So many little girls have been taught to be sweet at all costs. N.C. Harrison examines the life and times of a female wrestler who broke that rule…and plenty of others.
Cool old ladies are, in general, one of the few subjects on which people of my generation (the void between the tail end of Generation X and the Millennials, also known as the cast of New Girl) can agree. We may represent a staggering diversity of opinions on public policy, health care, the environment and the geopolitical ramifications of, well, anything, but the second that you throw on a Golden Girls DVD, all bets are off. My sister, for example, considers Rose, and by extension Betty White, one of her greatest heroes, hoping that she will see those qualities in herself in forty or fifty-years. I, on the other hand, knowing darned well that I will still see a certain amount of snappishness and melancholy, have always been a fan of Dorothy and Bea Arthur. Kids (er, mature young adults… yeah) my age also seem to adore Family Matters and Boy Meets World, but that’s a story for a different time—or maybe not, considering the respective presences of Estelle Winslow and Mr. Feeney (a cool old guy, but still) on those shows. Representatives of the Greatest Generation, for some reason, seem to make most of us stand up and say, “Yeah!”
This is why I have to report here on the life and times of one of the truly great cool old ladies, Johnnie Mae Young of professional wrestling fame. Mae was born in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, in 1923 and left us, right at the beginning of this year. She grew up sort of rough and tumble, right at the heart of the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl, and in true tomboy fashion wrestled on her high school’s varsity team at the age of fifteen. All this is to remind folks that, in spite of all the showmanship involved with professional wrestling, that Mae Young was a fighter, legitimately and truly. Her first foray into the strange, twilit carny world of the squared circle was even in a shoot fight, against Gladys “Killem” Gillem, probably as a teenager in Tulsa in 1939. Gillem fell to her in less than a minute and, although they would not let Young challenge the reigning champion, Mildred Burke, for fear that she would leave Burke embarrassed on the mat—or that Burke would have to injure the young woman seriously by using dirty tricks to preserve her title—the champion’s manager and partner, Billy Wolfe, expressed an interest in training the young woman to be a wrestler. It was the beginning of a stormy, amazing career.
WWE pays tribute to the long career of Johnnie Mae Young.
This is one match which makes her legendary claim to have wrestled in somewhere between seven and nine different decades, in one capacity or another, believable to me, no matter what Dave Meltzer might say. As for his complaint that her 2010 match against Layla and Michelle McCool shouldn’t be considered a wrestling match, well, I’d have to see what he—or I or anyone else—could pull out of our hats at north of eighty-five years old! Most of us would consider ourselves lucky to be up and walking around at that age, let alone stalking the squared circle in any capacity. Heck, getting up and finding a pair of matching shoes on any given day can feel like a real victory for me, from time to time, and I’m not even thirty yet.
Mae wrestled for a long time, in a lot of different places, and won a few championships, including the Florida Women’s Championship and United States Women’s Championship for the National Wrestling Alliance. The main thing that made her memorable, however, was her utterly fearless nature in the ring and out of it. Mae had that connection with the people, that chemistry which some modern pro wrestlers would kill for, and she made the best of it: by making people, all over the United States and beyond, absolutely hate her guts.
Conan O’Brien interviews Mae Young and the Fabulous Moolah in early 2005.
Mae was, to the utmost limits of the word, a classic professional wrestling heel. She was a dominant force in the ring who cheated not because she needed to but because she liked it, sure, but the essence of a true heel goes deeper than that. Mae went that extra mile by spitting on cops assigned to her security detail, shaking front row fans like so many cups full of dice and slapping state athletic commissioners. Even with a pinup model’s curves, a lounge singer’s husky, sultry voice and the kind of smile that turns angels green with envy, Mae wasn’t a figure of desire. Through her actions she became a figure of fear, contempt and disgust for the mostly male audiences watching her. Mae didn’t want to be loved, she wanted to be loathed as much as possible, because in pro wrestling someone has to be. “Anybody can be a baby face, what we call a clean wrestler,” she said during a 2004 documentary interview, “They don’t have to do nothing. It’s the heel who carries the whole show. I’ve always been a heel and wouldn’t be anything else but.”
And that was, and is, kind of freaking awesome.
The trailer for Lipstick & Dynamite, an excellent documentary about women’s wrestling.
So many little girls, for so long, have been taught to be sweet at all costs, avoiding any controversy even when it hurts them. Mae broke that mold long ago and heeled it up with other great stinkers of the sport such as Gorgeous George, Ric Flair and (anywhere that wasn’t Memphis, Tennessee) Jerry “the King” Lawler. And, just like the gender bending George (and Flair in many ways, for that matter), Mae liked to confuse the categories people expected. Penny Banner, a fellow gladiatrix and longtime compatriot of Mae’s, recalls meeting her in 1954 and experiencing a moment of shock at seeing a fellow lady wrestler wearing blue jeans, smoking a cigar and cursing like a sailor, and if anything sums up the willingness Mae always showed to go out of her way to make an impression, I think that little anecdote is probably it.
Neither death threats from angry fans nor age could keep Mae down for a three count. Shoot, I’m half unsure that the grave will do any better. And if she, and after her other great female heels like her student the Fabulous Moolah and even later and contemporary bruisers like Bull Nakano, Luna Vachon and Mercedes Martinez, can act out as heels, then maybe it also paves a way for it being okay for little boys to show their kinder, more nurturing sides. Turnabout is fair play, after all, and even the slightest variation can open the floodgates for greater change.
So I hope you’re up there, Mae, giving Indian burns to the angels for all eternity. We miss you down here, even if you scared us just a little bit more than we were comfortable with.
Photo–WrestleCrap
Yes, this is very relevant to men ….
I knew one of the first commenters would say something like that. I should have expected it would be you, though.
Women and their struggles are never relevant to men. Men could never see women and their struggles as a role model. That is too degrading. Yeah, that makes sense.
I am a man who has a sister and a god-daughter,both of whom I would like to grow up to be tough and skillful. It is relevant to me. It is, therefore, relevant to men, unless I have recently had my “man card” revoked without hearing about it. I mean, the notification could have gotten lost in the mail.