Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling

by Patrick W. Reed

A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling is the story of how professional wrestling evolved from humble roots as a folk sport into an intricate and unique performance art, and a global billion dollar industry. It’s a history that takes in America’s Wild West, the Music Halls of Victorian London, the circuses of P.T. Barnum, the golden age of television, the genesis of Mixed Martial Arts, all the way to the dizzying heights of WWE's Wrestlemania and AEW's All-In. As befitting a story with roots in Vaudeville Theatre, it’s full of twists, turns, surprises, myth-making and half-truths, with walk-on parts from some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment over the last two hundred years, and explains how wrestling went from a carnival con to a billion dollar business.

Cover Art Action Figure Cellar (www.actionfigurecellar.com)

Genres: History, Nonfiction

566 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 27, 2023

Reviews

[Stuart Iversen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writing a comprehensive history of wrestling is a near impossible task, as there is just too much of it scattered across the globe. However, for what this focuses on, it does a great job, diving deep into how this wonderful nonsense up here.

[Richard Tubb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a really well researched and presenter history of professional wrestling, through the lens of following kayfabe - or the concept of protecting the “secrets” of wrestling.

The author visits the early days of Pro Wrestling from the 1800s onwards, and while I found these early chapters hard going, the rest of the book was gold.

Looking at everything from the Montreal screw job to the bizarre worked shoot fights in Japan, this book is a treasure trove of information for any hardcore wrestling fan.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

The notion of the self-published book is always a curious one – at its worst it can lead to something truly terrible and self-indulgent but, at its best, it can give a voice to a writer who would otherwise struggle to get their vision committed to the page – something that Amazon’s publishing and printing arm has given even further life to, but I’m happy to say that Patrick W. Reed’s Kayfabe: A Mostly True History Of Professional Wrestling, while clearly a passion project, very much falls into the latter of the above categories.

I’ve read a few books describing themselves in similar terms to Reed’s in the past, most notably Jim Smallman’s I’m Sorry I Love You, as well as numerous biographies and autobiographies of pro-wrestling performers, but this is, from virtually the start, rather unique in that it admits it’s subject is likely too vast to fit into one book (even a more than 500 page one) and so Reed takes the notion of ‘Kayfabe’ as his focus and uses it to trace a through line from the earliest days of the ‘sport’ up to, approximately, the late 2010s and the arrival of American promotion AEW.

For clarity ‘kayfabe’ is, in general terms, the word used to refer to the on screen (in the TV age) world of professional wrestling containing the lore and storylines of the sport as opposed to the real world aspects of the business, but it reaches back well before the advent of TV…

https://tommygirard.wordpress.com/202...

[Will Cowen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellently researched and presented history of Professional Wrestling, with a really insightful take on the the mirror-image rise of Pro Wrestling in Japan, and the subsequent blending of MMA with Pro Wrestling, and pointing out how Kayfabe preserves the discipline and perseveres in what look like historically insurmountable challenges. The Japan section gets a bit muddy with many extraneous match details, which largely feels like a recency bias - it is hard to sift through the mass of information to find those elements that were actually most impactful, and so they all go in the mix. But really a stunning effort, and the bibliography is a goldmine!

[Sarah Parkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book covers a huge amount of ground. The quality of the research and how it's all put together lives up to its ambition: it's insightful in how it brings together the different strands of pro wrestling under the aegis of kayfabe, but it's an actual honest-to-god page turner with which I had fun. There are not enough history books about which I can say that.

[Daniel W · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating look into a little-known history. Covering everything from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performances to vaudeville to post-war Japan, Patrick Reed is able to show how sport and entertainment have been linked - and that, even if they say otherwise, people don’t always want what’s ‘real’!

[Jay Dougherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Besides dealing with a great historical overview of Kayfabe, it's probably the best single volume history of pro wrestling I have read. Extremely well written.

[Bob Barker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Starts slow, gets interesting with Andy Kaufman and falls apart for the last 150+ pages with nonstop UFC nonsense.

[H Kk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this, love how much I learned, wish I had read it before I left politics.