Ric Flair’s Last Match

Professional wrestling has produced no end of unedifying spectacles over the years, but few have sat at such stark contrast to the pomp and pageantry surrounding them as the visual of an aged, bleeding Ric Flair, trembling and unable to stand, at the height of a show entirely themed around his career and the nostalgia contingent upon it. Wrestling has made me feel many, many things over the past couple of decades, but it had never made me consider whether words have lost all meaning until I was faced with the sound of a room full of people chanting, “You’ve Still Got It” at a visibly frail, barely mobile Ric Flair, who would go on to spend much of the match unable to stand under his own power. Whatever “It” is, it deserted Ric Flair a long, long time ago.

Ric Flair, then. The Greatest Of All Time, almost canonically. Who am I to argue? Don’t answer that, because I’m going to. Bret Hart called Flair a “three dressed up as a nine”, and quoted his father, Stu Hart, as having called the Nature Boy “just a routine man” - that is to say, a wrestler dependent on a catalogue of reliable spots, bumps, pratfalls and bits of business to string his matches together, rather than relying on intuitively working with each opponent, tailoring a match to their opponents’ merits. It’s hard to argue - anyone who’s seen Flair work probably has a mental picture of that routine that’s at least 75% accurate. But Ric Flair was a touring champion at a time when champions really toured - I’m talking one day off a month, wrestling every night and twice on Sundays, up and down the United States, and shipped out overseas as well. With no time to work with an opponent, perhaps not even knowing who they were and what they’re capable of until the moment they get in the ring, a routine is what you need, and Flair might have been the best routine man there ever was - particularly as a heel, his signature sequences all rely on Flair being on the defensive, making his opponent look like they’re in complete control; he could work with anyone, and wrestle the proverbial broomstick to a passable match. But a routine man is only ever as good as his opponents, the wrestlers who fill in the blanks with their own match structure, their own moves, their own psychology - it’s why Flair and Hogan never really gelled in the early ‘90s, both men reliant on incompatible routines, honed through years of repetition. As far as opponents go, though, you couldn’t hope for better dance partners than Ric Flair - upwards of a hundred matches against the likes of Ricky Steamboat, Harley Race and Dusty Rhodes, or a wild, violent “I Quit” match against Terry Funk, with the greatest referee of all time, Tommy Young, on hand? The most star-studded Royal Rumble of all time, with Bobby Heenan at the height of his powers playing personal cheerleader? Flair was far from a schmuck in those matches, but he was lucky to spend the bulk of his career stood on the shoulder of giants, and to build a legacy that made it tempting to forgive all the low points - of which there were many; Flair was being accused of hanging on too long and prostituting his own legacy as far back as the early 1990s, yet here we are watching him wrestle in 2022.

I’ve written before about the notion of the “Greatest Of All Time”, or any attempt to codify greatness in wrestling. We can talk about drawing power, about money earned, but all else is subjective, and to create lists and “Mount Rushmores” and star ratings and all the rest of it risks preserving in amber a particular era, or a particular kind of wrestler, as “great” at the expense of all others. Is a technically limited main eventer who draws big money in a short-term period a “greater” wrestler than a career utility player with the respect of his peers? Can a comedy wrestler with impeccable timing be compared meaningfully to a hardcore brawler of a previous era? How does one compare, say, The Original Sheik to Masakatsu Funaki, or Les Kellett to El Hijo del Vikingo? Wrestling is a vast broad church, and to play the game of canonising the “best ever” is a fool’s errand. However, if one were to attempt it, there are surely qualities that need to be taken into account - any consideration of the “greatest of all time” would need to factor in longevity, adaptability, diversity of opponents and styles encountered, innovation, and however one chooses to quantify the more intangible qualities like in-ring ability and charisma. Flair is, undoubtedly, charismatic, and an extremely talented wrestler, even if he did lean on his routines. Longevity is a given, and with it comes diversity of opponents and styles (though Flair never, to the best of my knowledge, worked Mexico, or Europe outside of the context of WWF/WCW tours), but adaptability? For better or for worse, even when embarking on late career forays into ladder matches and hardcore wrestling, he remained Ric Flair, without the kind of career reinvention of, say, Terry Funk in the mid-90s. Innovation? Not a chance. There’s nothing wrong with cribbing from the best, and Flair did that in spades, taking his character wholesale from Buddy Rogers, and pinching bits of schtick from Jackie Fargo, Dusty Rhodes, Dory Funk Jr., and a handful of comedy wrestlers; his skill was in bringing those disparate parts together into a coherent whole, not in expanding the genre. Tallying up his points, it would be hard to argue that he was greater in many respects than Terry Funk or Eddy Guerrero, two of my go-to answers to the “best ever” question, and that’s before looking further afield than North America.

