On the Open Road in Search of Wrestling History

A conversation about an extraordinary work with The Six Pack author Brad Balukjian

Wrestling history, long the singular domain of the WWE monolith, has never been in better hands. For years it’s existed as little more than lore, a collection of stories we tell each other, many of which have almost no connection to any real world events. The underground version, “shoot interviews” that were basically poorly executed long-form conversations between an ignorant questioner and a disinterested wrestler, was equally full of shit, exaggerated tall tales that could often be easily dismissed with the most baseline level research.

Slowly but surely, however, the truth is finding its way to the surface, a titillating experience for the small but enthusiastic audience that cares about such things. We’ve talked a number of times in this space about the heroes of this journey, (mostly) men with their noses deep in the library stacks and microfiche newspaper collections, digital or otherwise. Al Getz, in particular, has set a new standard for research, using actual data to recreate the business in various territories as it actually existed, not how old-timers pretend it used to be.

But there’s another kind of history that can be equally important, if a little more treacherous, the kind that isn’t going to be found in the incorporating papers or tax returns Tim Hornbaker is so good at uncovering. Some stories, instead, can only be told by people—people who have to be courted, tracked down and made comfortable, people who have to be asked the right question at the right moment, holders of institutional knowledge who would happily go to their graves never telling their tales, people with secrets and subtext infused into their very souls.

People waiting for someone like Brad Balukjian.

If you’re an avid reader of sports books, you might remember Brad from his fantastic book The Wax Pack. It was a project built on a pretty remarkable conceit—opening an old pack of baseball cards and finding out what happened to all the players within, stars and journeyman alike. Where had life taken them in the ensuing years, long after reckoning with a fastball was the most challenging part of their day. It’s one of my favorite sports books of the century, so you can imagine my excitement upon learning his follow up would be set in the wacky world of professional wrestling.

Brad, it turns out, was briefly attached to an Iron Sheik biography, and his experiences with the Iranian villain make up a big part of his new book The Six Pack: On the Open Road in Search of WrestleMania. It’s a variation on the The Wax Pack template, this time tracking down as many wrestlers as humanly possible from a WWF card on December 26, 1983, the night Sheik took the sport’s greatest prize from the beloved Bob Backlund at Madison Square Garden. In a matter of mere days, the title would pass into the strangely tan hands of Hulk Hogan, assuring in a new era of prosperity and propelling wrestling back into the national spotlight for the first time in ages. It was the dawn of a new age, a fascinating time capsule perfectly suited for a writer of Balukjian’s gifts.

What followed was a road trip of more than 12,000 miles, with stops all over the country to visit with stars that still shine bright and others that have dimmed, each one revelatory, a look at the real life that exists outside the ring ropes and trite road tales that typically inform this kind of nostalgia. As a bonus, Balukjian tracks down many executives and industry professionals who worked closely with Vince McMahon in those formative days, some of whom have never spoken to a journalist before. It’s part travelogue, part biography and part homage to a time long past. That’s a difficult combination to pull off, but Balukjian manages it with aplomb. There is truth here, something all too rare in a phony world built on lies.

I’ll have to sit with it for awhile, but The Six Pack has a real case as the best wrestling book ever written. It’s certainly, at the very least, in the Pantheon. Highest Possible Recommendation.

---

(The following conversation with the author has been edited for space and clarity.)

Jonathan Snowden: I was really impressed by your book first of all. Congratulations on another fantastic effort.

As someone who has attempted several projects in this world, pitching in both the television and literary spaces, I’ve found people who are not actively involved in the fandom don't 100 percent understand the world. I’d have to imagine some people in your circle probably gave you a little side eye. I'm wondering how you go from one of the NPR Books of the Year in 2020 about baseball which is an acceptable subject, you know to deciding on pro wrestling as a follow-up. How many people tried to talk you out of it?

Brad Balukjian: Well, actually, you'd be surprised. No one tried to talk me out of it.

Snowden: I am surprised by that.

Balukjian: To me it was the natural next step just because I had this Iron Sheik back story, right? That was kind of always in the back of my head, that it didn't work out back in 2005. If there was a way to revisit that but also expand it, so it's not just an Iron Sheik biography about other people from that era, incorporating the road trip kind of storytelling and applying it to the 1980s WWF…It seemed like coming out of The Wax Pack I had the leverage where I could potentially make that idea viable.

