'Greatest Of All Time' Calling It A Day

There’s not much to say about Ric Flair that hasn’t already been said.

The Nature Boy. The dirtiest player in the game. The Man.

The greatest of all time.

The respect for Flair, who turned 59 last week, is boundless, and his legend grows every time he enters an arena.

Jeff Hardy, who grew up in North Carolina watching the Nature Boy, says it’s been an amazing experience wrestling in the same company alongside the 16-time world champion.

“I got to work him at a Raw awhile back and actually had the honor of beating The Man. Beating Ric Flair was just too good to be true It was crazy. It’s been such an honor.”

“He’s led the way for everybody in the wrestling business,” adds the 30-year-old Hardy. “He’s impressed me so much by still doing it today. It’d kind of be cool to see him wrestle Triple H in his last match, but I think whomever he wrestles, it’ll be one of those moments that will last through time. You can never forget that guy. He’ll leave a mark that will never be replaced.”

The late Johnny Weaver, who was the top babyface in the Carolinas during the ‘60s and early ‘70s, was in the area when Flair first came on board in 1974 and helped turn that territory into one of the hottest in the country.

“He was the man. Like I had been earlier, he became the main man around here,” Weaver related just days before his passing on Feb. 15 at the age of 72.

“He was the only one who was able to take my place after I had enjoyed such a long span of success,” said Weaver, who by that time had wound down his active career and had begun taking care of towns with longtime promoter Henry Marcus.

“But Ric sure had a pretty long run himself,” he added.

More than 30 years to be exact.

“He made such a big impact on this business,” said Weaver. “I know it’ll be hard to give up. I should have quit five years before I did. But you couldn’t have told me that. It’s hard to give up. He was the man in his era. We all had our eras, but he was really something special.”

Fast forward to now, and the reaction is much the same.

WWE PHOTO

Ric Flair with longtime friend and head USC football coach Steve Spurrier.

“He’s my favorite pro wrestler ever in the history of the business,” says “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. “He was the greatest traveling world champion of all time ... Ric Flair was the man. He still is.”

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson patterned his image after that of the Nature Boy. His meteoric rise to fame began shortly after going to WWE boss Vince McMahon and telling him that he saw the character of The Rock as “the ‘90s going into the new millennium version of Ric Flair.”

“He’s an icon in this business,” says Johnson. “Nowadays the word icon is thrown around like an egg-white omelet is thrown around. But he definitely is an icon.”

“When you’re comparing someone to the best, you’re comparing him to Ric Flair. Ric Flair is the best,” agrees TNA champion Kurt Angle. “A lot of people say Kurt Angle is comparable to Ric Flair, but you can’t compare yourself to Ric Flair. He’s amazing.”

Flair’s 2004 autobiography, “To Be The Man,” afforded other stars from this generation an opportunity to give props to a performer they had idolized for years.

“In my life, I bow down to only one person, and that’s Jesus Christ. But in my professional life, I wanted Ric to know, he is the man,” wrote Shawn Michaels, who will be Flair’s opponent in what is expected to be his last match at Wrestlemania 24 in Orlando.

“Even as a kid, I could tell there was a quality about Ric Flair that made the people around him look special. He’d get in the ring with somebody and when the match was over, his opponent had become a star. Ric had greatness, and those who came close to him took some of it with them,” wrote Triple H (Paul Levesque).

Buddy Landel, who parlayed the “Nature Boy” gimmick into a lucrative run with Flair in the mid-’80s, says there’s no argument that Flair was the best.

“I love Ric, and I pray for the best for him. He was my idol, and the greatest thing that ever happened in my career and in wrestling.”

Landel was only 23 when he wrestled Flair for the NWA world title.

“A lot of people don’t realize that we had a close relationship also,” says Landel, now 46. “There was a strong admiration on his part for me and, of course, me for him. That’s what really blew me away. I’ll never forget one night driving to Chicago. I was driving, he was sitting in the front seat, and Mike Graham and Bobby Eaton were passed out. I’ll never forget that conversation we had.”

Landel agrees it will be extremely difficult for Flair to leave the ring for good, perhaps even harder since he’s worked at such a high level for so many years.

“It’s tough out there after wrestling to find your niche. The day the roars from the crowd and all that adulation stops is very hard.”

Blackjack Mulligan (Bob Windham), who watched Flair mature into a top player in the business during the mid-’70s, says “there’s never been anybody like Ric Flair.”

“I can’t put it into words. I can’t put it into a sentence. It needs to be in a book,” says Mulligan. “The business is going to miss him. It’ll never be the same. An era has passed.”

Hall of Fame announcer Jim Ross has enjoyed a front-row seat for much of Flair’s career and calls him “the greatest wrestler of all time.”

“Ric Flair is to pro wrestling as Michael Jordan was to the NBA ... simply the greatest player of all time,” says Ross. “MJ’s influence to young athletes that have followed him in the NBA is obvious, which mirrors Ric’s influence to wrestlers for the past several decades. There is no doubt in my mind that many of wrestling’s greatest superstars of past generations made their decision to make pro wrestling their life’s work after watching, as young men, the exploits of Ric Flair.”

“I said many years ago that while many wrestlers were ‘artists’ inside the squared circle, that they were painting with water colors while ‘Naitch’ was creating art night after night painting with oils,” added Ross.

Flair’s impending retirement also has evoked strong emotions from a loyal legion of fans that have followed the Nature Boy’s illustrious career.

“The world is going to lose a wonderful man when he retires,” says Lola Corneal of North Charleston.

Her sentiment is echoed by fans throughout the Lowcountry.

Growing up in Charleston, Jack Hunter says his favorite memories of the Nature Boy had mostly to do with his parents.

“My folks have always enjoyed painting the town red, and made a point of telling me as a child when they would see Ric Flair out in the local bars (he usually was accompanied by Blackjack Mulligan back then) with the Sheraton hotel on Rivers Avenue being a popular nightspot in those days,” says Hunter.

“When Flair would talk about ‘partying all night long’ on television — sometimes even the very next day after I just received the update from my folks, and sometimes Flair even mentioned Charleston during his promos — I knew there was nothing phony about the Nature Boy. He walked the walk, talked the talk and truly lived the life he boastfully advertised. To me, Ric Flair was not only every bit the ‘jet flying, limousine riding, son of a gun’ he said he was — but my own parents were constant eyewitnesses. At no point in my life was pro wrestling more ‘real’ than in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when South Carolina was not only being established as ‘Flair country,’ but the Charleston nightlife scene was the Nature Boy’s personal playground.”