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The Summer of Funk

Posted: Jul 24th 2024 By: Phil Schneider

“He said that I wasn’t good enough. I’m not a contender? Look at him! Look at the horse-toothed, banana-nosed jerk!” —Terry Funk yelling at Jim Ross at WrestleWar ’89 over a prostrate Ric Flair

It was one of the most shocking pro wrestling moments of the 1980s. Ric Flair had just defeated longtime rival Ricky Steamboat in the third match of their 1989 trilogy. That series of matches featured long, technical battles, and it was considered the greatest series of pro wrestling bouts up to that time, mostly contested aboveboard with a fair amount of mutual respect mixed in. Because their two-out-of-three-falls match at the Clash of the Champions VI in April of 1989 (the second in their trilogy) went for nearly an hour, the National Wrestling Alliance assigned three former world champions as ringside judges for their third and final bout, which took place at WrestleWar ’89 in May. NWA legends Lou Thesz, Pat O’Connor, and Terry Funk were selected, with the idea that they would render a decision if the match went the distance.

After Flair defeated Steamboat, Jim Ross interviewed Flair in the ring. The notoriously braggadocious Flair gave an uncharacteristically humble promo, calling Steamboat the greatest champion he had ever faced. Funk entered the ring and congratulated Flair, coming off like a kindly uncle who couldn’t read social cues. As Ross and Flair tried to move the conversation along, Funk kept interjecting, eventually saying he wanted to be the first challenger for Flair’s belt. A bit of Flair’s trademark arrogance popped out when he accurately explained that Funk hadn’t been particularly active in the last several years, instead focusing on his acting career in movies such as Over the Top and Road House. Funk initially backtracked, claiming that he was just joking about challenging Flair, and offered his hand to shake. Suddenly, Funk attacked Flair, hitting him with a barrage of punches that sent Flair out of the ring and onto the floor, where Funk delivered a piledriver to Flair through one of the ringside tables, injuring Flair’s neck. While Flair lay hurt on the floor, Funk, frothing at the mouth, ranted about Flair. Funk was furious at the idea that he wasn’t worthy of a title shot.

It was a complete paradigm shift in how the NWA regularly presented pro wrestling. In the previous months, the promotion was laser focused on this battle of technicians, with Flair moving past his Four Horseman era (when he cheated at every opportunity) to become more of a cocky great who could back up his arrogance in the ring. There may have been some bad feelings mixed into Flair’s rivalry with Steamboat, but it was all about who was the better wrestler. That was very different from the chaos Funk was about to unleash on Flair.

Funk wasn’t on anyone’s wrestling radar in 1989. Since leaving the WWF in the middle of 1986 to pursue his acting career, Funk had two tours of All Japan Pro Wrestling (in 1986 and 1987), no matches in 1988, and a couple of sporadic one-offs earlier in 1989. None of this aired on U.S. television, and if you had polled the hard-core wrestling fans of the time, they would have said that Funk was retired. In one night, Funk went from being gone completely for three years to being the focal point of the entire promotion.

Funk’s ability to immediately arrive at a promotion and compel the audience was part of what made him great. “That’s the magic of Terry,” WWE Hall of Famer Paul Heyman tells The Ringer. “Look, there was an old expression in this industry that was referred to for many years in that it takes a year to get over, or a year to get your message across to the audience, or a year for the audience to understand your character to such a degree that you can become a box office attraction. Terry Funk, more than anyone else, had the ability to get over, to get his point across, to get the audience emotionally invested in him to such a degree that he would become a box office attraction in zero time flat.”

With Flair off TV selling the neck injury he received from Funk, the NWA’s focus shifted to Funk, who reveled in his role as the agent of chaos, a firecracker dropped amid an otherwise orderly TV show. Funk called out Flair and antagonized the babyfaces in his unique Funk style. “It was him and Sting,” former AEW Triple Crown winner Eddie Kingston remembers. “Sting was telling him off, and Terry goes, ‘What is your first name, Sting? Is it ‘Bee Sting’?” Kingston, a Funk superfan, admits he laughed at that moment. “I know Terry wanted everyone to hate him, but at that point in time, that was it. He was my guy.”

This was all by design, explains Heyman, who joined the territory in 1988. “He structured his interviews to be over the top, deeply personal. He would mention your wife and your kids’ names. If you had a public embarrassment, he would stick that in your craw harder than anyone else would feel it was appropriate to do so. He would do or say anything to make it personal.”

With Ted Turner’s acquisition of the promotion in 1989, these personal attacks hit harder because of Flair’s position in the company. “In 1989, Ric Flair was under a great deal of pressure in WCW,” Heyman says. “Flair was considered by Jim Herd—who was the executive vice president at the time and would ultimately call all the shots—to be yesterday’s news, a great champion at the end of his run. And WCW, looking for a new poster boy, a new theme, a new way to compete with WWF, wanted Flair to pass the torch.”

Funk, puncturing the image that Flair had so carefully cultured over the years, would build tremendous anticipation for their inevitable showdown, but they still had to get there, and that meant Flair would have to see Funk disparage him on TV.

