#14 Why You Won’t Be Seeing My Name Under the Byline “As Told To.”

(Originally appeared in Cemetery Dance, No. 42, 2003)

Today, I want to tell you about my journeys to a land far away, to an eerie landscape inhabited by testosteroned giants in costumes and make-up—the world of professional wrestling.[1]

I became enmeshed in this truly bizarre subculture by accident. A friend of mine, Chip Silverman, a writer who lives in Baltimore, had a very wealthy friend who happened to be a huge wrestling fan and friend of a wrestler known as Diamond Dallas Page[2]. The wealthy fan owned a small publishing company (called Positive Publications) and was instrumental in getting Page’s autobiography written (to be published by selfsame fan’s company). My friend Chip has been hired to edit the final manuscript, and he recommended Borderlands Press to typeset and design the book for Positive Publications.

Elizabeth and I decided it was a good deal, and we put together and attractive package full of great pictures and a very readable design. During the production of the book, we were invited to attend one these Pay-per-View “events” that were extremely popular on cable TV several years back. So popular that even a total non-fan as myself had heard of such things as WrestleMania and Halloween Bash. It was being held in Washington DC and was called Starrcade 99, and had been historically one of the biggest events of the year. Positive Publications said they would fly us down to DC and get us limosined to the DC Arena and all that biz.

Elizabeth and I figured it might be fun and if nothing else, suitable grist for the Great Mill of Human Experience, so we agreed to the trip and even angled two extra seats for Doug and Lynne Winter, who lived in nearby northern Virginia, and who have been on record as avowed fans of pro wrestling.[3] The stretch-limo picked us up at BWI, drove down to the Winters’ manse, and from there, we headed into DC for a quick dinner before heading into the MCI Center, a huge, typical, big-city arena. We were met at the door with VIP passes and led down to the absolute front row, comprised of folding chairs with upholstered, padded, leatherette emblazoned with the WCW logo and the Starrcade 99 imprint. We were wildly welcomed by our guest, an affable guy who worked as a mortgage banker by day, and who made sure to tell us our chairs were collector’s item and we would be able to take them home with us at evening’s end. Now, there was a bonus I hadn't planned on. I mean, how many times can you go to a concert or a ballgame and your seat goes home with you afterwards?

Before the Pay-per-View started, they had a bunch of warm-up matches for the arena crowd, and I watched how the crowd did their best to ignore these poor guys. They’re called “dark matches” because the cameras are still off; and were basically venues for your Total Unknowns looking for a gimmick and/or a novel identity that might catch the attention of the crowd. Our seats were close enough to count nose-hairs and catch a lot of errant sweat flying off the flying bodies, and I couldn't help but notice how earnest and sincere these young warm-up guys were. They were “wrestling” like they had guns to their heads, grappling and jumping and vaulting around the ring with a grim desperation. They all knew they had a very limited time and exposure to “catch on” with the promoters or the crowd, so their performances were pretty much balls-out crazy.

I sat there with Elizabeth and I said what both of us would repeat to each other many times during the evening—that being: “I don't get it . . . .”

Which was so true.

When the cameras were turned on and the crowd knew it was showtime, the arena became this seething cauldron of maniacs. They were holding signs and placards and festooned with hats and T-shirts depicting icons of their heroes. Modern gladiators and all that hackneyed imagery. All applied.

We watched guys whack each other with chairs (ad infinitum), stomp the mat to produce a crappy sound effect to accompany blows to the head, get thrown on folding tables, get thrown from the ropes, and we even saw a guy do a belly-flop from atop a step-ladder (from which all the warning-safety stickers had been removed). We saw people like Roddy Piper and Sting and Diamond Dallas and Goldberg and twenty other guys I can’t remember.

They were mostly huge and boring.

I mean, fifteen minutes into the three-hour event, and I believed I’d absorbed all the subtle nuances of the “sport,” and whatever came afterward would be more flash than substance. By the time the Main Event lurched into the lights—Goldberg in a titanic struggle with some guy I can’t remember—I could say with absolute certainty I’d been to my first and last wrestling show.

