The unmatched loyalty of Lori McGee Hurst

In the bar after the WWE Hall of Fame induction of the Fabulous Freebirds in Dallas at WrestleMania 32, Michael “P.S.” Hayes realized that he had forgotten to acknowledge someone key to his time in Texas during the heyday of the ‘Birds fighting the Von Erichs.

That key person had just ordered Chinese food for the crew — what else can you get at 3 a.m.?

The news that Lori McGee Hurst was looking out for the stars of World Class Championship Wrestling yet again made Hayes scoot out of the booth and over to Lori. Knees to knees, nose to nose.

“I thanked everybody but you. I want to thank you personally,” he said.

The whole restaurant quieted, sensing the moment’s seriousness, the loquacious and bombastic Hayes vulnerable and honest.

“Michael, so help me God, if you make me cry, I’m gonna beat you to death,” threatened McGee Hurst.

“I know what happens if I make you cry. I won’t make you cry. I’ve only done it once.”

“That’s right. You only did it once.”

The thank-you done, the din returned to the festivities. McGee Hurst recalled both Jimmy “Jam” Garvin and John Tatum being in awe. “That came straight from the heart,” was what they said.

It did.

But to understand why Hayes would pay tribute to McGee Hurst, or why Steve Simpson would say, “Half of us wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for her,” requires starting many years earlier and diving into the painful memory of her sister’s murder.

* * *

Lori McGee grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. There were four kids in the family. Brother Michael and sister Debbie were much older. Lecia Ann was a year younger than Lori and they were inseparable as their mother, Helen, often sighed, “These two here just try my patience.”

Saturday nights were special for Lori and Lecia, as they got to stay up later. “Our mom would wash our hair and get us ready for church and stuff for the next day. We’d get to watch wrestling and then we’d get to watch roller derby. Then she’s like, ‘Then you’re going to bed,'” recalled McGee Hurst to SlamWrestling.net. Her favorite wrestlers were Jose Lothario and Wahoo McDaniel.

When Lori was eight, her father, Cecil Carl McGee, died at age 42. He’d been injured in World War II, and worked as a postmaster. A blood clot hit his heart and he was gone. It forced Helen to step up and find a way to keep all the kids in good stead. Helen found work with the local government and balanced everything as best she could.

That meant sometimes shipping off the kids. Lori can recall watching wrestling with her grandfather in Arkansas in the summers, for example.

But what really stood out were the trips to her cousin’s grandfather’s ranch in Edom, Texas. (That cousin, Tommy Wageman, would, later wrestle as Terry Panteraand promote under the Buzzsaw Championship Wrestling banner.)

The ranch shared a property line with the Von Erichs, and a barbed wire fence was no deterrent.

“Kevin, Kerry and David and all of us were just romping around, because we were kids. Young kids do kids things,” said McGee Hurst, who was younger than Kevin, a year older than Kerry. “We would get in trouble and we would get blamed for it. But it was never, never the fault of the Von Erichs. It was always our fault.”

At the ranch, she got comfortable with horses resulting in her first job. She was 10. The family decided to rent out the horses by the hour and hired a hand to manage it all. “I was out there with the horses every day, feeding, saddling. Lori often heard from the visitors that she was too little, that she’d get hurt. Instead, she got positive reinforcement from the manager who told skeptics: “If one of the horses acts up, she’s the one that can make that horse act right.” The family did that for seven years.

Gifted athletically, as life at Southwest High School closed, Lori started competing in rodeos. Barrel racing was her specialty, but she sometimes hopped on a bull (“That’s just stupid!”) or other events. The unpredictability of the cowboy life, and the cowboys themselves, was preparing her for the future.

Bartending was the ideal job to fit into her competitions.

* * *

Blonde and blue-eyed, Lecia Ann competed in track and field in high school, worked at a car wash and drove a 1968 Chevy Impala, a gift from her mother. Her older sister looked out for her.

Until she couldn’t.

On Monday, January 23, 1978, Lecia Ann McGee was found dead in the trunk of her car in south Fort Worth with her throat slashed, stabbed seven times in the chest.

When Lecia hadn’t come home on Sunday night, a freaked-out mother sent Lori to look for her sister in the early hours of Monday and they called police at 5:30 a.m. Police, family and friends searched for the car, and eventually, it was found, with tires slashed.

Lori learned of her sister’s death when she came home later that Monday and saw her mother. There were no words. She could see the truth on her face.

