Any wrestling fan of the 80s will love this book. Filled with behind the scene insights and stories, this is a heavily researched book which goes beyond simply tying wrestling tidbits together. It blends the history of individual regions into a tapestry of wrestling lore which, while separate, is part of a larger piece of a past time we have all shared at some point in our lives. This book gives every wrestling fan an inside ride into the history of this great sport.

I really enjoyed this book it is a general overview of how Vince McMahon turned wrestling from many small promoters into the huge wwe wrestling company he controls I would have liked a little more detail but its a must read for any wrestling fan

A richly detailed look at a bygone era in professional wrestling. Fantastically researched and written.

Death of the Territories: Expansion, Betrayal and the War that Changed Pro Wrestling Forever by Tim Hornbaker focuses on the rise of Vince McMahon's vision of a nationwide wrestling program. However, rather than exploring Vince's process, this one really focuses on the regional wrestling model and where it all fell apart. For those who aren't aware (ad admittedly I didn't know a lot of this information prior to reading the book), pro wrestling used to be built on a regional model. Different promoters "ran" different cities, had regular venues in those cities, and had their own talent. With the regional promoters, there was some crossover with superstars, but they each maintained their niche. With Vince McMahon's rise, he sought to change this and expand the reach of a wrestling organization. For me, I found this to be a captivating read (and a thanks to NetGalley for letting me check it out). I learned a lot about the beginnings of some of my favorite wrestlers from the nineties. Not knowing the "way things used to be" with wrestling, I assumed that they'd just come through the WCW/WWE circuit. This was very much blowing up what I thought I knew and providing me some intriguing perspective on the industry. This is both a "what might have been" had the business plans of some organizations gone differently, as well as a "how this came to be as it is" explanation. It was a good dose of nostalgia, while also doing an in-depth exploration of the industry.

This book focuses on the early days of wrestling and its scrupulous promoters, as well as the formation of different territories that those promoters controlled. This is a comprehensive history of alliances and associations, regional territories, promoters, bookers, and wrestling talent as the focus of the sport shifted from regionalism to syndication and global expansion.

As a young kid in northeast Texas in the 80s, I lived just over two hours from Dallas, TX, Little Rock, AR, and Shreveport, LA. Wrestling was my life. This lasted well into my college years. The stories in this book illustrate how the way was paved for the superstars of today. Major turning points for professional wrestling occurred in the 70s and 80s, with many more to come in the decades to follow. As a lifelong fan of wrestling, I have lived the stories in this book, and this was a great walk down memory lane. This book, however, goes deep behind the scenes of the wrestling world. Promoters and bookers are spotlighted, giving the fans an insider’s look at the business.

This book chronicles the history of wrestling promotions and territories and the various changes that took place largely on the 1980s. The book concludes with Ted Turner buying out Jim Crockett in 1988 and forming World Class Wrestling. A whole other book could be written about the WWF vs. WCW feud, ECW, TNA, and beyond.

As a consumer of wrestling back in the day, you saw only what was presented before you. This mostly consisted of regional talent combined with borrowed headliners. The majority of consumers knew very little about what was going on in other parts of the country, like what other talent was out there or the struggles other promotions were going through.

The big names featured in this book are Jack Adkisson and his Von Erich boys of World Class Championship Wrestling, Jim Crockett, Bill Watts, Verne Gagne, Jerry Jarrett, Don Owen, Stu Hart, Bob Geigel, Carlos Colon, Lia Maivia, Joe Blanchard, Bob Armstrong, San Muchnick, Ron Fuller, and Paul Boesch.

I never realized just how much power and influence
Ole Anderson and Dusty Rhodes had in the business in those days. You always saw both of them in front of a microphone or in the ring, but their main jobs were behind the scenes. I also never realized that the NWA - the National Wrestling Alliance - was a group comprised of many different promotions. As this book points out, many people wrongly assumed that Jim Crockett was the NWA. When I was growing up that is how it appeared. But the members of the NWA collaborated and shared talent in order to bolster recognition of their individual promotions.

