Lost: A Little Piece of Childhood

Granted there aren't that many left, but one of the ever dwindling pieces of my childhood came to an end tonight. The Nature Boy is retired.
(Disclaimer: If you don't know what that means, you probably should stop reading right here. The rest of this will seem kind of silly to you........alright, you've been warned.)
Last night at Wrestlemania 24 (wrestling, like football, is not important enough for roman numerals, no matter what the people in charge of each think) The Heart Break Kid Shawn Michaels, 42, defeated The Nature Boy Ric Flair, 59, to bring an end to the greatest career in the history of professional wrestling. Ric debuted in 1972 with Verne Gagne in the Minnesota-based American Wrestling Association. But it wasn't until Ric signed on with Mid-Atlantic Wrestling, run by Jim Crockett, and relocated to the Carolinas, that he became The Nature Boy. Ric was The Heel. Universally hated by the fans, he could make anybody, and I mean anybody, into the crowd favorite just by calling the guy's name. For crying out loud, the National Wrestling Alliance put their championship on Ronnie Garvin because they knew Ric would make him look like a million bucks. And he did.
As I grew up, 11 am on Saturday was sacred time. That was when Championship Wrestling aired on Channel 13 in Memphis. The dignified and respected weatherman Dave Brown got his start at Channel 13, making a little extra money on the weekends by joining Lance Russell at the announce desk for wrestling, and jumping into the ring to clean house when the bad guys got a little too much out of hand. Memphis' memory will tell you that Dave Brown gave instant credibility to Channel 5's move with his jump to their news broadcast. The reality is that Channel 5 hired Dave Brown to help get the wrestling show to follow him. In those days, the Memphis wrestling show was the highest rated locally produced tv program anywhere in America. As Yogi says, you can look it up.
When cable arrived in the early 1970's, the sanctity of Saturday stretched to 6 pm. That's when Ted Turner's little Channel 17, WTCG, broadcast Georgia Championship Wrestling. On Saturday mornings, we inhaled Lance Russell's disgust with the latest shenanigans of Jerry Lawler, his admiration for the little Australian Bill Dundee, his frustration with Jimmy Hart, and his respect for Tojo Yamamoto and golden boy (and company owner) Jerry Jarrett. On Saturday night we studied under the Dean of Wrestling Announcers, Gordon Solie. Lance Russell was as blustry as the wrestlers; Gordon Solie was serious as a heart attack. Solie ruminated on the consequences for later life of a suplex (always pronounced by the gravel-voiced Solie as "soo-play"), explained the risks of the Battle Royal (pronounced as "royale" as in Casino Royale), analyzed the differences between a regular punch and a Flair open-hand chop, and turned a phrase like few great writers have ever been able to do.
Gordon Solie told us how good Ric Flair was. And Flair carried every opponent, the almost-equally-able ones like Rick Steamboat, Terry Funk and Sting, and the ones like the aforementioned Mr. Garvin who couldn't find their way around the ring with instructions in hand. Ric Flair took care of his opponents, and without exception, made them look dangerous. Flair knew the business. He knew that if he insisted that he never lose, or never look weak, then he would have no strong rivals. No strong rivals, then no strong feuds, then no fan interest, then no ticket sales, then no business. Ric made us care. For 36 years.
Wrestling promoters recognized that Ric was money. Beginning in 1981, Ric was given different versions of a World Heavyweight Championship at least 16 times across the years. This, in the days when a world champion wrestled 45 to 60 minute matches 300 nights a year, all over the country and overseas. Ric made people in Atlanta, Dallas, Minneapolis, New York, the Phillipines, Japan, Korea, England and everywhere in between show up to see him get his butt kicked by the local favorite. Because as he always said, "If you want to be The Man, you have to beat The Man." And every wrestling fan, regardless of the language they spoke, knew Ric Flair was The Man.
Long ago, fans stopped booing Ric the Heel. In the last analysis, it really is up to the fans to determine who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. We wouldn't boo Ric anymore. He meant too much to us. He still engaged in some of the dastardly behavior that had earned him the moniker "The Dirtiest Player in the Game," but now we were grown up and working and would have loved to have been able to get away with doing some of those terrible things to people around us, too. You might almost say that Ric laid the groundwork for the anti-hero, Stone Cold versus Mr. McMahon, fight all authority story that brought the then-WWF back from near extinction in the late 1990's. He still presented himself as the "Limousine riding, jet flying, kiss stealing, wheeling-dealing son of a gun" and we ate it up as we settled into middle age and routine lives. We lived vicariously through the outlaw Nature Boy.
Now he's done. Vince McMahon wrote Ric's impending retirement into WWE storylines several months ago, declaring that the next match Ric lost would be his last match. The time came last night, and Ric did good business again, looking at the lights, doing the job, for HBK. You see, when a wrestler is leaving a company, the tradition says that he goes out with a loss so that someone who has to wrestle again tomorrow will be made to look good. But no one will ever look as good as Ric Flair, The Nature Boy; not even the great Shawn Michaels. And there will never be another like him.
Thanks, Ric. It has been so, so, so much fun. To quote Naitch, "Whooo!"