About the Book
Male Stripper. Pimp. Street thug. Not exactly the typical credentials of a professional hockey player—unless, of course, you're Frank “the Animal” Bialowas.
WILD MAN is the story of a promising hockey fighter’s descent into the sordid criminal underworld of Winnipeg, Canada, and his miraculous resurrection as one of Philadelphia’s most iconic athletes of the 1990s.
The first-born son of poor Polish immigrants in Winnipeg, Frank Bialowas worked hard to become one of Manitoba’s toughest brawlers in junior hockey. But at eighteen, just before landing a big break in the Western Hockey League, a chance encounter with a Winnipeg pimp lured Frank into a life of crime with its promise of fast money and beautiful women. Long before he earned the nickname “the Animal,” Frank’s stripper agent dubbed him “Max the Millionaire,” the stripper who pimped, sold drugs, and collected money for the Los Bravos motorcycle gang. By age twenty, Frank's mother thought he would wind up either dead or in jail. Just when his fate seemed sealed, Frank received an out of the blue invite to play professional hockey in the East Coast Hockey League with the Roanoke Valley Rebels. Frank reluctantly said goodbye to his life of crime in Winnipeg and went on to great success in the American Hockey League, winning a Calder Cup in Philadelphia and netting an induction into the Phantoms hall of fame.
WILD MAN is a classic sports redemption story—a real-life ROCKY on ice. Despite the success that Frank enjoyed in professional hockey, his impulsive, self-destructive tendencies resulted in many devastating setbacks throughout his playing career and personal life, like his federal conviction for importing steroids into the U.S., and his costly divorces. Similar to many flawed hockey players, like Derek Sanderson or Bob Probert, Frank’s hockey success was limited primarily by his own destructive impulses. WILD MAN poses serious questions, such as the role of generational family trauma in shaping fate, and explores universal themes, like redemption and perdition, all through the fast times of “the Animal,” where fact is always more fantastic than fiction.