Other than Ric Flair sounding like a Jive Soul Brother this little cartoon is pretty fantastic. Ric Flair may be a republican, but he would sure style and profile far better than ole’ Dubya

You didn’t think just because Ric Flair has wrestled his last match that the Rewind would be over? To paraphrase, Diamonds are forever…and so is the Ric Flair Rewind, Woo!

Before we get to this, I’d just like to say that the match at WrestleMania not only lived up to my expectations of Natch, but possibly surpassed them. There was a moment when Abdullah the Blogger and I thought that maybe, just maaaybe this wouldn’t be Flair’s last match. And that is why Flair is so awesome! Here’s hoping that he comes back just once for a tag team match of the ages with him and his son Ried vs. Dusty and Cody Rhodes.

But, back to the Rewind. Lets go back a whopping 16 WrestleManias to WrestleMania VIII, where Flair and the Macho Man were feuding. Ric Flair and his partner in crime, Curt Hennig, were playing games with Savage suggesting that Elizabeth was having an affair with Natch, leading to this fantastic piece…

We’re less than 48 hours away from the biggest ripoff of the year, which will most likely feature the retirement of the greatest wrestler of all time, Ric Flair.

Now much like the the title of this post says, Flair was one cunning linguist. Some people would even argue that Flair is a poet. One of those people would most likely be an online Flair advocate who goes by the alias of Poodleface who has edited together two masterpieces showing off Flair’s (what the hip hoppers call) mad flow…

Since we have been looking back at the career of Ric Flair, it’s important to remember the valleys as well as the peaks. And what the horrible, disgusting people in charge of WCW did to piss all over his legacy, and ensure that he would become a legend in WWE — something unthinkable in 1990 — and remembered partly as a WWF/E icon.

When Ric Flair’s career ends at WrestleMania, for months to come, we will undoubtedly be deluged with thousands of hours of Ric Flair footage from years past to celebrate his great career. Most likely, though, this match will not be among them, one of the events that eventually drove him out of WCW. Ric Flair was actually given one of the shittiest gimmicks of all time in WCW: The Black Scorpion.

Well, sort of.

At the time (1990), Sting had just beaten Ric Flair for the World Title. Since WCW sucked at booking, led by Ole Anderson at that time, they had no one ready to step into that top contender spot vacated by Ric Flair. So they decided to create a completely new masked character out of thin air to challenge Sting — The Black Scorpion.

The Black Scorpion was supposed to be somebody from Sting’s past. He performed low-rent magic tricks on TV, like turning a man into a tiger, supposedly to scare Sting. He was shown in vignettes (through camera tricks) to be about 7 feet tall. They even used the same speech distortion box for the Black Scorpion that they would later use for Le Shockmaster.

I will leave it to JHawk to explain the rest of the story:

There was only one problem. Ole had the Angel of Death in mind to play the part of the Black Scorpion, but he didn’t actually bother to sign the Angel prior to starting the angle. What followed was probably the biggest flop of an angle in wrestling history.

With Sting defending the NWA World Title against The Black Scorpion at a live Clash of the Champions, a series of vignettes had aired where Scorpion promised to unmask if he didn’t win the title. So of course, Sting wins the match, but not only doesn’t the Scorpion unmask, but the Scorpion Sting was wrestling was a fake! In fact, the real Scorpion, easily 3-6 inches taller than the one who just wrestled, was standing on the ramp looking at Sting after the match. Supposedly the Scorpion that wrestled that night was former World Class Champion Al Perez, who hadn’t been seen in a year and hasn’t been seen since.

The angle got progressively worse, with Scorpion conducting “black magic” to get into Sting’s head over the next few months. These bits were mind-numbingly stupid, particularly when they turned the one guy into a “tiger” that looked more like a leopard…and the trick was so mind-numbingly blown that members of the crowd were actually pointing to the plant to tell Sting where he disappeared to.

