Original subtitles

Now, I understand you had a rough match last night. You wrestled a lady and she

got 14 stitches.

Yeah, well, if that's what it takes to try to win, that's what I'll do.

You can't say women's wrestling without thinking the fabulous Moolah. If she had

not run the women's wrestling business, there may not have been women's

wrestling. Introducing first to my right, former world's women's champion,

the fabulous Moolah.

As Moolah the promoter.

I want to make money for my talent.

I want to make money for Moolah.

Even to this day, if you say women's wrestling, the picture of Moolah

appears in my mind.

If Moolah was alive today, I'd probably slap her.

She was so jealous of any woman that was younger than her in wrestling.

She was also a manipulator, and she was also a thief.

She wanted to hurt me, bruise me.

There was drugs.

There was sex.

There was a lot of abuse with Moolah.

I'm like, wow, they waited until she passed away to say all these things so

she couldn't stand up and defend herself.

I was warned, but I wanted to wrestle so bad.

She gave her whole life.

to professional wrestling. She gave all these girls an opportunity, and for

nobody to stand up for, I don't know, just couldn't deal with it. She was a

great professional wrestler, but she didn't know when to stop.

On this episode, the life, legend, and controversy of the fabulous Moolah.

And it's Fabulous Moolah with a WWF Women's title on the line here. She made

all of her costumes herself.

Anything flashy she loved.

She was just that kind of person.

It really never impressed me that much because to me she was just my mother and

I didn't really realize how popular she was.

My name is Mary Austin and I'm the only child of the Fabulous Moolah.

My mother kind of kept me out of the spotlight, but she loved the spotlight.

She was determined to do it.

When you really love something, you put yourself into it, and she had all of

herself into it. This is one Mary let me have.

As you can see, how beautiful it is, sparkly, just like Moolah liked it. Oh,

yeah.

My name is Selena Majors.

I wrestled as Bambi.

Started in 1986, so I've been in it for 32 years.

I wanted my name as a kid to be Dynamite Dixie Majors. So I've got these big

posters that would say, The Fabulous Moolah Champion versus Dynamite Dixie

Majors.

I had this life-size doll.

And I'd take that doll and I would body slam it and climb up on the bed and drop

an elbow.

I'd stand in front of the mirror with my hairbrush, do little interviews and tell

Moolah how I was going to come and wrestle her.

As you can tell, I like the bad guys, the heels.

She was a heel. She played that part.

My name is the Fabulous Moolah. I've been wrestling since I was 15 years old,

and I am the world's champion lady wrestler.

They hated her, but that's what she wanted.

Oh,

I'd fix up a little spoon handle, you know, about the size of your finger,

roll it up with tape, and put it down in my bra.

The meaner she was, the more they liked it, you know?

and she loved being a heel.

Stick it in the eyes and the throat.

The Fabulous Moolah started as a female wrestler, and then she became the female

wrestling champion, and then she became the booker of all the girl wrestlers.

I first broke into wrestling as a photographer.

I was a 15-year-old kid, and I was doing all of the photography that was sold in

the arenas for the entire Memphis wrestling territory.

Moolah, can I get a couple of pictures for the magazines?

Always say for the magazines, right? Well, of course you can, darling. And

she had her stock poses, boom, boom, boom, in 30 seconds, and she's off to

the ring.

Moolah pioneered the hair-pulling, cat-fighting, scratching, crowd-pleasing

kind of women's wrestling.

She broke glass ceilings one after another.

She got into wrestling when there was no women in wrestling.

Women's wrestling was actually banned in Madison Square Garden, and Moolah was

the one that was chosen to break the ban.

She was the featured girl in the first girls' match in the Garden.

Now that she's almost 60, she's on MTV.

It's 1984, Rockin' Wrestling Connection, Cyndi Lauper, and that whole era of

network TV and Madison Square Garden and MTV and rock and roll stars.

And this place is ready to explode tonight.

got so much national attention that nbc and everybody else started looking at

pro wrestling she made it from the mid 50s to the dawn of mtv for the biggest

payoff she ever made there she is the fabulous one the fabulous mula putting

her title on the line there'll never be anyone to have the the guts that she had

this must have been really old look at that look at her hair

This is a wrestling license.

Her mom passed away when she was about nine, I think.

