Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling

by Brian Oliu

Professional wrestling is a strange beast full of contradictions-part live soap opera, part hypermasculine violent spectacle. It is an indelibly American pastime enjoyed by millions and leads a select group of wrestlers to international fame. It's also a sport that leaves many of its athletes broken and battered, at serious risk of addiction, poverty, and early death. Body Drop looks deeply at the nuances of professional wrestling and its strange place within American culture. Brian Oliu offers deeply personal meditations on such topics as disability, chronic pain, body image, masculinity, class, and more, all through the lens of American professional wrestling. Wrestling is a sport that is gleefully fake, but the people who love it are very real. In holding up this particular part of American culture to scrutiny, Oliu acknowledges that the wrestling world, like our own, is one that has been crafted, but by showing readers the scaffolding that holds everything up, he invites us
to figure out what holds our own realities straight.

208 pages, Paperback

Published September 28, 2021

About the author

Brian Oliu currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His publications include three chapbooks and five full-length collections of nonfiction, ranging on topics from Craigslist Missed Connections, to computer viruses, to the arcade game NBA Jam. He has two projects forthcoming in 2021: a collaborative chapbook on the Rocky films with the poet Jason McCall, “What Shot Did You Ever Take,” by The Hunger Press, and a full-length collection of essays, “Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling” by The University of North Carolina Press.

Reviews

[Maddie Mondeaux · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like a 3.5 for me, mostly because a lot of this went over my head. I went in expecting a cultural analysis, but instead, these are short personal essays/prose poems written in that very specific Lyrical Nonfiction Voice that I find inscrutable. What I COULD parse was a really heartfelt deep dive into the author's personal relationship to his body and his chronic pain, examined through the lens of his lifelong obsession with professional wrestling. Not what I was expecting, and it may not help me much as I continue to research the history of pro wrestling, but a good collection of essays in its own right.

[Brian Oliu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote this book! I think it's pretty good! I hope that you like it too.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher University of North Carolina Press for an advanced copy of this book on professional wrestling and so much more.

Brian Oliu in his book Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling, has created one of the most personal, oddest, informative and frankly beautiful and different books on professional wrestling that I have ever read. A mix of history, memoir, occupational, stream of consciousness writing as if the author spoke the words aloud in the midst of a fever dream. Or after taking a top rope splash to the concrete, and nobody there to stop the impact.

At once a history of the sport, well a modern history of the sport, full of terms and insider lingo with observations on historical highspots and matches, that the author was a fan of, combined with a memoir of growing up as a heavy child, and all the fun that could be. I was a heavy child too, so I understood this section, and the rage that he said he felt, but did not want to act on. Actions have consequences, as anyone watching wrestling can tell you. Mr. Oliu discusses body image, pain, trauma, mental and physical anguish, aspirations and reality with essays on the wrestlers, some never named and their travails in the rings, with his own life story. The book is truly different, in some parts so clear, in some you feel as if your head bounced on the mat, the air is gone from your lungs and you have to finish reading before the concussion gets worse, or the bell rings. I can't say enough.

If the reader has a history with WWE, WWF, WCW and since most of these wrestlers seem to be there now AEW it helps to make sense of some essays. You will appreciate the stories of the unnamed Harts or know who Jericho and Malenko are. However coming in to this book unknowing might be a great thing too. Like arriving in a new wrestling territory back in the day, and having only what you see in front of you to decide who to root for and who to boo. I really enjoyed this book, and look forward to reading it again. 6 stars on the Meltzer scale.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes in a review one says "this book is not for everybody." Well, this book is for almost nobody, to be honest. Its audience is people who are deeply steeped in the lore and history of professional wrestling and who are also ready to read dense, evocative prose poems that use the images and phrases of wrestling to create collages of sights and sounds, reflections on bodies and mortality. A piece comparing Hulk Hogan to a tornado that ripped through a town (and vice versa, the tornado to Hulk Hogan). A meditation connecting Owen Hart's accidental falling death to a loved one's suicide by hanging. A elegy for the erasing of Chris Benoit. A whole piece about Donald Trump without once mentioning his name. A paean to CM Punk as a Messiah, a King Arthur always on the cusp of returning to remake the world in his image. They're beautiful and bittersweet, and Oliu has a gift for the last line with a twist that takes the breath away. This book is not for everybody, but it was very much for me.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both the essay and pro wrestling are spaces for the obsessive, and Oliu’s love of both are a champion tag team in this volume. The body and pain, presentation and backstage, the true and the pretend all duke it out in service of your entertainment. Would some familiarity with pro wrestling or the OLU (Oliu Literary Universe) help? Possibly. But the sentences are still top-notch.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Repetitive, well written pointless frippery.

[Robyn Hammontree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent from start to finish.

[Chelsea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Of course the book had wrestling and wrestlers featured in it, but my gosh, it went so off-track with these weird, straying anecdotes that were so annoying and weird. The grammar and punctuation needed better editing too.

[Blaine Duncan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mysterious and heartbreaking, Brian Oliu’s book taps into the universal nature of what it is to live but does so through the lens of professional wrestling. The shifts here are sudden and playful as he reckons with what’s real both in wrestling and in each of our lives, as he reckons with himself.

Using tropes in wrestling to discuss the tropes of life, Oliu presents readers with the starkness that the cruelty of the real world can be much worse than what’s in the ring.

This is an excellent, beautiful book; it’s for a wrestling fan or a fan of life’s mysteries.