My initial thought was what you're saying, that this is going to be tough because mainstream society still looks sideways at wrestling, especially the literary world, one might not take it seriously. But the more that I brought it up with people or talked to my eventual editor, my eventual agent, they seem to think that if it was done, right, it could actually have more appeal than baseball just because wrestling, you know cuts across an even broader slice of society if done the right way. And some of these themes that are universal, which is why movies like The Wrestler or The Iron Claw were so popular, right? Because it's not really about just about wrestling, but about these larger themes that wrestling taps into. So, when I was able to pitch the idea, it got traction, I think, because of the idea of playing with this theme of myth versus reality And it definitely helped to have had The Wax Pack. If I didn't have that success, I don’t think it would have been greenlit the way that it was.

Snowden: So, you kind of superimpose The Wax Pack formula onto pro wrestling. It's not a perfect fit, right? It doesn't work quite as elegantly as opening up a pack of baseball cards. You pick a card from the era that connected to Sheik and there's 20 people advertised plus there's a bunch in the agate type at the bottom, like “other great matches are going to be on this card.”

You landed on six of them. This being pro wrestling from the 1980s, I counted at least seven off the top of my head who had passed away, but I guess my actual question is how did you land on this selection of wrestlers to profile and cover?

Balukjian: It was definitely a cruder thing like you said. It's actually six people who were on the December 26, 1983 card plus Hulk Hogan, plus Vince McMahon. There are eight people that I'm more or less writing about. There were something like 27 wrestlers on the card and like 13 of them had died. A significant percentage of the wrestlers had passed away. And so I basically looked at guys that were on both the generally on both the December and the January 4th cards, because you know the book is really about that whole transitional period.

And then I made some judgment calls. I knew I wanted to go deeper on each guy than I did in The Wax Pack, so I needed to have a smaller number, and I just didn't think it was necessary or realistic to get all 14 wrestlers. And because I didn't have a device as elegant as the pack, I didn't think it really mattered as much. I think I can get away with being a little more arbitrary in who I put in here. As long as I have the Iron Sheik and Hulk Hogan, they're kind of my anchors.

I was gonna have a whole chapter on Bob Backlund, I did a lot of reporting around him, but I cut that because I was told that he is in pretty poor health so I probably wasn't going to get to talk to him, and so I felt like I could probably cut that chapter. He and Ivan Putski had similar issues with CTE like problems. So, I made some choices.

Snowden: There's a real inclination, when people write about wrestling, to fall into that Chris Farley sketch from SNL where he's interviewing Paul McCartney. He's like, ‘oh, remember the time you fought Barry Windham? That was awesome.’ That was not your book. Instead, I really found it interesting the way you were able to tell human stories within this superhuman world of over-the-top and larger-than-life characters. I was wondering if that was difficult, because I would assume because their job for so long was to portray the superhuman, that it must be instinctual for them to kind of appear that way. And meanwhile, your goal is to make them appear human. Was that a push and tug a little bit with them to try to get real and tell real stories of suffering and hardship? Because their inclination is to tell the same five stories they always tell and get out and get the payday, right?

Balukjian: Yeah, and I think that same thing with The Wax Pack, there's also the same thing in baseball where, if you've seen the movie Bull Durham, the training about how to give the same answer to the media all the time. '“Take it one day at a time, we'll give 110 percent.” I think athletes are just conditioned to talk to the press that way. And then, in wrestling, you have the added layer that they're actually playing a fictional character. So I think it's a challenge.

You have to really do a lot of research in advance. So it helped that some of these guys had written books, so I kind of could pick out the pieces of their story that I wanted to expand on. If I only had two hours with Tito Santana, I'm not going to spend 20 minutes dissecting his feud with Greg “the Hammer” Valentine, right? I'm going to ask about his dad and his kids and the daughter that he discovered that he had. This kind of work is doing really comprehensive research and then being willing to ask hard questions and taking the risk of the discomfort of whether the guy is not going to react well or not.

If I'm asking Tony Atlas if he was a good father, that's a pretty heavy question. I have to be prepared to not have that go well. I think that at some point in my journalistic career, I just decided that I was willing to take on that vulnerability and take that risk and whether it's literally ringing Sgt. Slaughter's doorbell at his house not knowing if he's going to be there or in The Wax Pack trying to find Carlton Fisk on a golf course.

This is also why I, when I do these books, I get on the road and I get out and I meet people in person and in their lives, because I don't think you can pull that off as well when you're just on a phone call or on a Zoom call.

