I’ll admit that I was wary of STRAIGHT FROM THE HART from the start because in the intro, pro wrestler Bruce Hart admits that this book was written mainly to counteract the lies and misinformation spread in the other books either written by family members (which, he says, exist to “get back at others,” which is kind of ironic for reasons I’ll get into later) or written by outsiders who don’t know what they’re talking about.
Fair enough, but I don’t exactly have a burning desire to read books written for that sole purpose. However, once I got to reading it, I found it pretty entertaining. I’ll tell you right now that if you read one book by the wrestling Hart family, you should read HITMAN by his brother Bret, because it’s superior to this one in every way. STRAIGHT isn’t bad, but it does have its flaws.
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I hate to start a review like this, but I have to say it. The pivotal moment in Hulk Hogan’s autobiography, MY LIFE OUTSIDE THE RING, is when Hogan claims that he was feeling depressed about his life and was sitting in his home with a gun against his head, thinking about killing himself. Does it make for a good story? Sure it does. Do I believe for a second that it really happened? No.
This something most hardcore wrestling fans know about Hulk Hogan: He enjoys making stories up that may not necessarily be true. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure this is a bad thing, considering we’re dealing in the genre of a celebrity autobiography written by a C-level celebrity, which I think is meant to be more entertainment than anything else. If he stretches the truth at some points, does it really matter, so long as it’s a fun read? I say it doesn’t.
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Chris Benoit was a pro wrestler who, one summer day in 2007, decided to murder his wife, Nancy, and their 7-year-old son, Daniel. He followed these horrible acts up by killing himself.
Why did he do it? Drugs? Concussions? Or did he just outright snap? And once he did it, how did the WWE handle it? Or the wrestling media? Or the mainstream media? And how did Congress deal with a wrestling industry that is heavily drug-fueled and almost certainly more worthy of scrutiny than baseball, whose drug issues are a drop in the bucket compared to wrestling’s? These are the questions Irv Muchnick attempts to answer in CHRIS & NANCY: THE TRUE STORY OF THE BENOIT MURDER-SUICIDE & PRO WRESTLING’S COCKTAIL OF DEATH.
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I’ve admit right off, I’ve always been prejudiced against books that include footnotes, so I groaned a tad when I saw L. Jon Wertheim’s BLOOD IN THE CAGE: MIXED MARTIAL ARTS, PAT MILETICH, AND THE FURIOUS RISE OF THE UFC included them. If you ask me, footnotes should only exist to tell you what the acronyms S.H.I.E.L.D. and A.I.M. stand for, and to refer us to whatever back issue of a comic book the characters happen to be referring to at the moment.
However, as I actually read the footnotes, I saw that they included a great story about Steven Seagal getting his ass kicked by an old dude named Judo Gene LeBell. And I gotta admit, that’s a great use of a footnote. I’m still not a fan of footnotes and find them distracting, but in this book, many of them deal with various forms of violence with a smattering of sex and even bank robbery tossed in, so I guess I can deal with it.
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