Almost 20 years ago, Madusa unexpectedly became the mother to a pack of wolves: As a lifelong animal lover with enough acres on her property for wild beasts to roam free, the pioneering female wrestler was an ideal candidate to take in several wolf hybrid pups that the state of Florida had seized from unfit owners. There’s a reason why the average citizen is not allowed to raise wolves in captivity, and it took many nights of camping out with the pack, letting them acclimate to her presence and scent, before Madusa earned their trust. As she wrote in her memoir, The Woman Who Would Be King, “I was the only one who could get in there, because I was the alpha.” Becoming the female alpha of a literal wolf pack is, in many ways, a poignant encapsulation of Madusa’s legacy as trailblazer in more than one industry historically dominated by men. Even before becoming a mother to actual wolves, Madusa was a dominant woman surviving amongst a cutthroat pack of men.
During her professional wrestling career, Debrah Ann Miceli was known by different monikers—Alundra Blayze to WWE fans, Debrah to her family, and “Duse” to her friends—but Madusa rises above them all, the name under which she became famous not just to wrestling fans in the United States and Japan, but to monster truck enthusiasts the world over as Monster Jam’s first female champion. Madusa is something of a Renaissance woman: a veteran biker, a dedicated practitioner of yoga, an occasional actress, and a restless learner always in search of a new hobby. “I’m all over the place, because of my ADHD. Or ‘ADHD-usa,’ as I call it,” she says jokingly in conversation with The Ringer. Like so many of pro wrestling’s greats, Madusa has been defined by her ability to reinvent herself, inside the squared circle and out, which she credits to her desire to face everything in life head-on.
“I love challenges. Fear is a great challenge for me,” she says. “I know a lot of people don’t … do well with change, they’re comfortable in the situation, and that’s OK. They just adapt to things. But I love change, I love going head-on, because it grows me as a person.”
She’s always been outspoken, and as the author of her own narrative, Madusa was more vulnerable than ever—even with potential risks or personal anxieties. For her, opening up about abuse, trauma, and emotional harm isn’t out of a desire to bury anyone or get revenge, but to finally set the record straight. When Madusa writes about her tumultuous relationships or reflects on disparaging remarks her male colleagues have made in interviews over the years, it’s with a clarity that’s come from years of introspection and emotional healing. She speaks frankly about the interpersonal violence and abuse she’s experienced while refusing to be defined by bitterness or anger, and not letting painful memories cloud the good ones. “It’s important to me to keep true to myself,” she says. “Not everybody will like my thoughts or my reasoning on how I choose to do things, but I’m not here to please you. I gotta make sure I’m OK, and then I can help other people, because if I’m not OK, I can’t help anybody.”
Women’s wrestling before WWE’s Attitude Era can be mistakenly treated as the Dark Ages, and a significant motivator for Madusa in writing her own piece of history is to help dispel that false notion. The Woman Who Would Be King isn’t just an account of her own life, but a testament to the often unheralded female pioneers who paved the way for the likes of Mercedes Moné and Jamie Hayter. “There were women before me,” Madusa explains. “But I took it on full force because I wanted to change the trajectory of women’s wrestling and put it on the map. And I did just that. I went to Japan and lived there for three years. First American to ever do that. It was the best thing that happened in my career. My heart will always be in Japan, always.”
Joshi wrestlers—the term for Japanese women in pro wrestling—are often subject to intense training regimens and demanding physical standards. But in the 1980s and ’90s especially, All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling was uniquely tough on its workers, forcing talent to retire once they turned 26 years old—an age when most American wrestlers are just warming up. There was always a risk, but Madusa proved she could hold her own at an athletic standard far beyond American women’s wrestling at the time. “They’re brutal. They kicked my ass for a whole year before I even realized what was happening,” Madusa shares with a laugh. “I have so much respect for them. They helped hone my craft to become who I am today. Thank God for Chigusa Nagayo and Bull Nakano and Aja Kong and Noriyo Tateno. I think that my style was ahead of its time. My style of wrestling is today’s women’s style. It’s good to see.”
