YOUR ALL-NEW WRESTLING BOOK THREAD

[odessasteps]

Aren't those both 2023 books? If you read them this year, then I guess they would be 2024 books.

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

18 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

Aren't those both 2023 books? If you read them this year, then I guess they would be 2024 books.

If you haven't [read] it, it's new to you!

[SovietShooter]

35 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

Aren't those both 2023 books?

Yeah, looks like they're late 2023.  I read them this summer, so it counts to me!

[odessasteps]

Like my dad would say, an old show he hadn't seen was new to  him.

[Curt McGirt]

The Kayfabe book is pretty interesting so far (about 130 pages in) and I know it's gonna get better, after skimming some of the topics -- but this is a problem in that there is NO chapter list. It is just bizarre. I don't think I've ever seen a book opening without one. 

[Curt McGirt]

Finished Kayfabe! Excellent book. It starts at the very origins of professional wrestling and continues on through all the permutations until the present day. The main question is, if you already consider yourself a bit of an amateur historian about the profession, is it still entertaining or have anything new in it? The answer is yes. There's a ton of early times stuff (almost too much) that I don't recall from even the Hornbaker NWA book. The middle is a lot of stuff pretty much everyone knows (Montreal etc.) but then he hits Japan and we get a very entertaining recall of everything from JWA to today. The only rock left unturned, unfortunately, is Mexico. In retrospect it's a pretty glaring omission but I'm sure Mr. Reed has his reasons (likely, a lack of sources). There is also an epilogue referencing the Speaking Out movement which was sorely needed and unfortunately necessary to the topic at hand. 

Probably the best thing about the book is that he connects the dots as the book continues between prior events and recurring ones. Just as wrestling waxes and wanes in popularity, you get a sense of deja vu with history repeating itself in various forms. There's also an excellent bit at the end about the kayfabe of wrestling being just another example of the public wanting to be deceived as it is in their nature to desire such, from many outlets -- including politically. 

Buy it. 

[Curt McGirt]

Also, don't ignore the footnotes at the bottom, because they're always juicy bits written with some good in-jokes and snark. 

[Happ Hazzard]

Has anyone read the Chavo Guerrero Sr. biography "Instant Classic"?

[odessasteps]

I saw that there's a new Verne book.

[SirSmUgly]

I was thumbing through a paperback copy of the UK published Hitman bio, which I bought a) as a novelty because it's a UK publishing and therefore has way too many "u"s in it and b) so I can keep my hardback version in better shape by not opening it anymore. 

Anyway, once I got to the part where Bret and the Nastys visit Dynamite in the UK during a tour, I decided to pause there and finally read Pure Dynamite. It's a short read, but what I noticed the most is how much Dynamite elides exactly why his relationship with Michelle fell apart. I'll at least credit Bret for owning up to being a relationship-long cheater, even though he softens his actions through rationalization. 

The second thing I noticed was that Dyno was considerably more detailed about his time in Japan than in the UK, Canada, or the United States, which sort of bummed me out. I would have loved more about his wrestling experience in the UK other than about how much it sucked to work Big Daddy or Haystacks. Jim Breaks got like one mention. I would have loved to read his thoughts on some of the other workers around that time. Basically, he listed off who he thought sucked to work with and gave some praise to Rollerball Rocco. 

I thought that two hundred-ish pages wasn't enough for his career and would have loved another hundred pages of book, at the very least. 

As an aside, I think I'd put the Dynamite/Tiger Mask Sayama matches in the same group with Blitzkrieg as things that were obviously well-beloved in their time that have been aped so much, watching them in real time not only dampens their positive effect but also makes their flaws more apparent.

(As a second aside, I also quickly read Diana Hart's Under the Mat, which was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius a prime example of how toxic people are deluded enough not to realize their own toxicity when they're feeling particularly self-righteous.)

[Curt McGirt]

If you watch the TM/Dynamite feud in sequential order, as I once did, you get a real feel for the feud. Watching them individually... they pretty much suck. The bottle match is good and the rest have been smoked since. 

[driver]

20 hours ago, SirSmUgly said:

I was thumbing through a paperback copy of the UK published Hitman bio, which I bought a) as a novelty because it's a UK publishing and therefore has way too many "u"s in it and b) so I can keep my hardback version in better shape by not opening it anymore. 

Anyway, once I got to the part where Bret and the Nastys visit Dynamite in the UK during a tour, I decided to pause there and finally read Pure Dynamite. It's a short read, but what I noticed the most is how much Dynamite elides exactly why his relationship with Michelle fell apart. I'll at least credit Bret for owning up to being a relationship-long cheater, even though he softens his actions through rationalization. 

