Wrestling With Words
This is the most comprehensive written account of Flair’s life and career, but feels less than the sum of its parts. As readers of Hornbaker’s previous books on the NWA, the territories and the early years of the WWF will know, he is meticulous in his research but has tended to favour detail over narrative. That’s certainly the case with the sections here about Flair’s family history and life before wrestling. There are so many ...
There’s nothing wrong with this but it’s not a necessary read in 2023. Between The Ropes was a radio show broadcasting in Orlando, kicking off at the height of the Monday Night Wars. (Several years after this book’s publication it transitioned to an online presence and is now a podcast.) The bulk of this book is four overview histories covering WWE, WCW, ECW and TNA, with a particular emphasis on the period from the mi...
Originality always helps books, but sometimes lifting from reality can be entertaining. Novels about pro wrestling tend to fall into a couple of categories. Some use it as a backdrop for genre fiction such as crime (Blood Red, Dollar Green) or romance (The Cruiserweight). Many of the rest cover fictionalized careers based heavily on the US territory era. The Canvas certainly falls into the latter category, but in this case the obvious i...
My high hopes for this were not borne out, but it may be worth a look for Memphis completists. In the early years of wrestling on the internet, Hales wrote several fascinating pieces on his booking experiences and philosophies, particularly the Memphis flavour. Unfortunately those didn’t really get as much play in this book. Hales notes the focus changed midway through the writing process to switch from a history of his time runni...
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&#...
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...
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 st...
Sometimes you want a comprehensive, chronological, fact-checked, revelatory account of a wrestling personality’s career. But sometimes you just want to laugh your backside off. Tod Is God falls very much into the latter category, likely reflecting its origin story. It’s ghostwritten by Kayfabe Commentaries host Sean Oliver and he and Gordon are open about the way its production involved 60 hours of conversations followed by Oliver p...
You may ask “why write a biography of Adrian Adonis?” For John Ellul, the question was “why not?” As well as a chronological account of Adonis’s life and career, Ellul explores the question of how history remembers individual wrestlers. As he notes, Adonis had high-profile runs in multiple territories, was at once stage rated as one of the finest workers in the business, and had a particularly memorable run with a major match ...
John Ellul has a biography of Adrian Adonis to be published on 23 March in paperback and ebook. Pre-orders of the Kindle version are available from Amazon now. Flowers for Adrian: The Life and Death of Adrian Adonis is a detailed and engaging look at the life, death, and legacy of professional wrestler Keith Franke, who competed as “Gorgeous” Keith Franks and “Adorable” Adrian Adonis during the 1970s and 1980s before his untime...
