She came out of Louisville swinging — fists first, questions never. Phyllis Burch, known in the carnivals and coliseums as Diane Von Hoffman, The Teutonic Terror, Lady Beast, and most famously, Moondog Fifi, was never meant to wear a tiara or smile sweet for the camera. She was a wrestler the way a stray is a dog — tough, scarred, loud, and always chasing something just out of reach.
Born April 13, 1962, in Kentucky, Burch started early. While the other girls at Fern Creek High School were busy with yearbooks and prom dreams, she was training in barns and gymnasiums under Dale Mann, a roughneck promoter who believed in grit more than glamour. When other kids clocked in at Burger King, she took bumps on concrete floors and learned how to fall without crying. That was her education — bumps, bruises, and broken bones whispered like secrets in her joints.
But it wasn’t enough to just learn how to wrestle. She needed to learn how to survive. And that meant heading to the Church of Pain, run by none other than The Fabulous Moolah. In 1981, Burch entered the infamous Moolah compound — part school, part prison, part test of how badly you wanted it. She trained under the matriarch of mayhem, did her dues, and made pancakes at a Louisville IHOP to pay for bruises.
Moolah made her a tag team partner and gave her a name with flair: Diane Von Hoffman. It sounded like someone you’d find sipping wine in a European casino. But make no mistake — she was all knuckles and attitude. You could dress her up, but you couldn’t dull the blade.
She took that blade to Japan, the Philippines, and Canada, working alongside the legendary Leilani Kai. Overseas, she became “The Teutonic Terror,” a snarling, goose-stepping villainess in a business that still drooled over stereotypes. She leaned into it — jackboots, scowls, and all. The fans hated her for it. Which meant she was doing it right.
But her real legacy was forged not in Tokyo or Toronto, but under the flickering house lights of Memphis. In the 1990s, she joined the United States Wrestling Association (USWA), one of the last surviving bastions of territorial madness, where blood flowed like beer and logic didn’t matter as long as somebody got body-slammed through a table.
And that’s where she became Moondog Fifi.
The Moondogs were chaos with mange — wild-eyed, weapon-swinging lunatics who made the ring look like a demolition derby. Fifi didn’t just fit in — she completed the insanity. She wasn’t a valet in sequins. She was a snarling banshee with a bone in one hand and a death glare in the other. While the boys — Spot, Rex, and Cujo — gnawed their way through matches, Fifi barked at ringside like a woman possessed. She wasn’t there to look pretty. She was there to hurt people.
In 1992, she took things up a notch. That June, the Moondogs dropped the USWA Tag Team Titles to Jerry Lawler and Jeff Jarrett in a steel cage match that looked less like a contest and more like a prison riot. Fifi was there, gnashing and growling on the outside, every bit as dangerous as the men inside.
Later that year, she stepped into the ring herself and took the USWA Women’s Championship off Miss Texas — known today as Jacqueline Moore, one of the most respected women to ever lace up boots. It was a big win, but it came in the middle of a bigger story.
That year, the Moondogs’ feud with Lawler and Jarrett reached such lunatic heights that Pro Wrestling Illustrated named it Feud of the Year. That’s no small feat — not in a year when WCW and WWF were throwing millions around like confetti. But this wasn’t about money. It was about chaos. Raw, Southern-fried, blood-soaked chaos. And Moondog Fifi was right in the middle of it.
Then came the haircut.
As part of the feud, Fifi was dragged to the center of the ring and had her head shaved. Not trimmed. Not styled. Shaved. In a business where women were still treated like walking posters for Aqua Net and cleavage, she stood bald, beaten, and howling — and in that moment, she became more real than half the roster. It wasn’t pretty. But it was powerful. Wrestling is about moments, and Fifi gave them one you couldn’t forget.
Outside the ring, Phyllis Burch lived a life that mirrored her in-ring persona — messy, loud, and deeply human. She married a wrestler named Ringo Mercanerio. It sounded like a carnival act — and maybe it was — but it gave her two daughters, Melissa and Marla. For a time, she balanced suplexes with school runs, championships with chores. But the road never lets go easy, and Burch wrestled on and off into the 2000s under names like Lady Beast. She wrestled until 2013, a 34-year career stitched together with duct tape, grit, and willpower.
Then came the final bell.
She died on July 6, 2017, at the age of 55 after complications from knee surgery. For someone who survived decades of slams, chairs, and steel cages, it was a cruel twist — to be taken out not by a piledriver, but by the scalpel.
There were no red carpets. No hall of fame speeches. Just a few quiet tributes and the memories of fans who remembered the woman who once stood bald in a Memphis ring, screaming at the sky.
Phyllis Burch didn’t wrestle in the golden era. She wrestled in the gutter, where it was wet, wild, and real. She didn’t care about primetime. She was built for 11 p.m. slots on UHF channels with broken antennas and half the country already asleep.
She was one of the last of her kind — a wrestler who bled for the business before it came with hashtags, action figures, and corporate insurance. She didn’t get rich. She didn’t get famous. But she got respected — and in this business, that’s more than gold.
They called her Fifi, but she was no poodle. She was a junkyard dog, lean and mean and unwilling to let go, even when the leash frayed and snapped.
Here’s to Moondog Fifi — to the woman who howled into the void and left teeth marks in wrestling’s dirty heart.