But here we are. My opinion doesn’t count for much (nor, apparently, does Bret Hart’s), and Ric Flair is the Greatest Of All Time, on a show laden with (maddeningly repeated) video tributes saying as much from the likes of Sting, Cody Rhodes, Jim Ross and Shawn Michaels, and a Nick Aldis contribution that I’m pretty sure is still going on today. It’s a lot of hype and ballyhoo for a retirement match, more than I can think of anyone in American wrestling receiving - this is more akin to the kind of retirement ceremony you see from Japanese wrestling; announced months in advance, and presented as a standalone show in the honour of the retiree. I can’t think of a single example in recent memory of an American wrestler receiving the full retirement show treatment like this.

And there’s the rub - the “retirement match”, let alone the “retirement show” is an infamously unreliable thing in wrestling circles; Mick Foley’s book made much of Terry Funk’s repeated retirements, and his own wishes to avoid the same fate, only to return a matter of weeks after his (first) retirement match. The truth is, the majority of retirement matches are gimmicks, dictated by the needs of a promoter or booker, rather than a self-selected last chapter in a wrestler’s career. The concept of a wrestler having a much-hyped “final match”, and following it up with an emotional send-off and glowing tributes from their colleagues, is a relatively recent one, more or less popularised by Ric Flair’s WWE “retirement match” with Shawn Michaels - a retirement that lasted a little over a year, before Flair needed the money and embarked on a tour of Australia with Hulk Hogan.

Speaking of Hulk Hogan, he never got the glitz and glamour of a “Final Match” and ballyhooed farewell, his in-ring career ending as a warm body in a six-man tag team match in Manchester. John Cena, if his career turns out to be over, saw it out in a dark match sharing the ring with Dominik Mysterio. Triple H? Across the ring from Robert Roode and Samoa Joe on a house show. The Rock’s final match was against Erick Rowan, Bret Hart’s a three minute TV tag team match, the Ultimate Warrior ended his career against Orlando Jordan. It’s a privilege for a wrestler’s career to go out on much more than a whimper. Ric Flair, who had not only his send-off against Shawn Michaels (we’ll ignore at least two previous lost “retirement matches”, but also had the accidental symmetry of his hitherto final match being against long-term rival Sting, chose to return to the ring for one night only, simply to retire all over again.

Why? Maybe it’s ego, or the inability of an old turn to leave the spotlight. Maybe he’s strapped for cash, after Dark Side Of The Ring put a kibosh on what seemed like a dead cert for a big money contract with AEW. Maybe son-in-law Conrad Thompson, the promoter of Ric Flair’s Last Match, and ubiquitous wrestling podcaster, finally able to live out his dreams of promoting a wrestling event of his very own, called in a few favours to get the old man to lend his name to the proceedings. Maybe it was all an elaborate SEO scheme, to push any mentions of Flair’s decades of “hiding in plain sight” sexual harassment and abuse off Google’s front page. In any event, it happened, and it probably shouldn’t have.

