Pro Wrestling Books

A biography of wrestler Chick ‘Cocky’ Knight by his great-nephew, this is a life worth exploring but reads more as a set of facts than a story. Knight had quite the life, not only wrestling on-and-off for more than 25 years either side of the war (including a televised BBC match in 1938) but also boxing professionally and working as a bouncer across London. He also saved three people from drowning in two separate incidents including diving from Hammersmith Bridge. It’s clear an autobiography by Knight would have been a compelling tale, but sixty years after his death, this account is naturally based on both family members and archive research. Unfortunately it falls into the common trap of seemingly including every morsel from that research and feeling like an information dump. It’s also very loose in how relevant the information is to Knight’s life, the most extreme example being a section which notes that Knight’s father worked as a taxi driver during the time of a driver’s strike, a meeting for which took place at Earl’s Court shortly before a Jack Johnson boxing match. While there’s no mention of Knight’s father being at the meeting, and Johnson had no connection…

Having researched wrestling in Northern Ireland myself for what turned out to be around a 1,000 word section of a longer article, I would never have imagined it was possible to write a 400-page book on the subject. Not only has local wrestler and promoter Nick Campbell pulled off the task, but it’s a superb piece of work. Originally conceived as an oral history piece, Campbell gathered together enough material to produce a year-by-year account of wrestling in the area from 1932 to 2002. It draws on a combination of contemporary media reports and interviews with dozens of grapplers from the area including TV stars such as Fit Finlay and Eddie ‘Kung Fu’ Hammil and figures who are less well known on the international stage but were major influences on the local scene such as Noel ‘Darkie’ Arnott and Dave Finlay senior. The result strikes the perfect balance between the big picture record of how local wrestling developed and the individual experiences and anecdotes of those involved. It’s particularly strong on the unique aspects of Northern Ireland’s wrestling from the arm’s length involvement of Joint Promotions and its TV superstars to the bare bones culture of training gyms and the…

This may be a case of lowered expectations, but I found this surprisingly readable and insightful. It’s the usual approach by ghostwriter Scott Teal of keeping the narrative coherent while still reflecting the subject’s voice, and grounding the career account somewhat in reality in terms of dates and places, while still allowing the subject scope to make some perhaps questionable claims about their status and importance. This isn’t merely a chronological account of Atlas’ career but rather has a lot of explanations of how he learned the business, different promoters approaches to booking him and teaching him psychology, and the pros and cons of life on the road. Atlas also has clear views on topics such as racism and drug use that may surprise some readers but are expressed and explored so that even people who disagree with him can understand his viewpoint. There’s also far more detail on foot domination fetishes than you would ever expect and a full account of the night Bruiser Brody was killed just feet away from Atlas. The main narrative of the book is Atlas throwing away his potential, leading to periods out of the business and homelessness and his recovery. It’s very much…

This will reinforce everything you already thought about the Young Bucks. Perhaps inevitably, for older readers this will bring to mind the WWE Hardy Boys book with its similar tale of two brothers moving up from backyarding and enhancement roles to a high-profile career. The main structural difference (aside from the lack of a ghostwriter) is that the Hardys Book was almost in an oral history style, with individual paragraphs cited as either Matt or Jeff speaking. Here Matt and Nick write lengthy alternating chapters in the first person and, with the pair having similar writing voices, I was often left checking back to remember who was telling the story at a particular moment. For fans of the Bucks, this will be a fun experience reliving an uplifting tale of two guys who took chances and made their own career by treating themselves as a merchandise business while breaking many of the unwritten rules of wrestling. The most divisive element of the book will depend very much on your perspective of confidence: while only the harshest critics will interpret this account as being arrogant, there’s certainly no false modesty on display. The book is certainly an enjoyable read, but it’s…