by Ric Flair
When I first saw AJ Styles, I thought he was outstanding. He was a handsome guy who had a great look, could physically do anything in the ring, and was recognized by the audience as one of the first stars of the company.
AJ was a tremendous athlete and the TNA World Heavyweight Champion. The idea was for me to come into the company and act as his mentor. That’s one of the things I wanted to do in front of the cameras and behind the scenes: I wanted to help bring the younger talent along. I looked forward to working with them and teaching them whatever I could.
I thought the idea of working with AJ was great. Like any good mentor would do, I started walking him to the ring, being in his corner, and, of course, interfering in his matches to help him keep the championship. I became concerned when I learned that individuals within the company wanted to take my mentoring in a completely different direction.
TNA management wanted AJ to become the new Ric Flair. They wanted him to dye his hair blond, wear a robe to the ring, and use my mannerisms. I didn’t want AJ to be the next Ric Flair. I wanted him to be AJ Styles. I don’t want to speak for AJ, but I’m confident in saying that he felt the same way. And he should have; he had it all. AJ just needed time to put everything together. That feeling was reaffirmed for me the night I debuted with the company and saw the excellent match he had with Kurt Angle.
Kurt and I became friends when we worked together in WWE. He’s the only person in the history of our business who was an Olympic gold medalist in amateur freestyle wrestling. Kurt was a pure machine in the ring. The only other person I saw come into our business from amateur wrestling who succeeded like Kurt was Jack Brisco. If someone could last in the ring with Kurt Angle, he was the real deal. AJ did.
I was settling into my new surroundings at TNA. After a little more than a month, Dixie Carter and Hulk hosted a press conference at Universal Studios in Orlando. TNA announced that it was moving the Impact! program to Monday nights. This was to go head-to-head with WWE and Monday Night Raw from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. That made me nervous.
I understood the idea. I understood that the dedicated fans who closely follow our business wanted to elevate an organization so that there could be something similar to the “Monday Night War” in the ’90s, or Jim Crockett and the NWA versus Vince and WWE in the ’80s. Those were special eras that will likely not be duplicated. I thought that for TNA the time wasn’t right.
At the beginning of 2010, the episodes of Impact! did well in the context of TNA programming. That should have been a promising sign. I didn’t think TNA had the brand awareness with viewers or the advertising budget to compete with WWE. At that point, WWE had been around for close to fifty years. On the air since 1993, Raw had been an institution of the Monday night TV schedule. TNA had only been in existence almost eight years.
On TV, my story line was set up for the first episode of Monday night’s Impact! I came out of retirement to perform in a tag team match with AJ as my partner. The story was set up where AJ and I teamed together to face Hulk and a monster-type character called Abyss.
By the end of the match, a friend returned to TNA TV as a surprise: it was Sting. Sting had performed in TNA since the early days of the promotion. At this stage of his career, Sting still looked great, kept his character fresh, and was giving some of the best interview segments of his career. I was so happy to work with him again. I told him the same thing I’d been telling him for years: “Get to WWE before it’s too late.”
I understood TNA wanted to make a run at bringing Impact! to Monday nights. If the show drew somewhere between 1.0 and 1.7 million viewers in the Nielsen ratings on a Thursday night, what could it do on Monday, which is considered the night to watch wrestling? My concern that it wasn’t the right time was soon validated. Two months from the announcement at Universal Studios, Impact! was moved back to Thursday nights. It was good to have a goal; it was great to see people in the company excited; and I think that, in time, it may have been a good move. But not at that time. I just thought it was premature.
Despite TNA moving back to Thursdays two months after announcing the move to Mondays, the first few months working for TNA were excellent. I was able to let loose a little bit in front of the cameras and on the microphone. I also let loose while I enjoyed the nightlife in Orlando, and at one point, I enjoyed it a little too much and had to take a break.
