DCP110 – Judy Martin-Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame

Judy Martin

WWF Women's Tag Team Champion — Original Ditch-Cat Photo Print

The Bio

Judy Martin — born Judith Hardee on October 8, 1955, in Houston, Texas — is a Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame inductee and one of the most respected women's wrestlers of the 1980s. Her introduction to the business began in South Carolina, when she approached Blackjack Mulligan and Dick Murdoch after a match to ask how a woman broke into professional wrestling. That conversation set her on the path to Columbia, South Carolina, where in 1979 she began training under The Fabulous Moolah, Joyce Grable, and Leilani Kai at Moolah's Lillian Ellison School of Professional Wrestling — the pipeline that produced virtually every major female wrestler of the era.

Martin's career took her across the National Wrestling Alliance, the American Wrestling Association, the World Wrestling Federation, All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling, and the Ladies Professional Wrestling Association. She captured the NWA United States Women's Championship in 1980, the AJW All Pacific Heavyweight Championship in 1982, and became a two-time NWA World Women's Tag Team Champion and two-time WWF Women's Tag Team Champion alongside her longtime partner Leilani Kai. She was also, notably, one of the first American professional wrestlers — male or female — to use the powerbomb as a signature offensive maneuver.

In 1985, Martin and Kai were repackaged as the platinum-blond "Glamour Girls," managed by Jimmy Hart, and became one of the defining tag teams of the golden era of WWF women's wrestling. Their feud with the Japanese import team The Jumping Bomb Angels — Noriyo Tateno and Itsuki Yamazaki — produced some of the most technically celebrated women's matches ever broadcast on WWF television, including a legendary two-out-of-three-falls contest at the first Royal Rumble event in January 1988. Martin and Kai lost the tag titles that night, then won them back in Japan five months later, holding them until the WWF phased out its women's division in 1989. Martin continued to compete on the independent circuit and in the LPWA into the early 1990s, capturing the LPWA Tag Team Championship with Kai in 1991 before retiring from full-time competition.

Following her in-ring career, Martin worked in law enforcement as a corrections officer and later in medical records transcription. She has been honored by the Cauliflower Alley Club with its Women's Wrestling Award (2012), inducted into the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in the Lady Wrestlers wing (2021), and inducted into the St. Louis Wrestling Hall of Fame in the class of 2024.

This photograph — captured by Ditch-Cat Photo during the early-to-mid 1980s, before the Glamour Girls repackaging — preserves one of the era's most respected women's wrestlers in her original ring gear, her first name written across her boot, at the moment her career was catching fire.