For years, (Rowdy) Roddy Piper has insisted that, if not for the support of wrestling fans around the world, he would probably be dead.

Now, through a serendipitous twist, Piper's words resonate louder than ever. The Saskatoon-born wrestling legend is fighting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer that attacks the body's blood-filtering tissues. Doctors discovered the cancer while performing back surgery after Piper suffered an injury while touring with World Wrestling Entertainment in Europe last month.
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"If the fans hadn't voted me in (at Cyber Sunday), I wouldn't have discovered this," Piper said in a telephone interview from Portland, Ore. "I would have gone three to five years and never known it. And it's in my lymph glands, so it wouldn't have taken long to go through my entire body."