Customer Reviews

CHOKEHOLD: Pro Wrestling's Real Mayhem Outside the Ring

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Chokehold is a very well researched work. In fact there has been nothing preceeding it that has even come close to the details that Wilson has in this book. I commend and thank him for that. I found it very interesting indeed.
The only problem with this work is Wilson's view of his own pro wrestling career, as well as the careers of Ron Pope AKA The Magnificent Zulu and Claude "Thunderbolt" Patterson.
Wilson starts out the book by claiming he was a fan of pro wrestling while he was growing up, saying that he watched it on TV sometimes and went to the live matches twice. TWICE!!! Big deal. A true fan in that era watched the TV wrestling every week and went to many live shows. Wilson was never a serious fan judging by his statements (which was actually a failed attempt to prove otherwise).
Wilson also says that he got into wrestling in the early 1970s to "make money" during the off season from the NFL.He also claims that Atlanta promoter Ray Gunkle basically promised him the NWA world title. Both of these statements are more or less outrageous, to say the least.
First of all, every rookie breaking into the business, including NFL former All-Americans, were always told over & over again how they'd never make any real money in wrestling and most never did. The pay scale for newcomers was low. Read Ole Anderson's new book "Inside Out" for a real look at how things ran and how pay was figured.You had to be a top main event star, usually in more than one territory, to ever make real good money. The promoters were the ones who got the richest and Wilson more than acknowledges that in his book, so I don't see where he got the idea that he was going to accumulate great wealth from working in pro wrestling.
Secondly, Jim Wilson was NEVER a big name in the business. I am a wrestling historian and fanatic, and an ex-wrestler myself (from the same period that Wilson tried working in the business) and to be honest, if it hadn't been for Wilson's lawsuits and TV expose of wrestling, I don't think that I'd have ever heard of him.
He wasn't a main event star and from those I've talked to that saw him work matches, he didn't have the ability to ever be one. He didn't draw any money at the gate (and his book more or less proves that point as he himself admits that an outlaw show he tried to promote didn't draw a single fan). I'm not holding that against him as far as Chokehold goes, as it's a very good book overall.
The other problem I have with this book is Wilson's slant on racism in the business. Sure, it was prevelant and even blatant at times, but Wilson's examples to prove that point fall flat.
He mainly uses Pope & Patterson as his examples. Now Thunderbolt Patterson was a big name in the business throughout the 60s & 70s. He worked on top in numerous territories and he was great on interviews, but his ring work was just average.He was a decent and very entertaining performer, but was NEVER of world championship caliber.Wilson doesn't see that because he is unable to judge who is talented & who is not.
Wilson proves this by using Ron Pope as his next example. Pope was not talented or entertaining and couldn't even do a decent interview. The only thing that Pope had going for him was his tremendous look. He was huge and muscular but that's it. He never knew how to work.
If Pope had been white he'd never even been given a chance in the business, but Detroit promoter Ed Farhat AKA The Sheik gave Ron his start and the gimmick as Zulu, but even that gimmick didn't save him from being exposed in every single match he had as a horrible worker.Pope was a real nice guy with a great personality & body, but he was never able to transfer that personality to the ring and his muscular build kept him in the business far longer than he would have lasted had he been white.
So realizing that, I have to take just about everything Wilson writes with a grain of salt.
Had Wilson cut out the continual whining about himself, Patterson & Pope, I would have given this book 5 stars, because it's that good otherwise.
This book should hold the interest of any fan of wrestling's "Golden Era" as well as anyone who wants to learn about the NWA and how it ran. Even a know it all like me learned a lot from Chokehold. I was surprised just how much I really did learn by reading it.
I strongly reccomend this book and I strongly suggest reading Inside Out right after finishing Chokehold. They go well together. This book gives you a lot of information while Ole Anderson's book give you the straight, hard facts.

This is simply the best book on pro wrestling ever published, and I've read virtually all of them. Chokehold is not another wrestling comic and picture book of fluff and puff, but a beautifully written and documented history of the pro wrestling industry from the late 1940s to the present. It's no accident that wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer called this book "the most important book on pro wrestling covering the second half of the 20th century."
Chokehold is very much an insider account of the wrestling industry's shoddy business practices and labor relations. The book deals honestly with pro wrestling's "unromantic underside," the authors call it "a secret world of exploitation, abuse and illegality." In telling pro wresting's fascinating history, the authors present countless stories that cast light on the industry's long tradition of conducting its business in secrecy where there isn't much public notice or attention. The book's viewpoint is that of a former NFL player turned pro wrestler who was later blacklisted, Jim Wilson, one of the book's co-authors, and it is a compelling viewpoint that conveys the pain and pathos of all those wrestlers, past and present, who left the wrestling business with only broken bodies and shattered lives. Chokehold, unlike other wrestling books I've read, describes in detail the backstabbing wrestling life backstage, after the arena lights and TV cameras are turned off each night.
Serious wrestling fans are going to love this book and the wrestling promoters will hate it. And all the old, retired wrestlers living in poverty and pain and the widows of dead wrestlers will be grateful that somebody finally had the courage to tell the whole story about pro wrestling.

