Ric Flair Says He Passed Out Twice During His Last Match Due To Dehydration

During the latest episode of his To Be The Man podcast (via Fightful), Ric Flair said that he passed out twice during his last match a couple of weeks ago because he was dehydrated. Here are highlights:

On passing out during the match: “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. 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 [Andrade] 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.”

On going to the outside to slow the match down: “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. 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. Then Jeff, out of respect for me, he lifted me up to the top turnbuckle, and Jay was gonna give me a superplex, which would have blown the roof off the joint. But he was worried about my health, Jeff sincerely. He said, ‘We can’t do that, Naitch. We can’t do it.’ I said, ‘Yes I can.’ So rather than look awkward, I came down with him, then Jay came in and gave me the suplex, and we were back rolling. Then at that point, along came the guitar, right. Down, bingo. Well, I was down. I passed out again. I just passed out, and [Andrade] is going, ‘Sir, you have to wake up. I have the brass knuckles. Sir, you have to wake up.’ Then I woke up, I knew where we were, and we’re home. But I swear to god, twice during the match, I went completely black.”

On getting better after the match: “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. 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.”