Corrigan’s Corner: A Q&A With ‘Pro Wrestling FAQ’ Author Brian Solomon (Part I)

Brian Solomon has “toasted champagne cocktails with Ric Flair all night in Manchester, England; hung out in ‘Classy’ Freddie Blassie’s basement while wearing his house slippers; and once got stuck in a limo with Vince McMahon for three hours and lived to tell the tale.”

I was lucky enough to hear that tale while chatting with Solomon for an hour regarding his new book, PRO WRESTLING FAQ. Covering the carnie origins to modern day sports-entertainment, Solomon’s tome is the definitive guide to everything one must know about the history, athletes, and appeal of professional wrestling.

For my review of PRO WRESTLING FAQ (with a comment from The Fabulous Ones’ Steve Keirn aka SKINNER,) click here.

To order PRO WRESTLING FAQ, check out or or hit up Brian Solomon on .

Here’s Part II of the interview. Here’s Part III of the interview.

---

John Corrigan: With so much material covered, was there anything you had to cut from the book?

Brian Solomon: “I cut a total of about seven different chapters. I was going to do a chapter on, I’m a little biased, but the history of wrestling magazines. I was going to do a chapter on some of the more well-known wrestling arenas around the world. Also kind of a glossary of moves, something on wrestling books, wrestling movies, all that merchandise kind of stuff. And getting into all the different pay-per-views. But I had to decide what people wanted the most in there.”

JC: I’m glad with what you stuck with especially the chapters on the early days of professional wrestling. Before you began researching, how much of the early 20th century history did you know?

BS: “Well, thank you. Ever since I was a teenager, I was fascinated by the whole history of the business. And if you were following the stuff I did when I worked for WWE, you could probably tell I was one of the more historically minded writers they had. So I’m not going to sit here and say that everything in that book was off the top of my head, but I will say one of the reasons it took such a short amount of time to write is because I did have a lot of information that I already knew. So the process became just verifying that information.

Along the way I did find out things I never knew about and some of those things came from the interviews I did with just amazing people. Mike Chapman, he’s the number one authority on people like Gotch and Hackenschmidt and Joe Stecher, it was fascinating to pick his brain.”

JC: What was your favorite chapter to write?

BS: “It’s funny that you mention how much you love the Gotch/Hackenschmidt chapter because that was probably my favorite one to write. That might be why you like it so much because my passion for the subject really came through. I was so interested in portraying this rivalry between these two guys that I put so much effort into it. I even had a detail in there about how Frank Gotch on the night before his big rematch with Hackenschmidt in 1911 when he’s defending the title at Comiskey Park…well, the night before he went to Wrigley Field and caught a baseball game there. So I went through the effort of finding out who the hell played there on that night in 1911 and found out it was a double header.

In my head, I wanted this chapter, this whole book really, to read and sound as if it was a Ken Burns documentary. I loved doing that part, and I don’t want to say enjoyed because it’s morbid in a way, but I was really fascinated by the chapter I did on some of the scandals in the business. I didn’t want to make the whole book like that because I wasn’t trying to sensationalize and cash in all this negative crap, but you can’t do a book on all of the wrestling business and not touch on some of the scandals. It’s the stuff that’s urban legend in wrestling history and some fans may have never heard of it.”

JC: I suspect many fans haven’t heard of a lot of the names in this book due to either the passing of time or those characters just never entering the WWE Universe.

BS: “Want to know the original idea for the book? The publishers wanted it to be the WWE FAQ. I told them two things: you’re going to run into a lot of trouble if you do that because they’re very protective of intellectual property and they’ll accuse you of making it seem like it’s one of their books. Besides that, there’s so much more to the business than just WWE. Honestly, I don’t even know if they had a conception of that. It’s almost like WWE has been so successful with its branding that a lot of people just equate it with professional wrestling as if nothing else existed.

I got accused by some people and I’m not going to name names, there was one wrestling historian in particular of whom I was a great admirer and I really wanted to work with him on this book, and when he discovered where I worked, he got it into his head that I was going to be a WWE stooge and not do the history of the business any justice. He refused to work with me and even tried to badmouth me to other historians, but thankfully, they didn’t listen because I got to work with a lot of great historians like Scott Teal, Steve Yohe, Tim Hornbaker, and many others. And this one guy, who is probably the most accomplished of all of them, he got it into his head that my book was going to be a marketing puff piece for WWE. So it’s a matter of pride for me, quite frankly, that the finished product is absolutely the opposite of that.”

JC: Certainly. But let’s give WWE credit because you first became a fan when Andre tore the cross off the Hulkster, right?

BS: “(laughs) Yes, that’s right. I had a little bit of awareness of wrestling before that, but the time when I became a serious fan and got into the storylines and watched every week was the buildup to WrestleMania III. At that time, I knew only a little bit about early WWF stuff because of older relatives in my family who had been fans. I knew the names of Bruno Sammartino and Buddy Rogers, but I certainly didn’t know about other companies. I grew up in the New York area in the 80s and by the time I started watching, the territories were dying out and the New York area was traditionally WWF territory anyway. In the 90s is when I started reading through the old magazines and I would literally look through old newspaper microfilm stuff in the library to try and learn about these really old matches. And then with the explosion of the internet, forget about it.”

JC: And now with the WWE Network, it’s easier than ever for wrestling fans to learn about the old days.

BS: “People now don’t know how good they got it. The WWE Network has limits, of course, it just has footage that WWE owns. But it’s an incredible treasure trove of stuff. When I was a kid, to have access to stuff like this, we used to go nuts. We’d trade tapes back and forth, send away a mail order catalog, go and find video stores in other neighborhoods that we heard had wrestling tapes of old matches we could rent. And now to have something like this where I can watch Clash of Champions, TNT, World Class, it’s amazing. I hope they expand it even more. I’d love to see some AWA on there especially with Verne Gagne passing away. And I’d also love to see some Mid-South.”

---

Check back tomorrow for Part II as Solomon discusses writing for WWE Magazine, working under Shane McMahon, why Smackdown Magazine failed, and that legendary tale of riding the limo with Vince.

Wrestledelphia.com editor John Corrigan can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter at .