The Shoot: June Byers and Mildred Burke Fight For Control of Women's Wrestling
The Shoot: June Byers and Mildred Burke Fight For Control of Women's Wrestling
“June Byers!”
Mildred Burke all but screamed the name like an epitaph, her anger rising as she talked to Atlanta-based reporter Jimmy Mann in January, 1954, about the state of women’s wrestling, a sport she’d ruled like a queen for almost two decades.
“I’m the world’s champion woman wrestler, it’s been that way for 18 years and Byers’ claim is a lie,” Burke continued. “She came by the claim by winning a ‘framed up’ tournament last April in Baltimore. Even then the frame-up didn’t work. Byers’ win was an accident. It was supposed to be Nell Stewart. I will fight both of them on the same night right here in Atlanta, winner take all.”
That Burke had to take this remarkable step, to defend the honor of her claim in the press, was significant. It showed the continued influence of her ex-husband, the Don of women’s wrestling Billy Wolfe, and the rising popularity of Byers, who had wowed the country in media appearances since making her claim to the world’s title.
“A bundle of charm and loveliness,” The Tampa Times proclaimed, echoing what seemed to be the prevailing sentiment of everyone who met her during this victory tour. When meeting with the press, Byers’ husband G. Billie Wolfe would invite male reporters to squeeze his wife’s firm muscles. If the newsman was small enough, June would pick him up on her shoulders and spin him around. These were both tricks right out of the playbook established by Mildred and his father.
Byers appeared on mainstream television programs like “What’s My Line” and “The Jack Paar Show” and in a series of newspaper features and it was generally becoming an accepted fact that women’s grappling had a new standard-bearer.
“The world’s champ refused to participate,” one newspaper columnist wrote. “…in the eyes of many wrestling fans, Miss Byers is the new champ and Mildred can go back to her knitting.”
Burke had beaten Byers dozens of times in the ring. No one had pinned her own shoulders to the mat in many years. But beating a prominent promoter and his many media connections was proving more difficult.
Byers and Nell Stewart, Wolfe’s new wife, had started a competing promotion Girls Wrestling Enterprises to compete with Burke’s Attractions Inc. Even the National Wrestling Alliance, which had initially indicated they would allow the two groups (located across town from each other in Columbus, Ohio) to duke it out without interference, put Burke on the cover of their June 1953 magazine with the headline “World’s Champion, 1936 to 1953.”
It read like an obituary—of her wrestling career at least. Inside, the magazine proclaimed Byers the new world’s champion. Burke wasn’t mentioned at all. The NWA’s “neutrality”, it seemed, was a myth, something made even more clear when the new Byers group was able to book talent into NWA territories that were no longer taking Burke’s calls.
Pushed into a corner, Burke decided to come clean about some of the inner workings of the business that would have normally remained hidden.
“All this mess was started by my ex-husband Billy Wolfe,” Burke told The Atlanta Constitution. “After he and I split up, I bought him out and he agreed not to promote any more women’s wrestling. That didn’t last long. He kept doing it and was responsible for that tournament last April. I was invited to defend my title there. They must’ve thought I was nuts!
“It was his promotion, his girls, his referee. I didn’t even show up. That’s not the way I won the title and I certainly wasn’t going to lose it like that.”
Burke closed the interview with a combination of threat, invitation and warning:
“Wolfe can keep filling those girls with championship promises…Before any of them is the real champ, they have got to crawl through those ropes and pin Mildred Burke.”
On the surface, that was true of every match Burke ever had. But those in the know understood what Queen Mildred was getting at. If one of the other girls was going to beat her, it would only be with her permission. In a fight, she was confident she could handle her own.
Burke held a trump card many champions of the era did—in an effort to stave off double crosses and shenanigans, the belt holder needed to be able to really wrestle if the situation ever called for it. Lou Thesz, on the male side, was the NWA’s standard bearer for many years, in part because his presence in the ring made people think twice about trying any funny business. As Thesz wrote in his autobiography Hooker, though they smiled and slapped each other on the back whenever they met, every wrestling promoter was just looking for a place to stick the knife:
It wasn’t farfetched to believe that an NWA promoter might even decide to steal the belt and put it on his own boy. Having a champion who could actually defend himself against a double-cross was protection against that ever happening.
