Wrestling with Reading by Patrick Jones

Jones, Patrick.(2005). Wrestling with reading.

From Guys Write for Guys Read. Ed. Jon Scieszka.

You have to understand that the world was different then. I was growing up in Flint, Michigan, and was a huge fan of professional wrestling. But it wasn’t like now, with just Vince and the WWE. Then, every major city had its own wrestlers: my guys were The Sheik and Bobo Brazil. Every other city had its wrestlers who would often visit Flint to fight, and lose to, The Sheik. The only way you could know about those other wrestlers was through magazines. There was no Internet, no cable, no e-mail, no way of sharing information. The only way I could find out about these other wrestlers was through the newsstand wrestling magazines.

So, I’m twelve and I go to my local public library to get something for school. I wasn’t a big reader or library user; it just wasn’t something I did. I’m at the library and I see a whole shelf of different magazines. As I go to check out my books, I summon up all my twelve-year-old courage and ask the librarian if the library has any wrestling magazines. That is what I thought I asked; instead I think I asked her to show me what her face would look like if she sucked on lemon for a hundred years. She looked like she was about to stroke out at the mere mention of wrestling magazines in her library. She made me feel stupid, and I never went back.

Flash Forward now to the summer of 2000. Former professional wrestler and then best-selling author Mick “Cactus Jack Mankind Dude Love Hardcore Legend” Foley is the guest of honor at the American Library Association convention. I’m the one getting to ask him questions as some five hundred plus librarians sit in the audience, then later stand in line to have Foley autograph his book. Sometimes there is justice in the universe.

So it was newsstand wrestling magazines that started me reading, and for that matter, writing. By the time I was eight, I had already published some articles in a wrestling fan newsletter (In This Corner, edited by Danny Shelburg). After I went to college, then graduate school, I started working in libraries. One of the first articles I ever published was called “Wrestling with Magazines for Teenagers,” which called for libraries to buy more magazines generally for teens, and wrestling magazines specifically. The fact that people needed to be urged to buy interesting magazines for teens gives you an idea of how well most libraries did in serving boys. You have to understand that the world was different then.

Imagine my delight as the past couple of years have seen an explosion of books written by (and sometimes for) professional wrestlers: some about the new breed (The Rock), some about the old legends (Freddie Blassie), and some about the best of both worlds (Mick Foley). I don’t read much fiction anymore, even though I try to write now. I don’t read the newsstand wrestling magazines anymore, either. Instead the highlight of every Saturday is when the Wrestling Observer newsletter arrives in my mailbox.

But maybe you don’t like wrestling. That’s OK, but that’s not the point. The point is how something I saw on TV captured me and how reading everything that I could about it made me enjoy it even more. In doing so, it made me enjoy reading, as I learned the lesson about the value of reading for fun and for facts. Reading can be, for many folks, good in and of itself. But for me—for lots of men and boys—reading is the means to reach an end. The end being a fuller understanding, appreciation, and even expertise in an area: wrestling, baseball, fly fishing, computer graphics, model rockets, science-fiction films, rap music, or martial arts. Boys want to read about something. We’ll see a movie or something on TV, and want to know more. A lot more, and that is what reading books and magazines—and Web pages—can do for us.

I’m not sure what happened to that librarian in Flint, and I never got my wrestling magazines from the library. My hope is that boys going into libraries now can find wrestling magazines or something similar. Everyone has to understand that the world is different now.