To Be the Man (Autobiography) (2004)

Written by Ric Flair with Keith Elliot Greenberg and edited by Mark Madden
Grade: A+

As bad as Ric Flair was in figuring out his finances, I give him credit for at least attempting to try and figure out how to invest. At one point, he talks about getting into real estate and owning 11 Gold’s Gyms, with one doing well in St. Martin until a hurricane destroyed the island. The country went bankrupt, the government put a “phony tax lien” on his business and took “half a million” out of his bank account. Then, they put about $230,000 worth of his gym equipment up for auction. Plus, his insurance company in St. Martin went bankrupt. What terrible luck for someone trying to make a good decision financially for seemingly the first time in his life…

Summary

“This book is dedicated to my fans. The blood, sweat, and tears were all for you.”

Triple H does the Introduction section and opens by relating Ric Flair’s general aura to the scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High where the one guy tells his friend that to be cool, you have to make wherever you are the place to be. As a kid, Triple H saw that even Flair’s opponent would come out of the match looking like a star simply because he worked with Ric Flair. Even though he was a heel that his dad hated, Triple H loved Ric Flair and considers him the greatest interview in the wrestling business. He goes on about how he wanted to be great in the wrestling business, be Ric Flair, and has emulated a lot of his style. This includes Ric’s worth ethic as champion, dressing the part, and showing up on time no matter how hard he partied the night before. He calls Ric the “supreme professional” and the greatest wrestler of all time. Even at this time in 2004, he still gets one of the biggest reactions on the show because he’s still so entertaining. When Triple H drives with Flair, he’ll always mention something about having fun in the particular town they’re in way back in the day, but he says it pretty much everywhere. Flair has stories for days, and it includes onscreen, behind the scenes, and his personal life. Usually, he keeps it close to the chest, but To Be the Man is the first time he’s out in the open about everything. In closing, Triple H talks about how some people have become disappointed when meeting their idol because “the image that you build up in your mind is often unachievable”. Personally, he put Ric Flair on a high pedestal, but Ric exceeded his expectations after working alongside him and he hopes everyone feels the same way about this autobiography.

In Chapter 1 (“Black Market Baby”), Ric talks about others calling him the greatest professional wrestler who ever lived and how he went on the road and wrestled every single day – twice on Saturday, twice on Sunday, every birthday, every holiday, every anniversary – for twenty straight years. He’s spent more than thirty years to prove to himself and everyone that he could be the best at what he chose to do for a living. He goes on about how he feels at home in the ring, but “it’s what lurks outside of it that scares me”. Despite the pain felt in the ring, he argues that nothing can be as ruthless as the political sabotage inside the dressing room or promoter’s office. When fans would say he could have a five-star match with anyone, behind the scenes he would be called an “old piece of shit that didn’t understand the public, couldn’t read ratings, and deserved to be bankrupted along with my family”. He was told this for years. By the time he got to the WWE in 2001, he didn’t even know if the wrestlers liked or respected him or knew about his legacy. In fact, he began to wonder if he had a legacy at all because his confidence was so shot. This is why May 19, 2003, in Greenville, South Carolina meant so much to him. After Monday Night Raw was over, the WWE held a celebration for him in the ring and he couldn’t help but cry. The boys and the fans appreciated his legacy and all of his trials and tribulations, and he felt honored in that moment.

Going back to the beginning of his life, Ric says he assumes his mother probably thought he was stillborn because that’s what they told a lot of the young mothers whose kids ended up with the Tennesse Children’s Home Society in Memphis. They would say their babies were dead and they just needed to sign adoption papers. Some of the girls were poor, uneducated, or even under sedation. The Tennessee Children’s Home Society pulled the same scam on single mothers, promising that their kids would be kept in a safe place until the girls could come and get them. The judge had been in on the whole scheme, taking away infants from people on public assistance. He even brings up how one woman in the Western State Hospital for the Insane had a new baby with an inmate every year and she’d sign anything afterwards. Shockingly enough, this is all real. 60 Minutes did a report on it, and Mary Tyler Moore won an Emmy for the TV Movie Stolen Babies based on it. Before the governor of Tennessee called for an investigation in 1950, five thousand children had been taken away and adopted by parents from all over the country including Joan Crawford (whose Mommie Dearest daughter supposedly came from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society) and the people who became his parents, Dick and Kay Fliehr. They were born in 1918 and met at the University of Minnesota. Kay was born Kathleen Virginia Kinsmiller out of Brainerd, Minnesota. She wrote articles for newspapers and magazines. In 1968, she wrote the book In Search of Audience about the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Ric’s father Richard Reid Fliehr was salutatorian of his high school class in Virginia, Minnesota. He loved the theater, took pre-med courses, was a medic in the navy during World War II, and was an obstetrician and gynecologist. He also went back and got his master’s and doctorate in theater and English. He went on the road to perform in plays and because president of the American Community Theater Association while his practice was the biggest in Minneapolis. He delivered thousands of babies including wrestling promoter Gary Juster, Gene Kiniski’s kids, and “Superstar” Billy Graham’s daughter.

Ironically, Ric’s parents couldn’t have kids of their own. Ric’s mother had a daughter who died almost immediately after being born and she couldn’t get pregnant again, so she began corresponding with the Tennesse Children’s Home Society. Ric’s father’s salary was a bit of an issue, but it was explained that any child they adopt would live a privileged life and would most likely go to college since Richard was doing his residency at the time. Eventually, they were able to secure baby Ric. By the way, Ric doesn’t know his technical birthname. It could be “Fred Phillips, Fred Demaree, or Fred Stewart”. He was born in Memphis on February 25th, 1949. His biological mother’s name was Olive Phillips, Demaree, or Stewart. His biological father is listed as Luther Phillips. Considering all the lies the Tennesse Children’s Home Society told, Ric doesn’t know the actual circumstances surrounding his birth. The agency just said that Olive and Luther Phillips abandoned and deserted him there on March 12th, 1949. On March 18th, he was delivered to Detroit to his parents and was renamed Richard Morgan Fliehr. He was taken home shortly after to Edina, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis. Ric admits he never looked at his adoption papers until he started researching for this book because he was never curious and still isn’t. His parents didn’t keep his adoption a secret either and described it as one of the happiest events of their lives. He’d have a birthday party and then they would all go to celebrate his “anniversary” at an Italian restaurant on March 18th. In the summer, they’d take vacations that lasted three weeks and they’d drive all over the United States to everywhere you could imagine. Every year for Ric’s birthday, his dad would take him to the wrestling matches of the AWA. He liked the interviews more than the matches, with Reggie “Crusher” Lisowski being his favorite. Crusher called himself “The man who made Milwaukee famous” and claimed that he trained by “running with a beer keg on each shoulder and dancing with fat Polish women afterward”. Sometimes after winning matches, him and his tag partner Dick the Bruiser would start hitting each other because they were so excited.

He’d call his dad over to watch Crusher’s interviews and he’d laugh and walk away afterwards. He knew Ric was a fan, but it wasn’t his thing. This is when Ric started to realize how different he was from his parents. They loved theater and education, but Ric didn’t care about anything but sports. By 12 years old, Ric was already Ric Flair, just a younger version of the one we see today. He was never a follower and was at center stage at every party. His craziest friend in junior high school was a guy named Dan Piper. Dan came to Edina from Nashville and was a year older than Ric. The two would get into a lot of trouble. As early as 8th grade, Ric and Dan stole a car and drove some girls to the dances at Hopkins Roller Rink. It was around thirty below zero and Ric didn’t know how to work the car, so he accidentally turned on the air conditioner instead of the heater and froze the engine block. There was another night when the two took Ric’s dad’s car to where some girls were having a slumber party. They sneaked out a few of them in their pajamas and were in the car when one girl hit the brake pedal. Cops showed up and contacted the girls’ families, and one of the fathers was so irate he wanted to press charges. It was Father’s Day morning when Ric’s dad arrived at the jail to pick Ric up. Though he’s not diagnosed officially, Ric thinks he has ADHD because he could never concentrate and would get into trouble all the time for not listening. He couldn’t slow down enough to read or study. Even today, he doesn’t read books and just prefers magazines and such, which is ironic for the first-time author. He didn’t get into a lot of fights when he was younger, he was a good athlete and was relatively happy with a lot of friends. Actually, he gives his parents credit for being much more lenient with him than he is with his own kids. Ric goes on about how he started having sex at 14 and never went looking for it. His priority was going out and being the party. With this, he started adding numbers to his body count and fast.

Over time, he also had his run-ins with the law. He got caught riding a Honda 50 motorcycle around the lake without a license while his parents were out of town, and he got busted for using a fake ID at a liquor store. The cops went out of their way to make him feel horrible for the latter because the owner was an ex-football player in a wheelchair, so they told Ric he nearly caused this handicapped guy to lose his business. After all of the chaos he caused, Ric was sent to a boarding school, Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.

They had a great reputation, but the students Ric hung out with were mainly rich kids with family problems, or they’d been in trouble at school or with the police, and this was an alternative to military school. They were 15-year-olds, the school was coed, and they were all players. It was a lot of fun. Ric’s academics were still bad, but he lettered in three sports. He was a middle linebacker and fullback on the football team, threw shot put, and wrestled at 181 pounds and at heavyweight. Plus, the drinking age in Wisconsin was 18, so it was easy to get a fake ID. He didn’t see his family much during that time and he felt like he was on his own, which is why he wouldn’t let his own son Reid go to one despite being recruited as a wrestler. Ric’s best friend is referred to as the “General”, and he would invite Ric to his wealthy family’s house for the weekend. Just being around them made Ric start loving the lifestyle of the rich. It’s not that his dad wasn’t making good money, it’s just that the General’s dad was one of the wealthiest men in the Midwest. Plus, Ric’s parents would save and never lived large, which was the opposite of where he wanted to go in life. Every spring break, Ric and the General would hitchhike to Florida. Ric would tell his parents he’d be staying with the General and his family for a few days, his parents would drop him off at the train station in Minneapolis, and he’d start hitchhiking in twenty-below-zero weather until he ended up in Fort Lauderdale. When they were 16, Ric and General rented an apartment upstairs from a beauty salon during a stay. For the whole week, the General fucked the owner, and Ric fucked the daughter. One summer, Ric got a job as a lifeguard, which would serve as his first interaction with pro wrestlers. While working, he saw Maurice “Mad Dog” Vachon, his brother Paul “Butcher” Vachon, and their sister Vivian. The latter two engaged in friendly conversation with the 17-year-old Ric, but Mad Dog did not engage as he was exactly the character he played on television.

While working on becoming a water safety instructor for kids, he would become friends with one of the mothers. She was 35 and hot, and her husband travelled a lot. Naturally, Ric had sex with her too, and he calls it the “most exciting thing that had ever happened to me in my teenage years”. He was introduced to a lot of new experiences in the bedroom because of it. She even acted like she was Ric’s aunt to get him out of school one day and told him, “Ric, you’re going to learn that older women like a little appetizer before dinner”. Things went well, but she eventually felt guilty about cheating on her husband with a minor and confessed everything in her doctor’s office. The doctor left the room and told his partner, which happened to be Ric’s father, that it would be best if Ric stayed away from her. It took Ric five years to graduate high school, but colleges were still interested in him because of his athletic credentials. In 1966 and 1967, he was state private school wrestling champion, but professional wrestling didn’t enter his brain at the time because he was having too much fun. The University of Michigan wanted to recruit him, so he went with General to Ann Arbor to check out the school. They started out with $110 between them. They started running low on cash during their visit, and a black woman who worked for the hotel knocked on their door to collect the cash. Knowing he didn’t have the money, he issued her a challenge and bet her that the General’s balls were “bigger than any black guy’s you’ve ever seen”. She didn’t think so, but the General pulled down his pants to show her, so she comped their lodging. This is insane by itself. Anyway, Ric spent the weekend at the University of Michigan with Coach Bump Elliot and players like Jim Mandich and Dan Dierdorf and enjoyed himself. All he needed was a letter of intent from the dean of students at Wayland Academy in Jim Fierke to state his confidence in Ric to pass college-level classes.

