Transcript
Speaker: ah Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Wonder Camera. This is your podcast in which three dilettantes research a unique topic and then share those findings with all of you. So my name is Jen Rumpel. I'm here with David Powell and Tracy Anderson Powell.
Speaker: And, you know, we're not experts, but sometimes our guests are because today is the first in Wonder Camera history. We're opening the door to our little cabinet of curiosities and we're welcoming in an expert guest. So I'm very happy to introduce Sarah Elizabeth Cox. She is a PR and communications manager for the British Science Association, as well as an associate fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Speaker: so Sarah is a boxing and wrestling historian who specializes in the Victorian period. So right in line with our discussions with Dave's episodes. So her first book, The Devil's Dance Floor, will be published by Duckworth in February 2027. So welcome to the Wonder Camera, Sarah. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Greetings from Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, England.
Speaker: Nice. Sounds lovely there. Now I'll throw it to Dave. Thanks, Jen. And thank you so much for agreeing to do this with us, Sarah. There's going to be a touch more chaos here as we figure out how things go, but that's the spirit of all of this.
Speaker: The way you want to do this is I'm going to start into what I have prepared. And then when we hit the era that you particularly know, I'm going to have you pitch over to me on the British perspective. But Sarah, could you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your ah area of research as a historian?
Speaker: Yeah, of course. So returned to education in 2018. I decided to do a master's degree in history at Goldsmiths, which is university in South London. I knew I wanted to study probably something Victorian and probably something kind of working class and ideally something that didn't involve kings and queens and great men on horses and ideally something that involved photos and some kind of...
Speaker: link ah descendants or uh someone's still alive that I could visit or something like that and I stumbled across wrestling in Newcross which is a part of London where Goldsmiths University actually is I discovered a wrestler called Jack Wannip who was a wrestler and boxer um active in the 1880s until the early nineteen hundreds and jack lived for a while on the literal spot where my new build office was. oh oh wow. It was so bizarre. I started reading about him quite by accident. This was a guy who, there are thousands of mentions of him in the British Newspaper Archive, the digital newspaper collection for the UK. um He was kind of the unofficial champion of British wrestling for a while. he was a really well-known heavyweight boxer, a real pillar of the community. And no one had ever written on him before, which was really, really exciting for me. And i he was the guy yeah like he was the guy that was like, this is what I want to do
Speaker: I want to write about him. And I spent two years doing my master's course classes, but also looking at Jack, writing blogs about him I wrote my dissertation. My dissertation was called um Rediscovering Jack Wannup and the Wrestling and Boxing Gymnasiums of Late Victorian New Cross, which has an audience of about like one person. That sounds like any thesis. Yeah, I've done, you know, I've done talks at his graveside since I've written newspaper articles about him. He is one of the men in my forthcoming book. I started getting distracted quite early on and I'd see these names pop up either in newspaper articles about Jack or maybe a a advert where you would see other names on the boxing bill.
Speaker: I started researching some of those men, Google them at first, see if anyone else had done it. um I noticed... It wasn't my intention to really focus on the black Caribbean and African-American boxers who were active in Britain in the 1880s. But i kind of fell into that. I started noticing lots and lots of, it would literally say brackets black.
Speaker: um And no one had ever written on any of these men before. So I started researching them. ah Got really, really distracted by boxing and drifted away from wrestling a bit. Mm hmm. I started looking at women boxers, black women who were boxing in London in the 1880s, white women as well.
Speaker: And yeah, keep occasionally going back into wrestling. But yeah, it's been a bit it's been a bit of ah a boxing last couple of years. because um i worked on the tv show a thousand blows which aired on disney plus in the uk i'm not sure what it would have been in canada it's hulu in america um ah canadian streaming rights are insane i'd probably crave or disney plus we should find them Something like that. i' I'm pretty pretty sure I went out in Canada and that was based on my research into into two Caribbean boxers called Alec Munro and Hezekiah Moscow. And that's where I am at the moment. I've just written a book, which is a group biography of eight boxers, including Jack. So there's a bit of wrestling in in his story that will be published next year.
Speaker: right That's so exciting. that's i know. and it's so amazing, too. I love how historical research just leads you down all these rabbit holes. And it's great that you found like it's obviously rich vein of research that nobody's really written about before. And it's super fascinating. It's very surprising. but Yeah, it really is When it comes to the um the black guys, ah the Caribbean African American boxers who were here, it's that Britain has always really, really undervalued black history. um There is a huge underrepresentation of black and scholars and Students studying history, shouldn't really be me, white English woman, for those listening listening at home, to take on that research. Really, I feel a little awkward about it, but it's been very undervalued and undernoticed. And also, I think wrestling and boxing history, and I'm sorry to make a big sweeping judgment here, it is largely dominated in this country by middle-aged and older white men. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: That's called Tony and Bill. Yes. That tracks. And and that the kind of... yeah On behalf of middle-aged, slightly older white men, yes. Yeah. And and it's a problem. It is a problem. It's a problem for looking at at the at the female wrestlers boxers. There was something about people like Jack Wannup and Hezekiah Moscow, who is the Caribbean boxer, who has made my name and reputation a little bit online. There was something about him where I looked at his photo and i went, wow, you're a really good looking young man.
Speaker: And I took it from there. And that's not, it's not the path that the more traditional boxing historian would have gone down where they look at the career first, the achievements. Was he a champion? Did he do something super interesting, super novel? You know, I just went, I really want to research these young guys doing cool things and had a bit of a slightly unique perspective on it. So yeah.
Speaker: No, that's great. To be fair, that photo of him on your website, that's the first photo that comes up when you look him up, is a hell of a picture. It is. It really is.
Speaker: I knew we'd talk about Hezekiah as soon as I, as am he's inescapable really. That photo of Hezekiah Moscow is, i I'm doing a conference talk on Friday this this week, obviously.
Speaker: I don't know when the podcast is going out, but which is about how that photograph kickstarted the whole thing. I saw that photograph online. I could not stop staring at it I wanted to know more about this man and started researching him and A little bit later on, a TV unit researcher sort of then picked up on my research, took it to people that developed the TV show A Thousand Blows.
Speaker: But what I do not understand is how anyone looked at that photograph before and didn't didn't want to know more about him and didn't go for it and didn't publish it. or they did and they kept it offline and held it privately I'm not sure but yeah I couldn't look at that picture and not want to know more about that man he's absolutely fascinating he's a big big section of the book he's probably about probably 30 or 40 percent of the book is about him which meant I had to squeeze some of the other stories a little bit more than I'd like because people like Jack Wanup and other boxes in it they all deserve a whole book by themselves really
Speaker: And I've dropped the image in our chat. And of course, all of these, any images that we talk about are going to show up either on our YouTube channel or on our website ah through the show notes. So wonderful.
Speaker: We could come back and talk a whole episode about Hezekiah if you want next year, maybe when the book comes out, because I've got over hours and hours on him. Tell you what, let's make a promise to do that because I'm very excited to read your book.
Speaker: This is exactly the kind of thing I love, as you can tell. That's fascinating. And just to drop a little plug in here, your website is grapplingwithhistory.com. Grappling with history.com. Yeah, I'm really, really proud of that pun. I came up with that. That's great. when i thank When I started the blog, that was at the probably the end of 2018. So I just started the master's course in September 2018. I wanted to start chronicling the research I was doing into Jack Wanup. I didn't want to put it behind paywalls or wait to do any kind of academic papers. I was like, let's spat it all onto the internet.
Speaker: And I found Jack's um descendants and I found descendants of other men and women that I've written about through that blog. And it's now at like nearly 200,000 views, I think, which is really cool. and Mostly for Hezekiah, poor Jack. There's a lot more on Jack on there than anyone else. But yeah, is it is mostly for Hezekiah, Moscow. ah but yeah, graftingwithhistory.com. I haven't um updated anything since March. um I've been really, really busy writing the book, but I've got a few ideas planned for the summer and to start doing some new posts wrestling and boxing related. i think Exciting. And this podcast won't be coming out for a few months. So I think ok you will have some time.
Speaker: We keep a heavy ah stock of episodes because most of the time what we're talking about isn't particularly time bound so that ah we've probably ah two, two and a half months before it comes out.
Speaker: And we can drop your contact info in the web website as well, whatever you're comfortable with. Because I know on the website you have your Blue Sky Instagram. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm just on Blue Sky as Oyspooky. Long story, wrestling related, actually, but Oyspooky. And then Instagram as well. But Instagram is more selfies in 1980s outfits and pictures of my son. But yeah happy to... I'm happy to both of those. I do put research related stuff on there sometimes. Pictures of cemeteries I've visited trying to hunt down dead boxes and that kind of thing.
Speaker: Jen is a huge visiting cemeteries fan. Yeah. We did a Bronte's episode. It's one of my favorite things. and one um Actually, the book starts in um some of the London cemeteries with Alec Monroe, who was Hezekiah Mosko's friend, ah a Jamaican boxer.
Speaker: who's murdered and it starts at his graveside where I go occasionally and clear the litter away and uh yeah and then sugar goodson who is a character played by stephen graham in a thousand blows I go and visit him and uh jack wanup as well wanup is in in an unmarked grave which uh with his uh one of his sons one of his daughters and his wife as well as it starts in the graveyards And then moves on to that.
Speaker: Yeah. the The more traditional boxing biography type story. Also a lot of great names. Yeah. a lot of people drawn into the research just by the names. Sugar Goodson. Yeah. His name was Henry. yeah Henry Goodson. There's a lot of Henry's and Jack's and Alf's. And that is why Hezekiah Moscow just jumped out at me and Hezekiah Moscow.
Speaker: goes by about 13 different pseudonyms. So he's a nightmare to research. I don't think his real name was Hezekiah Moscow. There's yes lots of explanation about that in the book. um it Probably, yeah, it was something, John Smith, I don't know. But ah he, yeah, he's he's fascinating and frustrating and it drives me insane. But yes, a lot of men called Jack. I named my son after Jack Wanup, which shows the depth of my obsession. There we go.
Speaker: Amazing. If it was a girl, it was actually Juno was going to be one of the... Oh, that's so good. Oh, that's lovely. Pretty cool name, but alas, just got the one.
Speaker: All right. So I am going to jump into my script. And like with our first episode of this series, which started with a bit of a modern tale, I'm going to do the same. And then we're going to go back in time a little bit because I want to set the stage in that ultimately my interest in what I'm focusing on here is sort of where ah Sarah, in your case, you were looking at an area of history that people have not really dove into and not a historian. Our entire thing here is we're dilettantes in that we dabble with things beyond our expertise. But I know a lot about unions and I know a pretty decent amount about wrestling. And the sort of thesis behind this is why did wrestlers never unionize?
Speaker: And part of that is exploring the conditions of wrestlers as workers and doing their labor that might indicate they could have used some workplace protections. So I'm going to start in 2003.
Speaker: In 2003, World Wrestling Entertainment was in in the midst of rejuvenating its women's division, and it chose to do so with one of Vince McMahon's worst ideas, the diva search.
Speaker: hu Tracy, I know, and Jen has not watched much wrestling. ah Tracy, Sarah, did you see much of the diva search? Just a little bit. I was 16.
Speaker: Oh, how old was I in 2003? 16 to about 10, 17. yeah um I was massively into WWF then at the time. And I was a huge China fan. I probably started watching in about 1999. So she debuted just before that, didn't she? Was it 97, 98? She came out in 96 as Triple H's valet. But then 99 was when she took off and was wrestling ah Chris Jericho and Jeff Jarrett.
Speaker: Yeah, of course. And I was, my memory is terrible. We didn't get, we didn't have cable. So I got to watch about half an hour once a week on a Sunday of WWE. It would have been Sunday afternoons at Heat, Sunday afternoons Heat. yeah sunday night heat yeah sunday night heat um and i would get a friend's little brother to record um the pay-per-views on cassette tape and take them to my swimming training classes and i would watch them like three weeks after they happened uh so my knowledge of wrestling i to hang out on some of the forums um and chat to middle-aged men about wrestling I would probably say all sorts of stupid stuff on my dialogue internet. But, yeah, I remember women's wrestling being awful. I remember it being full of blondes and boobs and underwear and Chyna being something else entirely. was absolutely obsessed with her. Yeah.
Speaker: And Lisa, she was cool. Oh, she was. Lita was a lot of fun. Yeah. Lisa was. Lita still occasionally shows up and does a bit of wrestling here and there. She's still kicking around. I have always loved Lita and China. China, I, ah when she showed up in 90s, and this isn't China's story, although China's story, frankly, wouldn't have been a bad one for me to start with here. But she showed up as this very tall, just heavily muscled woman, just looking terrifying.
Speaker: And she slowly over time ah evolved her image and ah genuinely got a couple of surgeries, but then started to sort of typify because part of the big thing in women's wrestling – The notion that you want to be tough, but you also want to be sexy. And this is something that's a through line throughout all of it for better and much often for worse. And she did the Playboy pictorial.
Speaker: And during her heyday, she was the first woman in WWE wwe to wrestle men. And ah was the Intercontinental Champion, which was an incredible accomplishment. And she left the company because ah her boyfriend started an on-screen relationship and then real relationship with the boss's daughter. Hmm.
Speaker: And ah Paul Levesque Triple H now runs the company many, many years later. And unfortunately, after China left WWE, wwe ah her her life just kind of fell apart. She fell heavily into addiction. ah She worked in pornography for a while and she died of an overdose.
Speaker: I don't remember the exact date, but probably around 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Yeah, she was in her 40s, mid 40s at the time. And again, hitting that because the first episode, I opened up with a list of wrestlers who died before 50 in the mid 2000s to 2010s because it's enormous. And Chyna is one of the chief among them because she was...
Speaker: She unbelievably important and influential and was way ahead of her time. And I think somebody else who was put in a very, very difficult position. um But she inspired so many people, so many young women. And so her legacy is absolutely vital. yeah Huge China fan. She is, um i've um I've written a little bit of um China slash Juno May kind of parallels into a chapter. Yeah, into a chapter I've written for a forthcoming um essay collection, which is um tentatively titled Amazons or Amazons of the ah ah amazon's of the Arena. It's about wrestling and women's bodybuilding and physical culture and and trying to draw some of those parallels about how China... um
Speaker: starts off very masculine. She was huge. yeah She had the big physical build. She is sexualized. She gets breast implants. She has her jaw slimmed down. She um slims down her body shape a lot, stays muscular, but she's, you know, um very, very kind of sexy fetish ah kind of gear that she's wearing, that kind of thing. And how actually Juno May in 1906 is portrayed in the newspapers as she's a big lady. She's a big, tall, strong lady. But she's very feminine and pretty and nice and calm and sweet and lovely. That was the kind of 1906 version of what I feel like they were trying to do with China, make her palatable to the a typical wrestling fan at the same time. But yeah, for me, I was 14, 15-year-old girl.
