Bøger af Irvin Muchnick

Backed by hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of USA Swimming files subpoenaed by the FBI, Irvin Muchnick uncovers a generation of cover-ups involving some of the sport's biggest names.

Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads takes the conversation about football and public health to a new level with investigations of the sport's underreported worst tragedies and their cover-ups at major universities, obscure junior colleges, and high schools.

It was pro wrestling's most horrific weekend ever in June 2007, when beloved WWE superstar Chris Benoit went crazy -- murdering his wife Nancy and their seven-year-old son Daniel before taking his own life. More than a dozen years later, Irvin Muchnick's meticulous unpacking of the record of this event and its aftermath belongs to American history. Vince McMahon's pop culture franchise is more entrenched than ever, and his pal Donald Trump staged a remarkable populist, demagogic, wrestling-style takeover of politics and public style. "This book should be titled Zen and the Art of Scandal Maintenance. An instant cult classic." -- Larry Matysik, the late wrestling TV announcer, promoter, and historian "Irv Muchnick's magnificent investigative journalism." -- Frank Deford "If you can read what Irv has dug up and continue to turn your head, then your powers of denial exceed mine." -- from the Foreword by Phil Mushnick, New York Post columnist Irvin Muchnick (www.ConcussionInc.net; @irvmuch on Twitter) is the author of Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal. He also authored another ECW Press book, Concussion Inc.: The End of Football As We Know It, and has published extensive investigations of public health hazards and sexual abuse in the youth sports system. A one-time assistant director of the National Writers Union, Muchnick was lead respondent in the landmark 2010 Supreme Court of the United States decision impacting freelance writers' economic rights, Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick.

The Benoit murder-suicide in 2007 was one of the most shocking stories of the year, and a seminal event in the history of wrestling. It laid bare the devastating prevalence of steroids and its effects on users. In order to tackle the whole story, dig up the facts, and connect the dots, Irvin Muchnick gives the most sensational scandal in pro wrestling history the full true-crime treatment in Chris & Nancy. Muchnick — the author of Wrestling Babylon and a co-author of Benoit: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport — has parsed public records and interviewed dozens of witnesses, inside and outside wrestling, to put together the first thorough and authoritative events of the gruesome June 2007 weekend in Fayette County, Georgia, during which World Wrestling Entertainment superstar Chris Benoit murdered his wife Nancy and their seven-year-old son Daniel, before proceeding to kill himself. But this book goes beyond the crime itself to answer some of the most important questions behind it. The biography of Benoit, a wrestler’s wrestler, makes it clear that his tragedy was a microcosm of the culture of drugs and death behind the scenes of one of North America’s most popular brand of sports entertainment. The author probes the story of the massive supplies of steroids and human growth hormone found in his home — all prescribed by a “doctor to the stars” who got indicted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and all dismissed by a WWE “wellness policy” that promoted everything except its talent’s wellness. The Benoit case led to unprecedented scrutiny of wrestling’s overall health and safety standards, by Congressional investigators and others, and this book is the primary source of what they found and what they should continue to look for.

Professional wrestling's most notorious scandals and drug-fueled spectacles are laid out using insider details and investigative journalism in this powerful expose of the sport. Featuring pieces previously published in magazines such as "Penthouse" and "People," this book examines the demise of the old Mafia-like territories, whose wake, with the help of cable television and deregulation, helped fuel the astonishing growth of professional wrestling. These solemn and thoroughly investigated accounts--of Hulk Hogan's drug use, the untimely death of Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka's girlfriend, the ill-fated Von Erich clan, and various scandals associated with World Wrestling Entertainment's Vince McMahon--go beyond the theatrics to illustrate what really goes on behind the curtain and where the sport now stands.