Fierke refused because he knew Ric would blow it, and Ric admits he would’ve, but he just wanted Fierke to do him a favor.

Eventually, he was recruited by his parent’s alma mater University of Minnesota by offensive line coach Mike McGee. Ric started there in 1968 and was an offensive guard. They’d scrimmage with the varsity, and he did well. However, the question would always be his grades. It didn’t help that he joined fraternity Phi Delta Theta and began hanging around with football player Mike Goldberg who was a year older than him and a big partier. Mike’s brother Steven began playing football at the school the year after Ric, and their littlest brother was Bill Goldberg, the future professional wrestler. Anyway, Ric was told he’d have to attend summer school in order to play his second year. He went for two weeks until the General invited him out to his house for the weekend. Ric told his girlfriend Leslie Goodman (who would later become his first wife and mother to his kids Megan and David) that he would be gone for three days. It turned into two months. When he returned, she had another boyfriend, so he had to work to win her back and he did. However, he lost out on football because he skipped summer school. He ended up hanging around campus for a couple of months with Mike Goldberg and some other friends and then dropped out after the fall semester. Ric’s parents were worried about his future because of his known history up until this point, but Ric was confident that “the party was only getting started”. In Chapter 2 (“Breaking Into the Business!”), Ric talks about how he got a job selling insurance after dropping out of college. He liked it, had friends everywhere, and took the general agent around and they began writing policies on everyone. They even wrote Ric’s dad’s pension plan. Ric made $30,000 his first year, which was big money at the time. At the same time, he started bouncing at the best dinner and dance club in Minneapolis in George’s in the Park. They didn’t have a lot of trouble there because it was an upscale place. One guy there was Ron Kane, a legitimate tough guy with a metal plate and everyone in Minneapolis knew not to mess with him.

One night, Ken Patera walked into the club and Ric recognized him because he was a weightlifting fan. Patera was a power lifter who won four gold medals at the 1971 Pan Am Games and set 84 national or higher-level records, among other things. Ric introduced himself to Patera who was in Minneapolis training for the 1972 Olympics. Verne Gagne was sponsoring him. Verne was on the 1948 U.S. Olympic wrestling team and saw potential in Ken as a future professional wrestling star. The plan was for Patera to start wrestling in the AWA after making a strong showing at the Olympics. Patera chimes in for this section to talk about their friendly conversation and how Ric was surprised he drank and smoked. Ric invited Patera over for a dinner at his house for his 21st birthday, and Patera recalls how Ric had a stack of wrestling magazines in his room about “four feet high”. The two ended up moving into a house together in South Minneapolis. They didn’t have any furniture, but Patera was selling water beds, so he had them all over the house. Ric takes back over and talks about this time with Patera as an “endless summer”. Since Patera didn’t train until the afternoon, they kept the party going as long as they wanted. He would part-time bounce at the club Ric would work at for a bit, and they’d meet up with Mike Goldberg and some friends to party nonstop. Ric loved having Ken as a friend and he started weightlifting and working out because of him, especially because he got a chance to train with Patera at his level. Ric wondered how he was able to drink and smoke and still perform at a high level, but Patera explained that it’s what all the athletes in Eastern Europe, the East Germans, and the Russians did. In regard to smoking, he argued that “you don’t have to be able to breathe to lift weights”. Before the Olympics, Patera was trying to get as big as possible and was consuming everything like two gallons of milk, two dozen eggs, and then go to Burger King for five Whoppers.

Ric did the same, but Patera was turning everything into muscle while Ric was turning 40% of what he ate into fat. After the 1972 Olympics, Verne Gagne was to train Patera and some others to be professional wrestlers. Ric was interested in joining, but he wasn’t sure Verne would consider him.

Before he met Patera, Ric ran into Mad Dog at a bar and reminded Mad Dog about meeting him when he was a lifeguard. Mad Dog sent Ric to his friend Ricky Ferrera, but they had one workout in a gym with a wrestling ring, exchanged some holds, and went out for beers. That was it. Ric did know Verne’s son Greg Gagne, as he was a good quarterback at the University of Minnesota when Ric was there, but they hung out in different circles and never talked about wrestling. Ric talks about how Verne was a huge star in Minnesota, even bigger than Bud Grant who led the Vikings to the Super Bowl. He was the first AWA champion in 1960, he held the title 10 times, his show was one of the highest rated in Minnesota, and he expanded the AWA all over the country. Plus, he was a successful businessman outside of wrestling. After some time, Patera arranged to have Ric meet Verne, though Ric was intimidated. Verne only wanted top athletes for his training camp, and this class included Patera, Greg, “Jumping” Jim Brunzell, former Miami Dolphins and San Diego Chargers linebacker Bob Bruggers, and The Iron Sheik, who was a great amateur wrestler from Iran and an assistant coach on the U.S. Olympic team in 1972. Ken chimes in to tell Ric he was born to be in professional wrestling and that Verne didn’t want to train six guys initially but relented. Patera also talks about their trainer, an Englishman named Billy Robinson. He was a shooter and did most of the training along with a few assistants like Don “The Magnificent” Muraco. They’d start their workouts by running along the frozen creek and they’d have to wear three sweatsuits. The only way to stay warm was to keep moving for 6 to 8 hours. Going back to Ric for a second, he talks about how he’d never trained this hard in his life. The days would be ten degrees to ten below zero, and after so much running, they’d do 500 free squats (he had never done one in his life), 200 push-ups (hadn’t done them in years), and 200 sit-ups (was not used to doing them).

Patera cuts back in to talk about everything else they did including neck bridges, calisthenics, jumping jacks, everything. They would then workout in Verne’s horse barns in below-zero temperatures with one lightbulb in the whole place. Since the slats on the barn were about an inch apart, “there were times when we’d show up to four-foot snowdrifts in the place. The chickens would be roosting on the crossbeams of the barn, shitting in the ring, so we’d have to clean the mat”.

On top of that, the ring was worn out, and the ropes were drooping down. Despite being a millionaire, Verne had them training in the worst possible conditions, though he would rent the St. Paul Armory for them if it got unbearably cold. After talking more about all the workouts they were doing, All-American Joe Scarpello told them that Verne took ten years off of their careers because they took more bumps in training that he had in 25 years of his career. Going back to Ric, he says he quit the camp after two days, calling Greg to tell him. Greg told Verne, but Verne refused to accept it. He came to Ric’s house, grabbed him by the shirt, and threw him out on his own front lawn and pointed out how he quit on everything else in his life, but he wouldn’t let Ric quit this. It made Ric want to prove to Verne that he was better than Verne thought. Even so, it didn’t get easier. At times, they’d have to do a drill where they would wrestle Billy Robinson and you’d have to get away from him, and Ric would try to get Jim Brunzell to go first. The Iron Sheik did well with the exercises but would always run his mouth and would talk about how he didn’t think Verne or Robinson could take him. Robinson heard about this and challenged Sheik, who was down. However, Robinson used a “hook” style that was illegal in amateur ranks and took Sheik down after ten minutes, driving his knee into Sheik’s thigh which fucked up his hip. Then, Robinson turned him over and pinned him. Patera cuts in to say Sheik hated Robinson after that because a coach doesn’t do that to students. He also admits Robinson was a prick and nobody wanted to work with him outside of the AWA because they were afraid that he’d take cheap shots on them, and he more than likely would. Following the incident with Sheik, Ric told Greg he was quitting again and told him to not tell Verne. Of course, Greg still snitched. Verne just called Ric and scared him enough by threatening to come back to his house. With this, Ric returned the next day as if nothing happened.

While in training camp, Ric still wasn’t in on the secret of professional wrestling and if it was real or fake. He was too scared to ask too. Actually, he wasn’t told until five minutes before his first match. Ric began to get a feel for things by hanging out in the AWA dressing room. On Saturdays, they’d head over to WTCN Studios and watch them tape the show. He’d be an errand boy of sorts, and he’d talk with the veterans of the business. When other vets like “Cowboy” Bill Watts, Dick “The Destroyer” Beyer, or someone else would come into the promotion, he’d be the driver and would soak up all their stories or advice. This included “Superstar” Billy Graham. Whenever Graham had to wrestle for someone else, Ric would drive him to the airport in his El Dorado. Graham knew he liked weightlifting, powerlifting, and how much he loved wrestling, so he’d be cool with Ric and invite him out to dinner just to talk. Ric would also hang with Dusty Rhodes. At the time, Dusty was a heel and was teaming with “Dirty” Dick Murdoch. Ric was infatuated with Dusty’s style and wanted to be just like him. At the end of training camp, Verne told them all they could do whatever move they wanted, and Ric did a Dusty-inspired elbow. The ultra-purist of wrestling in Verne flipped out when he saw it. Before Ric’s first match, he asked Verne if he could be “Rambling” Ricky Rhodes, Dusty’s brother. Verne was the one that turned him down and said to change “Rick Fliehr” into “Ric Flair” on his insistence that he shouldn’t want to be tied to someone else before he even gets started. In 1971, Ric and Leslie got married, but she wanted him to convert to Judaism for the sake of her grandparents. He didn’t mind it at first, but he backed out after attending one of the religion classes and they were speaking Hebrew. What was he expecting though? Anyway, they ended up getting married at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis where his dad was a deacon. Ric’s parents knew of Verne’s legacy, but they weren’t sure Ric could make a living out of it because they knew how he was up until that point. Leslie was supportive of it though and made him a ring jacket before his first match.

On December 10th, 1972, in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, Ric made his debut against George “Scrap Iron” Gadaski. Verne told Ric to do exactly what George says, and they were to “go through”, meaning it was to be a draw. George set up the ring every night, would ride with Ric on occasion and Ric would help in setting up, and he’d wrestle as a face or a heel any night depending on what they needed. They didn’t talk before the match, but George just told him what to do at every moment until the 10-minute time limit expired. Ric spent his rookie year wrestling Greg Gagne, and they became friends. Next, Ric speaks on kayfabe and how AWA was strict about it, but the WWF ruined it in 1989 by wanting things to be deregulated and admitting to the athletic commission supervision of wrestling in New Jersey that it was in fact “sports entertainment”. A lot of his colleagues still lose sleep over it. He notes that he’s since gotten use to things with how they are now, but it does still bother him from time to time when arena employees see the wrestlers work out a match with their opponent before the show or a TV reporter with his kid sees them rehearse. Following this, he talks about partying in the AWA and when Verne was involved, you’d have to wrestle your way out because him and Robinson always wanted to wrestle somebody. He liked hanging with Verne but when he saw Verne get the look in his eye like “he wanted to torture me in front of the girls, I was out of there”. André the Giant was a known partier, and Ric would drive him around when he came to the AWA. He once witnessed André drink 106 beers one night in Charlotte. On a lesser talked about fact, André’s traveling companion and translator Frank Valois drank 54, which is pretty damn impressive too. One time, Blackjack Mulligan and Dick Murdoch were playfighting with André at a bar and one sucker punched André, so he dragged them to the ocean and started drowning them until he let up. Then, they went back to the bar to drink together.

Six months after he started wrestling, the AWA guys were booked for a Japan tour, but someone dropped out. So, Verne asked Ric if he wanted to take the spot and go there with Dusty Rhodes and Dick Murdoch. He jumped at the opportunity but was a glorified bellhop for them. He carried their bags the whole time, they drank every night, and they even broke into his hotel room one night, sprayed the room with a fire extinguisher, and threw all Ric’s clothes out a ten-story window. However, this is how you became one of “the boys”. The veterans would test you with stuff like this to see if you’d break, and Ric claims he had it easier than most. On June 26th, 1973, Ric had his first cage match against Rusher Kimura in Japan. He never bled in a match, so Dusty and Dick gave the ref a blade to use on him. After the match, he wanted someone to take a picture which caused them to laugh. Right after, they left Ric at the building in the middle of nowhere. After the tour, Leslie was to meet Ric in Hawaii, but there were a few hours before her plane arrived. Dusty and Dick took Ric to the beach, and they drank so much, he fell asleep in the sand, leaving Leslie at the airport for nearly four hours. Ken Patera cuts in to talk about the friendship between Ric, Dusty, and Dick and how out of control they all were. One night, the three drove drunk to Louisiana, got a mule, brought it back to Minneapolis, put it in a luxury apartment complex they were living in that wasn’t even finished yet, and put bales of hay and oats and water there. Dick once rode the mule into a bar and shot off a pistol, so Verne threatened to fire Dick and Dusty. Patera was living next to Ric and Leslie at the time and knew it was bothering Leslie. She was pregnant with Megan at the time, and she wanted Ric to quit wrestling. Patera wouldn’t let him though. Ric cuts back in to say he started living with Dusty and Dick in their apartment because Leslie kicked him out, which was a common occurrence between the two. Sometimes, Ric would tell Leslie he would wrestle in towns he wasn’t even going to just so he could take off with the two. Ric recalls a time when Dusty was going to set him up with a female wrestler he liked in Kay Noble, as he was hanging with her friend and fellow wrestler Donna Lemke. Ric drove over in heartbeat.

