Joseph and Colette Discuss Terry Funk vs. Ric Flair
Which Terry Funk/Ric Flair match is better, the one from the '89 Bash or the Clash of the Champions I Quit match?
Colette here: For the past couple of months, as time permitted, I've been fixing up our archives. When BIG EGG moved here from Substack, the data transfer screwed up basically all of the metadata. That's largely invisible and largely pointless for — if I ever give in to the urge to care about SEO again, assume I've been bodysnatched — but every post prior to February was credited to me. So I dug into all of our old posts, properly crediting them to Joseph, removing old Substack appeal-to-subscriber language where it existed, adding blurbs and tags and generally organizing things while re-reading the whole site again, from front-to-back.
Once I was finished, I found that I wanted to write about Terry Funk and Bret Hart again, so here we are: It's REMATCH MONTH, where we're looking at four feuds (I won't call them all "great" because Triple H vs. Undertaker has a ceiling well below that) that prompted some of our best writing. I'm gonna repeat all of that in the below conversation with Joseph, but some of y'all probably don't make it down that far in these posts, even if it's a hot one like this: a Top 10 BIG EGG MASTERLIST match whose prime competition ... is Terry Funk vs. Ric Flair from the Clash in 1989. It's a great conversation, and there are, by now, dozens in the archive. Consider subscribing to read 'em, then go crazy with the two of us as we build a mutual canon of great matches and Triple H matches and the stuff that falls between those two polls.
If you're buzzing from yesterday's All In, you should check out Joseph's piece on Hangman/Mox. I haven't read it yet because I'm on deadline for a piece about the match over at VGBees, keeping the Fanfyte flame lit, but I'm sure it's wonderful. Joseph saw the vision of this angle long before many did, and his perspective on this rebuilding period for the most important American wrestling promotion of the past quarter century is always on point.
Up Next: Speaking of things I haven't checked out but am pretty sure will be wonderful, we're revisiting the rivalry we launched BIG EGG with: Bret Hart vs. "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. Thing is, though: Joseph has already written about their famous, possibly better than WrestleMania 13 bout from Survivor Series 1996, so we're covering their first match that made it to tape in full: WWF's 9/14/1996 Sun City Superbowl in Sun City, South Africa! Kind of a shame that the Kuwait Cup match from May '96 only exists in clipped form on the World Tour 1996 tape/the WWE Vault's Bret Hart mixtape, kinda crazy that all of five of 15 of Hart and Austin's matches made tape/that most of their ring time together happened on foreign tours during the company's worst financial period, but if anyone was going to keep things interesting over there, it sure as hell wasn't gonna be Shawn Michaels.
Colette Arrand
Colette Arrand
It was my turn to pick the matches for a cycle, and so here we are with Rematch Month. The idea came to me while I was working through every essay you and I have written for this site — a lot of the matches we’ve written about are part of long, storied rivalries, and there’s a lot of space to roam in some of them. Three of the four matches I picked this month, this one included, I picked because the essays we did back then are still among my favorites — our Necro/Klein essays rock but mostly I couldn’t remember what gets hucked at who’s head in that one and can’t wait to find out. To kick things off we get to revisit Terry Funk vs. Ric Flair, this time with some distance from the Funker’s passing, which spurred a full Funk Month retrospective in which I called their Clash “I Quit” match the greatest of all time. Without acquiescing to the notion that I may be a bit liberal with that phrase, that match is currently #6 on the MASTERLIST. I don’t want to skip to the end here, but I suspect we’ll be talking about this one as a top 10 match. My ruthless capitalist heart is telling me to save the part where this is no longer a five star match for you for after the paywall, so I’ll start here instead: 1989 Ric Flair is a singularly astonishing wrestler, isn’t he? Like, holy shit what a worker. It isn’t just a matter of how great his matches are, or how good he is at playing the babyface or heel, but how legitimate he seems. This is the run so many generational world champions in America who have followed, Flair included, have tried to be, and precious few have come close — almost none at this level.
Joseph Montecillo
It is an abominably great run in the middle of an abominably great year. It's not just that Flair felt like the best in the world, it's that he felt like the best in the world when multiple all-timers were doing some of their greatest work ever. Speaking just of the BIG EGG MASTERLIST, my god, Vader/Wanz is still this year. That's not even to mention the end of an era in All Japan with this being the apex leading to the eventual end of Genichiro Tenryu's time in the company. Things come together for pro wrestling this year in a way it rarely ever will again and Ric Flair may be at the very tippy top of all of that.