Matt Brock

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Matt Brock is a fictitious "veteran pro wrestling reporter," appearing in the Pro Wrestling Illustrated family of magazines. Typically writing in the style of Hunter S. Thompson, Brock is portrayed as a hard-boiled, hard-drinking and cynical writer with many decades of experience covering pro wrestling. For many years a photo of a cigarette-smoking, visor-wearing "Brock" (actually Karl Hlavac, an employee at New York-based London Publishing) accompanied his bylined columns in Pro Wrestling Illustrated and Inside Wrestling.

According to the Brock "timeline," his wrestling writing career began in either the late 1940s or early 1950s and he traveled the circuit ever since. As the years went along, Brock railed against "pretty boy" wrestlers and modern gimmicks, much preferring old-time, no-frills tough guys, whether they be "fan favorites" or "rulebreakers."

Many different PWI staff writers and contributors have written as "Brock" over the years, and his name still appears to this day in PWI (which in now published by Kappa Publishing Group in Ambler, Pennsylvania). Some sources claim that there was a real Matt Brock with close connections inside the wrestling business and former Pro Wrestling Illustrated editor-in-chief Bill Apter used Brock's name (with permission) as a columnist for the PWI family of magazines.[1] However, this has never been confirmed.