How Good Was Roddy Piper Actually?

Roddy Piper is very difficult to unpack. Is there anybody in wrestling history with so many genius attributes whose record of output is actually, on balance, quite bad? 

He’s one of the very best promos ever, if not the absolute pinnacle of the game, but stopped making any sense and was rendered entirely ineffective by 1997. Once one of the most revered and influential wrestlers ever, given some of the stuff he came out with in the 1980s, you can’t actually study his tapes these days. He can’t be influential anymore. 

Again: Roddy Piper is very difficult to unpack. Anything less than a ‘10’ feels wrong, but you could make a very credible (albeit deeply unpopular) argument that he was a 3 for a very long and ultimately damning amount of time. 

A 10 at his peak, a 3 past his prime, no legend was as bad for as long - but then no other wrestler was as charismatic, outside of Ric Flair and the Rock, at their very best. The bad stuff has to count, but ultimately, it’s Rowdy Roddy Piper. His work was transcendent. You can watch him run his mouth and build a match all these years later and feel the need to fire up the footage even if you know the match isn’t going to be great. 

Piper, a mega-star everywhere he went, was a ticket-selling force of nature who made it feel real. He was so stunningly effective at his job that Vince McMahon ignored his size bias and mortgaged his very future as a promoter because he was confident that people would pay to watch Piper get what was coming to him. That’s how great Piper was as a heel.

8/10