And then it was her dad and her brothers that raised her. So she learned how to

fight real early.

It was rough for her. I was an only child and she was just a teenager.

She went to wrestling matches every week.

And my mother saw Mildred Burke and she said, that's what I want to be.

It's Mildred Burke of Los Angeles, California, world champion.

Back in the 30s and 40s, Mildred Burke was such a legitimate athlete.

She was in tremendous shape, and she just had a natural flair for wrestling.

But behind the scenes, Billy Wolf, Mildred Burke's husband, was pulling the

strings and managed the whole women's troupe, for good and bad.

When she was 17 or 18, she went to see Billy Wolf.

When you became a wrestler for Billy Wolf, you automatically had to go to bed

with him.

She says she wasn't doing it.

She could find some other way to wrestle without... having to go to bed with him

or anyone else.

What's the worst experience you might want to say that you ever had with a

promoter?

That's kind of hard to talk about. It really is.

The Fabulous Moolah at one point was married to a guy named Buddy Lee.

Buddy Lee used to wrestle. Of course, they met and they sort of fell for each

other. And she did most of the wrestling and he did most of the booking.

She basically copied the...

Mildred Burke and Billy Wolf Playbook, they kept their own stable, they took

all the bookings, and more importantly, a booking fee out of all of the girls'

pay. You knew right off the bat why she got in the business and why she wanted

to be a star.

She loved money.

Moolah would play such a dominant role in women's wrestling that in 2018, 11

years after her death, her memory still loomed over the sport.

The WWE made the announcement on March the 12th that they were going to honor

the Fabulous Moolah by having the Fabulous Moolah Memorial Battle Royal.

I thought it was very nice that they would name it after her, keeping her

legacy going.

Two or three days later, that had all been taken away.

Let's talk about the Fabulous Moolah controversy.

I think it's just a bunch of bull.

I really think it's a bunch of bull. Moolah has an awful past.

Some really, really sick shit.

She was an evil person. Moolah was pimping girls out. All of this stuff is

alleged. We gotta say that.

It's alleged.

Grossed out about it. Name it something else. It's not hard.

Scrap it.

Stories started coming out on the internet.

Fabulous Moolah suddenly was a horrible person who took advantage of all these

women and pimped them out and fed them drugs and all this stuff. They contacted

the sponsors and they had to take her name off.

I was very shocked because I knew better. I knew none of that was true.

And thanks to Nigel, he took the lead way on it.

My name is Nigel Sherrod. I'm mostly known as a wrestling host.

The Fight for Moolah campaign came about because we started a petition to put the

truth out there and to honor the woman who broke down the walls for everybody

else. I just wanted to clear a name because Moolah's not here to defend

herself. Did Moolah indeed take advantage of the girls? Some of the

girls have said yes, some of the girls have said no.

I think that it was ignorant, canceling.

the fabulous Moolah Memorial Battle Royal because I interviewed over 20

women and they all said the same thing.

There's no truth to those rumors.

Accusations about Moolah polarized the wrestling world.

They originated from an investigative newspaper story that quoted serious

allegations by the family of one of her former wrestlers.

St. Mark, if you see these guys moving around, they are a professional film

company, and they are doing an episode dealing with pro-women wrestlers,

which one of them was my mother.

South Carolina's first black female professional wrestler, Sweet Georgia

Brown.

I'm Michael McCoy.

I'm a senior pastor at St. Mark Baptist Church.

The article that came out in the Columbia Free Times, it was about what

my mother had to go through and endure while she was in wrestling.

I started a search to try to find out the truth.

Maybe you could just tell us your name and a little bit about yourself.

Yes, my name is Barbara Harsey, and I am the proud daughter of Susan Mae McCoy.

Who is also known as? Sweet Georgia Brown.

When my mom went...

Into wrestling, she was with the so-called great mullah.

She said she was forced to do a lot of things against her will.

Now, these are just stories that I heard. Do I know any truth to them? No,

I can't sit here and say I know truth to it or not.

But, you know, when more than one, two, three people saying the same story, you

know, somebody ain't lying.

Philip, honey, can you walk these guys outside and show them the banister? This

is my husband, Philip.

Back when Moolah died,

my husband, he went over to tear down the barn that the ring was in.

And he found the banister, the women's wrestlers.

