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Johnnie Mae Young, a women’s wrestling pioneer who gained far more fame as a comedy figure in her late 70s working for the WWF, passed away on 1/14 at the age of 90.

Young was in hospice care as she was going through kidney failure after a hospital visit more than a week earlier and was not expected to last the week.

Young was celebrated for having wrestled professionally in nine different decades, from the 30s to the 10s, something nobody else in history could claim. While that will likely remain a wrestling truism passed down forever and one of her calling cards, most serious historians have disputed the claim.

But Young was a pioneer, with claims she was part of the first group of women’s wrestlers ever to work in Canada, in 1941, and was known in Japan for being the rival of Mildred Burke on the first women’s pro wrestling show ever in that country in 1954.

She was amazingly tough and resilient, as when she wrestled well into her 70s, she wanted her male opponents to lay the clotheslines in, and took a well protected power bomb off the stage from Bubba Ray Dudley in a skit that, while Dudley did a great job of protecting her in, is probably something that WWE today would probably shudder at the thought they did it because of what could have happened had it gone wrong.

While in her mid-80s, in a WWE ring, in a match where the other women made sure to take care of her, she got light headed and fell down. She fell near the ropes without breaking her fall and everyone realized that she came very close to the ropes, and the way she fell, she could have broken her neck. At that point she was never put in the ring to wrestle again.

To compete in her supposed ninth decade, she was brought out on November 15, 2010, on Old School Raw, in what was billed as a falls count anywhere match against Layla and Michelle McCool. She was basically held onto by the babyface wrestlers on the stage to make sure she didn’t fall, and carefully placed over a fallen heel wrestler that had been knocked out. It really would be an injustice to call it a pro wrestling match from that standard, as she got nowhere close to a ring.

In reality, Young is believed to have competed in seven decades, matching the record held by Lou Thesz, who debuted in the 30s and had his final match in 1990 in Japan at the age of 74 against Masahiro Chono. You really couldn’t call the 2010 match anything resembling a pro wrestling match, even giving as much leeway as possible. While she always claimed to have started in 1939, at 16, historians researching have been unable to find any records of her wrestling prior to 1941, when she turned 18 and went on tour with Billy Wolfe’s troupe.

For years she had stated that her goal was, on her 100th birthday, on March 12, 2023, that she would wrestle a match against Stephanie McMahon.

“There will never be another Mae Young,” said Vince McMahon at the time of her death. Her longevity in sports entertainment may never be matched and I will forever be grateful for all of her contributions to the industry. On behalf of WWE, I extend our sincerest condolences to her family and friends.”

Young had been called to appear on the 1/6 “Old School Raw” in Baltimore, when company officials found out she had been hospitalized and would be unable to attend. Reports on 1/8 were that she was not expected to live much longer. Her death was actually reported on 1/9, first in the Charleston Post-Courier, which got the information from someone in the home she was in, that she had passed away at 1 a.m. that day. As it turned out, there was great confusion within the house and she was still alive, although still in grave condition, and lasted five more days.

It was actually her second career that is what made her a wrestling legend. Both she and the Fabulous Moolah were brought in as comedy figures as the old women in their 70s, and then their 80s, who would be brought to television for a variety of skits. The most famous was the idea that she had a relationship with Mark Henry, who got her pregnant, and she gave birth to a hand in one of those skits that many loved and many others hated.

It was that career that got her into both the WWE Hall of Fame and the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame, and created the image of she and the Fabulous Moolah as the grand old ladies and respected pioneers of women’s wrestling. During her career, Young was a name woman wrestler during the 40s and 50s early heyday of that genre. She retired a few times, but came back at different times into her 40s. She lived in California, and wrestled on occasion on Las Vegas shows for Moolah’s LIWA annual promotion into her 60s and early 70s where she would amaze people with how much she could still do. Even after moving to the Carolinas, when Moolah invited her to live with her after she had lost family, in 1991, she would work Carolina indies as “The Great Mae Young,” where on posters, they would put photos of her dolled up taken nearly 50 years earlier when she was a very pretty young woman, on the posters.

During her prime, she was never ranked as one of the elite stars on the level of Moolah, Mildred Burke, June Byers, Nell Stewart, Penny Banner, or even later like a Betty Niccoli, Toni Rose or Vivian Vachon. During her prime she was sometimes regarded as among the top ten women wrestlers in the country.

She did have a reputation for toughness. Legend had it that she grew up in Sand Springs, OK, and wrestled against the boys in high school, and she was also a star softball player. She claimed that when she was in high school, she attended a show in Tulsa, not knowing wrestling was worked, and challenged Burke, the world champion with the noted round biceps that she’d flex in tons of publicity photos. Burke was a major attraction at the time, as she and promoter Wolfe, her husband, had largely built up women’s wrestling to what was its mainstream peak of popularity during the 1940s and early 1950s.

The women’s championships and top spots in those days revolved around women who married or slept with the promoters. Burke was married to Wolfe. After they divorced, he married Stewart. Byers married Wolfe’s son. Moolah and husband Buddy Lee became the power brokers of women’s wrestling after Wolfe’s business went down, although after Moolah and Lee split up, it was Moolah who ran the business.

Young claimed that she went to a show, either in 1937 or 1939. Given that the former date was when she was 14, and by her own accounts she didn’t take up wrestling in high school until 15, the 1939 date if this story is accurate would seem the most plausible). She said she challenged Burke, but instead was put in a shoot match with Gladys “Killem” Gillem, and pinned her in seconds. Historians have been unable to verify this ever happened.

At 18, she was a regular in Wolfe’s troupe. She always claimed she could have beaten Burke but was never given the opportunity. She claimed in the book “Queen of the Ring,” about Burke, that in seeing the Burke vs. Byers shoot match for the world title, that she didn’t think either of them, who had the reputation of being the two best actual wrestlers of the women’s troupe, were really good wrestlers and would have beaten either. But years earlier, when Frank Deford did a story on Burke, Young was adamant in claiming that in her prime that no woman of the era could have beaten Burke. Burke was 39 when she had the shoot match for the title, on August 25, 1954 where he lost the only fall when her knee dislocated in a two out of three fall match that was stopped as a boring stalemate by the Atlanta Athletic Commission after 47 minutes. Byers, who also outweighed her significantly, was 32.

But she was a very real street fighter. There are stories of Young beating up men for real, and not all of them nice stories, particularly in her youth, but even a story in a Texas dressing room from the 60s where she beat up Dr. Ken Ramey, the skinny manager of The Masked Interns, who was arguably the most underrated manager of all-time. There is little doubt she was among the toughest of any of the women wrestlers who were in the so-called golden age in the 40s and early 50s, when Wolfe had a huge stable of women wrestlers all over North America getting full-time work.

Her peers who were still alive were highly critical of Young and Moolah appearing as comedy figures in WWF, saying it demeaned all of them as wrestlers. Young claimed that any one of them would have taken the job had it been offered, which is likely true in most situations.

When the movie “Lipstick and Dynamite” came out in 2005, there was more bitterness. Most of the wrestlers were very negative about Moolah in particular, for her always keeping the world title for decades, never allowing younger talent to get to the top. Young was, of course, the lone voice always defensive of Moolah. The bitterness increased over business dealings and later when the movie was released, and all the women were brought in to do media, and because of their fame in WWF, Moolah and Young were treated as the stars and the rest as secondary characters.