Author: Long before women’s wrestling became something WWE marketed as a revolution, Velvet McIntyre was already doing the work. She was a tag team trailblazer, a world-traveled singles champion, a barefoot high-flyer in an era that barely knew what to do with that, and one of the most versatile women wrestlers of her generation. Her career ran from 1980 to 1998 across dozens of countries and promotions, and she has yet to receive a WWE Hall of Fame induction. The longer that remains the case, the harder it becomes to justify.
Velvet McIntyre: A WWE Hall of Fame Worthy Wrestling Career
Irish-Canadian wrestler Velvet McIntyre put together a remarkable career that stretched from her training days under Sandy Barr in Oregon in 1980 to her retirement in 1998, when she stepped away from the road after discovering she was pregnant, with twins, as it turned out.
In a March 2003 interview with Slam Wrestling, McIntyre admitted, "If I didn’t have the kids, I’d probably still be doing it. But your priorities change. Now it matters if I break my neck!" It is the kind of line that says everything about both her love for wrestling and the reality of life on the road for women of her era.
McIntyre broke in at a time when opportunities for women were limited, inconsistent, and often dependent on geography, politics, and whichever promoter was willing to feature them. Her training was no walk in the park, either.
McIntyre recalled, "It was hard. I guess you would call it the older style of training. You didn’t know anything was fake until you actually had your match, type thing. My head was like a watermelon for about the first month." Even so, she emerged as one of the most athletic and well-traveled women wrestlers of her generation.
Tag Team Trailblazers
In 1983, McIntyre, alongside her training partner Princess Victoria, won the NWA Women’s Tag Team Titles in Calgary. When the then-WWF split from the NWA and recognized those belts as its own Women’s Tag Team Titles, Velvet McIntyre and Princess Victoria became the first-ever acknowledged WWF Women’s Tag Team Champions. The duo successfully defended the championship against Wendi Richter and Peggy Lee, holding the titles together for 574 days.
On September 1st, 1984, Princess Victoria suffered a career-ending neck injury. McIntyre carried on with a new partner in Desiree Petersen, retaining the titles for a further 237 days, bringing her total consecutive days as WWF Women’s Tag Team Champion to 811. The duo would eventually lose the belts to Judy Martin and Leilani Kai, The Glamour Girls, in Egypt in August of 1985.
Despite the partner change during the reign, McIntyre is recognized as a two-time WWF Women’s Tag Team Champion. That fact alone deserves far more attention than it typically receives.
Princess Victoria later made clear there was real substance behind their team. In a September 2018 interview with SoloWrestling, Victoria admitted, "Velvet and I were both trained at the same time by the same man, Sandy Barr. We both loved wrestling and we both had something to prove." That much was evident in what they accomplished together.
A Survivor Series Pioneer
In a career full of highlights, Velvet McIntyre had the honor of being one of the first ten women to compete in a Survivor Series match in 1987, teaming with The Fabulous Moolah, The Jumping Bomb Angels, Itsuki Yamazaki and Noriyo Tateno, and Rockin’ Robin. Her team came out victorious against Dawn Marie Johnston, Donna Christanello, The Glamour Girls, and "Sensational" Sherri. It remains one of the standout moments of that era’s women’s division, and McIntyre was right in the middle of it.
Singles Success Across the Globe
As a singles competitor, Velvet McIntyre found success well beyond WWF television. She held Women’s World Titles in the CWA, ECCW, WWWA, ICW, and NWA, a testament to how widely respected and trusted she was across different promotions and countries.
McIntyre admitted, "I’ve been just about everywhere where the girls go," having wrestled in Japan, Puerto Rico, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, France, Germany, Egypt, India, Peru, and across every U.S. state and Canadian province. Wrestling gave her both a passport and a career.
Her WWF Women’s Championship reign, brief as it was, is another chapter that tends to get glossed over.
On July 3rd, 1986, McIntyre beat "The Spider Lady," Fabulous Moolah under a mask, at a live event in Brisbane, Australia, to capture the title. She held the belt for six days before dropping it back to Moolah, unmasked, in Sydney. Short-lived, yes. But it happened, and it remains one of those intriguing corners of WWF history that says a great deal about how women’s accomplishments were documented, or too often not documented, at the time.
