Pro Wrestling Books

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…

This book makes the best of a concept with arguably limited potential, which is pretty much the opposite of what happened in the match it covers. It’s automatically an impressive feat to get a full book out of a match where famously almost nothing happened. Even with a literal blow-by-blow account (Gross bravely becoming sure the only person in history to watch the match multiple times), the core of the book is inherently limited in drama. Unfortunately the lack of cooperation from the key players involved means the book doesn’t reveal too much about the match, in particular the process by which a potential worked finish was set aside, a legitimate contest decided on (or reached by default) and the rules negotiated. Even with the book’s explanations, it still reads somewhat unclear exactly what each man could and couldn’t do and whether it’s fair to criticise Inoki for not taking down and submitting Ali, or whether the rules meant this really wasn’t a boxer vs grappler affair at all. Within these limitations, Gross does an excellent job of putting the match into context. Without ever losing the thread that keeps everything on topic, he covers everything from the development of…

Pro wrestling in Douglas Clark’s era was an often muddled blend of reality and fictionalised drama, as indeed is this book. Clark certainly had a life worthy of chronicling. He was among the pioneers of rugby league, winning numerous championships with Huddersfield and England, and is among just 25 members of the sports Hall of Fame. While a rugby professional, he was also a perennial top contender in Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling, a legitimate contest where grapplers aim simply to trip or throw an opponent to the ground. Following an eventful stint as a supply driver on the battlefields of the First World War he was given a disability discharge and ordered to give up professional sport. Instead he continued winning rugby championships throughout the 1920s before turning to pro wrestling where the addition of submission holds helped revive the business. Now in his 40s he claimed a British and later world championship, touring Australia and New Zealand. Author Steven Bell has amassed a wealth of source material including newspaper archives, Imperial War Museum records and even Clark’s own diaries and memoirs. Sadly Clark died before chronicling the pro wrestling years, so we don’t get his direct insight in this…

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…

Like a stereotypical indy match, this has its impressive moments but occasionally loses focus while cramming too much in. The challenge of writing such a book is that it “independent wrestling” is a topic with almost unlimited scope. In turn that means having to find the right blend of a straight chronological history and a more themed approach with a focused story. For these reasons the first third or so of the book often feels a little scattergun, skipping from topic to topic and relaying a string of information about each but without really telling a story or making a clear point. In particular, several sections will have multiple short quotes from different wrestlers and personalities that don’t really add up to an overall insight. This changes once the book returns to a clear focus point of the first All In show and concentrates on how various developments from the PWG “workrate” era to the rebirth of the UK scene to the way New Japan used international stars to increase its worldwide appeal combined to create the circumstances that led to a 10,000+ seat arena selling out in minutes. As you’d expect from an author with Greenberg’s experience, it’s clearly…

While it’s a hugely exaggerated fictionalisation of the real British wrestling world, this novella is unexpectedly timely. At first glance this seems purely in the world of outlandish fiction, with the central storyline being a Muslim wrestler beaten to death as he attempts to detonate a suicide vest in the ring. However, while the plot may be far-fetched, the setting is very true to life. The descriptions of a small-time independent wrestling show and its cast of characters are very much on the nose. A wrestling promotion may not be made up entirely of the people described in this book, but they could all very plausibly exist. Released in early-June, it’s a particularly notably timed book as a subplot involves a wrestler with a predatory interest in an underaged fan. The description of his machinations and the varying responses of his peers borders on eerily believable in the wake of the #speakingout movement. The story itself doesn’t quite live up to the characterisation. It’s brief enough to read in a single setting and is largely based around description. The plot consists of two detectives investigating the events that led up to the fateful night and the final twist feels too…

An in-character account by “The Animal” would have been a short read, but this attempt to capture his true voice disappoints. The book is presented as a first-person account in the words of Jim Myers (the man who portrayed Steele in the ring), but several style choices mean that even if this is how Myers speaks, it doesn’t feel natural. One problem is the repeated inclusion of extraneous facts that nobody would include in normal conversation. For example, when discussing his dyslexia, Myers/Steele mentions the “Dick and Jane” series and for some reason notes the authors, the publishers, the formal name of the series and even the years during which they were published. This ramps up to the extreme later on where we have several pages of the history of Joe Louis’s career leading up to barely a paragraph of Steele’s recollection of the time he refereed one his wrestling matches. Meanwhile a chapter about Steele’s appearance in the movie Ed Wood includes lengthy IMDB-style bios of every star in the production. Another issue is that a couple of chapters (covering Steele’s childhood and his time coaching sport students) are filled with lengthy first-person quotes from his peers and colleagues….