Photo: JASON KEMPIN
Hall of Fame wrestler Ric Flair revealed that he "passed out twice" due to dehydration during his Last Match event in Nashville last month.
Flair and his son-in-law, Manny Orpoeza, who wrestles for All Elite Wrestling as 'Andrade El Idolo,' defeated AEW/Ring of Honor star Jay Lethal and WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett in a tag-team main event match that was billed to be the last of Flair's legendary career.
The 16-time world champion discussed the situation with his son-in-law and co-host Conrad Thompson on the 'AFTER The Last Match' episode of his To Be The Man podcast this week.
“I don’t think people realized that I passed out twice. Well what happened was, my regimentation for training was so strict that I kept my weight, I wanted my perfect weighty to be like 220 going in," Flair said (h/t Fightful.com). "So the last day, the last day and a half, aside from all the work that we had planned for me to do, I didn’t hydrate. I had it in my mind that I had to weigh 219. So I went to the ring and I’m like 217 pounds, and what happened during the body of the match is I just became dehydrated. I actually, when I was standing on the apron, I looked at Jay, which started a wheel of motion. I said, ‘Man, I think I’m getting sick’ because I was getting light-headed. Nothing to do with my heart or nothing to do with my intestines. I was getting light-headed. I’m sure a lot of it was nerves as well. So I think Jay said, ‘Guys, we gotta move this along’, when that isn’t what I meant. But to the point when Manny came over and said, ‘Your turn, sir. Your turn, sir.’ So I got in and I didn’t know where we were in the match because I had missed about clearly like 10 seconds of it."
"So then when I went outside, I think everybody just jumped the gun a little bit and I saw where Booker T, who’s really a close friend of mine, thought it was in bad to do this, that was strictly on the fly to get everybody to slow down," Flair said. "Because everybody, if you look back on it, everybody just came all together at one time. We were far from the end of the match. So I just said to myself, ‘How do I get everybody to slow down?’ That wasn’t anticipated, that wasn’t called, I just did it. I apologize if I scared anybody, but I couldn’t think of any way to reorganize because we had everybody on the floor at one time, which was never planned out like that."
Flair said Jarrett, out of respect and fear for the wrestler's health, changed a spot in which Flair was supposed to take a superplex from the top rope.
Flair said he passed out a second time after a spot in which Jarrett, aiming for Flair, accidentally hit his teammate, Lethal, with an acoustic guitar shot to the head, saying he "went black" due to dehydration and, at the request of WWE Hall of Famer The Undertaker, drank Gatorade after he went backstage.
"My hand started trembling, but it was all dehydration. I had two doctors in there right away with me and everything, and The Undertaker came running in. I had like six beers there," Flair said. "He took them out of my hand and said, ‘You’re drinking two Gatorades first.’ So I drank two, and that’s all it was. I underestimated the importance of keeping hydrated, which is really big, especially when I lost that much weight and trained that hard."
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