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koilungfishAuthor - Chris Jericho
ISBN - 978-0446580069
"My legs were not pleased with their boss and they completely mutinied on me when I woke up the next morning. When I tried to get out of bed I collapsed on the floor while my legs stood beside me snickering. I crawled to the shower and sprayed hot water on my screaming limbs, hoping to reach a truce. They laughed in my face and knotted themselves tighter than Mick Foley. To make matters worse, when I showed up at the arena I found out that I was supposed to wrestle Liger in a championship match for the NJPW junior heavyweight title."A Lion's Tale is the sixth entry in Project: Pro Wrestling, which is starting to show a pattern. The two entries by non-wrestlers - The Death of WCW and Under The Mat - were of less-than-stellar quality, with distinctly negative focus. The three entries by wrestlers - Have A Nice Day!, On Edge and A Lion's Tale - are all non-ghostwritten, of good quality, with distinctly positive focus. The one entry landing between the two - Are You Ready? - is the sole ghostwritten product, being of mediocre quality with a painfully neutral focus. Given that Project: Pro Wrestling contains five entries still to be read, I'm going to go out on a limb and make some predictions.
- Controversy Creates Cash by Eric Bischoff - by a non-wrestler, and possibly ghostwritten. Probably not going to be very good reading. Bischoff is generally reputed to be a pretty smart guy who knows how to sell things, so it will be of interest to note how slick the presentation, how good the communication and how edited the history.
- Foley is Good and The Hardcore Diaries by Mick Foley - presumed to follow his previous form.
- Heartbreak and Triumph by Shawn Michaels and His Ghostwriter - of a wrestler, but definitely ghostwritten by the same guy who ghosted for Are You Ready?. Most likely going to be a whitewash job of sub-average quality.
- Hitman by Bret Hart - non-ghostwritten, by a wrestler with a sideline in journalism. Probably going to be good to very good reading. Mr Hart has something of a reputation for being a grumbler so it will be of interest to see if the general pattern of wrestlers = positive, non-wrestlers = negative holds.
A Lion's Tale details Mr Jericho's aspirations to become a world-class pro wrestler, starting around the age of ten and ending with his WWF - WWE? It gets confusing sometimes - debut. This book is very much about Mr Jericho's rise to fame rather than the actual fame itself. This is not, as with Mr Foley, because the book was written from start to present, since Mr Jericho wrote his book about six years after the last event mentioned, but a conscious choice of the author which he does not explain. Perhaps he feels that is what his readers will find most interesting. Perhaps he feels he has more stories to tell. Perhaps he simply doesn't want to risk upsetting the corporation he works for. Given how he details the various lessons he learned, how he learned the things that made him a success, it is possible Mr Jericho intends his book on some level to be a roadmap for those who follow him.
In any case, as with On Edge, A Lion's Tale is the climb-the-ladder story, only told with much greater skill and with more diversions into strangeness, such as being robbed at gunpoint in Mexico, accidentally buying crack cocaine and figuring out the landlord's surveillance system in a German guesthouse. His recollection of Owen Hart's funeral is the apex of this, combining as it does a surreal blend of genuine grief, socially maladapt Hart family behaviour, a weird and revealing conversation with Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bolea and a quote from Iron Maiden.
Mr Jericho comes across as an entertaining, likeable person with a strongly grounded ability to laugh at himself and his own misdeeds. He also comes across as somehow naive at heart - this, after all, is the man who went looking for a social life by picking a church at random from the Yellow Pages - and the fact that he manages to present himself as a life-long Christian, and worse, a fan of Christian metal, without coming across as a sanctimonious twerp is credit to his abilities as a storyteller. All in all, Mr Jericho comes across as a genuinely nice guy, a man you could trust with your sister, who just wants to have fun doing what he loves doing; being dropped on his head for money.
In terms of Project: Pro Wrestling, A Lion's Tale makes for interesting comparison data. As said, A Lion's Tale is much a bigger, better, less Big Happy Dog version of On Edge, with added Mexico and Japan, and is strongly comparable to Have a Nice Day! in as much as Mr Jericho and Mr Foley followed rather similar career paths - starting off small in their native country, spending time abroad, working on a bigger scale in the US, going to Japan to make a name, joining WCW, hating WCW, leaving WCW for WWE/F and ultimate success. A Lion's Tale is much more insightful as pertains to why WCW was a troubled business than The Death of WCW, since Mr Jericho outlines exactly why it sucked to be young, talented and aspirational in that company. Indeed, some of his descriptions of standard practices at WCW beggar belief that a company could run in such a fashion, which, if true, would definitely make sense of why it stopped running.
All in all A Lion's Tale is a likeable, readable success and silliness story by a good communicator with a strong sense of when to be self-deprecating and when to be emotionally honest.
This book is:
* - a good read with a strong narrative voice
* - Lessons I Have Learned In Getting Famous by Chris Jericho
* - full of some quite bizarre life experiences
This book is not:
* - serious business
* - all the dirt, all the time
* - going to dwell on the negative aspects of just about anything