Speaker: fourteen fifteen year olds who had big so i was a swimmer growing up on big shoulders i felt huge next to all the other little girls in my school my friends and i saw this woman on screen throwing around men being sexy and powerful and strong at the same time she absolutely and oh that would have been like crack to a 14 year old yeah like you particularly when you're so tall Yeah, and today i've got kind of brown hair with blonde bits um until a couple of months ago. So for the past 25 years, I've been dyeing my hair black.
Speaker: Basically, it's a tribute to China. Oh, amazing. Since the age of 15. I had long black hair with a fringe and it, you know, yeah.
Speaker: The reason I'm going to lead into this story is I want to talk about a wrestler who was, and I do not mean to denigrate her in any way, but somebody who was kind of a blip and was not particularly important because of what she went through, i think is very telling.
Speaker: So we're talking about the diva search right now, which is China has exited and the w WWE had some very competent women wrestlers and frankly started to let a lot of them go.
Speaker: And wanted everybody to be ah like a wrestler who was a genuine prodigy among them, who was Trish Stratus, who was a buxom blonde model, who also, when they started putting her in the ring, was a really good wrestler in a kind of shocking manner. She just had an incredible talent for it.
Speaker: And so they started what they called is the Diva Search. And this was early 2000s, the heyday reality television. And they would have a contest on Raw where they would do various kinds of, I'd say, often humiliating challenges for audience vote. So we're talking like, i well, I'll jump into my proper script here.
Speaker: In 2005 in particular, they started it in 2003, and every year there was a winner. 2005 was kind of a low point and included contestants having to strip tease while introducing themselves, the lingerie pillow fight,
Speaker: And being told to seduce Kamala, the Ugandan warrior, who was one of the worst racist stereotypes w WWE ever did of sort of the unciized uncivilized African tribes man who do everything but shout unga bunga, right? And would strange magic. And so they're trying to seduce him as a old, like diabetic and heavily injured man who's trying to make a buck, right? Because uganda ah not yeah ah sorry Kamala, Uganda's a country, ah was not particularly doing well at that point. Mm-hmm. This also led to the infamous Diss the Diva segment, where these women with no television training had to improvise insults.
Speaker: Famously, Christy Hemme shouted that another contestant was a cum-guzzling gutter slut before doing the splits on live television. Wow. Well, that's a diss, I guess.
Speaker: I hate it, but I laughed. Oh, it's it's insane. I highly if you want to see something that is just sort of the nadir of television, ah the Christy Hemme dissed the diea diva segment. My God. um The winner of the diva search was Ashley Massaro, a fitness model and pageant winner who had been trying to get on the reality TV craze of the early aughts. Has anyone ever heard Ashley Massaro's name as a wrestler? Nope. You might have seen bits of her on Raw because I've been the wrestling fan and tracy and Tracy's watched with me or gone to shows.
Speaker: Tracy is the giant racing fan and I've watched them races with her. So we kind of know a bit about each other's worlds. But Masero had a short wrestling career lasting around three years. And I watched at the time and I recall her as being kind of innocuous and doing her best. She was another ah genuinely untrained model trying her best on television.
Speaker: hu ah but I would not say she was never champion. She was just kind of there and fine. Almost a decade later in 2016, she joined in on a class action lawsuit against the WWE. wwe And it's the allegations of what she went through that I want to open with here.
Speaker: Now, the counsel she used, the lawyer, was a frequent flyer in suing WWE and had a track record of collecting wrestlers to file huge lawsuits and all of them failed.
Speaker: I have a feeling she was kind of used here. And the detail, yes, and more details came out after the lawsuit was filed. But I'm going to walk through everything that she alleges here.
Speaker: So she was forced into the ring early. So cage match dot net shows that she only had 63 matches in her entire career. A wrestler having a very heavy schedule might have 100 in one year, which is at a high end for schedule.
Speaker: And when you think about that, 63 matches is not a particularly large number of matches. And most of these matches were very short and not particularly hard hitting because of the way women were being taught to wrestle at that time.
Speaker: But she was injured constantly. And her first serious injury came in 2006 when she took a bump outside of a battle royal and that completely fucked up her foot, her leg and ankle. She took a spiral fracture, several ah in her ah fibula, a severed nerve in her ankle, multiple broken bones in her foot.
Speaker: She then shattered her knuckle in a match. And although she was kept to a cast under doctor's orders, Vince McMahon ordered the cast sawed off too early so she can continue competing in matches. In order to cope with this and other injuries, Ashley became addicted to somas and also painkillers. But somas in particular, they're a commonly prescribed muscle relaxant that particularly during this era, wrestlers were notorious for abusing. According to her lawsuit, they were everywhere in the women's locker room. Everybody used somas and the company doctor prescribed them constantly. And beyond all of this, Vince McMahon was, she used the word preying on women in that locker room.
Speaker: So in early 2007, Massero posed for Playboy, which was a trend started by Sable, a wildly popular manager during the Attitude Era, and then Chyna, who we just spoke about, which made w WWE wrestlers showing up in Playboy a thing. And starting in 2003, which is the start of this Divas era, every year they had somebody new pose for Playboy.
Speaker: During this time, Vince started to pay Ashley unwelcome attention, and her refusal to sleep with him led to constant segments where she was humiliated on camera, mocked and attacked by other women, ah beat up and abused backstage, left with a clothes strip, and also being wildly discussed as just a model who did not belong in WWE, wwe while never receiving the comeuppance that would have made this quote-unquote storyline validating. It's like, I'm not just a model. I'm a great wrestler. She never got that.
Speaker: h And she was still being promoted heavily by the company, but humiliated while being promoted. and This is kind of weird self-sabotage is a very Vince McMahon thing to do.
Speaker: Notably on the June 8th episode of Raw, this is 2007, Ashley was accidentally spilled coffee on Vince McMahon, who then spent minutes humiliatingly lecturing her on camera in a way that was just one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever seen. And I'm not going to share the clip.
Speaker: Viewers can find it if they want. before suspending her and this was to let her go do survivor because she did survivor china she was voted out early but she got to do the big reality tv thing but the key was to humiliate her off screen rather than book something else and this kept the weird energy of her being mocked and promoted at the same time but it was in december of 2007 that things got really bad for ashley The w WWE did a yearly show called The Tribute to the Troops. And so they would have a big show for the troops in the Middle East.
Speaker: They traveled to Kuwait. And again, this is 2005. We are in the height of the Iraq War. While suffering from dehydration, Ashley was put on an IV and then left alone.
Speaker: A man dressed in as an army doctor, accompanied by a woman in fatigues, entered the room, injected her with some kind of drug. And while she was paralyzed and unable to fight back, he violently sexually assaulted her while this woman guarded the door. Jesus Christ.
Speaker: Yeah. a wwe wwe staffer began banging on the door and they both covered her with a quilt and fled she was wrapped in the quilt unable to walk or speak on drugs but conscious throughout it all and brought to a hotel room because she thought she'd been assaulted by somebody in the military and also this is the instinct of people who go through this sort of thing she didn't tell anyone about this except a couple of friends However, a staffer was involved and there is no such thing as a secret in a wrestling locker room.
Speaker: By the time she returned to the USA, she was summoned in front of Vince McMahon and John Laurinaitis, the head of talent relations and a spectacular piece of shit in his own right. She was told directly this must remain a secret and not to let one bad experience ruin the good work they were doing with the military.
Speaker: Masero was not offered anything. No medical support, no therapy. She was not even given time off. She was wrestling the next week on the tour. Oh, wow. Man, that's horrible. Yeah. I just checked the timelines on cage match.net, which is a database of wrestling matches.
Speaker: And ah Ashley eventually retired out due to wanting to take care of her daughter, who had some sort of major undisclosed illness because she had a a young daughter at the time and was a single mother.
Speaker: When she retired and when this lawsuit came out years later, the list of injuries from within 64 matches is absurd. From her lawsuit, she claims a fractured spine, herniated C4 and C5 discs, serious neurological trauma from being repeatedly concussed, at times being knocked out for minutes at a time, and the damage to to her leg, foot, and ankle I mentioned earlier.
Speaker: Her quality of life was ruined by these injuries, the concussion syndrome causing severe severe depression, memory loss, and migraines. This lawsuit was, like all of the others, unsuccessful.
Speaker: And in fact, her counsel, Kairos Constantine, he was sanctioned for over $300,000 by the courts for plagiarizing texts, frivolous, false, and nonsensical allegations, and violating court orders.
Speaker: So many wrestlers have signed up with this guy to try to sue wwe WWE over the concussion injuries they've had, and they all fail because this is the guy who's gathering them up for whatever reason.
Speaker: He's the Lionel Hutz. He's doing a poor job, but they all go to him. They keep going to for some reason. It's like, we should try hiring a new lawyer. It's Yeah, and I'm trying to stay strictly to the facts because I don't want to insult a lawyer to it too intensely, but there are some inferences you could draw. And unfortunately, ah the lawsuit when it was thrown out in 2018, Ashley Massero took her own life in 2019, leaving behind her teenage daughter, Alexa. Terrible.
Speaker: Her lawyer released a sworn affidavit after her death, which contains much of what I explained. It's also corroborated by her then boyfriend and an excellent wrestler, Paul London, and her best friend, Kara Pippa.
Speaker: I wanted to talk about Ashley's story to start this off, even though it we're starting off on a very bleak note, because this is about labor and she was murdered by her workplace.
Speaker: She was murdered through a basic lack of safety. She was directly abused by her managers and she was medically neglected. She wasn't a marquee name or legendary performer. She was one of many young women trying to make it in reality TV and fell in with the wrong company.
Speaker: Wrestlers, particularly in wwe WWE, are often presented as living action figures, and she was just a person and deserved so much more. So I wanted to ground this before we go back and start talking about some of the so ah the astonishing history of women's wrestling.
Speaker: ah So that although there's a lot of wonderful things and many of the women who wrestle love it so much, it is so important to them and it's everything they love.
Speaker: But ah promoters and any kind of boss, actually, if you love what you do for a living, that leaves people fairly vulnerable to exploitation and particularly in the often pseudo legal world of professional wrestling.
Speaker: So with that kind of grim note, I want to move back into the past and retell our history of wrestling from a new perspective. And that's one of the reasons I was excited to have Sarah, because she can fill in the gaps I do not have, particularly with the United Kingdom.
Speaker: So to help us move past and lighten the mood, can I get a time machine noise from somebody? dululu de lolu lolulu my ways's world standard timeish It's better than trying to make a TARDIS noise. Yeah, I couldn't work that one out. um I'm not promising it gets any ah less grim in the past. No, no, it doesn't. It's so bad. oh no Yeah, there's a lot of bleak stories here, but women's wrestling is still amazing at the same time. And that's part of the dichotomy. um So grappling for sport is as old as humanity. And throughout any recorded history, women have wrestled. After all, if you can pin somebody for their meat, why would you not? but but
Speaker: Because women can wrestle, they did. And scant but definitive records show women wrestling in the United States and in Europe as early as the 18th century. And when I mean wrestle, I mean performing for a crowd of some kind in the folk wrestling traditions.
Speaker: They show up more regularly by the 1870s. You have these carnival attractions of the woman that no one could pin, as well as women who are just wrestling each other, often, frankly, is a barely disguised fetish display as they start to tear each other's clothes, things like that.
Speaker: And the reason I underline that is until the arrival of Mildred Burke in the 1940s, wrestling was kind of always segregated into higher and lower class of show. And this is understanding that wrestling has always been considered low class.
Speaker: And so the high class wrestling is men who are serious wrestlers with little in the way of gimmickry or tomfoolery. And they're still scamming the crowd on bets. But the presentation is of a traditional art exercise between gentlemen, right?
Speaker: On the other side is the lowbrow stuff, which would include outlandish gimmicks, freak show characters, wrestlings, little people wrestling with bears, and of course, women wrestlers.
Speaker: And so if men's wrestling is lowbrow, women's wrestling was seen as outright trashy. Still, it's sold tickets and in wrestling, selling tickets matters more than anything else. And there's a quote from the primary source I have for this episode, which is The Sisterhood of the Squared Circle by Pat LaPrade and Dan Murphy. And I'll preface that Pat LaPrade, whose primary voice here, seems to be a respected name.
Speaker: But this book is laid out like an encyclopedia and reads like promotional text on the back of like a ghostwritten autobiography for the least popular member of S Club 7.
Speaker: so So there's very much wowza, these girls sure could go. There's a lot of that stuff. He hits the head on the nail here with something that's vital to women's wrestling.
Speaker: It was part athletic competition, part carny swindle, and part sexual fetish, and spectators were lining up to pay good money to watch it unfold. And honestly, some famous women's wrestlers, you can see some of them are more carny, some of them are more athletes, some of them are more purely sexual, and some have all three, right?
Speaker: it's ah You can create an elaborate Venn diagram where you can put, who will talk about the fabulous moolah on the extreme end of the carny, while somebody like Sable, who had basically no wrestling or carny in her, was purely there as a model.
Speaker: So the first woman who could be considered a recognized champion of any kind was Josephine Blatt. Her real name is little disputed. A strong woman who went by the name of Minerva. Sarah, have you ever heard of Minerva? I have heard of Minerva. I thought you would. But I'm no expert. What kind of year, what kind of time period are we thinking? Minerva was wrestling in the 1890s. Yeah, yeah, that that makes sense. um My research is sort of started in the eighteen eighty s and looks into the 1890s, and there were not many female wrestlers around in Britain in the 1880s. By the 1890s, there are a lot more, and I have a feeling I've probably come across Minerva's name in relation to maybe a challenge or something like that to a British wrestler. I'm not sure i'd have to go back and...
Speaker: back and have a look um i'm so interested to know more about american lady i'm i call them lady wrestlers like it's okay if i say it that was the phrase that was used in in british uh in british newspapers actually it typically was lady wrestlers with a capital l and a capital w I kind of like lady wrestlers because something I struggle with here is if I want to be grammatical, the adjective is female, but describing women as females has an awful incel energy to it. It will not depart with. So I'm calling them woman wrestlers or women wrestlers, which kind of works, but I do love lady wrestlers. So Minerva was a legendary strong woman and was the first person to be considered by newspapers to be any kind of recognizable champion.
Speaker: Her act included catching cannibals, bending horseshoes, snapping iron chains. And she was a proper catch-as-catch-can wrestler who would take on all comers, men or women, usually in clandestine matches in the back rooms of taverns, which I can't imagine the scene of that, where you're going into the back room of a tavern and there is this gigantic ah woman who is going to beat the crap out of any man within 20 pounds. That was a rule that was set at that point that continued on for a very long time.
Speaker: ah She toured across the nation with her husband, also a strong man and wrestler. And although she was celebrated, much of her is not quite known. Her demeanor was apparently mild and sweet natured, although in one interview, she did reveal her temper when talking about a heckler.