"Chokehold" is no ordinary wrestling biography. It is the story of one man's attempt to challenge the Powers-That-Be for fair wages and benefits. He could have been a superstar of the mat world, and I remember him distinctly being pushed for such a position, but his integrity and ethics prevented such a future. They also may have saved him from an early death from the wrestling lifestyle that has left so many other victims in its wake.

Along the way, not only is the story of Jim Wilson told, but the seamy world of professional wrestling is exposed in all its faded notoriety. The fact that shady and illegal shenanigans happen from time to time in sports is nothing new to most readers, but the fact that these very same doings have been part and parcel of the way professional wrestling has been doing business since its inception should give readers cause for concern. Behind the glitz of the television camera and the character angles is a business that sees many of its most talented performers pass away at relatively early ages; a business that treats its workers like serfs on a feudal estate, telling them to win or lose, how to win or lose and where to appear, all the while calling them "independent contractors." This, of course, to deny them health and pension benefits available to most other workers. And, most astonishing of all, while Congress and the Justice Department have vetted boxing and other sports over the years, the image of pro wrestling as an unbelievable sham has kept it protected, except for a brief period in the 50's, when pro wrestling was convicted of Antitrust misdeeds, which were quickly forgotten by all parties concerned a few years later.

Instead of wasting your money on prefabricated biographies of WWE superstars, where the only things you really learn is that wrestling is wonderful and Vince McMahon the most wonderful of all, read this book, for it is the closest wrestling fans will get to the truth that underlies the circus-style atmosphere of that strange hybrid of athletics and entertainment.

I agree with parts of every review of this book I've read.
I'd have never heard of Jim Wilson if not for his efforts to reform the wrestling business--I was too young to know him as a football player, and he wrestled in the early cable days, so I wouldn't have seen him on TV while I was growing up in Alabama. Therefore, I don't know anything about him as an athlete/performer. However, he seems to think enough of his own abilities that he doesn't need any corroboration from me.

Be that as it may, the well-researched stories he tells of the wrestling business make me wonder if I shouldn't be ashamed to be a wrestling fan (but not so much I won't watch it next time it comes on).

When I first read Chokehold in 2004, shortly after it was published, I thought this was probably the best pro wrestling book I'd seen. Two years later, after reading all the other wrestling books that have come out in the past two years and re-reading Chokehold again, I am convinced that Chokehold is clearly the best thing yet published on the mat game. It's an unprecedented (and possibly unappreciated) triumph in its breadth and depth and, unlike any other wrestling books I've seen, it has documentation in chapter notes and includes a name index. It's also more intelligently written than anything else out there (despite a few minor errors that are inevitable in any 500+ page book). By comparison, this book is a joy to read and it is the one book that other writers and publishers in this genre ought to study as a model. If there were Pulitzer prizes for wrestling books, Wilson and Johnson would have one.

Chokehold reveals the dark underworld of professional wrestling. The National Wrestling Alliance is revealed as pro wrestling's mafia, controlling the business through dirty tactics over the years. In some ways, it makes me very sad to be a pro wrestling fan.

But at the same time, there's hope for the business and hopefully some reforms will happen, especially with a union for pro wrestlers, pensions, health insurance, and a drop in the fatalities of wrestlers from drugs and alcohol.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is a serious student of pro wrestling's history.

My compliments to Johnson and Wilson on a terrific book!!! CHOKEHOLD dispels conventional publishing wisdom that all wrestling books are written for juvenile, mouth-breathing fans. CHOKEHOLD appeals to the savvy wrestling afficionado on several levels --first, as a compelling story of a wrestler crusading for professional dignity and second, as a riveting history of a corrupt mega-business. A great read all around and a great Christmas gift idea!!

A MUST BUY for every wrestling fan's library and a GREAT holiday gift for the committed wrestling fan. Finally, an intelligent and captivating book about pro wrestling, filled with fascinating characters, which describes how the wrestling game became what it is today, warts-and-all. CHOKEHOLD is more than the personal tale of one sorry wrestler. CHOKEHOLD entwines Jim Wilson's story with an insider's view on the tumultuous wrestling promoters' turf wars of the last half of the 20th century which eliminated competition in the wrestling industry and created fertile ground for pervasive wrestler abuse. Masterfully written in painstakingly researched detail. I read it and re-read it several times.

