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I just returned home from a family funeral only to get the news that another wrestling legend, and friend of mine, Penny Banner has passed away. My heart goes out to her family, friends, and all of her fans. Penny was a class act and an amazing woman. She will be sorely missed. Penny was kind enough to do an interview with me in 2004. You can read that interview here.
For those of you who were not all that familiar with Penny's career,
here are a few highlights:
She was the first ever AWA World Women's Champion
She held the NWA Southern Women's Championship
She was NWA Women's World Tag Team Championship on 3 separate occasions
(with Bonnie Watson, Betty Jo Hawkins, and Lorraine Johnson)
She held the NWA Texas Women's Championship
She was a Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame inductee (Class of 2005)
She was also inducted into the Stampede Wrestling Hall of Fame, St. Louis
Wrestling Hall Of Fame, and last year's NWA Legends Hall of Heroes.
Penny also won medals while she competed in the Sr. Olympic Games doing Swimming, the ShotPut, and Discus throws.
Wrestling has lost a true legend and I have lost yet one more friend.
- Brett
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The CAC has received word that Penny Banner passed away last night, peacefully in her sleep, at her daughter's home in North Carolina.
Penny was one of the most decorated women in the history of professional wrestling. Her accolades have included being the first recipient of the CAC's Art Abrams Lifetime Achievement Award, being inducted into the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame in New York and she will be the first woman inducted to the George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo in 2008.
Penny served on the Board of Directors of the Cauliflower Alley Club for many years and worked tirelessly to ensure that all remembered the women of our sport.
Penny will always have a special place in my heart. We shared some wonderful emails and wonderful times in Las Vegas.
My thoughts and prayers go out to Wendi and the Banner family.
(Courtesy: Morgan Dollar)
Penny and I at last year's NWA Legends Convention in North Carolina
Penny and I at the premiere of Lipstick and Dynamite in NYC.
Pretty Penny Left Beautiful Legacy
By Mike Mooneyham
The Post and Courier
Sunday, May 18, 2008
It’s never easy writing about the passing of a pro wrestling legend. It’s even harder when the legend happens to be a close friend.
Penny Banner, who I’ve always known and will forever know as “Pretty Penny,” left us early Tuesday, peacefully at home and in the arms of her beloved daughter, Wendi.
The records may list her chronological age as 73, but to those who knew Penny, she was ageless, timeless and forever young.
“When I think of my dear friend Penny, I think of ‘57 Chevys, poodle skirts and rock and roll. God bless her. She was the eternal teenager right up until she left this earth,” Les Thatcher said last week.
Amen to that.
Penny Banner’s accomplishments in the wrestling business could fill a book, as they did a few years ago in her autobiography, “Banner Days.” She was the first AWA world women’s champion during the early ‘60s and was perennially ranked among the top two or three female performers in the business during a career that spanned from 1954-77.
The St. Louis native also was a diva long before the wrestling world even considered such a term. The focus of women’s wrestling back then was skill, ability and toughness, not sports entertainment, titillation and eye candy, all staples of today’s product. Penny, though, combined wrestling skill, raw athletic ability and glamorous looks to produce the total package. A drop-dead gorgeous blonde bombshell, she easily could have been the queen of the divas in the current incarnation of the profession.
But an amazing 50 years ago she was a queen of the mat. It was a golden era for the profession, and she was a pioneer who helped usher in the Golden Age of Women’s Wrestling.
Dick Beyer, who achieved worldwide acclaim as The Masked Destroyer, broke into the business around the same time as Penny. Twenty-four years old and just out of college, he started pro wrestling at Al Haft’s gym in Columbus, Ohio.
“There was a very good-looking blonde by the name of Penny Banner training in the same gym,” he recalled. “Needless to say, I had a difficult time trying to concentrate on my training when I just wanted to put my favorite wrestling hold on Penny, ‘the double lip lock.’ I never saw much of Penny during my 39 years of wrestling, but for the last several years we had plenty of time at the CAC (Cauliflower Alley Club) reunions to visit and tell stories about our separate careers.”
“She was beautiful, well-tanned, strong, very sexy, yet wholesome with class,” is how former mat great Cowboy Bill Watts described Penny.
Jody Hamilton, who formed half of one of wrestling’s most successful tag teams of the ‘60s and ‘70s, The Masked Assassins, said Penny’s striking beauty was even greater on the inside. She was, he said, one of the very few people in the business he loved and trusted implicitly.
“Penny was beautiful not only on the outside, but on the inside,” Hamilton said Friday. “I measure beauty more by inner beauty than outer beauty. She was a knockout on the inside as well.”
Many folks share his sentiments. Penny had a unique style that was endearing. One of her suitors in the early years was Elvis Presley, whom she dated several times over a three-year period. The king of rock ’n roll become a regular for Penny’s matches in Memphis and would invite her to his Graceland home after the shows.
