as she was in 1943. [New York Post photo] \nNEW YORK - The World Wrestling Federation's current mix of sex and grappling has its detractors and boycotters as well as fans. But now the question has arisen whether the act has gone too far - Madison Square Garden is probing whether a 78-year-old woman wrestler violated clauses in the World Wrestling Federation's contract with the New York arena by going topless.
Mae Young reportedly climaxed her routine by taking her top off, but a spokesman for the WWF tells the New York Post she was never naked, just wearing "a molded, nipple-bearing, chest-shaped device" simulating her actual breasts.
"Nothing except her face and neck was naked," WWF spokesman Jim Byrne tells the paper. "She was wearing a prosthesis, just like that scene in There's Something About Mary," alluding to the 1998 comedy film hit featuring an elderly sexpot in a Florida apartment who befriends the title character played by Cameron Diaz.
The Garden, though, hasn't yet accepted the WWF line, the Post says. "We were caught unaware of the show's content," he says, "and executives here are aggressively pursuing the matter."
The paper says pay-per-view audience never saw Young's alleged nudity, which climaxed the Royal Rumble swimsuit contest. Just as Young pulled down her bathing-suit top, the Post says, a large "Censored" sign covered 80 percent of the screen. Byrne says that plus the N for nudity rating the WWF put on the show was part of the gag.
"It's like a magic act, where your eyes aren't seeing what they think they're seeing," he tells the Post. "We wanted the [TV] audience to imagine that she was actually naked, if they wanted. But the MSG crowd could see that she was not nude."
Fans seemed to get a kick out of the routine, the paper says. World of Wrestling editor Bill Apter compared it to "when they used to bring out the midgets" in the 1970s.