I've been a wrestling fan since my dad took me to the matches, in late-1970's San Diego. My 9 year old brain instantly realized: a)The action inside the ring was for fun, not for fighting; and b)I absolutely loved the heels (bad guys). The main event that evening, which took place in a barn-sized building and couldn't have held more than 600-800 bodies, was the continuance of a feud that had raged up and down the Cali coast for over a year-top babyface (good guy) Chavo Guererro vs despised (by everyone but me, it seemed) mega-heel Roddy Piper.
While the bouts were in session, various wrestlers would stand around doorways that led to the dressing room presumably, so they could check out the other workers and the crowd. I had my little green autograph book and had already gotten the scribbled 'names' of such less-than luminaries as Butcher Vachon, Porkchop Cash, and Hector Lamas. However, these did nothing for me; everyone was allowed to walk up to the ring just before the bell and get the good guys to sign their name. More than halfway through the evening, however, my wandering eye caught the one guy whose John Hancock I would have prized: Yep, the "Rowdy One" himself was standing with another worker in the corner of the room. Mustering up every ounce of courage, I meekly approached the "Scot" and asked. I distinctly recall how tall he seemed-surely this was one of the biggest, tallest guys on the planet! "I dont, uh...suppose you would give me your autograph...sir?". Without saying a word, Piper simply looked down upon my pitiful countenance and slooowwlly shook his head: No.
I mumbled some words of wisdom like "oh, uh, thanks" and quickly walked back to the safety of my pops. When i told him the story, he just seemed mildly amused. Later, when i told my mother and grandmother, they practically recoiled in disgust. "How could that jerk turn down an innocent, little etc etc etc...". Meanwhile, it was slowly dawning on me: The way Piper treated me was..well, it..was..AWESOME! I mean, would i rather have some meaningless scribble inside a kiddie autograph book that i'd surely lose at some point-or would i prefer a cool little tale i could regale younger rasslin' fans with for the duration of my existence? No contest.
I told you that to tell you this: If stories like this remind you why you love this crazy pseudo-sport, and how much the over-sized personalities of yesteryear are as much a part of your memories as your own family highlights...then you'd be better off skipping Jim Wilson's "Chokehold".
When i finally purchased this whistle-blowing, controversial tome last year, I was already numb to the 'angles' and 'programs' (storylines), and thanks to the slick, corporate style of modern-age pro wrestling (or sports entertainment, as megalomaniacal WWE owner Vincent K McMahon, Jr would prefer it be called), I no longer got enjoyment from what had always been my favorite part of the whole show-the 'heel promo'. (Which is basically when the villain barks various insults into a microphone, while looking directly into a TV camera). In other words, I was ready to read a business buzz-kill on the order of Wilson's diatribe.
Thanks in part to the author's real-life credentials (All-American at Georgia U, NFL starter, and eventual United States Senator), I found myself soaking up the first half of Wilson's work with gusto, involuntarily giving him the benefit of the doubt when he would describe yet another of several personal beefs with local wrestling promoters and bookers (a promotion's 'head writer'). Although the tone was often self-congratulatory, with an air of martyrdom, soaked in superiority, I was hardly a virgin when it came to the seedy backstabbing (sometimes literally!) and soul-selling that went on in this strange universe. Wilson often simply re-enforced beliefs i'd held for years, and occasionally justified my personal loathing of certain notorious individuals.
But the more i read, the harder it was to shake the uneasy feeling that this supposedly important work exposing the greedy owners and, hopefully improving all aspects of the business for the hard-working men and women of pro wrestling, was simply using that facade to grind some old axes. In wrestling parlance, I began to believe Wilson was just playing the role of the babyface in order to get himself over.
And, in fact, after finishing this massive 'Gotcha!', I realized that the one document i had assumed was the only truly honest thing written about professional wrestling was, in fact, just another WORK, with Wilson using his relative fame to give some imagined long-overdue RECEIPTS out to all the promoters, bookers, and fellow workers who either didn't give him the PUSH he thought he had been promised, or who had the gall to take pride in their job, despite never having been a 'real National hero' like Senator Wilson.
Read it if you have to, and believe what you must. But remember, when you think you maybe feel the tone of "Chokehold" transitioning from an inspiring tale of the only man brave enough to call out the system in which he and thousands of others toiled, to a self-important whine-fest...don't doubt yourself.

I have not finished reading the book, about half way. So far some new things have been brought to my attention. I am a fan of pro wrestling, even though I know it is not "legit". I never knew how poorly the men were treated by the promoters. Someday I hope these guys will get the benifits they deserve.