Flair’s partner for the big match was Andrade El Idolo, his son-in-law, a fourth generation Luchadore. His opponents were Jay Lethal, who was Flair’s training partner from the moment he announced his intentions to return, and Jeff Jarrett. Without access to television, and no live events on which to build the match, Flair’s team took a surprisingly modern approach to promotion, for a show named and themed around the Jim Crockett Promotions television shows of the 1980s (complete with a replica of the old studio backdrop, Tony Schiavone and David Crockett on commentary duty, and even appearances for 91 year old NWA announcer Bob Caudle, and head of security Doug Dillinger, who looked positively ancient in 1998). Knowing full well that audiences had seen footage of Lethal training with Flair, to get to the point where he was a believable opponent rather than a cooperative dance partner, seeds were planted on social media, and on the podcasts Conrad Thompson helms with both Flair and Jarrett - Flair suggesting that Lethal has “an attitude problem”, and that he didn’t warrant a spot on the card, while Jarrett took aim at Flair’s legacy, his health conditions, and historic disagreements with both Jeff and Jerry Jarrett. By utilizing what is ordinarily a decidedly non-Kayfabe environment, they added verisimilitude to the Kayfabe beef between the two teams, before using a series of YouTube videos to build to the match itself. It didn’t always land, and Conrad Thompson is as unconvincing in keeping up his end of a kayfabe argument as he is irritating when not letting go of a minor point of order in his capacity as podcast host (his arguments with Jarrett over aspects of the founding of the USWA was my tipping point to give up listening to what was otherwise a compelling podcast), but it suggested a new approach to wrestling storytelling that I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of - though as Conrad Thompson interjects himself more and more into the wrestling business itself, his position as the neutral arbiter and king of wrestling podcasting may become untenable.

Before Flair’s swansong, there was an on paper stacked card, with representatives from AAA, NJPW, MLW, Impact, AEW, GCW and beyond, but no matches really lived up to the potential, with many - particularly the Horsemen/Rock N Roll Express tag team match - feeling cut short just as they began to get interesting, others feeling hamstrung by the booking; a match between Impact’s Josh Alexander and MLW’s Jacob Fatu ending in an unsatisfying disqualification to protect both men, with the attempt to win back crowd support by having Diamond Dallas Page attack Matt Cardona not really going far enough to make up for it, as it was little more than Pavlovian booking to throw a recognisable babyface at the problem. The best match of the night was a AAA match between four of the usual Lucha Lads, in which Taurus more than earned his keep as the best base in wrestling, saving Bandido from near catastrophe. Unfortunately, all four men have had better matches in various combinations in AAA in recent memory, so to audiences familiar with them, this will blur into memory alongside the incredible, chaotic title unification bout at the most recent Triplemania.

So, then, at long last, was the match itself.

Let’s start with the participants. All Speaking Out concerns aside, I can’t say that I particularly care for Jay Lethal - he sits, in my head, in a category labelled “mid-00s Very Good Wrestlers”. He’s undeniably talented and competent, yet stripped of the kind of showmanship that saw him make hay of a Randy Savage impression in TNA, he always feels like Fisher Price’s My First Heel Wrestler; the mannerisms are there, the putdowns, the sneer, and so on, but none of it feels genuine, none of it feels earned. At some point during the show he did a promo built around a Ric Flair impersonation, but it wasn’t a good enough Ric Flair impersonation for it to be obvious that’s what he was doing, and there wasn’t enough to distinguish it from just being another bland Jay Lethal promo, so it died on its arse. If he weren’t Ric Flair’s training partner, you could have swapped him for almost any sufficiently competent wrestler in this match, and I don’t think it would have lost a thing.

