Flowers for Sandy
Over the past week, the wrestling community learned of the passing of Sandy Parker, the first Black woman to become a world champion. Parker died over two years ago but only recently was her death publicly confirmed. When I learned of her passing, I was reminded of how we often have no idea about the sacrifices made to be who we are today. I had an article about Sandy Parker bookmarked on my phone for over a year because I had long-term plans of undertaking a research project on the history of women’s wrestling in my home state of South Carolina.
You can’t talk about North American women’s wrestling, and you can’t talk about South Carolina, without talking about the Fabulous Moolah who ruled the women’s wrestling scene in the U.S. with an iron fist for nearly half of the 20th century. At this point, the only thing I knew about Sandy Parker was that she was one of the rare people who stood up to Moolah at the height of her power and refused to put up with her financial and emotional mistreatment and she did it as an openly lesbian Black woman in the 1970s. Despite the magnitude of her courage in that instance, her legacy is even more impactful than I could’ve ever imagined.
Sandy Parker became the first Black woman to win a world champion by winning the World Women’s Wrestling Association (WWWA) World Championship in now-defunct All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling (AJW), largely considered to be the most prestigious women’s championship in wrestling history with 9.79 rating on Cagematch and ranking as the second overall most prestigious title regardless of gender. In America, Parker was often passed over for big opportunities after her fall out with Moolah but Japan offered an opportunity to rise to new heights and reinvent herself as one of AJW’s top foreign heels in the 1970s. In addition to the WWWA World Championship, she held the WWWA Tag Team Championships eight times.
Today when wrestling fans talk about AJW, it’s typically about stars from the 1990s, like Manami Toyota and Akira Hokuto, or 1980s standouts Dump Matsumoto and the Crush Gals, recently memorialized in Netflix’s ‘Queen of Villains’. Even the 1970s, the era Parker wrestled for the company, were best known for top talent such as Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda of Beauty Pair fame.
Despite not being a household name for modern wrestling fans, Parker’s legacy has stood the test of time and continues today. After her two-month reign as WWWA World Champion in 1973, two other Black women went on to hold the most critically acclaimed prize in women’s wrestling history. The first of whom was Aja Kong who’d win the title in 1992, nearly 20 years after Parker and hold it for 850 days, firmly cementing herself as not just one of the best wrestlers in the history of the company but one of the greatest of all time.
The second was Amazing Kong in 2004, better known as TNA Hall of Famer Awesome Kong and Kharma in WWE, who went on to push the boundaries of American women’s wrestling throughout the late 2000s in TNA’s Knockouts division. Amazing Kong got her ring name in Japan after filling in as a last minute replacement for Aja Kong on a show. They’d later end up being tag partners and the final team to hold the WWWA tag team titles before AJW shut their doors in 2006. Both Kongs were monster heels in Japan which was often expected from Black gaijins (foreigners), much like it was during Sandy Parker’s tours in the 1970s.
Although All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling closed up shop 18 years ago, their impact continues to shape the women’s wrestling we see today. Nearly 50 years after Sandy Parker’s historic WWWA world title win, Mercedes Moné debuted in New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) on January 4, 2023 at Wrestle Kingdom 17 in the Tokyo Dome after a successful tenure in WWE that saw her become a six-time world champion and the first Black woman to main event Wrestlemania, publicly announcing her intentions to challenge for NJPW’s newly created women’s championship under the revered International Wrestling Grand Prix (IWGP) banner.
Even though she had already accomplished so much in her career, Moné acknowledged that the best women’s wrestling in the world happens in Japan and to fully cement her own legacy, becoming a champion in Japan was paramount. She also referred to Aja Kong as her “wrestling mother” and an inspiration of hers when she was growing up as a wrestling fan. Considered by many to be the greatest North American woman wrestler of all time, Moné won the IWGP Womens Championship a month later and added her name to the short list of Black women to win top titles for major promotions in Japan. After the success of Moné’s run as IWGP Women’s Champion, NJPW created a new women’s championship as a part of their Strong brand, designed to be defended primarily in the United States.
On May 21, 2023, Willow Nightingale would emerge as the inaugural NJPW Strong Women’s Champion after a one night tournament featuring four women from four different promotions. At the time, Nightingale had been signed by AEW for less than a year and in one summer became the first woman to main event a NJPW PPV, the first woman to main event an ROH PPV, and and the 2023 winner of the Owen Hart Foundation Women’s Tournament. When asked aout her wrestling influences, Willow Nightingale was also largely impacted by AJW, namely performers like Aja Kong and Akira Hokuto.
As a Gen Z wrestling fan and creative, Sandy Parker was retired well over a decade before I was born and unfortunately very little footage of her career exists so I can’t say that I was influenced by her directly. What I can say though is that the seeds she sowed over half a century ago have borne trees with fruit that continue to uplift Black women in wrestling to new heights. I’ve been able to do things like see Aja Kong main event for ASÈ Wrestling in her 50s versus NJPW Academy graduate Trish Adora and recieve her flowers from the audience about an hour and a half away from the Fabulous Moolah complex in South Carolina that Sandy Parker walked away from so many years ago. I’ve seen Black women main event PPVs and become the highest paid women in the wrestling industry during my lifetime. I’ve even gone to Japan myself and covered some of the most respected promotions and events in the wrestling world as the only Black woman on media row.
In some way or another, we all stand on the shoulders of Sandy Parker and the bold, unapologetic life she lived. It is truly a tragedy that her death went unreported for over two years but as is the case with many of the Black women throughout history who laid the foundation for our paths today, the stories of our elders and ancestors will live forever as long as we contine to speak their names. Black women in wrestling have come so far thanks to the contributions of people like Sandy Parker and the best way we can honor her life is by going even further.
In a 1975 edition of The Eugene Register-Guard newspaper, Parker said she was “the best…and I’ll tell anyone that.” Thank you Sandy Parker for sitting at the head of a lineage of excellence. May your soul rest in eternal peace.
