I sold a lot of them and gave even more away. It became my first wrestling project in which I used the photocopy machine at my work. I got Dave Meltzer to put an ad in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter and began selling crude photocopies of the book to "smart" fans.
#The fall guy book pro
I knew how hard it was for the common wrestling fan to find a copy of a 1937 wrestling book, and soon, I was making copies for my friends, many of whom were historians that had been researching pro wrestling for years. Reading the book was enlightening, and I saw its importance right away. At some point, he went back to the college and made photocopies of the book for a few of his friends, including me. He had read Fall Guys years before and found another copy of it in the library at Cal State Fullerton. For years, Williams had been going to the Los Angeles main library and had researched many of the important matches in wrestling history. I don’t remember when I first learned of it, but by the early 1990s, it was the subject of many conversations I had with wrestling writer John Williams. It was the first "smart" pro wrestling book and one of the few that attempted to create a history of a performance sport. in 1937, Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce, has been a legendary book.
Since its publication by the Reilly and Lee Co. It all makes absorbing reading and a lively tale for those people afflicted with the disease which Griffin terms "wrestler-itis." They add additional detail to the stories and the lives of the book's personalities. This is the annotated version, in which Yohe & Teal challenge Griffin’s statements about events and correct errors that have been repeated through the years in other books and writings. That being the case, why would anyone want to read this book? Nevertheless, the book is the best resource of events that took place during that era, and wrestling scholars have used much of Griffin’s writing as a launchpad for their own research.
![the fall guy book the fall guy book](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41nANrtCGfL.jpg)
It is filled with inconsistencies, contradiction, and … yes, downright lies. A great deal of the book was written by Griffin with an extreme bias for Toots Mondt … his boss … and against those whom Toots didn’t like. Griffin wrote about double-crosses and rivalries between promoters, the manipulation of the wrestlers, the "synthetic buildup" promoters gave to grapplers to put them over in the minds of the ticket-buying public, and a history of some of the great characters of that era.įall Guys was, and still is, fascinating reading. It was the first credible book ever published on the subject. In the 215 pages written by sportwriter Marcus Griffin, the sport was exposed to the general public and the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by promoters and wrestlers alike were brought to light. In 1937, a book titled Falls Guys: The Barnums of Bounce was published.
#The fall guy book professional
If you’re like most people, who think professional wrestling was strictly "kayfabe" in the days before it morphed into "sports entertainment," then think again. "The Annotated Fall Guys" is available exclusively from Crowbar Press.Īll books will be shipped via Media Mail (U.S.), Priority Mail, or International Priority Mail (Canada/overseas).