You were trained by male wrestlers in exactly the same way as other male trainees. What effect do you think that had on your career?
When I started to train in 1977, there was basically no such thing as wrestling school and there were absolutely no girls to train with apart from one girl who was married to the promoter. So to be trained by men in those days was the norm. A lot of our training wasn’t in gyms, it was basically on the job, so if I’m totally honest, I actually have very little training – I was chucked in at the deep end!
What stood out about being in a male-dominated business and how can women wrestlers adapt to that?
It feels odd to go on the road and be probably the only two girls in a group in the community of males that are working and doing tours and staying overnight. Also because [Mitzi Mueller] was the promoter’s wife, she’d be with her husband and I often was the only girl on the road. So I travelled with the guys and I fitted in very well because I think I’ve got a guy’s mentality as well.
Just the sheer numbers, it’s always going to be guys outnumbering girls. But for the first time in my life I don’t know every girl wrestler today: I used to know every single woman that worked, but now with so many people coming in and doing well, there’s so many girls.
I don’t know about giving them advice, but you’ve got to hold your own. I actually think that you’ve got to be a lot tougher than some of the guys actually are because you’ll always be proving yourself in a man’s world. They’ve got to really, really push forward and make a name for themselves and show the world that they have every right to be top of the bill and headlining because some of the stuff they do is amazing.
What were the other effects of there being so few women wrestlers when you started?
I would imagine now it’s not so much of a problem because with so many girls now you’ve got fresh matches over time with different girls. With me it was ten years of doing pretty much the same match night after night. But I felt the more you worked with somebody, the more experienced and better you became, but you do get stale because you’re doing so much with somebody and you’re itching to do something else. Now you can go two or three months working with a different girl every night, whereas then there were only six girls wrestling!
What’s the biggest mistake young wrestlers make?
A lot of people in the business don’t want to work on holiday camps, but they are the best learning ground for any wrestler anywhere. Even some of the WWE chaps and girls will tell you so because they’ve done it. It’s a brilliant learning ground because the people you’re working in front of aren’t wrestling fans so you’re basically trying to win over the crowd and it just gives you more and more experience of what we’re doing in front of a big crowd. And it you do make mistakes and didn’t perform at your best, it’s not such a big deal as it would be elsewhere. I really do get mad when people say “I don’t want to do [camps].”
You famously once worked under a mask and bodysuit in Ireland when local authorities banned women from wrestling on the show. Did you have to change the mechanics of how you worked?
I was totally convincing. Nobody knew I was a female until the end of the show! I didn’t do anything different [in terms of working], though I hadn’t been in wrestling all that long, so I wasn’t greatly experienced anyway. The real difference was that [as girls] we’d do some daft stuff that would be quite sexist by today’s standards and probably people wouldn’t do it, like kissing the referee to get a reaction.
Did crowds react differently to a female villain than to a male one?
I didn’t find any difference. I must have been good at being a show person because I used to absolutely make people furious. I’ve had grown men climbing in the ring and even hit me and I’ve had to be helped out of the building by police. Some of them men in the crowd thought themselves brave when they’d go after a woman but wouldn’t go after a guy, so it was actually quite dangerous.
Where did you draw the line between getting good heat from the crowd and the abuse going too far?
Women now are not standing for the crap they used to stand for. We took it because those were the times where people didn’t sit down and think “well this is not politically correct” or “we shouldn’t be saying this or doing this.” Nowadays when you speak to somebody you really have to be careful of everything you say, though I am the sort of person to speak first and think after! I absolutely feel that women are doing the right thing now [by not standing for abuse].
For me at that time, my line was when I was in the ring. In that time I was in the ring, whatever they said to me was their prerogative. But after a show – back when there were no backstage passes – you’d come out of the venue and if people had waited for you and were rude or offensive, I’d say “Show’s over now, thanks very much, I’m off.” Depending on how bad it was, I might bite back. So my rule was that I’d stand for nothing that didn’t stop at the end of the show, I’d take no nonsense off anybody. It’s like Frank Sinatra going to sing and coming out after the show: if you don’t like it, you don’t come up and give him grief because he didn’t sing the way you wanted. Once I’ve done my job, I’ve done my job and I don’t want to be attacked by the public. They’ve paid for their ticket, they’ve had their time and that’s it.
Did having such a strong villain persona help keep the mental distinction between your real self and your in-ring character?
I never got caught up in my character for the simple reason there was no internet, no social media, no photographs: nobody knew about my life. Nobody knew my name was Jayne: people knew me as Klondyke Kate, a villain who hardly ever signed autographs and who people would be scared of. I obviously played the villain well enough for people to think that’s how I lived out of the ring. Obviously today social media is a great to promote yourself but can be a downfall when you want to keep a persona.
What would you do differently if you’d come along to wrestling in 2018?
I think it’s so hard now because there’s so many brilliant girls on the scene with some great characters and personas that you’ve got so be something so special to make it. I think in today’s market I wouldn’t have been a wrestler because although it’s been my life and I so adore it and get very passionate about things that go on in wrestling, I think in this day and age I would not have done as much as I did. I was right for my time but not now. Now you’ve got the ultimate dream of getting to WWE but my dream was just to be on the road, traveling to different countries and being part of the community.
What other advice do you give to young wrestlers today?
You need to go out there, have something different in yourself and believe in yourself. But you’ve also got to be humble because anyone who isn’t humble in this job, you can’t teach them anything and they’ll never get better. And I always tell the girls they’ve got to have a rocket up their arse: have that energy in the ring and not walk in like you’re doing your shopping in Tesco