The people who worked for the company worked really hard. Dixie Carter treated me very well. TNA’s schedule gave me a lot of flexibility, which was something I liked. It gave me time to plan a life with my new bride, though at the time, I didn’t think being at home would present so many problems.
From the second I met Jackie, one of the things I liked about her was that she didn’t know anything about me—who I was or what I did. It just didn’t matter to her. If she wanted to have dinner with me, she just wanted to share a meal and spend time together.
In a small, private ceremony, Jackie and I got married in November of 2009. This time my best “man” was my agent, Melinda.
Within a few months of our marriage, I saw a side of Jackie that I had never noticed before. Her way of handling a disagreement was to become combative. One night, we got into an argument, and she attacked me like someone on the street. It concerned me a great deal, and I tried to work on it with her.
I knew Jackie had a difficult childhood. She grew up in a foster home. Jackie had a tough side to her. I didn’t expect it to be physicality projected on me when we got into an argument.
Thankfully, work always stepped in to quiet the waters of a turbulent home life, and my matches at TNA helped calm those stormy seas.
TNA taped its programs at Universal Studios theme park. The wrestling is almost treated as an attraction at the park. People who are walking through the park can come in and watch the show for free. WCW did that for a while too.
It’s different performing in front of a crowd that’s paid. You have to have paying fans see your product. They invest their time and money into your characters and into your story lines. As a performer, that’s when you’re able to see what’s working in your performance and what’s not. You’re receiving real reactions. Someone I worked with that summer certainly had his share of authentic crowd reactions: Jay Lethal.
One of my favorites at TNA was Jay Lethal. Jay’s Black Machismo character picked up a ton of steam when Jay became known for his dead-ringer imitation of Randy Savage. When I got to TNA, I heard Jay did a great impression of me in the locker room. I suggested I work with him.
We began our story line in the spring. In a matter of weeks, we were full steam ahead. Fast-forward to the summer of 2010. I was introducing my new group, Fortune, and Jay came out in a suit and did a spot-on impression of me. He did me better than I did. There were times during the almost ten-minute segment that he made me break character and laugh. Jay was another person I hoped would make it to WWE and someone I wished I worked with when I was in my prime. He’s a tremendous talent.
I continued my work with AJ and added some fabulous talent to Fortune—namely, James Storm and Robert Roode, the team known as Beer Money. They were the best team in wrestling. I hoped they would move up to the WWE, but their contracts were over. Frankie Kazarian was part of the group—another excellent talent.
In working with young talent, I wanted to emphasize the importance of having confidence in themselves and their ability, to know who they are. I wanted them to realize how crucial it is in this profession to know how you’re different as a talent from everyone else in the locker room.
I thought the company made a mistake trying to have their characters resemble my look. I didn’t think they were fully comfortable in the suits and robes and jackets. I wanted them to be themselves, because that’s when you get the best performances from people.
Toward the end of my first year with TNA, the way the company was structured and the way the lines of communication traveled became frustrating. As a talent, I felt like you could never get anything approved so you could move forwar
d. Management would tell me one thing and then do another. You would think something was happening, and then someone would speak with a different executive and the objective would change. You didn’t find out what the new, approved direction was until moments before you were in front of the cameras. That’s challenging for even the most experienced performer. People had good ideas. I felt it was very difficult to get anything moving. It was a reminder that there’s nothing like the professionalism and dedication of working for Vince McMahon and WWE. I learned that after I finished up with WWE in 1993 and returned to WCW.
When I heard that a friend who worked for WWE was coming to TNA, I hoped he’d be able to facilitate change. Bruce Prichard joined TNA as an executive in the talent department. I wished that Bruce’s track record of success during his more than twenty years with WWE would add structure to TNA’s corporate environment, bring excitement to creative plans, and help develop characters.