Vince McMahon seems to operate by the old mantra “you have to spend money to make money”. He believed in taking chances and long range planning.

McMahon drew criticism from legends in the business as well as media professionals, claiming he had made a mockery of the sport and turned it into a circus. Many claimed that McMahon was developing a monopoly on the business, forcing regional promotions out of business.

Vince had the money, guts, and foresight to make bold moves in the business. He forever changed the wrestling world, and everyone else was forced to try and keep up with the times. He transformed the landscape and launched professional wrestling into the national spotlight.

I highly recommend this book to all fans of professional wrestling, young and old. I received this as a free ARC from ECW Press on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

DEATH OF THE TERRITORIES, by Tim Hornbaker, recounts the professional wrestling world starting with its geographically organized existence from the 1950's to the late 1970's as an alliance where each region knew how to work with and coexist amongst the group as a whole to the total upheaval of the wrestling community. A revolution started by Vince McMahon Jr and the WWF and ended in the late 1980's with a new dynamic; McMahon on top, and everyone else retired, gone, and/or wiped out. Any remaining other wrestling entities are so beneath McMahon's company financially and in popularity it's as if there are in a completely different avenue of the wrestling business.
Hornbaker really digs deep into the history of wrestling: the promoters, the organizations, and the wrestlers themselves. The layout of the book attempts to be chronological, but sometimes the tangents to explain a particular organization or person leaves the calendar and then circles back to the proper order later. The information and stories Hornbaker has gathered are great; there are things I've never known and stories that are one of a kind about many colorful personas, plentiful in the history of professional wrestling. Growing up in the 1980's in North Carolina, I watched first hand many of the shows and organizations that Hornbaker wrote about and having his gathered insights to look back on, it brings so many more layers and makes everything from that time so much more interesting. The book's layout is challenging at times with so many names and regions to keep track of, which while mirroring how many wrestling fans felt at the time, as a reader was tough to keep straight. As a reader, I wish Hornbaker could have formally had some breakout chapters to highlight certain people and/or groups so that there is a definitive break in the timeline of the book and then drop the reader back in when the spotlight is done.
Layered in facts and great tales of wrestling past, DEATH OF THE TERRITORIES is a must have for the wrestling enthusiast. I think wrestling touched most people in the 1980's and was a key component in the pop culture of the time. To that end, most people who read this novel will find some way to connect to it and take away new knowledge on the business of professional wrestling.

(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.)

For decades, distinct professional wrestling territories thrived across North America. Each regionally-based promotion operated individually and offered a brand of localized wrestling that greatly appealed to area fans. Promoters routinely coordinated with associates in surrounding regions, and the cooperation displayed by members of the National Wrestling Alliance made it easy for wrestlers to traverse the landscape with the utmost freedom.
Dozens of territories flourished between the 1950s and late ’70s. But by the early 1980s, the growth of cable television had put new outside pressures on promoters. An enterprising third-generation entrepreneur who believed cable was his opportunity to take his promotion national soon capitalized on the situation.
A host of novel ideas and the will to take chances gave Vincent Kennedy McMahon an incredible advantage. McMahon waged war on the territories and raided the NWA and AWA of their top talent. By creating WrestleMania, jumping into the pay-per-view field, and expanding across North America, McMahon changed professional wrestling forever.
Providing never-before-revealed information, Death of the Territories is a must-read for fans yearning to understand how McMahon outlasted his rivals and established the industry’s first national promotion. At the same time, it offers a comprehensive look at the promoters who opposed McMahon, focusing on their noteworthy power plays and embarrassing mistakes.

I have long been a fan of professional wrestling. Whether it be the WWF/WWE that I grew up on, or the days of WCW and ECW, I have always had a certain attraction to wrestling and the characters involved in it. For the most part, those characters were the people in front of the camera - the performers, in other words.

