A Read on Wrestling: Bill Hanstock’s ‘We Promised You a Great Main Event: An Unauthorized WWE History’

I did not hire a professional photographer for this image.

I can’t claim to be any sort of expert on wrestling. I knew some wrestlers in high school, but that’s not really the same as Bill Hanstock’s focus in We Promised You a Great Main Event (2020). Growing up I had one of those stuffed Wrestling Buddies. I had the Sting one with the blue face paint and the blue scorpion down the leg. I find that unusual now. My sister once won a Bart Simpson doll in a public school raffle and my mother made her return it the next day. We were a household of rules upholding decency.

Here’s the thing, though, a lot of other households also seemed to be held together by common decency and the like, and when I would visit those houses, wrestling and The Simpsons and Mortal Kombat were all at my fingertips, were all on the TV screens. At the Coopers’ house we reinvented American Gladiators. Across the street we performed Fatalities. At the Whiteheads’, an older kid named Donald gave me the rundown on the Four Horsemen. It had little to do with Revelations. At the Boyntons’ Ice Cube told me what a good day was.

The internet may have been in dialup, but the information available behind other people’s front doors was already in 5G. You just had to have a bicycle and the willingness to knock. Benjamin Drevlow was kind enough to…