On Episode #6 of Talkin’ Off The Top Rope, “The Grizzled Vet” Michael McCurdy welcomes Milaun Murry-Burke, founder of Experience Wrestling and the Texas Wrestling History Initiative, for a different kind of wrestling conversation. This one isn’t just about matches, moves, and road stories. It’s about making sure the stories never die, especially the stories tied to Texas wrestling history, independent wrestling, archives, and the people who helped build the business but may never become household names.
Milaun talks about first discovering wrestling during the late 90s and early 2000s, being drawn to the larger than life characters of the Attitude Era, and later reconnecting with wrestling through her work as a librarian at the University of Texas at Arlington. That’s where a special collection tied to the Von Erich family and World Class Championship Wrestling opened the door to a much bigger mission: preserving, documenting, and making wrestling history accessible.
The heart of this episode is preservation. Milaun explains that when she first started looking into independent wrestling, she was excited to learn about promotions and wrestlers only to find that in many cases, almost nothing had been saved. Some promotions were gone. Some names had already slipped through the cracks. And for a historian, librarian, and wrestling fan, that hit hard.
There’s also a real conversation here about being a woman in a male dominated space. Milaun talks about having to earn trust, overcome assumptions, and prove that she was there because she cared about wrestling history and the people involved in it. Michael doesn’t dance around the issue either, calling out the tired dressing-room mindset that assumes women around wrestling must have the wrong intentions.
For fans of Texas wrestling history, World Class Championship Wrestling, independent wrestling, wrestling archives, the Von Erichs, UTA’s wrestling collection, and the people doing the hard work to keep wrestling’s forgotten stories alive, this is a very different but very worthwhile episode of Talkin’ Off The Top Rope.
Because the big names matter.
But so do the ones history almost forgot.
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★