Chokehold: Pro Wrestling's Real Mayhem Outside the Ring - Paperback

by Weldon T. Johnson (Author), Jim Wilson (Author)

This meticulously crafted and searing critique of pro wrestling is unlike any wrestling book published: Chokehold is a penetrating description of pro wrestling's dark side, a secret underworld of deception, exploitation and greed. The storyteller is "Big Jim" Wilson, All-American football player and survivor of seven years in the NFL, who was promised wealth and the world championship as pro wrestler. Instead, Jim Wilson found a surprisingly lucrative sports entertainment industry built on a pyramid of secrets that included abusive control of its performers and a long history of illegal business practices and corruption of politicians and state athletic commissions. Chokehold describes and documents the abuses that Jim Wilson witnessed and endured - blacklisting, strong-arm tactics, homosexual blackmail, defiance of the U.S. Justice Department and bribery of TV executives and arena managers. Chokehold is an explosive indictment of the pro wrestling industry's business practices as well as a thoughtful proposal for pro wrestling's reform. This book is not a conventional expos' of pro wrestling's orchestrated stunts, gimmicks and blade jobs. Instead, it is an unprecedented examination of pro wrestling's less visible cons outside the ring -- its hidden manipulation of wrestlers with broken promises and broken bones and a backstage power of the pencil that writes scripts for wrestler stardom or extinction. Chokehold describes a secret slice of the wrestling life where traveling troupes of heels and babyfaces understand how they got into the game, but cannot find a way up or out. This is the story of why and how the big guys almost always lose. Chokehold is part autobiography and part pro wrestling history. Written in wrestlespeak (the industry's insider argot), it is dedicated to the memory of "the older boys whose broken bodies and shattered lives should have taught us something." In addition to Jim Wilson's experiences in The Bus