Another time, they were to wrestle in Mitchell, South Dakota, so Dusty told Ric to take Patera’s brand-new car. Ric drove them. After putting so many miles on it, and either Dusty or Dick burned a cigar hole in the upholstery, along with strawberry cake being smeared everywhere, the new car was fucked up. Patera chimes in just to say how pissed he was. Though Ric didn’t have a lot of money at the time, he bought Dusty a $500, 18-karat gold money clip with a $20 gold piece in the center to thank him for taking Ric under his wing. Ric admits there will be good and bad stories about Dusty but no matter the tension they had between them, “The good will always outweigh the bad”. In Chapter 3 (“Mr. Charisma”), Ric opens with a quote from Angelo “King Kong” Mosca who told him, “Ric, if you live past thirty, you’ll be overstaying your welcome”. Ric was doing his best at the time to make these words come true. After talking about Ray Stevens and Harley Race being greats whose performances in-ring were never affected by their lifestyles, he talks about a time when they were in Grand Island, Nebraska and had to go over the Rocky Mountains into Denver, which was about 400 miles. Stevens and Race had a station wagon and bet Greg Gagne and Jim Brunzell that they could beat them to the hotel. Before they left, Race asked Ric if he wanted to come with and he jumped at the chance because he was such a huge fan. Once they got into the mountains and the snow started coming down, the two started drinking some Southern Comfort and passed it around. Every time the bottle came to Ric, they’d turn on the light and check the rearview mirror to make sure he was drinking. Downhill, Race would be going 100 miles an hour. Race cuts in to talk about the story and how Ric was pointing out the speedometer to Stevens who in turn threatened Race to slow down. Race responded by daring him because he still wanted to win this bet. Ric started to throw up out the window, but they pulled him back in and beat Greg and Jim by 45 minutes. He knows Ric enjoyed himself “because he’s told this story himself a million times”.

Ric takes back over to talk about how Larry Hennig would play pranks in the ring. One time, he hit Ric and told him to not sell it, but he would turn to the referee and act like he was mad at Ric for not selling. Then, he’d tell Ric to sell, and he’d hit him really hard, only for him to complain to the ref that Ric was selling too much. Ric was freaking out that he was doing the wrong thing as Larry beat the shit out of him until the match was over. The veterans all saw something in Ric though, but he wasn’t there just yet. Larry told him, “You already have all the fucking around down. Now all you have to do is learn how to wrestle”. Wahoo McDaniel came into the AWA, and Ric says this is when his life changed forever. A man’s man and former NFL star for the New York Jets, Wahoo was someone Ric liked instantly. People loved telling stories about him too like when he ran 36 miles in 6 hours for a $100 bet with Bill Watts. Ric says that besides Mad Dog Vachon, Wahoo was the only wrestler who would get sewn up without novocaine. He was a great athlete, would play golf with Mickey Mantle and Charlie Pride, and even lost $5,000 to tournament pro Lee Trevino because he was so competitive. He was also married five times because he would refuse to comprise his lifestyle for any woman. In Atlanta in 1981, the wrestlers would hang out at a place called Dee Ford’s and fans would try to hassle the wrestlers. Tommy Rich got drunk and egged them on, causing three guys to attack him in the parking lot. Wahoo and Dick Slater came out for the save. Wahoo hit one of the guys in the head with the pistol, but it went off and shot Slater in the leg. Even so, Wahoo and Ric started to become good friends. Wahoo invited Ric to come along with him and Red Bastien to Fargo, North Dakota on Lars Anderson’s plane. Lars could fly, but he didn’t have a license. Lars had smoked a joint before they left and then started drinking Boone’s Farm apple wine with Ric, Wahoo, and Bastien. Lars couldn’t find the highway in the blizzard and landed on a football field. After this, Ric talks about the birth of Megan and how he always associates Wahoo with the event.

They were in a bar in Minneapolis called Left Guard with Greg Gagne, and someone asked if they wanted to party, but Ric wasn’t feeling it. When he got back home, Leslie went into labor a half hour later. Had he not called it a night, he would’ve been with Wahoo when Megan was born.

Ric and Wahoo had gotten close enough to where Ric was willing to do whatever he asked. Wahoo told him to get wrestling boots made from Clifford Mocias in Houston to make him look like a main eventer, but he wasn’t being paid like one. Despite this, Ric got them anyway and spent $200-$400 even though he was making $120 a week. Wahoo’s friend George Scott was booking in Charlotte, North Carolina and he was going there after his AWA stint. He ended up getting Ric a spot there, and he hasn’t left Charlotte since. “Mean” Gene Okerlund cuts in to talk about how he knew Ric when he was just a bouncer and announced his first match. He saw early on that Ric “appreciated his own self-worth” and that Ric was going to leave Verne if he wasn’t going to take Ric where he needed to go. Going back to Ric, he says that Verne understood he needed to keep learning the business and traveling the territories to pick up different styles. Charlotte was the next step, and Ric was set to leave. He thanked Verne for everything and asked to borrow $400, but Verne declined because he had to learn how to handle things on his own. Ric accepted this, shook his hand, and was about to leave only for Verne to hand him a contract to sign that guaranteed Verne 10% of Ric’s earnings for the next five years. Ric surprisingly wasn’t offended just because of how much he did for him. He took the contract to Charlotte and showed Jim Crockett Jr. to ask if this was standard practice in the wrestling business, but he said that it wasn’t at all. Crockett told him to tear it up and send it back to Verne, but Ric didn’t want to do that because he did feel like Verne was owed something. He called Ric for an update, and Ric told him he didn’t feel like the contract was right, though he was willing to give him a flat fee of $2,500 because Crockett’s other bit of advice was for him to pay Verne what he felt he deserved. Verne was cool with it, and Ric would show up to make random appearances in the AWA years later when he was NWA Champion. The Iron Sheik didn’t sign the contract either, but Patera said 10% was taken from his paycheck when he left.

Verne was such a fucking carny.

Before he left Minneapolis for Charlotte, Ric had “Superstar” Billy Graham’s wife Bunny bleach his hair like Graham’s, Dusty’s, Dick’s, and Ray Stevens’s. Ric even went out and got some tie-dye trunks and a headband like Graham too. Graham even cuts in to say he saw it as a compliment and adds that he still didn’t rip him off as bad as Jesse Ventura, which is pretty funny. Going back to Ric, he landed in Charlotte and was picked up by older wrestler Johnny Heideman who worked in the office for the promotion. Ric had his first match there against Abe Jacobs at the Charlotte Coliseum and got the win. Strangely enough, Ric left Leslie and Megan in Minneapolis, mostly because he only he had $200 to his name and couldn’t afford to bring them with. Even so, he knew he was making the right move. The Charlotte wrestling territory was started in 1935 by “Big Jim” Jim Crockett Sr. who also ran restaurants, promoted concerts and Harlem Globetrotters games, and owned the Baltimore Orioles’ AA affiliate and their stadium Crockett Park. Naturally, this was a regional promotion under the NWA banner. Every year, the NWA promoters held a convention where they debated over whether to keep or change their world champion. Whoever was champion would tour and defend the title in one territory after another. The Crockett’s territory was Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling. It was based in Charlotte and extended into the Carolinas and Virginia. If you were in Mid-Atlantic, you would work every single weeknight, twice on Saturday, and twice on Sunday. When Ric got there, the Crocketts were having a power struggle. Jim Crockett Jr. was a quiet guy who didn’t plan on going into the wrestling business. When Big Jim died in 1973, his wife Elizabeth decided that her son-in-law John Ringley would take over. However, he got caught having an affair, so the Crockett kids voted him out. Jim Jr. was only 24, but they all thought he would be the best replacement. Ringley didn’t want to leave though.

David Crockett cuts in to talk about his brother Jim Jr. and how he wasn’t outgoing and that Ringley was a good salesman with an eye for talent. Ringley also worked with Big Jim a lot earlier than anyone else in the family did, but he disrespected everyone with the affair, which is why Jim Jr. was selected to take over. Unfortunately, Jim Jr. was looked at by the other promoters as Big Jim’s son and had to prove himself. Going back to Ric, he agrees with Jim Jr. having to get respect by the others but says he was willing to work for it and the two became friends. Jim Jr. worked with his booker George Scott, and he paid for a lot of top talent to come in. David Crockett adds how valuable George Scott was because of his creativity, him knowing how to get the most out of talent, and he wasn’t wrestling anymore so he wasn’t fixing the show to make himself a bigger star like bookers sometimes do.

Ric comes back to say he always had Wahoo and George looking out for him. Ric continued to work but didn’t have a car yet, so the promotion had him ride with Johnny Valentine, a major singles star for Mid-Atlantic at the time and had been wrestling for 20 years at that point. Ric admits he was an odd guy. When George H.W. Bush was campaigning for office in Texas and was introduced at a wrestling show in Houston, he turned his back to Valentine in the ring, so he gave Bush the finger. Besides this, he was a quiet guy who read and played chess. He also wouldn’t pick up Ric anywhere, so Ric would have to hitchhike to a mutually agreed upon spot. He recalls a time when he rode with Valentine for the first time all the way to Greenville, South Carolina, and he played “bad Italian opera music and blasted it”. He didn’t say a word either. Once it would finish, he would just turn it over and play more. It was the same on the ride back. Valentine was also adamant on things looking legit, so he either refused to do moves off the ropes when asked or would do so kicking and screaming. His argument was that you would never run backwards and bounce off cables in a real fight and that does make sense. He was all about locking in a hold, beating someone up, and getting back to the hold. Ric learned from Valentine how to make things more meaningful. He also got the front fall spot from him. Eventually, the two started talking on their trips, but he always kept an eye on Valentine because he was a practical joker. In one instance, he put lighter fluid in the asthmatic Jay “The Alaskan” York’s inhaler. After a match, Jay used it and threw up all over the floor.

That’s diabolical.

Flair also rode around with the Missouri Mauler and garlic and raw onion-eating Brute Bernard and was shocked by their racist rhetoric. Their manager was Homer O’Dell who carried two pearl-handled revolvers with him. At a show in Richmond, Virginia, a group of fans attacked Professor Boris Malenko and “The Big O” Bob Orton Sr. They stabbed Malenko and cut him from the neck all the way down to his groin and hit Orton with a baseball bat. O’Dell shot off his guns and saved their lives. Later, Ric got his first $1,000 paycheck from Charlotte and was able to get Jim Jr. to loan him $3,000 to get his family down there too. Once he moved his family over, he used the left-over money to buy a Cadillac. This was how the first 15 years of Flair’s career went. If he “made $3,000, I spent $4,000. If I made $5,000, I spent $10,000”. In Charlotte, he shortened “Rick” to “Ric”, and George Scott started having him team with Rip Hawk, as Hawk split from his partner “Raw-Boned” Swede Hanson. Hanson would team with Tiger Conway Jr. and the two teams would feud. George had the idea for the team because Hawk could help Flair as a wrestler, and Flair could help Hawk stay contemporary. Ric started learning at an accelerated pace and was picking up a lot of advice and respect from the veterans. On July 4th, 1974, he won his first championship. It was the Mid-Atlantic Tag Team Championship with Rip Hawk in Greensboro, as they beat Paul Jones and Bob Bruggers. At the same time, Ric started developing his persona. This is where he states he got the “Woooo!” from hearing Jerry Lee Lewis in the middle of “Great Balls of Fire”. Later, he started teaming with the Minnesota Wrecking Crew, which consisted of Gene and Ole Anderson. Ric was being billed as their cousin. Eventually, Arn Anderson was added to the mix. While this was happening, Ric started to learn about bleeding. When there was a check by your name on the rundown of matches, it was your turn to “get juice” or bleed. Art Neilson taught him the importance of bleeding and how it adds so much more to a match.

