How Good Was Roddy Piper Actually?
9. Promos
Much of Piper’s work was very, very much of its time, which will be addressed deeper into this article, but in terms of pure delivery, Piper was out-of-this-world incredible. Piper’s lines were unimaginably hard, too. Being one of the single best heels ever, this is no surprise, but his style worked far better when he was a bad guy. There was a warbling, shrieking quality to Piper’s voice that bordered on the unpleasant. He didn’t just say nasty things; his actual voice was nasty. A torrent of shrill filth tumbled out of Piper’s vile mouth at such a pace that, after every other line, he’d take a sharp intake of breath. It was as if there was so much rage and bile in his body that he had to empty his lungs just to let it all out. A chuckling sinister presence early, his promos would build with such ungodly maniac intensity that he’d need an oxygen tank by the time he was done. Piper was as quotable as any wrestler ever, too.
“You do not throw rocks at a man who’s got a machine gun”.
“Just when they think they’ve got the answers, I change the questions.”
“Hello, peasants!”
“The reason Ric Flair always has two women with him is so they have someone to talk to when he falls asleep.”
Piper wasn’t just the quickest; his best stuff made a lasting impression because few were better at conveying the gravity of an upcoming match than Piper. Some of his stuff was corny, but that’s wrestling.
The other side of Piper’s promo game is that, at some point in the 1990s, he became actively bad to a shocking extent. It was almost impossible because it’s one thing to decline physically - time comes for all men - but nobody in the history of wrestling has lost their tongue as badly as Piper did. A lot of what he said was utterly nonsensical, and his attempts to launch catchphrases in WCW were forced and cringeworthy. Piper was openly mocked for this on WWE TV by Santino Marella, who once said in an impersonation angle: “Just when they think they’ve got the answers, I babble incoherently like a lunatic person”. Getting out-promo’d by Santino Marella is not great at all, is it?
Even during these years of baffling, meandering nonsense, though, Piper still had it in him on occasion. His heartfelt, haunting work opposite Chris Jericho in 2009, on the road to WrestleMania 25, was drenched in pathos.
Piper could have lived until he was 110 years old, said the same odd sh*t that defined the last several years of his career, and he’d still get perfect marks for how great he was in his prime.
10/10