Woooo! 10 Things You Might Not Know About The Incredible Life Of The ‘Nature Boy’ Ric Flair

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This week marks the anniversary (September 17th) of Ric Flair winning his first world title, so what better time to share a few interesting stories and facts from the life of The Nature Boy?

Of course 10 facts barely scratches the surface of Flair’s legendary, often insane 40-year-plus career, so consider this just a first installment. Also, I’ve decided not to focus heavily on stories of drinking and debauchery since a) said stories are hard/impossible to verify and b) there’s a pretty fine line between a fun Ric Flair carousing story and a sad one, and we’re keeping things (mostly) happy in this article.

So, without further ado, here’s a few things you might not know about the stylin’, proflin’, limousine ridin’, jet flyin’, kiss-stealing 16-time world champion…

1) Ric Flair was adopted under shady circumstances. As you could probably guess, The Nature Boy wasn’t born Ric Flair, but it turns out his real name Richard Fliehr wasn’t his birth name either. Records are sketchy, but Flair was born in Memphis in 1949 under the name Fred Phillips, Fred Demaree or Fred Stewart.

By his own admission, Flair hasn’t looked too deeply into the details of his birth, but he was adopted from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, a notorious orphanage which was found guilty in the early 50s of kidnapping children from their rightful mothers and arranging illegal black market adoptions. Whether Flair was the victim of this is hard to determine, since most of the orphanage’s records were destroyed or never existed to begin with and, again, Flair isn’t interested in knowing either way. Whatever the circumstances, little Fred was quickly adopted, moved to Edina, Minnesota and renamed Richard. So yes, Ric Flair’s earliest days were spent as a foundling at an evil orphanage — I dare you to write a better rags to riches story set-up.

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Pictured: Ric Flair’s childhood. 

2) The Nature Boy’s training was straight out of Rocky IV. Hey, remember those ridiculous training montages from Rocky IV where Sylvester Stallone runs around in the snow carrying logs and shit? Well, it turns out those scenes could have passed for a documentary of Ric Flair’s wrestling training. Ric trained under the legendary Verne Gagne, whose facilities fell somewhat short of the performance centers of today. Here’s a description from Ric Flair’s autobiography To Be the Man…

“We’d start off running along this frozen creek, slipping and sliding. I’m not exaggerating. You’d have to wear three sweat suits. The only way to stay warm was to keep moving and not slow down the whole day, for six or eight hours.

One day it was 10 degrees. The next, it was ten below. We ran around this farm, not on a track, but on a customized path that went about two miles.”

Here’s Ric’s friend and fellow trainee Ken Patera describing the ring they trained in…

“We went to work out in the ring, which was inside on of Verne’s old horse barns. The horses were downstairs, and the chickens were upstairs. It was below-zero temperatures, with one light bulb in the whole barn, just dangling on a wire. The slats on the barn were about an inch apart, so there were times when we’d show up to four-foot snowdrifts in the place. The chickens would be roosting on the crossbeams of the barn, shitting in the ring, so we’d have to clean the mat.

The ring was all broken down, and the ropes were f*cked up. They should be tight, but these were actually drooping. Here’s Verne Gagne, a multimillionaire, and he had the worst possible conditions for us to train in.”

Want to up the absurdity level another notch or two? Believe it or not, this guy was part of Ric Flair’s training class…

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He had to humble just to stay warm. 

…the conditions may not have been great, but you can’t argue with the results when a single class produces two world champions.

3) This is what Ric Flair looked like at the beginning of his career.

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Paul Blart, Pro Wrestler. 

No, really. Ric Flair didn’t start his career as a fully-formed stylin’, profilin’ playboy. Early Ric Flair was basically Husky Harris — a big, chunky, brown-haired dude with more charisma than he knew to do with, who worked an athletic brawling style. Thankfully ol’ Space Mountain would soon undergo some extensive renovations.

4) Dusty Rhodes deserved every bad thing Flair would eventually do to him. Ric Flair has faced a lot of legendary opponents, but none of his rivalries was more iconic than his feud with Dusty Rhodes. Flair’s ongoing, decade-spanning issue with Rhodes generally revolved around Flair being an absolutely horrible human being to poor, innocent, man o’ the people, Dusty Rhodes. In real life, particularly during Flair’s early years in the business, the tables were completely reversed. Dusty Rhodes was, to put it mildly, an unrelenting butthole to rookie Ric Flair.

Flair met Dusty and Dick Murdoch on his first tour of Japan. Flair’s job was basically to carry the veteran’s bags, and they didn’t show a lot of gratitude for the service according to Flair’s book…

“They [Rhodes and Murdoch] broke down my door at the hotel, sprayed the room with a fire extinguisher, and threw my clothes out a tenth-story window.

On June 26, 1973, I was booked in a cage match for the first time in my life, against Rusher Kimura. I’d never bled in a match, so Rhodes and Murdoch gave the referee a blade and he cut me from one end of my head to the other. Afterward, I went into the back and asked somebody to take a picture, but before I could feel too much pride, I realized that they’d left me at the building, in the middle of nowhere.

After the tour, Leslie [Flair's first wife] was supposed to meet me in Hawaii, but Rhodes and Murdoch took me to the beach, and we got so hammered that I ended up falling asleep on the sand. When I woke up, they were gone, and my wife had been waiting in the airport for nearly four hours.”

I’m sure this wasn’t even the worst of it. After reading this, I want to break Dusty Rhodes’ hand in a parking lot.

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Never feel sorry for this guy. No, not even for the polka-dots.