Ask 411 Wrestling: Who is on the Mt. Rushmore of Women’s Wrestling?

Welcome, guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 Wrestling. My name is Ryan Byers, and I’ll be here for the next five pages or so answering all of your burning questions about pro graps.

Last week, though the column was on the whole well-received, we did have a couple of people in the comments section talking about how they missed some subjects that used to be covered in Ask 411. If you’re one of those people or if you find yourself sympathizing with them, you can help change the direction of the column by submitting your own questions – because I can only answer what I am asked.

Those questions should be submitted to me via email at [email protected].

Somebody also asked about submitting questions through the comment section last week, and I will answer those questions when I see them, but I don’t always check the comment section as closely as I do emails, so sending things to the address above is the safer bet if you actually want to get things answered.

With all of those housekeeping notes out of the way, let’s A some Qs!

Jon is burning his bra:

Ryan, twist on a classic question: Who’s on the Mt. Rushmore of women’s wrestling?

First off, I feel like this question really should have gone to Caliber Winfield, who has a new column in which he really runs with this whole Mount Rushmore concept. If you’re interested, you can read it here.

But the question didn’t come to Caliber. It came to me, so I am obligated to answer it, much like Sisyphus was obligated to roll his own boulder up his own mountain.

Entries number one and two on my mountain are actually a tag team, Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda, collectively known as The Beauty Pair. There’s no question that Japan has taken women’s wrestling far more seriously for far longer than the United States and, even though there was joshi puroresu before Sato and Ueda debuted, they were its first breakout mega-stars, taking the wrestling world by storm in the 1970s when they were just teenagers. In addition to drawing thousands of fans (many of whom were also teenage girls) to arenas throughout the country to watch their matches, they were also a successful recording duo with multiple pop hits. Thought there were later joshi wrestlers who were bigger stars and certainly later joshi wrestlers who had more revolutionary, high impact matches, a lot of being on a “Mount Rushmore” is laying the foundation for those who came after you, and the Beauty Pair were legitimate pioneers.

Up next, I would have to go with Penny Banner who unfortunately gets written out of a lot of modern histories of women’s wrestling because she was never really affiliated with the WWWF and was in a rival camp of wrestlers to the Fabulous Moolah. Though women’s wrestling in the United States never became as big as men’s wrestling or even as big as women’s wrestling was in Japan, it has definitely had its peaks, and one of those peaks was in the 1950s. Perhaps the brightest star of that period was Penny Banner, a former NWA and AWA Women’s Champion who had a legendary series of matches with her rival June Byers. Banner also gets some credit for documenting her career in Banner Days, one of the better books to document U.S. wrestling in the 1950s and 1960s.

Finally, I’m going to go with Manami Toyota. One of these days, I’m going to set up a card table on the edge of my local college’s quad and tape a piece of poster board to it that says “Manami Toyota is the best female in-ring performer in the history of wrestling. Change my mind.” And you know what? Nobody will be able to change my mind, because it’s the god’s honest truth. If you’re somebody who has been watching the WWE women’s revolution and you think that Charlotte Flair, Asuka, or Becky Lynch are excellent professional wrestlers, you don’t know the half of it. Watching her matches from the early 1990s is insane, because she’s doing things in them that wouldn’t be commonplace until at least ten years later. She was constantly innovating and coming up with new moves and ways of executing existing moves that even male wrestlers in the United States are still stealing.

So, there you go. Do you disagree with my selections? Do you have your own Mt. Rushmore of women’s wrestling? If so, talk about it in the comments down below.

Dave W. is following up on a question from last week:

Not another question but a little gloss on the one about playing to the camera over the crowd:

The first set of NXT UK tapings (which are being shown now) were done in a theatre. The hard camera and entrance was on the stage, and the ring was where the first 20+ rows of seats would have been. They put in a few seats around the sides of the ring, but literally nothing camera-side; and the vast majority of the audience was on the opposite side to the camera.

Bizarre experience being in the audience when every promo, pose and finish is being pointed away from you at an empty space. Given some of the chants got a bit…feisty I’m slightly surprised the crowd played along the whole time! But to your point, the wrestlers had no issue with it, they just played to the camera as though that side was also packed out.

