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

Background

Roddy Piper arrived in Jim Crockett's Mid-Atlantic territory in the fall of 1980 as a virtual unknown, debuting on October 7 in Raleigh, North Carolina, and beating Special Delivery Jones.[5] He moved fast. Within a month he'd won the NWA Television Championship, and by November he'd taken the U.S. Heavyweight title.[5] He added the Mid-Atlantic Heavyweight title off Jack Brisco in January 1981, took it again off Ricky Steamboat that November, and beat Brisco for it a third time in July 1982.[5] He spent part of 1981 and 1982 as a commentator in Georgia Championship Wrestling, feuding with Bob Armstrong and Dick Slater on the side, before getting fired for showing up late to a match and working a stretch in Puerto Rico ahead of his return to Crockett's territory.[5]

Piper has talked about how rough his introduction to the business had been, crediting it with shaping the intensity he brought into the ring against Valentine. "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."[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 wrestling royalty, whether the business wanted to admit it or not. 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, effectively taking over the spot his father's injury had opened.[7]

By early 1983 both men were established headliners for Crockett, and the promotion needed a reason to put them in the ring together for real money. Piper beat Valentine for the NWA United States Heavyweight Championship on April 16, 1983, in a week that also happened to be his birthday on the 17th and the birth of his daughter on the 19th. Piper worked all three into a promo days later: "I had a week you wouldn't believe, man."[15] What happened to that title reign turned an ordinary exchange into the promotion's defining program of the year.[3][15]

Build-up

Valentine came into the spring of 1983 as the reigning NWA United States Heavyweight Champion, and Piper beat him for it on April 16, 1983, in Greensboro.[3] The reign lasted exactly two weeks. On May 1, back in Greensboro, Valentine won the belt back, then cracked the championship belt across Piper's left ear after the bell, opening a real injury that would define the rest of the year.[1][3][15] The visual was helped along by blade work early in the angle, Valentine reportedly cutting Piper's ear for blood in a way that, on camera, looked like it had been sliced in half.[13] The staged cut and the genuine damage underneath it are not the same thing, but fans watching television in 1983 had no way to tell them apart, which was the point.

The shot did lasting, legitimate damage, and Piper's absence from Mid-Atlantic television over the following weeks was sold on air as recovery time.[3] In reality he spent part of it on a tour of Japan and a run through St. Louis, standard territory business for an angle that needed time to breathe.[3] He was back on Mid-Atlantic TV by June 18, still selling the injury.[3]

Valentine turned the injury into a running bit, dubbing the feud "The Year of the Ear" and mocking Piper's damaged hearing on television for months.[1][3] It worked as pure heat: a wrestler taunting a legitimate injury he'd caused, in front of crowds who'd watched it happen. 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]

The two of them worked the feud constantly through the summer and fall, crisscrossing Virginia and the Carolinas on Crockett's house-show circuit, wrestling each other dozens of times in towns most fans in the bigger arenas never heard about.[3] The booking logic behind running it that hard was simple: the promotion wanted a match brutal enough that fans who saw it once would keep coming back to see whether it could possibly happen again.[3] By autumn, the promotion had settled on a stipulation violent enough to close out the story on its biggest stage yet. Piper has said he sourced the equipment himself: "I went and got a 12-foot logging chain and leather collars with spikes."[3][14] The spikes didn't survive contact with reality; once it became clear the two of them would be doing this match repeatedly, Piper lined the collars with sheep's wool so the chain wouldn't tear their necks open every single night.[3]

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 it predated the first WrestleMania's closed-circuit model by about a year and a half.[2][9]

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, and by most accounts it was the match the building actually remembered.[2][9] Both men wore leather collars, padded with sheep's wool, joined by a length of chain, and Valentine couldn't resist a shot at the padding once the bell rang: "Only a man would put sheep's wool in a dog collar," he bellowed at Piper mid-attack.[14]

The two men's styles were built to clash: Piper worked "electric, a whirling dervish of violence," while Valentine ground away as "a methodical, plodding striker," and the mismatch in rhythm is a big part of why the match still holds up on tape.[9] They opened by jerking each other around with the chain itself before dropping it to trade fists.[13] Piper took early control, cornering Valentine and working him over with both hands and the chain; Valentine answered by going straight back to the damaged ear, at one point wrapping the chain through Piper's mouth and around his head, in what one retrospective called one of the most focused, vicious body-part attacks in wrestling history.[9][13] Piper reversed it, choking Valentine against the ringpost with his own chain, 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, with both men grappling at the ropes, Piper yanked Valentine down off the top turnbuckle by the chain, whipped him with it, and covered him for the pin at 16:08.[2][13] Valentine didn't accept it was over, going after Piper again after the bell until officials pulled him off.[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 vary by account, from 50 to 75 percent, but every version agrees it was permanent.[1][3]

Piper honored the remainder of his contract with Crockett before Vince McMahon brought him into the WWF. Still recovering from the injury, he debuted on WWF television managing "Dr. D" David Schultz and "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff rather than as an active wrestler, and didn't move into a full-time in-ring role until later in 1984.[6][16] That managerial role turned out to be more consequential than a placeholder: Piper's Pit debuted on WWF television on January 28, 1984, out of the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, and within its first weeks Orndorff, the man Piper had been managing, was in the chair talking about challenging new champion Hulk Hogan, the same Hogan-Orndorff dynamic the company would spend the rest of the decade mining.[16][17] From there Piper became the WWF's top heel through 1984 and 1985, building into his own program with Hogan that 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.[18] By September 24, 1984, in London, Ontario, he'd beaten Tito Santana for the WWF Intercontinental Championship, working over Santana's knee before locking in the figure-four leglock. He held that belt for 285 days before Santana won it back in a steel cage rematch the following July.[8]

The two of them wrestled the dog collar match itself dozens more times on the Crockett circuit through the rest of 1983, by Piper's own recollection somewhere around 40 total outings between the TV version and the house-show tour.[7]

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 the roughly 300-mile loops they covered together between towns in Virginia and the Carolinas.[3] That real rapport is part of why the psychology of the angle, an injury real enough to be mocked convincingly, landed the way it did.

Both men have laughed about the practical cost of doing the match so many times. The sheep's wool lining Piper added to the leather collars, meant to make the gimmick bearable to wear, instead gave both of them a rash around their necks that Piper has compared to herpes.[3] Valentine, for his part, has never downplayed how legitimately dangerous the chain work was: "That chain was huge... no pulled punches, working with a truck tire chain."[3]

The money was part of the calculus too. Valentine has been direct about it: with houses packed specifically to see the two of them tear into each other, "the money was great," and neither man had much incentive to soften a formula that was drawing that well.[3]

Piper has talked about the broader psychological pressure of the moment, not just the physical toll. Starrcade was Crockett's answer to the WWF's Shea Stadium show earlier that decade, an attempt to prove the NWA could put on a supercard of its own, and Piper has said the weight of that showcase registered with the roster beforehand: "It dawned on us that all the important people in our business were looking at us."[3][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 single best dog collar match in wrestling history, "the match all dog collar matches aspire to be but are doomed to fall short of," while noting the finish itself, Piper's pull off the top rope, is a shade tamer than the sixteen minutes that preceded it.[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 became an annual tradition and, with its closed-circuit distribution model, is widely credited as a direct forerunner of the pay-per-view business the WWF would popularize with WrestleMania roughly eighteen months later.[2][9] 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, decades removed from the injury but never fully recovered from it.[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 for a career the Piper feud had done as much as anything to launch.[8]

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. "Piper's Pit with Paul Orndorff" (02-04-1984) — YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di0hB4KmDsM
18. "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

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