Ric Flair’s final match could have featured one last collision with Ricky Steamboat, and this wasn’t some fantasy booking idea that never left the group chat. There was an actual match pitched, Steamboat was being courted, money was being discussed — and then the whole thing fell apart before anyone could get it across the finish line.
Sean Ross Sapp broke down exactly how the plans died during his Fightful Select Q&A. The conversation started with a question about Steamboat nearly wrestling around the same period as Flair’s farewell, and Sapp immediately pointed to the price involved in getting The Dragon back into the ring.
“What happened, what I was told was that Ricky asked for basically the cost of a used car. He wanted a lot of money.”
That price tag didn’t automatically kill the deal, because negotiations kept moving and there was a legitimate match being discussed. Sapp noted that Steamboat eventually wrestled again elsewhere, but at this point the people behind Flair’s final match were specifically trying to get him involved with The Nature Boy.
“So he eventually wrestled against, I think he was alongside FTR against Brock Anderson, Jay Lethal, Nick Aldis, and he was being courted to wrestle Ric Flair.”
The pitch wasn’t Flair vs. Steamboat one-on-one for another 1989-style showdown. Instead, the plan was to surround the two legends with FTR and The Rock ’n’ Roll Express for a six-man tag loaded with wrestling history.
“And his last match, Pay per View, that would have also involved ftr. The pitched match was Flair and FTR versus Steamboat and the Rock and Roll Express.”
That’s where things started coming apart. Steamboat ultimately decided he wasn’t comfortable doing the match because of concerns about his health, and that became the biggest roadblock standing between the pitch and an actual bell ringing.
“But Steamboat had said he didn’t want to do it because of concerns for his health.”
Money was still hanging over the situation too, and Sapp then corrected his original description of Steamboat’s asking price. It apparently wasn’t the cost of some beat-up used car sitting on a corner lot — Conrad Thompson had compared it to buying a brand-new Toyota.
“But I remember Conrad had said something like, it was the price of a new Toyota, not a used car. It was a new Toyota.”
Then another problem landed on the pile: that number got out. According to Sapp, Thompson wasn’t happy that Steamboat’s asking price became public because it weakened his position while trying to make the deal happen.
“And Conrad was not thrilled that that story got out either, because, you know, didn’t help his leverage and all that. And I understood that.”
So the Flair-Steamboat plans didn’t disappear because nobody ever seriously tried to make them happen. A match was pitched, Steamboat was being pursued and financial negotiations were taking place, but his health concerns stopped him from committing while the public leak of his asking price made the business side even messier.
Ringside News covered the situation at the time when Steamboat declined involvement in Ric Flair’s final match, but Sapp’s explanation now fills in more of the wreckage behind the scenes. The six-man tag wasn’t just an idea that vanished overnight — there were multiple moving parts, and enough of them went wrong that the entire plan was dead before showtime.
The craziest part is that Steamboat eventually did wrestle again, so this wasn’t simply a permanent “I’m never getting back in the ring” decision. The Flair match specifically couldn’t survive the combination of Steamboat’s physical concerns and a negotiation that was already getting complicated once the money became public.
Flair and Steamboat had already given wrestling fans some of the most famous matches of their generation, and there was a real attempt to squeeze one more chapter out of that history. Instead, the match got as far as the pitch and the negotiating table before everything fell through, leaving one hell of a six-man tag sitting in wrestling’s giant pile of matches that almost happened.
Would you have wanted to see Ric Flair and FTR face Ricky Steamboat and The Rock ’n’ Roll Express, or did the plans fall apart for the right reasons? Leave your feedback in the comments and let us know what you think.
