Ric Flair Explains Why He Dropped the WWE Championship to Bret Hart at a House Show
Bret Hart, regarded by many as one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, won his first of five WWF (WWE) Championships on Oct. 12, 1992 by defeating "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair. But the match wasn't a clash of titans on one of WWE's biggest annual events, but rather a house show taking place in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Considering that Flair is an all-time great and that Hart would define WWE's main event scene for the next five years, it's always seemed odd that WWE wouldn't put this moment on a bigger stage. Flair explained why things went down the way they did on a new episode of his Wooooo! Nation Uncensored podcast this week.
"What happened was the night before, The Ultimate Warrior dropped me on my head with a vertical suplex and I got that inner ear thing," Flair said, explaining that he was struggling with his equilibrium. "When I went to the floor, I rolled up, went to get up and fell down. I went to get up again and I fell down. I thought I was having a stroke or something. What it was is I broke a little chip off in my ear canal. In a way, that's like oil. The chip goes back and forth. It lasted for six months. I went to The Mayo Clinic, Duke, everywhere with my dad, plus my dad being a physician, and it just didn't heal."
"I called Vince and he said, 'Get to Calgary.' The reason why the match was so bad was because I had no equilibrium," he continued. "The match sucked. I've never had the chance to tell this story publicly, but I had no equilibrium. I went home for six months after that. Bret gave me a backdrop. I had to lay there for a minute. I couldn't just get up. I had to collect myself. I had that for six months, and then one day I woke up, and it was gone. I banged my head against the wall five times because I was going to get a Lloyd's of London check tax free for $750,000. I called my dad and said, 'Dad, it's gone. I'm not going to tell anybody as I'm going to get my check.' He said, 'That's karma. Don't do it', and I didn't get it. I went back to work."
Flair would leave the WWF not long after his second world championship reign ended and wouldn't return until months after WCW had shuttered. Meanwhile, Hart would go on to hold the world championship a combined 654 days, the eighth-most in company history.