Today’s Favorite Quote: An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise-William Dean Howells
Happy Birthday to those who have passed on and to those great wrestlers still with us:
In Memoriam:
The Great Antonio 1925
Ripper Collins 1933
Giant Haystacks\Loch Ness 1946
Happy Birthday:
Gene Ligon (76)
Tony Khan (44)
Ilja Dravunov (33)
RIP Memorial: We stop & remember those who have passed on this day and gave themselves to the business for us, the fans. We salute you and thank you.
Tony Stecher 10-10-1954 at the age of 65
The Life and Career of Judy Martin
Judith Hardee was born in Houston on October 8, 1955, and spent a little more than twenty years in the ring as Judy Martin. She was never the most famous woman of her generation. Wendi Richter had the Rock ’n’ Wrestling crossover, the Jumping Bomb Angels had the match that still gets replayed, and Leilani Kai had the brief, famous run as Moolah’s chosen Women’s Champion. Martin was the other thing: a territory heel who could work, a tag-team anchor, and one of the first Americans, man or woman, to make the powerbomb a regular part of a match. For most of the 1980s she and Kai were the longest-reigning WWF Women’s Tag Team Champions the old belt ever had. When the division was quietly shut down in 1989, she was still chasing the singles title.
She did not come out of a wrestling family. After a show in Columbia, South Carolina, she walked up to Blackjack Mulligan and Dick Murdoch and asked how a woman got into the business. She later said she simply did not want an eight-hour job. Mulligan told her The Fabulous Moolah ran a school in Columbia, then squeezed her hand and told her she would never make it because she was not strong enough. She had played volleyball in school. That was the athletic background she brought. She went anyway.
Training began around 1978 or 1979 under Moolah, Joyce Grable, and Leilani Kai at the Lillian Ellison school. Martin’s own description of those months was plain: most of the days in the ring, most of the nights trying not to hurt. She debuted in 1978 and was almost immediately sent on a tour of Japan, which she found overwhelming at first. The crowds did not clap for the opening minutes.
Pictured: Early photo of Judy Martin and Leilani Kai
They watched the holds as if they were reading them. She came to like that. From there she worked the American circuit the way women of that era worked it, under Moolah’s booking umbrella and on her own: Mid-South, Georgia, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast Championship Wrestling, World Class, Stampede, the AWA, Puerto Rico, and repeated trips back to All Japan Women’s. She also worked the other side of the school. With Grable and Kai she helped train the next class, including Wendi Richter and Sherri Martel.
The early titles came on that circuit. On November 22, 1980, she beat Princess Little Heart for the NWA United States Women’s Championship; most histories credit her with three reigns of that belt.. In All Japan she was a regular through the early 1980s, often paired with Devil Masami. On October 5, 1982, in Osaka, she won the vacant All Pacific Championship from Yukari Omori by countout. Three days later, on her twenty-seventh birthday, she defended it against a young Chigusa Nagayo in Kumamoto. On November 4, in Himeji, Mimi Hagiwara took it from her. Thirty days. Short, but it put an American heel on a Japanese secondary title in the middle of AJW’s rise.
Pictured:: The Grand Wizard (Ernie Roth), Judy Martin, Buddy Rose and Sherri Martel
She was in the WWF on a regular basis from late 1981, first as Candy Malloy’s partner, then with Kai, and occasionally with Donna Christanello. She worked the heel side of Moolah’s stable alongside Spider Lady and Mad Maxine, and she challenged Richter for the WWF Women’s Championship without taking it. The partnership that defined her was already in place. She and Kai had been tagging since 1979, on American cards and on AJW tours, and they also held the NWA World Women’s Tag Team Championship twice.
In 1985 the WWF version of the women’s tag belts, then held by Velvet McIntyre and Desiree Petersen, changed hands. The recognized date is August 1, 1985, in Cairo, Egypt. Whether a match was actually worked there or the titles were simply awarded has never been settled cleanly. What is settled is the length of the reign: 906 days, the longest in the title’s short history, and the reason Martin and Kai still sit at the top of the combined-reign list.
They were not yet the Glamour Girls. That package came in 1987, after a stretch back on the independents and in Japan. Jimmy Hart saw them at a hotel pool, liked the teamwork, and told them the look was too old-school. Platinum hair, black and gold gear, Hart in their corner. They walked into the first Survivor Series that November on Sherri Martel’s team, with Dawn Marie and Donna Christanello, and were eliminated by Moolah’s side, which included Rockin’ Robin, Velvet McIntyre, and the Jumping Bomb Angels, Noriyo Tateno and Itsuki Yamazaki. The Angels were the sole survivors. The program that followed is the one that still holds up.
Pictured: The Glamour Girls (Martin\Kai) and Jimmy Hart
On January 24, 1988, at the first Royal Rumble, in Hamilton, Ontario, the Jumping Bomb Angels beat the Glamour Girls in a two-out-of-three-falls match for the tag titles. It ran about fifteen minutes and was the best women’s match the WWF had put on pay-per-view. Dave Meltzer rated it three stars. The Glamour Girls were the heels who got beaten clean by the better team, and the match worked because Martin and Kai could absorb that kind of wrestling without the bout falling apart.
