Ric Flair: To Be the Man…Whoooooo!

The next night on Monday Night Raw, Flair would get a send of befitting of a King. Every wrestler in the locker room would come out to pay their respects to the greatest of all time. Most of them had tears streaming down their faces. Even the legendary Undertaker couldn’t help but show emotion when honoring Flair. It would have been perfect had the story just ended there. Flair would have had the perfect final chapter to cap off the greatest career of all time, but like most other legends, he just couldn’t stay away from the sport. After managing Hall of Famer’s Roddy Piper, Jimmy, Snuka, and Ricky Steamboat in a match against Chris Jericho at WrestleMania 25, Flair would make a few more appearances for WWE before his contract expired in June 2009. His one off appearances in WWE did very little to hurt his legacy, but Flair’s next move ruin the best retirement in wrestling history. After a brief run as Ring of Honor‘s ambassador and on screen authority figure, Flair would join TNA Wrestling, and make his debut appearance on January 4^th 2009. The next three years would be kind of hard to watch for both Ric Flair fans and fans of TNA. Don’t get me wrong, there were brief glimpses of the old Ric Flair magic, specifically his work with AJ Styles and Jay Lethal, but overall the experiment was a total failure. Flair would be “fired” by TNA on May 12^th 2012, but in reality he had already been talking with WWE about a return to the company. He was even inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame for a second time as a member of The Four Horsemen earlier in 2012, while still under contract with TNA. So technically TNA fired him, but he was already walking out the door when they did it. Flair would officially return to WWE as a non-competitor in December of 2012, and from then on he’s had a few sporadic runs as a mentor to The Miz and more recently to his daughter Charlotte.