“The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase is one of my all-time favorite wrestlers and honestly, he might be my top guy.
Although, there are a lot of old school wrestlers that I hold in really high esteem, most of them being heels because, even as a kid, I always loved the villains.
Wrestling villains were always more fun to me and there weren’t many that were as good at being bad as Ted DiBiase.
The first time I remember seeing DiBiase, or at least noticing him, was the WrestleMania IV pay-per-view, which I watched with my cousins, as it was our annual tradition until this year, where none of us could make ourselves care about the current WWE product to make an effort to watch the two-day spectacle.
Anyway, I also loved DiBiase’s earlier work before he went to WWF to become “The Million Dollar Man”. In my teens and twenties, I acquired a lot of DiBiase’s other work from Texas, other territories and All Japan. Once I really deep dived into his career, my appreciation grew even more.
So I was pretty stoked to read this book. And for the most part, it’s really good, as it’s a true biography that goes through Ted DiBiase’s life from childhood to the days after he retired from being a full-time wrestling personality.
However, this is a book put out by WWE and with that, the WWE stuff is a bigger focal point and even though this covers DiBiase’s life outside of that one company, I feel like I wanted a lot more of his Texas and Japan stories.
In the end, though, fans of Ted DiBiase should probably still enjoy this. It covers a lot of phases in his life and it also doesn’t get overly heavy on the religious stuff, as he put his focus on that part of his life after leaving the squared circle behind.
Rating: 7/10
Pairs well with: other books on the history of the old school territory wrestling business, as well as biographies on the personalities who lived it.
Talking Pulp 