THE SIX PACK

THE SIX PACK is an eye-opening road trip adventure into a pocket of pop culture - professional wrestling - starring the Iron Sheik, Hulk Hogan, Tito Santana, and many more larger-than-life characters of the WWF of the 1980s.

In 2005, Brad Balukjian left his dream job as a magazine fact-checker to pursue another dream: partnering with his childhood hero, The Iron Sheik (whose real name is Khosrow Vaziri), to write his biography. Things quickly went terribly wrong, culminating in the Sheik threatening Balukjan's life. Now Balukjian hits the road in search of not only a reunion with the Sheik, but something much bigger: truth in a world built on illusion. He seeks out six of the Sheik's contemporaries, fellow witnesses to the World Wrestling Federation's (WWF) explosion in the mid-'80s, along with the man driving the ship, Vince McMahon, to unearth their true identities. As Balukjian drives 12,525 miles around the country, we plumb their lives outside the ring. From working out with Tony Atlas (Tony White) to visiting Hulk Hogan's (Terry Bollea) karaoke bar, we see where these men are now and how they have navigated the cliffs of fame. Balukjian combines the spirit of a fan with the rigor of an investigative reporter, tracking down former WWF employees who have never spoken publicly on the company's inner workings. Ironically, an industry built on illusion is underlain by radical truth, and is arguably among our most democratic forms of entertainment. The Iron Sheik, Hulk Hogan, and the rest of the cast were not pieces on a game board or characters in a comic book movie. They were real people, with families and feelings and bodies that could break - and most of them did. Some have been repaired, but none will ever be the same. Brad Balukjian's first book, The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife (Univ. of Nebraska Press) hit #7 on the LA Times bestseller list and was named one of NPR's Best Books of 2020 despite being published directly into lockdown, with endorsements from from Susan Orlean, George F. Will, and Tyler Kepner, among at least a half dozen others, not to mention coverage in The Wall Street Journal, on ESPN, and elsewhere.