Against Ric Flair, Terry Funk Battles Time Itself
Against Ric Flair, Terry Funk Battles Time Itself
Middle aged and crazy like a fox.
The story that WCW wants us to believe about Terry Funk in 1989 in that his best years are behind him. It’s the entire crux of his famous feud against Ric Flair for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship. Just look at how this whole rivalry even started. Terry Funk’s at ringside to be a judge for the Flair vs. Steamboat championship bout at WrestleWar ‘89 in the event that the match go to a time limit draw or otherwise end inconclusively. Funk’s fellow judges: Lou Thesz and Pat O’Connor. Funk’s placement among them sends a clear message: these are champions of the past, now mostly just passive observers and adornments to the more relevant action of the present day.
When Funk climbs into the ring to congratulate Flair and sheepishly request a title opportunity, he’s brushed off more as a nuisance than anything else. Flair tries to turn him down, but in doing so takes shots at Funk’s time in Hollywood instead.
And that’s what awakens the madman.
That initial opening angle once again highlighted the emotional versatility Funk often displayed. His initial approach to Flair is shy, even sycophantic in its praise. But then there’s a genuine hurt in Funk’s voice and demeanor when Flair rejects his challenge, there’s a bitterness there that would be pitiful if he didn’t lash out so violently afterwards. Regardless of how Flair meant his comments about Hollywood to come across, Terry Funk takes them as an insult to his ability.
In Funk’s mind, Flair’s not just enforcing the bureaucracy of NWA championship procedure, but rather calling him unworthy. For Funk, Flair is trying to put him out to pasture, and the only way to respond to that is with force.
It’s a perfect pro wrestling angle, perhaps one of the finest strokes of main event booking in the history of the industry. Flair had just completed the famous trilogy of matches against Ricky Steamboat, a rivalry built more around philosophical differences of lifestyle and pure athletic competition in the ring. Mere moments of coming out on top, Flair now finds himself embroiled in something entirely different and just as important: an honest to God blood feud.
In the weeks and months to follow WrestleWar, Funk would expand on his motivations for the attack further. One anecdote he shares repeatedly in his promos involves standing over his father’s grave with “nothing but the West Texas wind blowing” and vowing to make the name Funk synonymous with professional wrestling.
It’s easy to argue that Funk has nothing to worry about at this point. Both him and Dory have been crowned NWA World’s Champion, he’s a bonafide star all over the world, and he’s worked in basically every major territory worth mentioning. Yet, when we examine Funk’s opposition in this feud, suddenly his fears take on a more urgent quality.
Up against Terry Funk in this feud is Ric Flair. At this point, Flair’s a six-time World Champion compared to Funk’s single reign. Pro wrestling has changed now too. Between pay-per-view and the increased distribution of pro wrestling television, there’s an argument to be made that Ric Flair’s just a bigger star than Terry Funk right now. Given how history has generally (I can’t stress the word generally here enough, victors write history after all) perceived both men in the decades since, maybe Funk’s fears that he was running out of time to cement his legacy weren’t entirely unfounded.
A big part of this feud centers around the idea that Terry Funk maybe doesn’t really have what it takes anymore. In hindsight, we can see that Funk has so much more left to give. Even just watching his work in 1989, this becomes so apparent. “Middle aged and crazy” becomes a part of his onscreen persona, and he translates that into energetic and vicious performances that populate his year. It’s the kind of high bar of quality that can make a squash match against the likes of Cougar Jay compelling television, let alone his excellent bouts against the likes of Ricky Steamboat throughout the year. Terry Funk may be past his sell by date for some TV execs, but we know better.
Funk himself acknowledges them beautifully in a promo with Paul Heyman. “My arms are not the biggest arms in the world, and I don’t have the spring in my legs that I once had, nor can I run a race as fast as I once could.”
Time is running out for Terry Funk, his body is escaping his control.
These are the stakes behind his chase for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.
That brings us to the I Quit match.
These two had already wrestled a classic at The Great American Bash, a match that ended with a decisive victory for Flair. At Halloween Havoc, Flair & Sting scored a big victory over Funk & Muta in the (somewhat) Electrified Thunderdome Cage Match. There’s no real question over who the better competitor is in kayfabe. Flair’s come out on top basically every single time that counts.
The beauty of the thing is how they’re able to create stakes deeper than just the championship. The title isn’t irrelevant, but things quickly escalate into a matter of pride for these two. It’s Funk chasing history itself, rallying against the inevitability of his own mortality.
