• Look Back In History
• Pmessages
• Quiz
• Stump The Staff
• Top Fifty
• Close

Nature Boy's Fans Cheer A Ring Master

Posted: Apr 8th 2008 By: CMBurnham

Ric Flair?s wit and antics brought in crowds to arenas and armories in the Carolinas for years.

Say what you will about how he made his mark on our collective conscience.

Call him a sham, though it?s not likely you?d say it to his face.

But never say Ric Flair wasn?t entertaining. And when the Nature Boy announced his retirement at age 59 last week, it closed an era for wrestling fans in the Cape Fear region.

?You will never find a man who worked as hard to make sure the fans got their money?s worth,? said Tony James of Fayetteville. The lifelong fan says there?s never been a time in his life when he wasn?t aware of the Nature Boy.

?I guess my first memories came before I was born,? he says with a laugh. ?I?m 33, so I probably heard Ric before I could see him. My mom went to matches at the arena while she was still pregnant.?

For more than three decades, the bleached-blond Minnesota transplant brought a sense of style and swagger to the brutish buffoonery that many associate with professional wrestling. It was the lifeblood of arenas across the South, but was once just chubby clowns in tights to the majority of folks.

Flair helped change that.

?He was flamboyant, but not a clown,? said Eddie McKoy. The former Hope Mills police officer and lifelong fan is a professional wrestler now. He said Flair raised the bar for wrestlers and spectators.

?He was the guy who could talk smack and back it up,? McKoy said. ?He?d look like he was going to get beat, but somehow he?d win in the end.?

To put Flair?s career into perspective, consider another North Carolinian who dominated his respective sport ? NASCAR?s Richard Petty.

?I guess NASCAR and wrestling have a lot in common,? McKoy said. ?Both were more popular in the South than anywhere else, and reached a different clientele than other sports.
?But when you look at all that?s been accomplished by Flair and realize he?s a guy from North Carolina ... it sort of gives you a feeling of pride. He?s been everywhere and seen things all over the world, and he didn?t have to join the military to do it.?

Technically, Flair isn?t from North Carolina. And as wrestling fans know, his name isn?t really Ric Flair.

Like a masked wrestler from parts unknown, no one knows exactly what the Nature Boy?s original name was.

Born in Tennessee in 1949, he was given up for adoption to a couple from Minnesota. His new parents named him Richard Fliehr. He learned to wrestle in high school, and was a state champion in the late 1960s.

Flair played football at the University of Minnesota, where he met Greg Gagne. Gagne?s dad, legendary pro wrestler Verne Gagne, agreed to teach Flair the wrestling ropes. In 1972, Flair turned pro.

At the time, Flair had none of the moves or the persona that made him a legend. But he gained the attention of North Carolina promoter Jim Crockett with his in-ring endurance and athletic ability.

Flair had the tools; he just needed an angle. In the Carolinas, he found the perfect place for ?Nature Boy? to blossom.

If you grew up in the South before satellite dishes and the visual smorgasbord of cable, you remember Saturday afternoon TV. After cartoons went off, your choice was fishing shows, preaching or wrestling.

There?s only so much appeal to being Orlando Wilson or Rex Humbard. But wrestling ? now there was a gold mine for young imaginations.

According to UNC-Chapel Hill professor and Southern folklore expert Bill Ferris, the roots of wrestling tap deeply into the Southern subconscious.

?It goes all the way back to our frontier culture,? Ferris said. ?Think of it as a version of horse racing or cockfighting. The violence of the matches in the enclosed arenas, people packed in ? it was like a carnival. It?s easy to get caught up in that environment.

Wrestling, then, was a sweaty morality play, played out just a few feet from spectators.

?My aunt was one of those little old ladies on the front row,? said Fayetteville native Gary Patterson, who is 45 and a longtime Flair fan. He said his aunt worked at a nearby restaurant and would feed the wrestlers when they dropped by.

?When I was little, I always wondered how they could fight so much, then eat together,? he said.

According to the way the game worked, Flair could have been a good guy or a heel. Instead, he was a little bit of both.

