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.

Every saturday night in the eighties fans would gather around their television to watch, not Saturday Night Live, but Saturday Night The Main Event. WWE wrestling beat the ratings for the most talked about show on television week after week. Here is that era captured. “Introducing your champion, from Venice Beach, California, at three hundred and three pounds—Hulk Hogan! And his challenger . . .” Hearing those words ring out across the arena meant you were there. It didn't matter if you were there in person, or watching on television or closed circuit. You were in the place where everyone wanted to be. You could feel the crowd; as the tension built, you were swept up and into the action. You knew you were going to witness history. You were experiencing the main event at a live WWE show. It seemed that wrestling had changed overnight, that the men who entered the squared circle were suddenly larger than life. Everyone wanted to see the behemoth Hulk Hogan wrestle. And the men who wrestled with and against him were his equals in creating a match and a character that no one would soon forget: Andre the Giant, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Jake "the Snake" Roberts, Sgt. Slaughter. They all kept you pinned to your seat as they were pinning their opponents to the mat. You just knew that you were going to see things that no one had ever seen before. The eighties was the era that cemented WWE as the place where the best wrestlers on the planet worked. Main Event -- WWE in the Raging 80s dips into those years and reveals the most celebrated wrestlers and the matches that will be recalled as not just the best of the eighties but the best of the ages.

Audisee® eBooks with Audio combine professional narration and sentence highlighting for an engaging read aloud experience! Nothing in wrestling can match the excitement of the main event. It's the match that everyone wants to see, the match that will have fans talking the next day. Author Patrick Jones takes readers deep inside the world of pro wrestling and shows how its stars—and the wild characters they portray—have turned pro wrestling into a billion-dollar industry. Take a seat and gear up for the greatest show in wrestling—the main event!

Richard O. Davies won Foreword Reviews' INDIEFAB Book of the Year Bronze Medal in Sports for The Main Event: Boxing in Nevada from the Mining Camps to the Las Vegas Strip. Davies' book was chosen as one of the best indie books of 2014. As the twentieth century dawned, bare-knuckle prizefighting was transforming into the popular sport of boxing, yet simultaneously it was banned as immoral in many locales. Nevada was the first state to legalize it, in 1897, solely to stage the Corbett-Fitzsimmons world heavyweight championship in Carson City. Davies shows that the history of boxing in Nevada is integral to the growth of the sport in America. Promoters such as Tex Rickard brought in fighters like Jack Dempsey to the mining towns of Goldfield and Tonopah and presented the Johnson-Jeffries “Fight of the Century” in Reno in 1910. Prizefights sold tickets, hotel rooms, drinks, meals, and bets on the outcomes. It was boxing\--before gambling, prostitution, and easy divorce\--that first got Nevada called “America’s Disgrace” and the “Sin State.” The Main Event explores how boxing’s growth in Nevada relates to the state’s role as a social and cultural outlier. Starting in the Rat Pack era, organized gambling’s moguls built arenas outside the Vegas casinos to stage championships\--more than two hundred from 1960 to the present. Tourists and players came to see and bet on historic bouts featuring Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Sugar Ray Leonard, Mike Tyson, and other legends of the ring. From the celebrated referee Mills Lane to the challenge posed by mixed martial arts in contemporary Las Vegas, the story of boxing in Nevada is a prism for viewing the sport. Davies utilizes primary and secondary sources to analyze how boxing in the Silver State intersects with its tourist economy and libertarian values, paying special attention to issues of race, class, and gender. Written in an engaging style that shifts easily between narrative and analysis, The Main Event will be essential reading for sports fans and historians everywhere.

BACKS AGAINST THE WALL… Galatea. The Mercenary's Star. Even the most down on their luck units can find work here. Leading the newly-formed Gray Death Legion has been challenging for Grayson Death Carlyle, so when a job comes their way, he’s only too happy to take it. The mission: train the local resistance on the planet Verthandi to resist their Draconis Combine masters. But things do not go well almost from the moment the Legion arrives. Trapped on Verthandi and facing a superior force and a fractured populace, the men and women of the Legion find themselves in a situation that makes the campaign on Trellwan look like a walk in the park. And Grayson quickly learns repeating his past successes may not be so easy this time…