Speaker: I warned him to keep quiet. And finally, he dared me down off the stage. I jumped over the railing and in front of the stage, I went for him, grabbing him by the throat. I threw him across the tent against a pole. I was so angry. Well, didn't heckle her a wrestler.
Speaker: yeah how many performers can say that they haven't wanted to do that to a heckler? Exactly. oh i throw beautiful, right? And she may have been one of the most successful strong women to have ever lived. Although her records have a whiff of carny about them, to this day, she holds a Guinness World Record for a 3,549 pound hip and harness lift where she hoisted 18 men on a platform into the air.
Speaker: This was done in front of an enormous crowd and has never been duplicated. This is disputed. But the thing here is that it was likely not an illusion, but might have also have had wrestling number exaggeration tied in with it. Always has, yeah.
Speaker: ah One historian writing about this said it was more likely ah within ah two to three thousand pounds, which is still completely insane, but also not impossible for modern women to beat because setting a record a hundred years ago that can never be beaten athletics. yeah Usually most records get beat because of, you know, just how we train people and technology and also the pool of talent that comes in. Nonetheless, she was astonishing.
Speaker: hmm. So Minerva was the first truly famous female wrestler and following her was Cora Livingston, who might have been the first good a wrestler in the United States in terms of good at entertaining a crowd. She's from Montreal and joined the circus to train as a wrestler at 16 and became obsessed with training her body using only the finest Victorian technology. She claimed that bathing weakens the body and you must only eat meat at noon.
Speaker: ah Dave, I've actually just found while you've been talking, so i i wonder do I do know more about Minerva than I thought I did, actually. There's a book called and The Strongest Men on Earth by Graham Kent. I i saw a shout out to that in my sources. Yeah, it's a brilliant book. Graham Kent has written some fascinating boxing and wrestling histories. And there's one chapter in it on female bodybuilders and wrestlers. And actually, there's a there's a paragraph here. Can I just read you this? This is about Minerva's diet.
Speaker: And it makes me really happy. says, neither Sandwina nor Minerva concealed their appetites for food and drink. She said in 1892 to the San Antonio Daily Light newspaper, eating is about the principal part of my existence. LAUGHTER Same here, I know.
Speaker: I always have the best I can possibly procure. For breakfast, I generally have beef, cooked rare, good on you, oatmeal, French fried potatoes, sliced tomatoes with onions and two cups of coffee. At dinner, I have French soup, plenty of vegetables, squabs, I don't know what squab is, um and game. Pigeon. i think it's Pigeon, oh. When supper comes, I'm always ready for it.
Speaker: And I then have soup, porterhouse steak, three fried eggs, two different kinds of salads and tea. i mean oh wow yeah oh legendary see i don't if there's any pictures of her in here i love this book um it pretty there is uh there are some great pictures of minerva i'll pop them i'll pop them in the chat one moment because i didn't have pictures ready to go but that's fine i think that is sort of the iconic minerva picture there's a couple others of her though she looks like a pe teacher Yeah, that's kind of true.
Speaker: It's like, I would love to eat that much food, but I'm also five foot three and I don't have thousands of walking. so i can't really, unfortunately, wouldn't be a bad scene. And there's another picture of her looking extremely mighty. I love Minerva. Yeah. No, it's pretty badass. don't know if you've seen the film Love Lies Bleeding. It's rose glass.
Speaker: Amazing film about Kristen Stewart and another woman, Katie O'Brien, as ah bodybuilders. And although things go off the rails in this picture, I still was like, I should bulk up. so be Awesome.
Speaker: So on Cora Livingston, who came after Minerva, right. And Cora Livingston was the one who's talking about bathing weakens the body. So I'm going to quote L.A. Jennings from a Vice article. At the time that Livingston earned the right to declare herself the female champion wrestler of the world, the American plus was dis press was displeased with female wrestlers because up until the early there'd never been a particularly skilled one.
Speaker: This was because most of the women billed as wrestlers were either actresses pretending to be competent fighters or untrained women looking to fill a particular niche. And so I think this is to an extent notwithstanding Minerva, but she was primarily a, you know, she was a strong woman, right? This is the feats of strength and that, although she wrestled, that's what brought her to the party. Cora Livingston was the first to...
Speaker: really make wrestling the primary act and the performance of wrestling. Because this is also at the time where we're going into the starting to get into the Frank Gotch era where the concept of working in a match was not quite there.
Speaker: But people started to recognize in these somewhere between legitimate and rigged matches, you had to play it up for the crowd a bit more. Livingston took over all comers and the woman would line up to meet the champion only to get thrown. She knew how to promote herself, making huge self-aggrandizing challenges. Most women had no idea how to wrestle and were easily dispatched, while others were fairly beaten by a better opponent.
Speaker: Livingston's first loss came against a Miss A. Smith, where they wrestled for 14 minutes and Cora was disqualified due to MAUD tactics, which apparently means using a stranglehold, which we would call a sleeper nowadays.
Speaker: Her most infamous match took place in 1910 against Miss Lou Harris in New York. Lou was happily trying to gouge out Cora's left eye whilst trapped in the stranglehold. A crowd of a thousand men and maybe a dozen women were going into a frenzy over this.
Speaker: And as the women fought and the crowd got more heated, three detectives monitored from the theater box. Finally, they decided the bar of human decency had been passed and then arrested everybody.
Speaker: Yep. Yeah. no It's like you can only take the egg gouging so far. at The Chicago Tribune declared the fight the most disgraceful thing of the kind ever seen in Chicago. Horrified at how their legs were in tights. And they also just clearly fucking hated each other as opposed to it being, you know, a gentlemanly, gentlewomanly kind of contest.
Speaker: This is actually like fueled by rage and personal. Well, sort of animus. It was a visceral, very real fight or real looking fight because, again, we have no idea how much of wrestling was rigged or not at this point. We just know that a lot of it was.
Speaker: But at this point, we can also see that there's a parallel movement elsewhere in the world that often involves a lot of cross pollinations, people toured across scenes. And so now I want to lob it over to Sarah.
Speaker: And again, i haven't asked Sarah to prepare a script for this. ah So just talk off the dome about what the wrestling and boxing scene was like in the late Victorian period in the UK. Sure. Yeah. So just going back slightly to what you were just saying, the sources that we have are typically newspapers and news newspaper men, and they were pretty much all men, they write this stuff really straight most of the time. So they report on...
Speaker: What I am pretty convinced is a fixed wrestling match or a fixed boxing match in the 1880s, 90s, 1900s, in a straight way, as they would with a legitimate boxing or wrestling match.
Speaker: And you're just sitting in there going, I don't know. Do you believe it? Is this journalist, does he genuinely think it's a real wrestling match? Or is he just trying to convince us it's a real wrestling match? What's going on? And he's trying to interpret 130 years later is so difficult. And yeah I'm pretty sure most of them were in on it and they were in on the ruse and knew when things were fake and and when they weren't, ah particularly in UK. But yeah, it's very difficult. It's a real, um it's an interesting subject in itself. Yeah. Just trying to sort of analyze the media coverage at the time. So
Speaker: UK wrestling. My research period is very much focused on the 1880s. And if we look at British wrestling generally, so I am talking about man wrestling here. It's got a really, really long and complicated history. Man wrestling. That's what we'll call it. Man wrestling and lady wrestling. There's a big man football soccer competition going on at the moment, I heard. Man football. Yeah.
Speaker: We have various traditions in various parts of the UK when it comes to wrestling. This is, I'm talking about proper competitive wrestling. um In the Cumberland and Westmoreland region, you have Cumberland and Westmoreland wrestling. In Cornwall, you have Cornish wrestling. There are different styles of wrestling with all different kinds of rules, um sometimes different little costumes as well. So the Cornish will wear a little jacket.
Speaker: in Ireland, in Scotland, in Lancashire. There's different types of wrestling going on all over the place. And there has been for hundreds and hundreds of years. This is what young boys learned how to do. This was their national pastime kind of thing.
Speaker: We then get to 1880s and my research looks mostly at London. And London doesn't have... a wrestling tradition so there's no kind of style of wrestling like there is in the north or in cornwall for example yeah what london does have is loads of immigrants uh and i'm talking about maybe inter-uk immigrants so men that have come down from the north and come up from cornwall and come over from ireland in search of jobs usually in search of work from the 60s onwards
Speaker: And they bring with them their wrestling traditions. But it then becomes really difficult for them to have any kind of competition with each other because their rules are all completely different. so And their rules are also completely different to all the Europeans as well, the French and the Germans and Scandinavians. And of course, you've also got Indians and you've got Turkish.
Speaker: So wrestling in Germany, London is a huge city. In the 1880s, you have annual competitions held by northern men, which are for northern men. Northern men go and watch them. Northern men compete in them.
Speaker: And I've been looking at Jack Wanup, who I talked about earlier, and he was Northern. He was a Cumberland and Westmoreland wrestler by ah by training. He starts doing a bit of Greco-Roman wrestling as well. He knows how to do Cornish wrestling. He knows how to do Lancashire wrestling. You start seeing matches where they might do three rounds and they'll have to throw each other in three different styles.
Speaker: So yeah cornish yeah Cornish in round one, Greco-Roman in round two, Cumberland, Westmoreland in round three. And that sounds cool, right? But it's really confusing for an audience. At this point, they don't know what this stuff means. Prize fighting, boxing, it's about punching each other in the face to see who gets knocked out first, right? It's pretty simple. There are different types of rules and that's a whole... other podcasts about how it transitions over the 1880s actually but it's pretty simple but this stuff is really complicated who how do you win a fall is it shoulders on the ground is it any body part on the ground do you wear a little jacket do you not wear a little jacket
Speaker: some of the Europeans oil up first. yeah We're on round two, apply the oil in little jackets. And everyone in the audience is like, what the fuck is going on? So um in 1884, actually, there is an attempt in Deptford in South London to hold a British wrestling championship. And this was going to be the kind of uniting wrestling championship that would would crown a British champion. And it all ends in a bit of a It's a bit of a flop.
Speaker: It's Jack Wanup, who's a Cumberland wrestler against Tom Kennedy, who's, think he's a Cornish wrestler, in three different styles. There's disputes over the rules. Wanup gets to kind of the champion.
Speaker: Kennedy's people kind of walk out in a huff. it's wall it that The audience wasn't as big as expected. It's okay. Jack Wanup can kind of say he's the British champion now, but Other people are also claiming to be the British champion. It's all very unofficial. It's all very casual and a bit confusing.
Speaker: You have the invention of catch-as-catch-can wrestling, what you would sometimes call catch wrestling or catch-hold wrestling. Yes. 20-something years earlier, since eighteen sixty s It doesn't, ah excuse the pun, kind of catch on immediately. It's very similar to Lancashire wrestling. So men in Lancashire are already pretty much doing this kind of wrestling. It's a very freestyle. how would you describe it? You can catch hold of any body part. Cumberland and Westmoreland wrestling is a stand-up style of wrestling where you have to throw your man onto the floor
Speaker: Both shoulders on the ground. Other other types of wrestling are any body part on the ground. You don't grovel on the ground. You don't grapple on the ground at all. Some Lancashire wrestling actually does end once you throw. Some continues onto the ground. So others it's all is long and complex. I'm no expert in any one. I'm going to jump in a little bit because that's something I talk about quite a bit in part one from, again, the American's perspective.
Speaker: is that catch wrestling, which I'm starting to gather is not exactly the same as Lancashire wrestling, but rather sort of an offshot of it, was because it's catch as catch can, if you can catch the hold, you you therefore can, allowed for joint locks in particular, which are extremely dangerous. And that actually gave rise, and it's the foundational so style behind American pro wrestling because it became wildly popular once it was brought over from the UK, and And importantly, also became the basic style of wrestler behind the shooters and hookers who would know how to put you in a joint lock and end the match in any way they wanted ah in order to either protect you during a no man can pin me kind of competition or, you know, take the title from somebody. And we had a few major incidents talking about the history of men's wrestling where a trained catch wrestler could just steal the title from somebody because they trap you on a lock. And later athletes who had no
Speaker: real like training in these original folk styles of wrestling just thought somebody cast a spell on them they had no idea what the hell was going on and just hurt so that anyways that's fascinating to get more detail there have you talked about the 1888 uh world the first sort of world championship catchers catch cam wrestling match which was evan the strangler lewis against jack won it so jack yeah I know about that match, but I didn't talk about that match because I read a bit on Evan the Strangler Lewis and made a few jokes about the later Ed the Strangler Lewis committing the first gimmick infringement. But yes, go on. Yeah, that match is in my forthcoming book. is, as a huge Jack Wallop fan, feel I need to represent and...
Speaker: He lost pretty easily. He was apparently red-faced and was accused by the british American newspapers of drinking before the match, which is not the Jack Wannock that I know love. And as far as I understand it, Evan Lewis and his Chicago boys actually threatened Jack, you will lose this match beforehand. And Jack Wannock went over from the UK to America a couple of months earlier, i think, expecting a legitimate, proper wrestling match.
Speaker: He had backers who had put huge sums of money into him. He'd been training hard. He was probably one of the best, if not the best known wrestler in the UK. I think he was expecting it to be the first world championship match.
Speaker: he's um su He suffers from rheumatism occasionally, but he's otherwise pretty healthy. He's in his early 30s. He's done really well on the British scene. And it is a big, huge flop for him. He loses in a few minutes, think it's like nine minutes or something in total, the match.
Speaker: And what is embarrassing for him, he loses a lot of money. he carries on in America for the rest of the year in boxing and wrestling matches to sort of varying degrees of success and and several losses.
Speaker: When I think he got home, he probably was like... okay, that was a huge flop and it was a huge embarrassment and that could be my make or break. It wasn't. But what he would have seen in America was how huge catch wrestling was. it was about 3,000 people went to see that match with Evan Lewis and Evan Lewis becomes sort of even better known afterwards. um But it wasn't particularly big in England at the time. i think he said something on the list if he couldn't get a a match on in Britain, which is why he'd gone to America in the first place. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So he tries to, I think I see Jack as the person who tries to pioneer catch wrestling in London. So he's a northerner. He's lived in London since 1880. He's a carpenter by trade and probably moved down for work, but also maybe for wrestling and boxing as well. He runs a wrestling and boxing gym in New Cross and he teaches London boys, London men, catch wrestling as well as Cumberland wrestling and other kinds of folk styles as well.
Speaker: And it's kind of, he got there too soon. He's doing it early. It's not until much later. And by the time wrestling really starts to become popular in Britain, he's kind of in his late 40s. He's 50. No one wants to see middle-aged carpenter from Cumbria fighting anymore. They want to see Hackenschmidt and the the yeah the the Turks and the Greeks and the sort of The bodybuilders, these kind of gorgeous, young, handsome physiques you did not get on British men in the 1880s, by and large.
Speaker: And Jack kind of missed the boat. But I will always sort of press the point that I think he was a a real... forward with thinker and a pioneer, if that makes sense, you know, just trying to give London a wrestling it could understand and that it kind of unite behind and that could work. There's something about catch wrestling that's ah a little bit less boring than perhaps some of the sort of styles.
