Dan Jones
Dan Jones Wrestles with Two Books on Fighting
The Last Wrestlers: A Far Flung Journey in Search of a Manly Art
By Marcus Trower
Ebury 387pp £10.99 order from our bookshop
Tent Boxing: An Australian Journey
By Wayne McLennan
Granta Books xxpp £11.99 order from our bookshop
The last live wrestling match I saw was at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 2002. The highlight was a ‘Fatties Match’, in which three men with a combined weight of nearly 100 stone cavorted around the creaking ring. They were wearing leotards and tiny pairs of underpants, and performed numerous unlikely somersaults that did none of them much physical damage, but made a thunderous noise.
According to the chronology of Marcus Trower’s new book, The Last Wrestlers, while I was watching obese men tickle each other, he was in Nigeria, tracking down proper fighters. Trower regards modern Western wrestlers (from men like Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, to the stars of the American WWE shows
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