Swimming with Piranhas: Surviving the Politics of Professional Wrestling by Howard Brody
Reviewed by Christopher Cruise
The author exposes himself as possibly the most trusting and most screwed-over person ever in this fascinating, sad and disturbing inside look at the lower echelons of professional wrestling.
Howard Brody began as a fan of pro wrestling and rose to become president of the National Wrestling Alliance (although long after that group had become a shell of its former self). For almost thirty years, pro wrestling served as Howard’s crack cocaine, and, as with most crackheads, he ended up with nothing. As nice a guy as you will ever meet, Howard comes across in this book as the dumbest human being on the planet, blindly running down paths that lead, every time, to financial, professional and emotional ruin. Even Jim Cornette, in a forward to the book, asks if Howard is “plumb nuts,” to have persisted “throughout his long and often frustrating journey in professional wrestling.”
Mostly well-written, the book is at times plodding and disconnected, and sometimes has more detail than one needs. The book is also poorly-edited. The author deserved better. And Howard tells me that the book he submitted was at least twice as long as what got printed. I would have liked to have read the longer version.
Howard takes the reader on a harrowing, cringe-inducing and distressing journey, one filled with con-men, losers, wanna-bees, and whack jobs. He experiences at least ten or twenty failures for every little success. The biggest wanna-be, as he readily admits, is the author, a chubby, nebbishy Jewish kid with a chip on his shoulder and a determination to wring meaning out of his life. (I told Howard he should subtitle the book “What’s a nice Jewish boy doing in a sport like this?”) On almost every page we are introduced to people who come into the author’s life and, within a few pages, leave him distraught and devastated. It’s like watching a train about to collide with a bridge and being powerless to stop it. You want to be Superman and save Howard, but it’s too late, and you wonder if the train actually wants to be stopped from ramming the bridge. It’s clear that Howard could have benefitted from therapy, and even an intervention. It might have made things easier on him and on the people around him.
Howard may be the most-powerful magnet for losers and frauds I have ever heard of or read about. He seems to gather freaks to him like prostitutes gather STDs, and to the same effect.
Either he has a great memory or he kept a detailed journal since childhood with the intent of putting his life’s experiences into a book. (Cornette accurately describes the book as “incredibly detailed.”) The book has a ring of authenticity and will fascinate any pro wrestling fan – there’s inside information here that one just cannot get anywhere else. But it makes you want to run screaming from anything to do with pro wrestling (maybe that’s the real value of this book). Why would anyone take so many risks for so few rewards? Howard calls it “wrestle-itis,” and if it isn’t a condition accepted by the psychiatric profession, it surely ought to be.
If this book does nothing else, it will force you to confront the dreams question: How long do you continue to pursue your dream? Do you continue to pursue it after five years of getting nowhere, or ten or fifteen or twenty? Or never? This book details the author’s dreams being crushed at every turn over more than twenty years. It cost him all of his money, some of his family’s money, many of his friends and two marriages (to the same woman). While his dream cost him much and gave him little (save travels around the world, but, one wonders, was that worth a broken life?), it is important to note that his dreams cost others, too. He can’t get off easy on that score. He hurt a lot of people along the way to try to make his dreams come true. But, again, I ask, how long do you keep pursuing a dream until you realize it will not come true? Is there ever a time when you stop? It’s clear in this case that, for Howard, he should never have begun his pursuit. His life would have been less interesting, but more stable. And maybe he would have hurt fewer people.
In fact, because of his dream to have an impact on pro wrestling, his life was unstable for over twenty years, his finances always iffy (he couldn’t even support his wife), his lifestyle peripatetic and often pathetic. He met everyone in the odd world of professional wrestling, becoming the Forrest Gump of that world, but made virtually no impact. For all of the anguish, all of the pain, all of the crushing blows to his ego and dreams, he ends up nearly fifty years old with nothing – no money, no job, no wife, no life. What price dreams? To have lived your life being taken advantage of, being a sap, consorting with thieves and frauds and murderers and all kinds of unsavory characters? To his credit, Howard takes full responsibility and does not flinch from making the most horrible judgments on himself. His wounds are self-inflicted, and he knows it and does not shy away from saying so. But why so often and over so many years? When do you start learning and stop making mistakes? The evidence in this case is, never.
Give him credit - this may be the most honest autobiography ever written. While the author gives others in his life the benefit of the doubt, but does not cut himself any slack – nor, let’s make clear, should he. He makes himself an easy target. He even sent me a copy of the book to review, surely knowing that I would not be anything but honest in my assessment of the book and of his life.
He comes across as completely lacking in the ability to make judgments about the clearly unsavory people who come into his life. It’s like Groundhog Day for him. While he claims he learned from his mistakes, he seems to make the same mistakes over and over except with different people. What gives? He is so desperate to succeed, to be somebody, and so blinded by that desire, that he gives up any semblance of a real life to be on the fringes of the fake life of pro wrestling, and seems to build his dreams on the slightest hint that someone will “invest” in his wrestling business. Yet he never seems to be able to create a business model where the promotion makes financial sense. He always needs someone to bail him out. What kind of a business is it if it doesn’t make money? Even now, I wonder if he has learned anything. Given a million dollars, would he turn it into five million in a few years by running a wrestling promotion or would he turn it into five? Dollars. I’d bet the latter. Despite all that he has gone through, he does not seem to have learned anything. I hope I’m wrong here, but from the available evidence, it doesn’t appear that I am.
Cornette puts it well, and more nicely than me, when he notes that “if I’d had as many mishaps as he’d had for each success, I’d have thought he was even crazier than the rest of us for wanting to be part of this wacky industry.”
You want to scream at Howard on every page. Is he persistent? Sure is. Is he crazy? Seems to be. Is he pathetic? At almost every turn. He is gullible and naïve, and at almost every turn makes exactly the wrong decision. If one were to have followed him around the past twenty or so years, and did exactly the opposite of what he did, success would have been almost guaranteed. He had the reverse Midas touch – almost everything he touched turned to shit, not gold.
And yet, in Howard’s defense, so many times he was thiiiis close to success. Had just a few things gone differently he might have been one of the country’s top pro wrestling promoters. Had he set his ego aside, had be hooked up with people who were at least marginally sane and level-headed, had he had just a little of his own money rather than having to put himself in a bad bargaining position by being dependent on handouts and having to survive on the kindness of strangers, maybe, just maybe things would have gone differently.
Is there a lesson to be learned here? Is his life redeemable? I honestly don’t know. As someone who has loved professional wrestling since he was nine years old, and has worked in the field off and on and who still desires to do so, I understand the disease that the author suffered (still suffers?) from. I just hope he has conquered it and can go on with his life. Cornette calls the disease “incurable.” For Howard’s sake, I hope Cornette is wrong. This bitch of a mistress has cost Howard Brody, and the people who love him, too much. If Howard tries to get back into the business, I’ll be the first to try to arrange an intervention. I just don’t know if there is a rehab clinic anywhere in the world that could help him.
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