eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
With her body of death, quick-fire moves, and show-no-mercy attitude, Joanie Laurer, also known as "Chyna," has definitely earned her nickname: The Ninth Wonder of the World. Not content to play with the girls, Joanie has belted her way into the men's division where she more than holds her own--while knocking countless guys to the mat. Raw and riveting, this is the incredible story of Joanie Laurer's awesome climb to the pinnacle of a sport she's made her own.
NINTH WONDER OF THE WORLD
They never know what hit 'em
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307492951 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/24/2008 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Great Pyramids of Egypt. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The towering Colossus at Rhodes. The Lighthouse of Alexandria.
These are the Seven Wonders of the World. For centuries they have been considered the ultimate symbols of humanity’s greatest achievements, works that have inspired awe with their size, their beauty, and their poetry. The wonder of their construction is nothing short of miraculous. They are the pinnacles to which mankind aspires. Unfortunately for us, no one today has seen more than a single one of these wonders, because only the pyramids have survived to this dawning of a new millennium. The remaining six of these wonders of the world have been rubble for centuries, destroyed by wars, earthquakes, and the ravages of time.
It wasn’t until 1946 that an Eighth Wonder of the World was introduced into the universe and deemed worthy enough to join the lonely pyramids. Andre Rousimoff was an unbelievable phenomenon of creation. At age seventeen, young Andre was already seven feet tall. When he eventually entered the ring at seven-four and weighing 520 pounds, he could not be stopped, more a force of nature than a mere man. He was an anomaly in the wrestling world, all other contenders dwarfed by his mere presence. P. T. Barnum would have loved him. There was only one name for such as he—Andre the Giant, the Eighth Wonder of the World. He was a true giant of the ring.
Where other wrestlers could only make pretense to the title, demanding with their mouths what they could not take with their muscles or talents, Andre was the only human who could lay claim to that phrase literally. He remained undefeated—as defined by wrestling’s often-fluid rules—for two decades, until losing to that powerful icon of eighties wrestling, Hulk Hogan, at Wrestlemania III in 1987. In the ring Andre was not only an unstoppable force and an immovable object, but outside of the ring, in his private life, he was very much like Fezzek, the gentle character whom movie fans will recall him playing in the 1987 fairy-tale film The Princess Bride. The medical world would say that he suffered from giantism, but at least he did manage in the three-ring circus of wrestling to find a life where he did not suffer. He simply grew until he could no longer, and then died peacefully in 1993, having remade the wrestling world.
And there the tally of the world’s wonders stood frozen until a new contender approached the squared circle to demand the respect of all comers.
Joanie Laurer strides the packed arenas that are her workplace with supreme confidence. At five feet nine inches tall and weighing 201 pounds, this muscled black-clad grappler tosses the other wrestlers about like limp rag dolls. Dressed in a leather two-piece and sneering like Xena with an attitude, she marched uninvited into the wrestling world and remade it in her own captivating image—and she didn’t need an antique sword to do it. Her impact was explosive, catapulting her to heights that it would have taken others far longer to attain.
She is undoubtedly the greatest woman wrestler of her age, perhaps even of all time. And by her confident smile, we know that she knows it. Perhaps she is even the greatest wrestler of any gender; the jury is still out on that one. But waiting for the verdict is one of the greatest spectacles of our age.
She has captivated audiences, commanded respect, and ridden the waves of popularity as no woman wrestler before her has. Her legions of fans are not just the traditional hard-core audience. She has reached beyond them to capture the nation’s attention. A world watches in awe. Her chiseled features have stared back at us from the covers of Newsweek and TV Guide. Her sinews were more than sufficient to bend the mostly masculine WWF to her will. China, the continent, is large, but Chyna, the woman wrestling creation with raven hair and tight leather, is larger than life, a comic-book superhero made three-dimensional.
For she is no ordinary wrestler. She is Chyna, the Ninth Wonder of the World.
Her accomplishments are many, far greater than those of any other woman who has ever invaded this man’s world. She was considered a tough enough battler to be drafted as one of the three founding members of the hell-raising D-Generation-X, alongside Shawn Michaels and Triple H. In January 1999 she became the first and only woman to have ever competed in the organized mayhem that is the Royal Rumble. She is the only woman to have ever worn the Intercontinental Championship Belt.
Chyna is the only woman worthy enough in the eyes of the fans and the wrestling press to be given serious consideration as a contender for a potential World Wrestling Federation Heavyweight Championship Belt. That match will come someday—have no doubts about it. She has made it plain that she will not stand idly by while the musclebound men who think themselves her peers trade that trophy among themselves; she intends to someday reach out and seize it for herself. And once she has it, she will not let it go easily, or perhaps at all.
She is such a towering figure within the wrestling world that the other federations that must go head-to-head with the WWF feel they must compete not just with the reigning federation, but with her personally. This can be seen by the fact that the masterminds at World Championship Wrestling made the mistake of failing to hire her when she came knocking that they responded to Chyna’s astonishing success by coming up with their own wrestler called … Asia. Perhaps the WCW hoped to fool you with a name so close to Joanie’s chosen nom de plume, but instead, all it reminds us of is that there are no substitutions for the woman called Chyna.
Joanie Laurer has made Chyna into probably one of the most recognizable female athletes in the world, and this warrior princess stands ready to conquer.
Chyna’s magnetic ring personality has contributed in large part to the success of the World Wrestling Federation, which, now that it has gone public, has achieved a net worth of over one billion dollars, with 83 percent of that stock owned personally by Vince McMahon and his family. Wrestling has become a bigger business than ever before, with sales of over $340 million expected once the books are closed on 2000. Without the character of Chyna that Joanie Laurer has created and embodied, it is doubtful that so much would have been realized. Wrestling is bigger and better than ever, and Joanie Laurer is one of the core figures who has made it so. In the area of public acceptance of what was once considered only a lowbrow circus, Joanie Laurer is one of the best ambassadors the sport has ever had.
Strangely enough, once you learn her statistics, you realize that on the field of battle she seems far larger than the numbers that describe her dimensions would imply. Those cold, dry facts of height and weight are deceiving, perhaps because of our prejudicial preconceptions about the acceptable size of women. We look at her dwarfing the male wrestlers with her presence, men whom we already know from experience to themselves be imposing figures who could crush us ordinary citizens with an idle gesture, and assume that she surely must tip the scales and stretch the tape measures even farther than that. She has gone where no woman wrestler has ever gone before, and her cool stage presence makes us wish to know more of the mystery behind the character. Her size and strength are even more daunting to her opponents, whether male or female, than they are entertaining to the fans.
She has fought hard for her fabulous success, and she has had to fight hard, because no one was willing to hand it to her. She carved a path that did not exist before she decided to blaze it. Wrestling legend Lillian Ellison, who as the incomparable Fabulous Moolah dominated the women’s wrestling scene for over twenty-eight years (and who is still making regular appearances as crowd pleaser and a major player in WWF events) gave Joanie Laurer her first break in the business, and after all these years is still one of her closest coworkers. Of Chyna and the woman who stands behind her, Ellison has proudly said, “When you talk about the type of lady performer to help lead the business into the year 2000, Chyna is at the forefront.”
In fact, Chyna so dominates the sport, that when Rampage magazine polled its readers on their top choice for toughest female wrestler, she so dominated the category that she garnered just over eighty percent of the vote. The rest of her competition for the top spot in that poll was so slight that no other woman wrestler even got over five percent. And that tightly held monopoly on the public’s regard seems unlikely to change anytime soon.