Ric Flair’s retirement match had a few scary moments in the ring before “The Nature Boy” came out victorious in bloody fashion.
“I don’t think people realized that I passed out twice,” Flair said during the Aug. 10 episode of his “To Be The Man” podcast.
The 73-year-old WWE legend cited dehydration as part of the reason he felt sick and light-headed during the July 31 tag-team match in Nashville, which saw him partner with his son-in-law Andrade El Idolo to take on Jay Lethal and Jeff Jarrett.
“Well what happened was, my regimentation for training was so strict that I kept my weight, I wanted my perfect weight to be like 220 going in,” Flair said. “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.”
Flair insisted that his condition during his final match had “nothing to do with” his heart or intestines. In 2017, Flair was placed on life support and in a medically induced coma for 10 days following a medical emergency, in which he was later diagnosed with early stages of kidney failure and congestive heart failure.
“I was getting light-headed. I’m sure a lot of it was nerves as well,” Flair said. “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.”
After the match, Flair said fellow WWE legend The Undertaker was waiting for him, and forced him to drink Gatorade before knocking down a few beers.
“My hand started trembling, but it was all dehydration,” Flair said. “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.”
Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter also reported that Flair wrestled through a foot injury in his final match.
Flair, who finished the match with his head and face covered in blood, received a standing ovation from the Nashville crowd.