In 2014, with new DNA research available, police re-examined some of the cold case evidence, and linked it to Robin Carter, who was already imprisoned for a variety of crimes. He denied being involved with Lecia’s murder and was never charged.

Now in 2024, McGee Hurst knows that the murder shaped her, as did her father’s death. “I went through a lot, I lost a lot when I was young. Very important stuff that made me grow up faster,” she said.

The last child still at home, Lori’s mother worried. “This kind of all falls back into when my little sister was killed. They thought it was mistaken identity, it was supposed to be me, not her. But there was a serial killer running around Fort Worth area at that time,” explained McGee Hurst. The Fort Worth police surveilled and protected her for the next four years.

Not long after, she would have more protectors, but ones who lived a little looser and wilder than police officers.

Pro wrestlers.

* * *

Besides the Von Erichs, another wrestling personality had been a friend of the family when Lori was little — ex-wrestler, manager and booker Gary Hart, who she calls “Uncle Gary.”

Hart came to see her at the neighborhood bar she was working at one night, with “The Grappler” Lynn (Len) Denton and Brian Adias in tow. “They kept on and kept on and kept on at me, going, ‘Lori, you need to go with us to the shows,'” she recalled, as she repeatedly said no. “Uncle Gary kept laughing at me, ‘You loved it as a kid, come on back now.’ And they kept talking me into it.”

Fine.

Soon enough, Lori became a regular at the shows when she wasn’t working. When she was working, the boys would be there.

“If I wasn’t at the show and I was bartending, they were in my bar. Everybody was in my bar. Because every Monday night after Will Rogers [Arena], they would come to the bar because we had celebrity bar night, and the boys would get behind the bar and they would be the bartenders and everybody was drinking free,” laughed McGee Hurst. “They would come to my bar, and they would get in trouble. Anybody else would have gone to jail. And I’m over there going, ‘No, no, no, they didn’t do anything.’ And I’m like, pushing them behind me. ‘Get behind me. Shut up, get behind me and shut up.’ And they would.”

Convenience helped. “We were a mile from the apartment everybody lived in … every night when the bar would close, there would be like this little convoy out of the parking lot, across the bridge, down the service road, boom, down into where our apartments were. Because we were on the other side of the highway from the bar,” she explained. “Everybody lived over there in Hilltop Lodge if you were in the group. If we liked you, you got to live in Hilltop Lodge.”

By Lori’s recollection, she figured out that pro wrestling wasn’t on the up and up when she was a pre-teen, so by the time the boys started inviting her to shows, she was already one of them.

* * *

If an apartment complex could talk, oh, the stories the Hilltop Lodge in Fort Worth could tell.

The key was that the owner was okay renting out units month by month, which suited the transient lifestyle of the wrestlers, though they tended to be assignment apartments towards the back of the complex. While the Von Erichs had their homes in the country, so many others came and went, the territory system showing signs of slowing down but not gone yet in the mid-1980s.

As McGee Hurst names the characters that stayed at Hilltop Lodge, you can search the results boards to find out when they were in World Class Championship Wrestling. Ted Arcidi, Vince Apollo, Len Denton, John Nord, Ray Traylor, Al Perez, Eric Embry, John Tatum, Jack Victory. While it wasn’t just the heels, it wasn’t a place where, say, the Von Erichs could come hang out.

Lori’s apartment was a popular spot. “My grandmama and my mama had taught me well how to cook. If we were at home, they were going, ‘We’re going to Lori’s because we know she’s cooking,'” she remembered. “We never left each other alone. We were always together, no matter what we did, we were always together. We went bowling together. We went to the swimming pool together, we went to the movies together, we went out to eat together. We hung together. We didn’t hang with anybody else, just us.”

This gang of misfits that her daughter found herself in was actually okay with Mom. “She didn’t like it at first. But then she realized I was never alone and that’s what my mom was worried about,” said McGee Hurst. “The boys never left me alone. Never.”

In a short period of time, Lori grew to become a confidante, an ally, an advocate, an alibi, a bartender and designated driver for the various wrestlers and personalities that came in and out of southern Texas.

Then Fritz Von Erich decided to pay her for the role.

* * *

It was 1984, and World Class was still hot, often with two spot shows a night in different parts of the state.

As the promoter, Von Erich (Jack Adkisson) found himself unable to keep tabs on everything, learning about McGee Hurst’s role at the various cards seemed like a good opportunity.

