A book that changed my life: The Pictorial History of Wrestling

  I first got into Pro Wrestling when I was about 12 or so and from then on I would make a point of sitting down every Saturday afternoon to watch World Of Sport.
 But one day, circa 1984,  I happened to wander into a cheapo bookshop just off the high street and found a book that would maybe not change my life but certainly changed the way I looked at wrestling forever.

 

 Now at the time the biggest star in British wrestling was this man:

Shirley "Big Daddy" Crabtree

 Kids loved him.Grannies loved him. Serious wrestling fans --me, for instance -found him embarrassing. Aside from anything else, he never lost. Ever. Even at the age of 13 or so I was struggling to understand how a fat blob could be wrestling's own Superman. 

 So it was a bit of an eye-opener to see who the big star was over on the other side of the Atlantic.

 Hulk Hogan

 

 Now Hulk and Big Daddy were both pushed as all-conquering supermen. Both men had a repertoire of 4 moves. However, Big Daddy was a fat pensioner who's main offensive move was the belly-butt. Hogan was 300 pounds of tanned muscle who could actually get into the ring without a forklift.

Hmm. Wonder who's more believable?

 It wasn't just Hogan either. As I've mentioned earlier, wrestling in the UK was pushed as family-friendly entertainment for the kids and grannies. So you certainly weren't going to see anything comparable to , say, a bloody Dusty Rhodes strangling Billy Graham with a rope. Or Abdullah The Butcher sticking a fork into somebody's head. 

 British wrestlers mostly looked like what they were: Working class blokes in OK shape. Some were great technicians, quite a few were legimately very, very hard. But the guys in the book were off another planet entirely. They were bigger, more muscular, more colourful. They fought in front of thousands, hit each other with chairs and battered their opponents to a bloody pulp.   

 Once I'd bought the book, watching two ex-brickies trading armlocks in a Lancashire Town Hall didn't seem quite so ...dynamic as it once did.