Same Old Kayfabe

I can't believe it took me over a year to hear about this book, but I just picked up Minnesota's Golden Age of Wrestling at the Dakota County Library today after being told about it by a colleague at work. I was pretty excited, but skeptical as well. You see, the author is a local guy, George Schire, who goes way back with the AWA, to the years my high school friends and I were big fans. After the AWA folded, you could occasionally catch Verne or Greg telling stories about the business. But it was always in the context that the matches were legit. So I was skeptical that this would be anything but reminiscing about old matches (which would be good) as if they were real contests (which would be bad).

The book only occasionally breaks kayfabe ("kayfabe" is the "code" in pro wrestling that refers to acting as if the business is non-scripted or predetermined), and contains such rare shoot material (a "shoot" in pro wrestling is anything that is not a put-on, be it an interview, or a fight, or whatever else that may happen in the business) that the reader doesn't really know what to believe. Oh, I know not to believe that Stanley Blackburn actually stripped Verne Gagne of his title in 1981, but when you think you might be reading a shoot, you have to wonder, such as certain attendance figures it refers to regarding some of the shows.

That said, it's a must have for anyone who religiously watched All Star Wrestling at any time in Minnesota. The bios in the back of the book are fun to read, similar to Ross Bernstein's Grappling Glory: Celebrating a Century of Minnesota Wrestling & Rassling. It doesn't add a lot of insight into the business that you might expect from an "insider." It pretty much sticks to the facts of the wrestling, i.e., who won what belts against whom and in which city.

One of these days, when ol' Verne is gone probably, someone will offer up what working in the AWA was really all about in the glory days. That would be a helluva read. Until then, books like Schire's and Bernstein's will still do.