The end of the year also brought me into the middle of the ring with someone I’ve had quite a history with: Mick Foley. I first met Mick in 1991; Jim Cornette and Jim Ross introduced us. Mick came into WCW. I left the company about six months later to go to WWE. We were on the same roster again, and I was backstage in Germany when Mick’s ear got ripped off in a match against Vader. Mick went to ECW and then debuted in WWE in 1996. I didn’t see him again until my return to WWE in 2001.
Things took a turn in 1999 after Mick’s first book was published. For almost three years, wherever I went, people came up to me and asked for my opinion about what Mick said about me in the book. I didn’t read it. To paraphrase, Mick mentioned that I was a great wrestler but a terrible booker, referring to our time together in WCW during the ’90s. There was that misconception again, that I was the booker or in charge of the booking committee. Those notions bothered me for a long time.
When I came to WWE, I thought Mick and I worked well together. WrestleMania XX will always be a fun memory for me: Batista, Randy Orton, and myself versus Mick and The Rock—Evolution against The Rock ’n’ Sock Connection.
When my first book came out in 2004, I responded to Mick. In brief, I gave my opinion on the hard-core wrestling style and genre. I called Mick a “glorified stuntman.” I never took away from Mick’s success in our business, but things escalated quickly. We got into an altercation backstage at a WWE event in Huntsville, Alabama.
Mick approached me while I was sitting at a table with Arn Anderson. I extended my hand to shake Mick’s. He wouldn’t shake. He asked me to sign a copy of my book to him. I took that as a show of disrespect. I got up from my chair, and I punched Mick. Other members of the roster came and kept us apart. That was something we both regretted. Shortly thereafter, any ill will between us was forgotten.
As fate would have it, we ended up sitting next to each other on a flight back from a WWE tour. Before everyone took their seats for the fourteen-hour flight from the Philippines to Los Angeles, Paul and John Cena came up to us separately and asked if either of us wanted to switch seats with them. We both said no and that we were fine. Were we? Saying hello and shaking hands at an event is one thing, even working together in a match is another, but sitting next to each other for almost fourteen hours in an airplane flying halfway around the world? We were better than fine.
Shortly after takeoff, we started talking about everything but wrestling. We had more in common than just being wrestling fans as kids. We both were devoted to our children. I told Mick he certainly had a better track record at being married than I did. By the time we landed in Los Angeles, it was like we were old friends. We looked forward to the next six hours flying back to New York.
One of my favorite matches in my career was my “I Quit” match with Mick at SummerSlam in 2006. I was always up for trying new things. I had never done anything with barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bats and thumbtacks. I thought we put on a heck of a show that night in Boston.
Because our past issues became public knowledge, when we shared a locker room in TNA, some people in the company thought we still harbored anger and resentment toward one another. They didn’t know that Mick and I were past that and had become friends.
One night on Impact!, we were backstage preparing to go out for an interview on TV. Terry Taylor told Mick, “You and Ric go out there and do that thing between you that only you guys can understand.” Mick told me he was going to challenge me to a match. I told him I was going to say something about him being a good father and he should keep it that way. That was the premise we agreed on. Over that ten-minute span, we had one of our most intense face-to-face interview segments ever. We wanted the audience to feel like they needed to see the match between us. We knew we could bring out the best in each other and that fans would talk about the match after it took place.
I think our Last Man Standing Match delivered. Whether it’s in the ring during a match or on the microphone, Mick always gives it everything he’s got. And the fans love it.
* * *
I kept up with WWE and what my friends were up to on TV. When I heard that Shawn Michaels was announced as an inductee to the 2011 Hall of Fame, I knew I had to be there.
When I got off the plane in Atlanta for WrestleMania weekend, I had a lot of different emotions. Atlanta’s one of those cities that I’ll always feel close to. So many years of my career were spent in Atlanta—performing at the Omni, working at WTBS, and going to CNN Center. Those memories continued as a WWE Superstar: working in a match against Vince at the 2002 Royal Rumble and setting up the match between Evolution and the Rock ’n’ Sock Connection for WrestleMania XX.