Speaker: I think you start to see it becoming more worked when you might have people, thousands of people turn out for a match and it lasts three minutes. Or it lasts three hours. Three hours, yeah. And they're standing in a freezing cold fields in the middle of nowhere watching this match, bored out of their minds. And I think that's when it starts in Britain to be like, okay, well, we can make this something that is popular in musicals and it's exciting And it gives the impression of being a legitimate match, match but it is, um the audience is going to get what they've kind of paid for and what they want out of it. It's a gradual and slow kind of process. ah But yeah, that's how I kind of see what and Jack himself starts moving into I guess what we would call exhibition matches in the 1890s, touring the UK in music halls. And wrestling here has always been an outdoor sport. It's always been out in so sort of wholesome farmers, young farmers activity out in fields. It becomes a music hall,
Speaker: thing where he is performing an exhibition match that looks like real wrestling but it's all rehearsed and it's with his mate and it's a guy that he's trained and that knows him really well and Jack will of course always win as well interestingly enough so yeah the That is going to.
Speaker: Oh, just an interesting point you make about that. Why wrestling became worked or as we say, this rigged. But because it actually is, it does guarantee a better show. I never thought about that because if you had a real wrestling match like Greco Roman, like Olympic style. Yeah, you're right. It could just be go anyway. So who knows? But if the purpose is actually entertainment.
Speaker: It's a bit different, far more entertaining if you can work it to be maximally exciting. Yeah, and that's interesting. I never even make that connection. That's so interesting. This came about with and in the U.S. catch wrestling. And it's very much the same situation as London because the U.S. is a country of immigrants. And everybody has these different wrestling styles. And the three big ones were Irish collar and elbow because that became huge among these ah Union soldiers in the Civil War because there were so many Irishmen who were recent em immigrants forced to go fight in the war.
Speaker: And then you had Greco-Roman, which was everywhere. But then catch wrestling became... like was this enormous trend in wrestling and even ah got to the point of an Olympic sport, I think by the 1910s or something before being banned because simply it was too dangerous. It's kind of makes me think of modern Brazilian jujitsu because that became sort of the underlying concept the sort of default kind of martial art in mixed martial arts nowadays because it allowed for those extremely dangerous locks.
Speaker: And so what you'd have are these major catch wrestlers. But the problem was, again, that even when you're... rigging the match the matches just ended up being being too damn long and then the I forget what Toots Mont called it but like the wham bam western style of wrestling eventually came about in the twenty s when ah they went wait Since we're already like rigging these matches and we're already working a little, let's work everything.
Speaker: And then it gets to the point of, well, we do these kinds of punches and lumberyard wrestling and we do these amazing suplexes and Greco-Roman, which you don't use in other styles because you don't have to.
Speaker: But in Greco-Roman, you're trying to throw somebody or any a match where you're trying to throw someone. And so suddenly you've got throws, you've got leaps, you've got submissions, you've got punches. And that turns into what is really professional wrestling sort of starting the 20s in America. But it's all based on these British folk traditions, which is, yeah, it's so cool. There's some really interesting, I'm obsessed with a wrestling reporter and I shouldn't really be giving away all my secrets, but i'm really hoping to write a book based on his writing. He was called The Cross Buttocker and ah his real name is Walter Armstrong. He's a wrestler. He was a Cumberland or Westmoreland wrestler in the 60s. And by the
Speaker: and 1890s, he starts writing ah as ah as ah a boxing and wrestling writer for Sporting Life newspaper and then later the Boxing World newspaper. He's a wrestling correspondent.
Speaker: And he is a very traditional, old-fashioned, he likes proper wrestling and he likes proper British wrestling, which means you stand up to throw your man. And there's such interesting...
Speaker: xenophobia and racism is so know we start getting a lots of French what we we call the French style wrestling and over here and he calls it ground groveling like dogs um it's you know it's not British it's not what he has always and he also sees and chronicles the rise of the music hall wrestling the fake wrestling the showman he thinks Hackenschmidt is an absolute sham of a you know um ah just Just the showman, a fake. Someone like Hackenschmidt would never last five minutes with a legitimate wrestler like Jack Wallop, for example. And in fact, Cross Buttoke. Amazing. ah He's brilliant. I've got an idea for sort of a, I guess, like a history of wrestling based around a biography of Cross Buttoke, but also his essays. And then my essays and my thoughts on on wrestling as well. and But he has very strong words about about wrestling from as it starts to transition to become more and more and more fixed and showy and musical based it as the 1890s progresses. And he's brilliant. He's such a good writer as well. Very funny, very witty. Yeah. I can't get over him being called the Cross Butiker. Yeah, so that would be the name of the book. And if my agent doesn't go for that, then i I'll just have to go it alone. ah pretty he was he was the first man during World War I, and he is well into his 70s by this point.
Speaker: He is the first, actually probably he would have been 80. He's the first and only person to this date that I know of who as a journalist held the dual beats of wrestling and war correspondent. And he would write reports on wrestling. And there's not a huge amount of kind of wrestling in the UK kind of grinds to a halt during World War I. But, He's the only person i I can think of and know of who during World War I reports on the War the boxing worlds newspaper and on wrestling for Boxing World newspaper and newspaper, which is brilliant. So the Cross Buttocker history of wrestling and war will be my award-winning multi-million pounds. across yet i i think ever The Cross Buttocker is going to live in my mind forever. You can't steal that. i I shouldn't be saying out loud in public. but It's on your web website. I know.
Speaker: But yeah, where was I even going with that? I get to strike could see this is the thing. So I need to read write a book about him because I could get distracted by the cross buttock for ages. But um yeah, it is through him really that we start to see how wrestling turns from athletic competition to professional, I can't, I'm doing air quotes right now, sorry, I'm on a podcast. I'm just heavily using the term worked. and because Because again, the term fake has all sorts of baggage with wrestling for obvious reasons. And again, a fake fight looks like crap. A wrestling match looks wonderful, so worked. He calls it fraudulent and all sorts, as far as he understands it. It's it's um disrespecting the audience and it's not British and it's it's an abomination and a disgrace. so Amazing. So what about the women during this period? The women during this is what we are here to talk about. So I don't know what the very earliest women...
Speaker: wrestlers are who they were what they were doing in the UK I can imagine of course men who were training in Cumberland and Westmoreland wrestling in Lancashire and Cornish wrestling there were probably girls doing it on the sly I'd imagine they weren't active in competitions at all but you see the occasional report about maybe a servant girl getting into a grappling match with a with a servant boy that kind of thing In terms of sort music hall wrestling, the earliest mentions I found would be around 1867. And I know there was a German troupe of lady wrestlers who were touring in 1867. you reports I don't think there are many female wrestlers in the UK, but you get reports on female wrestling from other countries. There seem to be quite a few in France. There's reports of Indian wrestling. I'm so fascinated with what was going on in France because there's a lot going on and I don't know anything about it. Yeah, there is a big circus and fairground culture in France. And there is in the UK as well, very traditional kind of fairgrounds.
Speaker: fairs which were going you know running for hundreds of years back to the 1500s and 1600s in the UK where you would have boxing booths you would have ah rides you'd have novelties and you'd get these lady wrestlers touring kind of that um as I guess like a novelty you start to see in the eighteen eighty s Now, i'm I'm gathering all of this from newspapers. So this is not to say that there were not lady wrestlers. There may well have been loads of lady wrestlers in the UK, right? But they weren't in the papers. But they're not in the papers, yeah. They're not maybe being advertised. And that, to me, says there probably weren't that many of them. or they weren't you know
Speaker: It's not something that's you know any kind of phenomenon or any kind of movement. The eighteen eighty s I've been looking at lady boxers. And there's a lot in this that is ah very similar to how we would then see worked wrestling. So lady boxers in the 1880s were fairground circus and musical performers. They were novelty acts. They were not competitive boxers. So you would have the two girls coming on as the kind of light relief in between ah men doing maybe three rounds in sparring in public. You would have, i mean, there are Sisters Mills, who were two Caribbean born very mysterious, been researching them for years, and I still don't know their names, two black women who were boxing. They only boxed each other. They were managed by a showman called Alf Ball and toured the fairgrounds with Alf in his boxing booth.
Speaker: He didn't accept, you know, outside interference and they didn't accept even pre-arranged kind of competition from the crowd. You know how it looks like a member of the audience is volunteering to fight? and plant yeah yeah yeah They didn't even do that. They only fought each other three light rounds, and that kind of thing. You had others like Selina Seaforth and Alice Daltrey who toured with mailboxes and did, I guess, more kind of sketches, comedians,
Speaker: comedic kind of sketches with a boxing theme. They were billed as the champion lady boxer of Britain. ah Both Selina and Alice Dautry were and with rival groups between two brothers.
Speaker: Alice toured with Hezekiah Moscow, in fact, in 1891 until his departure and disappearance in 1892. And they would have performed some kind of, we don't really know the details, but some kind of boxing theme sketch.
Speaker: You had a husband and wife duo um called Billy and Mrs Noon, who were both kind of five foot tall, lightweights. And Billy was a a proper boxer before we kept getting injured. And his him and his wife would do a sort of fun, yeah hilarious domestic violence themed ah interlude. No! And it was all... I can imagine. This was... Yeah, yeah. So just Punch and Judy, basically. And the reports of their matches were very much tongue-in-cheek, you know, I hope she doesn't treat him this way at home kind of thing. week i mean, good on Billy for doing that sort of thing. This is the early to mid-1880s as well, which, you know... But it all would have been fun and games, very lighthearted, treated much in the same way as you would also have dwarfs wrestling. You would have two men with ah one leg each in a boxing match, that kind of thing. The the oddity side of it, which has always followed the carnival stuff. Yeah. Yeah, men boxing on donkeys, lots of fun. um The Victorians were constantly after just novelty and newness and, you know, and weird the weirder the better. Like things got really, really strange on the musicals. Just between two men...
Speaker: On donkey back, trying to box each other. It just is hilarious. Like, yeah, great me image. I've never found I want to kind of get like an academic paper at some point together on ah wrestling on horseback and boxing on donkeys with lots of sort of puns. And in there the title, I'll give everything away. Mm hmm. But you don't have in the 1880s a huge number of lady wrestlers.
Speaker: m You don't have a huge amount of male wrestling happening in, like I said before, in London. it' It's happening here and there, but it's mostly northern men. And London is wild for boxing. Boxing is happening everywhere. But you might get one wrestling match, maybe Jack Warnepal put on a competition and maybe organize a few box of wrestling matches, you know, in between the boxing. But it's not a huge spectator sport or anything like that.
Speaker: Then you get to the 1890s and what you have in the 1890s is a real boom in wrestling generally. So man man wrestling and as I mentioned before, lots of ah foreign influence coming in, the Turkish, the Greeks, the Indians.
Speaker: You have Antonio Pieri, the terrible Greek. So Pieri, I will not tell you what his real name is here. I do know his real name, ah but Antonio Pieri was a Greek wrestler who becomes a manager, he finds some of the most exciting things Turkish and um and foreign wrestlers and brings them to the UK and to America, I think, as well.
Speaker: He is one of the first to start touring with female wrestlers. And he will also later, I will talk about this in a few minutes, I guess, ah become Juno May's manager in the early 20th century. um There's greek' a guy called Greek George, not to be confused with Pieri, the terrible Greek. He has a daughter who's a wrestler, I think.
Speaker: His daughter might have been Aphrodite. need to check that. um Yeah, ephro Aphrodite. She's probably around the same kind of time as Minerva as well. Madame Pliny, who I think was French, she's touring in the UK. There's definitely that French influence coming in, man wrestling and lady wrestling. There's a woman...
Speaker: in 1897 who got lots of newspaper coverage actually for wrestling a bear in ah in the music halls and and fairgrounds. she i don't know her name. She was just described as a French lady with a bear. um All right. Someone I'd I posted about it on social media and someone said, was the bear just there for emotional support? You don't know. But no, she bought the bear. The bear was allegedly and still had its fangs and had its claws unclipped.
Speaker: Did it? We don't know. is that just publicity and advertising? I don't know. But apparently she sort of grappled the bear for 10 minutes um as part of the show. So, yeah, by the 1890s, you've got a um a good handful, not thousands, not um even hundreds, but a good handful of women who are wrestling in touring companies um around the UK, either visiting from elsewhere or they are UK women themselves. so Hmm.
Speaker: Yeah, and by I guess by the by about 1900, it's not, yeah, there's not loads of them, but it's it's a thing. And how it was perceived in the newspapers is really interesting. because There's not much commentary on it until you get into the nineteen hundreds Interesting. Yeah, it's really like, they're just there. They're not seen as shocking and scandalous and something awful. and they They're just kind of a novelty.
Speaker: an interesting thing amongst all the other interesting things. at any given show, you start to see from the 1900s, early 1900s, some concern from more conservative newspaper reporters, I guess, um conservative with a small c about, you know, you've got these lady boxers, you've got these lady wrestlers, you've got women wearing rational dress, so more practical clothing, large bloomers rather than a big skirt.
Speaker: to ride bikes. And it's like, goodness me, what next? ah The yeah moral panic over bicycles, one of my favorites. Yes. And it's also um steeped in concern for the female form. You know, these women are to be exerting themselves far too much. They're going to be muscly. They're going to be, you know, that women should not be exercising and doing this kind of level of physical activity they will be morally and physically corrupted by it so you start to see all that kind stuff from the top medical journals down as well not just from gobby newspaper columnists yeah incredible so could you talk a little bit about miss juno may and then i will take the reins once more and then jump us a little forward in time so i can talk about the explosion of women's wrestling in the u.s yeah Yeah, absolutely. Just before I do, I just want to read, had this up.
Speaker: Just, I wanted to read this out actually talking about this moral panic. So this is the- Oh yes. Yeah, this is the late 1890s, 1896. And this is a short column which appeared in the whole Daily Mail. So this is a Northern newspaper. It's just like a one- It's a one-paragraph article, but it really made me laugh.
Speaker: At the present appalling pace, ladies' cycle wrestling in rational costume at the aquarium and such like will soon be regarded in new woman circles as altogether too piffling and unathletic to satisfy satisfy the sex in its march to emancipation. The lady wrestlers, it seems, are to give displays shortly in public.
Speaker: After they have ceased to astonish us, the lady boxers will no doubt come to the front. Imagine the advertisements of the future in the sporting press of Betty the Bruiser offering to take on Nell the Naylor in a 14-foot ring for £50 a side.
Speaker: It's like, this is 1896, you know, and as I said, there's been lady boxers and lady wrestlers for a little while. yeah um got A few decades in the UK, not competitive. They are show women. They are burlesque performers. But still, this is, you know, whatever next is the theme here. I love that. Yeah. brilliant Again, got all those great names too. Nelvin Baylor. Juno May. So um skipping forward slightly
Speaker: um And I'll just go back to how I discovered Juno May, actually. I was reading a local history blog and based, it's sort of a South London history blog. And there was a short piece about this woman. So I was not the first person to kind of discover her. It was a really short piece years ago.