His partner, though, was Jeff Jarrett. I admit to being a late convert to the Church of Jarrett - if I saw anything of his first WWF run during my mid-90s initial dalliance with childhood wrestling fandom, it left no impression, and when I came back to wrestling in 2000, he was in a failing WCW, and he felt like a weird hanger on in WWF Attitude on the PS1, a relic from a bygone age. After that, he was the tyrannical, overpushed and overbooked top heel of NWA:TNA, public enemy number one to an emergent Internet Wrestling Community and, barely following TNA in the first place, I just assumed that was all true - you know the drill by now, broke a thousand guitars and never drew a dime. He won me over in 2011, at a TNA house show in London, when I watched him face Johnny Moss. Moss was an unknown to most of the audience, yet through a combination of old fashioned Memphis heel stooging and stalling, holiday camp comedy, and every heel bit of business you could imagine, Jarrett had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand, and baying for his blood. Crucially, the crowd weren’t just against Jarrett, they were for Johnny Moss - chanting “Let’s Go Johnny”, not “Jarrett Sucks”; it’s a distinction many people wouldn’t understand, but it’s crucial, and speaks to just how good, and what a pro Double J is. At CIWW, when I’ve been in the position of helping put matches together, or working on characterisation, I’ve often said that I stole a lifetime’s worth of heel schtick from that one match.

Andrade El Idolo is a frustrating performer in the way that only very successful luchadores get to be frustrating - when he turns it on, he’s as good as anyone. When the match isn’t so important, he’ll sleepwalk through it and you get what you’re given. Luckily, in this match, he was on - teaming with his daddy-in-law was a long sought after goal for Andrade, and one wonders how much influence that had on Flair agreeing to wrestle again in the first place. Nobody came to this match expecting elite level “workrate” or a five star match, but what we got from Andrade was perhaps even better - a rare look at him cast in the role of fired up, crowd-pleasing babyface, and he absolutely delivered in that capacity, which hopefully suggests a more substantial babyface run for him in the future.

And, finally, there’s Ric Flair himself. To put it bluntly, he looked like shit. Whether age, injuries, ill health, or his many anxieties were at the heart of it, he looked barely mobile from the outset - struggling to keep a championship belt secured around his waist and concealed under his robe, Flair gave the impression before even getting in the ring of an old man with mobility issues, and it was largely downhill from there.

The “highlights” for Flair were a few chops and punches - the latter better looking than the former, with chops thrown with little of the wind-up and showmanship that really makes them pop, and many falling short of the mark, with more than one catching Jay Lethal in the stomach, rather than the chest that one assumes Flair was aiming for. This array of strikes came early in the match, and it was actually distressing how much worse Flair looked than the last time we saw him in the ring, as a surprise accompaniment to Andrade at Triplemania last year.

Unfortunately, things only got worse from there. The idea, that was reported in the wrestling media prior to the match, that Flair had at one point intended a dive from the top rope to the floor, became terrifying in hindsight when watching Flair incapable of standing on his own two feet. At one point, sat on the top rope and clinging desperately to the top rope for dear life, Flair was dragged to the floor by Lethal and given a standard suplex, because even a man actively enabling Flair in this whole endeavour much have recognised that the superplex he was anticipating would have been horrific under the circumstances. And that’s before you even get to Flair faking a heart attack to absolutely zero reaction, to provide an opening for an eye poke to Jay Lethal.

One of Bret Hart’s many criticisms of Flair is that he had a surprisingly poor grasp of wrestling psychology - I always wrote that off as a peccadillo of Hart’s, a difference of opinion as to what constitutes good psychology, the WWF guy against the NWA guy. But Hart has talked of Flair working over a leg for ten minutes, then calling a series of running spots, or other sequences that seem utterly out of place. It was that Ric Flair who showed up, with seemingly none of the know-how of how to structure a dramatic wrestling match that one would expect from a star of his pedigree and experience. At one point, waiting for Andrade to make the tag, Flair simply entered the ring regardless, with no tag, no admonishment from referee Mike Chioda, and was treated as the legal man from thereon in. You can place the blame on Mike, but in reality, Flair decided it was time for his bit, didn’t bother waiting, and when his name’s on the marquee, who’s going to argue?

