10 Wrestlers Who Nearly Died

It's very difficult to contextualise a plane crash as a blessing in disguise, but for Ric Flair's career, it absolutely was.

On the night of 4 October 1975, a seemingly placid flight from Charlotte to Wilmington suddenly went wrong. Pilot Joseph Farkas had fatally miscalculated the distribution of a group of bulky wrestlers, and after struggling to make take-off, decided to jettison gas. As the Cessna 310 plane prepared for landing, it ran out of fuel, scraping across a line of trees before plunging into the ground. Flair and three other wrestlers, as well as promoter David Crockett, incredibly escaped with their lives. Farkas was not so lucky; he died in hospital a week later after falling into a coma.

The injuries Flair suffered forced him to dramatically alter his style. His distinct manner of bumping was developed as a consequence of breaking his back, but more crucially, the beefy brawler lost a huge amount of muscle - forcing a reinvention as 'The Nature Boy'.