Though uncommon for the time, it’s since become routine for foreign-born female wrestlers to relocate to Japan to hone their skills, like AEW stars Hayter and Toni Storm, or Stardom’s Mariah May. In Japan, Madusa expanded her skill set beyond just grappling, undergoing kickboxing and Muay Thai training ahead of several proto-MMA matches with Aja Kong in 1990. You can even see the influence of her kickboxing training in her matches against Nakano in the WWF, which are surprisingly heavy on leg strikes for the time. While her stateside work hit harder than most, Madusa was on another level of down and dirty in Japan—her 1990 “Martial Arts Street Fight” against Kong is a pure bunkhouse scrapfest. Duse isn’t rocking a flashy jumpsuit or colorful latex like she would in the WWF and WCW, just a t-shirt, a trucker hat, and blue jeans torn to shreds, like she’d pulled up on her Harley looking for a fight.
Madusa and Nakano’s feud over the WWF Women’s Championship, which unfolded throughout 1994 and 1995, was unlike anything on American television before. In an era dominated by cartoon characters like Doink the Clown and Isaac Yankem, what Madusa and Nakano were doing together even looked light-years ahead of many of their male counterparts, pushing the possibilities of pro wrestling forward much like innovative cruiserweights such as Sean Waltman and Chris Candido were doing at the time. The face-off between Blayze and Nakano at SummerSlam in 1994 feels more like the bloody mat-based melodrama of Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling than anything else in the WWF’s New Generation era.
Thirty years later, you can see shades of Nakano and Madusa’s work together in the feud between Athena and Willow Nightingale, which culminated in the first-ever women’s match to main event a Ring of Honor pay-per-view at this year’s Death Before Dishonor. Much like Blayze vs. Nakano at the Tokyo Dome, Athena and Willow showcased the kind of meat-and-potatoes wrestling that American women were so infrequently allowed to do for decades. Though mainstream women’s wrestling would reach unfortunate new lows during WWE’s Ruthless Aggression era, the female strong style Madusa exemplified was kept alive on the indies throughout the 2000s by physically formidable women like Mercedes Martinez and Sara Del Rey—women to whom Willow and Athena paid tribute throughout their bout.
For many fans, Madusa’s career is synonymous with one image: her 1995 debut on WCW Monday Nitro, when she dumped the WWF Women’s title belt in the trash. It was a shot right across the bow at her former employer, which subsequently blacklisted her for years. Regardless of gender, Madusa taking out the trash was one of the first instances of wrestling’s cable cold war turning hot, a provocative moment of fourth-wall-breaking that signaled the increasingly bitter competition between WCW and the WWF.
The infamous moment could have generated tremendous heat for WCW’s women’s division, but in hindsight, it feels like a missed opportunity. Throughout 1996 and 1997, Madusa turned in several hard-hitting matches with her former joshi co-workers, including an all-out brawl with Nakano at the inaugural Hog Wild pay-per-view. Though she never quite reached the heights of her actual work in Japan, Madusa’s matches during this WCW run brought a side of wrestling few American fans had seen at that time, much like the company was doing with its cruiserweight division.
But misogyny and bad booking habits both die hard, and Madusa was eventually slotted into degrading story lines, like a feud with Sherri Martel over the affections of Colonel Robert Parker. She’d leave WCW in a heartbreaking retirement match against Akira Hokuto at the Great American Bash in 1997, only to return in 1999. By then, the industry had undergone a process of intense Russo-fication, and Madusa’s last WCW run was doomed almost from the start; in one of her first matches, she was squashed in just over a minute by Nitro Girl Spice.
Madusa was later relaunched as WCW’s answer to Chyna, wrestling the likes of Meng and Evan Karagias in hard-to-watch matches that embodied all the worst stereotypes of intergender wrestling. The entire run of lingerie matches and barbecue sauce dousings felt like one elaborate rib on a woman who dared to push back and ask to be taken seriously. Madusa’s last match in WCW—and in fact, her last match until a brief appearance in a battle royal at WWE’s first all-women’s pay-per-view, Evolution, in 2018—was a “Pittsburgh Plunge” tag team scaffold match with Billy Kidman versus Shane Douglas and Torrie Wilson, which received a rare negative-star rating from the Wrestling Observer.