“Flair was furious,” Heyman explains, “when Funk came out on television with a 150-pound wrestler with dyed blond hair and a Flair-like robe and revealed that this enhancement talent that Funk was referring to as Ric Flair had a yellow streak painted down his back.” Heyman remembers that “Flair was apoplectic at these insults. And Funk was unrelenting in the manner in which he would disparage Ric Flair. Any other time in history, I think Flair would have laughed it off and realized the brilliance of the unhinged nature of what Terry Funk was doing. But with all the pressure on Flair, from WCW and the Turner executives now involved who had no idea about the realities of the scripting that we present, Flair was very sensitive to this level of insult on television and was quite vocal about it, to Funk, to Jim Herd, to other members of WCW management, because he felt that he himself and his body of work were being disrespected on television.”

Not only did Flair have a strong story-line reason to come at Funk hard, but underneath the story, he felt personally slighted. He was the great Ric Flair, and Funk was viciously tearing him down on television, with Flair unable to retaliate due to the injury he was selling.

Funk also started wrestling frequently on TV against the most talented lower-card talents in the NWA (including a very young Eddie Guerrero and Scott Hall) in an attempt to have standout enhancement matches that also gave these future stars a chance to shine on national TV. In addition to the weekly TV bouts and his memorable interviews, Funk had a no. 1 contenders bout against Ricky Steamboat at the Clash of the Champions VII (the only time those two icons had a singles match) and a series of house show contests against Sting. Funk eventually hooked up with manager Gary Hart (and Hart’s protégé the Great Muta) to form the J-Tex Corporation.

With all of these players in place, the stage was set for Flair’s return at the Great American Bash in the Baltimore Arena on July 23, 1989, where he would battle Funk with the NWA World’s Heavyweight Championship on the line. The match was a barn burner; compared to his technical series with Steamboat, Flair was in a different zone entirely. The match had none of the deliberate pace fans came to expect with Flair; he was lacerating Funk with chops and punches while Funk returned with strikes of his own, refusing to back down. Funk was one of the most unpredictable brawlers in wrestling history. There was no Funk formula; it was all fight. “I learned that from Terry, just to be in the moment,” Kingston shares. “That’s why you can tell when people are acting crazy, that’s why there’s a disconnect. But with Terry, it wasn’t that he was acting. He was in the moment, fighting for his life.” Eventually, Flair caught Funk with an inside cradle for the pin. The end of the match was only a brief pause in the action, though, as Muta hit the ring to jump Flair, bringing Sting in from the back to even the odds, starting one of the most intense pull-apart, post-match brawls in wrestling history.


The rivalry between Funk and Flair continued to heat up that summer, even when they weren’t facing each other in the ring. There was a tag match at the Clash of the Champions VIII, with Dick Slater and Muta taking on Flair and Sting; Funk ran in at the end of the match and tried to suffocate Flair with a plastic bag. That moment got a lot of corporate backlash from the newly instituted Turner executives, who were petrified that fans at home would re-create something they saw on TBS. “Trust me, I know how Turner is scared about that because I’ve asked about the plastic bag several times,” Kingston shares, reflecting on the creative process in AEW (which airs on two Turner stations, TBS and TNT) during his 2022 feud with Chris Jericho. “It was always walking in and Tony [Khan] going, ‘We’re not doing the plastic bag.’”

They soon took their rivalry on the road, wrestling over 30 times in the summer and fall of 1989, including multiple Texas Death and “I Quit” matches leading up to their final “I Quit” match at Clash of the Champions IX in November of 1989. The physicality of their matches was legendary in the wrestling world.

“Ric Flair chopped Terry Funk half to death,” Heyman recalls. “Flair lit Funk up, but Terry never complained. He used to travel with an industrial-sized jar of Preparation H, and he would rub it on his chest because it’s not just for hemorrhoids; it’s for inflamed tissue. And the tissue in Terry Funk’s chest was all inflamed because of these chops.

“At the time, Terry Funk was contracted for one year for 250 bookings,” Heyman continues. “Television, live events, pay-per-view, otherwise, 250 dates for the year. Funk used to count down the days, but he loved the fact that Flair was chopping him with everything that Flair had, because people could see the difference between a regular chop and the deeply personal chops that Ric Flair was laying in on Terry Funk to let him know, ‘I’m not very happy with you.’”

After losing the “I Quit” match to Flair, Funk briefly retired from the ring to serve as a color commentator and host an interview segment, Funk’s Grill, but that retirement, like many of Funk’s retirements, was short-lived. He was back in the ring—for the USWA in Memphis and overseas with All Japan—by the second half of 1990. Flair’s babyface run had ended, and he would turn on Sting and reform the Four Horsemen in early 1990. While Flair and Funk met in the squared circle a handful of times during the tail end of WCW in 2000, the promotion was far from adequately capitalizing on their dynamic feud. Two of the most complete and transcendentally talented pro wrestlers of all time pitted against each other and given free rein to rip and tear at each other verbally and physically is a rarity and one of the things that makes pro wrestling so unique.