…I had a handful of title matches where I could sense something was amiss, or where my opponent had a special relationship with the referee, and I handled all of them in a direct fashion: I hooked the guy and threatened to hurt him if he didn’t behave, and that was usually enough.
Women’s wrestling as it existed in the 50’s would never be mistaken for a real competition. Sure, there was some mat work and holds. But there was also plenty of showmanship and hair pulling, fast-paced action that got the heart racing in the ring and the stands, even if it didn’t do much to suspend anyone’s disbelief. Byers was a master of that kind of wrestling, both a tremendous bumping heel and a rough customer who wasn’t afraid to really lay them in on her opponents. She was not, however, known as a particularly gifted amateur wrestler.
Burke, by contrast, had come up in a time when a wrestler occasionally still needed to, well, wrestle. She was blazing new ground everywhere and, when there wasn’t another woman to wrestle, would often take on men from the community who were similarly sized in real contests.
Negotiations for a match between the two women spanned months. A joint tour was proposed, with the two exchanging the title back and forth all over the country. In the end, Burke just couldn’t stomach the idea of going back into business with her ex. She’d be willing to meet someone from the Wolfe camp under one condition—the match be an old-fashioned contest.
In other words, Byers would have to beat her for real.
“The potential paydays for a series of matches around the country between Burke and Byers was huge, yet Burke wasn’t having any of it,” historian Tim Hornbaker wrote. “There were too many factors that jeopardized both her standing in the wrestling world and her personal life. But because she needed the money, she agreed to a single bout against Byers in Atlanta.”
The match was scheduled for August 20, 1954, in Burke’s new southeast stomping grounds. Paul Jones, a long-time Burke ally, would be the promoter. Despite giving up 20 pounds in weight and 10 years of wear-and-tear on the mat, Burke was confident. Even a knee injury suffered late in the spring couldn’t dissuade her.
“Strongly influencing my decision to go through with the booking was my lack of any fear of June Byers,” Burke recounted in Jeff Leen’s amazing biography. “I was one of her original trainers. Through the years since, I had beaten her dozens of times. June Byers was not a particularly good wrestler in the legitimate sense, but she was rough. You always had to watch the dirty punch, dirty knee and other sharp shots that she took when the chance came. In an attempted double-cross once, she deliberately stomped me in the mouth on the mat. I remembered this incident well, because the dental bill was $2,000 to fix my loosened front teeth.”
What Burke didn’t know was that Byers had been training for the contest for weeks, dedicating every spare moment to prepare her body for a fight. Ruffy Silverstein, a former NCAA champion and a favorite of Ohio promoter Al Haft, was brought in to school Byers on the ground, both giving her a few tricks to deploy and some strategies to combat the techniques Burke would most likely bring to the table.
Already a noted fitness fanatic, working out for hours a day including 200 body bridges and 200 body lifts no matter what else was going on in her life, Byers ramped up for the upcoming contest that everyone on her team felt confident was eventually going to happen, especially with Burke being bled dry by a lack of bookings.
“I trained very hard for that bout, seven hours a day, five days a week, running five miles a day,” Byers told historian Jim Melby. “I trained in Al Haft's gym with Bill Miller, Dick Hutton, and Joe Scarpello. Joe in particular I could wrestle with, the others were way too big…I weighed about 145 at the time. Billy had me train with the men to increase my strength and endurance. When I wrestled my normal matches against women wrestlers I had a definite advantage.”
The muscular Byers who walked to the ring in Atlanta for what the papers were calling “a grudge battle of long-standing” didn’t resemble the wrestler Burke had shared the square circle with so many times before. Her jaw dropped. If she wasn’t nervous before, she definitely was now. This was going to be serious.
