Ric Flair emerged victorious in the last match of his professional wrestling career, but he admitted that it left him in a dangerous condition.
On July 31, the Nashville Municipal Auditorium in Tennessee played host to ‘The Nature Boy’s’ final dance. Despite the advice of the public, the 73-year-old had one last itch, and in the end, he couldn’t resist scratching.
He joined forces with his son-in-law Andrade El Idolo in a tag team match against Jay Lethal and Jeff Jarrett. While the veteran spent the bulk of the contest hyping up the crowd, he made his presence known with an array of punches and chops. And in an amusing, albeit slightly concerning moment, Flair faked a heart attack to land a brutal eye poke.
However, he faced a degree of adversity in the form of a Suplex before landing his iconic Figure Four Leg Lock to bag his final victory. He then left the ring to rapturous applause from a star-studded crowd featuring fellow legends like The Undertaker and Mick Foley.
But despite the occasion providing a beautiful send-off to the all-time great, the ageing wrestler admitted that the match left him in a bad way.
Ric Flair left in a bad condition during final match
The sporting icon has had an array of health problems in recent years. In 2017, after excessive alcohol abuse, Flair developed kidney and heart issues. Therefore, medical experts decided to place him in a medically induced coma. This obviously left fans extremely concerned for his farewell match, and in a recent interview, he proved that those worries were well founded.
Speaking on his To Be The Man podcast, he confessed: “I don’t think people realised that I passed out twice. Well what happened was my regimentation for training was so strict that I kept my weight, I wanted my perfect weight to be like 220 going in. So on the last day, the last day and a half, aside from all the work that we had planned for me to do, I didn’t hydrate. I had it in my mind that I had to weigh 219.
“So I went to the ring, and I’m like 217 pounds, and what happened during the body of the match is I just became dehydrated. I actually, when I was standing on the apron, I looked at Jay, which started a wheel of motion. I said, ‘Man, I think I’m getting sick’ because I was getting light-headed. Nothing to do with my heart or nothing to do with my intestines. I was getting light-headed. I’m sure a lot of it was nerves as well. So I think Jay said, ‘Guys, we gotta move this along’ when that isn’t what I meant. But to the point when [Andrade] came over and said, ‘Your turn, sir. Your turn, sir.’ So I got in, and I didn’t know where we were in the match because I had missed about clearly like 10 seconds of it.”
He continued: “So then when I went outside, I think everybody just jumped the gun a little bit, and I saw where Booker T, who’s really a close friend of mine, thought it was bad to do this, that was strictly on the fly to get everybody to slow down. Because everybody, if you look back on it, everybody just came all together at one time. We were far from the end of the match. So I just said to myself, ‘How do I get everybody to slow down?’ That wasn’t anticipated, that wasn’t called, I just did it. I apologize if I scared anybody, but I couldn’t think of any way to reorganize because we had everybody on the floor at one time, which was never planned out like that.”
Flair explained that Jarrett didn’t want to Suplex him before adding that he then passed out again.
“Then Jeff, out of respect for me, he lifted me up to the top turnbuckle, and Jay was gonna give me a Superplex, which would have blown the roof off the joint. But he was worried about my health, Jeff, sincerely. He said, ‘We can’t do that, Naitch. We can’t do it.’ I said, ‘Yes I can.’ So rather than look awkward, I came down with him, then Jay came in and gave me the Suplex, and we were back rolling.
“Then at that point, along came the guitar, right? Down, bingo. Well, I was down. I passed out again, just passed out, and [Andrade] is going, ‘Sir, you have to wake up. I have the brass knuckles. Sir, you have to wake up.’ Then I woke up, I knew where we were, and we’re home. But I swear to god, twice during the match, I went completely black.”
However, taking the advice of The Undertaker, he had some Gatorade and felt a lot better.
“My hand started trembling, but it was all dehydration. I had two doctors in there right away with me and everything, and The Undertaker came running in. I had like six beers there. He took them out of my hand and said, ‘You’re drinking two Gatorades first.’ So I drank two, and that’s all it was. I underestimated the importance of keeping hydrated, which is really big. Especially when I lost that much weight and trained that hard.”
Featured Image Credit: Getty