But I was wrong.

I would go to one more . . .

About a year later, my agent calls me with a possible deal. Books about pro wrestlers had been enjoying a bizarre and totally unpredicted success on the bestsellers’ lists[4], and my agent had sold one of them himself, the biography of the aforementioned Goldberg. He now had fallen into another book deal with one of the grand-daddy famous wrestling dudes of the past thirty years. To wrestling fans, this guy was even more well-known and well-liked than Hulk Hogan. His name was Ric Flair, the Nature Boy, and he needed a ghost-writer to do his (auto)biography.

I told my agent I was not crazy about the idea, basing it on my experience with Diamond Dallas[5] and the whole WCW phenomenon, and my general lack of knowledge or affinity for professional wrestling. My agent then began to run down the balance sheets and did some basic number-grinding and he convinced me there was an opportunity here to make an outrageous amount of money, even if I had to split it with Mr. Flair. With only a little reluctance, I agreed to (as they say in the world of sports personality books) be the guy with the words “as told to” in front of their name.

What I needed to do was meet with Ric Flair and collect the preliminary material to write the proposal, which would be enough of the book to get it sold, to get a contract. After doing some cursory internet-research on Flair’s long career, I wrote up a possible outline for the structure of the book, breaking out wrestler’s life into the usual chapters. I sent this to my agent, and he in turn sent it to Flair’s managers and to Flair himself. I expected to get some feedback, but nobody ever said anything. I figured they all found it an acceptable place to start because they arranged for me to fly down to Charlotte, North Carolina and spend a couple days with the wrestling legend and tape enough material to do the first 80 or 90 pages of the book.

So here I am walking through the thoroughly modern and totally Big-City-Generic airport in Charlotte, where I am supposed to be meeting a driver who is going to take me to a hotel where I will eventually meet the guy they’ve been calling “The Nature Boy” for almost thirty years now.

I have no idea what to expect, but have been told by his manager, Michael Braverman, to expect anything.

After a more than few viewings[6] of WCW’s Monday Night Nitro (on which the Secret Masters of Wrestling have had Ric Flair mixing it up with everybody from Hulk Hogan to his own son, David, and finally being humiliated in front of his wife and daughters in the ring by getting his thick shock of white-blonde hair shaved like a Marine recruit), I have no choice but to agree with Mr. Braverman.

After I do the usual, baggage carousel weave-and-shuffle, I turn towards the exit gates. Before I get there, I see a tall, young guy, wearing casual athletic gear that looks vaguely like tennis whites, but could be some sort of quasi-uniform sported by personal trainers. He is smiling and holding up a sign with my name on it. We shake hands. His name is Nick Lacaria, and he’s been sent to pick me up for his employer, Ric Flair.

Nick-for-Ric drops me off at a nice hotel on the outskirts of Charlotte’s real downtown, and it strikes me as a little remote, a little antiseptic, but I’m not really complaining. I get settled in, call “Slick Rick,” on his cell phone, and he promises to be there for the interview within the hour.

Two hours and some change later he finally arrives and we meet at the hotel bar to break the ice, have a few frosty ones, and start talking. Flair, the man, in this year 2000 looks very much the way he always has. He walks in with the controlled swagger of a naturally athletic guy, and he looks to be in reasonable shape for a guy living in the half-century neighborhood. He is dressed casually in a golf shirt and tailored shorts. He wears a Rolex Oyster and a diamond ring. He smiles easily as he shakes hands in a fashion that can only be described as very manly. Everybody in the bar waves and yells his name and shouts “Wooooooo!” when he enters the place.[7] This is Charlotte, his adopted hometown, and he is probably the most recognizable face in the entire city.

