Roddy Piper Made Insane Claim To Promote Former Venture

John "JBL" Layfield and Gerald Brisco recently released an episode of their podcast, "Stories with Brisco and Bradshaw," in which their guest was Len Denton, best known for his work under as mask as The Grappler. With Denton having been a longtime friend of late WWE Hall of Famer Roddy Piper, their relationship was a natural topic of discussion. One aspect of their friendship that came up was the disaster of an auto repair shop that they opened together in Portland, Oregon in 1990.

"JBL, this is how dumb I was," Denton explained. "I thought, 'Well, I'm The Grappler, and they all know me in town, and Piper, they know him more than me. Hell, brother, we're gonna have customers run the doors over, right? They would come in there and talk about wrestling; they weren't buying sh*t from us. Everyone asked me about my last match that I had on TV. So then I figure[d] out you hire guys [to do the repairs because] I don't know what I'm doing, and they're robbing me blind, so I had to get an education."

While wrestling at night and working in the shop during the day, Denton hired someone to teach him how to build transmissions over the course of two years. That helped turn the business around to the point that Denton eventually sold it for about $200,000. In the early days, though, Piper had to get creative with figuring out how to generate new customers. "He talks to Vince [McMahon] and gets a free commercial on [the Portland version] on Vince's show," Denton said. "Why he did this, I don't know [but in the commercial, he said], 'If you can body slam The Grappler, your transmission job's free.' I called him up in a week and said ,'I've got assh**les lined up here wanting to body slam me."

If you'd like to hear more stories from Denton, he has a memoir, "Grappler: Memories of a Masked Madman," that features a forward from Piper.