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“...the most engaging book in the series so far...For those fans who truly appreciate the good-vs.-evil pantomime of pro wrestling, the book will provide plenty of insights into the art of being hated.”
To call Kitchener native Greg Oliver a pro wrestling fan would be like calling the Pope a Catholic -- it's true, but it doesn't quite get the point across.
More than 20 years have passed since Oliver, while he was still a teenager, self-published the first issue of the Canadian Wrestling Report. And he's been writing about the bawdy ballet of brutality ever since.
He's now the head honcho of Slam! Wrestling, Canada's most authoritative Web site about so-called "sports entertainment," and he has written a growing series of books on the subject.
His latest, "The Heels" (co-written with American journalist Steven Johnson), is a 400-page encyclopedia of the most vile villains ever to have cheated their way to infamy in the pseudo-sport.
It's also the most engaging book in the series so far, since bad guys are the real money-makers of the wrestling biz -- fans pay to see the arrogant pretty-boy or the unstoppable monster get his butt whupped by the underdog favourite.
Wrestling is a two-to-tango charade in which the hero is only as good as the villain he overthrows.
Oliver and Johnson conducted hundreds of interviews with top bad guys past and present, from preening 1950s villain Gorgeous George to present-day scumbag (and former Cambridge boy), the egotistical villain Edge.
Most of them are surprisingly well-spoken -- given the number of times they've been clobbered on the noggin with folding chairs -- when they explain the art of behaving badly.
Longtime evildoer Larry Zbyszko describes the experience of getting booed by an arena full of angry wrestling fans as "an addictive feeling that no drug could ever produce."
The book is also loaded with photographs of the heels at their best/worst -- gouging eyes, choking necks and concealing "illegal foreign objects" for bashing the good guys with when the ref isn't looking (which means often).
To any reader who doesn't follow wrestling's sordid rope opera, the book might as well be written in Sanskrit, since the people and events only make sense within the subculture.
And even devoted wrestling buffs may be puzzled by some of the more obscure and long-forgotten rule-breakers who are memorialized here.
But for those fans who truly appreciate the good-vs.-evil pantomime of pro wrestling, the book will provide plenty of insights into the art of being hated.
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