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The WrestleMania 2 Controversy
Fabulous Moolah and Velvet McIntyre’s rivalry culminated in a singles match for the WWF Women’s Championship at WrestleMania 2 at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago. The match ended controversially at the 1:25 mark when the referee counted McIntyre’s shoulders down despite her foot clearly being on the bottom rope, a rule that should have broken the count. Moolah was awarded the victory, and McIntyre walked away from one of wrestling’s less-discussed questionable finishes.
What makes the whole thing more telling is what McIntyre said about simply being there.
In that same March 2003 interview with Slam Wrestling, she admitted, "The biggest thing that stands out about that is I wanted to go to Kuwait, but I got WrestleMania II instead. There was a trip for the girls to Kuwait, and I always liked to go where I hadn’t been. But I was told, ‘Nope, you get to stay here and do WrestleMania,’ so I was pretty bummed out about that. I didn’t really care for my opponent." The laugh behind the quote does not quite hide the frustration.
Did you know? This was certainly not The Fabulous Moolah’s first involvement in a controversial finish. On November 25th, 1985, a dispute occurred in the ring at Madison Square Garden between Moolah and then champion Wendi Richter. "I’ve never seen her this aggressive and this flagrant about breaking the rules." You can read all about this on our website here.
The Barefoot High Flyer
One of the most distinctive traits throughout Velvet McIntyre’s career was not just her high-flying ability, but the fact that she wrestled barefoot, something usually associated with Samoan wrestlers at the time. And, as she explained, it was not initially a choice at all.
"Somebody took one of my boots as a joke, and I only had one boot in my bag. I was wrestling with Leilani, actually. I said, ‘Well, I guess I’ve got to go barefoot.’ Away I went, and I never looked back."
What started as a rib became one of the most recognizable visual trademarks in women’s wrestling.
Going barefoot also changed how she wrestled. McIntyre admitted, "I could do tons more. My footing was better, my leverage, everything was better."
And where did all those high-flying moves come from? She was candid about that, too. McIntyre admitted, "I used to go to Japan, steal all the girls’ moves and bring them back here. Voila!"
She was innovating in real time, studying, borrowing, and evolving during an era when women in North America were rarely given much credit for doing so.
What Others Said About Velvet McIntyre
Even Moolah, a notoriously complicated and controlling figure in women’s wrestling history, spoke highly of McIntyre. Moolah admitted, "I think Velvet McIntyre was a very good wrestler, and I enjoyed wrestling her. She was full of energy, she had her mind 100% on wrestling. She did her best, she never gave up, she kept going, she was forever training and working out. She was just a great wrestler. I would say she was the best Canadian wrestler."
Coming from someone who worked with nearly every notable woman wrestler of that era, that is not faint praise.
McIntyre herself was equally generous when discussing her best opponents. She said of Penny Mitchell, Judy Martin, and Leilani Kai, "They just knew their stuff. We had good matches together. They knew the stories. We could do a lot of stuff together. They were good at what they did, whereas a lot of the other girls, you couldn’t do a lot of stuff with them." It is the kind of honest, straightforward assessment that reflects a career built on craft rather than hype.
The Case for Inducting Velvet McIntyre into the WWE Hall of Fame
Velvet McIntyre accomplished something very few women could in the 1980s: she thrived. She did not merely survive on the fringes of the business or fill time between men’s matches. She was a recognized champion across multiple promotions, a tag team pioneer, a Survivor Series original, and a genuinely inventive in-ring performer who studied the craft and kept raising her own game throughout her career.
The titles were real. The reigns were long. The miles were earned. She wrestled barefoot in countries most people could not find on a map, learned moves from Japan before anyone in North America thought to look there, and built a body of work that holds up on its own merits. Without women like Velvet McIntyre laying that groundwork, often without fanfare and rarely with the spotlight she deserved, the architecture of women’s wrestling that followed does not exist in quite the same way.
A WWE Hall of Fame induction would be a fitting acknowledgment of a career that was never short on substance, only short on recognition. But whether that call ever comes or not, the record speaks for itself. Velvet McIntyre was the real deal. She always was.
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