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Review: ‘Under the Black Hat’ a revealing second memoir by famed WWE announcer Jim Ross

Posted: May 12th 2020 By: Josh Needleman

UNDER THE BLACK HAT: My Life in the WWE and Beyond. By Jim Ross and Paul O’Brien. Tiller Press. 320 pages. $26.99.

Jim Ross takes his first yank at the reader’s heartstrings in the foreword of his new memoir, “Under the Black Hat: My Life in the WWE and Beyond.” Traveling back to 1999, Ross recalls how, after a second bout with Bell’s palsy left half his face paralyzed, he knew his inability to smile would be a liability as a television personality. Even fans on the street, he said, prodded him to smile.

“How I wished I could,” he wrote.

Ross’ second memoir (his first, “Slobberknocker: My Life in Wrestling” was published in 2017) is a must-read for wrestling fans. The voice of the most popular period in the sport’s history, Ross dispenses intimate details of behind-the-scenes goings-on, most notably of his interactions with Vince McMahon, WWE’s idiosyncratic chairman.

But Ross is most compelling when he reveals his vulnerability and explores the caverns of his psyche and his heart, detailing how both were tested in his turbulent years working for McMahon and in the wake of his late wife Jan’s death.

In addition to his duties as play-by-play man on Raw, WWE’s flagship Monday evening show, Ross served as WWE’s vice president of talent relations until 2004, when he was replaced without warning. Ross suspects the demotion was, in part, the result of his purchasing a second home in his native Oklahoma, and that it signaled the beginning of the end of his relationship with McMahon: “Vince liked the old Mafia motto: Once you were in, you were in for life.”