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

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

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John Corrigan: How did you go from watching Hogan and Andre on Piper’s Pit to actually working for WWE?

Brian Solomon: “I started watching when I was 12 years old and started working for WWE when I was 25. And throughout those 13 years in between I never stopped watching. I had a wrestling column in my college newspaper called ‘Wrestling Lowdown.’ I used to cover local indy events for my neighborhood newspaper for free. I’d take the pictures and everything. Then I started sending away my stuff to wrestling magazines. In college, I remember sending my material to Vince Russo at WWF Magazine. I sent it to Stu Saks at Pro Wrestling Illustrated. George Napolitano, WCW Magazine, the New York Daily News, anywhere I thought I could get work covering wrestling.

It didn’t work at the time, so I had to get a real job. (laughs) I studied writing, I’m an English lit major, and at that time, it was all about print so I was working for publishers. I had just gotten married and I was looking for a really good, dependable job, and I found an ad in the New York Times, of all things. It was October 1999 and had a big WWF logo on it. It was right after Vince Russo had left for WCW so he left this big vacuum in the magazine and they were looking to staff up. I was just like, ‘ah, what the hell? I’ll give it a shot just for a laugh.’ And they called me in for an interview. I couldn’t believe it. Three different times they called me in so I drove all the way up to Stanford each time because I thought if I get this job, it will be the greatest thing. And I started on Valentine’s Day 2000.”

JC: What was that first day like?

BS: “It was surreal. And all the while I was trying my best to not, you know, you don’t want to come across as a super mark because they really don’t like that. But you also don’t want them to think that you have no idea about the product. It took me a little while to find this weird balance. I didn’t want them to think they hired this crazy, internet smart mark, but I also wanted to let them know you have somebody working here who really knows his stuff, and I want to put it to use.”

JC: You certainly did. How long did it take for you to become editor?

BS: “I started actually as a copy-editor. I wasn’t writing. I kind of bluffed my way in as having a lot of editing experience when I really didn’t. My old boss may read this all these 15 years later but oh well. (laughs) I did that for half a year, six-to-nine months. When they lost one of their staff writers at the end of 2000, they brought me on to replace him. So I did that for three years and then the managing editor, Mike Fazioli, left. My publisher, Barry Werner, who’s the guy who really gave me my break and is just the greatest boss I ever had, looked at me and the other staff writer, Aaron Williams, and bumped us up. Aaron was in charge of RAW Magazine and I was in charge of WWE Magazine, which soon became Smackdown Magazine. I became kind of like the shepherd of Smackdown Magazine (laughs) and I was the one and only editor it ever had.”

JC: Speaking of SmackDown Magazine, you say in the book that it was “ill-fated.” Is that because of the doomed brand extension or is there another reason it didn’t take off?

BS: “Well, we were against putting the brand extension in play in the publications. We thought it would dilute the brand and that it was a bad idea. The problem was this: we had WWE Magazine which was the proven entity that had been around since 1983. We also had RAW Magazine, which as you know, had nothing to do with the RAW brand. It was more of a worked shoot while WWE Magazine was kayfabe. So one day some bright light, and I don’t know who it was, said we’ll have RAW Magazine completely kayfabe about RAW superstars and then we’ll turn WWE Magazine and make it just about the Smackdown superstars.

We fought like crazy to prevent this from happening because our sales were already struggling as it was because the product was flat. Remember when they used to have the branded pay-per-views? That didn’t last very long because nobody wanted to pay money to see half the roster. It was the same for the magazines. Don’t get me wrong—Smackdown had a good roster, but it was like okay, Smackdown Magazine, where every month you can read articles about Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio, Brock Lesnar, and like, two other guys.

We tried our best, but the sales were never good. They kind of used it as a self-fulfilling prophecy to say well, the magazines are garbage and we need to bring in all new blood and re-launch a new and improved WWE Magazine. So Smackdown Magazine was kind of dead on arrival, but I did the best I could and tried to infuse it with stuff I’d actually want to read and see.”

JC: What did you think of the re-launch?

BS: “I think we alienated a lot of wrestling fans with that magazine. The thing is they weren’t going for wrestling fans. They were trying to hook casual people and I always felt there wasn’t enough wrestling content in there. They were trying too much for a men’s lifestyle feel. The people they brought in were not really that well-versed in the product. The old publications crew was a little more old school. We were big fans of the Pro Wrestling Illustrated style magazine. We were really into the worked shoot stuff and had a lot of respect for the business.

The new crew had more of a Maxim Magazine, satirical crowd. So they started doing spreads like Brian Kendrick and Paul London doing a fashion spread. All of the wrestling stuff we loved to write about was gone, not to mention you couldn’t have any article last more than two pages long. It was just short attention span theater. I always felt our goal was not to try and get people to buy the magazine who would never watch wrestling. What’s the point of that?