This book took me back a long way and gave me a much clearer view of the people behind the cameras. In fact, so far back that television wasn't even a consideration for these wrestling territories. They often shared big name talent with each other to help bring in the punters but it wasn't until the introduction of - and understanding of - television that one man in particular stood out from the crowd - and ended up crushing them.

Was this a good book? Absolutely. The knowledge of the promoters, the wrestlers, the expansions and the locations is first-rate. I don't say that lightly. It could have been very easy to just focus on the name McMahon and tell that story, but the other promoters before him (including his father) help tell the complete story.

There was a little bit of repetition in the first 1/4 of the book with promoters and their territories and the story didn't completely flow chronologically. It was a little frustrating as I went along.

But, other than that, this was a book that captivated me from start to finish and I was able to put the book down a more knowledgeable person. And you can't argue with that!


Paul
ARH

While some might find the method used to tell this tale I found it to be fascinating. I wouldn’t say I’m a mega-wrestling fan but I have enjoyed watching it from time to time. When my son was you, during the huge Hulk Hogan days, he loved it and dreamed of being a professional wrestler. I took him to live shows when they came by and he loved them. Times change, he moved on to different things and I watch only on occasion now but have collected some of the DVDs of those bygone days.

But this book isn’t just about the WWE, though it takes up most of the space. It’s about the territory system that was in place long before the WWE even existed in its current form. This book takes us back to the first glory days of wrestling when it was on TV, those days of the black and white 6 inch screen TVs where grapplers actually wrestled. It talks about the formation of the NWA, a combination of promoters from across the country who banded together to claim their piece of the pie, their territory, and to dominate that territory as their own.

There were minor rivalries on occasion but most were shut down by those in power. They each had complete control of their part of the country. When Vince McMahon Jr. took over his father’s company that all changed. He saw the potential and invested in it. He saw what professional wrestling could be and grabbed that by the horns and flipped it over into something massive unlike anything ever seen before by those old time promoters.

The book chronicles the events that changed wrestling forever. It tosses out the names of long forgotten wrestlers who were at the top at one time as well as hall of famers and current ring stars. It describes the different territories, who ran them and who was featured in each. And it describes the breakdown of this system, something that was bound to happen as times changed.

Event attendance and TV ratings are a part of this story. The purchasing of air time is part of it. Alliances between warring factions in an effort to stay afloat are talked about. And the eventual upended business that came about when it was all over is reflected on.

If you’re a fan of professional wrestling then my guess is you’ll enjoy this book. Not just the type of fan that loves the pomp and circumstance that the business has become but the behind the scenes type fan. The one who knows names like Dick the Bruiser, Bruiser Brody and Chief Wahoo Daniels. If that’s you then by all means give this one a read.

A comprehensive exploration of the territorial system of wrestling past and how that system met its ultimate demise. Though being central to the demise, this is not a biography of Vince McMahon, but rather is a biography of the collective territories. This is an informative and vital read for wrestling fans new and old. Wrestling fans of a certain age across the country will relive fond memories, big personalities, and the metamorphosis of wrestling while navigating these pages. Newer fans will understand the roots of wrestling and how this conglomerate came about.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Death of the Territories - and the Rise of Vince McMahon

Tim Hornbaker's "Death of the Territories" is a detailed, comprehensive, exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting, simply because there's SO much information to unpack) look at the death of the territorial system in pro wrestling and the rise of Vince McMahon, TitanSports, and the WWF (now WWE) as a national and later international powerhouse.

Hindsight makes it easy to paint the AWA's Verne Gagne as old, out of touch, behind the times, and complicit in his own demise. Hornbaker, however, shows that Gagne was fighting for his life, trying desperately to evolve, and doing everything he can as Vince McMahon poached his talent (wrestlers, announcers, behind-the-scenes workers, you name it), his arenas, and his television timeslots over and over for years and years. That's just one example of one territory. Every territory experienced similar struggles and setbacks. They were all fighting for a piece of the increasingly dwindling pie as the WWF went national.

