In an era when women’s wrestling was often relegated to sideshow spectacle, Candi Devine entered the ring like a hammer wrapped in velvet. Tall, brash, unapologetically bold—she wasn’t just one of the girls. She was the woman.
Born Candace Maria Rummel in the hard-muscled heart of Nashville on January 1, 1958, she grew up in a world where wrestling was both myth and gospel. It didn’t take long for the squared circle to find her. First as a fan girl running Lanny Poffo’s fan club—nicknamed “Fang Face” for her buck teeth—then as a ring girl for ICW, then as a woman who traded newsletters for black eyes and wrist locks.
Her journey to the ring didn’t come through glitz or fast-tracked developmental programs. No, it came by way of the road—the real wrestling road—learning under journeymen like Don Fargo and Owen Henley. By 1980, she debuted against Ann Jeanette in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and just like that, a new Southern storm had blown into town.
Queen of the AWA
If the AWA was the house Verne Gagne built, Candi Devine helped paint the walls. Her four-time reign as AWA Women’s Champion placed her in the pantheon of 1980s women’s wrestling—a decade when titles weren’t just props, but war medals earned through blood and bruised vertebrae.
Her feud with Sherri Martel wasn’t just good—it was brutal, blistering, and a shot of nitroglycerin in an era starving for female storylines with bite. Trading titles like two gamblers throwing down cards, Devine and Martel lit up SuperClash and WrestleRock ’86 like firecrackers on concrete. They took the show—and sometimes the crowd—with them.
She wasn’t just a foil for Sherri. She wasn’t anyone’s “also-ran.” Candi Devine held gold like it owed her money and fought like it still hadn’t paid up.
By the late ’80s, as the AWA tried to find its footing against the juggernauts of WWF and Jim Crockett Promotions, Devine was still in the trenches—mixing it up in tag bouts and singles matches, even participating in the infamous Team Challenge Series, a storyline as bizarre as it was desperate. Through it all, Devine kept showing up. A constant. A presence. A professional.
Scars & Comebacks
In 1985, wrestling tried to take everything from her. A botched monkey flip with Amy Monroe in Memphis left Devine with a broken jaw and cheekbone. She could’ve left. Nobody would’ve blamed her. But after plastic surgery and a long road of healing, she came back. Because of course she did.
Wrestling doesn’t remember the easy stories. It remembers the bloodied ones. The ones stitched back together by pride and steel wire. Devine belonged to that lineage.
The Goddess and the Gypsy Years
After her prime AWA run, Devine transformed. Reinvented herself as “The Goddess” in the Ladies Professional Wrestling Association and barnstormed through independent rings across the country. She worked Smoky Mountain, the GWF, the USWA. She collected belts like a traveling preacher collected souls—quietly, efficiently, and with authority.
Four times she held the WWC Women’s Championship in Puerto Rico, a territory as volatile as it was violent. She stepped into the ring with Miss Texas, Tina Moretti, and Rockin’ Robin, and held her own—or beat them flat. Even in 1995, long past her supposed prime, she was working WWF house shows against Alundra Blayze. She wasn’t just hanging on—she was competing.
And when she finally hung up her boots in 1998, it was on her terms. Sort of. Because in 2005, she came back for one more go, beating Bambi in a USWO card. Because wrestling, like some bad romance, never stops calling.
Life Beyond the Canvas
Off the mat, Candi Devine lived the kind of winding, gritty, oddball life that fit a wrestler. She worked as a physical trainer back in Nashville, sued her longtime boyfriend and former wrestler Tom Burton on a televised episode of Divorce Court (over a dead cat, no less), then later reconciled with him before his death in 2010. It wasn’t clean or easy. But then again, neither was her career.
In 2021, her body started breaking down. A collapsed lung, seizures, spinal injuries—the kind of silent toll that decades of bumping, traveling, and ignoring pain leaves behind. She died on February 9, 2022, at the age of 64.
But by then, her legend was already inked into wrestling’s unwritten book of the damned and divine.
Legacy in Lace and Leather
Candi Devine never headlined WrestleMania. She didn’t sell out Madison Square Garden or appear on Saturday Night’s Main Event. She wasn’t a household name. But ask any woman who came through the door behind her—anyone who carved a living between the ropes in a sport that didn’t always make room for women—and they’ll tell you: Candi helped kick that door open.
She was part glam, part grit. She was both goddess and gladiator. In an industry built on illusion, her toughness was the realest thing in the room.
And that, more than any belt, is the mark of a champion.
