Ric Flair competed in his last match last month at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, beating Jay Lethal and Jeff Jarrett while teaming with Andrade El Idolo. Reception to the match was mixed, especially given how much Flair bled during the match and how he appeared to be knocked out just before the finish (which he later confirmed was the case). But one of the more controversial moments happened midway through the bout when Flair faked having a heart attack while at ringside in order to give himslef an opening against Lethal. In a new interview with New York Post this week, he admitted that was a mistake.
“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.”
Videos by ComicBook.com
Flair previously explained on his podcast that dehydration caused him to pass out twice during the match — “I don’t think people realized that I passed out twice. Well what happened was, my regimentation for training was so strict that I kept my weight, I wanted my perfect weighty to be like 220 going in,” Flair explained. “So the last day, the last day and a half, aside from all the work that we had planned for me to do, I didn’t hydrate. I had it in my mind that I had to weigh 219. So I went to the ring and I’m like 217 pounds, and what happened during the body of the match is I just became dehydrated. I actually, when I was standing on the apron, I looked at Jay, which started a wheel of motion. I said, ‘Man, I think I’m getting sick’ because I was getting light-headed. Nothing to do with my heart or nothing to do with my intestines. I was getting light-headed. I’m sure a lot of it was nerves as well. So I think Jay said, ‘Guys, we gotta move this along’, when that isn’t what I meant. But to the point when [Andrade] came over and said, ‘Your turn, sir. Your turn, sir.’ So I got in and I didn’t know where we were in the match because I had missed about clearly like 10 seconds of it.”
“Then at that point, along came the guitar, right. Down, bingo. Well, I was down. I passed out again. I just passed out, and [Andrade] is going, ‘Sir, you have to wake up. I have the brass knuckles. Sir, you have to wake up.’ Then I woke up, I knew where we were, and we’re home. But I swear to god, twice during the match, I went completely black. My hand started trembling, but it was all dehydration,” he added. “I had two doctors in there right away with me and everything, and The Undertaker came running in. I had like six beers there. He took them out of my hand and said, ‘You’re drinking two Gatorades first.’ So I drank two, and that’s all it was. I underestimated the importance of keeping hydrated, which is really big, especially when I lost that much weight and trained that hard.”