Speaker: that mentioned her. And it said she was a six foot two, 252 pound lady wrestler who had a brief career in the early 1900s. And she had been credited as coming from Broccoli, which is an area of South London, right near where I was studying and at Goldsmiths. And that was that was kind of it. And I thought, oh, my God. Right. So I'm a five foot eleven woman myself. As I said earlier, a huge fan of China.
Speaker: i was starting to go to wrestling club myself at this point in training as a wrestler. And my research, I was really determined to focus on the 1880s and look at Jack Wanup and look at wrestling and boxing in the earlier period.
Speaker: The 1900s to me in terms of British wrestling, I feel like there's some other people that have looked at that period, that kind of Hackenschmidt and Gotch and that kind of period. of oh no But also six foot two lady wrestler can't leave this alone. So I set out researching her. This was years ago. Now this is probably six, six or seven years ago.
Speaker: I set out researching her, trying to find out who her name, who she really was, what her real name was, and a bit about maybe maybe trying to... I had done this with male boxers who used pseudonyms. It was usually pretty straightforward. You're Jacks, you're usually John, you're Jems and Jameses. Someone like Hezekiah Moscow is a bit more con convoluted. His boxing name was Ching Hook. But there's a newspaper clipping later on in his career that gives it away and says...
Speaker: He is actually called Hezekiah Moscow. So I'm thinking, right, I might find something about Juno. um Nope. pin No, seven years later, still don't know who she is. But what we do know is September 1906, she gets launched in the British press via ah what i think was probably a press release written by Antonio Pieri, the terrible Greek, who at this point is past his prime as a wrestler and has turned to management and publicity.
Speaker: And he um gets this press release in every newspaper in the country, every national newspaper, every sporting newspaper, every regional newspaper. And it all says the same thing. She's six foot two. i mean, the average British woman today is only five foot five, right? So this is a ah colossus amongst dainty British women. She's six foot two. She's 252 pounds. It gives her neck ah measurements, her arm and her thigh and her waist measurements.
Speaker: it There's a kind of backstory in some newspapers, the sort of more detailed ones. She gives an interview where she says she is one of nine siblings. She has a bunch of brothers. um She has a few sisters who are normal size.
Speaker: She started training as a wrestler in South London as a girl. Now this makes me think, really? Is this the case? Because...
Speaker: Jack Wallop was the main ah wrestling trainer in South London during the 1890s. And I have no evidence whatsoever that girls were allowed to. I mean, they weren't doing wrestling classes at school in the 1890s. Who's training you? Yeah, who's training you? Was a six foot? Two lady wrestlers, training, 14-year-old girl, or whatever, training with Jack Warnham. I would know about this if they had. I think it's all made up.
Speaker: I don't know if she was really from Broccoli. Her age is given as 22. Was she really 22? Was she actually 30? Was she really 6'2"? Or was she maybe 5'10", let's say, wearing a pair of heels?
Speaker: It reads all to me like, okay, Fabe, he's created this story. to launch this woman, but the press go wild for it. There are a few sketches published and there were a few photographs as well in some of the the Daily Express and the Penny Illustrated newspaper.
Speaker: There's, it's kind of, most of the newspapers are quite, I would say quite polite and quite in awe of her, actually. She is treated sort of with respect. It's a bit like, wow, this huge woman, she's going to be the champion wrestler of Britain.
Speaker: In fact, she's billed as the champion wrestler of Britain. She's not even had a match yet. So, you know, this is to me says, you know, it's all, ah it's all a lie. It's all an act.
Speaker: She's training with Pieri and Pieri is going to turn her into the champion wrestler of Britain. And then a few weeks later, she has a match in a music hall for, like it's like a closed um event for the press. She throws a few women to the floor with ease, dispatches them in a couple of minutes. She fights a couple of men as well, throws them to the floor with ease.
Speaker: She does a public show in Britain around new Year 1906. So turn of this this is a kind of a private public showing. It's very well reviewed. She's this new phenomenon.
Speaker: Lots of excited reports about it in the newspapers. She then goes to Ireland and she has a few shows in Ireland, in Dublin, in a musical. She gets in trouble, well, some men that are touring with her get in trouble for and sort of conning a landlady out of some money for a room and some bacon. like And that makes the newspaper as well. In the Irish press, she disappears.
Speaker: So she is rumored the American newspapers, loads of American newspapers cover the same kind of thing that the British newspapers covered, her measurements. They all say that she is the champion lady, British wrestler, and she's coming to America.
Speaker: She's going to fight the American lady wrestlers and ah they should all be terrified. The American newspapers are bit ruder than the British ones. It's all a bit sexist. It's all a bit, um she's never going to get married, not at her size. And and what she's what's an awful, intimidating, terrifying woman she must be. you wouldn't want to mess with her, that kind of um attitude.
Speaker: But a bit of shock and awe at the same time. um But I have never found any evidence that she actually came to America. I've never found any reports of her involved in a wrestling match in America. i only have access to the Library of Congress digitized newspaper archives. So its search function.
Speaker: If she suddenly changed names or something like that, um you know, I I've looked up um various things like Lady Wrestler, 6'2 Lady Wrestler, British Lady Wrestler, things like that as well. So, you know, see if if she'd suddenly died, for example, the fact that she had been in every single newspaper just five months prior To me, it might have made a you know story. I was really sad. this The new um act has just disappeared. died Sorry, he died.
Speaker: But there's nothing. She comes, she wrestles for a few times, she disappears. And that's kind of... That's maddening. It is. it is It's really frustrating.
Speaker: About a year ago, i met a um American wrestling expert. He's a filmmaker called Joaquin. I'm sorry, Joaquin, if you're listening to this and mispronounced. I think it's Joaquin Poblite.
Speaker: ah he And he has been trying to get a documentary off the ground around um pro wrestling in general, the sort of 1900s Hackenschmidt and Gotch. And I was doing a bit filming with him for this documentary in London, and he was setting up some microphones with some lights or something like that, and just yells across the room at me, oh, by the way, I think I know who Juno May is.
Speaker: i was like, excuse me, I sit down and talk about this? Just casually. Just casually. And Joaquin has come up with a really, really interesting theory. And it's one that I've been looking at in a bit more detail as much as we can for this chapter that I've written for the book that's tentatively titled Amazon's at the moment.
Speaker: And his theory is that Juno May was Antonio Pieri's wife. It's based on... pretty scant evidence no offense wacky i know that she definitely wasn't his first wife his first wife is on the 1891 census they were living in britain at the time in a kind of a music hall performers hostel sort of hotel type situation um and his first wife would have been i can't remember exactly how old but something like early 30s in 1891 so there's no way she could have passed for 22 in
Speaker: um And she was also, I think she was Dutch, but perhaps he had a wife a bit later on second wife, third wife, whatever. and There are some references to Pieri coming to America with his wrestling troupe of women.
Speaker: and this is a bit earlier. and his wife is described as very tall, And you don't tend to comment on that unless someone is very tall. totally like but people People say it to me all the time, right? My sister is six foot one. People say, my God, you're very tall, right? But you don't if she was like five foot six, right, maybe, but probably wouldn't have been commented on. and Slightly tall, yeah. Yeah, Pierre is, I think he's about five foot nine.
Speaker: So there's that. And she also apparently had an a Cockney accent. So the accent of Bowbells, which is East London. Now, an American reporter probably wouldn't know the difference between East London and South London. So perhaps his wife was a very tall South London woman.
Speaker: That's about all we got, right? Until Pierre dies. And the um death records, he dies in Strasbourg.
Speaker: The death record has been translated by Joaquin and ah a colleague he was working with and probably a little bit of help from some translation software as well. It's in, I think it's in German. And it gives the name of his widow.
Speaker: And her first name is Johanna, Johanna. And her surname is um kind of German sounding, but it begins with M-A-E. um Johanna May, something right.
Speaker: ge I see the theory now Joanna May right yeah I mean if she wasn't his wife that's a bit of a weak coin instance or did he meet this really tall lady wrestler he wanted to form into a a act as Juno May and he named her after his wife kind of thing right The name Juno, so her real name wasn't Juno. No one in that, I've looked into all the kind of historical records. no one in Britain around Broccoli or anywhere is called Juno May and registered under that name. right
Speaker: But Juno is a Roman goddess and she's like a goddess of war. She's also the goddess of marriage. um So there's the clues. Those are the kind of four things that point towards her being his wife. Now, if she is his wife or if she isn't his wife, why did she disappear in 1906?
Speaker: Why did she suddenly get launched onto the music hall scene and then disappear? There are theories I've come up with. She perhaps got pregnant, had a baby. Pieri did not have any children. Pieri and his wife, Johanna, did not have any children when um he died. But that doesn't necessarily mean that this woman, Juno May, was his wife or that she didn't have a baby.
Speaker: Did she die? She might have died. and it just wasn't reported on. um Did she fall foul of someone? Perhaps Pieri himself did.
Speaker: So Pieri is very easily distracted. Almost as soon as Juno is launched and then disappears, he's got other lady wrestlers, he's got other male wrestlers, he's got other wrestlers with dwarfism, right?
Speaker: And he's touring around doing different things. He's ill for a little while as well. He comes back. that There's no obvious... I've looked into him and his career and the rest of his life up until when he dies.
Speaker: There's no mention of her whatsoever or anything like that. Did she fall foul with someone we know that At this time, it's a really brilliant book about a musical performer called Kitty Marion by Dr. Fern Riddell.
Speaker: And Fern writes in that book. And Kitty, actually Kitty and Juno may have crossed paths. um Kitty was an actress and a vocalist.
Speaker: She later becomes a radical suffragette or what Fern would call a terrorist. um She gets involved in a bombing campaign um for the right to vote. She later goes to prison um for being radical suffragette. People never talk about how suffragettes used bombs. Yes. I think that is a really important part of the history because, oh, this notable sexist in the U.S., Woodrow wilt Wilson, magically gave women the right to vote with nothing happening aside from waving some signs previously. I know, right? there were bombs. Yeah. Fern's um fern's book Death in 10 Minutes is about Kitty Marion. It's absolutely superb and it really you know it goes into detail about the firebombing and the bombing dynamite campaign against Fiveies women for the right to vote. Not all suffragettes were radical suffragettes. um But yeah, absolutely. Fern's a superb x expert on that amazing suffragette terrorism kind of thing. um But she talks in the book and she's talked to me. i sort of sent her a few messages when I was writing my chapter about Juno May.
Speaker: Juno, in the very first interviews that she does, explicitly states that she is not a suffragette. She is not campaigning for the right to vote. She just likes bombs. Which is really interesting to me. And it is um kind of... I'm into the bombs, but not the voting. Honestly, I don't care whatever cause it is. Just...
Speaker: So Juno May um is a six foot two larger lady and a lot of the there's a few newspaper articles which um mention this and they're sort of like, imagine if she had been on the suffragette side. Can you imagine her like flinging a policeman across the room or, you know, like she would have been this intimidating force.
Speaker: But she explicitly says she is not a women's rights campaigner. And I think she does that because she is either under the thumb of Pieri and Pieri has decided as a PR...
Speaker: gimmick being a suffragette is not a good one it would have made her hugely unpopular amongst men it would have made her hugely unpopular amongst probably quite a few women as well um the music hall women as far as I understand it from what Fern said to me music hall women you'd think as kind of business women show women women who would living outside the box you'd think they'd all have been like campaigners and wanted the vote but there is a real divide because of the power that men had in this industry and if a man um and I think there is a section in this in in the book on Kitty Marion there's there's a a manager of a of a musical who tells Kitty to take off her sash, her kind of colours that show that she is a a women's vote, women are vote for women, you know, supporter.
Speaker: ah Take off your colours or you'll never work again. know, you're dead in this industry. You'll never get work. I'll see to it that you don't. So I wonder, i wonder, I mean, it's absolutely just a theory that I have no evidence for whatsoever. If something like that might have happened to Juno May, was she...
Speaker: um actually a suffragette and was, you know, couldn't hold it in and wanted to, you know, wanted to be herself and not the character created for her by Pieri.
Speaker: Was she, um and again, this is in the Kitty Marion book, and the sexual harassment that female performers and faced in the musical. Was she driven out of it so quickly after five months as a 22 year old woman by, um,
Speaker: something along those lines. Or did she just not really like being a wrestler? Maybe she just got married. If she wasn't Pieri's wife, maybe she fell in love married someone else and in in ah direct conflict with what the American newspapers were predicting that she would never find a husband. ah So you you don't know. It's hard to... I don't want to be...
Speaker: disrespectful to her and say you know perhaps she was driven up perhaps she wasn't very good maybe she didn't like it maybe she got injured i don't know yeah you know it's just a very strange it's a very strange disappearance given the speed of it um and the fact that she was launched to such huge publicity and seem like this exciting new star she was not unique amongst female wrestlers at that time in 1906 but there weren't loads of them she was pretty certainly unique in terms of her size and strength and the fact that she was someone you could genuinely believe could fight a man as well you know the same way china like china got away with looking like she could fight a man because she looked like she could really fight a man you don't buy it when you're five foot one and 90 pounds you know
Speaker: And that's where we are with the story of Juno May. And she's so frustrating and makes me so angry. and yeah Incredible. I just want to know. I just want to know who she was. And yeah.
Speaker: Sarah, could you talk a little bit about the sort of character and persona that Juno May had? Yeah, absolutely. So Juno is, when she's first announced in 1906, she is um all statistics. You know, we've got inches for everything, every body part.
Speaker: She is deliberately made to sound like she's really big and really unusual. Of course, you know, like and of our very tallest, heaviest heavyweight boxers in this period were...
Speaker: make mailboxes were five foot eight, five foot nine, you know. So she's a very big intimidating woman, but the language used around that is that she wasn't intimidating in outside the ring. In real life, she was docile and non-combative, non-combative,
Speaker: And she didn't ah believe in the suffragette cause. She was ah young and softly spoken and she had dainty hands and feet and lovely clear skin. It was it was a description that was, ah you know, yeah designed to make her as popular as possible to as wide an audience as as possible. And while the votes for women campaign certainly had...
Speaker: it's ah its supporters. For the mainstream public and particularly for men, she was, you know, meant to be attractive. She was, you know, described as as pretty. There are a few photographs of her and, you know, they're unfortunately quite low res. I've never found a really great, you know, original portrait image of her.
