This wide-ranging and yet personal account of the wrestling industry provides fans and interested readers with a glimpse at wrestling's bizarre day-to-day realities, its most famous personalities, and its background figures as well. A refuge for the very athletic but often a breeding ground for the highly dysfunctional, professional wrestling is, in the truest sense, life on the fringes. "Headlocks and Dropkicks" chronicles Ted Kluck's training program to become a professional wrestler. Kluck delves into the traveling-circus elements of the sport, and talks to the people who make it work - promoters, bookers, and the wrestlers themselves. It may be ridiculous, but wrestling touches a nostalgic chord in many of us, and it has weathered manifold changes in American taste to survive and thrive as it does today. Here, Kluck examines the tension between the good vs. evil tales that pervaded wrestling in the early to mid 80's, along with the seamy soap opera storylines that seem to drive it today.