Roddy Piper

[Clayton Jones]

One of the things that's refreshing watching Piper feud with Rose in 1980 is how real of a threat he makes Buddy and his camp feel. Then I watch some of him feuding with Rude in 1989 and it feels like the opposite, that Rude is an annoying inconvenience that he's been tasked with getting some laughs at the expense of. Which version do people think is more representative of babyface Piper? I know he didn't age gracefully but as noted in previous posts it's also not like he was incapable of having great matches and making his opponents look good in the process into the 90s.

I love Piper and on my first round of GWE viewing he did very well but I did leave off asking myself this question.

[urbanecowboy]

Piper is a guy whose wrestling has aged better than his promos. 
 

When the guy was in the ring the crowd was always going nuts. 
 

when he was on the mic he was saying something racially insensitive or homophobic. 
 

Piper is a Top 20 lock for me. Possibly higher. 

[KB8]

I've watched a ton of WWF Piper over the last couple months, and he was a guy I knew would be a lock this time around anyway but it's really just confirmed that he'll be fighting for a top 30 spot. 

Piper was fucking amazing. His best work might’ve come outside the WWF, at least from a pure match quality standpoint (and some of that non-WWF stuff is incredible), but as a sheer heat magnet with absurd charisma, WWF Piper is next level. In the 80s, as a heel or a babyface, he was nuclear pretty much every time out, especially before the retirement in ’87 and MORE especially in MSG. He had a crowd connection in the Garden that was right there with Bruno’s, Hogan’s Backlund’s and Andre’s, and Piper had it as a heel AND as a babyface, eliciting searing hatred as the former and undying love as the latter. Honestly Piper is pretty close to the perfect sort of wrestler for me stylistically at this point in my fandom. I like spectacle and Piper’s a fucking spectacle unto himself.

Someone on the GME board or discord or maybe even here made a comparison between Piper and Bret, or at least posed the question of "who was better?", and it got me thinking about how Bret is one of the great understated, subtle sellers ever, and well, Piper is the whole entire other end of the spectrum because he’s selling not just for the back row but for someone watching on the fucking moon. I’ll tell you what though, nobody sells having a perforated eardrum like Piper, not even Funk. Almost nobody sells reckless abandon or UNTAMED FURY like Piper. He wrestled Adonis on house shows leading up to Wrestlemania 3 and they'd build part of those matches around Piper being blinded by whatever Adonis had in that big atomiser, and blinded Piper taking a swing at everything in the hopes of connecting with anything is the very best. When that man wanted to portray hatred I bought it completely. His stuff doesn't necessarily look great in a technical sense, but he has a kind of rubbery quality to his bumps that adds a sense of realism, and some of those bumps are pretty wild. In Portland he was a maniac for the back body drop bump where he'd just land all loose and he looked like a crash test dummy being yeeted out of a Tesla. He doesn't have the prettiest armdrags or hip tosses, but he performs them with a real sense of intent, like those moves aren't there to look pretty, they're there to legitimately throw someone across a ring. He’s also a decent actor by pro wrestling standards so his ability to convey emotions is actually pretty great. Even melodramatic shit like “oh no I’m conflicted about hitting this person with the ring bell as I am a reformed character” comes off well, and we’ve all seen enough modern WWE to know how cringey that nonsense can be otherwise. An absolutely phenomenal stooge with a hundred different plays on things like your face-first timber bump, jelly-legged selling, begging off, the whole lot. And again, as a babyface he was brilliant at garnering sympathy and working scrappy.  

Just an amazing pro wrestler. Maybe the person I never voted for in 2016 who'll finish highest on my 2026 list.