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.
Wrestling fans will enjoy the relevant sections of this book but it may not be enough to recommend the whole thing. Arezzi – also known as John Alexander and John Anthony as the book explains – has had a multi-faceted life. Largely a marketer and salesman, he’s worked in baseball, pro wrestling and country music. The wrestling sections of his life story are fascinating. In the space of a few years he produced the one of the first broadcast show (Pro Wrestling Spotlight on radio) to cover the business in a non-kayfabed sense, coinciding with the WWF drugs and sex scandals. He was partially responsible for Vince Russo’s entry into the business. He helped broker AAA’s stunningly successful expansion into the US in the early 90s. And he was a key player in establishing the wrestling convention circuit. All of this is covered in some detail, with honest and amusing recollections and a refreshing sense of perspective and reality on the ups and downs of the business. The most notable anecdote involves Arezzi’s two match “career” in the ring in the early 80s when he blagged his way into appearing as a jobber on a WWWF taping with awkward results….
An unusual take on wrestling in the past four decades, this is at its best when offering the author’s unique perspective. While you may not know the name Dave Dwinell, there’s a good chance you’ve seen him work. Between 1982 and 2015 he refereed shows for promotions including the WWF, WCW and ECW despite never actually working for them. That’s thanks to the odd set-up by which New York’s athletic commission, which in some ways treated wrestling as a legitimate sport, was in charge of assigning licensed referees to work on shows in the state rather than promotions solely using their own staff. Following some extreme persistence, Dwinell got on to the commission’s roster and found himself working at a WWF show despite having virtually no training and not being entirely certain about how wrestling actually worked. The strongest sections of the book are Dwinell’s experience as a referee working a diverse range of shows from Madison Square Garden to tiny indy shows, along with his memories of amusing incidents in matches. Those only familiar with today’s monster corporation WWE may be surprised to learn of the more bare-bones organization backstage in the 1980s, particularly from the perspective of somebody…
I’ve just transferred the blog and domain to a new host. As far as I can tell, everything should now be working as normal with the exception of most older images currently being missing. (This includes those for reviews before around June 2020 and for other posts that are more than a month old). This will be fixed but will take a little while. Please do let me know if anything looks wrong or appears to be missing.
This is well-written and extensively detailed, though it’s unclear if it’s the right fit for its target audience. The most notable element is the sheer length and depth of the book. At nearly 400 pages, it covers virtually every significant aspect of Johnson’s in-ring career and plenty more detail that a writer could have been forgiven for overlooking. As with Romero’s first book, Owen Hart: King of Pranks, it reads smoothly enough. There’s the occasional detour into opinion, but it’s rare enough to not be distracting or descend into a rant. Readers should be clear about what they are getting here, however. While clearly extensively researched, the book is effectively a compilation of stories and recollections from other published sources including books and interviews. While these are listed at the back of the book (running to several hundred sources), they aren’t acknowledged in the body of the text. This would likely have been unwieldy, but it’s certainly confusing to see what appears to be a direct spoken quote from Johnson and realise it’s actually an extract from his WWE autobiography. The book does a particularly good job of detailing the development of Rock’s in-ring persona, including notes of the first…
Ian Douglass, who worked with Buggsy McGraw on his autobiography, is using Kickstarter to publish The Incredible Brute, a new book inspired by McGraw’s career: This literary project is intended to create an appreciation for the early stages of the professional wrestling career of Michael Davis. Years before he entertained thousands of fans as Buggsy McGraw, Davis made his debut under a mask in Detroit as The Big O. From there, Davis would remove the mask and wrestle as Beautiful Brutus before enjoying the most productive years of his career as The Brute and Buggsy McGraw! Set primarily in the Detroit wrestling territory of the late 1960s, “The Incredible Brute” is a comic-style coloring book that transforms the early career of Davis into a superhero’s origin story. This fantastical professional wrestling parody will be a great collector’s item for fans of Detroit’s Big Time Wrestling era, and also for fans of any of Mike Davis’ colorful wrestling personas. This book is written by Ian Douglass, illustrated by M.W. Leitzel, published by Darkstream Press, and is included in the ongoing Bledtime Stories line of collectible pro wrestling coloring books
Sometimes you don’t enjoy a book because it’s plain bad. Sometimes you don’t enjoy it because it just isn’t for you. This feels like more of the latter. “In Defense Of…” is an anthology of columns from the 411Mania site in the mid 2000s with a simple concept: to take the conventional wisdom of the “Internet Wrestling Community” and argue against it, in the form of a courtroom defense argument. Prag is open in the appendix of this book that what some readers will see as a weakness is a deliberate design choice. These aren’t meant to be balanced articles or to get involved in a back-and-forth of the style that would actually happen in courtroom cross examinations or a debate. Instead they are intentionally one-sided pieces that ape and almost mock the extended negative rants that were popular online at the time. The book is certainly wide in scope, covering all the major topics of the era from the Monday Night Wars to Montreal to the booking career of Dusty Rhodes. That means it will certainly appeal to those who like the idea of thought-provoking and unfamiliar takes. (That said, the piece on Owen Hart’s death – a topic…