“We’d kiss all night long while the guys (the ‘Memphis Mafia’) played pool,” Penny would recall.
Penny, indeed, was captivating. Graceful, beautiful and talented, she was as athletic as most of her male counterparts. She also married the territory’s top star, Johnny Weaver, and that fact made her even more of a fan favorite.
But Penny, who had a six-year run as a heel before marrying Weaver, whom she had met in 1959 in the St. Joseph, Mo., area, lamented that she had to play the role of a babyface when the Weavers moved to Charlotte in the mid-’60s. It was fairly common knowledge among fans that the two were married, and promoters demanded that she work as a crowd favorite.
“I could have been the Buddy Rogers of women’s wrestling,” she once said. “I’m the first girl who started wearing two-piece bathing suits in the ring. I always tried to do something to be memorable and different — something more than just flying mares and dropkicks.”
She and Weaver, who was one of promoter Jim Crockett Sr.’s most popular stars during the ‘60s, also made a pact that she wouldn’t work a territory that he didn’t. With Weaver firmly entrenched in the Mid-Atlantic wrestling office, Penny’s career became limited to dates in the Carolinas and Virginia, working with a select number of women.
Surprisingly enough, Penny never fully knew just how good she was. She once confided that she wished she had realized it years ago while still in the business. But it was tough being a woman in the sport then, and she admitted being scared and nervous at times.
“If I had known I was that good, I would have really put on a show,” she joked. “I would have been like Buddy Rogers. I would have gotten confidence. I never thought of me as being good. I guess I always wanted to be a perfectionist.”
“She was so well respected by her peers — not only as a person, but for her tremendous physical ability in the ring,” said Hamilton. “It was well known among her peers that she was a tremendous icon in our profession, but she never let that go to her head. She was always Penny. What you saw was what you got.”
Penny’s wrestling days ended more than 30 years ago, following an illustrious 23-year career, but she found joy in many other facets of life. She began working in real estate in 1977 and made a comfortable living at it. She joined the Senior Olympic Games at age 56 and captured a shelf full of medals and trophies to show for her efforts. She loved to dance and sing karaoke with friends.
And while their marriage for years had been portrayed as a picture-perfect relationship in magazines and in front of the camera, the reality of the situation was far from it. Penny tried her best to make things work, often immersing herself in things to get her mind off her troubled marriage. She took guitar and clogging lessons. She even put a wig on and went out dancing with the wives of other wrestlers when her husband was on the road. She was petrified of horses, but she learned to train them and to rodeo. She was president of all the 4-H clubs in Charlotte. She became a top competitive swimmer in the Senior Olympics. She was a board member of the Cauliflower Alley Club and regularly attended its annual convention in Las Vegas as well as the Gulf Coast wrestling reunion in Mobile.
The marriage ended, in 1994, after 35 years.
Penny continued to champion the cause of serious women performers, and she never broke kayfabe. She always maintained the purity of the sport and her own image, paving the way for all the girls who followed.
She would joke when recalling how she and other lady wrestlers from her generation had to sew elastic around the legs of their suits to be sure their cheeks didn’t hang out. “Now, anything can hang out,” she’d laugh.
Penny, who was born Mary Ann Kostecki in St. Louis on Aug. 11, 1934, was inducted into the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2005 and the St. Louis Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2007. This summer she was set to receive the Frank Gotch Award at the George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa, the first woman to be so honored.
Always upbeat and positive with a youthful exuberance, Penny was never anything but the life of the party who would brighten up a room when she was in it. “The pleasure of her company was not an experience to be forgotten,” one acquaintance said of her outgoing personality. There was no pretense about Penny. She never failed to offer words of encouragement.
“She was always eager to do something new and always eager to be helpful to everybody,” said her daughter. “That’s what teenagers want to do. They want to go out and explore the world. They have a zest for life, and she’s always had that.”
“Penny was a dear, dear friend,” said Hamilton, who had known her since 1954. “Her passing has left a void in my life that won’t be filled. She was not only a great person, but to me she was one of the greatest of all the female wrestlers. I loved her dearly.
“It was a close relationship that had grown and matured over the years. We were friends through good times and bad times. She was always there if I needed anything, and she knew that if she needed anything I was always there for her. She was such a tremendously loyal friend.”
Penny’s passing has been especially hard on daughter Wendi, who is still grieving over the loss of her father, stricken at the age of 72 less than three months ago with a fatal heart attack. Weaver, just months away from retiring from the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Department, had gotten a clean bill of health from the doctor two days earlier. He had suffered from a heart arrhythmia a year and a half ago, but had been fine ever since, says his daughter. Three trips to the doctor this year also had checked out fine.
“It was just his time,” says Wendi. “I know he died in a manner behooving him, because he could not have gone through what my mom did.”
