Mae Young, 1923–2014

Mae Young was 77 years old and had been a professional wrestler for more than 60 years when she agreed to grapple with a young male wrestler, Bubba Ray Dudley. Noticing his concern, Young took him aside before the match. “Hey, hotshot,” she said. “If you’re going to slam me, you slam me like one of the boys.” Dudley politely agreed, and once in the ring he lifted her overhead and slammed her down back first in a “powerbomb” that broke a table. Young was unfazed. “By far, that was the toughest person, pound for pound, that we’ve ever been in the ring with,” Dudley later said. Many others, men and women alike, had said the same.

Young was born the youngest of eight children in hardscrabble Sand Springs, Okla., said the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier, and her father “left the family before she was born and never returned.” She quickly emerged as an exceptional athlete, beating boys at wrestling, playing softball, and “kicking field goals for the football team.” She was still a teenager when she joined the pro wrestling circuit.

“Lady wrestling,” as the discipline was then known, took off during World War II, said The New York Times, and Mae Young quickly became one of the stars that “crowds loved to hate,” a frequent target of rotten eggs tossed by rowdy fans. “Anybody can be a baby face, what we call a clean wrestler,” she later said. “It’s the heel that carries the whole show. I’ve always been a heel, and I wouldn’t be anything else but.”

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Back then Young was “a lissome blonde with a movie-star smile,” said The Washington Post, along with “the strength of a stevedore.” She was arrested in 1949 in Reno, Nev., after a man named Nelson claimed she’d beaten him up. “Maybe I did work Mr. Nelson over a little,” she said at the time. “He made advances to me. Improper advances.” In her later years, Young lived with her friend and fellow wrestler Lillian Ellison, aka the Fabulous Moolah, in a wrestling compound outside Columbia, S.C., and continued to wrestle into her 80s. “She just was a rough, tough broad,” one of her opponents said.