Every WWE Gimmick Match And The Wrestlers That Defined Them
16. Career-Threatening Match - Ric Flair
The most ironic of pro wrestling stipulations - no careers are ever really threatened - Ric Flair, fittingly, is the man that defines it.
He left for WCW, and then, respectively, depressingly, for TNA after each of his final bows. The first was a mere storyline exit, one designed to crown Mr. Perfect as the company's foremost veteran technician in his stead. It didn't work, but that isn't a criticism of the 1993 classic in and of itself, a match as charged as it was exquisite. Perfect's body was too ravaged to maintain his standard, illustrious form.
In 2008, Flair's ravaged body compelled Vince McMahon to craft a superb, real exit from in-ring competition, which Flair performed by acknowledging his limitations to pronounce the pathos of the psychology. As raw and selfless as that performance was, it would credit Flair a tad too much to state that he sold it as a career-threatening match. Those anguished tears, that ugly-crying - it was all real.
More real than the stipulation, which Flair betrayed by going to TNA.