When Roddy Piper came to WCW in 1996, he set his sights on Hollywood Hogan, culminating in a one-on-one match with the WCW champion at their biggest show of the year.
Piper shocked the world by putting Hogan out with a sleeper hold, but in an astonishing oversight, he had forgotten to ask Hogan to put the title on the line. Whoops!
Hogan thus retained the title despite the loss, posing with his belt at the end of the show, much to the confusion of everyone watching.
At SuperBrawl VII, Piper had the chance to win Hogan’s title…
…and once more, he put him to sleep. Referee Randy Anderson rang the bell and raised Piper’s hand…
…but by the time he turned around to check on Hogan, Randy Savage had pulled the champ’s legs under the ropes.
Despite having looked right at Hogan’s feet and seen they were well inside the ring, the referee now believed he was mistaken. One re-start and a brass-knuckle punch later, and Hogan pinned Piper to retain the title.
To make it up to Piper, Turner Sports allowed Roddy to captain a team of his own, shoehorning him into the upcoming WCW vs. nWo match at WCW Uncensored.
The stakes for this match were incredibly high:
- If the nWo won, they could challenge for any title at any time.
- If WCW won, the entire nWo would forfeit their titles and be suspended for three years.
- And if Piper won, he would get one (1) title shot against Hogan, in a cage.
Was it just me, or was it just a wee bit selfish for Piper and his team not to just help Team WCW win?
Not that Team Piper would be much help, anyway. See, given the pick of the entire WCW roster, Piper instead decided to audition a series of no-names, whom the fans would judge based on a thumbs-up…
…or thumbs-down.
And when I say no-names, I mean no-names; five of the six Team Piper hopefuls were never identified.
Whoever made the cut, though, would be not only Piper’s team, but Piper’s family.
Thus began what was supposed to be a series of shoot-style matches. The WWF had Ken Shamrock, but WCW wanted to get in on the Ultimate Fighting craze, too.
First out was this beefy young man. “I have no idea who that is”, remarked a perplexed Tony Schiavone.
Often, announcers will play dumb and pretend not to recognize wrestling stars from other promotions, but this was genuine. As far as I can tell, this was just some Power Plant student.
Jeans Man #1 tussled with Roddy Piper, who rode him for about thirty seconds, trapping him in an arm bar and making him tap out. “Tapping out” was a brand-new practice in wrestling, so the guy slapped the mat like this:
The announcers, confused, didn’t know why Piper let him out of the hold.
The Hot Rod asked the crowd for a thumbs up or down, heard the fans’ disapproval, and sent the guy on his way.
The next Team Piper hopeful sported Daisy Dukes and an exceedingly dumb haircut. You might recognize him as Kurt Angle’s assistant, Luther Reigns.
But here, he looked like he’d never been in the ring (let alone had peas) before. After absorbing the newcomer’s knees and clubs to the back, the wily veteran locked Reigns in a sleeper hold…
…beating the rookie in thirty seconds.
Again, Piper offered a thumbs up and a thumbs down, but it was an easy “no” from the fans.
Next came Jeans Man #2, who didn’t even get a chance. Instead, a guy in boxing gloves snuck up from behind and knocked him out with a donkeyrabbit punch.
This boxer threw an extra set of gloves to Piper and danced around the ring. With three of the six candidates eliminated, the pressure was mounting on Piper to find somebody for his team who didn’t absolutely suck.
Sure enough, the boxer in red put up quite a fight. Piper knocked him down, and the boxer got back up.
The boxer knocked Piper down, and Piper got back up.
Then Piper knocked him down again…
…so he grabbed Piper’s leg until the match devolved into a catfight.
At this point, the fans had lost their patience and started booing the fight, giving the boxer the thumbs down.
But Piper didn’t ask. Instead, he restarted the fight, even though both men were punched out.
At last, with the boxer on his knees and still flailing at Piper, Roddy gently pushed him over and declared the fight over.
Piper shook the man’s hand and polled the audience. Thumbs up? No, the audience still wasn’t having it. This was a problem, of course, because they were supposed to cheer the boxer so he could be on Roddy Piper’s team.
Instead, they booed the guy even louder than the previous guys.
So Roddy Piper praised the boxer’s “gonads”, chided the audience for being “a little too harsh”, and challenged him to another round. As if more boxing would win the audience over.
