the six pack: on the open road in search of wrestlemania

From the bestselling author of The Wax Pack, comes another eye-opening road trip adventure into a pocket of iconic pop culture--professional wrestling--starring the Iron Sheik, Hulk Hogan, Tito Santana, and many more larger-than-life characters of the WWF in the 1980s.

＂Perhaps one of the most truthful and enjoyable reads about my profession ever. I absolutely loved this book.＂ --Former WWF Champion Bret ＂The Hitman＂ Hart
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In 2005, Brad Balukjian left his position as a magazine fact-checker to pursue a dream job: partner with his childhood hero, The Iron Sheik (whose real name was Khosrow Vaziri), to write his biography. Things quickly went south, culminating in the Sheik threatening Balukjian’s life. Now seventeen years later, Balukjian returns to the road in search of not only a reunion with the Sheik, but something much bigger: truth in a world built on illusion.

Balukjian seeks out six of the Sheik’s contemporaries, fellow witnesses to the World Wrestling Federation’s (WWF) explosion in the mid-’80s, to unearth their true identities. As Balukjian drives 12,525 miles around the country, we revisit the heady days when these avatars of strength, villainy, and heroism first found fame and see where their journeys took them. From working out with Tony Atlas (Tony White) to visiting Hulk Hogan’s (Terry Bollea) karaoke bar, we see where these men are now and how they have navigated the cliffs of fame.

The Six Pack combines the spirit of a fan with the rigor of an investigative reporter, tracking down former WWF employees, childhood friends, and mutually curious archivists. Wrestling is perceived as a subculture without a cultural home, somewhere between sport and theater--often dismissed as silly and low-brow. But what makes this book so compelling is the humanity beneath each wrestler. The Iron Sheik, Hulk Hogan, and the rest of the cast were not characters in a comic book movie. They were real people, with families and feelings and bodies that could break. Most of them did, in fact, break; some have been repaired, but none of them will ever be the same.

Brad Balukjian has been published in Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, CNN, National Geographic, the Los Angeles Times, Discover, Natural History, Slate, ISLANDS, Alta, and many others. His first book, The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife hit #7 on the LA Times bestseller list and was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020. He teaches in the Natural History and Sustainability program at Merritt College, is a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences, and discovered 17 species of insects in Tahiti. He lives in Oakland, CA where he’s in an open relationship with his VCR.