A tale of two well-documented men, this brings together two entwined lives in a new form. Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks straddles the lines between multiple approaches — biographies of two individuals, a history of a wrestling era, a specific rivalry, and one high-profile event — in a way that has many of the advantages of each without becoming unfocused. The book brings together material from existing books and news articles, plus original interviews with Bret Hart, Tony St Clair and Mal Sanders among others. It’s weaved together well and uses relevant extracts to tell the story, rather than feeling too much like a “cut-and-shut” operations. There’s also a well balanced level of non-wrestling historical content to put things into context rather than padding, for example noting how Big Daddy’s match with John Quinn escaped an ITV broadcaster strike by a matter of weeks. (Said match is also a good example of the book not getting too caught up in the narrative, correctly identifying it as both the forerunner of, and in some ways bigger than, the Haystacks Wembley match.) It means there’s not much in the way of new revelations here, but rather a case of putting the pieces…