When he brought it back, he thought I would want, you know, keep it.

For the better part of 25 years, every top girl wrestler was trained by Moolah,

booked out by Moolah, and was controlled by Moolah's group.

Can you tell us who Sweet Georgia Brown was?

Yeah, she was one of the first African-American women to wrestle.

And my mother trained her.

Believe it or not, it was on a mattress in the living room.

It was unreal.

But they learned a lot.

I was told she had that drive to go get it.

You know, it's like she had a purpose. She wanted to be there.

The first time I seen a wrestler, at least with Jam Pat, throwing each other

out the ring, they kicking, body slamming.

I just figured, no, this is one tough lady.

Being one of the first black females to get into the wrestling business, the

KKKs was at their fullest.

The segregation was really bad at that time.

Whenever they were on the road, my mother was very protective.

There was a time in Mississippi she did have a run-in with some KKKs. She was

thrown on the floor of the bus, and she was scared for her life.

She'd have had to have been super passionate because, see, in 1964, she

was ranked number four in the world.

If she would have had the opportunity...

to fight for the world's title, she probably would have won it. But Moolah

was most definitely not going to let a student challenge her for the world's

title.

When my mom went into wrestling, she left us with one of her sisters.

She would call us names, half-breeds.

She was a witch.

God forgive me. She's dead and gone.

Every time my mother went on the road and she'd come back, just about she was

pregnant. One of my aunts said that every time you come back home, you come

back home with one of these half white kids, half greens.

And we got mistreated, you know, for years growing up because of our color.

I hated where she had left us.

I hated her career.

But then when I got the full story from her, I kind of understood

there's a lot of abuse.

with Mula and Buddy Lee.

I saw her one time. This big old car had pulled up.

She was getting out the back of the car, and it was only for a few hours.

I didn't know the man's name at the time, but he thought it was time to go.

My sister and I, we grabbed hold to her leg, but he kind of, like, pushed her.

and she hit her head getting into the car.

I don't know if it was intentionally or it was an accident.

My mom said everywhere she went and everything she did was done according

to Buddy Lee and Moolah.

I think she thought that it was going to be glamorous and glory, but it turned

out to be something totally different.

I heard different stories about my mother.

It's real sad.

And I have no reason not to believe that account.

There was one gruesome time that we talked about.

She was told to drink and pop pills.

She was made to have sex with other men.

On the road, some of the promoters wouldn't pay some of the girls until

they slept with other promoters.

From what my mother told me, she was their favorite.

And you can call it entertaining or whatever.

It's still pimping and prostitution.

Buddy Lee was not a nice person.

And my mother was on the road, and she came home a day early and caught him in

her bed with one of the girls that she trained.

And she threw Buddy out. That was it.

A lot of the girls went with him.

Georgia Brown was one of the girls that went with Buddy.

I started to search for my father, and then one of the first places where I

started was with the Fabulous Moolah.

Honestly, I was almost kind of afraid a little bit, because I heard of the

Moolah that everybody else talked about, but the Moolah that I met, she seemed to

be a fine lady.

I asked Moolah, did my mother ever talk about who my father was?

Then Moolah took me to her wall, and she pointed out this one picture.

And I said, who is this guy right here in the middle?

She said, well, his name is Buddy Lee.

He was kind of rough on the girls.

I think that happened with Sweet Georgia Brown, that she was one that had to go

to bed with Buddy.

And as a matter of fact, I think the son, Michael, is proof of that.

If Buddy Lee's my father, then that's who he is.

I wasn't coming in to look for anything, and I didn't want anything.

I just wanted to close a chapter in my life.

I knew that everything was over when my uncle burned up all

of her stuff, and he poured gas on it, and he set it on fire right

there in front of us.

At the end, she kind of thanked him.

because of the things that she had to endure, the things that she was made to

do by Moolah, by Buddy Lee, by the industry itself.

Listening to your mom describe some of the most horrific things she had to do,

you can't just walk away.

Regardless of the abuse she went through, regardless of if they made her

use drugs, They made her use alcohol.

Rather, they pimped her.

She still was South Carolina's first black female professional wrestler.

Honor it.

Sweet Georgia Brown's life was shaped by forces beyond her control.

For Moolah to succeed, she would need to build her own women's wrestling empire.