The second thing I noticed was that Dyno was considerably more detailed about his time in Japan than in the UK, Canada, or the United States, which sort of bummed me out. I would have loved more about his wrestling experience in the UK other than about how much it sucked to work Big Daddy or Haystacks. Jim Breaks got like one mention. I would have loved to read his thoughts on some of the other workers around that time. Basically, he listed off who he thought sucked to work with and gave some praise to Rollerball Rocco. 

I thought that two hundred-ish pages wasn't enough for his career and would have loved another hundred pages of book, at the very least. 

As an aside, I think I'd put the Dynamite/Tiger Mask Sayama matches in the same group with Blitzkrieg as things that were obviously well-beloved in their time that have been aped so much, watching them in real time not only dampens their positive effect but also makes their flaws more apparent.

(As a second aside, I also quickly read Diana Hart's Under the Mat, which was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius a prime example of how toxic people are deluded enough not to realize their own toxicity when they're feeling particularly self-righteous.)

So you're calling D-Dawg-Dianner toxic?

[Curt McGirt]

https://guyevansbooks.com/products/guy-evans-beyond-nitro

Here's the pre-order for Guy Evans' Beyond Nitro, the sequel to, of course, Nitro. If it's like a compedium of tales like the ones that formed the footnotes of Nitro, it should be an incredibly entertaining read. 

[Cobra Commander]

a WCW Thunder Book should eventually evolve from being changed just before writing to having two weeks worth of material written at once

has anybody ever tried doing a book version of the 6:05 show (GCW/WCW, WWF's GCW, and then WCW/Saturday Night) and how that evolved over the years?

[Curt McGirt]

You might want to ask Evans personally. Could be an idea he's been kicking around.

[SirSmUgly]

Dammit, I'm in. 

[SirSmUgly]

My copy of Beyond Nitro just got here. Even though I'm in the middle of another book, I'll be doing the old "alternating between two thick books at the same time" deal. Beyond Nitro is over six hundred pages and Lonesome Dove is over eight hundred, and what I really need right now is a summer break, a beach, and a cooler full of drinks. 

[AxB]

Has anyone read this: 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Steel-Chair-Head-Professional-Wrestling-ebook/dp/B00GG0K35K/ref=sr_1_1?crid=IYRJIH80OYNS&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.CD3cCx3TuRZWUaU0LEmBjQ.AEglYeYAYjLdy3ce3kd7evMTswfPxZWsfGqmgTdNDFo&dib_tag=se&keywords=steel+chair+to+the+head+nicholas+sammond&qid=1747086288&sprefix=steel+chair+to+the+head+nicholas+sammond%2Caps%2C162&sr=8-1

Spoiler

Spoiled for size. It's like a Cultural Studies book on Pro Wrestling.

Quote

Contributors. Roland Barthes, Douglas L. Battema, Susan Clerc, Laurence de Garis, Henry Jenkins III, Henry Jenkins IV, Heather Levi, Sharon Mazer, Carlos Monsiváis, Lucia Rahilly, Catherine Salmon, Nicholas Sammond, Phillip Serrat, Philip Sewell

 

[NikoBaltimore]

I saw that at a store years ago and tried to read the first 10-15 pages.  But at the time it wasn't the type of wrestling book I was looking for and it didn't interest me after that.  Looking at it now I can say I appreciate the philosophical look at wrestling they're doing and wouldn't mind giving it another try.

[SirSmUgly]

That'll be a great source for in a couple decades when I retire and spend my time getting a post-grad degree in sociology or anthropology because I'll need it to help write my pro-wrestling focused thesis.

[SirSmUgly]

OK, this is going to be a longer post, for which I apologize. 

Beyond Nitro is worth reading, but it's not an essential book. A chunk of it discusses broadly the common modern pro wrestling ideas that people smarter than Guy Evans have already discussed ad nauseam; a lot of this "smark relationship with wrestling/wrestler psychology 101 for the post-kayfabe millennium" stuff has been written about by DVDVR/PWO types in far more interesting ways to the point that I'd honestly rather read a book full of the best posts on those topics over the past near-three-decades than read this stuff again from Evans. 

This book is also part of the attempt by Eric Bischoff and his allies (Conrad Thompson, the producers of DSotR, and Evans himself) to burnish Bischoff's wrestling legacy, which is tiresome at this point. I get it, Bischoff wants to claim all victories for himself and place any losses on the heads of the dysfunction at Turner/TW. Evans spends a lot of time in the middle of the book doing this mind-numbing walkthrough of accounting practices so that the "true believers" who think that WCW actually lost money in 1999 - 2001 can be shown up as FOOLS. And yes, he uses the phrase "true believers" because he's spent too much time talking to Bischoff. 

