COMMENTARY
Ageless Flair still loves wrestling, still 'The Man'
TOM SORENSEN
We all have goals, and I finally achieved one of mine. After more than 20 years of trying, I bought Ric Flair a drink. It was only coffee, but it still counts.
Flair usually buys for everybody he knows and some he does not. I've tried to pay at least five times.
But he'll flash a signal to the woman at the register or the man behind the bar, maybe simulate his famed figure-four leglock, the most lethal hold ever unleashed in the squared circle, and my money no longer is good.
So this was a big day for me, and these are big days for Flair. The 16-time world wrestling champion's biography will be available in book stores June 29.
Written with Keith Elliott Greenberg -- unless his name is Triple H, a wrestling writer should never have more than two names -- and published by WWE and Simon and Schuster, it's entitled, "To Be The Man."
The title is a version of Flair's motto: To be the man, you have to beat the man.
Flair offers a new motto over coffee at the Dean & DeLuca at Stonecrest. The new motto is appropriate (and appropriated): "You never slow down, you never get old."
Flair is not old, but he is 55. He has lived in Charlotte 30 years. Before the Carolina Panthers, before the Charlotte Hornets and before most of the buildings that make up our skyline, there was Flair.
He's still doing what he always has. He moves around the country and the world for the WWE. Run into him and ask what he's been up to, and he'll say he just returned from England or India or Japan the way the rest of us would say we just returned from Greensboro.
On Friday night, Flair wrestled in Spartanburg. Before he did, he concluded his two-week wrestling camp at Providence High.
Flair says Charlotte high school wrestlers are at a disadvantage because the sport is not offered in middle school. So he holds the camp every summer to help wrestlers catch up. Twenty did, going daily from 9 to 11 a.m., 1 to 3 p.m. and 5 to 7 p.m.
How many sessions does each wrestler attend?
"If they want to graduate and get a T-shirt, all of them," Flair says.
Alas, the camp is a bit of a disappointment. The curriculum fails to address any of wrestling's three F's -- the figure-four, foreign objects and folding chairs.
In July, Flair begins a national book-signing tour. The tour includes one Charlotte stop, the Borders at Stonecrest, July 15.
"In the book I talk about the highs and the pitfalls and some things I've never told you or anybody," says Flair, who still sports the platinum blond hair for which he is famous.
Flair says the book is personal. He talks about the final days of World Championship Wrestling. The once great organization made a series of dumb, debilitating moves, one of which was de-emphasizing Flair. As the WCW crumbled, so did Flair's self-esteem.
The Nature Boy, who once announced he could entertain fans if he wrestled a broom, battled the same demons most of us do.
"I didn't know if I still fit," Flair says. "I worried about my legacy in the sport."
Flair was rescued when he was hired by the WWE in 2001. The man who had wrestled Bruno Sammartino now was bouncing off the ropes with The Rock. Flair immediately was accepted, and soon he again was loving who he is and what he does and for whom he does it.
The trick to being Ric Flair is this. No matter how cocky he appears in the ring or behind a microphone, he is humble. He doesn't buy drinks because he wants to flash his bank account. He wants to say thanks. This is why, when it came time to dedicate his biography, the choice was easy.
One page past the picture of Flair in a sequined robe (with trunks beneath it) is the introduction.
It says: "This book is dedicated to my fans."
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Tom Sorensen: (704) 358-5119; tsorensen@charlotteobserver.com.
credit:
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/sports/8968060.htm?1c