The saddest moment of the whole match, and one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in professional wrestling, was Ric Flair’s “hot tag”. Bleeding from a predictable, but hopelessly ill-advised, blade job outside the ring, Flair tagged out to Andrade, and was unable not only to get to his feet, but to even fully leave the ring and return to the apron. The other wrestlers in the match were forced to wrestle around his prone body, until it came time for him to make a “hot tag” - in another example of the psychology of the match being utterly broken, the hot tag came after the referee had been bumped, so lacked any of the necessary drama anyway. Not that it would have helped - Flair lay helpless, half on the ring apron, reaching a trembling hand between the bottom and middle rope for the tag. Andrade, God love him, was the consummate babyface and made sure that he reached over the top rope and got a hand-to-hand tag, so that it was all legal. Bless him, but again - the ref had already been knocked down, there was no one to call it, so it was all a little pointless. One has to question the Kayfabe logic of Andrade, given that Flair’s “hot tag”, far from the house of fire comeback expected of the role, saw him crawl painfully across the ring into a cover on Jay Lethal that was reminiscent of Steve Austin, broken neck and all, barely able to drape an arm over Owen Hart.

Thank the wrestling Gods, then, for Jeff Jarrett. In a match that otherwise would have fallen apart, or been little more than an extended love-in, we needed Jarrett to deliver the heat and, ably supported by Karen Jarrett, he did absolutely that. He pulled out every trick in his arsenal - stalling, begging off, overselling, threatening to walk out, bringing his trademark guitar into play, tactical deployment of the Fargo Strut (better than the Flair strut, fight me IRL) - to ensure that people weren’t just happy to see Ric Flair one last time, but that they had a villain they wanted to see him beat. What can’t be overstated is that Jarrett managed to get that level of heat despite wrestling in his hometown, with his father and family at ringside. What. A. Pro.

A couple of years ago, playing a game of TEW 2020, I paired Jarrett and Andrade together in WWE as manager and client - I’m in the minority, but I’ve always loved Jarrett’s work in AAA, and think he gels well with luchadores by, effectively, being the exact opposite of everything they are. Something told me they’d be a good fit, and I loved seeing them work together, briefly, here. It seems unlikely, given the already surreal setting of a WWE executive fighting an AEW wrestler on an independent show, that we’ll see them in the same ring again, but I’d love to see a singles match between the two.

The finish came when Conrad Thompson passed brass knuckles to Andrade, allowing him to force the foreign object on to the trembling hand of their father-in-law, and for Flair to knock Jarrett out and lock in the Figure Four Leg Lock, securing a win by pinfall, rather than submission. Going by what he seemed to say to Andrade after the match, Flair passed out in the moment - he lay back on the mat, both of his shoulders down, so by rights should have been pinned just as Jarrett was, but we didn’t come to this match for logic, just to see an old man try and grasp at former glory. It is hilarious, though, to think that this finish may have been booked so as to protect Jeff Jarrett from taking a clean loss, and keep the door open for a rematch. Ric Flair’s Final Last Match, 2023.

It was an embarrassing affair. Flair looked a broken down mess, and everyone chanting “You’ve Still Got It” should take a serious look at themselves. Conrad Thompson getting involved in the main event of his first foray into promoting doesn’t bode well for any future efforts - just as he’s gradually weaseled his way into being more of a “character” in his podcasts, in the mistaken belief that people want to listen to him as much as to the wrestler who’s name is on the marquee, a non-wrestling promoter booking themselves in an angle at the earliest opportunity always rings alarm bells about where there priorities lie. It’s not, necessarily, inherently wrong for a man of Flair’s advanced years to be wrestling - as we saw earlier, plenty have done it - but to wrestle at Flair’s age, in his physical condition, and to believe oneself still capable of wrestling a thirty minute main event match, is a recipe for disaster.

What this match did accomplish, however, was in creating one hell of an advert for Jeff Jarrett. For anyone not already sold on the man, he showed himself as everything we once said about Flair - able to garner heat from anywhere, to wrestle a match effectively singlehandedly, where any opponent can be simply slotted in among his usual routines. If there any other aging wrestlers out there looking for a final swansong, Jarrett has ably sold himself as the man to work with, a safe pair of hands to guide them through to a passable match that keeps the crowd engaged, even if they’re reduced to near unconsciousness.

Somewhere in Florida, Hulk Hogan is digging out the boots and rifling through his Filofax.