I couldn’t wait to arrive at Philips Arena during the Hall of Fame rehearsal. Going through the building, I saw so many friends I missed working with. This would be the first time in two years I’d see Shawn in person. Every day when I look at the Rolex that Shawn gave me, I’m reminded of my retirement and the special friendship we share.
To commemorate Shawn’s induction, I wanted to give him a gift. Knowing he’s a Texan at heart, I gave him a sterling silver belt buckle with HBK engraved on it. We hugged. I told him I’d be in the audience that night for his induction. I think there were some people at WWE who were surprised that I was there. There was no way I was missing Shawn being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.
That night marked the first time since the 2007 Hall of Fame ceremony in Detroit that I had the opportunity to enjoy the event from the audience; I couldn’t be on camera because of my contract with TNA. I marvel at the Hall of Fame production every year. It was tough not to have a great night because I sat next to Pat Patterson.
Shawn’s speech was very moving. I was grateful to be there and happy for my friend, who I believe will go down as the greatest performer in the history of our profession. I was so proud of Shawn. I’ll always have a difficult time articulating what my relationship with him means to me.
A couple of days later, I went back home to Charlotte. I reflected on the weekend, but I had no idea that a year later I’d be back at the WWE Hall of Fame, this time onstage as an inductee—again.
* * *
In the beginning of 2012, WWE announced that the Four Horsemen would be inducted into the Hall of Fame. I remember right after we got a call about the induction, J. J. Dillon called me and said, “Are you coming?”
I would be the first two-time WWE Hall of Fame inductee. Once again, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I was also under contract to another company. While I didn’t think this would be a problem, I had to have the conversation.
Dixie Carter was very gracious. She understood how important it was to me to receive this honor in person. She congratulated me. I was off to Miami.
I was excited because Ashley and Reid were going to join me on the trip. Reid kept training and was scheduled to meet with WWE executives to see what he needed to do to be considered for another tryout. Ashley built an incredible personal training business for herself at a private studio in Charlotte and was doing great. It took her a little while to get settl
ed after graduating from college and getting married. I was so proud of them both and wanted to have them share this experience with me.
When I arrived in Miami, I was greeted by the familiar feeling of excitement when WWE and WrestleMania take over a city.
After the storybook ending to my career at WrestleMania XXIV, I didn’t think I’d return to the Hall of Fame as an inductee. It was surreal to make that familiar trip through the talent entrance in American Airlines Arena and be backstage wearing a tuxedo at the WWE Hall of Fame.
When I saw Arn, Tully, J. J., and Barry, it felt like I had just seen them at Raw in Orlando the night after my retirement match. Now we were backstage together. I fought back tears looking at the Horsemen career retrospective video that played for the audience.
To remember how we looked back then and to see these men now—well, it was a special moment. When I listened to Dusty Rhodes, our greatest on-air rival, sing our praises, I thought back to our battles with the Dream. And poor J. J., the night the Road Warriors hit him with their Doomsday Device finisher in the War Games match, he dislocated his shoulder.
Dusty’s induction speech was the type of magic that only the American Dream can deliver. I never thought that one of my idols, who helped break me into this industry, would one day induct me into the Hall of Fame.
When we took the stage as a unit, it was like being transported back in time. It was fitting that J. J. Dillon, our manager, was the first to speak.
J. J. Dillon was the perfect man to lead the Horsemen to the ring. And he really was our manager in so many ways. J. J. was there for us every step of the way: making travel arrangements, setting schedules, confirming travel, and giving us advice. He looked out for us like we were his kids.
In front of the cameras, everything J. J. did meant something. Everything he said had a purpose. J. J. Dillon is a true student of the game who has an incredible history in the business. When J. J. was a kid, he loved wrestling so much that he was the president of the Johnny Valentine fan club. After he graduated high school, he got his break in the business as a referee for Vince McMahon Sr.