Ric Flair says his schedule as traveling world champion was absolutely insane — and The Nature Boy is throwing out a number that almost sounds impossible.
Flair opened up about the sacrifices that came with being on top while speaking with Booker T on the Hall of Fame podcast. Booker brought up just how much Flair gave up for wrestling and asked whether he would do it all over again. Flair said he would, although looking back at his documentary brought back plenty of memories of things he believes he did wrong. He then started talking about the workload that came with being the traveling world champion. That’s when Flair claimed he wrestled a staggering 454 times in a single year, although even he sounded less than completely certain about exactly when it happened.
“It would be yes. But I definitely looking back my documentary brought back so many memories of things I probably did wrong. But it’s 90% on. I mean a lot of it I just didn’t have a choice when you were the traveling world champion here. I figured this out the other day and I had to have somebody that’s real knowledgeable in the business look at it. So one year I wrestled 454 times, in ’83 I want to say.”
That 454 number should be taken as Flair’s personal recollection rather than a confirmed historical total. Flair wasn’t done throwing out ridiculous numbers either. He then claimed that during 1986 he wrestled Ricky Morton for nine total hours in one week — and then did essentially the same thing again the following week. Flair explained that some of those matches were brought back around because they sold out, leading to even longer bouts.
“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. 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.”
Whether Flair actually hit 454 matches in one calendar year is a number wrestling historians can argue over, but there’s no question his schedule during that era was brutal. The Nature Boy was traveling constantly, working long matches and defending the world championship across territories at a pace that would sound completely foreign to most wrestlers today.
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