Snowden: Yeah, it's very different. I noticed when I was doing the biography of Ken Shamrock that it was a very different experience to interview him in person and at his house and then at Starbucks and his favorite restaurant…that's a different deal than talking to him on the phone.

---

---

I wanted to explore the similarities and differences between wrestling and other sports. I've interviewed lots of other athletes and you’re right—they're trained to speak to the media in a certain way. What I feel like is different about wrestling is like the explicit lies, right? They would say “kayfabe” but that’s just a nice way to describe lying to somebody. I'd imagine that you faced a lot of that. And there’s the secondary challenge that I found with Ken and you know it's similar to what you're talking about with some of the 80’s wrestlers. He's taken a lot of blows to the head. And we're talking about things that happened 40 years ago, so it's not necessarily lying, but he didn't remember, “was something 1988 or was it 1991, was it before or after he went to WWF?” These are all major challenges and I suppose you faced them too. How did you handle it when, based on your research, you knew that someone was lying to you? I imagine it happened more than once?

Balukjian: First, you have to try to figure out what is true to begin with. Which is hard in wrestling because it wasn't covered like a sport. There is no regular newspaper coverage, there's no beat writers in wrestling. You have the Wrestling Observer, but the Observer is not perfect either. And so, the first thing would be trying to just triangulate all these fictions over the years and try to figure out what is true going into a particular interview. Once I have a handle on that,I would try to just be really upfront about any issues. I might say, “I know that you've said this before, but here's the evidence for this other thing.” And sometimes people would admit like, “oh yeah, okay, that's, you know, I guess I got that wrong.”

I think just being transparent and upfront about discrepancies, not in a gotcha kind of way, but in a like, okay, I've done my homework. I've done my research. I've read the whole case file for Bill Eadie for example. I had a good understanding of what he said under oath 30-some years ago, so if his memory faltered, I could just say, “well, here's what you said under oath at this time.” I really tried to make the fact checking a central part of my goal in this book. This is where it was helpful to talk to a lot of people who were in the WWF front office in the 80s that that hadn't really been interviewed much before like Jim Troy and Nelson Swegler and Tom Emanuel and Ed Helinsky and all these guys that were there.

Snowden: I thought those interviews helped make this an amazing piece of history. In addition to being this highly personal story about these individual wrestlers, as someone who enjoys learning about how the industry works, you've done just this phenomenal piece of work. I don't think I've ever seen some of these WWF executives do media like this. Did your on-the-ground approach help you get these interviews? Or was it a thing where you met one of them and they were like, “hey, this guy seems smart and he's well intentioned. I'm going to give him the phone number of this other guy.” How did you pull this off? As someone who attempts poorly to do this kind of work, it’s really impressive.

Balukjian:  I was surprised when I would meet up with a lot of these guys that they said they had not, most of them had not been approached before. It wasn't like they've had journalists contacting them. Finding the right people to approach was the first step. Some of it was doing a deep dive of studying the credits on Coliseum Videos and studying the masthead on old issues of WWF Magazine, doing public record searches to find phone numbers and striking out with 20 wrong numbers. But then eventually stumbling on someone who's the right person, making a good enough impression to have them talk to me. I would say it's a combination of presenting well, doing a lot of the deep homework, the research.

I think there are some people who have written about wrestling who are more interested in what you alluded to, kind of just telling the same war stories, road stories, or the shoot interview culture, right? And I was coming at this as like a journalist really wanting to do a deep dive and fact check some of these claims that had been made over the years and knowing that in order to do that I had to go well beyond just the wrestlers themselves.

Snowden: I always say that what we call wrestling history is actually lore. We're involved in myth-making. And that's the journalists and the writers as well as the wrestlers.

What I really enjoyed about your book was how human it was. And the way that you kind of made these parts of America where these guys lived— these are not normal settings for a book—you made them almost characters in the story. It's a very interesting subsection of America. What did you make of the places you went to? Some like Fayetteville, that’s the suburbs of Atlanta. But other places, these are spots a normal person in the course of their travels would never find themselves. It’s wonderful.

Balukjian: I appreciate that you like that because I actually, if someone asked me what kind of writer I am, I would say I'm actually a travel writer first. When I wrote The Wax Pack I would be invited to these panel discussions with baseball writers and I would be like, “hey guys, these are the real baseball writers.” I have certainly enough humility to recognize that I'm not one of them. I'm a travel writer who wrote a book about baseball. I'm not a wrestling journalist, I'm a travel writer that wrote a book about wrestling, right?

