Book review week 1

I'm starting my weekly blogging with a pro wrestling book called "How WCW Killed Vince Russo". Now, to start off with this title is just a play on words. There have been many tragic deaths of wrestlers and wrestling personalities over the past few years but Vince Russo has not officially died yet. Now, to clear up the play on words, I must first let you in on who exactly Vince Russo is.
Vince Russo was the head writer for the creative team in World Wrestling Entertainment or the WWE (then called the World Wrestling Federation, or WWF, but for simplicity's sake, it'll be referred to as the WWE from now on) back in the 1990's. He was credited for being a big part of the success of the WWE back in the "Attitude" era of the mid to late 1990's. The chief rival of the WWE at the time was a long-standing organization known as World Champoinship Wrestling, or WCW. A VERY creative moniker but that's another story. Anyway, Vince Russo was an integral part of the WWE overcoming WCW in the ratings war of the 1990's and in 1999, he decided to leave WWE for a larger contract in WCW. Alot of the reason he chose to leave was due to his feelings toward WWE President, Vince McMahon, but again, another story for later on.
Now, to explain the title of the book, Vince Russo took over the creative dept. of WCW in October of 1999, at a time when WCW needed a big boost that they were hoping he would help provide. After only 3 months on the job, he was suspended by the company. In March of 2001, the company was sold to Vince McMahon and was unceremoniously absolved. To alot of fans and with the help of some wrestlers over the years, the demise of WCW has been widely attributed to the fact that Russo was the man behind alot of bad storylines during the last two years of their existence. Thus the creation of the term, "Vince Russo killed WCW". Now whether this is fair or not is up for debate but in this book, Russo takes his chance and tells his side of the story, along with some other stuff I didn't know about him.
At the beginning of this blog, I'm already about 1/3 of the way through the book. I pick this review up in chapter 10 after he talks about his childhood a little bit and his reasons for initially leaving WWE the first time. Do we see a problem with that last sentence? One thing I have a problem with through the whole book is the fact that he jumps around alot. He explains it in the book as a way for him to make sure that you, the reader, reads the whole book and not just skip to the parts you want to read. To me, this is just the wrong way to write and I hate it. I've read several books that took you through their lives in cronological order without much of an issue. Only really dry books like Bret Hart's presented an issue with this and I made it through that one just fine.
Now I can do a little review in peace now that I have covered that. The 2 hours I spent reading this started with chapter 10 entitled, "Disco Doesn't Suck". This chapter covers Vince's relationship with Glenn Gilberti, AKA The Disco Inferno. For those of you who don't know, Disco Inferno was never really all that popular in WCW. He was ok but it's really hard to believe that Disco is this great TV genius with all these great ideas when his claim to fame is coming out like John Travolta and dancing the night away. But never-the-less, Vince tries to put him over as best he can while describing Disco's best idea as one involving a martian invasion storyline in which they invade and we find out one of the announcers is one and he is the mastermind behind it all. I'll end this review with that thought in your head and return next week for further commentary on this epic classic.