Book body-slams city's uptight image
Ric Flair tells exploits in 'To Be the Man'
TOMMY TOMLINSON
Commentary
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I've just read Ric Flair's new book, "To Be the Man." It's now clear that North Carolina needs some new historical markers.
Here lies the spot where Ric Flair fell down drunk on his kitchen floor while fellow wrestler Terry Funk crawled around the back yard naked, trying to start a fight with a pit bull.
Or: At this hotel bar, Ric Flair wooed a woman by boasting that he had just posed for Playgirl. He hadn't. She married him anyway.
Or: This is the traffic court where Ric Flair discovered that he had committed 82 moving violations in four years.
The problem with most people who write books about themselves is that they haven't done enough to write about.
Ric Flair does not have this problem.
"To Be the Man" came out Tuesday and spent the day in the top 75 at amazon.com. It's written mostly for wrestling geeks (like me).
But there's another layer if you read the book as a Charlottean.
Ric Flair moved here in 1974, spending his first night in an $8 hotel. In the 30 years since, he made it big and so did our town.
Read the book and you realize that Flair's life is the perfect comeback to the gripes people have about Charlotte.
Charlotte, not a party town? You should've been with Flair the night Andre the Giant drank 106 beers.
Charlotte, strait-laced and bland? Our most famous resident has spent the last three decades wearing custom-made robes and slashing his own forehead with a razor blade.
Charlotte, careful with its money? Our guy has personally kept half the IRS in business, racking up $1 million in fines on his taxes.
If you've lived here long, you'll love the local color -- Flair runs up a tab at Valentino's, buys his first fancy car at Arnold Palmer Cadillac, hires Bill Diehl as his lawyer.
(His current wife, Beth, gets off one of the best lines, describing their first meeting in Raleigh: "I thought Ric was a pimp. There were about seven women with him, and he didn't look like a normal person.")
He also takes steroids, chugs kamikazes like they're Gatorade, fools around until his first wife leaves him, sells shares in himself to pay off bills, and invites every woman in Baltimore between 18 and 28 to a party at his penthouse.
Dozens show up.
He spends a good portion of the book apologizing for all this -- mainly to his wives and four kids. (He doesn't get into his most recent trouble -- a lawsuit filed in March by two flight attendants. They say Flair and other wrestlers sexually assaulted and harassed them on a charter flight two years ago.)
But you get the feeling that even though he's sorry that he hurt people, he's not sorry enough to give up all those wild nights.
If you haven't followed wrestling for a while, it's the most real it has ever been.
Yes, the wrestlers still know who's going to win before they get in the ring. But wrestling has lifted its own curtain -- everybody admits it's a show, fans know performers' real names, the inner workings of the business are laid out on the table.
Flair (real name: Richard Fliehr) puts a good bit of that in his book. If you want to know what he thinks about why World Championship Wrestling went down, it's here. If you want to know the wrestlers he respects and the ones he can't stand, it's here.
But whether Flair intended it or not, his book is about psychology -- and not the kind that makes the fans boo or cheer.
It's about how a guy can do all the wrong things and somehow make you like him. It's about how a performer can get so deep into a character that even he can't tell the difference anymore.
And it's about how you can't sum up any person -- much less any city -- with a few quick words.
Yep, in many ways this is a pinstriped, tight-collared, Old Testament town.
But sometimes the pinstripes come off. The sequined robe comes on. And our inner Flair comes out.
From Ric Flair's book, "To Be the Man":
"In my eyes, Charlotte's the place that gave me my success. When I moved there in 1974, it was still a small Southern city; you couldn't even buy liquor by the drink. We had auto racing and wrestling, and that was it.... Throughout my life, I've had offers to relocate to other places, but once I got to Charlotte, I had no reason to leave. I raised my two youngest kids there and grew with the city. I remember promoters who wanted to announce my hometown as Minneapolis because Charlotte sounded `too small-market.' Not to me. It's my home, and I love it." Tommy Tomlinson
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Reach Tommy: (704) 358-5227; P.O. Box 30308, Charlotte, NC 28230; ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com
credit:
http://www.charlotte.com