And that’s a battle that all men are born to lose.
Just watch Funk’s promo on his talk show segment, Funk’s Grill, from November 3, 1989. Despite being so close to the I Quit match, at a point when this feud has been burning for close to half a year, neither man’s hollering and screaming. They’re both as cool as ice, and Flair in particular speaks not with confidence, but with certainty. He knows that he can and will beat Terry Funk.
And the worst part is that Funk seems to know it as well. He doesn’t say it out loud but look in the man’s eyes. That’s not the face of a man expecting to become the World’s Champion.
Given everything above, there’s a doomed quality to Terry Funk’s performance in the I Quit match against Ric Flair. Funk spends most of it on back foot, selling and bumping for Flair in typical Funk fashion. What advantages Terry’s able to get come from reasonably dirty tactics—a thumb to the eye here, trying to re-injure the neck there.
The brief moments of control for Funk never truly seem to spell too danger for Flair though. They brawl out into the crowd and Funker uses the microphone to punch at Flair, but it never halts the champion’s momentum for long. Still, the Funker’s able to play some of the hits here. The addition of the microphone for the stipulation grants us some classic lines “You egg sucking dog!” and “Pig!” Very much staples of the Terry Funk playbook, but welcome additions nonetheless.
His real contribution is on the sell. Every time control slips away from Terry Funk, he immediately looks punch drunk and out of sorts. He’s barely able to keep his wits about him and he takes some wonderful bumps in this—the sliding crash into the table and chair come to mind. He’s so goddamn expressive with it all that it might slip into self-parody territory if Flair’s babyface attack wasn’t so vicious as to warrant every exaggerated spaghetti-legged stumble.
The real tragedy of this all is that Terry Funk doomed himself from the start.
By attacking Flair at WrestleWar and making this match so immediately personal and heated, he unleashed a truly dangerous side of Flair. Fans of Flair’s NWA World Championship reigns have a general idea of how he approaches these matches—both as a character and as a performer. There’s a simple set formula Flair goes to that involves an early babyface shine, an extended period of control by Flair on the mat, all building up to a big comeback from the babyface that Flair bumps like a madman for.
In this babyface run, forced into a embittered blood feud with Funk, Flair’s unleashed from the necessity of his travelling champion formula. He no longer has to offer the shine to each territory’s challenger, but maximize his own shine as the hero for once.
Because of that, the dirty secret of this match is that Flair’s performance, by very design of the match’s narrative, outshines the Funker’s. Flair is relentless in this bout, attaining “force of nature” status in the ring. He doesn’t do anything too fancy too, simply reacts and keeps fighting but does it all so goddamn well, it’s impossible to ignore. Instead of punching like a blue collar babyface, he fires off some of the most brutal chops on that side of the Pacific—real chest bruisers that seem to stun Funk in his tracks at every turn. Fittingly, the context of the match allows Flair to indulge in some more heelish tactics as well, without ever losing the moral high ground. When he starts to choke Funk brutally down on the mat in the first few moments, he’s pretty much justified in trying to punish a man who has hounded him and threatened his livelihood for six months in a row now.
The Funker set off on this rivalry to prove that Father Time couldn’t keep him down quite yet. Unfortunately for him, his attempt simply awakened the most dangerous and deranged aspects of an already younger champion in the middle of his absolute prime.
What’s beautiful about Terry Funk though, both in and out of kayfabe, is the grace he accepts aging with. In the decade to come after this match, that would manifest itself as an eagerness to embrace new styles of wrestling while elevating younger talent along the way. On this night though, it manifests itself as a promise kept. He gave his word in the weeks leading up to this that he would shake the hand of Flair should he lose, and so he does in front of the whole world.
Terry Funk would have more battles against time and his own deteriorating body in the years to follow. Some he’d win, some he’d lose. At Clash of Champions IX, against a yellow-haired monster of a World’s Champion, Terry Funk lost.
No man can beat the flow of time, but if you’re like Terry Funk, you go down swinging anyway.
IS IT BETTER THAN 6/3/94? There’s a fascinating parallel here in that both matches feature challengers forced to confront their own imperfections through their battles against a nigh unstoppable champion. There’s perhaps something just a little more universal about Funk’s struggle against aging here though, and if not necessarily better as an idea, it’s certainly better acted. There’s a gravitas to Terry Funk’s failings and emotions that’s given the space to breathe in a way that Misawa and Kawada aren’t provided. Funker makes this section look easy, his third win in a row.
Rating: ****3/4