When the Lady Was a Tigress

To those who believe in the inherent infallibility of people who write for newspapers, I have what must be a shattering confession: I made a mistake.

While you are sitting there holding your bottle of Bud in a position of frozen shock, not quite believing what you’ve just read, I will soften that by saying it wasn’t exactly a mistake, it was a misunderstanding.

Well, actually, it was a misunderstanding based on a mistake, though a very small one. Not at all, for instance, as classic as that made by Alexander Haig who, following the 1981 assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan, declared, “I’m in charge around here.”

All I did was confuse the Golden State Boxing Association with the Cauliflower Alley Club.

I was informed of this by several telephone callers, not the least of whom was Maria (the Tigress) Bernardi, a former women’s wrestling champion, who told me of my blunder in the kind of deep, intimidating voice that can scatter children and frighten small animals.

She is communications secretary of the Cauliflower Alley Club and, unlike most chirpy PR people, straightened me out with the verbal equivalent of a hammerlock.

When I realized she was right, that I had confused the two clubs by making them one, I was tempted to clarify the, er, misunderstanding by simply reporting I had committed a faux pas , hoping that most of you, being monolingual, would mistake it for some kind of sexual practice between consenting adults and let it go at that.

But I was so intrigued by Maria the Tigress that I decided to extend the explanation of my misunderstanding by meeting her.

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Let me get this out of the way first by saying what I did was write about the Golden State Boxing Association as the Cauliflower Alley Club. Both are composed of ex-pugilists, but they are indeed two different organizations.

The GSBA is pretty much local while the CAC has about 2,000 members all over the world. Its roster also includes wrestlers, celebrities and fans.

Maria the Tigress clarified all this the other day in a Hollywood restaurant called Joseph’s, where she often dines on huge hamburgers with onions, and French fries dipped in a combination of ketchup and Tabasco.

She is a solid, plain-spoken person of 70 with a cauliflower ear (the left one) and was the women’s world wrestling champion from 1952-63, during which time too many whacks to the head deformed her ear.

She was damned good at what she did, Maria the Tigress informed me, either in or out of the ring. Her first husband, for instance, made the mistake (a real mistake) of slapping her during an argument over a bet and, in her words, “I tore his butt up.”

Later, as the argument apparently continued, she drop-kicked him down the stairs and left him for good.

Husband No. 2, who drank too much and sold her trophies to buy booze, was similarly dealt with when he too blundered by hitting her. His butt also suffered as the result of both her anger and her skill.

That occurred some years ago, but lest you feel that Maria the Tigress can no longer muster the strength to deal with aggression, let me add that only recently someone tried to snatch her purse and she broke his kneecap.

*

I listened to all of this with some trepidation, periodically assuring Maria the Tigress that I would write something to clarify my, well, lie. (You don’t play word games with women who drop-kick their men and break kneecaps.)

She softened a little and began telling me about how promoters used to insist that women wrestlers always appear as ladies when they were not in the ring, and wear dresses, white gloves and hats.

They could also not smoke or drink in public, which Maria the Tigress liked not at all. She smokes Pall Mall cigarettes today and still likes a couple of snorts of Scotch occasionally.

She got her wrestling name by playing the role of the bad guy in the ring. She frankly liked to tick people off, which she managed to do with such facility that they often responded by burning her with cigarettes and bopping her on the head with beer bottles.

“My promoter used to get calls from fans who said, ‘Don’t ever bring that bitch back again,’ ” she said. “But then they’d call back and say, ‘Bring her back, we wanna see her get beaten.’ ”

When her wrestling career ended, Maria the Tigress worked, not as a hit man or a loan collector, but as a bartender and a store detective. Today, she manages an apartment complex in Hollywood and lives with a sister and with a cat named Stupid.

Wrestling interests me and I’d have asked Maria the Tigress to show me some holds, but I’m small and afraid and throw up easily, so I let it go. Anyhow, I think I’ve already suffered enough for my misunderstanding, don’t you?