Since there were already plenty of good guys, and since the bad guys inevitably lost, Flair became a good-bad guy. Using traditional skills and dirty tricks, his youthful good looks and unabashed self-promotion, he became a rarity in the Carolinas: a bad guy people liked.

?The bad guy can be an attraction, to the point of being a hero,? Ferris said. ?There?s often an attraction to evil. It would be boring if everyone wore white.?

Flair rose quickly through the ranks. In 1975, he had his first title: a Mid-Atlantic Championship belt in a match taped at WRAL?s studios. After that, fans turned out in droves to see the new champ.

?My mom would tell me if I did well in school on a test, that she?d take me to see wrestling,? James said. ?People talk about the bad influence of wrestling, but they forget we?d do a lot for the chance to see it.?

Patterson added, ?You could see yourself in Ric Flair. Sure he was a bad guy, but he was the guy you?d want to be.?

Flair?s career ? and life ? came perilously close to ending just as he was getting established.

In the 1970s, professional wrestlers might as well have been long-distance truckers. They?d end one show in Savannah, only to fight the next night in Richmond. So some pooled their resources and chose to fly. That?s what happened in early October 1975, when Flair and fellow wrestlers Bobby Bruggers, Johnny Valentine and Tim Woods, along with promoter David Crocker, flew to a Saturday match in Wilmington.

To compensate for the extra weight of his beefy passengers, the pilot left without topping off the fuel tanks. When they ran into an unexpected head wind, the plane?s engines began draining the tanks.

The group began to be aware of problems over Lumberton, Flair said later. Rather than turn and land in Lumberton or Fayetteville, the nearest airports that could handle the plane, the pilot opted to head for Wilmington.
It was a fatal mistake.

The plane crashed just short of the runway. The pilot died. Bruggers and Valentine never wrestled again.
Flair and Wood ended up in a Wilmington hospital.

When Wahoo McDaniel ? Flair?s planned opponent for the Wilmington match ? heard about the crash, he raced to the hospital. There, reportedly, the staff feared that McDaniel ? a good guy in the ring ? would try to beat up his gravely injured nemesis.

Flair?s back was fractured, and doctors told him to stay out for at least a year. He was back in the ring, against McDaniel, six months later.

Flair?s style had changed, however. He was slimmer, to ease the strain on his back, and more agile. There was more bounce and less brawl and a lot more chopping.

?Those chops across the chest, man they were something else,? McKoy said. ?I?d sit up in the cheap seats, and you could still hear him smack his opponent. Pop! Pop!?

Over the years, Flair took on all comers: McDaniel, Ricky Steamboat, Blackjack Mulligan (who, it turns out, was his next-door neighbor in Charlotte at the time) and finally his good-guy Doppelganger Dusty Rhodes. Flair?s sharp wit and wild antics made him a guaranteed sellout in arenas and armories across the Carolinas.

Fayetteville was no exception. He was in town at least once a month. According to records, pro wrestling matches were the most lucrative events at Cumberland County Auditorium in the 1980s.

?One time, we saw him and some other wrestlers buying beer after a match,? Patterson said. ?You know he was in a hurry, but he still stopped and talk with us. He even posed for a picture, but he hid the beer. He said our mom might not like to see her boys with a can of beer.?

In a way, it?s a shame Flair came along when he did. Two decades later, he could have made the leap from the ring to the screen like The Rock or Steve Austin.

Flair nearly did follow the lead of former wrestler-turned-governor Jesse Ventura. Flair toyed with the idea of running for governor of North Carolina as a Republican in 2000 before staying out of the fray.

?I may have to tone down a few things,? he said at the time, ?but I think charisma can go a long way.?

His visits to Fayetteville decreased over the years. As wrestling took on a national profile, fewer events came to smaller arenas. But as a treat for his longtime fans, Flair made one of his final appearances in the Crown Center last month.

With his departure from the ring, wrestling lost something irreplaceable. At least according to his fans.

?There will be great wrestlers in the future, but never another Ric Flair,? James said. ?He was The Man.?

Tags: Ric Flair, Verne Gagne, Wahoo McDaniel, Dusty Rhodes