The Queen of the Ring by Jeff Leen

Author:Jeff Leen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2009-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

13

A Bout with Nell

The carefully crafted equilibrium that sustained the professional lives of Mildred Burke and Billy Wolfe, all the lies, evasions, and compromises, began to unravel after the automobile accident. With the champion injured and unable to perform, the future of the business was in doubt. Burke’s injuries, of course, brought up the question of succession. Nell Stewart and June Byers had both been listed for years as the number one contender. Gloria Barattini, the beauty with the opera-trained voice, waited in the wings. It was during this period that Wolfe’s allegiance to Stewart came to the fore. She had been his lover and his lady-wrestler-in-waiting for many years now. She had also become as big a draw as Burke.

Millie hated her. In her autobiography she said she heard from other wrestlers that Billy and Nell made fun of her behind her back. “One of his favorite sayings was that I was so dumb, all he had to do was throw me a hamburger or a fish and I would keep quiet,” Burke wrote. “Nell Stewart once suggested that my expense allowance on the road be limited to $25 a week, since that would be more than enough.” Burke said they also joked about her thirty-one-inch bust. “Although I had a near-perfect body for a female athlete, the family genes gave us all small breasts,” she later wrote. “This was a source of huge humor for Billy Wolfe. He enjoyed citing the superior endowment of Nell Stewart in that category.” One time, in the dressing room before a match in Atlanta, Nell cupped her thirty-eight-inch breasts and told Millie, “These are the real thing.” Burke shot back: “My husband knows they’re the real thing. But what’s important is what’s under them, the heart. When your heart gets to be the real thing, you’ll have something to brag about.” Millie said she then took revenge on Nell in the ring, “throwing her around like a bean bag and finishing her in two straight falls.” Back in the dressing room Millie told her, “Nell, that’s the real thing.”

They had wrestled only a handful of times, when Nell was starting out and, later, when Wolfe needed last-minute substitutions. Millie, of course, always won in the worked matches. But she maintained that Stewart was a poor wrestler. “There was never an occasion on which I did not have to carry her,” Burke wrote. “For the sake of the business, I made her look good before pinning her. Whatever her talents were outside the ring, wrestling was one thing that she just couldn’t do.” That flies in the face of what other observers, press accounts, and women wrestlers say about Stewart, and probably reflects the depths of Burke’s bitterness more than anything else. Stewart was a younger woman on the rise behind Burke, touted for her beauty, who happened to be sleeping with Burke’s husband. The press coverage makes it clear that Wolfe was grooming Stewart as Burke’s successor. In May 1951 Glance magazine

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