Pro Wrestling Books

This is an unusual book in that it’s hard to criticize but also hard to recommend. As a ring announcer’s biography, the natural comparison is to Gary Michael Capetta’s Bodyslams, which is largely a collection of fun stories about the weird world of pro wrestling. This is a more focused memoir about chasing a dream, finding it lacking and yet still celebrating the achievement. The early parts of the book cover Roberts’ relentless and driven struggle to get a ring announcing job with WWE over the course of many years. His keen interest as an obsessed childhood fan will certainly raise a few smiles, particularly for anyone who has gone to great lengths to find a wrestler willing to talk to them. From the point he achieves the job, the book is largely about its many shortcomings. It’s a combination of feeling unappreciated, suffering intense bullying (most significantly on overseas trips) and coping with the sheer lack of consistency by management, frequently falling foul of “rules” that change without logic, warning or explanation. The problem is that this is somewhat relentless. It’s no doubt an extremely fair representation of what it felt like to work for WWE, but it’s not…

It would be unfair to call this half-assed, but a substantial chunk of this book is missing in action. Marketed as a “definitive biography”, it suffers from the major shortcoming that it effectively ends in 1999 with the angle of the revelation of Vince McMahon as “Greater Power”. The subsequent 24 years of his life and career is covered in a whistlestop “coda” chapter where, for example, WWE becoming a public company and setting McMahon up as a billionaire gets a solitary paragraph. It would have been disappointing if this had been a planned approach and fully flagged up in the blurb of the book, but this isn’t the case. Speaking to Slam Wrestling, Riesman explained: There was just too much life to fit in there. I had a word count and we didn’t want to go over it because you don’t want a long wrestling book to try and market. Frankly it’s baffling how the publisher considered this acceptable, let alone how the book was then promoted to potential buyers. To make things worse, the abrupt ending will likely come as a shock to many given the book appears to be paced for 1999 to fall roughly in the…

While there’s nothing new here for serious fans, this is a fun biography for young readers (the stated target age is 7 to 9). It’s part of a series title “First Names”, the idea being that the reader will feel like they are on a first name basis with a curious mix of historical and contemporary figures, placing Johnson alongside Greta Thunberg, Nelson Mandela and Elon Musk. The book is simply a repackaging of Johnson’s life story (with an emphasis on inspiration), plus explanations of various concepts such as how wrestling works and the positions and depth chart in college football. For the wrestling sections at least, it will all be familiar for anyone who has read Rock’s WWE book and watched the Young Rock series. It does open with a neat acknowledgement for young readers that would be welcome in certain other wrestling biographies: the author explains that while the facts in the book are based on public record, some of the wording of conversations and descriptions of Johnson’s thoughts at the time are constructed (with direct quotes in italics.) At 150 pages, it’s a relatively comprehensive bio given the intended audience. For the wrestling section at least, it’s…