Conrad Thompson of the “Something To Wrestle” (with Bruce Prichard) and “What Happened When” (with Tony Schiavone) podcasts spoke with John Corrigan on the Wrestling Estate podcast to discuss this week’s ESPN 30 For 30 “Nature Boy” documentary on the life of Ric Flair.
Thompson, a close personal friend of Flair and his family, offered some great insight. Here are the highlights of what he said about:
His thoughts on the film:
“The real star of the show to me was Ric’s first wife. We’ve never seen her interviewed on camera before and it’s a really big deal to sit down and share really personal stuff. Obviously with his kids and the tragedy with Reid, there’s a lot of meat on the bone about him as a person.
As wrestling fans, we’ve only really seen the character. Now we got to see the real person, and sometimes, you know, it’s not all rosy. We heard some pretty critical comments from Triple H, Shawn Michaels, his two children and his first wife, but it really did give you a real sense of who he is and maybe why he does the things he does. I felt like it was well done and I really wish they’d put out a DVD with lots of cutting room footage.”
On Undertaker’s comments:
“It was cool and I think a lot of wrestling fans will get a kick out of that. In a perfect world, they would have been able to pin down The Rock to add another level of star power to it. He could have probably talked about the importance of promo because everybody knows Rock is probably one of the strongest, if not the strongest ever. But before people said that, they said it about Ric Flair.”
On being surprised that Vince McMahon wasn’t included:
“Yes and no. You know, it’s probably something where Vince knew that, if this was going to be a honest portrayal, there probably will be a lot of trials and tribulations stuff in there. It may have a fair amount of negativity. He probably wanted to avoid it for that. If we know anything about Vince, we know he likes to control the presentation.
I imagine, and I’m just free-styling, nobody told me this, but I imagine that Vince would have participated if he had some sort of final control over the end version. But we know that didn’t happen with Beyond the Mat, and if that didn’t happen here, it wouldn’t surprise me if he said I’ll take a pass.”
You can listen to the full interview here: