Ric Flair has revealed that he passed out twice during his ‘Last Match’ due to dehydration.
Speaking to Conrad Thompson for the ‘To Be The Man’ podcast, Flair blamed his weight management regime during training for the match, which took place on Sunday, July 31st.
The 73-year-old said (Transcription courtesy of F4Wonline):
I don’t think people realize that I passed out twice. What happened was, my regimentation for training was so strict that I kept my weight on. I wanted my perfect weight to be like 220lbs going in.
So, the last day and a half, aside from all the work that we had planned for me to do, I didn’t hydrate cause I had it in my mind that I had to weigh 219lbs. So anyway, I went to the ring at about 217lbs. What happened during the body of the match, I just became dehydrated.
The match was a tag with son-in-law Andrade El Idolo vs. Jeff Jarrett and Jay Lethal. He noted that at one point during the match while he stood on the apron, Andrade told him that it was his turn to tag in. Flair claimed that he did not know what point the match had reached, adding: “I had missed about, clearly like 10 seconds of it.”
Turning to the second point when he passed out, Flair said that it happened after the planned missed guitar shot when Jarrett went to hit Flair but accidentally struck Jay Lethal instead. He said:
Then along came the guitar, right down bingo, don’t know. While I was down, I passed out again. I just passed out. Manny [Andrade] is going, ‘Sir, you have to wake up, I have the brass knuckles, sir, you have to wake up.’ So then I woke up, I knew where we were right, boom, and we’re home. I swear to God, twice during the match, I went completely black.
Flair claimed that, after the match, he was all set to drink six beers but The Undertaker intervened and made him drink Gatorade.
Later in the podcast, he also claimed that his pacemaker had been fitted not because of a cardiac event but because of an exceptionally low resting heart rate of 38 beats per minute from “years of cardio and all the one-hour broadways.”