With no real blow off plan in place, they finally blew the angle off at Starrcade 1990, revealing the Scorpion to be Ric Flair playing mind games all along. Which might have worked had they not made it obvious by pulling Flair out of his scheduled tag team title match with Doom that had been scheduled to blow off that long-running feud.

Of course it is never explained why Ric Flair is 1 1/2 feet shorter than the Black Scorpion, or how Ric Flair can be “someone from Sting’s past” when they had just wrestled like the day before. But then again this was WCW in the 1990s, which made current WWE look like Upstairs, Downstairs in terms of coherent writing.

Funny enough, there is still some entertainment value in this match. The ending where 1,190 different Black Scorpions run into the ring and beat the shit out of Sting is pretty surreal, even by today’s standards.

Bonus feature 1: commentary by good old JR, and Paul Heyman in his Paul E. Dangerously days, pre-ECW (and pre-pre-shitty ECW).

Bonus feature 2: cameraman sitting on top of the cage and his sneakered feet dangling into the ring during the action. I guess hiring a magician to perform stupid magic tricks badly on WCW Saturday Night tapped out the budget, and they couldn’t stick a camera on a rafter somewhere.

Bonus feature 3: special referee Dick The Bruiser, dressed like he just woke up, got a surprise phone call to come and referee a match, and showed up without changing. Also, not being familiar with popular referee pin-counting conventions despite being an ex-wrestler.

Ric Flair has made it abundantly clear that Ricky Steamboat was his favorite opponent of all time. Watching the above clip, you can tell Flair loved working with Steamboat, and how much chemistry the two had, as Steamboat stripped Flair almost nude (NO HOMO!). Really, this was the beginning of a tradition of Flair stripping to his undies. This exchange is pure perfection. This angle occurred 30 years ago and it makes me want to watch their match right now. Both men played their roles perfectly.

See Also
The Ric Flair/Ricky Steamboat feud of 1978
Flair vs. Steamboat 2 out of 3 Falls - Clash of the Champions 6
Flair vs. Steamboat - WrestleWar ‘89
Flair vs. Steamboat - Chi’ Town Rumble

It’s sad to think that we are about a month away from Ric Flair’s final match. Here is a moment from a few years ago, where the wheelin’-dealin-kiss-stealin-limousine-riding-jet-flying-son-of-a-gun and the People’s Champ, The Rock squaring off for (if memory serves correct) the only time. Unfortunately, it was in a handicapped tag match with the Rock-n-Sock Connection taking on 3/4ths of Evolution. The Nature Boy is not to be outdone by the most electrifying move in sports entertainment, as he puts his own spin on things. Can I get a Woo!?

As we head closer to Wrestlemania, we are being constantly reminded that Ric Flair is approaching the end of his career. This past Monday night on Raw, Shawn Michaels announced Ric Flair as the first inductee for the 2008 WWE Hall of Fame. This makes Ric Flair the first active wrestler to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

In recent weeks, we’ve been rewinding to some of Ric Flair’s greatest moments. To keep the tradition going, here is another great Ric Flair moment from the 1992 Royal Rumble; where Ric Flair captured the World Wrestling Federation title to become the undisputed heavyweight champion.

Here is some back-story for this match. Ric Flair joined the World Wrestling Federation in 1991, proclaiming himself “The Real World Heavyweight Champion.” Just months earlier, Flair was a top draw for WCW. Departing WCW stemming from a contractual dispute, Flair jumped to the WWF. Bearing the WCW/NWA World Championship and carrying it on WWF television was huge. Ric Flair instantly became a top heel in the WWF, with Bobby Hennan and “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig as his “consultants.”

This all cumulated at the 1992 Royal Rumble, where Ric Flair won the Rumble Match to claim the vacant WWF Championship and become the undisputed champion. Flair lasted 59 minutes, eliminating Sid Justice with help from Hulk Hogan. This was the first and only time the WWF or WWE Championship was on the line in the Royal Rumble match. The championship was vacated in December 1991 because of the controversial finish to the Hulk Hogan vs. The Undertaker match during This Tuesday in Texas.

This is truly a historical moment, with a great post-match promo and video package that follows: