WWE Hall of Famer Debrah Miceli, along with legendary writer Greg Oliver, discusses her life in wrestling, monster trucks, and more, in her memoir The Woman Who Would Be King: The Madusa Story (ECW Press, 2023).
Miceli who was known in the professional wrestling world as Madusa in Verne Gagne’s AWA and Ted Turner’s WCW, along with being called Alundra Blayze in the WWE, candidly discusses her life throughout her time as a model, wrestling, and entering the world of monster trucks, where she was a trailblazer in both of the fields she succeeded in.
With a Forward by Paul Heyman, who knew her from the AWA when she started as a valet, Miceli had occasional matches where she won the AWA title and feuded with Sherri Martel, managed Curt Hennig and Nick Kiniski before dropping the title to Wendi Richter. She also won wrestling magazine Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s Rookie of the Year as the first female, and then leaving to spend time in Japan. After joining WCW as a stable member that included Heyman, Steve Austin, Bobby Eaton, and Rick Rude, she signed with Vince McMahon Jr.’s WWF to rebuild the women’s division. She was released and showed up in a memorable segment in WCW where she dropped the WWF title into a trash can live on air amid the Monday Night Wars, where the WWF and WCW were creating one of wrestling’s boom eras. The book goes into many aspects of her life, from the monster trucks to her family issues where she was in the dark for years about who her real father was.
The book is a mixed bag; if the reader is a casual fan of Miceli, just knowing her from the WWF days (or the Monday Night Wars) may be let down that not only half of the book is about her wrestling career, and in many parts she doesn’t give much information about what went on; for fans who love the behind-the-scenes gossip in the wrestling world, they will have to look elsewhere. However. the stories she does tell are up-front with her honest opinions, which is something that kept her strong throughout the years. If the reader wants to know more about who the person behind the spotlight, they will get a wonderful glimpse of the person with struggles and views on various topics, including at times the current wrestling world. The reader will learn about how the monster truck circuit works, which is interesting for someone like me, who is not versed in what goes on. Even if the reader isn’t a pro wrestling or a monster truck fan, they will get half of each along with the family and other parts of her life, including her thoughts of how she originally started writing ideas for her book decades ago, and claims she was a pioneer in the internet sales marketing herself as a brand among other business ideas that she did and did not finish.
I first saw her in the AWA, where I was a huge fan of the league in the late 1980s, and followed her career. I would have liked more talk discussing her time in the AWA (there seems to be a lacking of books from those who were there in that era) and was a casual fan of hers, so I fell into the more wrestling sections of the book, but with a writer like the wonderful Greg Oliver and ECW Press being behind it (they have put out many quality books on wrestling in the past several years), the parts that normally wouldn’t interest me, still kept me engaged enough to care, which is a credit to the author.
Review copy sent courtesy of the publisher.
The Woman Who Would Be King : The Madusa Story by Debrah Miceli with Greg Oliver (ECW Press, 2023) ISBN: 978-1-77041-671-0 Can be ordered at: http://www.ecwpress.com. Distributed in Canada by Jaguar Book Group.
The Overall:
Pages: 304
Language: Moderate
Geared For: Ages 12 and Up
For Fans Of: Professional Wrestling, Autobiographies, Sports, Monster Trucks
lancewrites: Reviews By Lance Lumley 