Wrestling to Rasslin': Ancient Sport to American Spectacle

by Gerald Morton, George O'Brien (Contributor)

Wrestling to Rasslin’ traces the roots of one of man’s oldest competitive sports. Beginning in sporting bars in the late 1800s and graduating to Barnum sideshow tents, wrestling has thrilled the world over with such early athletes as William Muldoon, George Hackenschmidt, and Tom Jenkins. After World War II and the advent of television, wrestling took a turn toward the dramatic, emphasizing conflicts between good and evil.

170 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2005

About the author

Planning to retire to the mountains of NC in 2005, Gerald Morton decided to earn his National Registry EMT-Basic certification so he could help out with the local volunteer ambulance service near his home. Little did he know that this community-minded action would lead to a new career as a paramedic. This career in Virginia as a Bristol Lifesaving Crew medic has provided experiences which remind him of an earlier event in his own life--in 2001 he was resuscitated from sudden cardiac death. Never Alone in the Back: A Paramedic's Reflections on Faith, Prayer and the Journey with God illuminates Morton's experience with God from both sides of the ambulance stretcher.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

While short and somewhat dated, with a few errors most likely as a result of the knowledge available at the time, and despite a few arguments to legitimacy (drawing a line of influence, rather than coincidence, between Noh theatre and wrestling, for example, or the rather grandiose anthropological argument of wrestling as "ritual") that don't hold much weight, this is one of the best books on wrestling I have read. A fantastic summary of its early history, combined with a succinct analysis of its then-current state of theatricality, and a thorough (and well-expressed) explanation of why certain stories and angles work, and what makes a good wrestling hero or villain.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pathbreaking but now extremely dated study of professional wrestling by two academics for whom this was clearly a labor of love. The prose at points is clunky to the point of incomprehensibility, factual errors and misspellings abound, and yet FWTR is in many respects deeper and more interesting than Barthes' oft-cited essay on the sport.