“We have never seen anything like this in the history of our sport”, said Schiavone, trying to pull something positive out of this fiasco. They were now ten minutes into this segment and still had two more fighters to go.
After a brief skirmish, Piper gave a double thumbs-up and ignored the crowd’s overwhelming boos.
Next came an Ogre lookalike, and while I knew it wasn’t actually Donald Gibb…
…I did have to check whether Road Block had any tattoos.
The curly-mulleted fighter came to the ring barefoot and hit Piper with kicks. The crowd booed.
Sometimes in wrestling, it’s hard to tell the difference between heel heat and “go away” heat, so here’s a rule of thumb:
If the crowd keeps booing even when the babyface makes his comeback, it’s “go away” heat.
The big guy pounded Roddy Piper some more as the restless fans chanted “Boring!”. Fans kept booing even when Piper took him down with a low blow.
Finally, the kickboxer hoisted the Hot Rod over his head and looked to chuck him over the top rope. Fortunately, before anything cool could happen, Piper waved the match off and raised the man’s hand.
By now, he knew better than to ask the audience.
At last, sixteen minutes into the segment, fans finally popped, rising to their feet as the giant John Tenta appeared on stage.
The former Earthquake had Piper well in hand during their brief encounter until Piper’s two teammates jumped in and attacked the big man, then each other…
…until everyone but Piper was fighting everyone else.
The team captain called a truce, finalized his team, and called out Hogan’s gang.
“You know what nWo stands for? No way out!”
Besides big John Tenta and Roddy himself, the rest of Team Piper was hardly conventional.
- No, they weren’t famous.
- No, they didn’t look like the typical wrestlers.
- No, they weren’t flashy or polished or skilled in the fundamentals.
- No, they didn’t have any discernible charisma.
- No, they had never wrestled a single match before and only got the job because they worked with Roddy Piper in some straight-to-video movies.
But yes, they were going to main event the pay-per-view in thirteen days.
***
The huge Uncensored main event was thus set:
In one corner, Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Scott Hall, and Kevin Nash.
In another corner, Lex Luger, The Giant, and the Steiner Brothers.
And in the third corner, Roddy Piper, John Tenta, and two guys.
Even with Piper’s team billed as martial arts experts (boxing, kickboxing, and sumo), they were obviously overmatched.
With Dennis Rodman scheduled to back the nWo, and with the eyes of the sports world on WCW…
…Team Piper appeared on the next week’s Nitro as a united front, with each man wearing a kilt.
Roddy Piper rebuffed all the critics (speaking at inordinate length about Howard Stern) and declared once again that Team Piper was his family. And he would never to turn his back on his family!
Five minutes later, he traded his guys for the Horsemen…
…and none of the three other guys (even Tenta) were ever seen again. Piper never even told us the guys’ names.
So who were they?
The kickboxer was Layton Morrison, a stunt coordinator for film and TV, including Back in Action, the 1994 video release starring Roddy Piper and Billy Blanks (the Tae-Bo guy).
The boxer? Craig Mally, a stuntman from not only Back in Action, but also Immortal Combat and Jungleground, all starring Roddy Piper. While he never did get that pay-per-view main event, he did get to work with Piper again in 1998’s Shepherd.
Basically, Roddy Piper had wasted twenty minutes of TV, meant to promote the next pay-per-view, to put over some of his friends. And this was back when Nitro was only two hours long.
And the segment bombed so badly, WCW needed another ten minute segment the next week just to undo the damage.
***
The only Team Piper hopeful to have a future in WCW was Luther Reigns. Later that year, the Power Plant grad began appearing on WCW’s lesser shows like Worldwide and Saturday Night.
Sporting the same distinctive (read: stupid) hairstyle as before, the young Matthew Weise took the name, “Horshu”.
Get it? As in horseshoe? Like his haircut?
Even worse than his hair were his catchphrases. Though never given actual mic time, Horshu did make the occasional comment during his entrances and matches. Comments like:
“It’s not show time, it’s shoe time!”
Or even better:
“There’s no business like shoe business!”
Horshu wrestled only a handful of matches for the company. In the ring, he was greener than Lucky the Leprechaun’s stool.
Maybe that’s why they called him Horshu?
Weise found himself in the spotlight most recently in 2015, when alleged steroid kingpin named Roman Reigns as a client. It turned out, he had him confused with Luther Reigns.