Wendi and her mother were like bookends. “She was the loving, caring, supportive mother. She definitely was somebody to look up to.”
Penny had been diagnosed with peritoneal cancer in late 2005. Like every other obstacle in her life — numerous family hardships which resulted from an absentee father, a tumultuous marriage and working in a man’s sport — she faced the disease with remarkable courage and resiliency. Through the surgeries and chemotherapy treatments, this regal lady would greet friends with cheerful phone calls and e-mails, never allowing herself to get down over her own condition.
Penny had valiantly battled the disease, but suffered a relapse in January. Wendi had been by her side since then, and spent a week with her in the hospital when Penny lost her appetite after getting laryngitis and an infection in her vocal chords. Penny’s condition worsened in April. Her muscles began to shut down and she lost 50 pounds.
Still, Wendi says, her mom would have an occasional good day, and she would start talking about the two of them going to Waterloo for Penny’s award and a real estate class she was going to take. Wendi would bring her protein drinks and do whatever it took to lift her spirits. The two had been going back and forth to the doctor every week, and Wendi took her mom to her home in Mint Hill, N.C., where she learned to administer some of the medical procedures necessary to care for her mom.
At the same time, she says, she was going to her dad’s house once a week just to “get her grief out and talk to him.”
Now there are two homes to consider. “I can barely step foot in my mom’s house, because now there’s just so many recent memories,” she says.
The two had spent Mother’s Day together last Sunday, but Penny took a turn for the worse later that day. Wendi had been warned by doctors about the normal end-life process that could be expected, although she never gave up hope. She held her mom’s hand and rubbed her feet. “It was so natural and peaceful. We just sat and talked.”
A couple of hours before she passed, says Wendi, the bedroom door popped open without explanation.
“I thought, oh my God, either her sister’s coming with the Lord to get her or Betty Jo’s (Hawkins) coming to get her, or she’s walked out of the door. I remember a slight whisper, and I think I know now what she was trying to say. I think she told me that she loved me. They know you’re there. That’s what’s important.”
With Wendi by her side, holding her hand, Penny peacefully drew her last breath at 1:30 a.m. Tuesday.
Penny, preparing her daughter for the inevitable, had told Wendi a week earlier that “she was ready to go and be with her Lord and her friends in heaven.” From a daughter’s point of view, says Wendi, it was unnerving and “something you don’t really want to hear.”
But Penny, a ring general who knew a three count when she saw one, assured Wendi that it would be OK.
“I’ve got just as many friends in heaven as I have down here,” she told her daughter. “I’ll be talking to them for a long time.”
Penny had lost a number of friends and loved ones over the past year. One of her old mat rivals, Judy Grable, had passed away only a week earlier. Her son called Penny from the hospital.
Up until the end, though, Penny’s friends remained optimistic that she would win her final battle.
“If there was any possible way this thing could be beaten, she was going to do it, because things like that (cancer) don’t run into people like her very often,” said Hamilton. “People who won’t give in and won’t give up. She fought it until the bitter end.”
Penny’s remains will be placed close to her best friend, Betty Jo Hawkins, who she teamed with in the ring and loved like a sister.
“So many good things have happened to me that I didn’t ask for. I’m so green about so many things, but I’ve been so blessed,” she once said. One of those good things was her friendship with Betty Jo. The two shared each other’s deepest secrets.
“They were partners and they were just little angels together,” says Wendi. “They drove across country together, and were just so close.” Hawkins, who had been married to wrestler Brute Bernard, died in 1987 at the age of 57 after suffering for years from rheumatoid arthritis.
Wendi is now “going through a whole lifetime” of photographs and memories as she prepares to say goodbye to another parent. It’s all overwhelming, she says, but she knows both of them would want her to live life to the fullest.
“She was my angel. She protected me all my life ... and now she’s going to be my real angel.”
- Former NWA world champion Tommy “Wildfire” Rich will make
a special appearance at an Old School Championship Wrestling show May
25 at Weekend’s Pub, 428 Redbank Road, Goose Creek. Top bouts are
Sixx vs. Jon Malus for the Universal title and Darkness vs. Calie Cassavova
in a Hardcore King title match. Bell time is 6 p.m. Adult admission is
$8; kids 12 and under $5. Visit www.oscwonline.com or call 743-4800 for
more information.
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I just wanted to drop a short note to let you know I am doing , ok. For the most part my fiance , Bill and his mom, Eileen are keeping close to me, so I don't spend much time alone. It is very difficult as my mom was my best friend. I might not have done everything with her but the things we did do were special.
She loved all of her friends and I want to thank you for being such a
good friend to her. Thank you for your cards, letters, emails and flowers.
She was truely blessed to have such good people.
I am still very teary and am unable to talk about it alot, so for now
Thank you and I will be getting stronger.
Love
Wendi
