by Ric Flair
That night, I was the third Superstar to enter the match, and the plan was for me to last the entire match: just over an hour. It will always be special because it showed that Vince had enough confidence in me to make me his champion. That night I became the second person—the original “Nature Boy,” Buddy Rogers, was the first—to win the NWA World Championship and the WWE Championship during his career.
I considered it special to have a match at this year’s Rumble because of what we were doing for WrestleMania and because the event was at Madison Square Garden.
The first time I performed in WWE was at the Garden in 1976. I don’t consider that my WWE debut, because it was one match. But Vince McMahon Sr. put together a stacked card that night: Ernie Ladd, Bobo Brazil, Ivan Koloff, the Fabulous Moolah, and Ivan Putski performed. Bruno Sammartino defended the WWE Championship against “Superstar” Billy Graham. A couple of years prior to that, Billy’s wife, Bunny, was the first person who bleached my hair.
I have incredible respect for the history of Madison Square Garden and for the legacy of WWE and the McMahon family in that building—both Vince and his father, Vince Sr., are in the Madison Square Garden Hall of Fame.
While I can do without the traffic, I’ve always enjoyed the energy of New York City and the passion of the New York fans. I don’t feel the same about the Garden itself, because I never got to enjoy being the main attraction there on a consistent basis. In the ’70s and ’80s, my strongest fan bases were primarily in the southeastern and midwestern United States. That changed with the expansion of cable television and two tenures with WWE, but there are other venues like the Omni in Atlanta, Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, and the Charlotte and Greensboro Coliseums that are sentimental favorites, considering where I was in my career at the time. I’m sure I’d feel the same way about the Garden if it were one of the homes of Space Mountain.
The fan reaction made this a farewell tour like I had never seen before. Each city I performed in was transformed into “Flair Country.” I even had the opportunity to return to the sacred ground of Japan’s Budokan and perform for the wonderful fans in Honolulu, Hawaii. I’ll always cherish the way WWE presented my matches during this time. Being able to perform around the world in so many cities and venues that I performed in throughout my career was something that will always stay with me. I’d call Tiffany from the road and talk to her about the favorite matches I had in different buildings and memories from each city. Then I’d go to wherever the party was that evening. Sometimes I’d start the party, but at least I called my wife.
This type of recognition prepared me to publicly acknowledge another honor. We were preparing to roll out the last two components of this story line: that I was going to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, and who my opponent would be at WrestleMania.
For the former, I knew from my original call with Vince that I was definitely going to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. To be the only person to be inducted into the Hall while still an active member of the WWE roster was something that I knew was an enormous accolade, but it was something that didn’t seem real during this epic journey to WrestleMania.
For the latter, I replayed in my mind what Vince told me during that call: “You’ll work with someone…” One possible way my opponent could’ve been decided was by selecting a young Superstar. That person would enter an intense story line with me and end up being the one to “retire” me at the largest show of the year. The hope was my opponent would get to build on that recognition and take his career to another level. Over the past year, Ricky Steamboat and I talked about pitching the idea of having a final match. I didn’t say anything about that, but maybe he did. I didn’t know. It was a mystery that I tried to figure out. Week after week, it became more difficult dealing with the anticipation … until I got a call from a close friend.
Michael Hayes has been my friend for thirty years. On television, his persona was Michael “PS” Hayes, the founder of the Fabulous Freebirds, a group who helped revolutionize our business. If there’s a definition for hell-raisers in the dictionary, there should be a picture of the Freebirds next to it.
Since 1995, Michael’s been a driving creative force behind the scenes at WWE. Any time there was a story line I was going to be involved in, a tour I was booked on, or reviewing the finer points of my match, I worked with Michael.
I picked up the phone and said, “Michael, how are you?” Right away, I could tell there was something different in his voice.
He said, “It’s Shawn. It’s going to be Shawn.” I froze. Michael added, “He asked for it, but we haven’t told him it’s a go. Ric, please don’t tell Shawn. Please don’t tell Shawn. We’re not telling Shawn for another week.”
I said, “Okay, I won’t tell anyone.”
He ended by saying, “Don’t tell anyone. Goodbye,”
It was the quickest conversation we had in thirty years.
I was hoping it would be either Paul or Shawn. It’s always easy to pitch ideas to yourself. I didn’t know what to do. I kept pacing back and forth, trying to relax, but I kept thinking of all the things we could do together, on the microphone and in the ring, to make this match what I knew it could be. I started thinking about the way WWE would take things to a higher level in presentation and promotion. I tried to breathe and stay calm. So I did what any other person in my position would do—I called Shawn.2
I first met Shawn at a bar in 1985 after a show. He was about nineteen years old and working in Kansas City. I came into the area to work with Bruiser Brody. I despised working in Kansas City and couldn’t stand the Central States promoter, Bob Geigel. He never wanted to pay for security at the buildings. One time, a kid snuck into our locker room and took one of my robes. When I rushed out through the back of the building, the kid was in the street wearing it. He gave me the middle finger and ran away. When Kansas City came up on my schedule, I used to tell people, “I’ll be in Moscow that week.”