The fabulous Moolah single-handedly built her women's training school into a

powerhouse that dominated the industry.

It attracted young women eager to follow in her footsteps.

In Columbia, South Carolina, there was a location called Moolah Drive.

And on Moolah Drive was the house that Moolah built and also a variety of other

buildings. It was a compound.

The women not only trained there, but they lived on the property, and Moolah

presided over it like a mother lion.

She took girls from all walks of life and she brought them in. She taught them

a skill.

She put it together like a group or a union and took care of the girls and

made sure they were taken care of.

She was one of the most powerful women in the wrestling business.

If you were a female wrestler at that point and you wanted to get booked, you

pretty much had to go through moolah or you weren't going to work.

I have a bunch of questions.

Okay. I took my truth serum before I came in.

My name is Wendy Richter. Wendy Richter! I was a professional wrestler for over

20 years.

The first time I ever watched a wrestling match, I watched the fabulous

Moolah versus Vivian St. John.

And I told my friend, I could beat Moolah.

The referee gave me Moolah's phone number. She told me to come on to

Columbia, South Carolina.

I was there within two weeks.

My name is Victoria Otis. I wrestled with Princess Victoria.

I come from a very, very abusive childhood.

And that's basically what took me to wrestling.

You had to want it.

You had to bleed.

You had to cry.

When I was wrestling, and it had been about a year, and I was told by my

promoter, look, I've done all I can do.

I've tried to get you booked other places. The only way I can get you

booked is I gotta send you to Moolah.

I still remember a friend of mine telling me, Vicki, he said, don't go to

Moolah's.

Find a job, get on your feet, just don't go to Moolah's.

I was warned.

But I wanted to wrestle so bad.

When you first got to the property, there's these big gates.

After dark, the gates were locked.

If you weren't home and you weren't working, you got locked out.

Moolah had a roommate named Diamond Lil, and we all called her Katie.

And I really liked Katie.

My name is Diamond Lil.

And Buddy Lee named me Diamond Lil.

Katie comes from a hard background, too. And she was a wrestler. And she lived in

the house with Moo.

And she called her Ma.

And she's been right there with my mother through thick and thin.

Katie liked to drink beer, but she wasn't allowed to.

Katie used to come out to the pond and go fishing, and I'd come in there and

drop a six-pack in the pond, and her and I'd sit there and drink beer.

I was famous for getting the beer on the property.

They had apartments, and she would put two or three girls in there at a time,

and they would come down to the gym every morning.

What I remember the most about my training at MOLA's was learning to drop

kick. I would go out there and drop kick and drop kick and drop kick and just

land on the mat. The mat wasn't soft.

It was all bloody. And by that time, a lot of it was mine.

There were buckets strategically placed. And it wasn't if you were going to throw

up. It was when you were going to throw up and would you hit the bucket.

One thing that Moolah taught me, take a bite and growl.

Moolah, she never trained me. She just took the money and she had the girls

train me.

She wanted her $300. Now, can you imagine?

Four girls in one little house. She's getting $1,200 a month in

the 80s.

And on top of that, she's taking 25% off of what she's telling us we're paid.

Bullpucky. I'm sitting here 24 hours a day making you connections with the

promoters. All you got to do is set your lazy butt in the car and go to Russell

and collect their money and send me 25%.

And I thought that was fair.

There's a picture of me in this brown outfit that Moolah presented to me at

Christmas in front of all the girls after she had given all of them a $5 or

$10 gift.

That was no cheap outfit.

That was hand-beated. That was a $200 to $300 outfit.

She couldn't take me in privately and give me this outfit. She had to do it in

front of the girls. That was another one of her little manipulation things.

Everything brings back memories now.

And it's like the floodgates get opened.

I was in a match.

I know it was the first or second week in September 1984.

A girl... Shut up!

The night I broke my neck in the ring, a girl stumbled and she

sat on my head.

That was the day my world fell apart.

It hurt so bad I couldn't stand it.

I remember a moment at the hospital.

They had my neck braced.

I remember being on a cot.

Then the next thing I remember, I don't know how, but I'm back at Moola's

property, and Moola's walking me out to the range. She said, I want to see if

you can take a bump.

I took a bump, and I cried.

Every time I took a bump, I felt like something was exploding.

This went on for a month, two months.

Moola comes to me one day.

She said, hon, if you go see this guy in Holland, he'll give you a payday.

I thought to myself, I can't wrestle.

Might as well.

I get on the phone with this guy, and I make it explicitly clear it's separate

motel rooms.

The conversation after I hung up from him with Moo was, you know, hon, the

nicer you are to him, the bigger your payday will be.

And you could really use a payday.

And so was Moolah sort of insinuating, like, the idea that... When Moolah

looked at me and said...

You know, the nicer you are to him, the nicer he'll be to you.

What else can I say?

When this guy first picked me up at the airport, I said, damn, this guy didn't

get beat by the ugly stick. He got beat by the whole damn forest.

I wake up the next morning. I catch him right here, and I grab his hand, and I'm

holding it.

I said, dude, I will break your wrist.

And she was fire engine red pissed when I got back.

I can't believe she didn't sleep with him.

Well, not a week after I got back is when Moo came to me and said, look, you

can't wrestle and I need my rent.

I'll take that yellow outfit. I'll take the brown outfit that she gave me for

Christmas.

I left the property that day with my Chevy Malibu station wagon and 20 bucks

in my pocket.

She dumped me.

And I never wrestled again.

When I walked away 30 years ago, my heart was broke.

I can't even explain it.

I miss the road.

I miss my friends. I miss my family.

And when I left, do you know what Moo told the girls?

She told them I was in prison for dealing cocaine.

For God's sake, she couldn't tell them that I broke my neck and I was of no use

to her anymore.

So I had to go, because then they knew their fate.

I love wrestling.

To protect this business, to me, is like protecting the country.

If wrestling needed me, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

All someone has to do is ask.

Moolah! As wrestling gained popularity in the early 1980s, the WWF looked to

replenish its roster with younger wrestlers.

Moolah's protege, Wendy Richter, was an obvious choice.

Wendy Richter.

Hell of a person.

Hell of a lady.

She loved her business. She honed her skills. She worked very hard to become

the wrestler she was.

Do you have an assumption as to why there was so much friction between you

and Moolah?

The only thing I can think of why there was so much friction is possibly she was

jealous of me because I was younger than her.

And like my father said, they couldn't put her face on a can of dog food to

sell it.

Wendy Richter began to eclipse her mentor.

and she left Mula's stable to join Vince McMahon.

When I left Mula's, I had a conversation with Vince McMahon and told him that I

didn't want to live there anymore, and I did not want my check going to her.

I wanted the check to come to me, so I knew what I was making.

As soon as Vince took over from his father, he started making changes.

One advantage that he had was that a lot of...

celebrities had grown up in the new york area as fans of wrestling and one of

those was cindy lopper cindy lopper

was on an airplane flight with lou albano and then lou albano tells

everyone that he was managing cindy lopper i created and made cindy lopper

took out from a nothing i don't know if anybody knows it but When she did Girls

Just Wanna Have Fun, he was in it.

That's how all of this came together.

It all boiled down to that Lou Albano said, I'm going to choose someone to

represent me in the ring.

So Lou Albano chose Fabulous Moolah. And Cyndi Lauper chose me.

the world's championship belt but she also has lou albano on her side as soon

as cindy lauper got involved with lou albano vince mcmahon saw gold and

fostered that connection into the rock and wrestling connection the wrestlers

giving their hand at it they have been involved with rock and roll in the past

year It brought the dated look of wrestling into the mainstream.

Wendy Richter morphed from the Dallas Cowgirl to Wendy Richter, a little bit

more Cyndi Lauper-ish, a little more rock and roll, and that's what led the

MTV movement there in 1984 that pretty much paved the way for the first

WrestleMania. They were giving girls more of a push than they probably ever

had before.

They were really trying to escalate the girls up, trying to get equal to the

men. It was a turning point for women's wrestling.

Vince wanted to make Wendy Richter the equivalent as Hulk Hogan would be, so he

had a male role model and a female role model. Since the most widely recognized

female champion of the previous 30 years had been the fabulous Moolah, Wendy

needed to beat Moolah for the title.

Well, with that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce to you

the number one contender for the ladies' championship, Miss Wendy Richter.

And the rest is history.

Ladies and gentlemen, this title belt will be on the line at Madison Square

Garden just moments from now. This lady to the fan.

The rivalry was about to explode in what would become one of the most watched

matches of all time.

That was probably the most nervous I've ever been in my life. I knew every move

mattered.

There was so much at stake, and it was against Moolah. It was the culmination

of my whole career.

Moolah had been very jealous and guarded of that championship for a long time,

but Vince was able to write the appropriate amount of money on a check

that changed Moolah's mind. And also, by doing that, Moolah got Vince McMahon

Jr.'s loyalty for life.

One, two.

That's when everything changed.

When I won the championship, it was a feeling like no other.

Everyone was up on their feet and screaming.

I can't believe someone beat her after 28 years and that someone was me.

It was a big deal for the fans because they wanted to see Wendy win, right? But

it was a bigger deal inside the business because two generations of wrestlers had

come and gone without ever seeing the fabulous Moolah lose.

It was shocking to the folks in the business who knew about the stranglehold

that Moolah had had on the thing. Right here is the new champ, the terrific

symbol of the new woman.

My match against Moolah for the championship was kind of ground zero for

women's wrestling.

It moved towards a different level of women's wrestling.

See, what a lot of people don't understand is once you step in that

ring, you're addicted.

I think Moolah let her ego get in her way, and Moolah couldn't

quit.

Cindy Lauper!

Oh my, we were on the top of a skyscraper.

I remember I was hot, I was hungry, I was thirsty, and it felt like the day

would never end.

When I went to visit my father and my grandmother in Kokomo, Indiana, people

recognized me. I'm thinking, they know me in Kokomo.

Even though Wendy was a household name, Wendy wasn't getting paid like a

household name, though.

I found out early in my career that the men were being paid far more than the

women. But if I'm the only one saying that, one person can be replaced.

Vince McMahon had been pushing Wendy Richter, going to make her a superstar.

She possibly was getting too big for her britches. He decided that she needed to

lose the belt, and who's going to beat her for the belt?

I was on the road constantly, but it was always matches against Moolah over and

over.

I'll never forget one time she got me in a move, the Boston Crab.

With that, you never go all the way back because you could break someone's back.

Well, she did.

She tried to break my back.

She wanted to put me out.

My spine snapped like firecrackers. She was just so bitter.

I really believe in the golden rule, treat others as you'd like to be

treated. But sometimes you got to treat fire with fire.

And in the ring, when that bell rang, you had no friends.

When I was to wrestle the Spider Lady for a championship match, it changed my

career.

It changed my life.

I really didn't think anything of it. So I thought, well, it's just another

championship match.

And it's against the Spider Lady.

Wendy said that Moolah had showed up.

She didn't understand why Moolah was there.

I'd wrestled the Spider Lady before, and I didn't recall her being that size.

A very determined young lady is going to take one heck of a wrestler to be able

to strip that title from her.

The match really didn't go that good.

It was just a wrestling halt.

Spider going, oh, small package.

The referee counted one.

I kicked out, had my shoulder up.

Two, three.

And that was it.

What was that?

Appears that the referee has made a three count.

The match was over.

Then... The masked person took their mask off,

and it was Moolah.

It is Moolah!

It is Moolah! Take a look, Jess! Fabulous Moolah, the oldest, saltiest

dog in the yard that knows all the tricks. She was the one that was chosen

because it was thought that if things did break down, that she can handle

Wendy legitimately anyway.

Did you have any idea that that was Moolah? Did it match at all? No.

I couldn't tell who it was.

It was obvious who was under that mask.

Everybody in the arena knew who was under that mask.

Wendy knew.

This double-cross blurred the lines between business and storyline.

Whatever the truth was, Wendy came out the loser.

I demanded to talk to Vince McMahon, and no one would tell me where he was.

I probably would have killed him with my bare hands.

What Vinny and Moo did to her?

Wendy was over like a million dollars at that time. Her and Cyndi Lauper and the

cartoon, the Goonies.

You know, Wendy was over as big as Hogan, and maybe that was the problem.

The only thing I can think of is I was asking to be paid fairly.

I feel like it was a sad situation that happened because the girls should be

paid maybe more than they were at the time. But when a promoter tells you

who's going to win or lose, you have to go with the one who's running the show,

whether you like it or not.

