by Ric Flair
Paul served as a master of ceremonies and introduced people from my career who were special to me: my brother from Evolution, Batista; Ricky Steamboat; Harley Race; Greg Valentine, who was my tag team partner in the ’70s; and one of my favorite Horsemen from the ’90s, Dean Malenko. I was thrilled when Chris Jericho made his way to the ring. Since I returned to WWE, we had formed an awesome friendship. And then there was John Cena, another person who became a great friend. I returned to WWE in 2001; John debuted on SmackDown in 2002. I didn’t know that the best part was about to come.
Then Paul introduced my family. I never thought, in my wildest dreams, my family would walk the aisle and meet me in the ring like this. It was so special to be able to share all of this with them. I know how much being there meant to them. It was extra special for Reid because of the journey he wanted to take into the business. He knew it was going to be tough, but he was ready.
Shawn was the final person to come to the ring. I knew how much the last three months had meant to him.
Paul had another surprise for me: the entire WWE locker room came out to celebrate my career. The greatest thing as a professional is the respect of your peers. The show was going off the air, and I thought we were calling it a night. But Paul wasn’t done yet.
The bells tolled, and the Undertaker’s harrowing chords filled the arena. The most respected member of the WWE roster, the man who’s just as responsible as anyone else for WWE’s success, parted the roster and came into the ring. Undertaker shook my hand and saluted me in the greatest way possible: with thunder and lightning in the arena. He broke character and hugged me. Then he raised my arm to the crowd. It’s rare that Undertaker allows the public to see how great a man he is. That memory is one of my most vivid.
I thought the evening was finally over. Then Vince McMahon came to the ring. We hugged like I’ve worked for him my entire career. He took me to each side of the ring and raised my arm to the fans in the building. That’s the type of person Vince is. It was rare that Vince would show his personal side while the show in the arena was still going on. It was another special moment from a man who’s always been there for me.
It was time to wind down. I couldn’t leave WWE’s beautiful canvas without doing one more thing. I laid my jacket on the mat, bounced off the ropes, and dropped an elbow. And then for good measure, I bounced off the ropes at the other end of the ring and landed my knee drop. Now I was ready to exit the squared circle.
It was time to go back to the hotel. I was looking forward to going on vacation with Tiffany and then settling into my new role as an ambassador with WWE. Tomorrow would be the first day of the rest of my life.
4
I WAS IN PARADISE—IT WAS ALL A MIRAGE
I started to panic.
Three days removed from my final match …
Sheer terror is the only way I can describe it. I woke up in St. Croix in a luxury hotel suite with a beautiful view of the ocean. It’s not like I was waking up in traction in a hospital. But out of nowhere, I felt my heart pounding. I couldn’t breathe. It was like the oxygen was being sucked out of the room and the bed was getting smaller. I tried to sit up, but I felt dizzy. My thoughts were racing faster than my heart. I was out of control.
I’ve had panic attacks before. Sure, there were times in my life when I had self-confidence issues or when I felt anxious before a match, but this was different. All of a sudden, I realized that the world as I knew it had slipped away; my career was behind me, and I let it happen. Wrestling was my life. It was all I’d ever known. Now it was gone. My God, what had I done? What was I going to do?
Tiffany tried to talk me through it. Okay, I was the new WWE ambassador. I’d be making appearances for the company, I’d be on TV every now and then … that kind of thing. There were opportunities with large corporate partners outside my work with WWE that I’d be pursuing. And Tiffany and I were exploring some ventures together. But all I kept thinking about was, What about Ric Flair? What will happen to the Nature Boy? What will happen to me?
Like many of my contemporaries, I entered the wrestling business so early in life that this was all I really knew how to do. You try to diversify as you progress in your career: make investments, pursue business opportunities, and try new things, which I always did and enjoyed. Wrestling was always where I felt the most comfortable and where I enjoyed the most success. You have to accept that there will be a time when you can no longer perform in the ring on a full-time basis—or at all.