I heard of the team Shawn formed with Marty Jannetty, the Midnight Rockers, and saw him again when I went to WWE in 1991. He was still teaming with Marty but looking to start a career as a singles performer.
Shawn and I had a match in Houston, Texas, that was meant to help prepare him for a singles program with Randy “Macho Man” Savage. Shawn would be better at his craft after being in the ring with me and other established singles performers so that he’d be comfortable in a high-profile, one-on-one series with Randy. Performing in a tag team is different; you always have someone else to rely on, and you’re not in the ring every second of the match. You can tag out and catch your breath. I wanted Shawn to be better prepared for a career as a singles Superstar, which is how it’s supposed to be in our line of work—helping younger talent come up. I knew it was only a matter of time before Shawn would break out as a megastar.
We worked together a second time in a tag team match where Shawn and I were partners against Randy and Bret “Hit Man” Hart. We got to work together more when Shawn returned to the company in 2002. We had a great match that lasted thirty minutes in Japan in 2005. For my final match as a WWE Superstar, I knew we could turn it on and tear it down in the ring.
The way Shawn was introduced to the story line was that he would be the one who made the announcement on Raw that I’d be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.
Since WWE resumed Hall of Fame inductions in 2004, it’s one of my favorite nights of the year. That year, I inducted Harley Race. In 2005, I inducted “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. The following year in Chicago, I saw close friends Blackjack Mulligan and “Mean” Gene Okerlund take their rightful place in the Hall along with my mentor, the legendary Verne Gagne. The previous year in Detroit was extra special when Dusty closed out the show. He asked if he and Harley could join Arn Anderson and me as part of the Four Horsemen. I still fight back tears thinking of Dusty saying that during his induction speech and what it means to me.
The way things would unfold with Shawn over the next five weeks was that I would first as
k him to be my opponent at WrestleMania. He’d accept but then become conflicted over the coming weeks. Because of the admiration he had for me, he couldn’t be the one who would go down in history as the man who retired me. I’d come back the next week and tell him I didn’t need his sympathy and that if I couldn’t hang with the top guys, I didn’t want to be part of the show. This was another example of something being said for the cameras but the feeling behind those words was true—the closer WrestleMania came, the more this became the realest story line I was ever a part of. As the crowds cheered louder, I struggled with whether it was the right decision.
The important part was creating enough tension between us as WrestleMania inched closer, so that the audience felt like they were seeing a battle between two participants who would fight until they had nothing left. There would be a winner and a loser. If I lost, I’d never compete in a match again. I had just the thing, and so did Shawn.
One of my final matches before WrestleMania in Orlando was with someone who became known as one of my fiercest on-camera rivals and who has always been a confidant away from the ring: Vince McMahon.
Vince and I were getting ready for our match that day in Lafayette, Louisiana, when he stopped speaking. I saw tears in his eyes, and he said to me, “I want to make sure this is so special for you.” From the moment I met Vince in 1976, he’s treated me like gold. Since I returned to WWE in 2001, we’ve had a lot of fun working together. I know sometimes I’ve made things challenging for him in front of the cameras and away from them, but Vince has always been there for me.
The match I had with Vince on Raw was a “Street Fight.” In our business, that’s another way of saying things are going to get crazy—anything goes. Our first “Street Fight” was at the 2002 Royal Rumble. Paul would always joke that Vince took himself for the legendary NWA Champion Lou Thesz in the ring, but he didn’t. Vince knew that in the end, the fans wanted to see the Mr. McMahon character suffer the consequences for his dastardly deeds. If Vince feels the audience wants to see something, he makes it happen, even if it means that he steps through the ropes. Vince has fallen off cages, jumped off ladders, and been put through the announcers’ table. He doesn’t ask anyone to do something he hasn’t done or wouldn’t do himself. You have to admire that in the leader of a global, publicly traded organization. Just watch the video of Vince taking the zip line from the rafters of the Pond in Anaheim, California, down to the arena floor to make sure it was safe. Then see Shawn do it later that day during his entrance in the main event of WrestleMania XII.
For this match, the mind-set was different from the others in this story line. Even though Vince can squat seven hundred pounds in the weight room, the idea should be that he’s at a disadvantage because he hasn’t been a WWE Superstar. But the Mr. McMahon character always stacks the deck and has a trick up his sleeve. From the moment the bell rang, we didn’t hold anything back. Vince drilled me in the face with a television monitor, nailed me with a garbage can, flogged me with a Singapore cane, and blasted me with a chair. He said he wanted to make it special, right? Just when it looked like the sun was setting on my career in the sky of Columbia, South Carolina, Shawn came to ringside to interrupt the referee’s count.
This is the turning point in the story that night. In what other line of work can you hit your boss twice below the belt, put him on a table, and dive from ten feet in the air, putting him through that table? How many people would love to do that? That’s how I won the match. It was a great night at the office. That’s what Vince meant when he said he wanted it to be special. He gave himself to the performance, to further the story line, where his character lost to me in spectacular fashion. It was just another example of how he’s been there for me.
