By Alan Greenberg
Los Angeles Times, Friday, April 17th,
1981
One guy who was supposed to wrestle her
was so scared, the promoter had to send
the sheriff after him.
When the lawman finally dragged him
to the arena from behind his counter
-- he was a Bethany, Mo., short-order
cook -- the guy protested he couldn't
wrestle Mildred Burke because
he had no trunks. So Burke, the crowd
cheering her on, took hers off (she
was wearing a leotard) and gave them
to her opponent. Then she pinned him.
In 1935, at age 19, she started wrestling
in earnest on the carnival circuit,
offering $25 to any many of reasonably
similar weight who could pin her within
10 minutes. None did.
After word got around and takers were
hard to find, she entertained by blowing
up inner tubes until they burst. Her
chest expansion was 5 1/2 inches, more
than Jack Dempsey's.
Her physique was such that the Los
Angeles Police Department displayed
her poster in its offices as a way of
shaming its men into staying in shape.
She was in Ripley's Believe It or Not
for doing 100 body bridges on the editor's
desk.
Opponents believed it. Because after
21 years and more than 6,000 matches,
Mildred Burke retired in 1955 as the
undefeated women's world wrestling champion.
"I've had two or three gilrs say they
beat me," Burke said, "and I've threatened
to take them to court, because they
never even wrestled me."
Before you go off thinking that she
must have looked like some sort of Russian
shot putter who feared nothing except
a chromosome test, be advised Millie
Burke, made up and dressed
in her prime, was a beauty and the heartthrob
of thousands. She was married three
times. Her fans included Al Jolson and
Cesar Romero.
In her prime, she was 5-2, 138 pounds.
Now, she weighs 180, but you wouldn't
know it to look at her. It's mostly
muscle. Even now, she says, she gets
marriage proposals in the mail. She's
an outgoing woman with a gentle manner
who apologized to a visitor recently
for not wearing eye makeup. She's allergic
to it.
Affixed to the concrete wall behind
her desk is a poster of her as a young
woman, biceps flexed, dressed in a championship
belt and a low-cut blue wrestling outfit.
She says she was offered a movie contract
in those days, but turned it down.
"They wanted to make fun of wrestling,"
Burke said. "To me, it was terrific.
I didn't want to put it down."
Finally, years later, she took a movie
job. Burke, 65, has just wrapped up
a stint as technical advisor for MGM's
"All the Marbles," a movie about women
wrestlers.
Burke has been instructing the actresses
for six months at her Encino gym, occasionally
climbing through the ropes herself to
show them how to deliver a forearm shiver,
or how to apply a crooked leg scissors,
her favorite hold.
"You thrust their head in a vise with
your legs," Burke said. "You can break
their neck."
And embarrass them as well. Certain
attributes are needed to apply the crooked
leg scissors, but modesty isn't one
of them. When an actress tried to apply
the hold by locking her opponent's head
between her knees, Millie, wearing a
dress, climbed into the ring to demonstrate.
She locked the woman's head between
her thighs, thereby utilizing the body's
strongest muscle, the quadriceps.
"You should have heard her scream,"
Burke said.
Burke doesn't use the crooked head
scissors much any more. Mostly, she's
an entrepreneur. Since 1961, she has
trained about 2,000 aspiring women wrestlers.
She has about 500 under contract and
they wrestle throughout the nation and
in Canada, Mexico and Japan.
She also has a thriving mail-order
business featuring video tapes of her
wrestlers, which grosses about $150,000
a year. She says MGM paid her $3,000
a week for her services on "All the
Marbles."
She has just moved into a $500,000
home and owns a 1980 Lincoln and Cadillac.
Not bad for a woman who had to hock
what she said was worth $50,000 worth
of jewelry for $5,000 in order to eat
when she retired from the ring.
But Burke never spent much time grieving
about fortunes made and squandered.
She was born Aug. 5, 1915, in Coffeyville,
Kan., the youngest of six children.
Her father was a part-time inventor
who, she says, invented a non-skid chain
for tires and a heavy-duty hand soap.
"I can't ever remember him working
much," she said. "He'd work up something,
make a small fortune, live it up, and
then go on to something else."
At 15, after shuttling between Kansas
City and California
with her family, she found herself working
as a waitress on the Zuni Indian reservation
near Gallup, N.M. Her mother, then separated
from her father, was employed there
as a cook.
Millie Burke lived there three years,
and the highlight was falling off a
horse and being knocked unconscious.
Her social life consisted of sneaking
in to watch an occasional Zuni war dance.
She was 17 when her boyfriend stopped
to see her on his way to California
and asked her to marry him. She accepted.
"I would have married anyone to get
off that reservation," she said.
When they moved to Kansas City, he
took her to a wrestling match. She was
hooked.
"I loved it," she said. "It (women
wrestling) was something that had never
been done. As a kid, I had the same
dream over and over. I'd be at the head
of the steps, and there'd be a crowd
of people applauding me at the bottom.
And I'd take off . . . like an angel."
She faced only two obstacles. One
was she was pregnant, the other was
the thought of putting a woman wrestler
in the ring was just slightly less remote
than that of putting a man on the moon.
In those days, women wrestlers were
seen only in vaudeville.
But she persevered, finally convincing
Billy Wolfe, then the Missouri
state champion and soon to be her promoter
and second husband, of her desire to
make wrestling her career. She weighed
115 then, but when she twiced pinned
a 160-pounder she says Wolfe had paid
$1 to "slam her so hard that she'll
quit bothering me," Wolfe became a believer.
Burke attributed her invincibility
in the ring mostly to the "alligator
clutch," a Burke invention with which
she figures she ended about 4,500 of
her matches. The alligator clutch is
a devilish pinning maneuver in which
you may make a pretzel of your opponent
and then sit on him, or her. It's not
recommended unless your brother is a
chiropractor.
It wasn't an easy life. For two decades,
Burke wrestled six
days a week, 50 weeks a year, driving
day and night, wrestling in every state
of the continental United States except
New York (when women wrestling wasn't
permitted there) and in Canada, Cuba,
Mexico and Japan.
"Mexico was the most dangerous," she
said. "Down there, it's as dangerous
if they like you as if they hate you.
If they like you, they want a piece
of your clothing. If they don't like
you, they want a piece of your flesh."
Along the way, Burke
says she broke her nose, had five knee
injuries and had each of her thumbs
ripped out of the joint and pushed back
to her wrist. To this day, they are
outsized and misshapen.
Burke's worst injury was when she
was on her back and an opponent stomped
her on the mouth, loosening all her
teeth. Eventually, they all had to be
removed.
"I beat the living hell out of her,"
Burke recalled. "I was hurting so bad,
I went insane."
In 1938, she competed in what she
believes was the first mud wrestling.
Life magazine chronicled it. During
the '40s in Jacksonville, Fla., she
wrestled in a ring covered with a mixture
of swamp mud and melted lard. She says
her principal reward for that evening
was an ear infection that impaired her
hearing.
Whatever the circumstances, she always
tried to be feminine. Burke says she
was the first wrestler of either sex
to wear fancy robes, and she wore $50,000
worth of jewelry into the ring until
its safekeeping became too much of a
headache.
She was paid well, making as much
as $2,000 a night and grossing $250,000
to $300,000 a year in her heyday --
30 years ago.
But she said Wolfe, as her promoter,
got it all.
"That was the stupid part of me,"
Burke said. "Twenty-two years. All the
bleeding I went through, to wind up
with nothing. Someone would say 'wrestling'
to me and tears would come to my eyes.
The years no longer seem wasted, though
Burke says many of her wrestlers clear
$20,000-$30,000 a year, although the
overseas market is more lucrative. Here,
she says, people are more interested
in an acrobatic show. Abroad, she says,
they are more interested in a real scuffle.
She says her training program attracts
educated girls, girls unlike "Crazy
Gladys," a former opponent who Burke
said had a "cauliflower head" and ate
soap after every match because she thought
it would kill whatever germs she might
have picked up in the ring.
There's a book coming out about Millie
Burke. A throwback who bled
and not catsup, she wanted to call it,
"The Third Fall." But the author has
decided to call it "Sex, Muscles and
Diamonds." Oh well, that's show biz.