That was her choice to walk away from it.

If everything had worked with Wendy, there would have been an established

women's division with women featured in more important matches.

a lot before it actually happened.

I was angry for what she just did to women's wrestling.

For so long, she held it back, she held it back, she held it back. Then finally,

it started to bloom, and she killed it.

I think Moolah was afraid.

I think she was afraid of walking away.

I left out of the arena fully dressed in my wrestling suit, hailed a cab in New

York City.

and went to the airport.

They were dead in my life.

They were dead.

Have you ever seen the footage of the match?

I almost did. I couldn't bear to see it. What good would it do?

The bitch is dead, OK?

I don't need to see it. I was there.

In 1995, the fabulous Moolah became the first woman inducted into the WWF

Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Tonight is the greatest night of my life, being inducted into the

WWF Hall of Fame.

By the year 2000, the WWF had phased out traditional women's athletic wrestling

in favor of strip matches and comedy storylines. But Moolah showed no sign of

slowing down.

She teamed up with fellow wrestling legend Mae Young.

Mae Young wrestled seven different decades.

She was tougher than Moolah, and that's saying something.

Years ago, they had to put up a chicken wire fence up over the ring because they

hated me so bad.

It's insane that more people saw Moolah and Mae in the late 90s and early 2000s

when they were both everybody's grandmother.

Maybe the Adams family's grandmother.

I have to be real careful with her. Everywhere I go, she either wants to get

drunk or naked. This would be the place, I guess.

And then, of course, they go out on TV and they can take the tremendous bumps

and incredible falls and still somehow not break into a million pieces.

Oh, come on!

She should have stopped in her 60s, but she couldn't.

I mean, my God, she was 80 years old wearing a checkered schoolgirl outfit.

No, no. Stop.

Stop. Cooter, stop it.

Stop.

Shh.

I get the last word, not you.

Be good boy.

What was her funeral like?

It was crowded.

And I don't, I tell you the truth, I don't know. I was just in a daze the

whole time.

I didn't even know that he was there.

I just remember thinking that it was the end of an era.

In 2007, Moolah passed away at the age of 84.

The wrestling family showed up in large numbers to pay their respects.

This is where she's buried.

This is hers here, and this is Katie's, and this was Johnny Mae's here.

She had that little thing put there. She said, when you want to come talk to me,

there's a bench in there. You won't get wet if it's raining.

She was all I had.

And I miss her every day.

No one can ever be as good as she was, never.

Women's wrestling today has undergone a renaissance I don't think would have

been possible without the rise of women in mixed martial arts, and specifically

Ronda Rousey. Now it's so much more refined. It wasn't that way in Moolah's

day because that wasn't her strong point.

Ten years after Moolah's death, her impact on wrestling remains

controversial.

Well, I think in wrestling, there is blurred lines between your character and

who you really are.

I believe that the fans couldn't tell the difference between Moolah and the

character she was playing.

Nobody really knows how it hurts you to hear that, that you worked for somebody

and they pimped you out so you can get where you did.

She had never once ever drugged any of us. It just really pisses me

off that they're taking away the legacy of the fabulous Moolah.

I mean, I'll be honest with you. Bambi was never a famous wrestler. But if

there's one thing that I could do, it would be to save Moolah's name and

legacy and restore what she gave to the professional wrestling business.

May have initially opened doors, but she quickly closed the door.

She held women's wrestling back probably for 40 years.

If Moolah had left Wendy with the belt, I think women's wrestling would have

skyrocketed.

She wasn't as big a star as Mildred Burke.

She's not as big a star as Ronda Rousey, but she was the placeholder for 30

years.

How do you think people should remember Moolah?

Any way they like.

Everybody have their own opinion.

And me personally, I don't have an opinion of Moolah.

Nothing that I care to share.

If I choose not to like her because of what she did to me, that's fine.

But Moolah needs to be remembered.

She was an icon in this business.

You can't take away her history just because she's an asshole.

All the girls that should try and remember her.

And they know that they wouldn't be where they are now without her, and they

wouldn't have had the career they had without her.

Whoever's starting these rumors, you're not just calling Moolah a pimp.

You're calling me a prostitute.

And that hurts.

And if you were not on that property, if you were not in that room, you don't

know what happened, and you need to shut up.