Ric Flair came up in an era where calling things in the ring wasn’t just preferred, it was necessary if you wanted to survive the kind of schedule wrestlers were working. Looking at wrestling today, Flair thinks too much of that has disappeared because performers can spend all day rehearsing and memorizing matches instead of reacting to the crowd.
While speaking on the Hall of Fame podcast, Ric Flair first put his own workload into perspective. He claimed he wrestled 454 times in 1983, with 360 of those matches going an hour.
“One year I wrestled 454 times, in ’83, I want to say. And of those, 360 [were] hour matches.”
That wasn’t an isolated stretch either. Flair remembered working Ricky Morton for a staggering nine hours over the course of a single week in 1986, then turning around and doing it again the following week.
“In ’86, I wrestled Ricky Morton nine hours in one week. Two weeks in a row. Every day of the week. Twice on Saturday, twice on Sunday, which Book knows, we did double shots, and then it sold out. So they go, ‘Oh, let’s bring it back around and do it 90 minutes.’ So we went like 60 and then we did the finish.”
Those advertised match lengths also meant they couldn’t simply decide to cut things dramatically short once they got into the ring. If people bought tickets expecting that kind of wrestling, Flair said they had to deliver it.
“Does that make sense? You couldn’t just go out and advertise 90 minutes and go 30 minutes. So we did like 60 or two or three minutes and then we had a finish. But that’s a lot of wrestling.”
Flair gave plenty of credit to Morton for being able to handle that workload with him. Their matches were physical too, with Flair remembering just how hard Morton allowed him to lay in his chops.
“My hat’s off to Ricky Morton because, you know, I used to beat the shit out of him, man. And Morton, I mean, he let me chop him as hard as I could, but he fought back. Ricky’s a hell of a hand.”
That raised an obvious question. If Flair and Morton were wrestling for nine hours in one week, there was no realistic way they could sit backstage and map out every move beforehand the way many matches are put together today. Flair’s answer was about as simple as it gets.
“We never talked about it.”
When asked how wrestlers could possibly go 60 minutes without calling everything beforehand, Flair used that question to explain one of his biggest problems with how matches are constructed today. He isn’t knocking modern wrestlers for making money, but he believes spending all day rehearsing can create a problem once they actually get in front of a live audience.
“Well, Book and I talk about this. We have not, maybe in the last couple years, but here’s the deal. Even with today, right, they spend all day rehearsing, which, you know, God bless them. They’re all making money. That’s an important thing.”
The issue for Flair is that there’s one thing no amount of rehearsal can guarantee: how the people in the building are going to respond.
“But you can never predict how the crowd is going to react. And that’s why you can’t memorize.”
Flair knew the basic role he was playing when he walked through the curtain. He knew he was supposed to be the bad guy, but that didn’t mean he could decide ahead of time exactly how the next hour was going to unfold.
“I could never, ever go out with the idea that this was going to take place. I mean, obviously I knew I was going to be the bad guy, right? That was for sure. But you can’t go out there and…”
Flair was also careful to make it clear that he wasn’t simply trashing modern wrestling because it’s different from what he did. His criticism is specifically about matches becoming too routine when wrestlers spend so much time preparing everything beforehand.
“I’m never cracking on the business today. It’s just where they get, it’s a routine and they, to me, they over-rehearse it.”
There are modern wrestlers Flair believes have learned how to adjust, and he immediately put Charlotte Flair in that category. Her crowd reactions can change from one show to another, which means she has had to learn how to read what she’s getting rather than expecting the same response every night.
“The great ones today, and I’m going to throw my daughter right into that role, she has learned how to, because one day they like her, one day they don’t. That’s an unusual situation in this business today.”
For Flair, being able to make those adjustments is even more important now because viewers have endless alternatives. If something isn’t holding their attention, changing the channel takes a second.
“You’ve got to learn when to, you know, just change it enough so that you’re getting any reaction you hopefully want because it’s so easy to turn the channel now. I mean, that’s the biggest enemy. ‘Hey, I don’t like this.’ Boom.”
That also makes long matches particularly difficult. Flair believes keeping viewers invested for an extended period requires wrestlers to recognize what’s working in the moment rather than simply moving on to the next thing they memorized backstage.
“And that’s why it’s hard to put on a long match that’s going to sustain the viewers. You know what I mean?”
Flair isn’t asking wrestlers to recreate the schedules he and Morton survived in the 1980s. His point is that no matter how much wrestling changes, the crowd still gets the final vote, and memorizing everything beforehand can only take a wrestler so far when those fans react differently than expected.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
