Ric Flair has criticized the way some matches are put together in today’s pro wrestling.
Speaking on the Hall of Fame podcast with Booker T and Brad Gilmore, the WWE Hall of Famer said over-rehearsing matches can hurt wrestlers’ ability to react to the crowd.
To Flair, the main problem with memorizing the entire structure of a match is that no amount of preparation can anticipate how the fans in the arena will respond to what happens in the ring.
“But you can never predict how the crowd is going to react. And that’s why you can’t memorize.”
“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.”
Among today’s stars, Flair pointed to Charlotte Flair as an example of someone who’s learned to adjust her performance based on the crowd’s response.
“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.”
Explaining where that view comes from, Flair went back to his days carrying the NWA World Heavyweight Championship through different territories. He said he wrestled 454 matches in 1983, with 360 of them going a full hour.
“One year I wrestled 454 times, in ’83, I want to say. And of those, 360 [were] hour matches.”
Flair had publicly made the same claim about the 454 matches in 1983 in a conversation with Booker T published in 2023. Historical records confirm an extremely heavy schedule that year, with NWA World Heavyweight Championship defenses across different territories.
In 1986, Flair also worked a long series of matches against Ricky Morton during their feud over the NWA World Heavyweight Championship. The records include meetings between the two in April, May and July, along with the famous July 5 Steel Cage Match during the Great American Bash tour.
Flair said that at one point in that feud, he and Morton logged nine hours in the ring in a single week.
“We never talked about it.”
