look this is a TERRIBLE book, and im not just saying that because Vinnie is a real good friend of mine, this is poorly researched and full of LIES, the fake news throughout this is really something, this shaun ASSael needs to leave the country if hes gonna be spreading lies about one of america's greatest sports, really real stuff happens in that ring, i know it because this one time i main evented a wrestlemania and showed everyone who was boss, i threw the most convincing punches youve ever seen in your life, believe you me you dont want to be wasting your time with this, Vinnie is a really swell guy and he loves his wife and has always been faithful to her, Vinnie told me he can deadlift aroundpounds and i believe him, i mean look at the size of that fucker, i tell ya, all these guys calling Vinnie a drug dealer and a murder dont know him like i do, a real american legend, Vinnie is, what a DISGRACE this trash is!!! This was an excellent reminder of why I loved professional wrestling so much as a youth, Here we get intimate portraits of not only Vince McMahon, Ted Turner and Eric Bischoff, we also get a refresher course on long forgotten wrestling bosses like the old N.
W. A. network of federations. If you grew up watching the World Wrestling Federation on UHF, or World Championship Wrestling on TBS, than this is the book for you! Dave Meltzer shouldve been given a coauthor credit as this book cribs heavily and I mean heavily from Meltzers Wrestling Observer newsletter reports.
Very little in this book is fresh knowledge and it needs an update as it ends inthough to be fair, the author nails the earlys as the start of Vince McMahons creative decline and weve seen no indication to the contrary since then.
The best part of this book was about Vince Sr, whose reluctance to hand the business to his son is a fascinating insight into how Vince McMahon has, and continues, to operate, Here we are now, with Vince almost, and hes yet to cede the company to his children yet either, I enjoyed this book and remember almost none of it even though I read it last month As others have mentioned, there are problems with this book, The first one is while the chapters are divided numerically, it doesn't have the equivalent of a description for what each chapter is about, It would be like clicking on a link for an article without a headline, Another is there are some questionable statements like Shawn Michaels is a harder worker than Bret Hart, which is a stretch, considering Michaels' propensity failure to drop titles cleanly, or his willingness to job to wrestlers who weren't in The Kliq.
There is hardly any information that wasn't known before, but I would give it three, because it isn't terrible, but hardly good or great based on the content, since much of that content was already known or could be found online or elsewhere.
The most interesting part of the book is when it focused on his early years, growing up with him mom and stepfather, and meeting his father, That was interesting, and also how he met Linda, and how he managed to basically lock out Jim Crockett Promotions when they tried to make their closed circuit event a PPV inwhen he introduced the Survivor Series, and became a cutthroat operator, and Crockett countered with the Clash of Champions to run against Wrestlemania, and also the Bunkhouse Stampede to compete with the Royal Rumble.
The steroid trial with him, Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, George Zahorian and others are mentioned, It also discusses his XFL and WBF World Bodybuilding Federation ventures, which is interesting because the XFL is going to be back in, and the WBF was supposed to compete against the IFBB International Federation of Bodybuilers, founded by the Weider Brothers, and was more established, but Vince offered a better payday, but could only get a handful of elite bodybuilders.
Both ventures eventually flopped. Maybe Vince was a product of his childhood with his somewhat eccentric personality at times, since he seemed to be interested in forging a relationship with his biological father, compared to his abusive stepfather.
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A decent enough read, but given its age there's very little in here wrestling fans don't already know,
And at the risk of sounding like the guy from the Simpsons, there are numerous, glaring examples of inaccuracy and things being bundled together for narrative purposes over accuracy Riddled with minor inaccuracies but otherwise a highly readable summary of the "McMahon Era" of wrestling.
Far superior to Assael's Steroid Nation in large part because it seems a fair amount of actual investigative work original interviews, etc, went into the production of this book, A wellresearched look at the underbelly of the WWF and the bizarre, often brilliant vision of the utterly amoral Vince McMahon,
Oftquoted on The Lapsed Fan podcast and extremely influential on titles like The Titan Trilogy which, on reflection, seems to take chunks of the text here and reproduce them “faithfully” its a cult gem that reads swiftly and well.
Condensing the labyrinthine history of the territory system and rise of the first national, then international promotion this is an informative, sobering read that presents the human and cultural cost of the industry in a stark, suitable light.
Wow, my teen years were nothing but this stuff, huh, Rating
Forgettable and not much more than what I already knew Biography from Mankind was such a better read and is
worth reading again very poor writing style
Wrestler autobiographers are a far more interesting read A capitalization on the fad of wrestling books at the time, although my general knowledge probably influences my boredom in the book Reading for book discussion on Novemberth at sitelinkMain Library Good read
This is for anyone who wants an unbiased look on Wrestling and the crazy things in it.
Not the best writing and there wasn't anything I haven't heard/read before, but it was nice to have the bulk of it on one place, From the cable television ratings to the bestseller lists, professional wrestling is redhot, How it got that way is not a pretty picture, but its one that is painted in more detail than ever before in Sex, Lies, and Headlocks, the first indepth, journalistic look at the world of wrestling.