(This is not to say that his argument doesn't have merit! I don't think, based on the evidence, that there's any way to tell exactly how much WCW actually made or lost. All we have to look at that can hint toward anything concrete is WCW's nosediving attendance and PPV buyrates, something that Evans simply ignores when trying to discuss how we perceive late-stage WCW's viability). 

In some ways, this book is a credit to Bischoff in that while he comes off as a scummy used car salesman to me, were he in that business, he would have sold a lot of lemons to people like Guy Evans. He's a heck of a salesman and pretty much everyone quoted in the book loves him. 

Broadly, the book advances three major arguments:

1. Nothing bad that happened in WCW was really Eric Bischoff's fault if you do a bit of research on the topic
2. WCW was a dead promotion walking almost from the point that Turner acquired it
3. Turner and Time Warner wasted the great work of a lot of talented individuals because it was uncaring toward WCW or simply an inept parent company (there are shades of "If only Ted Turner really knew, he'd have fixed it" in this argument). 

What makes this worth reading are some of the stories and uncovered documents that Evans uses since, admittedly, he has done the research. I don't agree with his conclusions, but he has done a journalism, so that's neat. People tell their stories, and those stories are compelling even though they are clearly structured in a way so that Evans can use them to advance his broad arguments. That's fine, though. There is value in Keith Mitchell telling stories from his time in wrestling or in a detailed look at TNN's pre-ECW, pre-WWF foray into mashing up pro wrestling with their other content by talking to Ralph Shaheen (NASCAR announcer, former host of Motocross Madness along with Dusty EFFIN' Rhodes)

I think it's also worth reading for the accounting info or the negotiation info w/r/t the sale of some of WCW's assets to the WWF. My personal issue is that Zellner (who is quoted multiple times in the chapter that enflamed my passions the most) and Bixenspan have done a more interesting job of presenting evidence that Brad Siegel always wanted to sell to Vince and used Stu Snyder as his go-between. Making this clear has been an Eric Bischoff initiative over the past couple of years - he has a conversation on 83 Weeks with Snyder about this and Who Killed WCW grills Siegel on this matter - but since I already had a handle on all that, the reinforcement of it all didn't do much for me. I do think there is value in Evans making a convincing argument that, based on the evidence, AOLTW and the WWF structured their sale so that AOLTW got a nice tax writeoff for keeping the losses from WCW/Universal Wrestling Corporation while handing the WWF the assets for a song in a mutually beneficial arrangement, but other than that, there isn't much else here that I haven't already heard from other researchers. 

I will say that there is a chapter that riled me way the hell up. The argument it posits is as such: WCW could never have sustained growth as a Southern wrestling brand because Southern wrestling could never go mainstream. Despite the fact that earlier in the book, Evans talked to Ralph Shaheen, who commentates NASCAR, which is a distinctly Southern brand that went mainstream, Evans pushes this narrative. Look, we live in a post-OutKast world. Ludacris is in mainstream movies. Country music is ubiquitous on the airwaves. Popeyes and Zaxbys and Chick-Fil-A and other Southern fast food brands are clamored for nationwide. Dudes in small-town Oregon and Michigan hang Confederate flags from their trucks. I have no idea why we're pretending that Southern culture doesn't travel outside of the South. 

On this note, I turn it over to Scott Hudson, who is quoted in this book as saying one of the dumber comments that I've come across: "There was no national appetite for 'southern style' wrestling as a major motion picture, sitcom, or wrestling product much the same way that there is no national interest in pickled eggs, sweet tea, and grits." Motherfucker, grits were an American hipster's "exotic" breakfast choice in 2009! Everyone loves sweet tea! What the fuck are you talking about?! (In fairness, he might be right about pickled eggs, but half the Southerners I know don't love those, either.)

This chapter on Southern wrestling has some interesting ideas which I will absolutely be pursuing when I'm an old retired man writing his thesis to earn a post-grad anthropological degree. Most of these ideas are about the historical-cultural elements of Southern wrestling in ways that, again, DVDVR posters have talked about before and more interestingly. But the core thesis falls apart because it rests on this idea that there is something about Southern wrestling that doesn't translate in a way that either the Northeastern WWF style does or that West Coast style - I'm thinking specifically Reseda - that permeates a lot of what pro wrestlers are doing today. 