Despite how much he’s bled over the years, he has used a lot of Neosporin to ensure his forehead didn’t look scarred up like his peers. Flair goes on to talk about the rougher crowds they faced and how a lot of times they didn’t have cops in the Carolinas to protect the wrestlers. Regularly, people would throw penknives in the ring and shoot pennies at the wrestlers with slingshots. One time in Asheville, a guy threw a rattlesnake into the ring. Other wrestlers would goad fans into trying to fight them. In Colombus, Georgia, a 280-pound man sucker punched Tim “Mr. Wrestling” Woods and pulled off his mask. Woods got his mask back, took the fan down, and started beating him. When he put the guy in a crossface though, the guy bit off one of Woods’s fingers, “putting an end to open challenges in that town”. In the WWWF at the Boston Gardens, Blackjack Mulligan was stabbed in the leg all the way to the bone by a fan during a match with Pedro Morales. He got a staph infection from it and “Crazy” Luke Graham rushed him to the hospital in the middle of the night. The doctors said the fan must have worked in a butcher shop because there was pig fat bacteria in Blackjack’s wound, forcing them to reopen the leg and scrape everything out. Ric credits George Scott with being given the moniker of “Nature Boy”, as George was a friend and admirer of the original in Buddy Rogers. Ric did a variation of Buddy’s strut, took his figure-four leglock, and he started smoking cigars because he was told Buddy used to do it, though Ric calls it a phase because he burned holes in all his clothes. On February 8th, 1975, Ric won his first singles title by beating Paul Jones for the Mid-Atlantic TV Championship, and he really started coming into his own as a singles star. David Crockett cuts in to talk about Ric’s relations with women after the shows. Sometimes, he’d come out of the bathroom, “walk up to a female sitting on the couch, and tap her on the head. Only he wasn’t tapping her with his finger”. Going back to Ric, he brings up midget wrestler Cowboy Lang who had a huge dick and always expected Ric to get him laid. This was tough since not everyone is into little people, but Ric had a friend in Charlotte named Sarge because she was in the National Guard.

She hosted great parties and would find a girl for Lang if pressured. Ric would help and he recalls that after Ric would talk Lang up and Lang would show off his dick, he’d end up with a girl at the end of the night.

Ric uses this as a transition to admit he doesn’t know how Leslie survived her marriage to him because of how irresponsible he was. He even says, “You couldn’t pay me to be home. Not because of anything Leslie ever did, but because I didn’t want to miss a party. I was having too much fun being Ric Flair”. The holidays were all big wrestling days too. If you didn’t work them, you would lose your spot. Ric never considered taking a night off because he wanted to build his name in and out of the ring. However, one event almost cost him his entire career. In Chapter 4 (“The Man Who Saved Wrestling”), Flair talks about Vietnam veteran Mike Farkas. Farkas was a pilot, and they started talking one night at a bar. Because of all the long road trips the wrestlers had to do at the time, Farkas offered to fly a group of wrestlers for payment. Ric approached Johnny Valentine who liked the idea because a 45-minute plane ride would equate to 5 hours by car. If they got five or six guys, it would cost only a $100 a piece. Nobody checked Farkas’s background either. On the afternoon of October 4th, 1975, Ric, Valentine, Tim Woods, David Crockett, and Bob Bruggers got in the plane for a ride from Charlotte to Wilmington, North Carolina. Since it was small plane, the guy with the most stroke got the largest seat next to the pilot. This went to Valentine. In the middle was Woods and Flair, and Crockett and Bruggers were in the back. Wahoo was going to join them but decided to drive at the last minute, so Bruggers took his spot. They were 1,400 pounds over gross, and Farkas lightened the load by dumping fuel out of the gas tank. David Crockett chimes to say he made a joke to Farkas about him making sure they had enough fuel. He wasn’t even supposed to be there too. In fact, he took Jim Jr.’s spot because he was sick. It was an easy flight, but the left engine shut down around Lumberton, but Farkas said their twin-engine plane was designed to carry on a single engine, so that’s why they didn’t stop. Going back to Flair, he recalls Valentine laughing while pointing out they are out of fuel. Then, the right engine died over the Cape Fear River, and they heard a big boom.

Crockett cuts in again to say they almost hit a water tower at the New Hanover Airport because they were too low. Farkas tried to pull up but the engine stalled. Had he been flying higher, they would’ve made the runway. We go back to Flair who remembers Farkas panicking and Valentine slapping him to bring him back to his senses, but it wasn’t working. Tim Woods wasn’t wearing his shoes but remembered Austin Idol talking about his own experience in a plane crash. He didn’t have his shoes on and tore his feet to the bone. Since Woods didn’t have time to get his shoes, he got a hold of Farkas’s briefcase and put his feet inside. After Crockett talks about trying to control his breathing before the impact, Ric cuts back in to say he has no memories past the point where the second engine died. Even so, he does know what happened. “The plane cut across several treetops, and a wing collapsed against a utility pole before we nose-dived, crashing into a railroad embankment”. Ric is sure that if they gotten past the trees, they would’ve ended up on the runway. David Crockett’s head crashed through the seat in front of him and cracked Woods’s ribs, and he got a concussion and a slight compression fracture. Woods was the only passenger who wasn’t knocked unconscious. Ric woke up when he was pulled off the plane and into an ambulance. He blacked out again and woke up on the X-ray table. Wahoo barged in to check up on him, as Ric had just beaten him for the Mid-Atlantic title, and they were supposed to wrestle that night. The workers tried to restrain him because they thought he was going to finish the job. He notes how good of a decision it was for Wahoo to drive, but it’s because it would have killed the territory to have the two opponents found in the same plane. The other problem was Woods who was known to fans for not associating with heels like Flair and Valentine, especially since Valentine kayfabe broke his leg and was supposed to defend the U.S. title against him in the main event. Before the show at Legion Stadium, the ring announcer told the crowd of the plane crash and how Valentine and Flair were injured but added that Woods was lost on an unrelated note and wouldn’t be there either.

To protect the business, Woods checked into the hospital under his real name and said he was a wrestling promoter. He wrestled under a mask, so this is the best he could do. The rumor mill was still on his ass however, so he checked himself out of the hospital the next day. Two people had to help put him on a commercial flight back to Charlotte. Ironically, the brakes failed on that flight, but nothing serious happened. Immediately, Woods made appearances all over the territory to protect the business so there wouldn’t be speculation he had been hospitalized. Two weeks after the crash, he even wrestled “Superstar” Billy Graham. Ric attributes Woods to being “the man who saved wrestling. Mid-Atlantic wrestling, anyway”. The aftermath for the others was still devastating. Farkas was in a coma for a year before he died, and Bruggers and Valentine had broken backs. After 10 days in the hospital, Jim Jr. had them flown over to Houston for specialized treatment. Bruggers had a steel rod inserted in his spinal column and was released three weeks later and retired from wrestling shortly after. He took the $70,000 received in the insurance settlement, married a flight attendant, and bought a bar in West Palm Beach. By the time the surgery happened for Valentine, the “nerve endings were apparently calcified, and the damage could not be repaired. As a result, this 47-year-old superstar, who’d been selling out arenas and stirring up shit for nearly a generation, was paralyzed from the waist down”. Naturally, Valentine was miserable, so Ric, Wahoo, and Red Bastien would hang out with him from time to time. Everyone else stayed away and didn’t have sympathy because of the mean-spirited jokes he pulled back in the day. Bastien didn’t forget either. When Valentine got drunk once and fell out of his braces in his front yard, Bastien pulled out “The Bishop” (Bastien’s nickname for his dick) and pissed on him in front of Valentine’s wife, which is insane. Valentine smiled though because he still felt like one of the boys. Ric’s back was broken in three places, but he didn’t need surgery. He just had to wait to heal. During the timeframe, his weight dropped from 255 to 180.

Billy Graham cuts in to say he saw Ric at his house during the aftermath and noted how positive he was despite the injuries and how he knew he was going to come back. Ric comes back in to give credit to Jim Jr. for giving him extra money along with the $35,000 he got from the insurance settlement.

The first day he got out of his bed wearing his body brace to go to the office, he was looking for a pat on the back, but George Scott yelled at him to take it off because it’s holding back his recovery time, as his muscles will atrophy, and he’ll be out for another six months. Ric knew George was partially right, but he still needed the brace to keep his body intact. So, he wore the brace while he was at home and stayed away from the office until he was done recuperating. This gave him some time with Megan, and they were taking their first steps together, with Ric going through therapy just as she was learning to walk. Finally, he got the medical clearance to come back and came to the WRAL Studios in his suit and sunglasses in 1976. The crowd didn’t want to boo him, but after he received a bunch of get-well cards and letters from fans by announcer Ed Caperal, Ric said he’d keep the ones from Raquel Welch and Joey Heatherton and then he threw the rest on the floor. The crowd turned on him just like that. What followed was the greatest stretch of Ric Flair’s career, as he details it through the rest of the territory era and the NWA, into WCW, and finally to the WWE. He became what some considered the greatest wrestler of all time, though his personal life struggled to keep up.

My Thoughts:

How soon they forget…

Now more than ever, people need to be reminded how great Ric Flair truly was. Though people still need this reminder today, the same could be said as far back as 2004 when To Be the Man was published. At that point in time, this was the beginning of Ric Flair’s final run as a full-time wrestler, but many WWE fans at that time (and even now) missed out on peak Ric Flair, which by many accounts was one of the greatest stretches of a wrestling career anyone has ever seen. Besides Hulk Hogan, no one had that long of a prime and did so at such a high level, especially because the schedule of a top attraction in wrestling made it virtually impossible to keep up for that long. The fact that he was able to do so while putting on great matches and making every single one of his opponents look good on a consistent basis, something he does have over Hogan, is what set him apart from all his peers. Again, it’s a shame how soon they forget. To Be the Man gives the reader insight on coming up in the professional wrestling business when you had to not only be tough as nails but also have the thickest skin imaginable to survive. The territory era of professional wrestling isn’t covered enough and isn’t given nearly the credit it deserves for being the precursor to sports entertainment today, but Ric Flair’s autobiography does an unbelievable job in giving as much detail as possible in describing the insanity surrounding a directionless orphan looking to break into a business consisting of people who didn’t take too kindly to new guys, mostly because they were worried they were going to lose their spot, which was a valid concern in those days. Make no mistake about it, the territory wrestlers were batshit crazy.

From the constant pranking to the nonstop partying, to the regular occurrence of drinking and driving on the way to the next territory, to the in-fighting, to the constant near-death experiences these wrestlers faced because of crazed fans that believed in absolutely everything the wrestlers were doing, to situations caused by the wrestlers fucking around, the content of this book and the stories Ric Flair is willing to tell will both shock and amaze you to no end. The shit these guys got away with is absurd. It’s as if they lived in a different world than the rest of us. The hazing was a huge part in making it too. Otherwise, you’d never be one of the “boys”. Ric recalls a time when Mike Rotunda started out and the Briscos were his mentors. They made Mike down 20 Budweisers in a single sitting, and he was so messed up that he climbed over a chain-link fence and got his balls stuck on the metal barbs. He “pretty much tore his nut sack off, and Rocky Kernodle had to rush him to the hospital”. Are you kidding me?

