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Recovering Ric Flair unafraid to talk thorny wrestling issues, from sex to drugs

Posted: Oct 7th 2017 By: Mark Price

Wrestling icon Ric Flair’s recent brush with death has emboldened him to talk freely about hot button issues in professional wrestling, including time spent from family and the drug abuse that killed his son, professional wrestler Reid Flair.

“The drug problem...You never see it coming,” he said this week in an interview with NBC Sports Radio. “You are in denial. My kid smoking dope? Not a chance, no chance in hell. All of a sudden, it’s reality...I couldn’t fathom it. He was fighting a disease. Trust me, drugs are not an addiction. Drugs, at a high level, are a disease. That’s all there is to it.”

Reid Flair, 25, died of a toxic combination of heroin and prescription drugs in 2013. He was found dead by his father in a SouthPark hotel suite.

Ric Flair also admits in the NBC Sports Radio interview that too much time away from home hurt his family, including his other son, David Flair.

“I know my son is still very upset with me and that’s something I have to live with,” Flair said. “He’ll never get over the fact that I wasn’t around enough...A lot of fathers aren’t around for different reasons...I’m willing to take the blame for it. I was very selfish. I wanted to be the best.”

As for his recent health scare, it has been blamed largely on years of heavy drinking. Flair says he is getting better, but is trying to regain 40 pounds lost over three weeks in an Atlanta hospital. That was in August and he says he spent 10 days on life support.

His daughter, professional wrestler Charlotte Flair, said in a recent interview that things were so bad at one point that her father didn’t even recognize her.

People magazine recently reported that Flair had the early stages of kidney failure and congestive heart failure.

Another of the topics Flair has been unafraid to discuss since recovering is his love life. He bragged in a recent interview of having been intimate with 10,000 women in his
life.

Men’s Health magazine did some math and suggests that was impossible.

Flair is not backing down, however.

“I started when I was in the 7th grade,” he told NBC. “I’m not far off on that number. That doesn’t mean everybody was, like, Marilyn Monroe, by any means. But I’m not far off. I was good at three things: Drinking, wrestling and saying ‘Good night’.”

Flair, who now lives in Atlanta, added in the interview that he is now completely faithful to his fiancée of five years, Wendy Barlow