What's fun about these books, in addition to just being on the road, is that I'm really telling the story of America, right? Not to sound too ambitious, but like I'm telling the story of the people, the everyday people that, all these, you know, these guys came from these generally small towns and just sort of middle America and they were just like you and me and then they became these larger than life characters but they're still from these places. So to talk to the people they grew up with or to show the place they came from and the differences between a Tampa, Florida and a Brownsville, Pennsylvania and Eden Prairie, Minnesota was part of the experience.

Snowden: Speaking of fact checking, the Iron Sheik section was really impressive. It must have been a real struggle to find the truth a world and 60 years removed from the events themselves.

Balukjian: Even when WWE inducted him in the Hall of Fame they said he was in the Olympics. All these wrestlers, even his closest friends like Sergeant Slaughter, are still saying that he was in the Olympics. No one really knows the truth, right? It’s wrestling.

But now, I've actually seen his immigration papers, and I've seen his papers from competing in Iran in amateur wrestling tournaments, and his report cards from high school in Iran. Being able to see all these documents to really fact check some of these things was really satisfying.

Snowden: The interviews were great, but you were really at your best when you didn’t get them. I feel like a fanboy here, but the way you write around your disappointments was really fascinating.

Balukjian: What new do you say about Hulk Hogan? So I didn't get to interview Hulk. I was like, okay, I'm just gonna focus on two things. One, like the story about how he broke into the business that's been told a million times. Hiro Matsuda breaking his leg. What actually happened there? And two, did he really have a rock and roll career before wrestling?

We've only ever heard that from Hulk Hogan directly and you know he's known to distort the truth. But getting to talk to the guys that he was in the band with, you know, we have a whole new perspective. What set him apart from everyone is his ability to work the crowd. And so I think it was a conscious choice to go into the music stuff because it's evocative of what he became later. And in sort of trying to bring it full circle, that chapter ends with him and his karaoke bar at almost 70 years old in front of 100 people, you know, diminished because of all his scandal, but yet kind of coming full circle to when he was 16 playing in front of 100 people at a Tampa fraternity party.

Snowden: In 2005, you were gonna write the biography of the Iron Sheik. As someone who's done the biography of a crazy person who had a crazy life, you know, I'm probably one of a handful of people relating. You're interviewing this crazy guy and he wants to stop in a parking lot and buy drugs. I'm like, “oh I get this guy.” I get what's happening here. The feeling that like, I'm with someone that could murder me with their bare hands and they're very unpredictable and angry all the time. I was relating very strongly to that. I'm probably the only reader that will relate to that specific circumstance.

But, anyway, here you are all these years later, and it's not strictly the biography of the Iron Sheik, but you probably do have 50 pages focused on the beginning and the end of the Sheik’s story. Do you feel mission accomplished on that?

Balukjian: I do. The failure of that biography was the hardest thing for me to accept. I just did not want to accept that it wasn't going to work out. I had been spoiled by a lot of success. I got the job I wanted to get after college. Things were falling into place. I didn’t want to accept that failure. But, eventually, I did.

I didn't think I would ever write the story. Looking back, like, I don't know, even if the Iron Sheik had been a delight in 2005, I don't know that I was ready at age 24 to write that book. I thought I was. The hubris of youth. I'm such a better writer at 43 than I was at 24 that I'm kind of grateful in a weird way that it didn't happen. And also that this is a more interesting book. The Iron Sheik story is fascinating, but I was able to cover more ground with this book. I wanted to hit certain things, which I was able to do in this book. I could tell that, the most relevant parts of Sheik’s story and also tell a story about Tony Atlas. Hopefully the whole project scales up.

There's these sort of universal themes that emerge from this book about these guys losing themselves. I call it the Darth Vader moment. You're no longer Anakin Skywalker. You're Darth Vader. You're no longer Merced Solis. You're Tito Santana. Now your Hulk Hogan, not Terry Bollea. That wasn’t possible with a straight biography. At least not in the same way.

Snowden: It’s really fascinating. What a wild world.

I really appreciate the time you've given me, and I really just wanted to congratulate you on this. It's just a fantastic work, not only as a piece of storytelling for people who are not wrestling obsessives, but also for the small group of us wrestling historians, quote-unquote, to have this much new information is really great. 

Balukjian: Thank you.

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.