Harley HAM

For LK

Zelda had spent the entire ten-hour day working out the kinks to her new finisher. It was a move off the top ropes--she was five feet tall and weighed in just under ninety pounds, so this was her bread and butter--and it involved spinning her legs a full 360 degrees so that her knees would torque that extra oomf as they slammed against her helpless opponent.

She called it El Huracán.

She must've fallen from sky to mat a hundred times that day, and it was Lyon who took every one of those bumps. The thing was that unless she hit this thing dead on, because of her miniscule build there was barely any impact when she landed it off target--even when she botched the move and hit knees first right onto Lyon's chicken chest.

Zelda was a fiery one--like all the smaller wrestlers usually are--and today was a particularly frustrating day, so when she botched a string of Huracán attempts and was repeatedly told by her coaches that the move wasn't "selling", she finally had had enough. She ripped off her knee pads and threw them across the room as everyone stopped their work and the whole gym went silent.

She stormed off to her own corner of the gym to take off her boots in solitude. After she removed the rancid footwear, she popped on her headphones and closed her eyes to find some form of composure. After giving her minute, Lyon made his way over. We saw them chatting for a beat, but from this distance, the only thing we were able to hear was her screaming obscenities. However, as soon as we saw Lyon get into his trademark criss-cross applesauce position, we all rushed over because that only meant one thing: a story.

As we took our seats in the circle, Lyon told us that Zelda kicked some serious tail in that ring today--that Hoo-roo-can was a winner for sure, even in its current primitive form--but she was still struggling in one aspect. She was forgetting her biggest strength, which of course was her "compactness", as he put it, and to make matters worse, she even considered it a weakness.

This reminded him of another wrestler he met while working the Midwest territories back in the early eighties, who also had issues with her size. This skull buster called herself Harley HAM, and she was about the most vexatious vixen he had ever seen--not just in the state of Ohio and not even the most rabid on the female side --just the flat out most vicious combatant he had ever seen in any ring.

Harley started her career wrestling girls in parking lots just outside the factories in Akron. The workers would clock out and rush to get a good vantage point for these brawls, and it didn't take long for them to start their lunch breaks with debates on just how many broads Harley would bruise that afternoon.

Now, Harley was not your average athlete. This woman stood about six foot eight and had to have weighed in above 300 pounds. She had a short bob of straw blonde hair that rested just above a neck that was as thick as an elephant's knee, and Lyon swore to the big guy upstairs he once saw her palm a grown man's waist--fingers wrapped around the protruding parts of the hip, too.

Lyon said we might be sitting here saying to ourselves how rad it must've been to be born that size in our racket, but he cautioned us to remember that this was a lady we were talking about, and this was a far less inclusive time than present day. Sure, had she been a man, she'd have been a regular Andre the Giant in terms of celebrity, but as a woman, this was actually an obstacle. It wasn't that hard to see why. After all, how would any promoter find a suitable opponent for such a behemoth?

Fortunately for Harley, by the time she started fighting handicap matches against teams of five, she had gotten the attention of Petey Buttadega, the star promoter of the Columbus territory, and he said he had just the spot for her.