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…

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…

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…

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…

Described by the author as a “loosely chronologized cultural criticism of World Wrestling Entertainment’s herstory”, this may not be what some readers expect but is certainly worthy of your attention. Rather than a chronological account aiming to cover the entire development of womens wrestling, this is more a series of essays on the different ways womens wrestling, particularly in WWE, intersects with wider culture. It goes far deeper than simply acknowledging how the presentation and priority of womens wrestling in the promotion has improved over the years while still being behind the time in many regards. The book’s main appeal is that, rarely for a pro wrestling title, it addresses academic topics and thinking but in accessible and unpretentious language. It offers different perspectives on the topic, not as simplistic as “wrestling from the viewpoint of a woman” but rather focusing on specific aspects of female portrayal and involvement in WWE. Examples range from the expectations of how performers create and maintain their hair and make-up to the trope of the wrestling wedding and its near-inevitable disastrous outcome. This is a case of Harris presenting a different take: whereas many long-time wrestling watchers have come to expect that a wedding…