Rowdy Roddy Piper vs. Greg The Hammer Valentine (Apr 1983 – Nov 1983)

Background

Roddy Piper came to Jim Crockett's Mid-Atlantic territory in the early 1980s from the Portland territory in the Pacific Northwest.[22] In the Mid-Atlantic he beat Jack Brisco for the Mid-Atlantic Heavyweight Championship and Ric Flair for the United States title, and won the Television Championship twice.[5][6] From 1981 to 1982 he also worked as a commentator for Georgia Championship Wrestling, feuding with Bob Armstrong, Dick Slater and Tommy Rich.[6]

In 1982 he was fired in Georgia for showing up late to a match, and spent a month in Puerto Rico before working his way back to Crockett's territory.[5][6]

Piper has talked about how rough his introduction to the business had been. "The guys who broke Greg and myself in were the guys that were at the end of the Gorgeous George era," he said. "They were absolutely brutal. They were so cruel to me for the first four years of my career." He said the veterans felt cheated out of their main events and had nowhere else to go.[1] He came into wrestling as a Golden Gloves boxer, and Valentine has said Piper knew exactly how to sell the fighting side of their program because of it.[1]

Greg Valentine came from a wrestling family. His father, Johnny Valentine, was one of the sport's most respected in-ring performers until an October 4, 1975 plane crash from Charlotte to Wilmington broke his back and severed his spinal cord, ending his career and paralyzing him for life.[11] The same crash broke Ric Flair's back in three places and injured Bob Bruggers and Tim Woods; pilot Joseph Farkas died of his injuries two months later.[11]

Promoters worried billing Greg as Johnny's son would age the elder Valentine in fans' eyes, so early in his career he was sometimes presented as Johnny's brother instead.[7] Greg trained under Stu Hart in Calgary starting in 1970 and debuted for Crockett's Mid-Atlantic promotion in August 1976.[7]

Piper beat Valentine for the NWA United States Heavyweight Championship in Greensboro on Saturday, April 16, 1983, in a week that also brought his birthday on the 17th and the birth of his daughter, a 7.9-pound girl, on the 19th.[15] He worked all three into a promo with Bob Caudle: "I had a week you wouldn't believe, man." In the promo he gave the date as April 15, but the win was on the 16th.[15]

Build-up

Piper's reign lasted two weeks.[22] On May 1, back in Greensboro, Valentine won the belt back, badly injuring Piper's left ear in the process.[1][15][22] Valentine pounded the ear over and over, and Piper was a bloody mess.[3][22]

Early in the feud, Valentine has said, Piper "took a blade and just cut his ear right in half. Blood was everywhere, and I'm hitting him with the belt. It just looked horrible."[1]

Piper's absence from the Mid-Atlantic over the following weeks was explained as recovery from the ear injury. In reality he went on a three-week tour of Japan, worked a St. Louis card on June 10 on his first stop back in the U.S., and returned to the Mid-Atlantic on June 18.[22] His first night back, he teamed with Ric Flair in Greenville, South Carolina.[22]

Valentine turned the injury into a running bit, dubbing it "The Year of the Ear" and poking fun at Piper for months.[1][22]

On July 9 in Charlotte, the two of them had a non-title brawl that ended in a disqualification when Piper refused to let go of a rope he'd wrapped around Valentine's throat; one retrospective review of the tape called it "goddamn near as good as the dog collar match" that was still months away, with Valentine described as "foaming at the mouth" by the finish and both men bleeding heavily.[10]

Piper said the office wanted "a match that was so brutal that people would keep coming back to see it."[1][3] He got the equipment himself: "I went and got a 12-foot logging chain and leather collars with spikes. It really hadn't hit me what I had got myself into until that moment."[1][14] He took the collars back and lined them with sheep's wool, thinking it would be easier on the neck.[1]

On television, the dog collar match came out of a gift box. On the show taped October 5 in Greenwood, South Carolina, and aired October 15, Piper brought out a present, said he knew it was premature but so was Valentine, and asked Bob Caudle to hand it over as if it came from a big fan.[18]

Valentine opened it, found a dog collar, and went nuts. There was no way he would wrestle Piper in a dog collar match, he said, and he stormed off.[18] The next two nights on the house-show loop, Piper beat him in a lumberjack match in Norfolk and a lumberjack strap match in Charleston.[18]