Ric Flair himself is a well-documented “wild man”, and throughout his autobiography he lets us in on the outrageous but true life he’s lived. Does he have a screw loose? Is he an alcoholic? The answer to both questions is probably yes, as though we may enjoy social drinking and promiscuity as much as Flair, the motor on him to be able to do it at such a high level for that many years is legitimately impressive. As demented as some of his peers were, even they were amazed. It wasn’t just in the territory days either. This included when he went to the WWF. Bobby Heenan said he couldn’t keep up with Flair’s drinking, and referee Earl Hebner said it took five years off his life hanging with him. If they get 3 or 4 hours of sleep they were lucky, and they’d party every day for months to the point where Earl started missing flights and getting to the arena late with him hilariously commenting, “I can’t blame Ric completely for that divorce, but he definitely played a role in it”. Arn Anderson recalls when they were the Four Horsemen and they bought five Mercedes, flew private on Jim Crockett’s planes, and if they had to wrestle in the West Coat, they’d stay in Las Vegas. Then, they’d fly to Oakland for a match and come back to Vegas to party all night. Following this, they’d fly to LA and come back to party in Vegas on no sleep. During a stint in Chicago, they technically played a part in a limo driver’s death! He had to drive the Horsemen around and pick them at 3PM and drop them off at 8AM for three straight days, and he died of a heart attack in his sleep the day after they left town. With Ric leading the charge, this type of partying was a regular occurrence, and each party story Ric recalls is as crazy as the last, furthering his legend as someone who was out of control and lived to be the life of the party, a sentiment shared by a lot of top wrestlers of this era.

Take for instance his story in Chapter 5 (“Where Does a Turkey Like This Fit Into My Plans”). Flair, Terry Funk, Jim Crockett Jr., and Greg “The Hammer” Valentine drove together, and Ric admits to pouring Everclear into some of Funk’s beers. Keep in mind, they were already drunk to begin with. During the car ride, Funk tried lighting Valentine’s hair on fire with a cigarette lighter while he was driving. When they got back to Charlotte, a naked Funk, just wearing cowboy boots and the NWA title, started directing traffic. At Flair’s house, a still naked Funk was attacked by Ric’s pit bull, and it bit Funk on the nose while Ric’s babysitter was watching his daughter and hiding in the closet out of fear. Of course, that’s not all. Funk grabbed Flair’s shotgun from his wall and a knife and tried to kill Ric’s dog. While this is going on, Ric threw up and fell on the kitchen floor, and his first wife Leslie came home with a friend to these two maniacs acting a fool. One is her husband who’s passed out on the ground of the kitchen in his own puke, and the other is the naked NWA champion. To finish the story, Ric says he woke up in a hotel and still doesn’t remember how he got there. One time, Ric and Stan Hansen had two girls in Stan’s rental car and Ric drove it straight into the median trying to show off. Somehow, Ric did the same thing shortly after with Stan’s other rental, something he just laughed off. In Baltimore before the Crockett Cup, Ric cut an interview inviting all females between 18 and 28 to a party at the hotel he was at and hired a doorman to turn away the women’s dates, so all their men had to wait in the lobby while the wrestlers had their fun. It truly was a nonstop party when it came to being Ric Flair. There are also loads of stories involving Ric hanging out with Roddy Piper (“I think the reason he worked so well with Ric was that they’re both nuts”), who’s quite literally the “Hot Rod” he portrayed on television. It’s just like Ric said, “Whether alcohol or drugs were on the table, Piper could put anyone to bed”. This was used as a transition to describe a party hosted by Ric and Wahoo McDaniel they dubbed “The Great Shootout – The Hot Rod vs. The Purple Haze”.

The “Purple Haze” was Mark Lewin, a wrestler Kevin Sullivan was sure could take Piper in terms of partying. At the party, Ric and Wahoo bought $1,000 worth of seafood, steak, and liquor, and all the wrestlers in the territory were invited. Over the course of the night, Ric poured 30 shots of Crown Royal for Piper and Lewin, and he argues the nod went to Piper because when the party ended at 6:30AM, Lewin had to be carried out of the house while Piper went to sleep in the guest room. That’s just a sliver of Ric’s random anecdotes sprinkled throughout that shows how reckless the industry used to be before the 1990s. Not to sound like that guy, but these wrestlers today don’t realize how good they have it. Back then, anything and everything went. It goes without saying that if there were cameras and phones back then, every last one of these guys would be arrested. It was just a different world back then, and Ric paints one hell of a picture in making us understand it, like how anytime they would get pulled over by the cops for whatever reckless driving they were doing, they’d just pay the cops off and keep going. At one point though, Ric had to go to traffic court and was told he had 82 moving violations over four years, with most of them being in an excess of 80 mph. He was about to face 30 days in jail until they appealed with a different judge and Ric somehow got away by just paying a fine of $2,500. This is the type of stuff that just doesn’t happen today because the world won’t allow it, like Ric paying a flight attendant $200 to get Piper and Dick Slater to join him in first class and they finished every ounce of liquor on the flight from Tokyo to Chicago, or Ric and Piper attacking the Brisco Brothers in a terminal once just to mess around. In Ric’s rematch against Jack Veneno in the Dominican Republic where he brought Piper along for protection basically, Ric was paid $5,000 and Piper was paid $500 and a “spittoon full of cocaine”.

This was the same match where soldiers literally pointed their guns at Piper for pulling heel tactics at ringside because everyone in the crowd fully believed in the match taking place and rioted. These stories are movie-quality! Every one of them! For the first match in the Dominican Republic against Veneno, Ric didn’t have a passport, so the higher-ups paid to get him over there anyway! Again, the stuff Ric did can’t be replicated simply because the rules are different today. It’s legitimately impossible to copy his lifestyle or anyone from that era. During Ric’s 40th birthday party, Kevin Sullivan put a trick candle from Ric’s birthday cake in his foreskin and told Gary Juster’s wife to blow it out, and they all laughed it off. What?! Again, these guys existed in a different world from the rest of us. Wrestling in general just isn’t as intense as it was back then either. Part of it is because kayfabe isn’t taken nearly as serious as it was during the territory days. Ric’s recalling of his match against Victor Jovica in Trinidad is a great example of this. According to Ric, Jovica was considered average everywhere in the Caribbean except for Trinidad. There, he was worshipped. Despite the audience being “100% black”, they “loved this guy from Croatia who relocated to Puerto Rico”. For their match, they sold out, but in Trinidad, they did a lot of walk-up business and people flipped out when they were turned away. Someone even shot a fucking horse during the melee! In another instance where everyone fully believed in the presentation because the business was protected back then, some guy would shout the finish over a microphone to the people outside the building because they were that obsessed with it. It was real to them, and it was because the old guard of wrestling made sure it looked as authentic as possible. If they weren’t protective of the business and people didn’t believe in what they were doing and it was considered phony, it could kill the profession and the money they were making. Kayfabe was serious back then and it’s a lost art today.

The lengths they went to make people believe were just as outrageous as some of the drinking stories. One of the most shocking stories told in To Be the Man had to have been during one of Ric Flair’s early feuds with Ricky Steamboat when he was US champion. They had Ric do his attack on Steamboat for television, but to make the attack look even worse, Ric gave him a “hard-way” shot to make Steamboat’s eye swell up. To make it look legit when Steamboat was going on tour, the wrestlers took him into the locker room afterwards to make his wounds look more devasting. How did they do so, you ask? Harley Race cut Ricky’s “face in five places with folded sandpaper, poured iodine in the wounds and rubbed sandpaper across the scars”. After Harley told him it was going to hurt, he sandpapered Steamboat’s face around his eye and literally took the hairs of his eyebrow completely off. On Steamboat’s own admission, his face was discolored for 6-8 months! THIS was a regular practice back then! THIS is how far they were willing to go to ensure kayfabe! Stories like these ones are reason enough for every wrestler today to go back and read this book to appreciate where the business is at now and what they don’t have to go through anymore, like being in the absolute disaster of a locker room that was WCCW with habitual bad decision makers like the Von Erich boys, Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy, Gino Hernandez, and Chris Adams. Ric’s detailing of his interactions with the Von Erichs explain a whole lot like with Kerry Von Erich who was “drug-impaired all the time”. Regularly, you’d talk over a match with Kerry, and he would ask before they went through the curtain what they were doing. He’d even do his finish out of nowhere and unprompted, but he would get away with it because of his dad Fritz and because of how popular he was with the crowd. One time, Ric waited in the ring for 10 minutes for their match and Kerry was found in his Lincoln passed out! By the time Kerry got to the ring, he wrestled the whole match with his boots untied and put all his focus on one girl in the crowd, forcing Ric to make the match look good by putting himself into holds because Kerry was so out of it!

Man, Ric really was the consummate professional, something proven time and time again in To Be the Man and is something he never gets enough credit for.

He should’ve gotten a raise for dealing with Kerry Von Erich alone. Still, everyone enabled Kerry because he was popular, and Fritz had the audacity to put out a story in the paper about how Kerry was battling a fever and still fought Ric in the same night when it was a complete lie. Though it’s a bit mean for Flair to say the Von Erich kids would still be alive if Fritz held them accountable for their behavior, you can’t help but silently nod to yourself and ashamedly agree. Wrestlers today also don’t have to face life-threatening situations like when Jack and Jerry Brisco sold their stock in Georgia Championship Wrestling to Vince McMahon and secured a job with McMahon, which allowed Vince to take their slot on TBS. Road Warrior Animal told the Briscos that him and Hawk were offered $5,000 to hurt the brothers, but they didn’t go through with it. Paul Jones told them he heard someone was hired to shoot them. Two women claimed to be pregnant with Jerry’s baby to get his wife to divorce him. Can you believe this? They were willing to go that far over a business deal! The territory era was the wild fucking west! When Leslie gave birth to David, he was born on a Tuesday, but Ric had to be at a TV taping the next night in Raleigh. Flair called booker George Scott to ask if he can miss it because the birth of his son and all. George said fine, but he told him to not come back and go to Memphis, the last territory anyone wanted to work because the promoter Nick Gulas was the “cheapest man in the industry”. This was the wrestling business back then. It’s just like Ric says, “The word compassion did not exist”. These territory guys went through this, so today’s wrestlers didn’t have to. This is why the veterans of the business should be respected and appreciated by the younger generation. The trials and tribulations they faced cannot be overstated. On another occasion, Ric’s second wife Beth was having issues with her pregnancy, so she was rushed to hospital when they were in Hawaii. Ric had to leave her there to fly to Kansas City to work a show for Bob Geigel, and she miscarried while he was on the flight.

The flight was $1,400, and Bob didn’t reimburse Ric like he was supposed to because Bob thought Lia Maivia was going to pick it up. Ric had to explain how when he’s working a territory, the promoter is supposed to pick it up, but Bob wanted Lia to pay half. Ric had to still worry about his traumatized wife at the time, but it wasn’t a factor to son of a bitch Bob. This type of carny shit was commonplace, but these wrestlers had to trek through such despicable situations just to maintain their careers and their spots. Otherwise, they’re pockets would be affected.

Flair’s territory stories are enthralling too. It could be little tidbits like wrestling as part of a carnival (“Once you paid your admission, you had several choices: go on the Ferris wheel, knock someone in the dunking tank, or watch Ric Flair defend his NWA World Heavyweight title”) where some kids stole his $4000 robe and promoter Bob Geigel never offered to reimburse him for it because he was “one of the cheapest men of all time”, or it could just be the politics of becoming NWA champion and all the arguments and conversations that had to go on to decide who would be the guy, with Ric likening the process to picking the champ as the College of Cardinals choosing the Pope. For wrestling fans, this is an absolute must-read autobiography for this part alone. Just hearing about the St. Louis card where all the NWA promoters would send their top guys to the show to work NWA President and “one of the best payoff men in the business” Sam Muchnick’s hard-as-concrete ring, and Ric taking big bumps on it to get over like Harley Race did on advice from Dory Funk Jr., to Ric getting his education on wrestling politics is more engrossing with every page turn. The insecurities of these wrestlers is what was most surprising. It’s like how Ric defended Sting’s failure that was his first world title reign, as it was the company’s fault for not having heel challengers ready for him. He adds, “In our business, people like when a guy does well- but not too well. They’ll pat someone like Sting on the back, then get in the car, go on the road, and bitch that he can’t draw”. When it came to the NWA title back in the day, every promoter that had a seat on the board lobbied for their guy to be champ and had their own agenda. Eddie Graham thought Ric was too small and that despite being of similar size as other world champs, wrestlers “had gotten bigger and stronger since (Buddy) Rogers’s time, and I didn’t have (Jack) Brisco’s amateur credentials”. This allowed for Dusty to win the title for the short term, but even Harley Race defends Flair here because the NWA champ had to be a wrestler who could wrestle anyone at any time for an hour AND have a good match.