It is early September, 2000, and Ric has been absent from the WCW spotlight for more than two months because he’s been recuperating from shoulder surgery. He tells me the operation was a huge success and he has been able to return to his Spartan-like regimen of daily work-outs. Two hours a day; five days a week. A tough schedule for guys half his age. He claims physical discipline has been paying off (and I’m thinking it better . . . Kramer’s “manzeer-model” look when he’d been head-shaved into “retirement” on his last appearance on Nitro didn’t play too well).

Instead, our conversation drifts into speculation about where he thinks professional wrestling will be in the next year or two. A topic I think is important because that would be about when his book would appear. He is surprised at this timeline—having no idea how publishing schedules work. He, like many people, must believe that books spring full-blown from the writer’s brow like the birth of Aphrodite.

“It’s definitely riding the crest of a wave right now,” he says. “There’ve been plenty of times when the Monday night matches just blow Monday Night Football away!” He seems a bit reluctant to discuss the recent drop in popularity of the World Championship Wrestling in its continuing hammerlock struggle with the rival World Wrestling Federation[8], and says something about how all these things run in cycles.

After we finish our beers, we take a short spin around suburban Charlotte in his fully-loaded, burnished-silver Lincoln Navigator. Ric keeps his window down, so the myriad Charlotteans can see him tooling around, and our conversation is constantly interrupted by people blowing there horns, waving, and screaming “Wooooooo!” to which Ric always responds in kind. It is a great ritualistic greeting he seems to enjoy with un-ending gusto. Great fun, that.

We stop at the Gold’s Gym where he is a controlling partner and he introduces me to his staff and we inspect the phalanxes of exercise machines that fill the place. It is a beautifully impressive facility and there is one huge wall in the lobby literally covered with framed photos of The Nature Boy grinning and posing with the rich, famous, powerful, and athletically gifted: ex-President George Bush, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are a just a few of the luminaries I saw there. Ric Flair truly is “The Man.” (another of his sobriquets) It seems as if everybody knows him and everybody loves him.

Later on, he takes me on a cook’s tour of his home in one of Charlotte’s most prominently exclusive neighborhoods. It is a palatial mansion fashioned from sandy brick; its backyard pool and patio look down on the 18^th tee of a golf course accented by weeping willows and a meandering stream. Despite this, he claims to have neither the time nor the inclination to play golf.

Same goes, apparently for reading.

(I must have walked through eighteen rooms of his house and did not see one book.)

We spend the next hour or so talking about the popularity of recent wrestling biographies that have done a “souplex”[9] on the bestseller lists. The books I mentioned before by Foley and The Rock have made the mainstream New York publishers suddenly salivating for the next mega-hit by a wrestling superstar. Ric tells me with great non-humility his story will simply blow away everybody else’s. “C’mon,” he says with boyish charm and that trademark smile, “let’s face it—I’ve wrestled everybody who’s ever been anybody in this business! Everybody! You can’t name one guy I never wrestled. And I’ve done it all over the world—I even wrestled in front of 90,000 people in Tokyo!”

I want to tell him I couldn’t name anybody—period, but I resist. As I listen to him bullshit about his exploits, I begin to realize he talks about all his achievements as if they are indeed achievements instead of the staged set-ups they are and always have been.

My agent has assured me a Ric Flair biography would be a treasure to the true, long-time wrestling fan. Because Ric has been there from the days of all the old regional wrestling federations, associations, league, etc. He has seen the field evolve from a curious backwater of “sports” into the billion-dollar industry of “sports entertainment” (to borrow a phrase from the McMahons). When Ric first broke in, the game operated under a different set of never-stated rules. The prime directive being that whether or not the audience suspected the matches of being rigged in advance (“scripted,” as they prefer to say), if you were a performer, you never acknowledged it. The general consensus back then, Ric tells me, is that it would have killed the sport. Either audiences didn’t want to know that legends like Johnny Valentine had the outcomes of their matches pre-determined . . . or they secretly/unconsciously knew, and didn’t want it rubbed in their faces.

Regardless, says Ric, it was a great fear in the Seventies that the fans might Find Out the Truth.

