Source: The Winnipeg Free Press Online
CANADIAN professional wrestling legend “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, who hails Winnipeg as his home, has been diagnosed with lymphoma.
In a statement posted Monday on Piper’s web site, the 52-year-old Saskatoon native said doctors found a cancerous tumour on a disc in his spine. Piper will begin treatment immediately.
Back discomfort had forced Piper to leave World Wrestling Entertainment’s tour of Europe and return to North America two weeks ago.
“It seems like I have been fighting someone, something, someplace, in some manner, my whole life,” Piper said in a statement. “But this fight is one I am gonna win!”
Piper was born in Saskatoon, but in his first visit to Winnipeg in three decades this past April, Piper told Free Press reporter Brad Oswald that Winnipeg is the only place that has ever felt like home to him.
“I bounced around so many places when I was a kid, and it was difficult, and Winnipeg was the only town that ever felt like home to me.”
Piper came to Winnipeg to host the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival’s roots-themed My Hometown International gala.
Piper, who was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005, is married with four children. He was scheduled to tour Quebec and Ontario by train next week to help promote Wrestlemania — held next April in Detroit — and his DVD set, “Born to Controversy,” released Nov. 14.
Oswald wrote that when Piper “gets to talking about the town he still calls home, the guy who made a career out of being a crazed squared-circle villain talks in soft, sweet and darned near warm-and-fuzzy tones.”
Piper was offered honorary citizenship by Mayor Sam Katz last spring, saluted by a pipe band and taken a tour of a few of the old haunts that were part of his troubled teens. Piper was born Roderick George Toombs and lived the early part of his life in various parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba — his father was an often-relocated police officer with the RCMP and CN Rail.