It didn’t matter who the opponent was. Harley argues that Dusty couldn’t do it with everybody while Flair could. It was eventually decided that Ric would win it, but Dusty didn’t want to lose it in a city where he was a major name. Because of this, the title switch happened in Kansas City. Unfortunately, neither guy was a big name there, and the crowd was terrible and so was the match. On top of that, Ric felt the animosity from Dusty, which hurt Ric because he idolized him. The week after Ric won the title, he was scheduled to go to Florida to defend it, but Graham disappeared, and Dusty resigned as booker. Basically, it was because they were salty they were outvoted, and they sabotaged the territory to ensure no one would go to the arena to “prove” Flair wasn’t a draw. It’s about the right opponent just as much as it is the champion to draw a house, and those assholes knew it and tried to fuck him over on purpose. That’s some real petty shit and needs to be discussed more. To make matters worse, emergency booker JJ Dillon gave Ric midcarder Charlie Cook and no one cared for the match. This was the ugly side of the business, and Ric didn’t see it until he reached the top. It didn’t stop him though, and that’s where his legacy grew. He put the business first and Flair worked every day and did double headers on the weekends when he could’ve asked for a couple of days off a week like other champs previously did. In 1987 alone, he wrestled Ricky Morton to 11 hour-long draws in 9 days, and there were times he would do two 60-minute draws in one day! He was wrestling 380 matches a year and traveling more than any champ in NWA history while helping their show on TBS draw a 6.6 rating and making it the most watched program on cable. You can’t question the legacy of Ric Flair after reading this book. It’s impossible. It’s just a damn shame so many people still tried to undermine out of jealously, hatred, or some other inexplicable reason unbeknownst to Flair because Flair’s career could have been even greater had he been given the full backing of the people he worked with.

As much as late WCW was marred with political issues from a creative and executive standpoint, early WCW and Jim Crockett Promotions had just as many issues that Ric spotlights. With Dusty Rhodes as booker, there were a lot of difficulties like Dusty’s problems with being too small minded and southern when they were trying to expand like his Bunkhouse Stampede failure or his creativity becoming stale with David Crockett bringing up how “at times, all of Dusty’s ideas seemed inspired by one movie, True Grit. In our storylines, he had to come back from the dead like John Wayne”. There was also his penchant for putting himself over, with Tully Blanchard comically telling Dusty’s friend Jimmy Crockett that Dusty should book himself against Dusty at a bar after the show. Then, there’s Ric realizing the facts in that, “Everything had been great between us until the moment I had rivaled him as a top attraction”. Once again, Dusty was salty with Flair’s popularity and tried to make him a second-tier guy. He would do undermining things like positioning “Dr. Death” Steve Williams on Ric’s level after the UWF purchase or making Buddy Landel his mirror image and calling him “Nature Boy”. You tell me if Dusty wasn’t doing this shit on purpose to bring Ric down a peg! To insult their intelligence further, Dusty would just start lying for no reason like telling Ric and Arn Anderson that they were going to make a movie about Magnum TA’s life to compete with Vince McMahon and how Sylvester Stallone already agreed to star, and Sally Field was to play his wife, but he “wasn’t sure she was right for the part”. Look, we can all talk about the good that Dusty has given the industry and the great ideas he gave wrestling like Starrcade and such, but let’s not forget about his less publicized carny bullshit and petty backstabbing too. Maybe Ric should have left for the WWF in 1988 when Vince McMahon gave him an offer to face Randy Savage for the title at SummerSlam that year. If he did, he would’ve avoided Jim Herd’s (“Jim Herd was an idiot. This is not defamation”) run at the top, which was the first real instance of character assassination that Ric faced in WCW.

The Black Scorpion angle was created to give Sting a major heel challenger, but the random wrestler they chose to portray it in Al Perez backed out after he was told he was going to lose. First of all, what the fuck was that guy’s problem? No one knew who he was to begin with, and no one knew him after. Agreeing to this could have given him a career! Regardless, Ric was chosen because they had no one else, and it ruined Sting’s reign. They didn’t draw with it, and the switch was made back to Ric as champ. Their rematch didn’t draw well because of how badly creative botched the angle, and the blame was unfairly put on 42-year-old Ric. They tried to argue he was too old to maintain a top spot, even though this failure was out of his hands. Despite guaranteed contracts giving wrestlers reasons to find a way not to work (one night in Greensboro, 16/24 wrestlers didn’t show up for the card), WCW tried to cut Ric’s salary and phase him out of the main event while scaling back on his dates. They were doing this to the workhorse of the company! Instead of the $730,000 he was making, they offered him a deal of $350,000 for 2 years and $250,000 for the last year of the agreement. Herd justified this because if business was down, it had to be Ric’s fault and no one else’s. That’s absolute horseshit! Despite us knowing the blame isn’t on Ric and rather the creative and bad decision making like putting their biggest PPV in Chicago instead of Greensboro where they were guaranteed a big house, Ric took it to heart and started to lose confidence in his abilities. Karma is awesome though. Not every time, but a lot of times, the universe makes up for things. After Herd told Ric “Fuck you” over the phone after he fired Flair and demanded the NWA title back without Ric getting his deposit back and Ric refusing, the Great American Bash‘s title match was flooded with chants of “We want Flair!”. On top of that, “mainstream sports commentators in the Charlotte area called for a WCW boycott” and the NWA issued a statement that they still recognized Ric as champion.

It was so satisfying to hear that Herd knew he fucked up and tried to call Ric, but Ric refused the call and met with Vince McMahon instead. Flair still took a meeting later on after he had his leverage, and he talks about how Herd and Petrik couldn’t be nicer and offered to put a clause in his contract “that I’d be depicted as the Babe Ruth of professional wrestling”, and they wanted to increase his salary to $800,000 to $2.4 million over three years. Instead, Ric put his foot down and chose Vince McMahon’s handshake deal over uncertain salary and didn’t regret it. The fact that Vince didn’t change Ric’s character like he did with Harley Race or Dusty Rhodes and delivered on his promise to position Flair in the main event, and if he wasn’t there he’d be allowed to leave, was a huge compliment. One can only wonder how Ric’s career would have turned out had he stayed with the WWF, considering he regained his confidence during this run and how much Vince respected his legacy. Granted, they were going to go through a youth movement no matter what, but who knows? Can you imagine Ric in the Attitude Era working in the main event helping the younger generation? A motivated Ric positioned high on the card is one of the most valuable wrestlers on the planet.

People act like the NWA didn’t hold a candle to the WWF, but Ric brings up a great point pre-Hogan. When he faced Bob Backlund in a “Champion vs. Champion” crossover match, it didn’t do great business because the WWF title didn’t mean anything in Atlanta just as the NWA title didn’t excite anyone in New York.

“When you’ve been repeatedly told that your guy is the only real champion, someone coming in with a different championship just doesn’t hold much value”. This line alone changed my thinking about professional wrestling in the 1970s and 1980s.

What’s so refreshing about To Be the Man is that you can tell Ric isn’t holding back and isn’t lying his way through these stories like some wrestlers tend to do. Some of it is even embarrassing to him, but this book is sort of a catharsis for him, explaining who he is and what he’s done to be the character he presented onscreen, as well as how greatly it affected his personal life. Though he admits he loved every second of being the character Ric Flair (“I was always there monetarily, but everybody – including my wife and kids – came second to the business”), he admits he messed up as a father and as a husband because of it. Despite his son David being born, Leslie wanted a divorce because Ric was just as reckless as he always was, and he didn’t argue her decision. On a somber note, that really reveals who Ric was at the time, he is honest in saying Leslie didn’t do anything wrong and “I could have been married to Raquel Welch, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I wanted to be Ric Flair, the character the fans saw on television, every minute of every day of my life”. Despite how fruitful his career has been, he reveals that Leslie still hasn’t forgiven him 25 years later and he hasn’t forgiven himself for putting his “Ric Flair” persona before her and his kids. It’s something that haunts him and shows the dark side of one of the most famous wrestlers to ever exist. His spending habits contributed to his personal problems just as much. Being the character of Ric Flair, he bought whatever he wanted because that’s who he wanted to be. Even if he didn’t have the money for it or owed a lot of money to the IRS, it never seemed to stop him. In Chapter 8 (“You’ve Been Here Before, and We’ve Never Been the Same”), he details how he bought a “private plane, 3 condos in Florida, 2 condos in South Carolina, 3 Rolexes, a three-carat diamond ring, 200 custom made suits, 300 pairs of alligator shoes, all the limos the Four Horsemen rode in (which racked up an annual bill of $60,000), and 2 oil wells in Texas that he was told were going to have a huge return.

Apparently, that’s the cost of being “The man”.

Going back to his infamous drinking habits, Flair calculates that he bought 100 kamikazes a week from 1976 to 1991, which equates to nearly 80,000 kamikazes in addition to all the beer, liquor, and wine that also went on his tab. It never stopped him, despite having to pay $1,000,000 in late penalties and interest to the IRS. Anytime an accountant said something he didn’t like, he would just fire one and get another. Though he can’t prove it, he still thinks one of the accountants embezzled from him because he kept a poor track record of his assets. He doesn’t outright say it, but this does seem to contribute mightily to his mental breakdown on the way to Japan for one of his mini-tours. Because of how awful he was with his finances and how deep of a hole he was in and how irresponsible he was (this is a guy who lost his driver’s license, so he had to be driven around from 1983 to 1985), he had to ask for help. To solve his tax issue, Jimmy Crockett, David Crockett, and George Scott basically owned 10% of Ric, and Ric paid them back the money he owed out of his own checks with 10% interest! Mind you, this is a grown man with a family, but Ric was that careless in his prime that this was what it turned into. Thank God he was one of the biggest stars in the industry because a lower card guy would not be afforded this luxury of a couple of promoters and a booker paying off his debts for him. By the way, Ric still didn’t learn from his mistakes. When he went to the WWF before he signed anything, he mentions how he called Vince McMahon to tell him that he owed $200,000 to the IRS and when he got home from Japan, Vince sent the money to him to pay it off, despite the fact that he was working on a handshake deal. He’s lucky he’s respected so much, or maybe he doesn’t realize how lucky he is. This is the same guy who talks about how wrestlers liked to fly with him because it made them feel safer and “After all, I’d been in one plane crash. What were the odds that it would happen twice?”.

His drinking and spending were just an inkling of Ric’s incredible lack of foresight. He opens Chapter 10 (“Things Are Taking Place”) talking about how “With the kind of houses that we were drawing, I never looked at Vince McMahon, or the World Wrestling Federation, as a threat to the NWA”. He liked seeing his friends doing well in the WWF, but he didn’t watch their programming or feel threatened in the slightest because he didn’t see any of them being bigger than him. It’s kind of crazy to admit this in hindsight. With that being said, he does make a very good point that could very well alter anyone’s all-time wrestler list in that, “The World Wrestling Federation Champion was chosen by one man. To win the NWA title, you needed nine individuals to pick you. That meant that you had to be better than everyone else, and if you weren’t, they took it away from you”. With that being said, he does wonder what type of money he could have made if he left the NWA in 1985 adding, “Sure Hulk Hogan was on top, but in the ring, he wasn’t my peer. How could he have held me down?”. He even argues Roddy Piper could have been as hot as Hogan because he was a better interview and worker, but this is the one time I’ll take Hogan’s side. In the Hulkster’s defense, Piper was unreliable and too unpredictable as a person to put your whole company around him.

