10 Most Brutal Acts Of Wrestling Revenge
5. "You're A Hell Of A Man, Ric!"
When people deem Ric Flair's 1989 as the single best year any wrestler has ever enjoyed, they do so because he performed the best matches of the annum, and of all time, and because he transitioned from the game's slickest and dirtiest player to a battling, popular, badass babyface.
Minutes after winning his seminal rivalry with Ricky Steamboat, Terry Funk, with an unsettling menace, questioned why Flair wouldn't grant him the next shot at the World's Heavyweight Title. Flair was having none of it. Funk was an actor now.
Funk showed him that nothing about him was an act by brutalising him and plunging him through a table with a piledriver years before this sort of diluted spot become commonplace. The blow-off took place at Clash of the Champions IX under I Quit rules. Short of repeating the platitudes flung at this classic throughout history, we'll just state that this is one of those rare, magical matches during which you forget completely that this thing is meant to be a work. The aural agony and animosity is real. It must be.
In the end, trapped in the Figure Four, Funk could only wail "My leg! My leg!" before repenting. In the glorious post-match, Funk called Flair a "hell of a man".
Flair remains a hell of a man, as the recent pictures from his fifth (5) wedding prove. Real men don't go in for the prim and proper pursed lips kiss; they carry their wives' tonsils to a five-star effort.