JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – They call them legacy stars.
The Rock is one. Randy Orton too. Cody Rhodes, Natalya Neidhart and on and on.
And there is another icon in the making. A wrestling star with a VERY famous last name. She’s Teal Piper (real name Ariel Toombs) and her star is rising.
(Piper’s interview can be found right after Sgt. Slaughter on the latest episode of Going Ringside)
Pro wrestling is something she’s known since she was a child growing up in the Pacific Northwest where he father “Rowdy” Roddy Piper kept his family far away from the crazy world he made a living in.
“Not everybody’s dad was a babyface (good guy). My dad was a heel (bad guy). And he was very protective of us,” said Piper. “Especially when we were younger. The fans, there were some fans that would really go after him. They would go after our family. So he was very untrusting of everybody.”
And that meant a delay for Piper entering her dad’s world.
“It took a long time for him to kind of get comfortable with us being around wrestling at all,” she said. “Let alone where I’m at today. And I think he’d be very happy.”
Roddy Piper passed away in 2015.
Following her father’s death, Piper entered the world her dad left behind. She has been through numerous promotions and continues gaining notoriety in the industry.
But she notes that for legacy wrestlers, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
“When you’re in a situation like I am, the door opens really fast but it shuts twice as fast on you,” said Piper. “You don’t get the opportunity to grow. You don’t get to make mistakes. You don’t get to better yourself and then have people pay attention. They’re paying attention before you’ve even gotten to a certain level.”
But Piper is now getting to that level as she’s performed for various promotions around the country as she teams with her fiance, another wrestler named Deimos.
“Traveling around purging everybody,” she said. “We’ve made a point of going around this industry making a statement everywhere we go. We wrestled around the world. We wrestled around the country. We’re just really loving what we’re doing right now.”
You can follow Piper’s continued rise to stardom on her Instagram channel.