Piper had the collar and chain with him the following week, pointing out the spiked studs that kept anyone from choking with his hands and putting the chain at 12 feet and 40 pounds. Valentine insisted it was 20 feet.[19] In an inset interview that week, he said he might take Flair out again before Starrcade, and that Harley Race having to wrestle in a cage was a disgrace.[19] He closed that show saying he wouldn't be set up like Harley Race, who had been stuck in a cage for his Starrcade title match with Flair, and that there was no way he would face Piper in a dog collar.[19]

It became official on the October 29 show, when Jim Crockett Jr. announced Valentine vs. Piper in a dog collar match.[20] Valentine, in a suit, was livid that the office had handed Piper a lethal weapon, but said he was The Hammer, he was a man, and he would fight tooth and nail.[20] A week later Piper, in a dark plaid sports coat, said his family had been through a lot and the match was a matter of pride.[21] Valentine, still irate on the same show, said he was a man, not an animal.[21]

The Matches

Starrcade '83: A Flare for the Gold ran November 24, 1983, at the Greensboro Coliseum, a sellout at 15,447 fans for a $500,000 gate.[2] It was also broadcast to closed-circuit theaters around the Southern United States, a format winter storms cut down to roughly 30,000 additional viewers that night, and the show helped popularize closed-circuit broadcasting for wrestling.[2]

Piper and Valentine's Dog Collar Match went on ahead of the main event, Ric Flair's steel cage match with Harley Race for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.[2] Both men wore leather collars padded with sheep's wool, joined by the chain. Piper remembered Valentine bellowing at him as he pounded away: "Only a man would put sheep's wool in a dog collar."[14]

One review described Piper as "electric, a whirling dervish of violence and intensity," and Valentine as "a methodical, plodding striker, focused and punishing."[9] The start took thought. "That chain was so heavy. It got taut and very tight from the beginning," Piper said. "There was a moment when I'm looking Greg in the eye and he's looking me in the eye, and we're wondering what we're going to do next. We knew that once we got to each other, we would be finished. We knew we had to go backwards."[14] So instead of charging, they backed up and looked at each other, jerking each other around with the chain.[13][14] Valentine wrapped the chain around Piper's head to cover his eyes, and Piper turned it around, wrapping it around Valentine's head and through his mouth.[13] Valentine went after the damaged ear with the length of the chain, in what the same review called "one of the most focused, vicious attacks on a body part in wrestling history."[9] Piper wrapped the chain around the ringpost to choke Valentine, and the fight spilled to the floor, where Valentine kept kicking at the ear and Piper visibly staggered, selling a real loss of balance along with the storyline injury.[13]

Piper found a comeback, working Valentine back toward the ring with haymakers and chain shots. Near the finish, Valentine climbed to the second rope, and Piper yanked him down by the chain, whipped him with it, and covered him for the pin at 16:08.[2][13]

Valentine didn't accept it. He went after Piper again, choked him with the chain over the top rope while the referee was down, and kept pummeling him until the referee got him out of the ring.[13] Asked to sum up the match afterward, Piper didn't reach for a long answer: "Brutal."[14]

Aftermath

The hearing loss was real and it never reversed. Piper described the aftermath for years afterward: "I'd wake up in the morning, and the pillow would be stuck to my ear. It would drain every night... I would be pouring hydrogen peroxide into it, and it hurt so bad."[3] Estimates of how much hearing he lost in the ear range from 50 to 75 percent.[3][14]

Piper honored the remainder of his contract with Crockett before Vince McMahon brought him into the WWF. "I wouldn't come and work against Crockett," Piper said. McMahon brought him into the WWF several months later.[14]

He debuted on WWF television as a manager for "Dr. D" David Schultz and "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff before wrestling full-time.[6] Piper's Pit was announced on January 28, 1984, at a taping at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, New York.[16] Pro Wrestling Illustrated named him its Most Hated Wrestler of the Year in 1984 and 1985, and his program with Hulk Hogan headlined the first WrestleMania.[6]

The U.S. title itself outlived the feud that had defined it. Valentine dropped the belt to Dick Slater at a television taping in Shelby, North Carolina, on December 14, 1983, only weeks after Starrcade and a matter of months before he left Jim Crockett Promotions for the WWF for good.[17] On September 24, 1984, in London, Ontario, he beat Tito Santana for the WWF Intercontinental Championship, working over Santana's injured knee.[7][8] He held it for 285 days, until Santana won it back in a steel cage match in Baltimore on July 6, 1985.[7]

