Book review: The Squared Circle, by David Shoemaker
"This is a book about dead wrestlers but along the way, it became a history of professional wrestling."
by David Shoemaker
Gotham
3 stars
"This is a book about dead wrestlers but along the way, it became a history of professional wrestling."
It's a great opening hook, but also a disingenuous one, because surely, Shoemaker - the wrestling expert who writes on the industry for popular website Grantland - knew well beforehand that there was no way he could have written a book about dead wrestlers without covering the history of wrestling, or vice versa. Death and pro wrestling go, sadly, hand in hand.
That's ironic, because pro wrestling is considered somewhat of a joke to the world. It's a fake sport, featuring overly muscled men in tights play-fighting, goes the common perception. Yet more wrestlers die young, and die on the job, than any other sport in the world. Sixty-five wrestlers under the age of 45 died between 1997 and 2004.
Shoemaker's 390-pager tells that story, about the evolution of wrestling from a carnival sideshow in early 19th-century North America to an almost billion-dollar industry, and all the famous wrestlers who have died.
Some died from in-ring accidents, others from heart failure due to years of painkiller addiction. (Although the outcomes of the matches are predetermined, there really is no faking falling flat on your back 30 times a night for 250-plus nights a year.)
