Reddit reviews The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

> He has a wide breadth of knowledge about wrestling but very little depth

He literally wrote an entire book about wrestling history.
https://www.amazon.com/Squared-Circle-Death-Professional-Wrestling-ebook/dp/B008BM4MN0

I think it'll help you if you research pro wrestling's history/past. I've been reading David Shoemaker's "The Squared Circle", and I feel like I've learned a good deal about pro wrestling in general despite only being a few chapters in. For example, the chapter on Gorgeous George explains that GG innovated basically all the classic "heel" traits, like being a cocky/arrogant bastard, flamboyant/effeminate behavior, cheating, etc. He drew massive crowds of people who wanted to see him get his ass kicked, actually became a legit celebrity figure, introduced the idea of pro wrestling being a spectacle of performance art, and was incredibly important in the success of televised pro wrestling.

http://www.cagesideseats.com/2013/5/1/4291028/underrated-and-under-appreciated-wrestler-series-gorgeous-george

>The simple fact of the matter is that Gorgeous George was the most influential wrestler in the history of this business. Professional wrestling would not be the great spectacle that it is today without Gorgeous George. He popularized the entertainment part of sports entertainment. In-ring weddings and the hair match were brought to us by the Human Orchid. George was the first in a long line of wrestlers to capitalize on the concept that people will pay for the chance to see you get beat.

>A significant part of his legacy as an entertainer is the establishment of wrestling on television -- and television itself. Steve Slagle of The Ring Chronicle wrote that:

>>"In a very real sense, Gorgeous George single-handedly established the unproven new technology of television as a viable entertainment medium that could reach literally millions of homes all across the country. Pro wrestling was TV's first real "hit" ...and Gorgeous George was directly responsible for all of the commotion. He was probably responsible for selling more television sets in the early days of TV than any other factor."

Switching gears, be sure to keep in mind wrestling in different parts of the world.

http://www.uproxx.com/sports/2011/10/the-best-and-worst-of-wwe-hell-in-a-cell-2011/3/

>If you told me two years ago that Mistico would be competing on a WWE pay-per-view and the fans would be chanting “boring”, I wouldn’t (and couldn’t) believe it. There are a lot of problems keeping this from being what it should be, and I’ve come up with a handful.

>1. Lucha libre in Mexico is a different style of wrestling, and when I say “style” I don’t mean they do different moves and have different characters, I mean that it’s a completely different genre of pro wrestling. A lot of wrestling fans in the United States can’t get it through their heads that other interpretations of the Hulk Hogan and Steve Austin thing we cling to like a baby blanket exist, and that there is a world where selling doesn’t really matter. Nobody chants “you fucked up” when somebody botches a spot, because the audience accepts that these guys are super heroes doing crazy shit and sometimes they aren’t going to land it. If WWE put a big Keystone Light logo in the middle of the ring, the Internet would berate them into unconsciousness and hashtag them to death until they changed it back. That’s not what happens in Mexico. When you have luchadores trying to add U.S. wrestling psychology to a very not-U.S. wrestling type of match-up, you shortchange lucha libre AND U.S. wrestling, and it comes out sounding like one of those country/rap efforts that sound good for a minute, but God, no.

>2. Heel/face in the United States means “guy the fans like against guy the fans don’t”, and the reason fans don’t like the one guy is because he’s arrogant or cheats, or something. In Mexico, rudos and técnicos aren’t divided by “guy who cheats and guy who doesn’t”, they wrestle two very distinct styles. In WWE you’ve got Hunico playing Sin Cara 2, but he’s too big to be trying to match Mistico move-for-move. He’s not that guy. That’s why they’re messing up a lot. Sin Cara 2 should be wrestling a rougher, rudo style (like Averno, for example) to compliment Sin Cara 1 instead of detract from what makes him special. Hopefully they can move past the mirror image stuff now and get to some real rudo/técnico stuff, or Chico can come bumbling into frame as Sin Cara 3 and give us a punchline.

http://www.examiner.com/article/a-primer-to-strong-style-and-king-s-road-styles

http://www.onlineworldofwrestling.com/columns/misc/ejt04.html

The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker

https://www.amazon.com/Squared-Circle-Death-Professional-Wrestling-ebook/dp/B008BM4MN0