If women’s wrestling has a back alley entrance and a backfist to the jaw, Susan “Tex” Green kicked the door open in cowboy boots and dared anyone to tell her she didn’t belong.
Born in the swelter of Corpus Christi in 1953, Green wasn’t raised on dreams of tiaras and pageants—she was bred in the same soil that birthed steelworkers, bar brawlers, and sunburned dreamers. She fell for wrestling the way a kid falls into a drainage ditch—sudden, messy, and impossible to climb out of. Her dad took her to weekly wrestling shows by promoter Joe Blanchard, and by the time most kids were begging for a driver’s permit, Green was wrestling grown women in smoky Texas gymnasiums and holding her own.
By fifteen, she was trading headlocks with Maria DeLeon. By twenty, she was bleeding in Tokyo after catching a bucket to the back of the skull in a tag match that belonged in a war journal, not a wrestling program. She toured Vietnam and Hong Kong in an era when women were barely allowed a voice, much less a piledriver. And all of this while still learning how to parallel park.
Trained by The Fabulous Moolah—herself a complicated hurricane of a woman—Tex Green was never your average apprentice. She didn’t just want in; she wanted the whole damn business.
She found success with Sandy Parker, claiming the NWA Women’s World Tag Team Championship in ’71, though the record books, in typical fashion, pretended it never happened. That’s the thing about Green’s legacy—it was constantly being erased, rewritten, or ignored. But she never stopped. She fought like someone who knew the spotlight was on a dimmer switch—and if she didn’t crank it herself, no one else would.
In 1972, when New York finally legalized women’s wrestling, Tex stormed Madison Square Garden for one of the first sanctioned women’s matches. Two years later, she put Moolah in a submission hold during what’s whispered to be a shoot match, walked out with the belt, and held it like a queen with blood on her hands—until Vince McMahon Sr. told her to hand it back. History forgot that one, too.
Green was never the chosen one. She was the chosen by no one one. The kind of wrestler who came back from a broken neck and back in ’79 like it was a stubbed toe. She returned, beat Donna Christanello in Maple Leaf Gardens in ’84, and proved, once again, that pain is a tax women in wrestling pay daily—with interest.
She helped launch the PGWA in the ’90s, carrying their championship and eventually becoming commissioner. She trained men in her “Gym of Pain and Glory” in South Carolina, broke ribs in a planning department day job, and nearly died from a post-op staph infection that left her paralyzed on one side.
She learned to walk again.
She wrestled again.
And somewhere in between surgeries, lawsuits, and local government gigs, she kept lighting candles in the dark for women’s wrestling. Not because she wanted thanks—but because someone had to.
Tex Green wasn’t the face on the cereal box. She wasn’t the swimsuit calendar or the bikini brawler. She was the scar. The limp. The bruised jaw. She was the long, ugly trail through the history of women’s wrestling that made room for those who came after.
She got hit with buckets in Japan, tossed aside by institutions that said her title reigns “didn’t count,” and gutted like a fish by decades of medical issues that would’ve stopped a lesser person. But Susan Tex Green never asked for sympathy. She just kept showing up. That’s the kind of woman who doesn’t age—she sets like concrete.
A member of the NWA Hall of Fame, a two-time PGWA Champion, and the PWI “Girl Wrestler of the Year” in 1976, Green’s accolades are real—even if half of them had to be pried from clenched fists.
Now a mentor, a trainer, and a quiet legend, she stands as the wild rose that bloomed between the ring ropes and the hospital bed. And if that’s not greatness, what the hell is?