If Madusa hadn’t controlled her own ring name, that iconic image of the title in the trash, which has been recreated and parodied on WWE television and countless Madusa t-shirts, probably couldn’t have happened—instead of making her immediate debut on Nitro, she would have had to spend months developing a completely new persona. Madusa took total ownership of her name when it was still rare even for men in wrestling to do so, and she credits that as maybe one of the single most defining choices in her career. “It saved my ass,” she says bluntly. “It’s the smartest thing I did, because when I was done with WWE, I couldn’t go back to Alundra Blayze, I had to start all over again. But no, I went back to Madusa, like, within 24 hours.”
As companies like AEW have increasingly allowed their talent to retain their name wherever they work, ownership of names is still an enormously contentious issue, from the re-christening of Walter to Gunther, to Cody Rhodes’s legal struggle to use his legendary kayfabe surname. In decades past, chances were that if you left one company for another, you’d have to start from the ground up entirely, as your identity was likely the intellectual property of a former employer.
“No one ever told me to do it,” Madusa confesses. “I just did it.”
Because of her foresight, Madusa was able to successfully transition to another industry, retaining a segment of her old fan base because of the familiar name while building a devoted new audience. After leaving the wrestling business, Madusa would pave a new road as the first major female driver for Monster Jam and the first woman ever to win the Finals Championship. “Let me tell you, being in wrestling really helped me out in monster trucks because it wasn’t my first rodeo, per se,” she explains. “I knew how to handle the guys. I knew how guys ate and slept and thought and acted.”
However, with her 2015 WWE Hall of Fame induction, Madusa started dipping her toes back into a world she thought she’d left behind. Her work has come full circle with her current position as a producer for Billy Corgan’s revamped National Wrestling Alliance. Madusa was first brought on board as a legacy commentator for NWA’s 2021 all-women’s show, EmPowerrr, and soon joined the team full-time as a match agent, helping shape a women’s division that, while sometimes overlooked, has included gifted performers like Taya Valkyrie and Max the Impaler.
“I never thought this would be a part of my career,” Madusa said. “Walking into a position like that was like, not that I’ve never done it—I’ve always been doing it—because I’ve been helping younger talent, just not under one roof. So I was like, ‘OK, alright, I can do this.’”
Spending so many years in front of the curtain before she worked behind it has given Madusa unique insight into her current position. A wrestler’s success in the business might depend on their own skills, but at the end of the day, it’s more about what you do with the resources and support you’re given than innate ability.
“If I’m in a business,” Madusa explains, “I’m only as good as myself and my talent and what I produce. But no. 2, I’m also only as good as the company and how much they promote me, how much they’re going to write me a script and a whole story line. And no. 3, I’m only as good as that ring put together. So if the ropes fail me or the ring busts my ass, my match is squashed and I look horrible. So it’s not just about the talent, it takes all three together to make a great company.”
Paying tribute to wrestling’s history is an essential part of the NWA brand, and Madusa herself has become an outspoken proponent of preserving that history, particularly when it comes to that pre-Attitude Era of women’s wrestling she refers to as the “lost generation.” In her eyes, it’s just as important for wrestling companies to shine a light on the pioneers of yesterday as it is to promote the stars of today.
“Women are honored with the Hall of Fame,” Madusa says. “However, there are so many important women in this business before the Attitude Era that have so much to offer that are never spoken about, not even credited. And the only way we’re going to see change is the people that are active now voice their opinion.”
Madusa readily acknowledges the work of the female veterans who are still out there today, like Lita and Trish Stratus. Still, her goal is for the often overlooked history of women’s wrestling to eventually receive the same recognition and respect as the history of men’s wrestling. And while Madusa is honest about the love and respect she has for Trish and Lita, there is more that can be done, calling for WWE to incorporate more women from the past on their programming, just like they do with their male counterparts. “I am the only one that they do things with intermittently. If anything, it’s very little. Not that I’m complaining, but no, I’ve put in the work and I’m demanding more. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Nadine Smith is a writer, critic, and DJ based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in publications like Pitchfork, The Los Angeles Times, Texas Monthly, GQ, Rolling Stone, and more. She is on Twitter at @trillmoregirls.