As with any autobiography or shoot interview, Ric pulls no punches on his honest opinion of fellow wrestlers. As much praise as he gives territory guys like Harley Race, Ricky Steamboat (“He’s the greatest hero I’ve ever wrestled”) Wahoo McDaniel, Triple H, or Shawn Michaels, he lets out a lot of critiques that he was clearly itching to get off his chest and it’s wildly entertaining. Though I don’t necessarily agree with some of his takes, I do like hearing his perspective on why he thinks the way he does. Considering his pedigree, Ric has every right to criticize certain wrestlers like when he asks where The Honky Tonk Man would be if he wasn’t employed by Vince McMahon, or that Jake Roberts was a good worker “but when he wrestled the Carolinas, the fans looked at him as a marginal guy” and how he didn’t become a superstar until Vince had him chasing André the Giant around with a snake. With Scott Hall, he does say he could be a good performer on a given night “but when people called him “great”, they lowered the ball ten feet”. When referring to Scott’s match with Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania X he says, “Shawn had that match with the ladder; Scott Hall just happened to be in the vicinity”. A lot of the time, Flair is funny without even trying. A great example of this is him talking about Muhammed Ali at the conference in North Korea. Because of Ali’s sickness, he could barely talk, but once he heard all the propaganda being spewed about how they could take out the US and Japan at any time, Ali said perfectly, “No wonder we hate these motherfuckers”. Naturally, Flair couldn’t believe it (“Oh shit. Don’t start talking now!”).

Ric’s biggest criticism of certain wrestling stars comes down to them having the ability to call a match in the ring. He refuses to call anyone a good worker if they have to choreograph an entire match. He was taught that you had to be able to call it in the ring and improvise. It was essential to being a great wrestler. Because of this, he unexpectedly trashes Diamond Dallas Page and his world title reigns directly stating, “His climb to the top will go down in history as one of the biggest jokes ever perpetrated on our industry”. He calls him an average wrestler who couldn’t improvise whatsoever, an average talker, and how his tattoos did nothing to win over fans. He even accuses Eric Bischoff of forcing DDP down the fans’ throats because he was friends with him. What’s funny about this is that Bischoff stated in Controversy Creates Cash that he didn’t see DDP as a long-term champion either, though Ric’s hatred of Bischoff probably blinded him to the facts. DDP was always one of my favorites, so I’ll defend him against either guy. Even so, Ric doesn’t stop there. Because of Mick Foley trashing Ric’s booking of him in Have A Nice Day when Ric was on the booking committee, Ric gives him an earned receipt. I like Foley, but after hearing Ric’s side of the story, it’s clear that Mick didn’t know the full details of what Ric was going through at the time and just blamed Flair because he was the biggest name there. Flair was technically on the booking committee, but his problems with Jim Herd cannot be overstated. While in charge, Herd famously wanted to update Ric’s character by changing his name to Spartacus and dressing him like a gladiator with an earring, a haircut, and a shield. Keep in mind that this guy was a station manager, a bank manager, and he managed a Pizza Hut (the wrestlers hilariously called him “Pizza King” behind his back) before WCW, and he’s trying to tell RIC FLAIR that he needs to change everything about himself to stay with the times!

Ric was already fighting an uphill battle for himself because it’s as if his legacy meant absolutely nothing to Herd, despite being the biggest star the company had and was being referred to as the GOAT during this timeframe by wrestling pundits and fans. So, when faced with Cactus Jack, where his angle was that he was a 300-pound guy living in a homeless shelter, Ric admits he didn’t know what to do with him. However, he couldn’t just push everything aside to mold Mick into a star when he was dealing with being humiliated on a consistent basis by Jim Herd. After reading about Herd’s moronic ideas and learning about what Flair was dealing with mentally, I see where Ric is coming from. Jim Cornette even chimes in to talk about Herd wanting to copy Vince McMahon, but he “didn’t have the talent or insight”. He jokes that he thought about shooting Herd when he left the booking committee, but “I figured anybody as stupid as he was, who had pissed off as many people and screwed with as many careers as he had, probably had a real gun in his desk drawer”. That should tell you all you need to know about that moron. Plus, Ric wasn’t in charge, so it’s not entirely on him. Regardless, he points out how Mick didn’t have much ability and surely wouldn’t survive Verne Gagne’s camp, which I agree with Ric on that one, and calls Mick a “glorified stuntman”. It’s obvious Ric isn’t a fan of hardcore wrestling, but his comment of “hardcore became a niche for a lot of guys who couldn’t do fuck-all in the ring” was hilarious. Along with saying The Sandman isn’t a wrestler and talking about how real wrestlers didn’t have to fall off a ladder to be a star, he doubles down and says Foley isn’t a great worker, something he says about “Macho Man” Randy Savage too just because he had to choreograph everything like DDP. He even argues that the fans didn’t care for Savage nearly as much without Miss Elizabeth, but I digress. Though he knows more than we do, I don’t know how accurate his comment is of Foley spending “half the day before television broadcasts sucking up to the writers – because he’s such a fan of himself”.

Additionally, Ric makes an interesting point about the difference between being a great performer and just being a guy “who became famous because he happened to be working for Vince”. He’s right that Vince was able to make stars out of guys like Brutus Beefcake and the Ultimate Warrior when no one else would have that much success, but I disagree with Flair putting Foley in this category. At that point, Ric just seemed pissed off. Then, there’s Ric’s controversial take on Bret Hart, which naturally Bret still talks about to this day like he does everything else. It’s probably because Ric said there was no comparison between him and Shawn Michaels, among other things. Even so, it’s a decent talking point rather than an outright burial. He admits that, “Personally, I never saw dollar signs on Bret Hart”, bringing up his limited charisma and interview skills and how he didn’t draw (which is highly debatable). On top of that, he also brings up something that has been corroborated by quite a few wrestlers in that “He also could have been the president of his own fan club. Bret truly thought that he was the best technical wrestler who ever lived, and he was stuck in a routine that he refused to break”. That last part is rich coming from Flair. He criticizes Bret for relying on the same sequence for his comeback, but Bret has rightfully pointed out in his own criticism of Ric that he pretty much does the same thing in every match. Most of the time, you know exactly the spots you’re getting in a Flair match. It may have been different when Ric was doing hour-long matches daily, but when he was on regular television every week from WCW on, Ric became everything he criticized Bret for. That’s not a diss either. Ric just loved not having a TV time limit in his matches because it allowed for him to improvise. He talks about how frustrated he was when he was in the WWF the first time around because matches didn’t go longer than 10 or 15 minutes comically stating, “Well, that might have worked for Hogan – no one wanted to see him wrestle thirty minutes anyway”.

Had Bret Hart started around the same time as prime Flair, I’m sure he could have torn down the house in hour-long matches just as well. Then again, Bret’s inflexibility is probably fair at that point if Ric is telling the truth when “If I tried adding things to Bret’s comeback – like hitting him with a chop – he couldn’t stand it. It had to be in a rotation”. We don’t need to get into the Montreal Screwjob all over again, but Ric’s “territory wrestler” perspective had me nodding in agreement, like him being annoyed that Bret couldn’t lose in Canada and how it was the equivalent of Ric refusing to lose in North Carolina (“Give me a break!”). When he puts it like this, it is a bit outrageous for Bret to have that much of an ego over the thing. What did surprise me is how hard he went on “not a good in-ring performer” Bruno Sammartino, pointing out how limited he was in the ring outside of lifting and bear hugging people. As a wrestling fan, I do like Bruno, but if you’ve seen literally any Bruno match, you’d be hard pressed to disagree with anything Ric says about him. It’s true that compared to versatile NWA champions like Harley Race, Dory Funk Jr., and Jack Brisco that Bruno didn’t have comparable ability. When Ric saw Bruno wrestle, he came to the realization that I feel like fans would balk at. At the time, Bruno was at the top of all the rankings because all the wrestling magazines came out of New York, but Ric saw him firsthand saying, “How could anyone rate him ahead of Harley? Christ, how could this guy be champion of anything?”. Bruno was popular in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia because of his immigrant roots, but Ric says Pedro Morales was better and that’s why he was able to work in different territories. With Bruno, Ric reveals, “When Sammartino came to St. Louis, where the NWA was headquartered, nobody cared because he was so far below the standards of the wrestlers they knew as champions”. On top of trashing fans calling Bruno “great” because the “term is thrown around much too liberally”, he hates how bitter Bruno has become, spending much of his retirement burying the business that gave him money and fame. Honestly, that’s fair too.

Like a lot of older wrestlers today, Bruno just couldn’t accept that wrestling wasn’t the same as it was in “1965”. As many hardships as Ric faced, he told his second wife Beth to not criticize wrestling if she outlives him because it’s given them the lifestyle that they are able to live, and that’s pretty admirable coming from Flair. Bruno could have been a frequent visitor of the locker room like Freddie Blassie was with the boys coming to listen to his stories, but his bitterness removed him from it all and Ric can’t respect that because it gave them everything. I understand his perspective on the subject. With all of this being said, he did bury Shane Douglas (“This is a man who failed on every level”; “in his mind, someone was always holding him back”,) and Sid (“A useless muscle head who would bounce back and forth between WCW and the World Wrestling Federation, contributing zero to either company. Sid exemplifies the worst of this business; he got rich despite never learning his craft or drawing a dime”). I loved how full of shit Brutus Beefcake was too (“An idiot who’d insert himself into situations where he didn’t belong because of his association with Hogan”). Him getting pissy with Ric for giving Eddie Guerrero a good match because it would make Ric look like less of a viable opponent to Hogan was a great example as to the stark contrast in philosophies of a true professional wrestler and a guy that got over because of Vince McMahon, the WWF machine, and how that side of the pond views pro wrestling. Can you imagine being Brutus Beefcake and telling Ric Flair what to do in a ring? Ric is right to call him out, just as he was with the Renegade having a horrible match with Arn Anderson. Bischoff thought he should’ve beaten Arn in 15 seconds so he was protected, but Ric is correct in saying that they shouldn’t have attempted it at all because the guy shouldn’t hold a title if he can’t work longer than 15 seconds. It would be disrespectful to the business otherwise. Hogan’s a liar if he’s acting like that loss to the Ultimate Warrior didn’t bother him with how they tried to make the Renegade into something. It’s as clear as day.

The most agitating thing about To Be the Man is that you start to realize that the political sabotage and character assassination of Ric Flair in WCW was very real. As great as Flair’s legacy is despite all the bullshit he went through and accepted, he still arguably didn’t reach his full potential. Had Dusty Rhodes not overused the infamous “Dusty finish” to avoid clean wins for Flair to keep his title when Hogan was beating everyone clean in the WWF, Ric could have been invincible, but Dusty was still booking WCW like a territory rather than thinking of the big picture and Ric was taking a beating every night and looking weak when the NWA champ should have been protected more once they were on weekly national television. It diminished Ric’s credibility to a point. To Flair’s credit, he didn’t see it this way because he was always taught to have the best match possible, to sell his opponent’s moves as best he can to make them look good, and to give the fans as much as he can during a match. It’s a total difference in philosophy to how the WWF was doing things to make their stars look like superstars and it affected the NWA/WCW greatly. Think about it, if the WWF’s top guy is beating everyone clean in 10 or 15 minutes, and Ric is taking an hour to retain the title by DQ, who would you think is the better champion? That was WCW’s problem, and Jim Cornette was right in pointing this out. What’s really aggravating is that Ric’s final run with WCW after coming back from the WWF, IF HANDLED RIGHT, could have positioned him as the undisputed GOAT. Unfortunately, Flair might be right. After he played a major part in getting Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage to come to WCW, something Eric Bischoff has even corroborated in Controversy Creates Cash, it seemed as though Bischoff treated him as a bit player and gave Flair nowhere near the respect and metaphorical cock sucking he gave to Hogan, Nash, Hall, Savage, and others.

