James Guttman is a name that’s fallen off my radar in the last couple of years. Tuesday mornings used to be time to go onto his website WorldWrestlingInsanity.com to read his RAW Insanity and laugh out loud. Then he started doing interviews too. Then his first book came out, covering the WWE during a very dark period, basically the first few years after The Rock and Stone Cold left and the company, the RAW brand especially, was the HHH show. I even subscribed to ClubWWI.com, the pay section of his site for a while. But then for reasons I forget I cancelled my sub and haven’t gone on his site or even heard his name mentioned anywhere until I received this new book in the post on Christmas Eve, so I was looking forward to reading it.

The basic premise of Shoot First…Ask Questions Later is to take a look back at the hundred plus interviews Guttman has conducted and talk about his experiences. This covers contacting wrestlers, sometimes chasing them for months for a reply, putting the shows together, and using that to tie into observations about the wrestling business and the people involved even how his own perceptions had changed. When covering the Chris Benoit murders for instance, he’d have been right there with Johnny B. Badd on the anti-McMahon bandwagon, but here he wasn’t at all, and actually defended the WWE from blame, which is a viewpoint I agree with.

It was interesting to hear some people, Kevin Nash and Scott Steiner standing out the most, described as totally exceeding Guttman’s expectations, and was probably a sign that sometimes people aren’t who they are on TV. Doing an hours interview with Roid Rage Big Poppa Pomp and then having to call him back because you forgot to hit record? Given some stories about him plus his on-screen persona, you’d expect Steiner to have kicked off, right? Well not at all actually, it sounds like he was totally cool with it and rescheduled the interview right away. And as for Nash, he has been talked about as a cancer that killed WCW in the past, and most famously in two books, Death Of WCW by Bryan Alvarez and RD Reynolds, and also Eddie Guerrero’s WWE-produced autobiography, where a guy who was so modest about himself and so nice about pretty much anyone else he knew just ripped Nash apart. Here, Guttman found Nash to be friendly and personable, a good reason why he actually got so much power in WCW to begin with, and also states that it came across like he genuinely was hurt when WCW failed – and when you’re booking and you’ve invested so much time into it, why wouldn’t you be?

Of course, some people come across exactly like their reputations, as noted by a quote from Disco Inferno saying, in a public forum such as an audio show that could be heard by the whole world, that the young cruiserweight guys should all take steroids because they’re so small to Buff Bagwell acting like the angle with his mother in WCW was one of the most successful crowd-pleasing moments of all time.

Then there’s Ole Anderson. Ole gets a whole chapter devoted to him, and interviewing him sounds like a complete fucking nightmare. I remember hearing about this because it’s where he stated that being in the Four Horsemen was “showbiz bullshit” and “the lowest point of his career.” OK, so he didn’t want to talk about The Horsemen? Fair enough, he’s had a long and successful career before that as both a wrestler and booker, so what does he do? He Talks about meeting some guy at a gym and talking math regarding how much money he’d have had to make to retire at 42, which just made Guttman’s head spin, then acts like an ungracious hard-headed prick, just typifying every negative stereotype about him.

You’ve got your crazy guests (Hi Tracy Smothers!), your guys who have just been released from WWE and either have an axe to grind or want to keep their name out there for TNA, your retired stars, and your legends, and Guttman goes through the process of interviewing all these guys in a way that got out the personal sides of the people behind the characters we see on TV, and in some cases that explained why people were the way they are on TV. For example, the story Jerry Lawler recounted about listening to Superstar Billy Graham’s WWE Hall Of Fame induction speech is worth the price of the book alone if like me you have a sick sense of humour and it kind of makes you realise how at ease you are with the Lawler that appears on WWE RAW every Monday night, and makes you miss the one-liner interaction he used to have with Vince McMahon and Jim Ross that he doesn’t appear to have with Michael Cole quite yet.

The final chapter of the book is perhaps the most interesting. One of Guttman’s staple interview questions is “if you could work with one guy either from today, or from the past that you never got a chance to work with, who would it be?” and over the final 35 pages of the book are transcripts of answers to that question from many people, picking names as wide-ranging as obvious choices like Hogan, Rock and Michaels to old legends ranging from Abdullah The Butcher, Lou Thesz, Bruiser Brody and Ricky Steamboat to, inexplicably, somebody picking The Masterpiece Chris Masters as his all-time dream opponent.

I really liked this book, it’s easy reading but it’s entertaining, informative, funny and sad in places all at the same time, and at the end of the day you’re getting commentary about wrestling from a wrestling writer and from several dozen wrestlers speaking on the record, which to me is a perfect combination.