R.D. Reynolds Audiobooks

The Death of WCW: how the hottest company in wrestling destroyed itself

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

1 listener rating

Who is R.D. Reynolds?

Under the pen name R.D. Reynolds, Randy Baer has built a career out of professional wrestling’s worst ideas. Born in January 1969 and a former wrestling manager himself, he co-founded WrestleCrap in 2000 with the late Merle Vincent, a website devoted to cataloguing the gimmicks, storylines and characters the industry would much rather everyone forgot.

The joke could easily have worn thin. It did not, because Reynolds turned out to be a serious historian of the business as well as its funniest critic. The Canadian Online Explorer once called him the foremost authority on the worst of professional wrestling, which is a compliment however you turn it over.

His books grew from the same instinct. WrestleCrap and The WrestleCrap Book of Lists catalogue the absurdities, the latter written with the late Blade Braxton. The Death of WCW, co-written with Bryan Alvarez, does something harder: it takes the collapse of a billion-dollar company seriously enough to explain, decision by decision, exactly how it happened.

R.D. Reynolds in audiobooks

Our shelves carry The Death of WCW, the autopsy he wrote with Bryan Alvarez on a company that in 1997 was the biggest wrestling promotion on earth and by 2001 had been sold off for pocket change. It has been a classic of the genre for two decades, and this edition runs a shade over fourteen hours.

The audio edition has an unusual advantage. Alvarez, the co-author, reads it himself, and he is a broadcaster by trade, so the delivery carries the exasperation of somebody who watched every one of these decisions being taken in real time.

You do not need to have watched a minute of Monday Nitro to enjoy it. It holds up as a business disaster story, told by people who loved the thing being dismantled. The audiobook is waiting on the shelf below whenever you are.