Keep up the good work with the column, loving the theoretical lineal title histories. Because I’m a massive nerd.

I hope NXT UK fans like looking at wrestlers’ butts.

Butts butts butts.

AG Awesome wants to ask a slightly different question about women:

On the 5/6/96 episode of RAW there’s an anonymous woman accusing Shawn Michaels of having an affair with her. Who was this woman? And also, the audio of her husband’s name is garbled. Who was the husband supposed to be?

I don’t think that he was supposed to be anybody in particular. I couldn’t find any record of that, at least.

According to the May 13, 1996 edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the purpose of the angle was to get over the fact that Michaels was now a big star who had a lot of people out to get him. This was combined with things like Diana Hart Smith (the British Bulldog’s wife) claiming that HBK made a pass at her and Marty Jannetty, who at the time was a heel with the New Rockers, telling stories of his former partner’s womanizing ways when they travelled with each other.

In a way, it’s almost like the WWF was trying to set up Michaels to be one of the problematic dudes who are being exposed by the #metoo movement, except he was supposed to be a babyface and not a heel. (And, yes, for those keeping score at home, Louis C.K. = Heel.)

Interestingly, the Observer continued to report on the story, as in its May 27 edition of the same year, it mentioned that part of the basis for this Michaels angle may have been the personal and legal difficulties that Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan had in the early 1990s, which would explain why Shawn was portrayed as a babyface despite being accused of all manner of horrible things.

Joe M. has a conflict of interest:

I was wondering why WWE runs house shows the same day they run TV, i.e. Raw and SmackDown?

Also, while they are running the house show do they show what’s going on live on Raw or SmackDown?

Running a house show makes the company money off of ticket sales and merchandise, and the amount of television viewers that they lose because of one house show going on in one city (usually not a major market, e.g. New York or L.A.) is not going to be large enough to cause any sort of slip in ratings. So, if you can make some cash by running a house show opposite your television, it’s really not going to hurt you and you might as well go ahead and do it.

As to the second part of the question, I have never heard of any house shows during which WWE television programming has been broadcast to the live audience. In fact, depending on the language of the company’s contracts with the television networks that air its shows, that sort of airing of TV footage might be prohibited.

Richard U. has an aura about him:

I’ve been watching wrestling since 1976. It may have been my youth, but there were some wrestlers who seemed to simply be unbeatable in the first half of my 40 years as a fan. Bruiser Brody in the early 1980’s. The Road Warriors from 1983 to 1985. The Undertaker from 1991 to 1994. Vader in 1992 and 1993. Bill Goldberg in 1997 and 1998.

Then I reached my late 20’s and my interest waned. Has anybody had that aura of unbeatablility in the last twenty years? Having just started watching again in the last couple years, Minoru Suzuki seems to have had it in NJPW for the last year. Anybody else? What about somebody coming along like a Jeff Cobb or WALTER? Is it there anymore?
Or has the loss of kayfabe ended that forever?

Wrestling has travelled so far away from being portrayed as a real sport that it’s difficulty to watch a match and think of anybody as being “unbeatable.” In other words, my suspension of disbelief is totally shot. When I’m watching, I pretty much know that anybody can be defeated at any time at the whim of the booker, and that part of my brain can’t shut off anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGR0O1sd_QQ

That being said, even though I have a hard time pretending that a particular wrestler cannot be beaten, there is a small handful of wrestlers who I think do an excellent job of projecting the notion that they are badasses. Minoru Suzuki, who Richard mentioned, is one of those people. Ronda Rousey is another one, as is Brock Lesnar.

Of course, one of the reasons that those people are great at projecting the image of a badass is that they ARE actually badasses, so that doesn’t say much about them being a cure for my inability to suspend disbelief.

And, with that, we are unfortunately going to have to cut this week’s edition of the column a little bit short due to some outside issues on my end. Early fall tends to be a pretty busy season for me, but, fortunately, things are slowing down and hopefully I will be able to get back to an insane research question or two in the relatively near future.

If you would like to shoot some of those questions my way, just remember: The place to send them to is [email protected]