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Review: Ed "Strangler" Lewis: Facts within a Myth

Posted: Oct 13th 2017 By: Steve Yohe

Easily the definitive work on Ed Lewis, and the heavyweight title picture of his era. Ed Lewis occupied that enormously important era of wrestling history between the Gotch era and the Thesz era, when the sport went from the slower, "realistic" Greco-Roman and catch-as-catch-can styles to the flashier, strictly performance-based style that we have today. Lewis and Co. help build the sport back up after the Gotch/Hackenschmidt fiasco, and along the way effectively commit a few similar travesties of their own, killing various towns over the years, but always steadily moving the sport forward. An impressive amount of research went into this work, by a murderer's row of pro wrestling historians and beaten into shape by the inimitable Steve Yohe.

The photos are wonderful, and the work is thoroughly cited with an enormous number of end notes used. In a lot of ways, as the title of the book alludes to, this book is both a biography of Lewis, and a partial debunking of his myth. Both "The Fall Guys" and "Hooker" are cited liberally, along with an unpublished autobiography Lewis had done, and every story compared to the newspaper coverage of the time. In fact, the end notes, over 480 of them, take up probably 20% of the book's page count, filling in a lot of detail that just didn't fit into the narrative of the main body. Some of them take up nearly half a page, and they offer not only expanded detail about the point referenced, but also provide a lot of Yohe's reasoning behind many of his conclusions about what may really have been behind the stories.

The biggest (only?) flaw, however, is that the book desperately needed one final pass by a proof reader to catch all the typos and grammatical errors. This book could really use a second edition, both to clean up the problems with the text, as well as possible fill in a bit more detail now that there are so many more newspaper archives available online. Another few dozen matches could be added to the record book appendix.

That said, this is an important work, and easily rivals Lou Thesz & Kit Bauman's "Hooker: The Authentic Wrestler's Adventures Inside the Bizarre World of Professional Wrestling" and Tim Hornbaker's "National Wrestling Alliance: The Untold Story of the Monopoly That Strangled Pro Wrestling" as one of the most detailed and heavily researched books on the history of the "sport"

4/5 Stars