Yeah, that would be really terrible, I’m thinking. I mean, what kind of troglodyte could watch these guys and believe it was real? (Don’t answer that!)

Anyway, the afternoon is winding down and we pile into the Navigator and careen through incredibly hectic Charlotte traffic back to my South Park hotel. Ric is dropping me off because he is due at the Charlotte Coliseum to rehearse his first appearance back on Monday Night Nitro after several months of absence. He is very much looking forward to getting back into action and he expects a “great night in front of his hometown crowd.”

The plan is for me to be driven down to the Coliseum by the faithful and friendly Nick, whereupon we will meet The Nature Boy at the back entrance to the arena and I will be escorted backstage. It works to perfection except that we can’t seem to locate Ric as we creep dangerously close to showtime. I am standing outside the old Charlotte Coliseum, inside the perimeter of temporary barriers—beyond which a small ragtag collection of fans wait for a fading glimpse of one of their heroes. They wear the obligatory T-shirts and face-paint and, yeah, they look kinda pathetic.

I am surrounded by a spilled spaghetti bowl of broadcast cables and wires of varying gauges and thicknesses. They look like they’re randomly snaking in and out of a trailers, vans, and doorways. There is also a lot frantic human traffic, punctuated by moments of everybody just standing around. The “everybody” is largely a group of roadies who look like everything from mutant-throwback metal-heads from the Seventies to Harley hog-riders and straight up carnies who have clearly found a life on the road that pays better than pounding tent-pegs and unpacking the Tilt-A-Whirl from a flatbed truck once a week.

Nick is a real gentleman, preferring to stay out there with me instead of going on in to get comfortable in his seat. When Ric finally appears, still in his casual, late summer attire, he relieves Nick of his duties and escorts me through the back doors, past the bouncer-sized Security dudes. We say hello to announcer Mark Madden, who is checking his scripts and his on-air material, and then we are funneled through a claustrophobic Minotaur-would-love-it maze of walkways beneath the stands of the old Coliseum. We pass some of the young, aspiring wrestlers pacing and psyching-up as they await their appearance in the traditional “dark matches” that don’t go out as part of the televised Nitro package.

“It’s really crowded back here,” says Ric. “Lots of the guys have to change and get ready out in the hallways.”

There is a lot of yelling of last-minute instructions, and everywhere you try to walk you are in danger of disturbing a prop or gimmick that has been labeled with tape and stick-ons warning everyone Do not remove! It is barely controlled chaos that is obviously s.o.p. for the backstage crew as well as the talent. Ric intros me to one of the Floor Security guys, and tells him to get me a v.i.p. badge, which allows me to pretty much wander anywhere I want . . . including the seating areas.

Once the “dark matches” conclude, I try to be as invisible as possible in the wings near the entrance ramp, when one of the Security guys tells not to stand to close to the flame-throwing fire-pots. “They’re hotter than hell, man,” he adds colorfully. I take him at his word and step back a little farther into the shadows. The show starts with a tag team match pitting a two-man crew named “Kronic” against a seeming army of little guys (I missed their collective name) who move in and out of the ring like otters playing silkily in a small pond. They end up beating the two guys who are only slightly smaller than the Chrysler Building. It’s a crazy start to what ends up being a completely goofy evening.

For the next two hours I flow from my backstage hidey-hole . . . to a corner of the barricades by the steps leading up to the ring . . . to a primo seat next to a big square of seats reserved for many of the performers’ family members. The matches have, to my untrained eye, displayed a uniform degree of lackluster energy, and the story-lines[10] have not exactly advanced the action with anything that could be accused of being either dramatic or exciting.

Amazingly, the Charlotte Coliseum is, at best, only half-full (or . . . half-empty, depending on your personality-type). This is especially odd because it is a beautiful night, there are no competing events going on in town, and don't forget—this is Ric Flair’s Big! Comeback! Appearance! after a possible banishment/forced retirement. I am expecting a triumphant return to the ring, and figured the hometown rooters would be out in legendary numbers to woooooooo their local hero back into action.