You have to realize that as a person and as a professional, it’s time to succeed at something else. It’s difficult, because you still have this measuring stick for yourself—an expectation that your level of success outside the industry should be the same as your accomplishments inside it. When people see you, they immediately identify you as the person you used to be. You try to evolve from that persona, but it’s a real challenge for people to look at you in an objective way. In one sense, it’s a testament to your success. In another, it’s like being typecast. I was always comfortable trying new things. At one point, I owned and operated eleven Gold’s Gyms. When I sold them, half the money went to my second wife. That’s divorce, American-style.
I looked forward to the challenge of finding something new while still being involved with WWE because I loved the company and business so much. At least I thought I looked forward to that challenge—until now.
The person who had the most difficult time seeing me other than the Nature Boy was me. When I think about it, the difference between the name “Nature Boy” Ric Flair and my legal name of Richard Morgan Fliehr is purely semantics.
The essence of this individual, the spirit, and what drives him all come from me.
Ever since high school, I’ve appreciated nice things. I always liked the idea of being well dressed, having a beautiful watch on my wrist and a shine on my leather shoes. In Minnesota, I was raised in an upper-middle-class neighborhood.
My father served in the US Navy. After he was honorably discharged in 1945, he returned to Minnesota to practice obstetrics and gynecology. He also obtained a master’s degree in theater and arts at the University of Minnesota. He was affiliated with the Theatre in the Round Players and directed and performed in several productions while he practiced medicine. In addition, my dad was the president of the Theatre in the Round Players and was the president of the American Association of Community Theatre.
My mother was a writer. She wrote newspaper and magazine articles and coauthored a book about the famous Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. She was a marketing executive at the Guthrie. I was adopted as a baby, allegedly stolen, in a Tennessee black market baby scandal that received national media attention. When my parents told me that I was adopted, I didn’t care. I never had an interest in finding my biological parents. To me, Kay and Dick Fliehr were my parents. They took care of me. They loved me. I loved them. I look back and laugh when I think that they didn’t really get a true sense of what they had on their hands until I was a teenager.
I got into a lot of trouble when I was a kid. It was never malicious or violent toward others, but it was mischievous. I drove my motorcycle to the lake when my parents weren’t home. When I was fourteen, my mom and dad caught me driving my friends around town in their car. When, as an underaged teen, I was caught trying to buy alcohol, well, that was the last straw.
My parents felt that I needed a more disciplined environment. They sent me to Wayland Academy, an all-boys boarding school in Wisconsin. I was around kids from all over the country who were there for the same reason I was. The main difference between me and them was that they were from very affluent families. They were part of a world that seemed like an elite society to me. I was at the school a few days when someone handed me an ID that said I was eighteen so I could go into bars. I went on spring break with my friends and their families. It was amazing.
During the spring of 1966, I hitchhiked all the way from Minneapolis to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was thirty degrees belo
w zero the day I started. I remember stepping off a truck in Macon, Georgia. I had never seen anything like Macon in my life. From there, I hitched a ride down the Florida Turnpike and cruised right into Fort Lauderdale where I met my friend Bruce McArthur.
One year we rented an apartment above a beauty salon. The next year, we rented a place directly over the Elbow Room, which was the hot spot in Fort Lauderdale. The year after that, we stayed at Bruce’s mom’s house. Those were three phenomenal years. Going to Fort Lauderdale as a teenager back then was unbelievable—the weather, the women, the partying—and the atmosphere was something out of a movie; it was anything goes. That was when I really developed a taste for the finer things in life. I liked it.
When I was wrestling for Verne, at the suggestion of Wahoo McDaniel, I moved to Charlotte in April of 1974 to work for Jim Crockett’s Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling territory. My first wife, Leslie, was still in Minnesota, and I left our car with her. I lived in a bad part of Charlotte where I rented a room for nine dollars a night. I hitchhiked wherever I needed to go. I had to find a place to live and a way to get around—fast.
