Watch Ric Flair Tell Crazy Andre the Giant Drinking Stories
If you’ve paid attention to professional wrestling for long enough, there’s a pretty great chance you’ve heard a good Ric Flair story or two. You know about the time he walked away from a plane crash? Partying with John Cena? That time in the eighties when Flair said the name of the hotel the Four Horsemen were staying at and hundreds of women showed up? All the blood and titles? Those are all good, but what about the time the Nature Boy was struck by lightning and survived?
“I got off the plane and was walking,” the two-time WWE Hall of Famer said on the Dan Le Batard Show on ESPN. “I didn’t go 10, 15 feet when all of a sudden I felt this pressure boom, and man, my umbrella shot 50 feet in the air.”
What was that pressure?
“Lightning hit the top of my umbrella, bounced off and hit the guy in the eye five feet behind me and killed him. Right there. I just stood there looking at the guy and froze, it scared me to death,” he said.
The incident occurred after Flair stepped off the plane in Richmond, Virginia, on his way to a match with Ricky Steamboat, one of his most famous rivals.
There’s that, and there’s also his stories about taking Andre the Giant out to party, that the “The Eighth Wonder of the World” was a great wingman for meeting ladies. You can’t really go wrong with those.
Flair, 67, also told the host that while some of the guys he wrestled with throughout his career are banged up, can hardly move or worse, he feels pretty great.
Pretty much any story by the guy who has held 31 different major championships between the NWA, WCW and WWE, and who wrestled everybody from Dusty Rhodes to Shawn Michaels is a good one. And while you may have heard one or two of them before, Flair is sort of one of wrestling’s last great storytellers who has pretty much seen it all, so you can’t go wrong listening to him talk to get to a nugget like the lighting tale.