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Ric Flair and the heart attack that wasn’t

Posted: Dec 25th 2016 By: Mike Mooneyham

Warren Peper’s column on Christmas memories last week in The Post and Courier brought to mind one of my own, and it indirectly involved the venerable journalist.

It was during the holiday season in 1998 when 16-time world heavyweight champion Ric Flair was in the midst of a red-hot feud with then-WCW boss Eric Bischoff. The controversy stemmed from some legitimate bad blood between the Nature Boy and Bischoff, who had “fired” Flair two months earlier.

Bischoff was irate that Flair had missed a TV booking. Flair claimed he had permission to take the night off to see his son Reid, then 10 years old, wrestle in a national amateur
championship. There seemed to be little room for compromise.

A frustrated Bischoff called Flair “trash” in front of a locker-room audience and threatened to sue him.

“Look, Ric Flair is a liar and everyone lets him get away with it because he’s Ric Flair,” Bischoff was quoted as telling his troops. “Let him be Ric Flair. I’m gonna sue him
and his family into bankruptcy.”

In the eyes of many wrestling fans and wrestlers, Bischoff became about as popular as the Grinch who stole Christmas. Fans showed their disapproval by filling arenas with “We
Want Flair” signs and chants.

Flair, vowing that he would never allow Bischoff to tarnish a reputation he had spent 25 years to build, responded by

Fans, angry at the treatment of one of their favorites and a performer widely regarded as the greatest performer of the modern generation, rebelled.

Cooler heads, though, would ultimately prevail when it was determined that money could be made from the controversy. Making the best (or was it the worst) out of the situation,
Bischoff decided to add some sizzle when he wrote the legal battle into the storyline, asking Flair to feign a heart attack on national television in an attempt to hype a match
between the two at that year’s Starrcade pay-per-view in Washington, D.C.

“Some of the decisions that the company made were so arbitrary,” Flair wrote in his 2004 book “To Be The Man.” “When Atlanta Falcons coach Dan Reeves suffered a heart attack, Eric and Diamond Dallas Page had a brainstorm on an airplane. When they got to the arena, I was told, ‘You’re going to have a heart attack in the ring tonight. Don’t tell
anyone – not the boys, not your family.’”

While not his proudest moment inside a wrestling ring, Flair was the consummate team player and delivered the goods in convincing fashion. During a live, nationally televised
edition of Monday Nitro on Dec. 14, 1998, in Tampa, Fla., Flair gave one of his fiery, impassioned promos after chasing Bischoff out of the ring.

Calling his adversary a “worthless scumbag,” Flair vowed to exact his revenge.

“I’m going to strangle you half to death. I’m going to reach down inside your skinny little neck, grab what heart you have, and pull it out to show the world you have no heart,”
Flair bellowed.

That’s when Flair reached for his left arm, slumped into a corner and collapsed to the mat. Medical personnel were summoned, and he was taken off in an ambulance. The crowd
went quiet. The show ended on a somber note, leaving millions of viewers concerned over the state of Flair’s dire condition.

The angle was so realistically done that a number of legitimate media outlets reported that Flair had suffered an apparent heart attack during the show.

“When the time came, I got into the ring and started doing an interview, sweating and jumping around and screaming myself hoarse … then held my heart and fell backward. People were calling my house for a week,” Flair later explained in his book.

Flair didn’t realize just how brilliantly the angle was executed. Frantic fans, fearing for his life, called the emergency room and newspapers.

That’s where Warren Peper comes into the picture. At that time the sports director at WCSC-TV here in Charleston, Warren was looking for an update for his late newscast.
Having been deluged the past couple of days by viewers understandably shaken by Flair’s apparent misfortune, he was digging for some answers, and he knew where he could get
them.

My cell phone rang, and it was Warren.

“Mike, I’ve just got to know the answer,” he said with a justifiable sense of urgency. But I really knew the question before he asked it.

“How is Ric doing? Did he really have a heart attack?”

“Let me put it this way,” I replied. “He’s in the middle of the dance floor right now, and he looks like he’s moving pretty good from here.”

The truth was that Warren caught me at a Christmas bash Ric was holding at a posh location in Charlotte where, safely out of public sight, the Nature Boy partied well into the
early morning hours, obviously displaying no effects of a heart attack.

But Warren had his story, with other media outlets soon following suit. And WCW, fearing backlash due to the controversial storyline, would later take the high road and drop the misguided angle.

Tagging out

Wishing a happy retirement to my longtime newspaper colleague and rasslin’ tag-team partner Frank Wooten, whose last day at The Post and Courier was Friday.

Our newspaper careers coincided for four decades, during which some of our greatest times were spent watching wrestling at County Hall and football at Clemson’s Death
Valley, not to mention a night on the town with the aforementioned “Nature Boy” Ric Flair.

Keep stylin’ and profilin’ Frank!