Wrestling With Words
Cafe Royal Books in the UK has released a 36 page photo book, “Wrestling in the North 1980s” by Peter Byrne. It’s a limited edition print run available from some independent stockists or direct from the publisher, with options for international shipping.
This certainly lives up to its title, but that’s about it. Released appropriately on March 16, this is simply 316 entries relating to Austin’s career, covering three main formats. One is straightforward stories and incidents. Some are simply on-screen happenings while many of the backstage/real life events will be familiar to anyone who’s read the autobiographies of Austin and his peers and followed his various podcast series. The second category is transcripts of Austin promos. Some are short and effective while others, from the What?! era, are as tedious on paper as in the original telling. Finally there’s a whole bunch of trivia and lists. A few of the trivia notes are genuinely surprising, but there’s some serious padding here with lists including everyone who held the WWF title before Austin, everyone who held the WCW TV title for longer than him, and every other Texan in the WWE Hall of Fame. While the whole thing won’t take much more than an hour to read, it’s fine as a bathroom reading book and would theoretically suit the stocking stuffer/gift from a baffled auntie market. But the problem is this is a book about a wrestler who retired almost 20 years…
While well-written and informative, this book may struggle to stand out. If you’ve read any of the Greg Oliver/Steve Johnson “Hall of Fame” series, you’ll be familiar with the format of this book. It’s a series of profiles (primarily of US wrestlers) grouped together in broad categories, each combining a career overview with comments from interviews. In this case the participants are not the subjects but rather several dozen wrestling figures interviewed for the project, covering such diverse perspectives as Colt Cabana, Shayna Bayzler and referee Jimmy Korderas. These are backed up wit the occasional, clearly-acknowledged, extract from a book or broadcast interview. Between the category sections the book has a run-down of various historical eras such as the height of the territory system or the shoot-style period in Japan. The profiles are detailed enough that only the most devoted fans of wrestling history will come away without learning anything. The main limitation is instead the absence of a clear niche. The problem is that “wrestler’s wrestler” is inherently a subjective and fuzzy concept that’s defined largely by the contributing voices. At different points it covers skilled in-ring workers, those with a legitimate background, and those who connected with an…
Ehren Schaffter has recently published Independent Road, A Wrestler’s Journey, available from Barnes & Noble in paperback and NOOK (e-reader) formats: When you turn on your television weekly, you’d find it very hard not to find a representation of the wrestling industry at some point. Multimillion-dollar companies continue to push out stars through their programming. What about the men and women who have yet to make it to those promotions? Independent Road, A Wrestler’s Journey introduces you to those talents who not only have traveled down that road for decades but are still trying to carve their paths. Author Ehren Schaffter takes you on a journey to learn of the talents, upbringing, struggles, fears, and dreams.