But that’s not looking too likely.

Of course, there’s been no sign of The Nature Boy because he’s obviously being saved for the Main Event. And it finally arrives when they announce the much-ballyhooed wedding of Ric’s twentysomething son, David Flair, to a tall and leggy blond.

Yeah, I realize, they are actually going to stage a wedding at a wrestling match.

The energy-level drops to sub-zero as the roadies take their time turning the ring into a pseudo-Corinthian wedding chapel, and then more time drags by as the various wedding-party members death-march their way to the center of the ring.

The final witness to the wedding is none other than “Slick Rick,” the “Space Mountain”[11] himself, Ric Flair, and he enters the arena dressed not in his familiar rhinestone robes, but a tuxedo that makes him look like a bouncer at a gentleman’s club show-bar. The crowd-reaction is not the thermo-nuked explosion of cheering I’d expected, but rather a tepid scattering of applause and really half-assed woooooing.

But Ric is a dependable performer and he follows the script by walking up to the ring/chapel and stands next to son, David, as the service begins. I watch in disbelief as the ceremony is interrupted by members of the Charlotte Sheriff’s Office, who stride up to the ring and slap The Nature Boy into handcuffs, announcing a restraining order from Head Writer, Vince Russo.

As they escort him from the arena to a round of boos that are far more vociferous than any cheers I’d heard all night, Ric says nothing, does nothing, other than to exit the arena with his head sheepishly down while all the other wrestlers and wedding party odd-balls just stand there in mute acceptance of this silly outrage. The whole scene just kind of fizzles out after that, and son David’s bride runs from the ring crying out that she can’t marry him after all.

What. A. Bust.

It’s so bad, it’s not even bad enough to be fun like Truly Bad Cinema. This shit is just plain old, unrefined, brown matter. And I’m thinking: this is what everybody loves so much that it’s gonna sell a million copies? On the planet Stupid, no doubt.

Ric Flair’s “return to the ring” is imminently forgettable, and will never be confused with anything momentous.

The next day, I have an appointment with Ric to tape biographical stuff at 10:30 a.m. at the hotel. Ric calls at 11:15 and says he’s running a little late—he has to drop off his younger son at camp, but he’ll be over in a half-hour.

He arrives two hours later and is all agitated and pissed off because nobody will leave him alone, and say he can only stay for a half-­hour, because he has to do some other bullshit errand. I tell him that isn't enough time to get any serious work done, so he suggests just having a beer.

I have no choice. So while we are tilting one back, he asks me what I thought of last night’s show. I tell him I gotta be honest—I’d expected the entire wedding party to move in aggravated concert, in righteous anger and indignation, and summarily destroy that cheesy wedding chapel set; I figured a whole bunch of nasty wrestlers were going to grab that crew of badly-suited Sheriff’s and deputies and toss them like sacks of leaky grain over the ropes. I expected a first-class melee. An outrageous rebellion and a barbarian-sacking of the set that would become part of WCW mythology. I said that’s the only way to write that turkey and have it come out in the tradition of the “sport.”

He smiles wistfully. “Yeah,” he says. “That would’ve been fun.”

I ask him to give me an honest assessment of what he thought of last night’s script.

“I thought it was lame,” he said without hesitation. “They didn’t even use me!”

“Yeah,” I said “I agree.”

He looks at me kind of funny . . . as if maybe he should be the only one allowed to say anything bad about his performances . . . and then he let's it go. Getting up, he promises to meet at the hotel early the next day so we can get in a full day of taping. I say cool, and he promises to call me at 9:00 the next morning.

Next day and it’s almost 11:00 and Ric has not called. I call him on his cell phone, and he gives me some bullshit about something else going wrong in his life but he’ll be over to the hotel by noon.

Yeah.

He shows up at 2:00 and—big surprise!—can only stay for about an hour.

