CHARLOTTE, N.C. _ Ric Flair's first wife flatly says this about her famous ex in a new documentary, premiering Nov. 7: "Don't trust him."
At another point in the ESPN's "30 for 30" film, titled "Nature Boy," his longtime friend Paul Levesque (aka pro wrestler Triple H) brands Flair "a consummate liar."
So when the 68-year-old WWE Hall of Famer calls the Charlotte Observer to chat about the upcoming film, his recently released book and the health scare that almost made him miss both, it's hard for those statements not to echo in an interviewer's mind.
One thing seems fairly free of exaggeration, though:
"I could never drink again," he says. "I mean it. Never.
"I made a joke about it to my doctor recently. He said, 'So what have you been doing?' I said, 'Eh, just been laying low, and healing up. Had a couple beers the other night.' He looked at me and said 'What?' I mean, I could tell. He was pissed. I said, 'No, I'm just kidding.'
"He said, 'Ric, let me tell you something: I can't get you through something like this again.' "
A Charlotte resident for decades, Flair _ born Richard Morgan Fliehr (rhymes with "clear") and raised in a Minneapolis suburb _ lorded over professional wrestling in elaborate fur-lined, sequin-covered robes, and left countless foes crying for mercy with his signature Figure Four leg-lock. He is the only wrestler to have been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame twice, as an individual in 2008 and as a member of The Four Horsemen in 2012.
He was almost as legendary for his drinking. In the ESPN documentary, he boasts of pounding 10 beers and five cocktails per day for decades.
Now? That's all history, it seems.
The last drink he had _ the last drink he'll ever have, Flair says _ went down his throat at 4 o'clock in the afternoon on Friday, the 11th of August. Two hours later, he was checking himself into Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville, Ga., just down the road from the home he shares with his fiancee, Wendy Barlow.
He initially thought it was merely an upset stomach, he says, but it turned out to be far more serious.
After decades of hard-core alcohol abuse, both his kidneys and heart were beginning to fail. Three days later, doctors removed part of his bowel (to relieve an intestinal blockage) and installed a pacemaker; Flair then spent 10 days in a medically induced coma.
Doctors gave him just a 20 percent chance of ever waking up, he says.
"Miss drinking? No. Not at all. Ten days of not knowing where you are and being on life support? Even a guy as irresponsible as I have been, and can be, would never subject himself to that again.
"So yeah. Diet Coke, man. Starbucks coffee. Venti bold. And a lot of Gatorade. Actually, when I first got out of the hospital ... I couldn't twist the top off a bottle of Gatorade. That tells you how weak I was."
