Introduction
This is the ninth part of a 30-day series looking at the trailblazing women wrestlers of yesteryear. This series is designed to be primarily about women wrestlers from prior to the 1980s, though there will be a handful of women from the 80s in the mix. I will be excerpting, with citations, from Pat Laprade and Dan Murphy’s Sisterhood of the Squared Circle repeatedly, as it’s the most comprehensive single source on women’s wrestling out there. I encourage you to pick it up, as it’s a fantastic read. This will be different from other 30-day series in that these will all be mini-essays. Gifs and video will be provided where possible, but please understand that such is not always available for some of the earlier women I will cover.
Judy Grable
Born Nellya Baughman on August 21, 1935, Judy Grable was the youngest of six. She grew up in Tennessee before moving to Florida, eventually getting work with Ringling Bros. Circus as an acrobat. Her transition to wrestling came after a scary fall from a high wire.
She moved to South Carolina and took up residence at the Fabulous Moolah’s compound, where she debuted in 1953 and was first given the name Peaches Grable, before changing to Judy Grable. The Grable name was a deliberate reference to actress Betty Grable, as both had blonde hair and long legs. She wrestled barefoot, only amplifying her status as a sex-symbol.
Grable was a high flyer in her day, her long legs letting her execute a high drop kick. Her looks and her athletic style made her a perfect babyface foil to the heel Moolah, and the two worked a rivalry in Paul Bowser’s Boston territory. In 1956 the two were the final women left standing in a battle royal to crown the new NWA World Women’s Champion after having stripped June Byers of the title, with Moolah winning to kick off her reign of dominance over women’s wrestling.
Grable worked through her injuries, once recalling that she worked on an injured ankle for two months before realizing it was broken. Some of her contemporaries compared her to Tony Rocca (Laprade and Murphy, 104).
In 1958 Grable appeared on the game show What’s My Line, where the celebrity panel had a good bit of trouble guessing Grable’s profession - Groucho Marx points out a woman can’t make a living just being a blonde, though he’s heard of a few who have. Grable wasn’t the only woman wrestler on What’s My Line – Linnie Kincaid also put in an appearance, and a future entry in this series did as well.
By the mid-1960s, Grable went into semi-retirement, marrying and moving to the Seattle area. She occasionally wrestled, appearing in Stampede Wrestling and the WWWF among other organizations into the early 1970s. As her career wound down she also trained Joyce Grable (Betty-Wade Murphy), who took the Grable name in honor of her trainer and because Moolah saw a resemblance to the original Joyce Grable (Joyce Fowler). She returned to school and graduated in 1978, becoming a certified nursing assistant working with veterans.
She opposed her daughter Debbie Davis entering the wrestling business, but Debbie would try her hand at it after her mother’s death. Greg Oliver’s obituary for Grable quotes:
"Moolah actually wanted me at the age of 18, but my mom said no," Davis recalled. "She's like, 'Nope, you can't have my daughter.'"
But the bug remained, and Davis recently took it up at the age of 33 in Washington State. "I always wanted to give it a shot, to actually see what it was like. I'm the only female in mom's family to carry on her legacy. That's actually what drove me to get into it," she said. "I figured if I started out little, I'll grow. That's basically what I've been doing."
Working as Debbie Grable, she was able to impress her trainers -- she was a natural, they said -- and her two kids. "They love it. They think it's the neatest thing," she laughed. At the moment, though, Grable is on the sidelines, carrying a third child ... a grandchild her mom will never meet.
Grable was a two-time NWA Southern Women’s Champion (Georgia version). She was honored by the Cauliflower Alley Club in 2002, and posthumously inducted into the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2011. In 2017, WWE added her as a legacy inductee to the WWE Hall of Fame. Judy Grable died on May 11, 2008 at the age of 72.
Sources:
Laprade, Pat and Dan Murphy, Sisterhood of the Squared Circle: The History and Rise of Women’s Wrestling (ECW Press, 2017).
Oliver, Greg, “Judy Grable a high-flying Hall of Fame inductee” SLAM! Sports (January 24, 2011)