My good friend Mike Mooneyham, pro wrestling columnist for the Post & Courier, was kind enough to publish in today’s column a recent message I sent him, where I reminisced about memories of Ric Flair and my parents:
“Growing up in Charleston, Jack Hunter says his favorite memories of the Nature Boy had mostly to do with his parents.
“My folks have always enjoyed painting the town red, and made a point of telling me as a child when they would see Ric Flair out in the local bars (he usually was accompanied by Blackjack Mulligan back then) with the Sheraton hotel on Rivers Avenue being a popular nightspot in those days,” says Hunter.
“When Flair would talk about ‘partying all night long’ on television — sometimes even the very next day after I just received the update from my folks, and sometimes Flair even mentioned Charleston during his promos — I knew there was nothing phony about the Nature Boy. He walked the walk, talked the talk and truly lived the life he boastfully advertised. To me, Ric Flair was not only every bit the ‘jet flying, limousine riding, son of a gun’ he said he was — but my own parents were constant eyewitnesses. At no point in my life was pro wrestling more ‘real’ than in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when South Carolina was not only being established as ‘Flair country,’ but the Charleston nightlife scene was the Nature Boy’s personal playground.”
Read Mooneyham’s entire Flair tribute. It’s a good’n. Unfortunately the greatest of all time will likely retire March 30 at Wrestlemania 24 in Orlando, Florida.
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