Not to pocket watch, but there is no excuse for 18 wrestlers to earn more than Ric fucking Flair, especially when he names some of them as Scott Norton, Booker T, and Stevie Ray. THAT is outrageous. When his contract expired in 1998, he wanted a “3-year deal, reasonable involvement in storylines, fair treatment, and legitimate consideration of my experience and status as a multiple time world champion”. Considering this is Ric Flair we’re talking about, this is totally reasonable, and he was told his needs would be met. However, he received a letter of agreement in November 1997 that expressed the basic terms of contract but with major things missing such as “promising my involvement in storylines and requiring that I be treated in a “civil and respectful” manner. WCW also wanted the right to eliminate me from their programs as long as I was getting paid”. What in the absolute fuck? It’s like they hated him for being the star that he was and wanted the right contractually to fuck him over! Ric’s jerkoff loser agents Barry Bloom and Michael Braverman are as big of villains as WCW was as far as I’m concerned. They assured Flair to stay put and they’d get him big guaranteed money, promising him a book deal including a $360,000 advance with Crown Publishing, but it was put on hold when Goldberg was to write his book. When the book bombed, they forgot about Ric’s. Sadly, “over the course of my entire relationship with Bloom and Braverman, they never got me one outside project, not even an autograph signing”. This is bizarre considering the star Ric was in his prime. Him going the movie route wouldn’t even be out of the equation considering how popular he was. For these moronic agents not even able to get him an autograph signing begs the question WHAT IN THE FUCK WERE THESE TWO DOING except for stealing money from Flair?! Their lies continued because they told Ric he would get a salary comparable to everyone except Hogan (who was making more than twice Ric’s yearly salary for a single fucking PPV), Nash, Hall, and Sting.

During this time frame, Ric’s son Reid qualified for an AAU national wrestling tournament and Ric was going, but Eric in Japan called to say he couldn’t go because they needed him for WCW Thunder. They offered to charter a plane to fly him to Tallahassee from the tournament in Detroit on the condition that Ric paid half the airfare, a story covered in detail in Controversy Creates Cash. Ric does bring up two valid points though. They would never do this to Hulk Hogan, and though I saw things from Bischoff’s perspective of firing Flair and suing him for breach of contract, Bischoff conveniently left out the part that Ric didn’t have a contract. There was only that letter of intent that he rejected. WCW was pulling shit out their ass too when they said Ric’s absence on a single edition of Thunder cost them about $2 million, “a pretty interesting number since I was getting paid just a quarter of that to work a full year”. Ric countersued and sat without a paycheck for five months while Monday Nitro‘s streak against Monday Night Raw came to an end, but Ric finally relented and agreed to extend his old contract for four more years because he knew if they were to go to trial for a long time, his wrestling career would be over since he was already older. Plus, he knew Arn was trying to keep the Horsemen together on TV, which would be impossible without Flair. Once again, Ric got screwed and was forced to just take it. The hoops Ric Flair had to crawl through to survive, despite practically building the company with his name is downright disrespectful. As much credit as I gave Bischoff for how he had to battle the executives once the merger happened in WCW, I cannot defend him for his treatment of such a legend. Going out of your way to collect the wrestlers backstage for a meeting to say, “Look, Ric Flair is a liar, and everyone lets him get away with it because he’s Ric Flair. Let him be Ric Flair. I’m going to sue him and his family into bankruptcy” is appalling. If this is verbatim what he said and Chris Jericho seems to confirm the story, it goes without saying how unprofessional it is for a major executive of a major corporation saying this about an employee in front of other employees.

Another inexcusable moment was a storyline involving Curt Hennig stealing one of Ric Flair’s $5,500 robes, ripping off the sleeves, and giving it to Hogan. Ric wasn’t reimbursed for it! Are you kidding? Jericho is right. Bischoff did seem to have some sort of vendetta against Ric. From having the Horsemen lose WarGames two years in a row in North Carolina, to punishing Ric for missing only his second show in 25 years to take his son Reid to his amateur wrestling tournament by having him drop the title to The Giant, to getting his series screwed with by Hogan because Hogan refused to give him the win back, to Ric having to save their third match by losing a retirement stipulation, to embarrassingly having to return in drag to attack Randy Savage, there did seem to be a problem that Bischoff clearly had with Flair. Even so, Flair did his best to try and do what he was told. When Vader refused to lose to Hogan and vice versa, Ric interfered in their strap match and lost the match for Vader, despite not being in the fucking match! How moronic is that? Once he lost the tag match at Slamboree he thought, “I’d brought Hogan and Savage into WCW, dropped the title, retired, come back in drag, lost Vader’s strap match for him, and had gotten pinned at Slamboree. Call me paranoid, but I was starting to feel a little manipulated”. He was! It’s as simple as that! The one time he had enough and told Randy Savage that he’s winning this time and Randy agreed to it, Ric was instantly kicked off the booking committee. It’s like they were just waiting for a reason to get him out. For the record, he wasn’t even being paid extra to help out on the booking committee, which is total bullshit. Going along with his real-life feud with Eric Bischoff, Eric would apparently blame Ric for decisions he didn’t make like convincing Arn Anderson to cancel his planned vacation to tour Japan because Eric told Arn that Ric wanted him to. Ron Simmons was led to believe Ric didn’t seem him as a main eventer, which Ric shoots down because it was actually Hogan who didn’t want to work with him.

Then, Ric started noticing he was booked to lose in the Carolinas and Virginia where he was most popular, and fans started losing interest in his character. I have to agree with him here. Even back then, I remember not considering Flair up there with the top of the card because of how much he was losing at that time. He was right to be paranoid. They were screwing him from every angle! He’s right to question losing to Konnan. Naturally, Eric flipped out on him for complaining and accused him of not being a team player, which pisses me off more because you knew he wouldn’t dare yell at some of those other top guys like that. Though it’s up in the air whether he gave notice or not, Eric reprimanding Ric for getting surgery in his cataracts without permission for the time off, so he forced Ric to fly back immediately which messed up his eye to this day is infuriating because you know he wouldn’t do that to Hogan, Hall, or Nash. Then, there’s more of the disrespect from Eric when he collected the roster for another meeting to talk about how they were going to put the WWF out of business in 6 months guaranteed and nobody in the room has drawn a dime except Hogan, Savage, and Piper. Everyone looked at Ric who was a well-documented draw, but he just sat there and took it, completely humiliated at the comment. It’s more infuriating because Ric played a part in getting Bischoff the promotion in the first place. In Chapter 16 (“This Guy’s Got a Vision”), Ric was asked by Bob Dhue what he thought about Eric and Ric gave him credit. He liked Eric and said he was aggressive, smart, and contemporary. He doubled down when talking with Bill Shaw about it. In addition, Shaw asked Ric how Bob was doing, and Ric admitted he was struggling in his position. When Bill brought up Bischoff to see if he could be the kind of guy who could make decisions, Ric said “Definitely”. Did Bischoff know how big of a part Ric played in getting him his job in the first place? Based off of Eric’s autobiography, I don’t think he had a clue, or at least he doesn’t believe Ric’s side of the story. Considering Flair is still harboring this hatred of Bischoff and admits to trying to fight him backstage in 2003 after he was signed to WWE by cornering him in his office, it goes to show you how much Bischoff messed with his head.

I’m not saying Ric was in the right to attack him because Bischoff was under a lot of pressure himself in WCW, but I couldn’t help but laugh at Flair’s recalling of Bischoff’s phone call before he entered the room, as he overheard Eric talking about his new idea that was going to “revolutionize” television and saying his classic clichéd line of, “It’s taking on a life of its own”. I can practically hear Bischoff saying this. That is 100% him. He’s a salesman to the day he dies.

WCW was in complete disarray and Flair comes off as the last professional there in its dying days. He talks about how in 1999 how bad he took his father’s death and had to deal with the continued dysfunction in the company like his son David never being trained to wrestle but being brought in, leading to a segment where Hogan went overboard and whipped David with his belt many more times than agreed upon while Flair was handcuffed. Then, there were things like Scott Steiner finishing a match and would “Barge through the curtain, screaming at road agents, knocking down tables, and throwing around television monitors”, Nash and Hall no-showing important dates, and Eric and DDP coming up with an idea for Flair to fake a heart attack for a storyline (and much later on they staged a funeral for Kevin Nash the day after Dale Earnhardt died). Then, you got the Vince Russo era where Ric hilariously points out Russo falling in love with pushing “two guys who couldn’t draw a dime”, referring to Jeff Jarrett and Scott Steiner. His receipt on Steiner is warranted too, as he’s still pissed about the unnecessary shoot promo Steiner pulled on him that was riddled with lies about how Ric got Stone Cold fired because he was jealous of him, and how he privately told Lex Luger that Ric screwed him around, despite Ric never having a problem with Lex and was a big part in showing him how to work early in his career. It must have felt good for Ric to say, “He’s a guy who meant nothing as an attraction, drew no money, and has no legacy. People will forget him the minute he retires”. Though this is a bit of a stretch, Scott Steiner’s well-documented disrespect to the bottom card talent is inexcusable all the same, but WCW deserves a slap in the face for NEVER reprimanding him. Ric says it himself, “I can’t count the number of times I heard agents say, we don’t want to get Scotty mad”. If you’re scared of your own employees, you can’t be in charge. Then again, this was commonplace for WCW.

I even started to feel bad for Flair in this final stretch with WCW. After losing to a magazine writer in Russo, who seemed to plug in Flair’s family for a storyline anytime the show had a hole in it, while fake blood was poured on him at 51 years of age, it was almost like Ric didn’t recognize what wrestling had turned into. By the time he had to get surgery on his rotator cuff, him and Reid lost a tag match to his son David and Vince Russo, and they had to get their heads shaved. At this point, he was so over the company, he just said “Fuck it” essentially and did so because the company agreed to pay him while he was recovering from surgery. Even on this, they stiffed him, so he had to call Russo. To Russo’s credit, he went to bat for him and talked to Brad Siegel over this, but Ric only got some of the money back. I can’t imagine being fucked over this many times by one company and not flipping out. By his own admission, Ric couldn’t wait for the company to go out of business, but he couldn’t walk out because he didn’t want to get sued again. When WCW went out with a whimper, Ric was mentally broken, out of shape, thought his wrestling career was over, and developed “alcoholic cardiomyopathy”. As great of a career as he has had, the man went through a mental anguish I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Nevertheless, fans will appreciate factoids like Ric getting the idea for his chops from Wahoo McDaniel and Terry Funk, his hair from Dusty Rhodes and “Superstar” Billy Graham (among others), Jimmy Crockett coming up with the idea for Ric’s theme song being “Also sprach Zarathustra”, and how Ric did steroids in 1972, 1978, 1983, 1989, and 1990. You have to appreciate his honesty. Additionally, he bled 42 consecutive nights during the Bash series, and at that point in 2004, he only had 7 of his robes left. He originally had 22, but he gave some to charity, some were stolen, and the two that were hung in the WCW Nitro Cafe in Las Vegas disappeared after the restaurant closed. There’s WCW screwing with him again. On a side note, Flair’s recounting of Bruiser Brody’s death got a chuckle out of me with, “A lot of people claim that given the corrupt nature of the Puerto Rican legal system, the verdict was inevitable. I wasn’t there, so I’ll never be sure. I do know this, though: Brody was a stubborn guy, but so were the Puerto Ricans. And it was their island”.

Hulk Hogan joked with Flair that “The man who makes the most money is the best worker”. The two laughed because Ric knew what he meant. As fans we can laugh too because we also know what he meant. It is about making money, but it doesn’t make you the greatest of all time because you still have to make it work in the ring. Ric Flair is someone who could do both better than anyone. Even though he didn’t have to, Ric loved this business and would try to wrestle a classic every night out, willing to sell his “heart out to make it happen”. It came at a cost, and his family never truly recovered, but he did it for the love of the game. He sacrificed everything so he could be “Ric Flair” and gained the respect of every one of his peers, which is something that can’t be bought. In doing so, he created a legacy that is unmatched, though he had to be reminded of it after quite a few troubling years. Should he be praised for it? It’s hard to say, as Ric would tell you firsthand, he regretted what he did to his family in pursuit of greatness and the party lifestyle. To this day, he still works to improve his relationship with them to mixed results. At the same time, he still admits he loves being Ric Flair and still wrestles just so he can be that character, so it’s hard to say where he even lands on the subject. If he didn’t have his family take a backseat, where would his wrestling legacy be? This is the conundrum of trying to be the greatest of all time and why very few try to reach that level because of how great of a cost it can be. Regardless of where you land on the proverbial fence of the right and wrong on the life and times of Ric Flair, one thing that cannot be argued is that To Be the Man is one the best books about professional wrestling ever written.