Ric Flair took part in his final pro wrestling match at the end of SummerSlam weekend on July 31. The event, titled Ric Flair’s Last Match, had representation from nearly every major professional wrestling promotion in the world and had a main event of Flair teaming with Andrade El Idolo to face Jay Lethal and Jeff Jarrett. Flair was busted open midway through the match and his bumps were kept to a minimum (both of which were expected), but he spent a good chunk of the latter half of the match seemingly passed out on the canvas. Fans were especially concerned when El Idolo had to slip brass knucks onto his shaking hand just before the finish. “The Nature Boy” even admitted he couldn’t remember most of the match that had just happened in a post-match promo. Flair finally spoke about the match on his To Be The Man Podcast, admitting he passed out twice during the bout due to dehydration.
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“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 confirmed he had passed out right before the brass knuckles spot — “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 later 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.”
