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Why Ric Flair faked a heart attack in front of daughter in final match

Posted: Sep 1st 2022 By: Ryan Glasspiegel

The dirtiest player in the game faked a heart attack in front of his own daughter.

Ric Flair was taking part in his final wrestling match in Nashville on July 31. His son-in-law Conrad Thompson, the podcast magnate who also promoted the event, would later reveal that he “begged” Flair before the match not to do a fake heart attack spot. Nevertheless, Flair explained to The Post he felt it was necessary to preserve the pacing to the finish as he was suffering dehydration.

“I made the mistake of saying to someone in the match that I felt lightheaded, so everybody jumped way too early [toward the finish of the match], and I just said [in my head] that this was the only way to slow it down,” Flair said.

Flair has stared death in the face twice. The first time, in 1975, he was on a plane that crashed. The pilot died, and Flair suffered a broken back.

At that point, however, Flair wasn’t thinking about death. He was worried about what would happen if he couldn’t wrestle again.

“The other one was 10 times more serious,” he said.

“The other one” was a multi-year saga. Flair had an intestinal blockage in 2015. He had an emergency appendectomy. He tried to walk out of the hospital that day.

“I was determined not to be checked in. I hate hospitals,” Flair said. “I got up, took the needles out of my arm. It was no big deal — I’ve done that before. But when I was walking out the door I got a hernia.”

Durning the hernia surgery, they nicked his bowel. This meant his third surgery in 11 days, the final one involving a long recovery process.

He then had what he said doctors told him was a “one in a million” occurrence of the bowel issues flaring back up, in 2019 — and it had a devastating effect.

“I was septic — they couldn’t operate on me for 48 hours,” Flair said. “I was in such pain that they put me on life support and they kept me on it for 14 days. For 31 days in ICU, I couldn’t walk. I had no memory. I couldn’t even open a can of Diet Coke. With 31 more days of rehab, learning how to walk again, I finally headed home.”

During the time in which he thought he might die, he called everybody he cared about, including those he might have had “beef” with, and told them how much he loved them.

It took two years after leaving the hospital for him to be what he considered “halfway normal.” A year and change after that, he wrestled, at the age of 73.

While the match was critically acclaimed — justifiably graded on a curve — Flair feels that his performance lagged due to dehydration he suffered, and he did not get closure from it.

Flair is a perfectionist about accomplishing the goals he sets for himself. For example, he was “fixated” on dropping nearly 30 pounds to get down to 218, and did it.

The Nature Boy — whose cannabis collaboration with Mike Tyson’s “Tyson 2.0” launches in October — had a few beers out in Nashville the night before, but he went to bed early. He woke up before dawn, had egg whites and coffee, and didn’t eat anything else the rest of the day. This, combined with the performance anxiety he had about performing in front of 9,000 people, led him to be dehydrated.

“I just ran out of fluid,” Flair said. “I didn’t get tired or anything. I was doing 500 free squats in 12 minutes. Find someone my age who can do that, or what I was doing on the stationary bike. Even 50.”

The dehydration caused Flair to get “lost” during the match. This brings us to the fake heart attack right in front of his daughter Megan, which Flair wants to set the record straight about — it was an audible on his part, not a scripted part of the match.

“I did that on my own,” Flair said. “I told the referee [to tell] Jeff Jarrett to slow down. Boom, bring it back down and lay the rest of the match out. And we did that. That was an audible to get everybody back on the same track — slow down, I’m fine. It was not the plan. It was not in good taste. I realize that. It was the only thing that was going to keep everybody from going right to the finish.”