Ric Flair competed in what was supposed to be his final in-ring match back in late July at the Ric Flair’s Last Match event in Nashville. But mere weeks after the show, the “Nature Boy” claimed on his To Be The Man Podcast that he was already regretting that he made that claim.
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“I wish I hadn’t said it was my last match,” Flair said in mid-August. “That’s gonna get heat. Hell, they wanted me to wrestle in Puerto Rico on Saturday night. I said, ‘Guys, I cannot get in the ring one week later.’ And the guy looked at me and said, ‘Well, you know what, could retire in Puerto Rico can’t you?’ No, no, no that’s not the point.”
Then, shortly after Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat announced he was stepping back in the ring for the first time in over a decade, Flair admitted it was giving him the motivation to start training again. He said last week, “Steamboat coming back makes me want to come back again. I went back up to Lincoln and started training again. What else is there to do?”
The 16-time world champion then took to social media on Monday to celebrate 50 years since his in-ring professional wrestling debut. He ended his message with the same statement he gave at the start of the build to his initial retirement at WrestleMania XXIV — “I will never retire.”
These claims of coming back for yet another match come despite the fact Flair passed out twice during his retirement match with Andrade El Idolo, Jeff Jarrett and Jay Lethal. He explained on his podcast that it was due to dehydration.
“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,” Flair said back in August.
