Ric Flair Means Something In This Town | WCW Monday Nitro 9/15/97
Steve McMichael is out to avenge Ric Flair against Curt Hennig, shaking the very foundations of the WCW MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST.
My favorite trope in professional wrestling is when a wrestler needs to be written off of television for a surgery. My favorite kind of surgery is plastic surgery. According to speculation, this 1997 episode of WCW Nitro combines the two by airing footage of Ric Flair just before getting a facelift, which is awesome if it’s true, the absolute peak of the form.
It’s a good angle, too. Hell, it would have been great if WCW didn’t fucking despise Ric Flair. His best friend, Arn Anderson, has to retire early due to a neck injury. He’s fighting a war with a fledgling version of the Four Horsemen against the nWo, and he has no enforcer. Here comes his friend, Curt Hennig, with whom he clinched the World Title twice, pledging to watch his back. In the War Games, he betrays that trust, smashing Flair’s head with the cage door, which in 1997 playground chatter was tantamount to attempted murder. Fuck.
The opening of this episode of Nitro shows Flair on a slab, marked up like his doctor is about to put in some Frankenstein’s Monster-ass stitches, then Tony Schiavone, who nearly breaks down in describing how he owes his livelihood to Flair for advocating for him as an announcer, and he says he can’t go on with the show. It’s maybe the one time an announcer has done “Owen voice” — the put-upon hushed cadence of kayfabe concern over a successfully executed high spot that became a cliche within a year of Owen Hart’s 1999 death and the announcement made by Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler — and it’s not just a matter of Owen Hart being alive and well in 1997.
Ric Flair means something, man. I mean, of course he does, but I mean this man, in this time, meant something. The connection between him and WCW’s fanbase, especially in their southeastern home, is deep and unbreakable.
He is wrestling.
And tonight, it appears that wrestling is dead. Or at least temporarily indisposed. Tony Schiavone is crying, the odd sob catching in his throat while he calls off the job. He should cry. That’s his friend. That is the beating heart of this great sport. Also, the Disco Inferno is opening the show. Use your fuckin’ sick days, y’all.
Colette Arrand