by Brad Balukjian ★★★★☆
During a few years as a kid in the '80s, I was a wrestling fanatic. All WWF (it was "F", not "E" at the time) shows were appointment viewing for me. I'd excitedly check the Sunday paper TV listings each week to see if Saturday Night's Main Event was pre-empting Saturday Night Live, as it did 3-4 times per year. I asked my parents to drive across town to the one video store that had copies of Wrestlemania I and II so I could rent them and get caught up. I talked my dad into having his co-worker host us to watch Wrestlemania III on pay-per-view, since our cable provider didn't offer it. I went to multiple live shows at Milwaukee's Mecca Arena, and even one ("WrestleFest") at the Brewers' old stomping grounds, County Stadium. I was a super-fan.
So to say Brad Balukjian's book is right up my alley is putting it mildly. The Six Pack focuses on six wrestlers that were on the card the night the Iron Sheik won the WWF Championship in December, 1983 -- the Iron Sheik (Brad's personal favorite), Mr. USA Tony Atlas, Tito Santana, Sgt. Slaughter, The Masked Superstar (who I knew better as his later character, Ax of Demolition), and Mac Rivera (who wrestled under a whopping 8 different personas). Balukjian's goal is to seek out each of the six, visit with them in person, capture their memories of the night in question, and try to understand the impact wrestling had on their lives, then and now.
Under this construct, the book is part history, part exposé, and part introspection about wrestling as a sport and a form of entertainment. Balukjian dispels any notions about the "f word" ("fake") when it comes to wrestling. While professional wrestling eventually admitted that the matches and storylines are pre-determined, the physical nature of the activity is far more real than it appears on television. To prove the point, one stop on his roadtrip is to a wrestling training program in New Jersey, where he gets to take bumps, bounce off the ropes, and get up close with just how real wrestling can be.
A particularly interesting secondary subject that Balukjian weaves throughout the book are the blurred lines of reality between the wrestlers' personas and the actual men. Chapters are titled, for example, "Hulk Hogan vs. Terry Bollea", pitting the character against the person who portrayed them in the ring. In more cases than not, wrestlers long-retired are still latched on, in some way, to the characters they embodied, which makes sense when you consider every interview they did, commercial they filmed, movie cameo they made, or convention they attended was in character. Balukjian susses that out even more when describing the interaction between wrestlers and fans, particularly for heels/"bad guys". The hatred between fans and some heels was intense at times -- the Iron Sheik would regularly receive death threats, for example, from rowdy fans who saw him only as the character.
Like many behind-the-scenes accounts of wrestling, Balukjian tackles head-on the wrestling's darker side: the drug use that was prevalent, be it steroids, pain pills, or harder stuff; the infidelity and life on the road; the toll the job took on the backs and knees and hips of nearly everyone who was part of it; the questionable contracts and pay distribution that has resulted in several lawsuits over the years; the head trauma, and the shockingly high rate of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) found in wrestlers. As Balukjian writes, "A USA Today study of wrestler deaths between 1997 and 2003 revealed a death rate seven times higher than the general population. Wrestlers were twenty times more likely to die before the age of forty-five than football players." While Balukjian is an even bigger fan than I ever was, this is not a glowing send-up of the sport, but rather a sobering account of the many of the difficult realities of life for wrestlers outside of the ring.
The premise of the book was crisp, but some of the execution was a bit less so. Balukjian did mountains of research independent of his interactions with the wrestlers, but the actual interviews more often than not felt stunted, with limited access (90 minutes in one case, 2 hours in another), and in one case Balukjian was not able to connect with the one of the six-packers despite herculean efforts to do so. As a result, the pay-off wasn't exactly what I hoped for, in the sense that I didn't get as much of the story directly from the source as I was expecting. Some of the book's best stories come not from the titular "six pack" of wrestlers, but from their family members, friends, or from those that worked at WWF corporate in the early '80s. I think Balukjian also tried a bit too hard to mimic his first book, The Wax Pack, from the mirroring of the books' titles (and subtitles) to the road trip nature of the journalism. The parallelization was interesting, but the accounts of his travels on the road or his search for hotels distracted from the crux of the book rather than adding depth to the story.
That being said, for anyone that was a fan during the initial rise of the WWF -- 1983-1987 -- there's plenty of nostalgic goodness within The Six Pack to make this well worth a read. For those without a connection to the men and the characters they portrayed, this probably isn't a book you'd be seeking out anyway. There is still plenty that is captivating about the book to hold the interest of a casual fan curious about the profession, but this is one that will be best enjoyed by hard-core 1980s wrestling fans.
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