Monday’s Impact was an ocean of crap, with just one island of goodness – the Styles-Angle match. But other than this match, everything was bad. TNA opened the night on a sad note, when they managed to do something that I thought was impossible – get the Impact Zone audience to chant ‘This is Bullshit†at an X-Division match, and it went downhill from that. But among all the wretlecrap, worked shoots, old guys limping around and TNA guys getting buried, there was one thing that bothered me the most. That was Ric Flair’s appearance.
It was bad for several reasons. The most obvious one is that it was treated as an afterthought. He wasn’t RIC FLAIR, the greatest wrestler of all time. He was just another face in a chain that included Shannon Moore, Sean Morley, Orlando Jordan and the Nasty Boys. But unlike those names, he never got to say a word. Ric Flair is arguably the greatest talker in the history of the business but all he does is walk into AJ Styles’ locker room and watch the main event? If they were trying to make this look like he was giving Styles and Angle his seal of approval, they failed. It was just weird. And even after the match, the show ended with Hogan and his nWo buddies and Flair was forgotten. This is not how you treat Ric Flair.
But even worse than the way Flair was treated was his decision to actually appear on TNA. For one, it was beneath him. But he also proved true the sentence “no good deed goes unpunishedâ€. And the one punished for doing the good deed was Vince McMahon. Vince is mean, heartless bastard but when it came to Ric Flair’s retirement he did everything perfect. He inducted him into the Hall of Fame as an active wrestler. He gave him a great storyline and the perfect opponent for his retirement match so it would be a memorable classic. And then was the sendoff on Raw the following night. Raw was Flair and it was the best farewell in wrestling history. Emotional, touching, respectable. Hell, they even managed to turn his retirement into two excellent feuds in the following months. But this week Ric Flair turned around and spat on all of this.
I didn’t mind seeing Hogan, Foley, Angle, Christian or Hardy in TNA this week or in the past. They were all just one more wrestler umping from one promotion to another. Whether they left WWE on good terms or bad terms, it didn’t matter. But when Ric Flair retired, Vince put him above the promotion. He did something for him that he never did for anyone else, and now I doubt that he will ever do again. Not even Stone Cold Steve Austin got the farewell that Flair did. If we look at the current WWE roster, I can see two wrestler that deserve a sendoff like Ric Flair received – Shawn Michaels and the Undertaker. But will Vince do the right thing with them? Will he go all out like he did with Flair or will he think about the risk he’s taking by putting a guy on a pedestal only to have this guy turned around and cross the line to the competition? And will the fans ever look at Ric Flair the same? When I watch Wrestlemania 24 in the future, will I still get the same feelings as I did until now?
But when I go back to Flair’s silence on Impact, there is a side of me that wants to see the positive in this. Is it possible that Flair did not speak because TNA asked him to trash WWE and Vince McMahon and he refused to do so? Or is this just a weak theory that I thought of because I still want to think that Flair isn’t a complete sellout?
