How Dr. Death Became Dr. Life by Steve Williams

This autobiography fails to live up to the legacy that Dr. Death created in the ring. I have read much better books about many of the topics he discusses including the Oklahoma Sooner football team, the UWF, and wrestlers finding salvation. The book contains way too much filler material and the stories about his wrestling and football career give little depth. If you are a Dr. Death fan, you already know everything that you will read and if you aren't familiar with him just read this and you will have saved yourself 200-plus pages of reading.

For those unfamiliar with Dr. Death's story, he is a former Oklahoma Sooner football and wrestling star that made it big in the UWF and Japan. The beginning of the book details his battle against cancer. That is the best part of the book as he reveals his emotions and as a reader you feel that you are a part of his journey.

The bulk of the book then details his Oklahoma and wrestling career. At this point of the book, I felt like I was reading Cliff's Notes. There was nothing that a reader could really sink their teeth into. The Oklahoma section is a huge disappointment as that was one of the wildest programs both on and off the field and there were no stories that would let the reader know about that legendary aspect of the program.

The part of the book about his wrestling career has so many problems that I won't bore you with all the details. Again, this part of the book had the Cliff's Notes feel but what makes it worse is that when he has an interesting story to tell, it is repeated almost verbatim in a dialog box by someone else on that page. I also hate books where when a wrestling career goes wrong it is the fault of politics but when a wrestling career goes right it is because of something else. The best example of that problem is when he describes winning the UWF/PWI tournament due to his toughness. Anyone could argue based upon the words written in this book that his success in the UWF was due to being on right side of the owner of the company Bill Watts. Bill was his trainer and a fan of amateur wrestlers.

After 30 pages of writing about his salvation, the book then derails into the biggest filler seen in a wrestling book since the second half of Goldberg's. Once I finished reading the book, I just had the feeling that I wasted a lot of time and should have just read his Wikipedia entry instead.