It fails to note that, for example:

• Vince McMahon had the largest market in the world from which to expand. Strangely, the book notes that the South (and its Midwestern neighbors like OK and MO) had about as many territories as the rest of the country combined, yet it fails to conjecture how Vince McMahon being able to leverage the money made from NYC/Philly/Boston/Toronto might be the reason that he found it easier to move the WWF style into other territories as compared to the Southern territories not being able to draw on as much money from their towns. It's odd. All the ingredients for this argument are touched upon in the chapter itself. Southern wrestling promotions fed small towns on their loops; Vince wanted to only do bigger cities. Southern wrestling promotions covered less area and fed less affluent media markets than Vince did. Yet somehow, the conclusion is that something is wrong with the Southern wrestling product or formula and not simply that Vince had more money and a stronger base of operations from which to expand. Baffling. Or that...

 

• ...the primary issue with booking Southern wrestling to a wider base, looking at WCW from an artistic standpoint, is that Southern wrestling bookers can be just as provincial as Vince was in the WWF. Ole Anderson having concrete ideas about booking wrestling that are two decades old is a fault in Ole, not a fault in the style of wrestling! The same goes for Bill Watts or whomever you want to talk about (yeah, I love 1992 WCW, but we've talked about Watts's shortcomings as a booker in the '90s more than enough). 

I think the one thing this book, a poor attempt at helping Eric Bischoff run as a WCW executive look better in hindsight, doesn't do enough of is giving Eric Bischoff credit for being the head showrunner during a period where WCW was able to update their show's look and feel, keep some of the Southern elements, and to sell them to the Midwest especially. There is a reason that, for example, the West Texas Rednecks got over as a midcard stable in the Midwest where WCW spent a ton of time touring in 1999. Bischoff low-key discovered a bit of a formula that he coudn't figure out how to build upon which basically helped him make inroads into the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain States, and a lot of that stuff that worked was stuff that worked in the South alongside the updating of WCW to look like a modern wrestling show and the nWo angle (though even the nWo angle was about the heels led by a bunch of guys from "up North" destroying "tradition").

Also, Evans spends two long chapters talking about how much Vince Russo sucks, including a whole run-down of his TNA stints. Unnecessary stuff, but Evans wants to make sure you know that Russo is the failed creative mind in the Bischoff/Russo pairing, not Bischoff! Of course, the idea that both of them are failed creative minds is never considered. Evans notes that Bischoff/Hogan-era TNA set TNA's slow-but-steady ratings growth back quite a lot, but somehow, Bisch never really comes in for much criticism in that regard. Instead, we're focused on Russo being a head case. 

All this is to say that I did enjoy the stories and some of the interesting documents in this book. But man, this could have been half the size and ditched the primary goal to paint Eric Bischoff as just a talented guy doing the best he could to help make WCW profitable against all odds. 

Though in fairness, I have been thinking about, reading about, and watching WCW over the last few years way the hell more than most people, so if you haven't done much of that, this book will also probably have more value add for you than it did for me. 

Edited May 18 by SirSmUgly

[zendragon]

Yhea Vince had the smallest geographical area but the most people in is territory, plus he immediately got LA to start his expansion. 

When did Nascar blow up nationally? I feel like it was a few years after WCW's death that it really got big and we started hearing "Soccer is the new NASCAR" or whatever, same with Country music. Maybe WCW's collapse predated Southern culture going mainstream by a few years and if it could have hung on it could have found a different audience 

[SirSmUgly]

2 hours ago, zendragon said:

Yhea Vince had the smallest geographical area but the most people in is territory, plus he immediately got LA to start his expansion. 

When did Nascar blow up nationally? I feel like it was a few years after WCW's death that it really got big and we started hearing "Soccer is the new NASCAR" or whatever, same with Country music. Maybe WCW's collapse predated Southern culture going mainstream by a few years and if it could have hung on it could have found a different audience 

NASCAR got their FOX deal in 2001 and Shania Twain was a pop country crossover star in the late '90s. I personally think WCW could have thriven in that environment as a culturally Southern-based promotion.

[SovietShooter]

Im not sure I buy in to any theory that WCW was too "southern", as compared to any other 80s & 90s wrestling product. Like, if you're some random person from Peoria, and you watch an episode of Nitro, what exactly screams out that it was "southern"?  Even going back to JCP or GCW before that, not even the announcers had thick typical southern accents or anything like that. 

I think more than anything, network "coastal elites" deemed it "southern" as a type of code-switching language that meant "poor" and "rural".

Now, I do think WCW probably did skew southern as far as audience went, but I think that has more to do with WCW being the successor to the Southern based promotions (JCP, GCW, FL) and the brand loyalty, then the product being "southern style".  Unless "southern" is code for a less "produced" product that doesn't look as slick on television... but I don't think Nitro had a minor league look compared to WWF at that time.

[AxB]

At the same time as WCW was "Too Southern", the most heard voices on every WWF show were Jerry Lawler from Tennessee, and Jim Ross from Oklahoma.