The match was of great interest, at least to the wrestling community. “Grapevine news that the girls would be ‘shooting’ attracted promoters and bookers from all parts of the country” according to The Knoxville Journal. Many made their way to the city for the match, including Mae Young, who had wrestled them both countless times and drove down from Baltimore to see the contest at the City Auditorium for herself, sitting in the crowd amongst the 4000 fans in attendance.
It was scheduled for two-of-three-falls and no time limit, though promoters would eventually think better of the latter clause. Like most shooting matches, it wasn’t especially exciting. The two were cautious, Burke afraid her injured knee would give out and Byers no doubt nervous about what tricks the more experienced woman had hidden away for the proper moment. Author John Cosper believes the audience, most of whom had no idea about the match’s behind-the-scene significance, must have been baffled by what they saw:
With all the build up to the match, anticipation was high the two ladies would pull out all the stops and put on as hard-hitting a match as any ever seen in Atlanta. Imagine the confusion and disappointment in the crowd as the two ladies tossed all hint of showmanship out the door.
No video exists of the match and reporting is sparse. We know Byers won the first fall in 16 minutes, pinning Burke’s shoulders to the mat when her knee gave out in a tussle (Burke claims she wasn’t pinned but, rather, conceded the fall to the referee. This is disputed by ringside accounts including the newspaper’s and Mae Young’s). According to Leen, the match then proceeded in much the same fashion it had begun, Burke on the defensive, Byers attempting to push her into the ropes, a test of both wills and the crowd’s patience:
It was as if she had been transported back to the carnival, wrestling defensively, blocking “her opponent, the entire goal being to avoid getting pinned and losing the second and determining fall. The two women stayed on their feet, their hands locked around each other’s necks and elbows, straining and pushing all over the ring in an awkward dance for the smallest advantage, a momentary loss of balance, a tiny shift of weight, a slow ebbing of strength.
…The match had little differentiation, just two women locked together in the relentless logic of forward and retreat, push and pull, a clenched two-step all over the ring. The legs moved, the muscles strained. Neither could gain an edge.
As the minutes ticked by, Burke believed she might win a war of attrition. Byers was breathing heavy, Burke’s son Joe thought, suddenly confident his mother might have a chance. That’s when things got fishy.
“Wrestling commissioners ended the Mildred Burke-June Byers World Championship title match Friday night after 45 minutes of grunts and groans left the two almost where they had begun,” The Atlanta Constitution reported the next day, one of two truly contemporaneous account of the match I can find.
The bout, according to a report in The Tampa Times was ruled “a no decision, which means that whatever advantage Miss Byers had it was purely a moral victory.” Florida promoter Cowboy Luttrall, who had traveled up to Atlanta for the bout, agreed it was “dull” but contended it should have been allowed to continue to a culmination. Instead, there remained a potentially confusing matter of two titleists, alike in dignity, both cavorting the country calling themselves world champion.
“Atlanta promoter Paul Jones and a state inspector for the Georgia Commission stepped in at the end of an hour’s wrestling and called it a no contest,” The Springfield News Leader sports editor Perry Smith wrote days later, explaining to his readers the decision to recognize Byers as champion might prove controversial.
Instead, the title switch was mostly a fait accompli. Byers went forward as if she was the rightful champion. Two days later, the story had shifted to include the detail that both women were defending title belts, therefore Byers’ victory in the first of three potential falls earned her the victory and the righteous claim to the world’s championship. Burke had been ducking Byers, her admitted refusal to enter the Baltimore tournament of 1953 presented as dispositive evidence that June and not Mildred had gone into the match with the more definitive claim.
Within a week, she was defending in Orlando and soon around the country, Wolfe spreading his account of events far and wide with friendly members of the press, “showering sports desks with broadsides,” as The Atlanta Journal sports editor Earl Danforth put it. Wolfe’s manifesto reads in part:
During the one hour of wrestling, June Byers decisively defeated Mildred Burke one fall, right in the center of the ring.
Mildred Burke did not get one single fall on June Byers, nor did Mildred at any time get behind June, or on top of June for one single second throughout the entire match."
