image credit: Peter Kramer/Getty Images
David Shoemaker’s The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling serves not only as a (deeply) expanded version of his brilliant Dead Wrestler of the Week Deadspin column, but also takes on the daunting task of chronicling the vast history of professional wrestling as a business and an art form. This book is in no way just a tale of dead wrestlers, it’s the story of professional wrestling.
Those who find weekly escape in the three-hour hearth of WWE Raw will have a hard time putting The Squared Circle down, but this book is not just for fans who stay current with the sport, it’s for anyone who has ever been touched by it (which, as Shoemaker proves, is almost everyone).
We caught up with David recently to get his thoughts on the current state of wrestling and some insights into assembling The Squared Circle.
As a reader of your Grantland column and your work on Deadspin, I credit you as one of our generation’s most knowledgeable and insightful pro wrestling luminaries.That said, what sticks out in your mind as something you learned while writing/researching for The Squared Circle?
Everything. It’s such a big bizarro world with a huge history that’s barely been chronicled. Even the stuff I thought I knew, I’d look it up and realize my memory was 5% off from the truth. Or 50% off. Or even if I was right, somebody would have a totally different recollection or interpretation of events, and who’s to say what’s right?
The most interesting things I found out were about the interconnectedness of everything — how obscure wrestlers had much bigger influences than I realized. Like The Fabulous Kangaroos, who were trailblazers in being an evil tag team of foreign nationals, but they were also incredibly influential in terms of marketing and self-promotion.
The book explores professional wrestling and its cultural place starting in the early 1900s- what would you say is the biggest difference between the pro wrestling of a century ago and that of today?
The biggest differences are probably technological — the never-ending weekly schedule, the PPVs, the TV audience’s primacy over the live crowd. But really, for every major difference, it’s the similarities that stand out.
Wrestling was the first big nationally televised sport — it’s much easier to film a wrestling match than a baseball game, obviously — and cheap, canned material for the first networks looking for content. It was the same reason that they were so vital to the cable expansion in the 80s — channels like USA and TBS were hungry for content. And even now they’re poised to be on the forefront of new media platforms — though reality has stolen some of their thunder in the quick-and-easy-to-produce category.
Another obvious change is the entry of the sport into a postmodern state — a world where everybody knows it’s fake and the WWE doesn’t even try to hide it. But there too it’s not as different as it seems — the fans have always been in on the joke to a large degree. There are quotes throughout the 20th century of fans saying “It doesn’t matter to me as long as it’s fun.” Of course, every article has to pretend it’s the first to ask the question, so overall perception of the sport doesn’t change much. I found a quote from Grantland Rice about sports editors objecting to him covering wrestling as early as 1915. That’s how long the jig has been up, so to speak.
What chapter of The Squared Circle gave you writer’s block or presented the biggest challenge?
I have two answers: One is the first section, which is about 10K works chronicling roughly 1900-1950. That alone took probably 6 months to write. It was half writer’s block and half sheer volume of information. The other was all the way at the other end of the book, in the chapter on Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero. When I started writing Dead Wrestler of the Week at Deadspin.com, the first one that was really difficult was Chris Kanyon, because that was the first one I did after the guy had just died. It was suddenly too real, and too sad. And I was never even a big Kanyon fan. The Benoit/Guerrero chapter was like that — just too raw, even years after the fact. Usually I slog through the factual stuff so I can get to the stuff I really enjoy, the reminiscence and the cultural context and the silly highbrow metaphors and whatnot. In that chapter I relished in the history, because their careers were simple and comprehensible, and you could set that aside from the end of their lives. You couldn’t really ignore their deaths when you took a step back.
Professional wrestling changes as rapidly as any business or industry. After the book was completed and out of your hands, did you have any “Oh man I wish I could have it back to add/subtract/edit that” moments?
The manuscript was nearly 100,000 words long, and it could have easily been twice that. With nearly everything historical I’ve read since then, I think, “that could have been in chapter 3”. I say in there that it’s a book of incomplete truth — as a wrestling history, it has to be. Too much of the industry’s history is shrouded in secrets and lies and competing memories. At the end of the day, I’m just happy if I got most of it in there, and maybe some of the metaphorical truth, and mostly if people have fun reading it.
I’m positive they will. Any current writers that you are hooked on?
I live and breathe wrestling so much, the stuff I relish in is rarely wrestling writing. When I was writing the book, I read a lot of Nick Toshes and Greil Marcus, writers who could write about a really narrow subject and make it matter (and sing) even for someone not interested in the topic. Outside of that, it’s a lot of what counts for me as escapism — I read a ton of the sort of crime writers who seem to be mostly disinterested in writing crime novels — James Crumley, Charles Willeford, Daniel Woodrell, George Pelecanos. Maybe there’s some affinity there for people doing something different with their writing than they’re letting on, I don’t know. And lots of comic books. I want Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips to clone themselves and produce 10 times as much stuff.
Is there an overall message/feeling you think most readers will come away with after reading The Squared Circle?
They’ll laugh, they’ll cry, they’ll think a lot about spandex. But seriously, hopefully it’ll be fun. The book really doesn’t dwell on death much at all. It’s just a romp through the oddball world of pro wrestling. I hope that most fans will be able to relive some of the craziest moments of their youth, while at the same time learn a whole lot that they had no idea about. It’s a fan’s history in that I’m unabashedly a fan, but there’s just so much in the book that I didn’t know, and I’m sure wrestling fans will get to experience all of those “aha” moments in the same way I did when they get a chance to read my book. It’s an incredible, weird world, and we should all be happy to be a part of it.
David Shoemaker’s The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling is available at Amazon. You can find The Masked Man’s weekly column at Grantland and follow him on Twitter @AKATheMaskedMan.