If you see a pattern developing here (and I hope you do), then I don't need to tell you this went on for the entire week I was down there. Every day, more bullshit, more wasted time. It wasn't a complete loss because I caught up on a few short stories I owed people, did a column, and worked on my current novel. But when I wasn’t writing, it like being in Il Purgatorio. The hotel cable had only ONE channel of HBO, plus a bunch of local shit—a whopping 16 (count ‘em!) channels in all. And did I mention the hotel was in this part of the city called South Park, but it should have been called South Hell-and-Gone. Aside from a few groceries, a strip mall, and more hotels, there was NOTHING for miles around it. I couldn't even walk around and get a feel for the city of Charlotte because the city was a LONG way from where I was.

So let’s summarize: 6 days with “Slick Ric” and I get 3 hours of useable tape.

Pitiful.

Dealing with this guy was like dealing with a twelve-year-old who happens to have a lot of money and who also happens to really be fifty-years-old. He had no respect for my role in how the book would “happen” and he had no sense of time or responsibility.

So I go back to New Hampshire and tell my agent, it’s going to be a tough gig. “No kidding,” he says. “Ric just called his managers, who called me, and Ric wants his pal Mark Madden to ‘help’ you write the book.”

“Why will I need help?”

“Ric doesn't think you know enough about wrestling or his career to do a good job.”

“Really? Has he ever heard of research? Or reading?”

It was obvious that Ric and I hadn’t hit it off famously while I was in North Carolina, and looking back, he probably regarded me a little, bookish, wiseguy, who had no feel for the richly textured history of his “sport.”[12] He simply didn’t trust me to get it right, so his long-time buddy, Mark Madden gets cut into the pie—from my half, naturally. But I didn’t care for two good reasons: (1) I’m not greedy, and if the book was a hit, there would be more than enough cash for everybody after the smoke cleared, (2) it would be a hell of a lot easier with Madden sharing the work-load and knowing ahead of time what anecdotes, “famous” matches, and personalities should be included in The Ric Flair Story—because I had no clue . . . unless I sharpened my skills as a mentalist.

I did get a decent advance to actually write the first two chapters of the book and a very detailed outline of the book. It came to about 70 pages of stuff, and it was of sufficient professional quality to land us a very nice deal with St. Martin’s Press. We had about 9 months in which to complete the project, and it seemed like it would be cake.

But things never seemed to work out.

For one thing, I’d been asking Flair for pictures and clippings and memorabilia for a long time and he continually promised to gather up a bunch of stuff, but NEVER did. Months and months of asking for the stuff, and it simply never happened. After almost six months of asking, I had to figure one of three things: (1) he had no intention of giving the stuff to me, or (2) he didn’t give a shit or (3) he was so incompetent, he was incapable of making it happen.

I also spent about 6 months trying to arrange additional interviews that would be more productive than three hours of tape in six days, and that never happened either. No matter what plans we made to meet, to have a phone conference, or even construct a weekly or monthly schedule when we could cover material, Flair would always throw a wrench into the works. Something was always happening to stall the sessions where I could get information out of him.

He’d gone back to a weekly wrestling gig with WCW and that meant he was in a new city for four days each week, then three days back in Charlotte—when we would supposedly work on the book. But from what I could tell, Flair never read a note, a fax, a letter, email, or ANY of the book pages I ever sent him—because he never offered me a cogent commentary on ANY of it.

Mark Madden proved to be a stand-up guy, who had a show on the local Pittsburgh affiliate of ESPN radio, and although busy as hell, always had time for phone-conferences, e-mails, and what little collaborating we could get done with ZERO cooperation from Flair. Mark told me Flair was historically undependable and probably thought the book would “magically fly out of out asses” without any assistance, input, or cooperation from Ric Flair himself.

Now, in the middle of this mess, WCW gets devoured by Vince McMahon and his WWF, which means Ric has a new boss, a new schedule, a new everything. And he uses this development as a very convenient and believable excuse for why he’s not giving us any time for the book.