The Tampa paper that had called the bout a no decision had changed its tune by the time Byers was there to compete in a match at the end of the month, saying she “defeated Mildred Burke” to end a long campaign chasing the title. Eventually it was simply reported wherever she went that Byers had beaten Burke, which was both true and not true at the same time. Though Burke protested, the institutional powers were hard to overcome. Everyone simple fell into line. By 1955 Burke had left the sport completely.
"It took Billy (Wolfe) one year to convince Mildred to wrestle me, and it was a shoot,” Byers told Women’s Wrestling Illustrated. “Sam Muchnick sent a referee that we both agreed on. Mildred claims she wasn’t defeated, but I pinned her in the first fall. During the second fall, she left the ring and refused to come back. Regardless of what she told people, it was a shoot.”
As champion, Byers started strong. Penny Banner became her main opponent and the two had rip roaring matches all over the continent during the 1950s. Byers remained a draw, especially throughout Canada where women’s wrestling was still fresh and new and was often featured as a special attraction when a promoter wanted to go all out to present a major event.
“She’s the attraction she is for one very simple reason,” Calgary newspaper columnist Johnny Hopkins wrote. “She’s the best. Think what you like of wrestling, smear it if you must, but June Byers is the best in the business.”
While Burke was no doubt a very difficult act to follow, broader issues made it hard for Byers to make the same kind of impact. The economic growth that followed World War II couldn’t last forever and there was a massive recession in the mid-1950s that left millions unemployed.
With the economy in shambles and the sport over-exposed thanks to a constant television presence in the medium’s infancy, wrestling became, as historian Scott Beekman wrote, “one of the casualties of what Benjamin Rader termed the ‘‘great sports slump’’ of the 1950s...wrestling found itself edged out of the crowded television sports market as net-works came to view it as an outdated fad. With attendance at arenas down as well, wrestling was marginalized, similar to the experience of the late 1930s. No longer an attraction featured in popular periodicals and prime-time television, wrestling survived as an entertainment form on the fringes of popular culture.”
Age, wear and a desire for a more domestic life limited Byers’ touring schedule to a shadow of what it had previously been. She had a number of interests outside the ring, from learning to play the organ to flying airplanes, once traveling to all 50 states on an extended vacation tour. She raised Pekingese dogs and read a book a week. By the time she and new husband Sam Menaker moved to New Mexico, she was mostly working in that territory, leaving space for Banner and the Fabulous Moolah to stake their own title claims. When she did wrestle, however, she gave it her all.
"I took every match and every opponent very seriously,” she said. “Every time I climbed into the ring it was my goal to make that match the best I could. That may sound silly, but I was always nervous before wrestling, but I always gave each match my best. I always wrestled to win, and I always tried to give the fans the best possible ring action that I was capable of."
Though Byers maintained her rigorous exercise schedule, there’s no doubt that a decade-plus of grinding had taken its toll.
“It’s no kind of work for a sissy,” the El Paso Herald Post reported. “June’s had nearly every bone in both hands broken, two broken collar bones, a broken left arm, her knees torn out a number of times…another time she was struck in the face by a pop bottle and it was a long, hard expensive proposition getting over that injury; her sight had been impaired and she still has difficulty reading for long periods of time and target shooting.” She’d also fallen on a chair during a match and had to have her gall bladder and appendix removed.
A car accident in 1963 was the final straw, a broken knee cap and crushed leg leaving Byers unconvinced she could pick up where she left off.
“I loved the sport so much,” she told Melby. “I wanted my supporters to remember me at my peak, when I still wrestled well, and looked sharp physically…I met all worthy contenders before I quit. I think I did both the sport and myself credit, as I didn't want to wrestle as an old woman.”
Byers retired as champion in 1964 after an undefeated decade as Burke’s successor. She belongs in any wrestling Hall of Fame that takes itself seriously as a defender of the sport’s history. Burke was seen as a first ballot candidate—how is it that no other woman in American wrestling history merits the honor? If anyone does, it’s Byers.
Though her championship victory was clouded in controversy, her legacy is clear, at least according to long-time foe Penny Banner:
“The greatest wrestler I ever faced.”
(Primary Source Material Here)
Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Read part one of his June Byers retrospective here.
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