Terry Funk vs. Ric Flair Is the Greatest Wrestling Match of All Time
Everything great about wrestling's past, present, and future is right here in this I Quit match from Clash of the Champions IX.
Simply put, this is the greatest wrestling match of all time.
No, I am not being hyperbolic. I mean it with every fiber of my being as a fan and critic of professional wrestling — Ric Flair and Terry Funk put on the greatest wrestling match of all time at Clash of the Champions IX: New York Knockout, a violent triumph that may never be equaled in my lifetime. Everything I love about wrestling – its past, present, and future – is right here. I do not know what I’ll do if another wrestling match comes along and knocks it from its place in history. Maybe I’ll stop watching wrestling. Why would I want to come down from that peak?
Terry Funk was 45 years old when he wrestled this match, of legitimate middle age and seemingly legitimately crazy. Wrestling, as it is often said, is a young person’s sport, a game that passes by even its greatest legends in a blur, and Ric Flair was, well, five years younger than Funk and at the top of his game, the champion of the world, with the schedule, money, and fame to show for it, a work ethic, Flair insisted at the outset of the feud that led here, that Funk, great as he was, could not match while he was out in Hollywood, making pictures with the likes of Stallone and Swayze.
It’s something of a cliche to point to the ages of these two men in looking at this match, but I’m not doing that so I can valorize what came later for either man. Rather, I want to place it into a category that many of my favorite matches fall into, that of the aging gunslinger’s last stand against the inevitability of time.
There are few stories so human in sport, and no sport as uniquely positioned to tell this story to its full potential as professional wrestling, where emotion is the point more so than wins and losses. It doesn’t always work (Flair vs. Shawn Michaels) and it often isn’t pretty (Kazuchika Okada vs. Genichiro Tenryu), but we are all destined to die one day and, worse (at least so far as society tells us) will age out of our ability to produce labor in a “meaningful” capacity before then. The old wrestler trotting out to the ring to take on the best wrestler in the world is a big “fuck you” to that notion. Only Terry Funk is the heel here, cornered and lashing out at anything that moves. Typically this is a story about going out with dignity. Forced to quit and shake Ric Flair’s hand on national television, Terry Funk does something even more rare than that: he finds dignity.
Before this, Terry Funk is a wounded animal, unable to recapture the championship he so prized, even with the backing of Gary Hart’s J-Tex Corporation. If you’re watching the match as it aired on TBS, Funk enters the ring to Ennio Morricone’s “Man with a Harmonica,” the haunting, paranoiac theme from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. On the WWE Network, they go with Marcello Giombini’s “Ballata Per Un Pistolero,” which is too romantic for this specific occasion but also one of my favorite overall themes for the Texas Bronco — the movie it’s sourced from was released in English under the title Ringo, Pray to Your God and Die, which is appropriate to the vibe of most of Terry’s work in the States.
That Funk enters this match in a frenzy, knowing full well that this is a do or die situation for him, dials up the pressure he faced in his empty arena challenge to Jerry Lawler, which also revolved around his trying to get Lawler to verbally submit — he even tries the bit where he tries to get Flair to give up before the match is underway, only it is lost somewhat beneath the buzz of the fans in Troy, New York, whom the Funker did not think to bar from the venue before the show, presumably as a favor to the wrestlers on the undercard, who put on a real dog of a show before the bell rang on the main event. You know you have an audience hooked when they’re messing up their bedsheets to make a flag to wave in the heel’s face.
Ric Flair, meanwhile, is Funk’s opposite. In pre-tape promos he talks about how losing would be it for him and his career despite his standing as the champion, how there is no shame greater than telling another man that you quit, but if this weighs on his mind at all he doesn’t show it. He’s got Troy’s finest women on his arms, he’s shaking hands and high-fiving kids he calls “big man,” behavior that is largely antithetical to Flair except that, in the crucible that was Terry Funk’s hatred for him, he’s changed in the eyes of wrestling fans. He may not be a good man — he may never be a good man — but he’s a hell of an athlete, the kind of guy the beleaguered, smart wrestling viewer of 1989 wouldn’t be ashamed to call their champion.
That dynamic carries over into their first physical interaction, a wild chop from Funk that Flair ducks before firing back with one of his own, sending Funk over the top rope, and to the floor, where a fan at ringside is laughing at him. He laughs even more when Funk tries to confront him, nearly spills over the guardrail, and takes an impotent swipe before returning to the ring. Funk’s big, exaggerated manner of selling is a hallmark of his style, and here is one of the best bits of it. Here is a man who lives for pride, who prosecutes his vendettas based on how much that pride is wounded, a man who says that he would rather die than lose an ounce of that pride to his rival, and he crumbles after the first blow of the match. He is wounded, and everybody knows it. He tries to cover it up. That makes it worse. He gathers himself at ringside, goes back to Flair, and is immediately staggered by those chops again.
When people ask me why I love professional wrestling, I often have a hard time explaining — not out of any sense of shame, mind you, but it’s like describing why I believe in God or find so many forms of human expression beautiful to the point that I am moved to tears. This match is something of a guidepost. This is what’s possible when you take the uncertainty out of a sport without removing any of its stakes, when two people are simultaneously competitors and collaborators. Wrestling is a sport, but in squaring up to each other their opponent is meaning itself, whether or not they’re able to conjure it despite their audience knowing that if these men play for a team or have any purpose, it’s the same one.
To do this successfully, professional wrestlers have to give themselves to each other, body and soul, and there were few as willing to give both as Terry Funk. He is in the ring against a Ric Flair who, on this night, makes an argument for himself as one of the greatest babyfaces who hardly ever worked as a babyface, a blur of fury and passion, but Terry Funk is willing to make himself a fool for the sake of Ric Flair, and, more than that, he is able to turn the embarrassment the fool is meant to feel for our sake into motivation to go about destroying Flair. By the time Funk is screaming in Flair’s face to quit, you’ve forgotten all about the fan laughing in his face. He wrestles this match like he wants to kill Ric Flair, but the fucked up thing about Terry Funk is that if he crippled Flair or killed him without Flair saying “I Quit,” he’d go home to the Double Cross Ranch feeling like a failure because he didn’t take the man’s dignity along with his career or his life.
This is how villains operate when they don’t have any dignity of their own, and, again, this is a story about a man who finds his after taking the beating of a lifetime. That this match is bloodless surprises me every time I watch it, but there is enough sweat and bruised flesh, enough panic in Terry Funk’s voice when he bellows “never” (forever’s antonym) into the microphone when Flair locks the Figure Four in clean. I mean clean, too — despite the fight Funk puts up in this match, there aren’t many wrestlers more thoroughly beaten than he is here. But this match isn’t about whether or not he’s going to beat Ric Flair. It’s about the choices men make, and whether those choices are ones they can live with. After months of chasing Flair, of getting beat by Flair, he finds himself at the man’s mercy and, no longer able to delude himself into believing that he is Flair’s better, he decides to take it, to show the man the respect he is more than due. Another perfect ending to Terry Funk’s story. Until, of course, he decides there is more story to tell.
.