Tuesday, September 6, 2011

"Coutdown to Lockdown"

Countdown to Lockdown: A Hardcore Journal (Mick Foley)

I am apparently one of the few people who enjoyed Foley's previous book, "Hardcore Diaries", so I was happy to read in the introduction that this book follows the same format - that is to say the birth, life, and hopefully successful climax of a single wrestling angle. In "Hardcore Diaries", it was a fairly horrible journey, with our author at the end wishing he'd just stayed at home, but happily at the end of "Countdown to Lockdown" everything goes about as well as it can when you have a 300 pound, 45-year old retired wrestler lacing up the boots one last time. Um, spoiler alert.
As always, Foley is a wonderful author with a gift for perfect understatment and setting up horrible, obvious jokes that make you laugh anyway after they land. On the downside, he also continues his bad habit of rambling about how much he loves a random celebrity (having now moved from Katie Couric to Tori Amos, who he won't stop talking about). For this book he introduces the "Wrestlemeter", a device that is supposted to let you know how much he's going to be talking about Tori Amos or his charitable work in Sierra Leone as opposted to the main thrust of the book, which is dissecting in fascinating detail what goes into a modern wrestling angle. To be honest, I don't think the Wrestlemeter works. It's not specifically that I only want to read about wrestling, it's more that I just don't want to hear him going on about how much he loves Tori Amos for pages. In fact one of my favorite parts of the entire book has nothing to do with wrestling, it's Foley admitting to and then describing in amusing detail his watching and then re-watching in slow motion a scene from Mad Men trying to see if the actress is using a body double when he's supposted to be working out.
In that respect, the Wrestlemeter is actually unnessessary; All you need to do is start flipping pages when you see "Tori Amos" or "Sierra Leone" and you'll be fine. I don't think I really skipped that many pages - maybe 10 or 15 out of a 314-page book -  and the rest is just as good as anything he's ever written. Recommended for wrestling fans and non-wrestling fans alike, or, I guess, Tori Amos fans.

Grade: A-

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