At the heart of the story is Vince McMahon, the mercurial owner of the World Wrestling Federation, The authors trace his beginnings as the forgotten son of a secondgeneration wrestling czar who left rural North Carolina to stake his own claim to the family business.
They detail his early, ruthless genius in declaring war on the old territory czars who had grown fat and lazy, And they show how his first brush with fame in thes with Hulk Hogan and Cyndi Lauper sowed the seeds for the drug and sex scandals that nearly toppled his empire in thes.
They also tell us the inside story of McMahons blood feud with Ted Turner, adding some surprising details about the two mens quests to ruin each other,
Throughout the book, the authors examine the appeal of the industrys biggestincluding Ed “Strangler” Lewis, Gorgeous George, Bruno Sammartino, Ric Flair, and, most recently, Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock.
In doing so, they show us that while WWF stock is traded to the public on Wall Street, wrestling remains a shadowy world guided by a centuryold code that stresses secrecy and loyalty.
Sex, Lies, and Headlocks is the ultimate behindthescenes look at the history, personalities, backstabbing, scandals, and highstakes gambles that have made Vince McMahon the king of the ring and wrestling an enduring television phenomenon.
./stars. Really fun, interesting read. Especially in the origins of the business and in thes, But thes things seem to fall apart from a fact checking perspective, Some stories I know had to be have some creative telling for space purposes, but some were just wrong, Still, a really entertaining read, I lost the book after starting at WWE Survivor Series, and was determined to finish it after getting hooked by the first chapter.
Phenomenal. This was a pretty good book, lots of facts and background information, but short of some of the revelations about Vince's personal life prior to the 's it didn't have anything that was really new or groundbreaking to me.
It was a big rehash of most of the information that is pretty much old hat for wrestling fans from Vince's expansion of WWF, to the steroid trials, to the Monday Night Wars, it was all just another version of the same story.
Entertaining, because the source materials is very entertaining, but just the same old story with a new voice,
The biggest issue for me was that the author got some pretty simple facts wrong throughout the book and I feel like you can't get that stuff wrong, especially when you're trying to write an expose, if you want to keep your credibility.
If I remembered the accurate information without having to look it up, it means that it shouldn't have taken a legit factchecker more than a few seconds to catch the errors.
Inexcusable. If I had a nickel for every time a person I've met was dismissive of or ridiculed professional wrestling, well, . . I'd have quite a few nickels,
Silly old rasslin', right Wrong, When you see Hulk Hogan saying his prayers and eating his vitamins or John Cena preaching "hustle, loyalty, respect" on screen, you only get the tip of the iceberg of what prowrestling is.
This book gives you a good look at what lies hidden "underwater", behind the fun characters and colorful entertainment facade that you see on your TV sets, The reality of this business is much more complicated than it seems to be, and when you start flipping through the pages, you are taken behind the scenes of this microcosm: its almost like opening up a Pandora's box full of overinflated egos, cutthroat backstage politicking, steroids, drugs, broken lives and premature deaths.
There is nothing rosy or pretty about people injecting elephantdose cocktails of painkillers and steroids to numb their many injuries and grow cartoonish muscles,
The story centers around one Vincent Kennedy McMahon, If you considered WWE to be a religion, then he'd be the equivalent of His Holiness, the Pope, A brilliant, creative, competitive, ruthless, lying, egomaniacal son of a bitch of a pope, Gotta love Vinnie. True, like many critics of this book have said, it is not a flattering portrayal of Vince if you worship the ground he walks on like many do, but I believe that it is a fair portrayal.
It tells the story of a man hellbent on succeeding, at all cost, When he dealt with his competition like NWA and WCW he was merciless and conniving, And you know what He admits it, The important thing that McMahon fans who try to berate this book are missing is that Vince himself brags that he was a bloodthirsty asshole, More so, he is proud of it! As he should be, because all of the raunchy, scandalous television that he produced in the lates gave birth to the golden age of professional wrestling known as The WWF Attitude Era.
It was glorious and, on a random side note, today Hollywood wouldn't have Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson without it,
As with any genius, McMahon isn't a saint, nor does he claim to be one, He is a perfect mess of both good and bad qualities, This cool little book gives a good summary of both his spectacular achievements and embarrassing blunders WBF and XFL, I use the word "summary" with a purpose, because the readership that this book was crafted for is the casual reader, not a hardcore wrestling fan or a smark.
So if you are a Wrestling Observer Newsletter subscriber, you'll find nothing new or groundbreaking here, but if you're an average Joe who heard about this "raslin" thing, then I suggest you educate yourself by laying the smackdown on this book.
Holy shit, I actually enjoyed a book about the history of professional wrestling, The good news is that you don't have to be a childhood fan of the WWF like me to take something away from this book, The history of wrestling is also the history of vaudeville, boxing, and cable television, Recommended for fans ofth century American history and pop culture, .