Mae Young was born on March 12, 1923, in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, beginning a life that would become one of the longest careers in professional wrestling history.
Mae Young was born on March 12, 1923, in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. She grew up during the Great Depression in a working-class family, and from a young age displayed the athleticism and toughness that would define her career. As a teenager, she was drawn to the emerging and controversial world of women's professional wrestling, a field almost entirely closed off to women and viewed with skepticism by mainstream sports institutions.
Her Oklahoma upbringing instilled in her a fierce, scrappy determination. She began training and competing in wrestling in the late 1930s, at a time when female wrestlers were often banned outright from competing in many U.S. states, including New York, due to laws and moral objections to women fighting for entertainment.
This early start placed her at the vanguard of a small but pioneering group of women who fought to legitimize women's wrestling as a profession, laying groundwork that would eventually allow her to compete, remarkably, into her eighties and beyond. Her birth in 1923 places her career's eventual length at over seven decades, an almost unmatched span in the history of professional sports entertainment.
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