Once you realize that it’s all performance, the medicine goes down easier. The boy on the playground who doesn’t really want to fight dances around and talks his shit at a volume that shakes the birds from the trees. There was a point where most feared rappers are the ones who could best convince you that they have killed someone before, even if they hadn’t. Perhaps if they had only held a gun and dreamed of the history it could unwrite. Before the internet, it was even more possible to believe in anything a performer presented. It took more work to track their histories, their more unprepared moments. I feared N.W.A. most when they wore all black and looked like they might not run from any manner of violence that arrived at their doorsteps.
Look, all I know is that Ali started this shit, bouncing around his opponents and daring them to lay some small violence on him. What a gift, to be both invisible and as bright as the sun itself. All I’m saying is that no one knows where Richard Morgan Fliehr came from and that ain’t even his birth name but no one knows that either, not even him. The Tennessee Children’s Home Society spent the ’40s and ’50s illegally removing children from their birth mothers and stripped them of their histories before putting them up for questionable adoptions with desperate parents, and that’s how Richard Fliehr ended up in the world, so it’s hard to trace exactly when and how the fire started.
(But it did start in Memphis, where Three 6 Mafia once played at a nightclub on Lt. George W. Lee Ave. after they won an Academy Award for a song about the difficulties associated with being a pimp, and Juicy J had the academy award on stage and the light hit it just right and reflected back into the crowd and Juicy J said, “This right here is for Memphis, Tennessee,” and everyone was blinded by its immense presence, and then he threw a handful of dollar bills in the crowd that arched and then collapsed in the middle of the club floor and this was in 2006 in the South when everyone was just trying to survive and so a fight broke out right there in the middle of the club while Three 6 Mafia played their song “Stay Fly” which samples the Willie Hutch song “Tell Me Why Has Our Love Turned Cold” which is one of those samples that you can’t unravel from your memory once you hear it nested deep in the song and so while watching a man straddling another man on the ground preparing to throw a punch, all I could hear was Willie Hutch singing “tell me / tell me / tell me” so what I’m mostly saying is that Memphis is a wild place to fight your way into and then fight your way out of.)
And speaking of staying fly, Richard Morgan Fliehr was going by Ric Flair in 1975, when the twin-engine Cessna 310 he was in ran out of gas in North Carolina and fell from the sky, hitting the ground at 100 miles per hour. In the picture of the plane after the crash, the entire front window is gone, the plane’s front smashed. The pilot, Joseph Farkas, eventually died from the crash. The crash also paralyzed wrestler Johnny Valentine, one of the biggest wrestlers of the era. When the plane went down all of the seats were jarred loose, pushing the weight of all the wrestlers onto Valentine at impact. Before the flight began, Ric Flair switched seats with Valentine, after being nervous about sitting up front near the pilot. Ric Flair walked away from the flight with a broken back, and returned to the ring in six months. Doctors told him that his bones were healed but there was no telling how they’d hold up under the stress of the ring. Valentine never walked again. Ric Flair never talks about this.
But he sure could talk, sometimes about flying, sometimes in jets while wearing $8,000 sequined robes in the 1980s. There is almost dying and then there is truly almost dying. The thing about that is you get a grasp of all that which you cannot take with you and then you sometimes wear it on your body at all times. Ali had the mouth, but was always too humble for the gold. Ric Flair walked from the wreckage and became The Nature Boy. All of the best showmen hid behind their names and their gold. The people didn’t scream for Antonio Hardy like they did for Big Daddy Kane. The women weren’t always running for James Todd Smith, but for LL Cool J, sure. It is more than just the name. At the start of rap, it was about stepping into a phone booth and coming out as something greater than you were. It was easier to sell a personality than it is now, with every nuance of a person’s life splayed in front of us. Rappers can go by their real names now, with no persona attached, and still be legends. Ric Flair, already an invention, walked from a plane crash reinvented.
I imagine the rivalry between Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes was only a little bit about wrestling and a lot about the fantasy of hard work seeing a triumph over flash. Dusty Rhodes wasn’t built like a bodybuilder. He was built like a man who you might live next to, and see mowing the lawn on a Sunday morning. He sold himself as a plumber’s son, a part of the working-class America who kept his adornments modest by comparison to his peers. Dusty Rhodes was more of an idea than a wrestler. The American Dream that could still be touched by anyone who just worked hard enough. Nestled up next to Flair, sold as the golden boy, born with a silver spoon and reaping the benefits of a hardened, steroid-enhanced body, the battles became that of someone fighting for the people against someone fighting for his own, gold-drenched legacy. In promos, Dusty Rhodes would scream at Flair about how he was going to defeat him in the name of blue-collar Americans everywhere, and Flair, on a split screen, would laugh, flip his blonde hair, and let it fall perfectly back into place.
The fundamental difference between Rhodes and Flair that sat in the middle of their feud is a difference that also sat between LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee during their near-decade battle with each other: a different understanding of what the people need. Moe Dee, like Rhodes, was interested in selling the people a living dream, while Flair and LL were more interested in selling the possibility of dreaming larger. The idea of making yourself anything, as large as you want to be, so that someone might think twice before coming for you. Moe Dee thought that he could pick LL apart by mocking his muscles, his appearance, the consistent licking of his lips. This scored some direct hits, sure. But LL just covered his chest in bigger chains, came back with bigger muscles, became loved by more of the masses. This idea was simple: there is no victory like fame. Popularity so heavy that no one can take it from you, even if they tried. It didn’t matter if Ric Flair lost to Dusty Rhodes in the ring if he made people believe that he would never lose to him in life.
I grew up too poor to admire the fantasy of the slow-rise of the working class. I admire the things I could see when I closed my eyes, always a bit out of reach. When I started making my own money, I bought all of the sneakers I saw rappers wearing in their videos because it seemed like a way to separate myself from the times I opened an empty refrigerator. Ric Flair wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but none of the best MCs were. The only way to build yourself into something unstoppable is to become intimate with all of that which would otherwise attempt to stop you where you stand. Hunger is not glamorous, but under the bright lights, far removed from its grasp, it is a currency. A thing you know well enough to not desire a return to.
The greatest Ric Flair promo is called “His Kingdom.” In it, he directly addresses Lex Luger, who was challenging him for his heavyweight title. The promo is vintage Flair, starting out tense, but calm, and then slowly losing his cool as the promo goes on, eventually stripping out of his expensive jacket, loosening his expensive tie, and tearing off his expensive sunglasses. The promo hits a climax with about one minute left, when Flair decides to rip off a bandage that was covering a wound on his head. As his eyes bulge and the veins pop out of his forehead, blood lightly begins to descend from the wound, making a slow journey down the front of his face. It was the height of his performance as Ric Flair, who walked away from a plane crash and ran into the ring still broken. Who never talks about facing death, who maybe before would be ashamed to show his own blood, who maybe would be ashamed to show the damage done to his stunning and flawless image. And as he hit fever pitch, his eyebrows raised and holding back the small river of blood from falling into his eye, he yells, staring into the camera, “No one is going to determine my destiny in this sport but me. So, pal, either bury me, or do nothing at all.”
And he spun and walked away, carried through a crowd once again, on the back of the realest shit he ever wrote.