Ric Flair blacked out twice during his last match.
On July 31, the WWE Hall of Wrestler wrestled for the first time since 2011 at the Ric Flair's Last Match event. There, he teamed up with Andrade El Idolo to defeat Jeff Jarrett and Jay Lethal.
Speaking on his To Be The Man podcast, Flair discussed his return to the ring and revealed that he passed out twice during the bout.
“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. 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," he said.
Flair continued by noting that he went to the outside because he wanted to slow the match down. In hindsight, he stated that he didn't mean to scare anyone who thought that something was wrong at this point in the contest.
"So then when I went outside, I think everybody just jumped the gun a little bit and I saw where Booker T, who’s really a close friend of mine, thought it was in bad to do this, that was strictly on the fly to get everybody to slow down. Because everybody, if you look back on it, everybody just came all together at one time. We were far from the end of the match. So I just said to myself, ‘How do I get everybody to slow down?’ That wasn’t anticipated, that wasn’t called, I just did it. I apologize if I scared anybody, but I couldn’t think of any way to reorganize because we had everybody on the floor at one time, which was never planned out like that," Flair said.
Flair kept recapping the match, and he noted that, out of concern for his health, he didn't want "The Nature Boy" to take a superplex.
"Then Jeff, out of respect for me, he lifted me up to the top turnbuckle, and Jay was gonna give me a superplex, which would have blown the roof off the joint. But he was worried about my health, Jeff sincerely. He said, ‘We can’t do that, Naitch. We can’t do it.’ I said, ‘Yes I can.’ So rather than look awkward, I came down with him, then Jay came in and gave me the suplex, and we were back rolling," he said.
The WWE Hall of Famer then described how he passed out again during the guitar shot, saying, "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."
Flair made it clear that he "went black" due to dehydration, and as soon as he drank some Gatorade, at The Undertaker's request, he felt better.
"My hand started trembling, but it was all dehydration. 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," he said.
Conrad Thompson recently detailed how Ric Flair's Last Match came together. You can check out his comments here. Plus, Flair described how he was happy with how the match turned out, and you can read about it here.
Should you use any portion of the quotes above, transcription credit should go to Fightful with a H/T linking back to this article.
