age of the 1980s is that it looked more glossy and was thus more accessible as the box office magic started to wane. Wrestling was invented in 1984, everybody knows that - but it still looked a bit like the dreaded olden days until around 1988, didn’t it?
The rise of the Ultimate Warrior actually coincided with the onset of the decline. This era of the WWF peaked commercially (and you could argue critically) with WrestleMania 5. The Legion of Doom are more fondly remembered than Strike Force, but Hawk and Animal arrived in the summer of 1990.
A lot of kids brought up on the WWF didn’t know they were actually watching the beginning of the end.
Roddy Piper, then, was a strange guy to unpack for the young WWF fan raised on Coliseum video. A lot of people won’t admit this, but there weren’t many lines of static on those WrestleMania 2 VHS tapes. Piper’s segment with Morton Downey, Jr. at WrestleMania 5 was weird. Even more weird, to absolutely use a euphemism there, was Piper’s appearance at WrestleMania 6. Piper popped up as a manager and commentator on occasion. Young children raised on the bronzed and oiled late-Golden Age WWF could just about infer that he must have been a big deal, since he was very animated and the crowds seemed to love him, but they didn’t necessarily grasp how big a deal he was.
Piper’s legacy is strange. He is more revered than anybody in wrestler circles, whereas fans, if they are being truly honest, are mostly happy to accept this secondhand recommendation as gospel. By the time Piper was more visible in the more remembered (yet far less popular) year of 1992, he was a midcard act.
More adventurous fans might have sought out Piper’s most famous match for Jim Crockett Promotions, or checked out the Piper’s Pit segments that the talking heads on WWE documentaries rave about so fervently.
Piper’s brilliance extends well beyond that - but equally, his post-peak slump was far more stark than most are willing to admit.
So how good was Roddy Piper, actually…?
10. Presence/Look/Presentation
Roddy Piper did not boast what was an impressive or supposedly marketable physique by 1980s standards.
Vince McMahon, Jr. was the size-obsessed promoter, but it was his father who first rejected Piper. Vincent James thought that Piper was too skinny and weak-looking when, after hearing about a great new heel talker, he brought Piper in as a potential heel opponent for Bob Backlund. Piper’s July 30, 1979 MSG debut went badly, and the Backlund programme was dropped immediately. Vincent Kennedy was so dubious about Piper’s look that he was initially brought back to New York to play a manager who sometimes wrestled before he got too over not to main event.
Piper lacked definition in the 1980s (although he was weirdly ripped at King Of The Ring 1994). He wasn’t small, but then, nobody was back then. He was handsome, which helped. He was telegenic at the advent of the cable television wrestling boom.
When programmed opposite Hulk Hogan and Mr. T, Piper’s relative lack of size and muscle became a feature, not a bug. In an age where the muscle monster was a babyface idol, a totem of the strength of Reagan’s America, Piper was an ideal contrast. Of course he was going to run his mouth, poke you in the eye, and run away. He was a scrawny cheating coward punk. His size generated heat. Piper’s size almost did not matter at all because he was so absurdly overpowered in the charisma department.
Piper was also easy to identify via silhouette. His signature kilt was a fantastic touch because, in an age where people were more openly bigoted, it was confused, deliberately, for a skirt. Piper, more savvy than most, knew what he was doing. He made fans foam at the mouth. This guy thinks he’s so tough, but he’s wearing women’s clothing!
“You wear a skirt, where’s your pantyhose at?”
“Look in the top drawer of your wife’s bedroom, man”.
It worked to outrageous effect every time.
The blue trunks were on-the-nose for a Scotsman, but it was a broad old industry during Piper’s heyday. His bagpipe and drums-led ‘The Green Hills of Tyrol’ theme was magnificent, utterly unique, and it was, again, ideal. The xenophobic yanks did not want to hear that sh*t. It was much too foreign.
9.5/10