This isn't an anti-McMahon manifesto though. As the book points out, if McMahon didn't do it, Jim Crockett would have. The world was changing, and the demise of the territorial system was all but inevitable. That didn't make the stakes any less personal for the losing territories though, such as when Greg Gagne asked his former tag team partner Jim Brunzell, "How could you do this" - leave the AWA for the WWF - "after all we've done for you?"

Hornbaker's writing style can be a bit dry and clinical, but his skills as a reporter are top-notch. The book can be a bit confusing to follow at times, but that may be the fault of this reader, as there's an overwhelming abundance of information on hand here. That's a good thing though. I'd rather too much detail and knowledge than not enough. Therefore, the author made the right decision to overload the book with an excess of facts and figures.

If you ever had a question about the life and death of your favorite regional territory, chances are Hornbaker has addressed it in "Death of the Territories." If you were a fan of wrestling during this turbulent time period, this is an indispensable account of what happened - and why.

Beginning with the explanation of how wrestling established imposed territories (mostly in the US but truly across the world), Hornbaker recounts how, in both incremental spurts and monumental leaps, wrestling formed itself into the form in which we view it today.

Yeah, this could also just be summarized as "the rise of Vince McMahon Jr", as that's what it truly amounts to, but the nitty-gritty, Machiavellian tactics that composed of the shifts in loyalty, the creative elements leading to innovative changes, and the scores of tragedies and missed opportunities need to be read to be believed.

Hornbaker doesn't just casually report who did what and where they did it---also laid out here are moments wherein we see how wrestling *used* to operate, when the pyrotechnics and pizzazz that we correlate with the modern-day antics of the WWE empire. Some readers might remember those days (not me...I joined the wrestling bandwagon in the early 90s, so much of this is not trodden ground).

If there's a hang=up in the book, it's that there was a choice made to switch between entities and/or territories in the narrative within small time frames (i.e. Memphis in the time of late 1986 to early 1987; next chapter is Florida-ish area from early 1986-late 1987) and, as Hornbaker a) can only report the events as they happened and b) can't help when they happened, I can see why this choice was made, but it could be confusing for some readers, as sticking to a strict, linear timeline and then plugging in the events as they happened *where* they happened might read more coherently. This is just presuming that most readers will subscribe to the idea that, as they read further, time is progressing forward, and not backward. The book suffers a little because I don't think that the reader is given the 100% opportunity (as opposed to, like, the 90% at present) to have it cleanly laid out, detail by detail, how it ended up as WCW versus WWF.

Are you a wrestling fan? If so, then this is mandatory reading. Learn the history. If you don't like pro wrestling and are a skeptic on if the sport holds anything of value, then I implore you to give this a shot.

Many thanks to NetGalley and ECW Press for the advance review.

Loved it. Growing up as a kin in Fort Lauderdale in the early 80s I loved FCW. As I got a little older I experienced the advent of the WWE. This book lays out in a very entertaining way all the machinations that went on between the territories and the WWE. The book was very through but far from a boring resuscitation of facts. I would say I fall just below an superfan so there was much in the book that was. Newmaterial for me. Thank you for the opportunity to read the book.

Professional wresting is often stigmatized but the fact is that it is also quite the lucrative industry. For instance, the WWE (formerly the WWF and, before that, the WWWF) is a multi-billion dollar company. This book tells the story of one of the most transformative periods of the history of professional wrestling that was also the genesis of the current multi-billion dollar WWE that we know today.

Like Mr. Hornbaker's previous works, this book is distinguished by exhaustive research and attention to detail. There is a lot of detail in this book (such as things like attendance figures and gate receipts for particular wrestling events) but detail is the key to telling the full story of the transformation that was thrust upon the professional wrestling industry in this time. This book is required reading for every fan of professional wresting and will be quite eye-opening for fans of modern wrestling (perhaps from the so-called "Attitude Era of the mid to late 1990's to present).