Speaker: But there are images where she is posing with her hands behind her head, a little bit saucy, but still quite kind of quite demure at the same time. wearing, she's wearing knickerbockers, like long trousers with knee length leather boots and a white blouse, which is kind of form fitting, but not, um not overly explicitly sexual and, and ah scandalous, you know, so she's,
Speaker: she's bridging the two kind of sides, I guess, if that makes sense. And she is then interpreted, it interpreted, yeah, definitely in those American newspaper reports as being, um,
Speaker: a dominant man scolding sort of, there's if there's a caricature of her as a housewife berating little weakling husband. love that. And she's only 22 actually, but in this image, it's quite a crude sketch, but she looks like she's like a middle-aged, big, scary, and you know, you you wouldn't want to mess with her kind of thing. So some of the newspapers kind of looked through those things attempts at making her sound feminine and placid as well. So there is a um an attempt to make it sound like she becomes something else in the ring. So in the ring, she will throw around men. And that is a really interesting thing. Even today where WWE wwe does not show intergender wrestling. We had intergender wrestling, intergender boxing in the 1880s. We have intergender wrestling in the eighteen eighty s eighteen ninety s
Speaker: and 1900s I would imagine pretty much all the men that she fights are plants there are certainly as I mentioned earlier because they get in trouble with the law there are men that tour with her and they are wrestlers themselves so they are all plants and it's all deliberately designed to show off how powerful and you know um yeah different she was um yeah so she's um And it's really interesting. There's one photo spread which appeared in the Penny Illustrated paper where she's ah pictured with Pieri.
Speaker: And she's wearing um her wrestling gear in one one or two of the pictures, I think. Her sort of blouse and her knickerbockers. And then in others, she's in her street clothes. So she's wearing a full covering, ah Edwardian gown, long skirts, really big hat.
Speaker: The weird thing is, she's sitting down in the image and Pieri is standing up. And this is a man who was a master publicist and a really fantastic...
Speaker: um, advertiser. He created his own image. His name is not Antonio Pieri. He was in fact Greek, but he was Pieri the terrible Greek. Why did he have a photo of this intimidating six foot two woman sat down?
Speaker: I don't understand it Surely he would have had her towering over him. It's really bizarre. I've not really come up with an explanation for it yet. The the old trick where a wrestling manager is always meant to be shorter than the wrestlers they're talking about, how some wrestlers who tried to be managers had a lot of problems with that because they were taller than wrestlers they were managing. But he's shorter, yeah. He was five foot nine. so This goes into something that I see in Japan a lot, and I'll talk about a bit, is a Japanese idol culture, right? Is something that ties in with ah Joshi Japanese wrestling. And in idol culture, the women and the men are meant to evoke a sort of cultural ideal, right? And the women are meant to be
Speaker: lively but gentle and compliant and although they are these excellent athletes and particularly in Japan extremely hard hitting and violent in the ring they are also sold in these photo books and in their personality outside of the ring as being appealing to men and appealing to men in that sort of demure sort of way and that you sort of have those both because they want to see em of them in the ring but then they also want to dream of being married to them And so the idea is that you have to be also the ideal woman for this, ah you know, this ah male gaze. And I think that's exactly what they were doing with Juno May, too. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, definitely. um But yeah, that photo with Pieri, I just don't understand.
Speaker: i as as ah as I said, a tall woman myself, like... if I was launching myself as a wrestler, I'd want to be as big and intimidating. And it just seems very strange to me. Absolutely. Yeah. um But yeah, it is. um So that's, that's kind of how she was. She is also not a woman who is um showing off muscles at all. So you see those images of people like Minerva and the bodybuilders who um are wearing more like a leotard or something that shows off their thighs and their arms. And they've got these big biceps.
Speaker: she's She's described by Pieri as being strong, but she looks like she's a curvy lady. she's not um a She doesn't have what would have been considered a manly masculine physique. yeah She is softer. She's powerful, but softer.
Speaker: um so yeah, she's she's very, I don't know what the what the word is. It's escaped me. but um It's not hypocritical. It's um paradoxical. paradoxical that's the one yeah so she's yeah trying she's being portrayed as as as everything i am still you know i don't know how much of it is true and i don't know there's so much about the backstory and everything um she allegedly had a dad who was in south africa who didn't approve of her wrestling
Speaker: And now you have the Boer War in the... I think that was probably still going on in 1906. I'm not sure. Terrible historian moment. I'll Google it later. I think Tracy? I think it was over by then.
Speaker: Yeah, early 19... late eighteen ninety s but you know was her dad perhaps a military man and over in South Africa and also was that just completely made up or I've looked into all these things and I've looked on sort of ancestry and find my past looking for families from Broccoli where you may have had a military father for example with nine children she was said to have yeah eight siblings or nine siblings Never found anything. Never even come close to And i I still couldn't say whether all of it. She might have come from somewhere completely different.
Speaker: I'm going to use that as an excellent segue to take the reins once more and drive us back to America and then jump forwards in time a little bit. Because the lack of records on ah lady wrestling is something that plagues all of this because it's always the sort of secondary attraction in these, what started as the touring carnivals and then eventually became wrestling promotions.
Speaker: So where it changes and where we see the explosion of women's wrestling is in the 1940s. Prior to that, there were still some major names and a bunch of names I could run through. One very important one was ah Clara Mortensen, who at one point wrestled on a card in Hawaii in the 1930s during the sort of huge, there was a huge wrestling boom in the early years of the depression.
Speaker: And there was one, the show in Hawaii had 31,000 fans in attendance, apparently. It might be an exaggerated number, but it was absolutely enormous. And it wasn't, she wasn't the headliner, but Clara Mortensen was on the card.
Speaker: And she eventually fell in with a promoter who was a spectacular piece of shit. But this promoter is a key figure behind who becomes the biggest name in women's wrestling, Mildred Burke.
Speaker: so I'm going to talk about Mildred Burke a little bit. She was born Mildred Bliss in 1915 and was immediately an incredible athlete who also could put on muscle far more easily than a lot of other women.
Speaker: Common at the time, she drops out of high school and is working on a ah Native Reserve as a stenographer. And then... Marries a man twice her age, and he leaves her as soon as she gets pregnant.
Speaker: Desperate to wait to get away from this awful job and also find a way to take care of her kid, she moves in with her mother at Mums Cafe in Kansas City. Down the block, this promoter of women's wrestling, which at this point was a very small part of the wrestling scene, was a man named Billy Wolf.
Speaker: Wolf had left his wife to be with a wrestler he was managing, Barbara Ware, and then he ran a gym to train aspiring women wrestlers and operate as a home base for his touring act. This is all out of Kansas City.
Speaker: Mildred saw a wrestling event and became obsessed and then just started showing up at the gym saying, bring me on, bring me on, bring me on. And Wolf likes what he sees and then immediately dumps Barbara Ware, who he had left his wife for, and then gets with Mildred Burke.
Speaker: ah Well, midrid Mildred Bliss. He actually changed her last name to Burke to capitalize on Irish sentiment being a big deal in the US, whether it was pro or anti, because you had more Irish people coming in and also the existing diaspora sort of coming more and more into society.
Speaker: And so opinions on whether or not being Irish was good was all over the place. So whether or not he was a face or heel thing, we're not quite sure. Even faces and heels were still somewhat in their sort of proto state.
Speaker: So this forced ah Burke's mother to sell the cafe. And here Wolf shows what a great guy he is. Because there was an implied promise that he would marry Burke and that Burke would have this kind of financial security. She's 19 years old.
Speaker: And so this guy, you marry in with him. There's a wrestling career. There's stability. And she's coming out of a lot of poverty. When her mom sells the cafe, Wolf finds out that ah Burke isn't going to see any of the money about this. So he completely loses her temper. And swears not to marry her because he thought that his wife to be would become wealthy, at least with the money of this cafe. And thus he'd get that money.
Speaker: And he says, i will not marry you for a year. And if you leave me, I'm reporting you to the police for violating the Mann Act, crossing state lines for immoral purposes. but Would he not be also violating it?
Speaker: He's talking to a 19 year old She doesn't get that. But yeah, absolutely. It's a ludicrous threat. But the point is, is that coercion becomes the nature of the relationship. yeah That isn't the point. The point is the abuse. Yeah, that's unfortunate.
Speaker: Wolf is an incredible carnival barker. And so Burke starts with the Take On All Comers Act. Beat Mildred Burke for 25 bucks. Take on any woman or any man if he's within 20 pounds. This is a mix of a carnival scam. So there's definitely plants, but there are also legitimate matches mixed in with here. And although he claimed Burke was undefeated, little murkier than that, but she did handily and legitimately beat several men.
Speaker: Wolf also was fucking around almost immediately, letting Burke clearly know this was a business arrangement where he got to have sex with his business partner. In one incident, he beat Burke's infant son for crying ah during one of his liaisons and interrupting it.
Speaker: This led Burke to walk out on him with the baby, but she was forced to return for lack of other options. She did promise to decapitate Wolf if he ever touched her son again. Well, that's good. Yeah. That's something. Yeah, I mean, that's what you gotta do.
Speaker: I respect that threat. So wrestling is in a downward turn in the 1930s. And while the men are failing to draw, and also we're starting to see is the U.S. getting involved in the war or not, she's a draw when men aren't. without The problem is there's no women to face, so she's taking on male challengers a decent amount, but is a genuine draw.
Speaker: So she starts to tour more widely and then finally comes across the woman I spoke about previously, Clara Mortensen, who at this point was a veteran kind of these name in women's wrestling.
Speaker: And again, possibly the only other woman in the country who is a draw because there's so few women who are actually wrestling. Wolf convinces an Alabama promoter to book the attraction, promising it would fill houses. And he was right. Burke and Mortensen did a very successful circuit tour with Burke putting over the more senior Mortensen.
Speaker: Burke did not like this and eventually began threatening to shoot on Claire Mortensen and take the match for real. This culminated in a huge bout in front of 6,000 fans where Burke dethroned Mortensen in what to date was the most publicized women's match of all time in the U.S. s with, I don't have the number in front of me, but it was thousands in attendance. Not tens of thousands, but thousands. And in the meantime, Wolfe and Burke had developed a very simple relationship.
Speaker: They needed each other and they hated each other. Oh, no. Toxic codependency. Awesome. Oh, no. oh this is the most toxic relationship in wrestling. My God. They marry in 63, and Burke's quote on this was, I'm going to affect my ah transatlantic accent. There was no question of my being in love with Billy Wolf. He'd become physically and sexually repulsive to me.
Speaker: Well... In one incident, Burke asked for time off when her son became sick, and Wolf responded by punching her in the face. Jesus. Oh. So she splits, leaves for California, and then after time away, they they can't, neither of them are going to make money without each other.
Speaker: huh Burke needs Wolf's incredible promotion skills, and Wolf needs Burke, who is this incredible draw. Just get separate hoses then, you know? sucks. Yeah. it sucks World War Two is where Burke becomes a megastar because men start leaving because of the draft and women flood into vacated sporting roles. And although wrestling ah women's wrestling was banned in some of the most populous states, ah it still nonetheless takes off, particularly in the Midwest. Forty percent of the wrestling audience at this point was women and they wanted in.
Speaker: Burke was standing atop it all during this massive boom in wrestling, and Billy Wolfe is suddenly awash with trainees who had to be between 18 to 24 years old, 130 to 150 pounds, photogenic, and would have sex with him. I guess that's a plus.
Speaker: Burke had unreleased memoirs, which were used as one of the sources in this book. And Billy Wolf's orgies and trafficking and sexual favors of some of the girls were infamous in the business. Some promoters happily took part in this lavish whoring, envying Wolf for his access to so much female flesh. Like, he gets to be a rapist without any consequences. Yeah.
Speaker: Effectively, yes. ah The legendary Mae Young, who is perhaps one of the toughest and most plain spoken women in wrestling history, had this incredible line. The thing they were interested in is getting bookings. They didn't have the brains enough to know they could get them without screwing that old fart.
Speaker: So while Wolf trained dozens of young women and turned his training camp into a brothel, Burke began traveling with his son instead. She is a star. She is across newspapers and in 1943 claims to have made $22,000, which of course makes me wonder what Wolf made. But $22,000 in 1943 would put her as one of the most highly paid athletes in the country. This is also when there's an explosion in women's tennis and other sports. milk So Mildred Burke is a huge deal. This is a League of Their Own times too, right? Absolutely. League of Their Own is absolutely based on women's baseball during this time. Or ladies' baseball. Female baseball? Wait.
Speaker: no So as we go into the end of the 1940s, during this decade of dominance from Mildred Burke, the National Wrestling Alliance had begun to take And there was a growing sentiment against a women's wrestling. The N.W.A. very much took this. There's the two types of wrestling. There's the practice craft between gentlemen, sort of an agreement between men to do battle. And there's there's the trash that is women's wrestling. And that's not real wrestling. So they were anti.
Speaker: The other promoters were kind of disgusted by Billy Wolf, and he was an outsider and more of a pimp than a true wrestling promoter. ah Luthez was in particular wanted nothing to do with it.
Speaker: Quote, I had nothing against the idea of women wrestling, but it's the fact I never actually met one, a wrestler that is during my career. Every single one of them were performers, and the whole act designed to titillate the males. So I was happy when the NWA ruled I didn't have to appear with them.
Speaker: ah legendarily, Luthez never wanted to appear on a card with people with dwarfism or any lady wrestlers. Burke's professional relationship with Wolf, though lucrative for both, was not sustainable.
Speaker: Rather than traveling together, Burke had taken to traveling with Wolf's son, who went by a G. Bill. G. Bill was a ah sad sack alcoholic. and he was completely dominated by his father, but also very kind and doting. Burke was kind of fond of him, not in love, but they nonetheless started an affair.
Speaker: He asked his father for permission to marry her and was laughed out of the room. Hmm. In 1951, Burke was traveling with G. Bill, and so she's been on the top for a decade. And although there is a sea of amazing wrestlers she was also facing, I kind of have to do a broad strokes history here. Mildred Burke herself could be a huge multi-podcast series. She blows a tire while traveling with G. Bill in 51, and the resulting car wreck hideously injures both of them.
Speaker: Burke is on the shelf for six months, and G. Bill is in a full body cast. And Wolf finally sees the opportunity to get the title off of Burke, because one of the key things here is the titles were co-owned sort of between the wrestler and the promoter. You couldn't just take the title off of somebody. You had to lose it in the ring. And this a key thing in wrestling that's resulted in a lot of controversies over time, one of which we'll talk about more later.
Speaker: As ah Bill and Burke are recovering, Wolf wants her to drop the belt to one of his protégés, Nell Stewart. Burke simply says, if you think she's good enough to beat me, let her beat me.
Speaker: Because Burke knew if she lost that belt, her career is done. During the argument, so Wolf, as he's trying to coerce her, bullies his poor son, who's hopelessly in love with her, but he can't stand up to his father. And they corner her and beat the shit out of Mildred Burke outside of a liquor store in front of Mildred's son.
