The Six Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Wrestlemania by Brad BalukjianMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
"The Six Pack" repeats Balukjian’s formula from “The Wax Pack”, a pop-culture, road trip memoir, this time swapping in the rise of WWF pro wrestling for baseball. The story centers on Khosrow Viziri (infamously known to wrestling fans as The Iron Sheik) and the colorful pro-wrestlers he shared a Madison Square Garden ring with on the night he won the WWF title, Dec 16, 1983. It’s a fascinating look behind the pretend "kayfabe" at how utterly chaotic and underhanded the WWF was during its meteoric rise in the 1980s. Wrestling fans of a certain age (raises hand) will eat it up. Stories of Sgt. Slaughter, for whom the line between real life and wrestling gets very blurry, is a stand out. As in “The Wax Pack,” “The Six Pack” is most interesting when it’s centered not on Balukjian’s memoirs, but the wrestlers and personalities he’s chasing down. It’s a standard memoir of looking back at the kayfabe of youth turning into the shoot of adulthood, elevated by the often-cartoonish and fascinating personalities of the pro wrestlers, led by Khos Viziri.
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