I went into Jimmy Crockett’s office the day after my first match at the Charlotte Coliseum. Jimmy told me he was impressed with my match the night before and asked if there was anything he could do to help me out. I told him I needed to get on my feet and find a place to live and a way to get around. After I told him I wanted to move my family to Charlotte, he gave me a check for $2,000. Within a month from that day, I was making $1,000 a week working for the Crockett family. I paid Jimmy back, and the first thing I did to celebrate my new job and income: I bought a black, four-door Cadillac Fleetwood.
This beauty had power windows, power locks, power seats, cruise control, and an AM/FM radio with an eight-track cassette player. There was nothing like a Cadillac in those days. When it came time to become the Nature Boy, it was like putting my hand in a glove. I liked a certain lifestyle, but I wanted to work for it. Nothing was handed to me.
Looking back to the previous seventy-two hours, I couldn’t believe that WWE had taken so much time from Raw to pay tribute to me. The goal at the end of the TV show was to make sure that people tuned in the following week, but I wasn’t returning the following week. I wasn’t coming back as part of a new story line with a new opponent in a few weeks. As an in-ring performer, I was gone. Forever. I was still really touched that the company had given me that moment with my family and my peers, but I also knew that the company and the fans were saying goodbye to the era I represented.
It was there in my hotel room that I realized I was not emotionally prepared to walk away from wrestling. I didn’t know how I could make it through a vacation with Tiffany in St. Croix. The rest of the week, I was preoccupied. My mind was elsewhere. I was also trying to prevent another panic attack.
I’d never felt like this before. Not even after a never-ending series of standoffs with WCW executive Jim Herd in the late 1980s.
Jim Herd came into WCW sometime in 1988 or 1989. He was a friend of Jack Petrik, a top executive at Turner Broadcasting. At one point, Jim was the channel manager at the KPLR television station in St. Louis that broadcast the Wrestling at the Chase program. When Jack hired him to run WCW he was an executive for Pizza Hut. I’m not saying that someone can’t come into our industry from another profession and be a success, but it’s important to become familiar with the product, the audience, and your talent roster before making major decisions. So here was a guy who was a station manager at a big TV station that produced a very popular wrestling program, who basically knew nothing about wrestling when he arrived at WCW. Except that his station produced this great show. Not him, the station. That’s like someone who worked in the finance department at Nike telling people he worked with the team who created the Air Jordan sneaker.
It seemed everything Jim touched during his tenure with WCW was destined for failure. One of his “big” ideas was to create a tag team who performed under masks; they had a bell in their corner, and they’d ring it when one of them performed an impressive move. He called them the Ding Dongs. They had bells around their wrists and ankles so the audience could hear bells chiming every time Ding or Dong moved. They debuted at Clash of the Champions VII: Guts and Glory and were booed for most of their match. Jim Herd was recruited to Turner Broadcasting to run a major company that was trying to compete with Vince McMahon and the WWE.
Another idea Jim had was to create a tag team called the Humpbacks. The premise—and I don’t know if I’ve ever used a term so loosely—was that since these guys had humpbacks, they couldn’t be pinned on the mat. The only way to pin them was to dig a hole outside the ring, and put one of them on his back in the hole.
I remember thinking about the NWA’s incredible history and its unbelievable tradition in tag team wrestling: Ole and Gene Anderson, the Briscos, Slaughter and Kernodle, Steamboat and Youngblood, Arn and Ole, the Rock ’n’ Roll Express, the Midnight Express, Ivan and Nikita Koloff, Arn and Tully, the Road Warriors, the Freebirds, the Steiner Brothers, Doom … and this guy wants to enter a new decade with innovative concepts like the Ding Dongs and Humpbacks? This is what WCW was going to do with Ted Turner’s money to compete with Vince?