Speaker: ah who's a teenager at this point. She ends up no-showing an event as a result, and Wolfe starts spreading rumors that Mildred Burke has cancer. in This just destroys their working relationship, even though they've been kind of at a distance. For obvious reasons, Burke files for divorce, and the NWA steps in to mediate over the fate of the women's title. They don't quite permit women's wrestling on a lot of their cards, but because the NWA now has a monopoly over all wrestling in the United States... they nonetheless are overseeing these kinds of things and where women's wrestling does appear. Because the men are speaking, Mildred Burke is forced to sit outside in the hallway.
Speaker: The result of these negotiations is Burke is going to buy the right off of the title for Wolf for $30,000, and he would agree not to promote women's wrestling for five years. They then start rival promotions. With Wolfe operating as a promoter but not in name within the offices of an NWA affiliate run by Al Haft, he and Burke go to war with their different promotions, trying to claim competing women's champions.
Speaker: And the problem here is that while Burke was a huge star, Wolfe was a promoter and Burke was not. He had promotional savvy, he was ruthless, and he had political connections. He also had two handpicked ringers in Nell Stewart and June Byers.
Speaker: And Burke, meanwhile, is pawning her possessions in order to fund her tools. Burke is eventually forced into receivership during this war. She just is hemorrhaging money. And so while in receivership and she's trying to divorce this guy, well, somebody has to be appointed administrator for promotion.
Speaker: And the judge appoints Billy Wolf to run ah Mildred Burke's promotion. Hmm. The NWA is sick of this shit. They hold another mediation and rule that Billy Wolf is going to buy Mildred Burke's debt and her company and that she gets to work for him for two years before ah leaving the business. They then swore to never deal with women's wrestling again. Promised they wouldn't keep. Just sick of the marital discord between the two. And they just...
Speaker: And again, what they see is drama. What I see is abuse. But nonetheless, this then leads us to June Byers, who is sort of taken up from Nell Stewart as Wolfe's handpicked successor. And Burke finally holding a title match to determine a true champion.
Speaker: What had happened is Nell Stewart was set to win a tournament and Burke got wind that she was set to win. And so when in the newspapers claiming that Nell Stewart was going to be the victor. And so they had to reverse the result, putting June Byers as the person against Burke.
Speaker: Because Burke is wrestling for Wolf, she's not going to voluntarily lose this match. But June Byers can go, and they wrestle a shoot. This is the early 50s. The notion of a professional wrestling match being wrestled wholly as a shoot is kind of unheard of.
Speaker: So Burke was a lifelong grappler. You might want to just go back a bit, Dave, for those of us who might not remember what a shoot is. Yeah, no problem. I.e. me. Yeah. A shoot means that they are wrestling a legitimate real wrestling match. Okay.
Speaker: They're both wrestling Catch's Catch Can style. When Catch's Catch Can style is effectively dead in the 1950s. And they are going to wrestle for real to see who can beat each other. Okay.
Speaker: So Burke is a lifelong grappler and Byers, meanwhile, had been trained by an NCAA champion, which would be an Olympic freestyle at this point, actually, and had been bulking up and putting on enormous muscle weight. So they both come ready to fight. And this is a best out of three falls match, like pretty much all title matches of this era.
Speaker: And the fans are immediately confused because they're not doing professional wrestling. There's a lot of circling and quick attempts at grapples. And then during one melee, Byers hits Burke with a bunch of gut punches. Burke's ah knee collapses under her and then they get up and then Byers gets the first fall.
Speaker: Mm hmm. Into the second fall, Burke is a lot more defensive and cagier, which means that the match drags on in a way that these early matches used to for several hours. So it's going on for the better part of an hour without much action. The fans are starting to get extremely angry. And the state athletic commissioner says this needs to go to a fall or I'm calling off the match.
Speaker: Byers is slowing down, and Burke knows that that if she keeps up this war of attrition, Byers' extra muscle mass is going to cost her because Burke is just more physically fit and a little lighter.
Speaker: But it's not 19-10 anymore. The commissioner finally gives up and tosses out the match at a little over and under. no And we're left with June Byers having not beat the champion and Mildred Burke having taken one fall in the match. That was best out of three falls, so it's ambiguous. Right.
Speaker: Byers and Burke are mortal enemies at this point. Burke did not like women stepping up to try to take her spotlight, particularly somebody who was sleeping with her now ex-husband and was trying to destroy her career. It was a little personal.
Speaker: And despite this, they both considered it the greatest moment of their career. They're very proud of what they did in that ring because being able to put on a real shoot fight Even if it went to a no contest is quite a thing.
Speaker: But everyone leaves mad because there's no champion and both of them declare themselves the victor. hmm. This, however, kind of is the ah death knell of the huge rush of women's wrestling in the 1940s into the early fifty s Right. We start to see state athletic commissions banning women's wrestling more and more because the moral outrage with this very 40s and fifty s view of women's wrestling, the men are back from the war. And so the notion that this is immoral and a sort of
Speaker: an assault on the American character, that's in the newspapers everywhere. Byers also, although she was a legitimate shooter and a very good wrestler, was not the draw that Mildred Burke was. right Burke's career, meanwhile, is in Twilight. So she continues to wrestle and promote and train until her retirement. And I cannot stress enough, is probably the most important name in American women's wrestling history, if not in women's wrestling, because there's something else Mildred Burke did, and that she toured Japan.
Speaker: so I'm going to do a brief but I think important diversion here because ah Burke toured Japan in 1954 and wrestled 26 events. The intense culture shock on both sides of how Burke was expected to behave and how she actually did behave because this is post-war Japan wildly opening themselves up to the world. So it's constant what the hell is going on here. So she's an immediate sensation and women's wrestling takes root and becomes quite popular in Japan afterwards. There's attempts to start different kinds of um promotions and associations, and they don't quite figure out until the 1970s when All Japan Women's Pro Wrestling is established.
Speaker: Now, women's wrestling in Japan is called joshi pura-ruso, which literally means women wrestling. and ah But the women are commonly called joshis, which, again, joshi just means woman. But if I talk about joshis, I mean lady wrestlers.
Speaker: This training dojo establishes the regime of what is now famous and infamous as the most grueling training that you can go through as a female athlete. It implemented rules to prevent veterans from clogging up the sport and keep things feeling young, and also ties in with the youth-obsessed idol culture.
Speaker: Mandatory retirement to 26 years 26?
Speaker: Yep. And this is very common in Joshi today. There's kind of up a point where you see a lot of wrestlers retire at around 25, 26. Many others continue into ah like later life careers now. Later life, like 27 is later life. But you know you know what I mean, where they say, am I going to get out or am I going to continue wrestling for the rest of my life? That's the time when they make that decision. Lots of people retire at around 25. Well, less chance to destroy your body, too. You know. Very true. In addition, there's the three famous no's. No alcohol, no smoking, and no men. Oh,
Speaker: Well, this ties in with the how you have to be appealing in that Miss Juno May way, right? Where if everyone is young and under lock and key and living a vice-free life and conveniently single all the time, that ties them in with ah with the ah burgeoning idol culture at that point.
Speaker: To this day, the marital status of many Joshis is unknown. They do not talk about it, ah particularly in Stardom, which is the biggest pro wrestling company for women in Japan and has a very everyone's involved in the team and they're all sort of feuding idol group, even though they don't do a lot of pop music.
Speaker: Pop music and Joshis has a long history. The big thing is the training was unbelievably brutal and produced some of the best wrestlers who have ever lived. The quality of wrestling coming out of women in Japan in the 1980s was well above anything else on the planet. And particularly early NWA is really hailed as like a golden age of great wrestling. I think the Joshi's had them beat. So,
Speaker: they were just better than everyone. And many of them were pop singers. And so they become a part of nineteen eighty s teen pop culture where, uh, an enormous amount of the fans of Joshi in the eighties were teenage girls.
Speaker: So, which is very different from the heavily male-dominated wrestling audience you see in for most co-ed promotions and, frankly, a lot of women's promotions, too.
Speaker: Major wrestlers of this time, Linus Asuka, Chigusa Nagayo, and the terrifying Dump Matsumoto just electrified fans everywhere and established wrestling moves, gimmicks, and various different ah kinds of presentation in wrestling that influenced everything. particularly Dump Matsumoto, she created the notion of like a face painted or mask, gigantic, terrifying person who doesn't sell. The Road Warriors grabbed their gimmick off of her, Big Van Vader.
Speaker: And ah you would see major later major stars kind of do the same gimmick because it's so successful. Dump Matsumoto, terrified people in the street. She was legendary. And it was Linus Asuka and Chigusa Nagayo who were famous for these just best matches ever.
Speaker: There was a tag team jumping bomb angels who did a brief tour of the WWF in the late 80s and would show up on these early WWF cards where, frankly, the wrestling was mostly pretty garbage and just put on these unbelievable matches no one had ever seen.
Speaker: This goes into the 90s where Joshi transforms into a really hard-hitting style featuring a period in wrestling that a lot of wrestling nerds can't let go of in a way that almost annoys me, even though the matches were incredible, where you have ah stars like Manami Toyota, Bull Nakado, and Aja Kong who put on these stiff, violent, epic matches. And when you talk about it with wrestling nerds, and you talk about women's wrestling in Japan.
Speaker: All they can talk about is all Japan women's pro wrestling in the night. and There's a lot of great stuff that comes before and after, but this is legendary. And the men's wrestling at this time, also in all Japan wrestling was incredible.
Speaker: Because this is a labor story, I'm going to talk about the labor of Joshi as well, because it is infamously brutal and exploitative. The training regimen is cruel, and the train female trainers are exploitative in any manner they wish to be. i think there's no shortage of sexual exploitation and ah just a lot of...
Speaker: implications about that. Joshi's also toured relentlessly, wrestled very hard matches, and put in a lot of matches a year. If you just go to cage match and check out wrestlers and stardom, the matches they put in per year are unbelievable, well over 100 for most of them.
Speaker: And I'll close on the Joshi's diversion by talking about Rossi Ogawa. who founded the promotion Stardom, of which I was a ludicrous fan for years.
Speaker: ah Tracy certainly knows my fixation on Stardom for a while. um Stardom is produced, I think, the best wrestlers in the world on several occasions. He was also blacklisted from most of the other women's wrestling promotions in Japan. And for example, when the company I watched the most, AEW, started up, I was always confused as to why they wouldn't work with Stardom.
Speaker: Because they'd work with TJPW, another major Joshi promotion, which I love, but didn't. ah TJPW is more about a wonderful variety show. Stardom is about the best wrestlers.
Speaker: So Stardom, because it's based on idol culture, they sell a lot of photo books, which is something very common with Joshi's. And there's also a decent amount of the wrestlers who do gravure, which is um sort of like softcore videos. And Rossi made a lot of money of selling photo books of his trainees, who are 15-year-olds in bikinis, basically.
Speaker: Japanese libel laws are the worst in the world for those who recall the VTuber episodes because you can get successfully sued for defamation even if it's true. Hmm.
Speaker: And this means it's very, very hard for public allegations to come out about anything. Many names have implied there is something really dark about Rossi Ogawa. Kenny Omega ah last year was a voice who came out very strongly saying people don't work with this guy for a reason.
Speaker: And he recruits quite young into his training camps and has that sort of very similar to Billy Wolf thing about you need to be of a specific age and look good and of the specific weight in a way that's a little creepy.
Speaker: Rossi was fired from stardom in 2024 for talent poaching because harming another business is far more appalling than harming women and now runs the promotion Marigold, which thankfully is not doing particularly well, even though it does contain my favorite wrestler, Mayu Iwatani, who I'm convinced is trauma bonded to Rossi Ogawa, but that is a lot of speculation on my part.
Speaker: Joshi also has a fandom problem and a lot of people genuinely dismiss it as content from weird fetishists into Asian women. And frankly, they're kind of right. ah I don't like a lot of the Joshi fan spaces. Photography is often discouraged and has occasionally been been banned Joshi shows because fans have such a problem of taking and posting pictures of these wrestlers in compromising positions.
Speaker: There is unbelievable Wiki feed content on independent Japanese wrestlers. That's weird. Like, these are not major stars. If I look at Mio Momono, for example, another wrestler I adore. She's an independent wrestler. Why is there so much English WikiFeet content? Perverts are never nook and cranny, I guess, Dave. Fans are so... You know, unfortunately... So many crannies.
Speaker: And so this, I genuinely believe this is some of the best, most exciting wrestling in the world. And these are phenomenally skilled, passionate athletes. And I love how so many of the Joshis are people who come from odd backgrounds, have difficulty fitting in and ah find this new lifeline for themselves in this very strict culture. These sort of transgressive whims, women, side of like, women's performance art and art in Japan produces some amazing content because they're kind of fighting back against that while at the same time put into this really exploitative system. But still, it's fantastic. I recommend anybody check out a TJPW pay-per-view or check out incredible independent wrestlers like the beef-shaped Chihiro Mashimoto or who I mentioned, Miyo Momono, who wrestles like she is a feral cat. let alone Maya Iwatani, who I genuinely think is the best living wrestler. Even if she is so completely incapable of basic tasks, she once let all the light bulbs in her apartment burn out because she didn't know you could change them. Oh, no. It's like, now it's dark forever. yeah
Speaker: Maya routinely wins trophies because when you win a title, you get a trophy and accidentally breaks them. This is not a gimmick. She's just like this, but is a savant in the ring. I adore her. But I want to take um away from my diversion on Joe's shoes because I think they are so important to what makes women's wrestling, particularly modern women's wrestling, great and go back to America and then do another time jump to the 1980s.
Speaker: But I'm going to say, well, Dave, you stopped in the 50s. Where the hell did the next two decades go? And this comes to the next major women in wrestling, Lillian Ellison, also known as the Fabulous Moolah.
Speaker: Sarah, have you heard about the stories of the Fabulous Moolah? I'm very aware of Fabulous Moolah. That book I mentioned earlier, actually, um Heather Vandenberg's Unladylike. So she, is this is, um this is great. It's, ah it's yeah, it's a poem i gotta to read that a biography of career she wrestled with um lucha britannia in london um as a masked wrestler and it sort of documents her um starting to train how she got into it and the training and the shows and everything and then it jumps at the end to like an appendix where she gives a history of women's wrestling it doesn't start until the nineteen thirty s so
Speaker: that there is There is a huge there huge gap in the literature with all the difficulties that come with researching those really early late 19th century and early 20s that I would love to try and fill at some point. a bit But her first chapters, they are on like Mildred Burke and Muller and yeah.
Speaker: And i obviously I know a book from Queen of the Ring, which I saw recently and really actually enjoyed it. know if you guys have seen it. ah No, I made brilliant i've really enjoyed it. I didn't really know much about her full story. I knew of her as a women's wrestling pioneer, but didn't really know much of the detail and anything about Wolf and all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker: But yeah, ive I really enjoyed the film as a sort of a sports ah sports film. It's got those cheesy cliché moments in it. But yeah, it's really, really good. and We love a good sports film, cheesy cliché.
Speaker: I know, you know, the basics. I wish she was wrestling until she was a of significant age. don't know that much. Oh my God. ah So...
