The Six Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Wrestlemania

(Hardback)

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They say to never meet your heroes. Brad Balukjian doesn't listen.

From the bestselling author of The Wax Pack, comes another eye-opening road trip adventure into a pocket of massively popular pop culture-professional wrestling-starring the Iron Sheik, Hulk Hogan, Tito Santana, and many more larger-than-life characters of the WWF of the 1980s.

In 2005, Brad Balukjian left his dream job as a magazine fact-checker to pursue another dream: partner with his childhood hero, The Iron Sheik (whose real name is Khosrow Vaziri), to write his biography. Things quickly went terribly wrong, culminating in the Sheik threatening Balukjan's life. Now seventeen years later, Balukjian returns to the road in search of not only a reunion with the Sheik, but something much bigger: truth in a world built on illusion. He seeks out six of the Sheik's contemporaries, fellow witnesses to the World Wrestling Federation's (WWF) explosion in the mid-80s, along with the man driving the ship, Vince McMahon, to unearth their true identities. As Balukjian drives 12,525 miles around the country, we revisit the heady days when these avatars of strength, villainy, and heroism first found fame and see where their journeys took them. Balukjian plumbs their lives outside the ring, uncovering the pain of the inevitable transformation into their ring personas as myth merged with reality. From working out with Tony Atlas (Tony White) to visiting Hulk Hogan's (Terry Bollea) karaoke bar, we see where these men are now and how they have navigated the cliffs of fame.

The Six Pack is fascinating for its humor, honesty, and clear-eyed look at the spectacle of sports entertainment. Balukjian combines the spirit of a fan with the rigor of an investigative reporter, tracking down former WWF employees who have never spoken publicly on the company's inner workings. But what makes this book so compelling is the humanity beneath each wrestler. Wrestling is perceived as a subculture, a sideshow without a cultural home, somewhere between sport and dance and theater and improv. It is often dismissed by the elites as low-brow, silly, and simplistic. But ironically, an industry built on illusion is underlain by radical truth, and is arguably among our most democratic forms of entertainment. The Iron Sheik, Hulk Hogan, and the rest of the cast were not pieces on a game board or characters in a comic book movie. They were real people, with families and feelings and bodies that could break. Most of them did, in fact, break; some have been repaired, but none of them will ever be the same.

Reviews

"Newbies to the sport...will find an amiable, informed guide in Balukjian.... [T]he author puts wonderfully human faces to professional wrestlers and the fans who love them."--Booklist
"I've never been a wrestling fan - but this book is an absolute gem, for anyone. Balukjian goes deep inside this wild, bizarre, at times hilarious world and shows how it means much more than silly costumes and steroidal bodies. The human drama outside the ring is even more compelling than the brawls staged inside it."--Elie Honig, CNN Senior Legal Analyst and bestselling author
"In the acclaimed The Wax Pack, Brad Balukjian's subject was baseball, where stats are precise and rules are rigid. In The Six Pack, his focus is Pro Wrestling, where stats are irrelevant and rules are fungible."--Bob Costas
"The Six Pack was a fascinating read. The extensive research and interviews with the subjects, combined with the cinematic writing style made me feel like I had a ringside seat to what can be argued as one of the most important eras in the evolution of what has become such a successful form of American entertainment. Once finished, I realized how much I learned about people I've known and worked with over the past thirty plus years, and how much more I would have loved to learn and appreciate from those included in this incredible book that I didn't get to know. Bravo."--Eric Bischoff, former president of WCW
"Brad Balukjian has created something unique in the crowded genre of pro-wrestling literature. Part wrestling confessional, part a series of eye-opening road stories, Balukjian writes of the joys (and dangers) of meeting one's idols, as he peels back layers of some of wrestling's greatest stars--revealing the real men within."--Mick Foley, author of The Hardcore Diaries
"Brad Balukjian has masterfully combined two icons of the American experience - the road trip and professional wrestling - into a rollicking, one-of-a-kind tale. His journey, both hilarious and deeply moving, takes us through a cultural era, across the blurred lines of reality and spectacle, and into the heart of the American dream."--Daniel H. Pink, author of The Power of Regret, Drive, and To Sell Is Human
"Brad Balukjian was looking for a book that would be about the first WrestleMania and the characters involved, only to travel the country and find out the characters were even more unique than what he bargained for. In doing so he had to navigate crazies, pathological liars and bad memories but still end up with more real truths about Vince McMahon's expansion of the WWF from a regional to international brand than anyone else."--Dave Meltzer, Publisher and Editor of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter
"This is such an original concept for a book about wrestling (which is rare these days) and Brad's storytelling abilities and sense of adventure, makes me wish I would've been riding beside him for every one of those 12,525 miles!"--Chris Jericho, author of A Lion's Tale and Undisputed
"The Six Pack isn't mere rediscover-my-youth journey. It's a joyful odyssey into the blissful, wacky, weird, outrageous world of 1980s wrestling. So step up to the top rope and leap into Balukjian's masterful time machine."--Jeff Pearlman, author of The Last Folk Hero and Three-Ring Circus
"With a PhD in entomology, a beat-up Ford Fusion, and a prior career as a fact-checker, Brad Balukjian is both the least likely and the absolute best person to write this book. His humility, intelligence, and devotion to fact serve a work that is revelatory, emotionally on point, and addictively readable. It's all here--the lawsuits and exploitation, the clashing egos, the brain damage and the debauchery. But this is less an expos than a love letter--to the strutting monsters of Balukjian's youth and to the men they ultimately became: surprisingly reflective, sometimes broken, always fascinating. What an achievement this book is."--Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Fuzz
"Is pro wrestling real Of course it is! It's real enough to make a man take to the road in search of his boyhood heroes, undertake a sweet journey of self-discovery, and produce this gem of a book filled with wit, warmth, and wisdom."--Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life, Ali: A Life, and Luckiest Man

Author Bio

Brad Balukjian has been published in Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, CNN, National Geographic, the Los Angeles Times, Discover, Natural History, Slate, ISLANDS, Alta, and many others. His first book, The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife hit #7 on the LA Times bestseller list and was named one of NPR's Best Books of 2020. He teaches in the Natural History and Sustainability program at Merritt College, is a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences, and discovered 17 species of insects in Tahiti. He lives in Oakland, CA where he's in an open relationship with his VCR.