After reading Vince Russo's beautiful and insightful tome "Forgiven" (review pending), I had the bug to read even more wrestling autobiographies. Having recently acquired an Amazon Kindle I have been able to get wrestling books much more easily than I would have if I was still a paper book reading, tree murderer (by proxy). So I got a bunch of them - Eric Bischoff's, Bret Hart's, The Death of WCW etc... And Chris Jericho's 'Undisputed'.
I've always been a big fan of Chris Jericho. As a worker, he is without a doubt one of the best in the business. His angle with Shawn Michaels when he turned heel in 2008 is one of my all time favourite wrestling feuds and the guy almost carried WWE on his back single-handedly during an era of blandness, Mcmahon million dollar give aways and Z-list Raw celebrity guest hosts (Al Sharpton).
However, Jericho's writing talents are not as sterling as his in-ring work is. The book is laced with boring attempts at comedy and celebrity-mocking metaphors that sound like a bad Eminem b-side (".. as large as Snooki's hair", "..like Justin Bieber feeling his first titty"). Some of the wrestling-based humour is funny, such as the constant digs at Mick Foley in brackets whenever his name comes up, or the list of silly names for Goldberg in Jericho-promo style (Goldfinch, the Bergmeister etc.) - but rarely did I raise a smile or laugh throughout the 400 or so pages (I don't know how many pages exactly, Kindles don't tell you how many pages you've read for some stupid reason - the only flaw of that beautiful machine).
The chapters on his run with WWE were good, and while I knew most of the backstage info already, there was some good bits I didn't know about that I found interesting. The best part was him writing in general about his relationships with certain people throughout his career - Vince Mcmahon especially. Vince seems to be the focal point of all wrestling autobiographies (he is the daddy after all) and reading Jericho's own take on the big boss was quite interesting.
One of the best parts of the book is right near the end, the chapter simply entitled 'Benoit'. He gives his impressions of the man he grew up in the business with and called his friend, as well as the man he was at his time of death. I found it to be very touching writing, as well as the chapters about his mother dying and Eddie Guerrero's death. If the rest of the book had been as sober, I would have enjoyed it a lot more.
But 'Undisputed' was more inebriated than sober, with dozens of chapters detailing his boring drunken antics with rock stars I've never heard of (I'm not a big rock music fan), or his friendship with the Hollywood director Eli Roth and other such trivial crap I didn't care about. If all this had been compressed into one or two chapters that would have been fine, but it ran throughout the course of the book. You would be reading about Jericho's angle with Chyna one moment and then all about a Fozzy documentary the next.
While I respect Jericho has tried to attempt trying other career paths (and I'd love to see him do well 'cause he seems like a nice guy), when you write a book that will be bought 99% by wrestling fans - then 99% of the book should be about wrestling. While I found it to be an easy read and there was interesting parts, I would only recommend it if you're a big Jericho fan or if you're willing to flick past the rock band fanboyism and drunken antics to get to the good stuff. Vince Russo's 'Forgiven' was undisputedly much better (review pending).
Now hit my damn music.
Gotta say 'Enemy' is a tune
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