Speaker: I will. So Lillian Ellison came from a hardscrabble background, growing up the youngest of 13 on a cotton farm in South Carolina. Her mother died when she was young, and she was thus close with her father, who regularly took her to see the wrestling.
Speaker: She became enamored with Mildred Burke and, once old enough, was doing what Mildred did and begging Billy Wolf for a job. Wolf thought she was too short to wrestle, but... ah Lillian Ellison was persistent, and her persistence won through.
Speaker: She, however, was disgusted with Billy Wolf and how the wrestlers had to sleep with him to get bookings. Notably, Ellison's father passed away in 1949 on her birthday, and after receiving a call, she asked for an advance to go attend his funeral. Wolf's response was, you just left home two days ago. What do you want to do? Go hold his hand?
Speaker: i love it how horrible creeps run everything. yeah As it ever was, as it ever was, and probably always will be.
Speaker: We're going to get into a horrible creep running things and a a slight power inversion. But my God, um her response was, I hope you die in the damned gutter and the worms eat your body before they find you. And she splits from Wolf. Good for her She starts dating a wrestler who got her connected with Jack Pfeffer in New York, who's a promoter. And he's trying to find a gimmick for her and repeatedly asks why she wants to wrestle. And, you know, for the money, I want to wrestle for the moolah.
Speaker: And then he has it. The perfect gimmick. Slave girl Moolah. Oh, awesome. Moolah was paired up with the nature boy, Buddy Rogers, wearing a tiny leopard print skirt and waiting on him in the ring.
Speaker: She wasn't fond of this and less fond of Rogers, who kept trying to have sex with her. So she was instead paired up with elephant boy, Tony Olivas. Or Olivas, I should say. Unfortunately, Tony Olivas, fairly dark-skinned Mexican, is touring around the southern United States in the 1950s with dark skin and a white girl whose name is literally Slave Girl.
Speaker: So in Oklahoma, Moolah is stabbed by a fan who charges at her with a knife, and only an extremely sturdy bra possibly saves her life. Jeez, wow. So she splits from doing this and instead starts playing herself into the nascent Capitol Wrestling territory in the Northeast United States, run by Vincent James McMahon. That is McMahon Sr. She is picked by him to win a tournament for women's champion in Capitol Wrestling because Capitol Wrestling was going its own way from the NWA. My timelines might be a little muddy here. But the short version is they're starting up their own title. Doesn't matter that there's the whole Mildred Burke, June Byers thing. This is our title.
Speaker: And she holds that title for so long. When w WWE attempted to honor Moolah in 2018, around nine years after she had passed away and in her 80s, with a commemorative battle royal, allegations suddenly exploded about her, which, although were known and documented, had never risen to the point of public awareness. So Moolah, now the fabulous Moolah, in around Capitol Wrestling in that territory, began a reign of terror as the women's champion that lasted 28 years.
Speaker: She commanded her own roster of ah female wrestlers from a training camp that she set up in her home in the Carolinas. And with the N.W.A. holding a monopoly over women's wrestling and then women's wrestling banned in New York for ah quite a while, she uses this positioning and the fact that she's this major draw to just take everything over.
Speaker: And so Moolah sets up a training camp and her trainees had to rent a room to stay at her compound, which she would rent out to them to wrestle to take up to 50 percent of their wage. This meant them this meant that they were in debt bondage to the employer. Oh, wow.
Speaker: A black wrestler, Sweet Georgia Brown, was then ah sort of led to become addicted to prescription pills under Moolah and then was constantly pimped out to promoters and wrestlers as a part of a deal of hiring her. Sweet Georgia Brown was not even permitted her own bank account.
Speaker: Vice does a wonderful series called Dark Side of the Ring and go into Sweet Georgia Brown's allegations in detail. I want to stress that the allegations about Moolah are disputed, but they are also numerous. And there's tons of stories about Moolah being exploitative. It's also important to understand that she did this for decades. So situations change and evolve, and some wrestlers are preyed upon while others are not.
Speaker: There's a reason why have a Black wrestler with Moolah who has possibly the worst allegations against her. Easier targets. Weirdly, both. Billy Wolf, our previous piece of shit, he kept a fairly successful roster of ah of ah black lady wrestlers and ah was kind of responsible for getting them more bookings, time and attention than any other promoter. So of all the things he was, he was not he was not a racist. He was everything else, but he was not a racist. So there's something. Or at the very least, he wasn't racist and he knew how to get money from black people too. yeah i was just I was just about to say that, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, like put it this way. He knew how to get money out of black people rather than not book them in the first place, which for the 1950s past is the most progressive man you could find. I know, isn't that amazing? Jesus Christ.
Speaker: I am ah convinced that one of the reasons reasons why women's wrestling took until the mid-2010s to find its stride in the United States is because of Moolah.
Speaker: She calcified women's wrestling in the U.S. s And also, she didn't wrest she wasn't a good wrestler. ah She did very hair-pull-y, kick people while they're down. Everything's just building heat, and there's not much competition. I've got a Dave Meltzer quote from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.
Speaker: During the period Moolah-controlled women's wrestling, the popularity and the product that did not evolve. The women in the 40s and 50s, even in the late 50s and places like Florida, they were headlining shows. The idea that women can't headline came years later.
Speaker: They used to headline and were successful. Women's wrestling under her tutelage, and I don't know if it's her fault, went way down. By the 1980s, the version in Japan grew and was light years ahead in every way possible.
Speaker: Moolah controlled the NWA title until she was in her early 60s, which leads us to the last story for this episode. So throughout the ah late 60s, 70s, and early 80s, fabulous Moolah controls everything. well more from, let's say, 64 or so.
Speaker: But anyways... We're now in the WWF era, and this is where we're going to go to our last story of this episode, which is the early rise of when ah Vince McMahon Jr. has taken the company.
Speaker: He's got Hulk Hogan, and he's starting to go national and start steamrolling the NWA territories with his national television presence. A chance encounter led to the charismatic wrestling announcer, Captain Lou Albano, to appear in The Father as Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun video in 1983.
Speaker: This crossover between rock and wrestling started what's called the Rock and Wrestling Connection and made the WWF a household name. I cannot stress how Cyndi Lauper and the ww WWF hit that pop culture moment perfectly. So Lopper's manager and boyfriend pitched the idea of, well, why don't we turn this into a wrestling feud, the father versus a daughter? And Lopper and Albano, you know, they engage in a feud and the angle is an immediate hit.
Speaker: But because they're this is, you know, this is about the girls, they need some wrestlers. So Albano brings in the now 60-year-old fabulous moolah. And Lauper brings in a very ah ah young upcoming woman wrestler, Wendy Richter.
Speaker: So MTV airs a match billed as the brawl to end it all, where Richter finally dethrones Moolah, beating her in 11 minutes. Moolah had lost her title previously, but only for very short periods of time and often in a way that was never even acknowledged, where she dropped the title at the start of a tour and pick it up at the end. So there were brief moments where she technically didn't have the title, but her reign was for the purposes of sort of ah record keeping and myth making. She was treated as undefeated. This is very common with undefeated wrestlers.
Speaker: Richter beats Moolah in 11 minutes. And of course, because Moolah is such a giving wrestler, she makes sure it's not a clean pinfall and her shoulder up as it is is up at the end, even though she didn't had no reason to do that because she's 60.
Speaker: Meltzer has another great quote on this match, which is, I wouldn't say this match put them on the map, but to put it on a map they weren't on. The Rockin' Wrestling connection, again, goes nuts. And McMahon tours the nation with the Moolah putting over Richter.
Speaker: this builds to her losing the title to Leilani Kai at the first WrestleMania, giving her an angle to chase the, uh, back for the title where the, the money is in the chase is an old wrestling thing where if you have a popular face, it's better if they don't have the title.
Speaker: Um, I also want to be clear, Wendy Rector was very young and inexperienced, and she came out of Moola's camp, and most of the women who came out of Moola's camp didn't really know how to wrestle. They could go in a ring and put on a match, but wrestling to the standard of what we think wrestling is, they didn't really have. But she was tall, she looked good, and she evoked the quintessential 80s girl in a way that really mattered. Hmm.
Speaker: Now, Richter, however, had a problem. So this has been going on for a couple of years. It's the heyday of Hulkamania, and the WWF is raking in the cash. Richter's not seeing it.
Speaker: She's a household name, and I'll quote from Sisterhood of the Squared Circle. For the fans, it was just another feud for the champion, but internally a bigger feud was going on. In 1985, Richter was on top of the world. A two-time women's champion should become face of the women's division. But following WrestleMania, she felt she was underpaid.
Speaker: According to some sources, the main male stars of the show received huge paydays. Paul Orndorff received $20,000. T, Piper, And Hulk Hogan between and Richter was paid thought least be like forty ah jesus And I cannot stress, I'm absolutely convinced, this is opinion, that she was more important in the success and eyeballs in the first WrestleMania than Hulk Hogan was. Mr. T mattered too, but this cross this pop culture crossover, all of the pop culture stuff fed in from Cyndi Lauper and Wendy Rector. Interesting. So Rector went to Vince to renegotiate a contract because she was locked in for five years, and he said, yeah, fuck off.
Speaker: Leilani Kai, ah the woman who had briefly held the title, noted that although she had trained Richter after Moolah and was the incoming champion of the show, she got paid half of what Richter was paid. The only woman who made any money was Moolah.
Speaker: After making her complaints, Richter felt things turn. And so at this point, there was a wrestler touring with the ww WWF named Penny Mitchell who wrestled as the Spider Lady. Richter was booked against Spider Lady for a show, and she shows up to the show and sees Moolah backstage, which is odd. She's not booked, and Moolah doesn't show up if she's not booked.
Speaker: In the ring, the spider lady makes her entrance, and it's immediately obvious that it's Moolah under this getup. The fans, because she's a 60-year-old woman, everyone can see it's a fabulous Moolah. So the fans start chanting Moolah at her, and Richter starts wrestling a strange match. It lasts around six minutes, and then Moolah puts Richter in a small package. Richter immediately kicks out, but the referee hits a lightning-fast three count and awards the title to Moolah immediately. Wow.
Speaker: Richter is stunned. The referee looks like a sad dog and Moolah is about to get her shit rocked. Wendy Richter realizes she's been screwed and starts beating the hell out of Moolah, who's not selling because you don't sell when you're getting punched. You just kind of go um as you're getting punched.
Speaker: Richter even hit a backbreaker and then tried for a pinfall so she could like claim her title back. This obviously didn't work. Mooli got the hell out of the ring and Wendy got the hell out of the ww WWF and the entire women's division was shuttered after that.
Speaker: So with that closure of the of ah the women's division and nud at that point, I am going to end it here. I have so much more to say about women's wrestling, but we've been recording for a really long time now and I think we've had a lot to say so far. It's my bedtime. It's 9pm here in England. My God, you are a hero. That's why I was... Oh, wow. I know. I was worried.
Speaker: Tracy wasn't on the call when I went to get my glass of wine. And just, yeah, that is why I have a glass of wine. Oh, that's fair. It's probably a little earlier where you are, isn't it? Absolutely. So with that, we will end our part three. And thank you so much, Sarah, for showing up here as a guest and just saying so much amazing stuff about wrestling, boxing in the in the have been the 90s and aughts. You're welcome. And I've got so much more to say, and I'm really hopeful that I will be able to write a wrestling book at some point. It's a tough sell here. It's a tough sell to write boxing books. It wasn't explicit, but implicitly, you know, writing a boxing book, they don't sell a huge amount, and they definitely don't sell if you're a woman writing them, because...
Speaker: such as like So whether I can get a women's wrestling history or a general wrestling history or the cross buttercup off the ground, ah we shall see. But I will hopefully be doing some more blogging nonetheless and some articles or something like that. um there's there's There's so much more. that These women are really, really difficult to research. They have fake names. They have multiple fake names. They're all involved. Well, not all of them. Some of them.
Speaker: to some extent in in criminality, um working in brothels, theft, all sorts of stuff. It's so difficult. And mean then, of course, married names as well. If they then change their name, which is so common, the the path ends and you can't,
Speaker: however many years you spend, it's just a dead end. So yeah, I find it very frustrating, but also so exciting. And you used a phrase earlier, Dave, about transgressive women when you were talking about Joshi. Yeah.
Speaker: And that is such a perfect description of what I think the women in my period in the 1890s and 1900s were, by and large. They were incredibly unusual rule breakers and badasses. Yeah. So I just, yeah, it still grinds my gears that Juno May was allegedly not a suffragette.
Speaker: But we don't know. Maybe she was. I like to think about that. I like to build up the potential TV drama possibilities in my head for that kind of character meeting someone like Kitty Marion. And you know what? Since it's a little debatable and might have been an act...
Speaker: You can fictionalize that bit and hit the and ah you know state of the facts and everything that we can demonstrate because, you know, it's a TV drama. Build a character. Yeah. i hope Exactly. But yeah, so i love I love these women. i wish we had photos of more of them. I wish we could learn more about them. I hope your book sells a bazillion copies and that makes you such as a sex successful author. You can then publish whatever the hell you want.
Speaker: Exactly. Whatever I want. I've got a brain full of ideas. It's just, yeah, the market at the moment is very difficult. so yeah, let's see. understand. we'll buy copies. Thank you so much. And hopefully listeners will, too. i Yeah, if you have contact info you want to share. Yeah, hopefully my...
Speaker: Oh, this I would happily plug my book if you don't mind. and So my first book, yeah, you mentioned earlier The Devil's Dance Floor. The subtitle at the moment is Hezekiah Moscow and the Fight for Life in Late Victorian London. bit of a mouthful, but it's a group biography of eight. eight Thank you. The Devil's Dance Floor, which is obviously sort of meant to represent the boxing ring, but also London and all the crime and poverty and ah evil forces within it.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great biography of eight men from different parts of the world who all fought in 1880s London. So that's book one and that it should be out next spring. So I'm hoping February, possibly March.
Speaker: It's in the hands of my editors at the moment. And then after that, i was yeah I'm going to be working on pitches for my next one, if not two, and one will be boxing and wannabe wrestling so yeah let's see how that goes and um i will hopefully get back to doing a few more blogs on grapplingwithhistory.com i sometimes post fun things clips from old newspapers and that kind of thing on blue sky as well which is always spooky but Thank you so much for having me. And I've really, so much of what I know about later women's wrestling, later wrestling in general, that whole massive gap in my, no, sort of World War onwards, has actually come from Dark Side of the Rings. So, yeah ah yeah, it's brilliant. and But it's really interesting. oh it's such a good series. It's such a good series. I have absolutely no idea about. I'm very, yeah, I've got a very niche experience. couple of decades i stick to and then but clueless one of that
Speaker: wonderful okay well and with that we can sign off and thank you once more and goodbye everybody bye thanks so much thank you you too take care thank you for listening to the wonder camera find us under the wonder camera on blue sky youtube and instagram can
