01/29/2026
Lost a really great friend and mentor earlier this week. Kim Wood will be remembered as a legendary figure in the worlds of football, strength training, and pro wrestling, and as his son John Wood correctly noted, was a legitimate worlds most interesting man, but he was an even greater friend.
I connected with Kim when I was a young teenager in Cincinnati based on our mutual appreciation for pro wrestling in the mid-1980s through our mutual friend Grant, who ran the neighborhood newsstand. Kim introduced me to Brian Pillman and got me cageside seats with the Lion’s Den for the UFC for which he trained Ken Shamrock. He hired me to work for Hammer Strength during summer breaks, and got me a gym membership at Better Bodies gym in NYC (a Hammer Strength customer) when I went to NYU. He was a strength coach (the first) by trade, but he was a teacher by nature.
The breadth of his experiences and stories was unbelievable. He introduced me to so many great books beginning in high school; I got my last book from him in the mail just a few weeks ago.
Kim had many interests including zines, generally, and he was very supportive and encouraging of my own bourbon zine even though the belief is he never drank and he was very antidrug, which I resonated with a lot in my younger years. I learned at Hammer Strength to give my zine a powerful masculine name with three syllables and two words that would look good on a t shirt: King Bourbon. Of course I learned a lot more than that.
Kim loved to call Jocelyn “Jezebel” with a bit of a Dusty Rhodes inflection. We all loved it.
The last time we saw Kim was at my first bookstore storytelling event (stories from my zine) last summer in northern Kentucky, and his attendance and chiming in, especially with respect to local organized crime history, was priceless at the time and even more meaningful now. Kim will be sorely missed but never forgotten.
