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Sleeper Hold: How Professional Wrestling Worked Its Magic
Sleeper Hold: The Dream
I started sending items into the New Yorker in high school, and after dozens of form rejections, began getting encouraging letters from real, live editors shortly after college. After a year and a half as a cub reporter at Newsday Sports I was still taking school game results over the phone, so in January, 1985, armed with half a dozen clips, I decided to try my luck, and managed to get an interview at the magazine's old offices on W. 43rd St. "We don't have any jobs open," Tony Gibbs said, and then, catching me off-guard, "but if you'd like to try writing something for us, we'd be interested." "How about pro wrestling?" I blurted out. Gibbs nodded.
I dove into the wrestling world and held my breath for a year and a half. It felt kind of like a kindergarten Mafia, lots of threats and anger and phony blood. I knew better than to try to get any of the wrestlers to dish, though a few of them -- Titan boys, naturally -- feigned treachery. It helped that I didn't have a particular axe to grind and had genuine admiration for the great ones, plus a sincere regard for just how hard a life it was. The whole thing was just such crazy, insane, American fun that having anything to do with it, even writing an investigation, was a panic. I saw my role as a curious wrestling fan, except instead of Wrestling's Main Event Magazine or TV Sports Magazine I was writing for The New Yorker.
Why they rejected Sleeper Hold I can only speculate. Right before Vince McMahon threw me out of the Titan Sports office in Connecticut -- punishment, as far as I can tell, for asking a question about Toots Mondt -- a conversation with Jim Barnett had left me with a sense of forboding, since Barnett was profoundly well-connected, particularly in the TV business, and at the time they were knee-deep into negotiations over Saturday Night's Main Event. Did NBC played a part in quashing it? I'll probably never know for sure.
At the time, I still thought Sleeper Hold could find a book publisher, but I guess the prevailing wisdom was, as one editor told me, "Wrestling fans don't read, and the ones that do, won't buy your book." A couple things nearly came of it: for a month or two I worked on a screenplay with Eddie Mansfield, until he called me up and started threatening me, why I can't remember; and a cokehead book packager tried to get me to write a low-rent coffee-table fan book.
It broke me (another story) but weirdly enough, I would do it all again.
Painful as my wrestling experience ended up, it could have been worse -- after John Stossel got brutally pummeled by Dave Shultz, he turned into a neoconservative anti-consumer affairs reporter.
There's no end of falsehood in the wrestling business -- every time you think you've gotten to the truth it turns out to be just another fabrication. But two people were especially generous with their time and expertise, and in a business essentially built on lies, they shone out: Dave Meltzer, the intrepid, devoted, phenomenally knowledgeable chronicle of the squared circle, talked with me nearly every day for a year. His expertise was matched not just by his intelligence, but yes, taste; and Roy Shire answered my questions with great-humored candor and forthrightness.
On the other hand, what he lacked in candor Buddy Rogers made up for in spontaneity and force of personality. At one point in the interview, when we were talking about Don Muraco, I started to get a little fed up with the kayfabe malarkey, and just to see how he'd react, I mentioned how I thought Mr. Fuji, Muraco's manager at the time, was really helping him become more evil. "Muraco don't need Fuji," said Rogers, turning a fearsome look of scorn on me, "any more than I need a wart hangin' off my eye."