When it got down to crunch-time and the manuscript was due in 10 weeks (and we still had our original 70 pages and little else), Mark Madden and I phone-conferenced with Flair, getting him to agree to give us each 4-5 hours of tape a week for the next 6 weeks. Me on Thursdays; Mark on Fridays.

He never kept one appointment.

We couldn’t figure it out. And when we would call his managers, they were telling us they hadn’t heard from Ric in months, that he wasn't returning their calls, and they suspected he was planning to dump them.

Long story short: he did dump them, and he dumped Madden and me and St. Martin’s Press. Just walked away and made believe it never happened, as far I could tell. From some correspondence among the lawyers, it appears to be like this: I think Flair was told by his new boss, Vince McMahon, that the WWF had an exclusive blanket book-deal with another publisher, and that WWF would “buy-out” his original deal or in some other way “fix” things so Ric could do his biography under the WWF umbrella.

It would have been nice if he’d bothered to tell us his plans. But he didn’t.

Instead, he told people he “had problems with the writer.” Yeah, his big problem with me is that I kept BUGGING him to get his stupid life story out of him so I might make it . . . oh, I don’t know . . . interesting? dramatic? . . . admirable?

Yeah, I was a real problem, all right.

Anyway, the deal remains deader than Generalissimo Franco, and at tyis writing, lives now only in the airy realms of litigation. The upshot is that I wasted almost a year of my ever-shortening life on a project that I had foolishly believed would give my family lifetime security. I didn’t work on my own stories and novels with my usual attention, and ended up way behind on my personal production schedule.

So, these days, when I’m channel-surfing and the big screen momentarily splashes with the color and macho-crap-o of WWE Smackdown or Raw, I pause only long enough to reflect on how much I don't like about the sorry spectacle. But you know what?—your Padrone had a chance to enter a world excluded to most of you, and he felt duty-bound to give you an inside-look.

Someday, you’ll thank me for it.

Later. It’s ciao-time . . . .

(if you enjoyed this ‘stack, please rec me to your friends—I need all the readers I can get)

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[1]For many years, it has been kind of chic in the horror/dark fantasy world to be a wrestling aficionado, and the likes of Dennis Etchison, Charlie Grant, Dave Bischoff, Doug and Lynne Winter have all publicly proclaimed their fascination with this “sports entertainment” phenomenon. I was one of those writers who never understood the attraction.

[2]I’d never heard of this guy, but I was told he was a two-time WCW World Champion. It’s all fake—big deal.

[3]In fact, “Missy Lynne” Winter is the editor of Rampage magazine, a large bedsheet-sized, full-color magazine full of outrageous articles and pictures about the giants of the industry.

[4]Books by Mick Foley, The Rock, Chyna, and others had made millions.

[5]His real name is Page Falkenberg and he is actually a very nice guy. I liked him a lot, but I just never understood the world in which he worked.

[6]a truly painful experience, but required in the name of research. But to be truthful, it’s like watching an autopsy.

[7]Oh yeah . . . the “woooooo!”-thing. It is one of the trademarks of his ring persona and performance. He yells it out as he acts like a madman. Clever and catchy.

[8]It’s now called something else because they got sued by the World Wildlife Federation. (How’d they tell the difference?) And it continued to be owned by Vince McMahon, the man who thought the public was dumb enough to embrace the XFL. Although, without that innovative enterprise, we would have never enjoyed the ungrammatical pleasure of a player named “He Hate Me.”

[9]an old favorite wrestling “move” that is usually a match-ender.

[10]Yeah, modern pro wrestling is also a kind of adolescent male soap-opera. There are always “stories” which motivate these guys to hate each other enough to want to make believe they are hurting each other. Ho Hum.

[11]When you’ve been around as long as this guy, you get a lot of nicknames. You’ve just been “treated” to two more . . .

[12]One of Flair’s more perceptive moments, I’d say.