The two of them went on to wrestle the dog collar match around forty times in towns around the territory.[1] "That sounded good, in principle," Piper said of the original idea. "And one time? Sure. But to do it every night? Never crossed this dumb wrestler's head."[1]

Behind the Scenes

Valentine has said the two of them worked better together, and more violently, because they got along off camera. "We got along better in the ring if we rode together because then we could talk," he said, describing 300-mile trips through Virginia and the Carolinas, getting in at five in the morning and being back in Charleston by three in the afternoon. "We had to hide when we stopped to get beer."[1]

Both men have laughed about the practical cost of doing the match so many times. The sheep's wool backfired. "After using that dog collar a couple times, we both developed terrible rashes around our necks. I was putting baby powder on my neck and Greg started wearing a turtleneck," Piper said.[3][14] Valentine remembered the chain: "You could see there were no pulled punches, and you were working with a truck tire chain where they wrap around. I mean, God, this chain was huge."[3]

The money was part of it. "Sometimes we'd do doubles on Saturdays and then come back and do doubles on Sundays," Valentine said. "But the money! The money was great."[1]

Valentine has said they planned only a few spots for Starrcade, talking for 20 minutes after Piper snuck over to the heels' side of the dressing room in Greensboro, and that the rest, including the finish, was ad-libbed.[3] "I always work stiff, and he put up with it," he said.[3]

Piper said he never would have picked Valentine himself. "We were both young and stout then. I didn't pick Greg. They did. I don't think I would have been smart enough. But there wouldn't have been anybody else, or at least anybody I knew in the business, that could have pulled that off like he did."[14]

"I didn't lay off him much at all when I was hitting him, nor did he lay off of me, because it was all about working for the Carolinas," Piper said.[14]

He also remembered a famous photo of Valentine screaming at him with the chain around him: "My ear's bleeding badly, and he's screaming at me while he's wailing away. But I can't hear him because I've got a blood clot in my ear."[14]

Piper has talked about the broader psychological pressure of the moment, not just the physical toll. Piper called Starrcade "the ending of the 'Civil War' between the North and the South," Jim Crockett's answer to the $500,000 Bruno Sammartino and Larry Zbyszko had drawn at Shea Stadium in 1980.[14] "It dawned on us that all the important people in our business were looking at us," he said. "It was a pride issue."[1][14]

Valentine's family history sat underneath all of it without ever being mentioned on camera. His father's paralysis in the same 1975 crash that broke Ric Flair's back meant that on the night of Starrcade '83, two performers whose careers had been permanently reshaped by that single plane going down were both on the card, Flair headlining against Harley Race in the main event and Valentine closing out the story that had defined his year against Piper.[2][11]

Legacy

The Piper-Valentine Dog Collar Match is ranked No. 70 on WWE's own list of the 100 best matches available on the WWE Network, described there as one of "the most infamously vicious battles" of the NWA/WCW era, occurring "fifteen years before the advent of WWE's Attitude Era."[4] The Ringer has called it "the match all dog collar matches aspire to be but are doomed to fall short of."[9] Some retrospectives go further and treat it as a hardcore-wrestling forerunner in its own right, arriving more than a decade before ECW made blood and weapons its entire business model.[14]

Starrcade '83 was the first of an annual event that ran until 2000, and its closed-circuit broadcast helped popularize that format for wrestling.[2] Valentine called it "kind of like a pay-per-view then."[1]

Valentine watched the match again decades later. "I watched it before, but I kinda stayed away from it because it's such a brutal match," he said. "We were so young and so dedicated, and Piper was such a great guy."[3] One reviewer of the tape rated it 4.5 out of 5, while arguing that their July match in Charlotte, without the chain, was even better.[13] One retrospective has argued the brutality of the Piper-Valentine match specifically was part of what put Piper on Vince McMahon's radar for the WWF signing that followed.[14]

