Review: Walking a Golden Mile

Walking a Golden Mile by William Regal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Walking a Golden Mile is the story of the rise, fall, and redemption of professional wrestler William Regal.

Secret hint for wrestling fans: Every week, the price on a few WWE wrestling books drops to $3.99 for a few days.

As I've said in earlier reviews, I used to watch wrestling religiously. I don't have time for it these days but I still follow it and occasionally read the books.

Anyway, William Regal, Lord Steven Regal in his WCW days, is one of those performers that always stood out for me, mostly because of his British wrestling style and upper class Englishman character. Walking a Golden mile covers his career, starting from his carnival days in the 1970's.
Walking a Golden Mile passed the first of my wrestling book gauntlet easily: Regal spends less than 3% on his time prior to wrestling.

Regal worked primarily in Europe before the English wrestling market nearly died in the early nineties. Fortunately, he got a job with WCW and soon won the Television title. Regal's road stories from that era are hilarious. Unfortunately, that's also where his decline into drug and alcohol abuse started.

Regal pulls no punches, talking about drinking a gallon of wine a day and downing countless pills, eventually getting himself fired for urinating on a refreshments cart and a stewardess on a plane, landing him in the clink in Alaska. Still, that wasn't even rock bottom...

For a WWE-published book, there is some dark shit in this, even darker than Eddie Guerrero's book. Regal got hooked on GHB during his first brief stint in the WWE and it took years for him to finally get his life back on track, only to nearly die from congestive heart failure. Like I said, this one is pretty dark at times. Finally, Regal got his life back in order and rocketed to a fairly high position in the WWE.

Walking a Golden Mile was a lot funnier than most wrestling books and pretty damn dark. Regal doesn't gloss over the wreck he let his personal life become but doesn't forget his friends either. All things considered, it's one of the better WWE-published wrestling biographies. 3.5 out of 5 stars.



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