Jim wanted me to change my name, cut my hair, and put in a diamond earring—all to appeal to a younger demographic. I wanted to make an effort, so I agreed to cut my hair—what a mistake! I remember flying out of the Charlotte airport the following week and no one knowing who I was. I almost lost it right there in the terminal. I couldn’t wait for my hair to grow back!
Even if you didn’t know anything about our industry, if you’re evaluating your talent and looking at my body of work from the first Starrcade to the Four Horsemen to the Great American Bash and War Games events to my matches with Steamboat in ’89—why would you tell me I needed to be repackaged as a different character? Jim’s idea was to get rid of the name Ric Flair and call me Spartacus. I remember Kevin Sullivan saying, “Why don’t we take the number seven off Mickey Mantle’s uniform while we’re at it?”
To make matters worse, I was second-guessed and undermined at every turn. They tried to manipulate me when it came to signing a new contract. I didn’t understand why. I was sitting in Daytona, Florida, with Arn Anderson, Terry Taylor, and Kevin Sullivan, and Jim called and told me that he wanted me to fly to a show and drop the title to Lex Luger.
I said, “We’re right in the middle of a contract negotiation. Let’s get this worked out.”
He said, “No.”
His usual demeanor was hollering and screaming, very demanding. I went back and talked to Beth, my wife at the time, and meanwhile, he called me back and said, “You know what? Just come to Columbus, Georgia, and drop it to Barry Windham. We don’t want you at the [Great American] Bash.”
I made up my mind then and there that it was not worth this. I flew back to Charlotte and left Beth and the kids in Daytona. While I was packing my bags, Herd called me at the house. He said, “Don’t worry about it. We don’t want you.” So between me leaving Florida and flying back home, they had a meeting and said, “Let’s just strip him of the championship.” I said, “Okay, that’s fine.” Then he told me he was sending Doug Dillinger over to pick up the belt. I said to make sure he had a check for $25,000 plus interest, because I still had my deposit down from my initial NWA championship run. The NWA was still its own entity. After Crockett sold to Ted Turner, Ted tried to buy the NWA. There were legal reasons that prevented Ted from doing that. The name of Crockett’s Saturday program on WTBS, World Championship Wrestling, was used as the company name. That’s how the company got the letters WCW.
When I said, “Send the twenty-five grand plus interest,” he said, “Stick it up your ass. Keep the belt.” While I didn’t listen to the former part of that statement, I was more than happy to oblige with the latter. So I did. The next thing I did was call Vince McMahon.
I asked him if he still wanted me to come. He said yes, and when I told him I
had the belt, he said, “Bring that too.” I flew to New York, and we made the deal. I was going to be a WWE Superstar. In the meantime, the executives in WCW realized they screwed up. Now everybody was on top of Herd, from Jack Petrik on down. I went home and talked to Beth. WCW decided to fly me to Atlanta. They offered me three times what I’d ever made in my life to stay. But I made my decision based on the fact that, one, I gave Vince my word, and two, my wife, my lawyer, and a bunch of my trusted friends said that once WCW had me locked into a contract, they would never let me go. I might get paid, but I’d be miserable. No, thanks.
So I left. I sent the NWA World Heavyweight Championship to Vince. In July of 1991, the championship appeared on WWE programming in the arms of Bobby “the Brain” Heenan. On the September 9 episode of Prime Time Wrestling, I made my WWE debut alongside my great friend the Brain.
When I came home from St. Croix, I met with my agent about our planned projects and appearances. WWE allowed me to do outside work as long as it wasn’t televised or recorded for an independent wrestling company and it didn’t conflict with WWE bookings. I was not going to do anything that tarnished my legacy. I received offers from promoters all over the world to have “one last match.” This included a friend in Japan who offered me a huge six-figure salary for a ten-day tour of Japan. And I knew we could have great matches together. I turned it down. I turned them all down. Nothing was going to take away from the prestige and splendor of that WrestleMania XXIV weekend. Nothing.