Piper carried the hearing damage for the rest of his life; he died of cardiac arrest on July 31, 2015, at 61.[12] Valentine went on to a long WWF run, including his Intercontinental Championship reign and his tag team with Brutus Beefcake as the Dream Team, before a WWE Hall of Fame induction in 2004, and he went into the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2016.[7] Starrcade was only the first of their dog collar matches, and the return bouts weren't nearly as high profile, but Piper said they were close in brutality.[14]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. "Roddy Piper and Greg Valentine - Their Lauded Feud & Dog Collar Match" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/roddy-piper-greg-valentine/
2. Starrcade '83: A Flare for the Gold — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starrcade_%2783:_A_Flare_for_the_Gold
3. "Roddy Piper and Greg Valentine - The Epic Odyssey Towards Their Brutal Dog Collar Match" — ProWrestlingPost.com. https://prowrestlingpost.com/roddy-piper-and-greg-valentine/
4. "The 100 best matches on WWE Network" — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/article/100-best-matches
5. "10 Things You Should Know About Roddy Piper's Wrestling Career In The 1980s" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/roddy-piper-wrestling-career-1980s-facts-trivia/
6. Roddy Piper — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roddy_Piper
7. Greg Valentine — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Valentine
8. "19840924 - Greg Valentine" (Intercontinental Championship title history) — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/classics/titlehistory/intercontinental/322396
9. "The Best Dog Collar Matches in Pro Wrestling History" by Ian Williams (Dec 10, 2022) — The Ringer. https://www.theringer.com/2022/12/10/mma/best-dog-collar-matches-in-pro-wrestling-history
10. "Greg Valentine vs Roddy Piper (Mid-Atlantic, 7-9-1983)" — Tape Machines Are Rolling. https://tapemachinesarerolling.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/greg-valentine-vs-roddy-piper-mid-atlantic-7-9-1983/
11. "October 4, 1975: The Plane Crash That Ended Johnny Valentine And Created The Nature Boy" — Wrestling News. https://wrestlingnews.co/stories/october-1975-plane-crash-ended-johnny-valentine-created-nature-boy/
12. "'Rowdy' Roddy Piper -- Dies at 61 from Cardiac Arrest" — TMZ. https://www.tmz.com/2015/07/31/roddy-piper-dead-dies-wwe-wrestler-cancer/
13. "Greg Valentine vs Roddy Piper (NWA, 11-24-1983)" — Tape Machines Are Rolling. https://tapemachinesarerolling.wordpress.com/2018/07/02/greg-valentine-vs-roddy-piper-nwa-11-24-1983/
14. "Piper-Valentine Dog Collar wrestling match at Starrcade '83 remembered for brutality" — Post and Courier. https://www.postandcourier.com/sports/wrestling/piper-valentine-dog-collar-wrestling-match-at-starrcade-83-remembered-for-brutality/article_cbbc4af2-8a29-11ee-ab99-ff8e709c730f.html
15. "Father and Fighter: Roddy Piper Delivers the Ultimate Babyface Promo" — Mid-Atlantic Gateway. https://www.midatlanticgateway.com/2021/01/piper-ultimate-babyface-promo.html
16. "40 Years Ago: Piper's Pit Debuts in Poughkeepsie, NY" — WPDH. https://wpdh.com/wwf-pipers-pit-segment-poughkeepsie-ny/
17. "Dick Slater wins U.S. Title from Greg Valentine" — Mid-Atlantic Gateway. http://www.midatlanticgateway.com/2015/12/slater-wins-us-title-from-valentine.html
18. "Mid-Atlantic TV Report: October 15, 1983" — Mid-Atlantic Gateway. https://www.midatlanticgateway.com/2021/08/tv-macw-831015.html
19. "Mid-Atlantic TV Report: October 22, 1983" — Mid-Atlantic Gateway. https://www.midatlanticgateway.com/2021/08/tv-macw-831022.html
20. "Mid-Atlantic TV Report: October 29, 1983" — Mid-Atlantic Gateway. https://www.midatlanticgateway.com/2021/08/tv-macw-831029.html
21. "Mid-Atlantic TV Report: November 5, 1983" — Mid-Atlantic Gateway. https://www.midatlanticgateway.com/2021/10/tv-macw-831105.html
22. "U.S. Champ Roddy Piper Returns to Portland (1983)" by Dick Bourne — Mid-Atlantic Gateway. https://www.midatlanticgateway.com/2015/08/us-champ-roddy-piper-returns-to-portland.html

Further Listening

• "Greg Valentine & 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper - Why We Beat the S**t Out of Each Other in NWA Wrestling" — a joint interview on the feud and the real toll of the chain matches
• "Roddy Piper and Greg Valentine talk about their Dog Collar matches" — All Out of Bubblegum, Piper's own outlet, revisiting the Starrcade match
• David Crockett's account of the 1975 plane crash that paralyzed Johnny Valentine and broke Ric Flair's back — for the family history behind Greg Valentine's career