Incorporating Shawn into the end of the match with Vince served as a great way to keep the tension rising between us and put us on course to a standoff the next week on TV—another exciting aspect of our business that I wish more people appreciated—leaving the story at a certain point where the audience is compelled to tune in next week. There’s an art to doing that, especially fifty-two weeks a year.
The following week on Raw, I began my interview segment by saying that I lost respect for Shawn for interfering in my match with Mr. McMahon, and I asked him to come to the ring. I brought a black velvet bag with me. The NWA World Heavyweight Championship was in it. The same title worn by people like Harley Race, Jack Brisco, Dory and Terry Funk, Dusty Rhodes, and me.
It was one of the few times that the NWA World Heavyweight Championship appeared on WWE television. There were times in the 1970s when Harley Race was NWA Champion and appeared on WWE cards to promote his “Champion versus Champion” matches against WWE Champions “Superstar” Billy Graham and Bob Backlund. Dusty and Harley met for the title at Madison Square Garden too. Vince’s father, Vince Sr., was such a respected individual in our industry that he sat on the NWA board of directors (WWE was not part of the NWA). Vince Sr. was one of the deciding votes that helped me win the NWA title from Dusty in 1981. You can ask anyone in our business, and Vince McMahon will tell you himself, in those days, if you were the NWA Champion, you were “the Man.”
Some people thought Vince didn’t want me to incorporate the title because it represented a onetime competition to WWE—it was the exact opposite. Vince loved the idea of adding a sense of history to the story line, considering the connection I have to that championship and the fact that Shawn grew up a fan of mine. There’s even a childhood picture of Shawn, in a suit, dressed just like me.
It made for a nice addition. I wasn’t sure where Shawn wanted to take things on the microphone. All I knew was that he wanted to shake things up as we headed into the final week before our match.
No one knew how true every word was that came out of both our mouths during that last segment. It took everything I had to keep my composure, because I knew the words I was saying would be my final moments on TV as a WWE Superstar.
For the audience, Shawn apologized for interfering in my match and reiterated what the “Nature Boy” meant to him—“You’ll always be the Naitch to me—”
I cut him off before he could utter another word and fired back, “I don’t need anybody, anymore, to tell me who I am.” I remember saying, “I want you to bring out the best in me. I need that … I need that to make it the rest of the way in my life. I need one more night. I need to be the Naitch.”
Shawn replied that he was going to give me everything I needed. That he had no choice … but to give me the Showstopper. “Come Sunday, Naitch … you’re going to step inside the ring with Mr. WrestleMania.” We shook hands, signifying mutual respect and that the deal was for both of us to be our very best. What appeared to be the end of the segment continued when Shawn turned it up on the microphone like only the Heartbreak Kid can and said, “I want to remind you of a little story. Remember the story of Old Yeller? They had to take that dog out back and finish him. Come Sunday, the Showstopper’s going to take you, Old Yeller, out to the woodshed and put you out of your misery.” Shawn put his finger to my temple and repeated, “And put you out of your misery.”3
The crowd gasped and booed in disgust. I said to myself, “We got ’em.” I threw down the NWA Championship and unbuttoned my shirt to let everybody know that we weren’t going to wait for WrestleMania … that this was going to happen right now. I slapped Shawn in the face twice and dared him to do it right there. Shawn ended the segment by reiterating, “I’m gonna put you out of your misery.” Then he dropped the microphone. You could feel the tension fill the arena. You could feel the anger from the crowd as Shawn walked back up the ramp. It was perfect.
I mean no disrespect to anyone else, but looking back, no one could bring the emotion out of that story line and bring us to WrestleMania the way Shawn did.
The moment we got backstage, we knew we hit the segment out of the park. It was time to leave my last Monday Night Raw as a WWE Superstar and go home. I had to prepare for the final match of my career.
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ENTERING IMMORTALITY
Everything I am today, everything I have today, everything I will be, is because of the sport of professional wrestling.
March 2008
I looked out the plane window and saw the “Welcome to WrestleMania” logo on the grass. We were touching down on the runway in Orlando. What a difference a year makes …
I had some ups and downs with Vince McMahon in the first half of 2007. I was supposed to be in a program with Mr. Kennedy that would’ve taken us through WrestleMania 23. One night during Raw, Vince and I got into an argument backstage about something in a match. Later that night, WWE executive Bruce Prichard said Vince wanted me to lay into WWE Superstar Carlito during an interview segment. I was supposed to emasculate his on-air character for not having passion for the business and for leaving the arena before the main event was over. That’s one of the unwritten rules in our business: you never leave a show after your match. It’s disrespectful to the people who are performing after you. I spoke to Carlito beforehand to make sure he was okay with the general idea of what I was going to say.
When I got my cue and we crossed paths backstage, the thrashing began. “Have you ever stopped to think why guys like you are not in the main event? Maybe you’re a lazy, underachieving, son of a bitch lucky to be walking the halls of this building, lucky to be on the Raw roster, lucky to be here at all.” I continued, “Guys like you have no passion, no guts … you want all the money, you want all the glory, you want to fly first class. You don’t deserve it, because you haven’t worked for it. You haven’t paid the price.” And I continued my barrage of insults.