We Promised You a Great Main Event cover art

We Promised You a Great Main Event

An Unauthorized WWE History

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We Promised You a Great Main Event

By: Bill Hanstock
Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
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About this listen

Unauthorized. Unrestricted. No holds barred.

In We Promised You a Great Main Event, longtime sports journalist Bill Hanstock pulls back the curtain to give a smart fan’s account of WWE and Vince McMahon’s journey to the top. Untangling the truth behind the official WWE storyline, Hanstock does a deep dive into key moments of the company’s history, from the behind-the-scenes drama at the Montreal Screwjob, to the company’s handling of the Jimmy Snuka scandal, to the real story of the Monday Night Wars.

WWE is an extraordinary business success and an underappreciated pop cultural phenomenon. While WWE soared to prominence during the Hulk Hogan years, as the stakes grew more and more extreme, wrestlers faced steroid scandals and assault allegations. The whole story is here, good, bad, and ugly, from the heights of iconic cultural moments like Wrestlemania III to the arrival of global superstars like The Rock and John Cena.

We Promised You a Great Main Event is an exhaustive, fun account of the McMahon family and WWE’s unprecedented rise. Drawing on a decade of covering wrestling, Bill Hanstock synthesizes insights from historians, journalists, and industry insiders with his own deep research to produce the most up-to-date, entertaining history of WWE available. Full of amazing characters and astonishing stories from the ring to corporate boardrooms, it is a story as audacious as any WWE spectacle.

©2020 Bill Hanstock (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
History & Criticism Wrestling Combat Sports Wrestling Biographies
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What listeners say about We Promised You a Great Main Event

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WWE bluffer's guides

I had a need to get a better understanding of the WWE and some of the thinking that's gone into it. Ignoring the occasionally dubious nature of the the McMahon family, this does exactly what I hoped and provides a potted history at perhaps the greatest sport-entertainment TV juggernaut since gladiators fought lions.

I'm not a wrestling fan, but I really wanted to know more about what makes it tick. This book is a wrestling-positive history of the WWE (it glosses over many of the most negative stories, but doesn't omit them).

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Enjoyable

A few times the chronology was off which led to repetition that was a little confusing, but generally this was very good

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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Inaccuracies, Mispronunciations and Monotony

Trying to generalise the entire history of the WWE is a task that has been done many times before with varying success. This example is one of the worst because besides being a bit too opinionates, it says nothing new that we haven't heard before, has a litany of small mistakes such as saying that Big Bossman vs. The Undertaker took place at WrestleMania XIV instead of XV and stating that Chyna died in 2011 when she actually died in 2016, and comes across very sexually implicit with loads of unimaginative metaphors that shows the author trying too hard to impress WWE and wrestling fans.

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2 people found this helpful

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OK but too many pot shots

This disappointed me, the author focuses on their own opinion of the history of wwe and makes alot of sarcastic remarks rather than the facts, clearly the author doesn't actually like wwe.
The beginning of the book rarely follows any time line in stead jumping from the early 1900s to the 70s and then back again. Finally settling in to a narrative about an hour in.

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3 people found this helpful