“They got me to go into every spot show. And Fritz found out. He was like, ‘She’s always there.’ It kind of went a little sideways there, it was strictly kept a secret, totally kayfabe. Fritz was like, ‘You keep an eye on everybody. You let me know if anything happens.’ I was like, ‘Nothing’s gonna happen,'” said McGee Hurst. “But I would go, everybody would show up, nobody got in trouble; if they did, we kept them out of jail. Fritz never knew and he was never none the wiser.”

She kayfabed the boys. “It was still all kept very secret. It was very secretive. And nobody ever really figured it out till way later on.”

While her personal relationship with the Fort Worth police came in handy once or twice, the fact is that the wrestlers were revered around town. “Back then, wrestling was taking off, it was super popular. The boys could do anything and not get in trouble,” she said.

The role grew into a logistics kind of secretarial job, but Lori labels the job “glorified babysitter.” She was a fixer, like Mr. Wolfe in Reservoir Dogs. Another secretary in the World Class office called Lori “The Band-Aid.” “She said, ‘If things happen, you’re the Band-Aid. You’re the one that fixes everything. You’re the mommy’s kiss that makes it all go away.”

The boys would ask about hotels, airfare, this or that, and Von Erich wouldn’t be prompt with answers, and wrestlers would just say, “We’ll go ask Lori.” Eventually, Fritz just started letting her do the work.

It got to the point where Lori’s 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Chrome — a “land tank” — “had its own booking sheet.”

“I would go on airport runs, spot shows and running all that,” said McGee Hurst, jumping ahead a bit to when Von Erich no longer promoted, and the likes of Eric Embry, Gary Hart or Michael Hayes were booking. Hart said, “Lori’s going to learn this. She does it anyway. Let’s just show her the rest of it.” That meant doing all the legwork a month or two before a spot show, like postering the town, arranging sponsors, ticket outlets, and newspaper, TV and radio promotion. Closer to the show, she’d get the wrestlers into her car and drive to the town to do further promo to drum up ticket sales.

“She’s been babysitting us for years,” said long-time World Class referee James Beard. “She’s the one that always got things done. Travel, booking arrangements, pretty much anything, she’d just take care of it.”

Later, McGee Hurst worked with the USWA when Jerry Jarrett bought what was left of World Class and the promotions in Memphis and Dallas merged. “I knew everything that was going on in the office because I was in the office every day then. When Jarrett took over, I spent almost every day at the Sportatorium. I tried not to,” she recalled. Eventually, she told Embry that she needed to get a real job — and went back to bartending, eventually buying her own bar to get away from the wrestling shenanigans.

One particular memory was renting a bus to drive to Tennessee, with all the Texas-based wrestlers, for a TV taping. “Everybody being on the same bus, leave the Sportatorium and go straight to Memphis. Oh my god, that was a nightmare. It was funny, but it was a nightmare,” she laughed. Next, they tried to vans. “We had a babyface van and we had a heel van. That was a bigger nightmare because everybody wanted to ride together. Not happening.”

* * *

For the most part, McGee Hurst only worked with the top talent. An underneath wrestler, a local carpenter, wouldn’t get the time of day from her. But if there was a young wrestler that the veterans believed in, like Steve Austin or Mark Callaway, who would become The Undertaker, that was OK.

The rookies quickly learned that Lori was not one to mess with. “They were trying to figure out what they could get away with,” she recalled. “And it was always like, ‘You might want to go talk to Lori. She’ll lay the law down on you. She’ll tell you what you can and can’t do, how far you can go with it. And if you go any farther than that, then you’re on your own.'”

At first, Lori mainly looked after the babyfaces, like Chris Adams, Steve Simpson, Brian Adias, Mark Youngblood and Lance Von Erich, but not the “real” Von Erichs. “As far as Kerry and Kevin, I was like, uh-uh, I have nothing to do with them two, nothing. If they get in trouble, they’re on their own.”

Then she switched sides. “Eventually I told Uncle Gary one night, I said, ‘Look, I just want to deal with the heels. They’re a whole lot easier to deal with. I don’t have to deal with fans. The boys are on their own.’ Uncle Gary’s like, ‘OK, you just deal with the heels.'”

The World Class office at the Sportatorium was not that big, where Bronco Lubich and Gary Hart had small offices, and Eric Embry was in a closet that had been converted to a workspace. Then there were the cat-sized rats. At times, the rats would jump on the table where Lori was working, and she’d give them a bit of a biscuit.

There were so many other unwritten jobs. Steve Simpson calling at 2 a.m. about a stalker/fan claiming she was carrying his baby? Lori dealt with it, and that fan never talked to Simpson again. “They were always like, if you need something, this is who you call, this is what you do. I knew everybody’s wives. I knew everybody’s girlfriends. And I’m always going, ‘You don’t gotta worry. They’re with me. I could care less what these fools do.'”

