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Around the Town #8: Diamonds are Forever |
» Reported by Hunter Golden of WrestleView.com
» On Tuesday, March 25, 2008 at 1:02 AM EST
Around the Town #8: Diamonds are Forever
March 24, 2008
By: Hunter Golden of WrestleView.com
‘Often in society, those that have it and talk about it, we don’t like. But then again…”-- Tully Blanchard
I don’t think there’s a single guy in pro wrestling who is harder to write about than Ric Flair. I mean what exactly do you say that hasn’t been said already? Even parroting stuff is difficult because you’ve got to find a way to parrot it better. I’m definitely not all that creative. I am a Republican, after all.
Everyone’s counted their love for Flair in so many ways.
Everyone’s talked about Flair’s great matches with guys like Ricky Steamboat, Dusty Rhodes, Terry Funk, Harley Race, Sting, Triple H, Lex Luger, Vader, Terry Taylor, Kerry Von Erich, Butch Reed and pretty much every guy who was ever worth shaking a stick at.
Everyone’s talked about Flair’s, well, ‘flair’ for the dramatic. Who could forget him giving a training bra to Ricky Morton or dropping an elbow on Carlito’s half eaten apple? Who could possibly make sparkly, feathery robes, strutting and slapping more manly than Flair?
Everyone’s talked about the respect that they have for him out of the ring. Wrestlers have blathered on and on about lining up for the honor of lying down for him. His name is constantly bantered around as a potential candidate for the Governor’s office in North Carolina.
Heck, we’ve even talked about Flair’s more controversial side. Who could forget the ‘no one in the WWE does steroids’ quote on ESPN’s “Cold Pizza”? Or the mug shot after having a spot of road rage in January of 2006? Or calling Mick Foley a ‘stunt’ man? Even for his faults, we still love him.
We’ve talked about all the various components that make Flair what he is so talking about that is kind of pointless. I’m not two shakes away from an emotional break down, either, so talking about what Flair means ‘to me’ would be simply too melodramatic and frankly as unstable a written piece as I could possibly write. Flair’s last match is much more than a crappy, overly dramatic career retrospective. After all, putting him on a pedestal as I’m sure Flair would probably tell you, is missing the point.
So what’s Causin’ all this?
What makes Flair so compelling I suppose, isn’t the robes, the great matches, the training bras or the antics. It’s that despite all of that, Flair is probably the most normal and true to life character you’ve ever seen. We love him because in the most ridiculous way possible, he’s really just all of us.
Often in wrestling, it’s what characters do that separates them from the rest of us that is what draws us to them. But Flair wasn’t another character. What separated him from us actually drew us closer to him. He was the best and worst in all of us, in the most normal way possible.
Flair had a knack for making you want to hate him as much as you secretly wanted to be like him. He talked about having it all and we didn’t like it, but then again, we kind of did. Ric Flair represented all the things we like and dislike about ourselves, unearthing and prodding at a sense of insecurity that lies within everyone. We hated it on one hand, but on the other, we appreciated him for it.
Bringing with him the most disarming of personalities that only he could bring, He represented as many of the hopes and aspirations we tell our family about, but also the ones we didn’t. He represents the things we’re proud of, the things we’re not so proud of. Even the things we just don’t want anyone to know we want to be proud of.
Flair toppling the unstoppable Vaders and out classing the un-out-classable Ricky Steamboats of life are all what we hope to do at our best. Wrestling with our shirts on against Sting is sometimes how we feel when we’re at our lowest. Toughing it out and working with what we’ve got on Raw in the last few years is the best we can hope for when the deck is so obviously stacked against us.
Flair’s character lived the same life we all do but most importantly, the life we all want to have, coping with both what we’re capable of being and what we hope to avoid and, in the end, proud of who we are in spite of it all, comfortable in our own skin.
So to Ric Flair, thank you for being what we all wish we could be and showing that it can be possible. If a guy who grew up not knowing who his real parents were with a dumpy build can chase a dream, do it well, take some lumps and regardless of how wild the ride might be, still manage to be left standing on your own two feet happy with life despite his shortcomings, can do it, then so can we.
Throughout my life as a wrestling fan, I gladly ‘learned to live with it’. So much so, that it’s going to be tough as a wrestling fan to live without it. Indeed, Space Mountain, like life, may be the oldest ride in the park.
But it still has the longest line.
Thank you, Naitch.
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