They got the belts back on June 8, 1988, in Ōmiya, Saitama, on an All Japan Women’s card, by countout. Meltzer had that one higher, at three and three-quarters. The politics around it were worse than the finish. Martin and Kai had fallen out with Moolah over her cut of their booking fees. Before the Japan tour, Moolah went around the WWF office and told the Japanese promoters the Glamour Girls were to win the titles in the last match. Martin and Kai tried to reach Pat Patterson and could not. They won the belts. Patterson was not pleased. A proposed WrestleMania V match evaporated, and on February 14, 1989, the WWF Women’s Tag Team Championship was abandoned. The Glamour Girls were the final champions. A new women’s tag title, created in 2019, does not carry the lineage.
Through the first half of 1989 Martin chased Rockin’ Robin’s WWF Women’s Championship and lost to her at the Royal Rumble. Then Vince McMahon phased the women’s division out. Martin’s verdict, given years later, was direct: if the girls had been given the exposure the men got, they would have drawn. She thought shelving them was a mistake. She also said, after watching the later product, that she would not have wanted to work in it. The 1980s locker room she remembered was one in which no two women worked alike.
She spent the rest of 1989 in the AWA, feuding with Richter over the AWA World Women’s Championship without winning it. After Richter left, Martin wrestled Candi Devine on December 6, 1989, for the vacant title and lost. In 1990 she and Kai turned up in Ladies Major League Wrestling, managed for a time by Abdullah Farouk Jr., and held that promotion’s tag belts. The LPWA, launched out of Minnesota, was the last real home for the team.
They worked as the Queen’s Court under Queen Christopher Love and later Adnan Al-Kaissie, stayed in the hunt for Susan Sexton’s singles title, and on February 28, 1991, beat Misty Blue Simmes and Heidi Lee Morgan for the LPWA Tag Team Championship. They defended against Bambi and Malia Hosaka on the LPWA Super Ladies pay-per-view. The promotion folded in 1992. A brief WCW run in October 1991, singles losses to Bambi and Madusa on Saturday Night and WorldWide, ended the same way the WWF run had: the office decided it wanted valets, not wrestlers.
Martin’s last title was a curiosity. In 1999, in a Professional Girl Wrestling Association mixed tag with the women’s title at stake, her partner Thunderfoot pinned George South, Susan Green’s partner, and the belt went to Martin. A month later Green beat her in a singles match and took it back. She retired that year.
In the ring she was a technician who worked heel and did not need the crowd to like her. The Judy Drop was a fireman’s carry powerslam. The double chickenwing was a hold she trusted. The finish that people still mention is the Drip Dry, her powerbomb. Wrestlers who watched her in those years have argued she was the first American, male or female, to use the move as a regular part of a match rather than a spot. She was also proud of a mixed tag in Atlanta in which she and Kai, as tag champions, wrestled two men. She called it unusual for the time and one of the things she was glad she had done. Her standard for herself was simple: a hundred percent every time she walked through the ropes.
After 1999 she left the towns. She worked in law enforcement, including time as a prison guard, and later transcribed medical records, which she described as a good deal safer than the other job. She stayed mostly off the convention circuit until the NWA Legends Fanfest in Charlotte in 2007. The honors came late and in a cluster. The Cauliflower Alley Club gave her its Women’s Wrestling Award in 2012. The Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame inducted her in the Lady Wrestler wing in 2021. The St. Louis Wrestling Hall of Fame followed in 2024. In July 2016 she was among the wrestlers named in the class-action suit against WWE over traumatic brain injury and concealed risk. U.S. District Judge Vanessa Lynne Bryant dismissed the case in September 2018.
Pictured: Judy Martin and Leilani Kai at the 2026 Caulfiflower Alley Club Hall of Fame Induction Banquet
In May 2026 Leilani Kai posted that Martin had been admitted to the hospital and asked for prayers. She recovered well enough to travel. At the Cauliflower Alley Club’s 60th reunion in Las Vegas that August, the Glamour Girls received the Tag Team Award, the first women’s team to get it. Kai had been in line for the women’s award and asked that Martin be honored with her instead.
The career does not resolve into a single famous night. It resolves into a working life: Columbia school, Japan tours, a thirty-day All Pacific reign, three NWA United States Women’s reigns, two NWA world tag reigns, 906 days with the WWF belts, the Hamilton match that still looks like a real wrestling match, the Ōmiya countout that ended a friendship with Moolah and a title lineage at the same time, and a last odd belt in 1999 won because her partner pinned the other man’s partner. She was the heel half of the best American women’s tag team of the territorial twilight, and she stayed in the ring until the offices stopped booking women who wrestled.
One Thing I Learned About Diana Hart
In 1997, Diana Hart was named Mrs. Calgary Stampede. That summer, when the Hart Foundation headlined the In Your House: Canadian Stampede event at the Saddledome against Steve Austin’s team, she walked out with the group and was introduced under that title—making her pageant win part of the live presentation of one of the family’s most famous hometown shows.
Thank You for Watching and Listening
I’m Tony Richards, Pro Wrestling Historian, Author and Storyteller. I share pro wrestling historical items in each issue of the Time Tunnel Pro Wrestling History Newsletter and each episode of our podcast show. Thanks for your support! If you enjoy my information on select events, matches and insights, please share with folks you think might like to be a subscriber!
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