10 BEST Wrestling Rip-Offs
3. Ric Flair (Buddy Rogers)
Beyond the magic he created bell to bell for decades, all the aesthetics that made Ric Flair Ric f*cking Flair were a zoom-and-enhance job on the career of 'The Nature Boy' Buddy Rogers.
Pictures of Flair in his original incarnation show a brown-haired bulky powerlifter type about as far away from the man that became 'The Man', but adopting Rogers' look, nickname, moves and even the signature strut helped elevate him in the eyes of the audience and the National Wrestling Alliance. The elements he inherited were ultimately set dressing, but Flair might not have been able to keep the audience's attention so deftly had he not found this way of grabbing it in the first place.
Time and exposure has given him the legacy of the definitive 'Nature Boy', if not the first. Should there ever be a 'Nature Boy' again (as was the case post-Flair with Buddy Landell), they'll almost certainly be compared first and foremost to 'Slick Ric', such was the level of stardom and acclaim he garnered with the gimmick and his amazing work for the NWA atop JCP/WCW in the 1980s.