She had a magic touch of sorts. If she sensed Chris Adams was getting riled up, which happened often with alcohol involved, Lori would act. “Chris, six-pack of beer, hot tub. Now.” And “Gentleman” Chris would obey.

* * *

It’s not like McGee Hurst was a prude and didn’t drink or didn’t have fun.

Someone would have an idea where they should all go — Hayes, especially was a ring leader — and off they’d go. Lori would tell them, “Well, y’all drink all you want, do whatever you want to do. I’m the sober one. I’m the one driving.”

It was a personal decision.

“I just chose to look after them. I was like, ‘I’m going to be the one telling you what you did the next day, and I’m gonna make fun of you. From now on, and I can tell you everything you said, did, who you were with, what you did.’ And they’re like, going, ‘Oh, God.’ You ask the boys right now, ask Lenny [Denton], Lenny would tell you to this day, he says, ‘She knows where every one of them bodies are buried. She knows it all.’ And I’ve got dirt on everybody.”

McGee Hurst tried to keep personal life separate from wrestling, but did date DJ Peterson, who died in a motorcycle crash in 1993. “He was in and out in and out in and out. It was kind of like an amicable split. He dragged me to Vegas for the first time. I was very innocent of it. … I went with him to Vegas, to an AWA show at the Showboat. Then after that, I was like, ‘I don’t want to be involved.’ Because of rodeo and stuff, I’d been used to being around cowboys and crazy stuff and police officers all the time. And I was like, ‘Ah ,wrestling’s a little bit out there.’ But yet, they were still all my friends.”

During all the time with the wrestlers, she did meet someone though they’d known each from years previous. Larry Hurst, a left-handed baseball pitcher, came into the bar one night. They asked what each other were doing there … and got married not long after, bringing a stepson, Lawrence “Cody” Leamon Hurst III, to the union.

At that point, Lori McGee added Hurst to her name and tried to distance herself from wrestling.

“After I got married, the boys showed up at my house and I lived on Lake Palestine. Now you need a GPS and a bloodhound to find where I was living. But the boys found me and come walking up in my yard. I was like, ‘Oh, my god. What now?'” she began.

Hayes said, “I want to meet the man that finally got Lori to get married because she told everybody no from the get-go.”

Larry Hurst was with Helen McGee and saw the boys pull up through a window in the house.

“Who’s over there in the yard? And who’s that big blond that’s got his hands all over my wife?” he asked his mother-in-law.

“Honey, that’s the boys, get used to it,” she replied, putting a comforting arm around him.

The boys talked Larry into coming with them to a show. He ended up hanging out with some of the other spouses. Used to routine, Lori left with the wrestlers … and had to return to retrieve her husband.

“I said, ‘And this is why I can’t be around you guys.’ I cut all ties right then,” she said.

Except she didn’t.

* * *

A select few kept in touch with Mrs. McGee Hurst.

Matt Borne was one. When Borne was in a car accident in Georgia, emergency services found Lori’s number first and called her. She then had to figure out who Borne was currently married to — and did. All of Borne’s wives through the years knew Lori and often asked for help dealing with their unpredictable spouse.

Gary Young was another. “Gary Young’s like my big brother, so I always talked to Gary,” she said. For a time, Lori lived with Gary and his wife, Angela, so the bond was deeper than just wrestling. There were occasional calls to Al Perez or Eric Embry.

When Larry Hurst died in September 2008, it wasn’t long until McGee Hurst found herself surrounded by wrestling again.

“After my husband died, it was one year and one day after, and my phone rang, and it was Matt Borne,” she recalled. “And Matt said, ‘It’s time for you to come back home.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘It’s time for you to come back home.’ I said, ‘Matt. I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I’m sitting in my home. I am fine.’ He said, ‘It’s time for you to come home to wrestling. Come on. We’ve given you that time. You’ve had your break, it’s time for you to come back.'”

The Band-Aid had to be convinced to return, but did. Initially, she made a few calls to help Borne, who died in 2013, with bookings. Then Gary Young called to say he was coming to town and wanted to take her to the Red Bastien Texas Shootout, an informal reunion of wrestlers, no fans. Egos and past issues are left at the door.

Since that time, McGee Hurst, who works as a reservation supervisor for American Airlines, has decidedly been back in the wrestling fold, attending plenty of reunions from the induction ceremony for the George Tragos/Lou Thesz Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa, to a SICW-run fan fest in St. Louis.

More recently, McGee Hurst has been in the news for her efforts to return the artifacts that were donated to the now-shuttered Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in Wichita Falls, Texas, to their rightful honors.

After the PWHF moved to Texas from Upstate New York, McGee Hurst went to some of the induction ceremonies. “Cowboy” Johnny Mantell and his wife, “K” who was wrestler Tygress Lourdes, were the main people behind the location switch, and are the ones who have taken much of the blame for the PWHF falling apart.

When McGee Hurst was asked by a couple of friends like Young and Embry about the status of the memorabilia that they had lent, once again she sprung into action. “Like hell, I’ll go get it. I did,” is how she remembered the challenge.

Turning up in person at The Big Blue building in downtown Wichita Falls since no one was taking her calls, McGee Hurst met the owner, impressed him with her knowledge of the artifacts and ability to connect with the names from the past. “They just evicted the Hall of Fame. So all that stuff was still sitting there. And it was even sitting there two months after the eviction,” she recalled.

McGee Hurst was given written permission to start taking out the goodies and returning them to their rightful owners, holding things in four different storage lockers. Sadly, some of the memorabilia went missing before McGee Hurst got there and other items were water-damaged.

It was a small team effort, with a few other helpers. A few things were sent to the International Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame in Albany, New York, while all the paperwork and research that had been donated by the likes of historians like J Michael Kenyon and Fred Hornby was picked up by fellow historians Tim Hornbaker and Steven Johnson.

In the end, McGee Hurst rescued scores of wrestling history.

For her efforts, and so much more, the Cauliflower Alley Club is honoring her at this year’s reunion, August 19-21, in Las Vegas, with its Red Bastien Friendship Award. Though McGee Hurst only met Bastien once, she is pleased with the award and what it represents — friendship. She has plenty of those through her decades in wrestling, including the next generations.

After the funeral for Doris Atkisson in 2015, Lori was chatting with people she knew when she saw a young woman and something clicked. She introduced herself: “Honey, I don’t think you remember me.” It was Hollie Adkisson, the daughter of Kerry Von Erich. Hollie’s response? “Out of everybody here, you’re the one I do remember.” All that kindness that McGee Hurst gave out applied to the kids too. Hollie used to sit on her lap at the matches, and they would just have fun, ignoring the matches.

Hollie also recalled that she always wanted to go home with Lori and “Uncle Michael” Hayes.

It makes sense, said McGee Hurst. “Kerry and Michael were so close. So close. And Hollie was always used to seeing me because as always with Michael.”

And why was Michael Hayes always with McGee Hurst? Maybe it had something to do with having a designated driver and her pretty sweetly tricked-out Cadillac.

“When Michael was here, we had put a refrigerator, a little baby refrigerator, in the back floorboard in the backseat, that kept all of Michael’s stuff cold, his drinks and other sundries were in that refrigerator,” she began. “He would be the only one in the backseat. We had a TV that we set on the armrest that plugged into the cigarette lighter. We ran the antenna up through the sunroof, so he watched all his football games when he was on the road. …

“He was so spoiled. … Michael and I were laughing about it one night. He said, ‘I wouldn’t have made half the shows I made if it hadn’t have been for you. The fact is that I never had to drive.’ … it was the ’80s, Michael would get messed up. But he was safe. He was in the car. Not a problem.”

All thanks to Lori McGee Hurst.

TOP PHOTO: Lori McGee Hurst with Kerry Von Erich back in the day; Lori with Michael Hayes.

2024 CAULIFLOWER ALLEY CLUB HONOREES

• Iron Mike Mazurki Award: Sting
• Lou Thesz/Art Abrams Award: Kurt Angle
• Karl Lauer Independent Promoters’ Award: David McLane
• Jim Ross Announcers’ Award: Jim Ross
• Women’s Wrestling Award: Allison Danger
• Tag Team Award: The Dudley Boyz
• Men’s Wrestling Award: Buff Bagwell
• Lucha Libre Award: Negro Casas
• Red Bastien Friendship Award: Lori McGee Hurst
• Independent Wrestling Award: “Night Train” Gary Jackson
• Charlie Smith Referee Award: Bill “Fonzie” Alfonso
• REEL Award: Todd Bridges
• James C. Melby Historian Award: Jason Presley
• Courage Award: Black Bart (Rick Harris)

RELATED LINKS

• Cauliflower Alley Club story archive
• Cauliflower Alley Club website