Our goal should be to get all the people who love our show, but don’t read the magazine, to buy it. If we sell 300,000 issues a month, but you have 3 million people watching RAW every week, that’s a lot of people watching RAW who don’t buy it. That’s one of the reasons why I kind of rode off into the sunset because my view point on things was yesterday’s news. I was the last survivor of the old crew because of all my historical and product knowledge and business context. But it only went so far and it was not pretty at the end, unfortunately.”

JC: What was it like working under Shane McMahon?

BS: “He was a very interesting boss. First of all, in all honesty, he is the nicest of the entire McMahon clan. Unfortunately, in that family, I think that’s kind of like a badge of dishonor. He really was a nice guy. Yeah, he’s a celebrity and celebrities are an unusual bunch. It’s a challenge working for people who are famous. My sister has worked for a lot of magazines run by celebrities. She currently works for Martha Stewart’s magazine, she worked for Rosie O’Donnell, Puff Daddy. We share these war stories of these weird, unrealistic expectations they might have and how they can sometimes be detached from the average person’s everyday life. He could be a fun guy and enjoyed working with us a lot of the time.

But there were times when he could be unreasonable and demanding. He worked us pretty damn hard. You always got the sense that he was getting pressure himself from above and that he was transferring that pressure to us. There were times when we would go nuts mocking up literally 30 or 40 different covers just to get one he would like. There would be times when there was just no pleasing him. For years Barry was our buffer, but unfortunately, he had to deal with it. He and Shane locked horns a lot. They were very different people. Barry was an old newspaper guy. He was sports editor of the New York Daily News. He wanted to be shown the confidence that he could do his job and not be micromanaged by somebody who, quite frankly, did not understand the publishing industry as well as he did. Shane was supposed to be in this position to learn from Barry, and instead it turned out to be this toxic relationship.

One time we had a cover where Vince and Hulk Hogan were staring each other down from WrestleMania XIX. Shane was asking us if we could turn their heads around so you could see the other side of their face. And we would have to tell him, Shane, it’s a 2-dimensional image. (laughs) We can’t really turn it around—there is no other side of the face. So those were the kind of requests we would sometimes be pulling our hair out about.”

JC: As a fan, it seems really cool to have Shane McMahon as your boss. But as a writer, I could definitely see where you would take umbrage with someone not experienced in your field calling the shots.

BS: “That’s what caused some of the resentment sometimes. You also didn’t want to insult him, you know. You didn’t want to give the impression to him that you knew better than him. There would be times when we just wanted him to trust us a little more. We wanted him, and he did this a lot, to take care of us because he did have a lot of stroke in the company. We were kind of viewed as Shane’s boys which opened a lot of doors. I was able to do a three hour interview in Vince’s limo with Vince on the tenth anniversary of RAW. I sat in the limo with him on the ride from Manhattan to Stamford in horrendous traffic. We talked about everything under the sun. And Shane made the introduction personally and gave me his blessing.”

JC: Wow…what was that like?

BS: “Well, Vince ate a lot of protein bars. He was very candid. We ran out of interview stuff after a while and it was just us talking. I was amazed at how nostalgic he was because you always heard how he’s a very forward-thinking person and doesn’t want to look back and doesn’t really care about the history of the business. But here he was telling me stories about his father, dying his hair to look like Dr. Jerry Graham when he was a teenager and how his dad was pissed off at him. He told me when he was 15 years old and in Comiskey Park for the NWA title match between Pat O’Connor and Buddy Rogers—I never even heard that before. Then he was talking to me about his family and how much he loves Shane and Stephanie and how much trouble Shane gave him and Linda when he was a kid. They sent him off to boarding school and he was like, ‘we smothered them in love, Brian. We smothered him in love,’ and made this motion like he was hugging himself. In that moment, he was really down to earth and that was a great day. There were other times when I saw him act like the character on TV.”

JC: (laughs) Well, he can’t act like that when he’s stuck in the car with ya!

BS: “(laughs) When I was in the car with him, this was great, he had to take a couple of phone calls. There’s a woman in the company named Liz Difabio who has been there since the 80s. She’s one of his most loyal employees. In fact, when you watch the old Coliseum Videos, she’s actually in the closing credits. It’ll say like ‘special thanks to Gorilla Monsoon, Lord Alfred Hayes, and Liz Difabio.” So it just happened to be her 50th birthday that day. Vince’s assistant called him up to remind him to call her for her birthday. So Vince calls her up and gets her voicemail. And I’m sitting there listening to him leaving the voicemail going “Happy Birthday to you” and he sings the whole thing to Liz Difabio.”

JC: That’s awesome. I hope she never deleted that message.

BS: “I wouldn’t.”

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Check back tomorrow for Part III as Solomon discusses “Classy” Freddie Blassie, advertising on RAW, and the stigma of being a pro wrestling fan.

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