One last walk down the aisle

I would like to apologize to everyone who was expecting to see me write the results of Star Wars-a-palooza tonight. Despite my previously stated intentions I did not in fact spend the first full day of my unemployment by sitting on my couch and watching every episode of Star Wars in order. I instead got to spend the morning doing something more enjoyable than watching the prequels. Ok, that is damning with faint praise. Let’s just say that there are some things in my life more important than Star Wars. No one will actually believe that but it is true.

(I did however spend my first day of unemployment by hanging out directly across the street from my old office. Seriously, I could see my cube from there. That just seemed totally unfair. Cool, but unfair.)

However, that was sadly just the morning so by about 1:30 in the afternoon I discovered that I was watching Rachel Ray and going slowly insane due to boredom. How bad was it? Not only did I clean my apartment this afternoon, not only did I disassemble my vacuum cleaner in order to optimize my vacuuming experience, but I even mopped the floors. Heck, I even drove to the store to get a new mop for the occasion. True, I needed to mop the floors since my entryway still had shoeprint shaped dirt marks where all the snow and slush had melted off my shoes but for crying out loud why the hell am I mopping floors? If this is what I do on day one what the hell am I going to be doing on day 27?

Anyway, I need to royally switch gears here because I have a topic that I need to discuss tonight. It is something that is pretty much the ultimate in geekery for me and if I ever wanted to impress someone by what I write this topic would never come up but damnit, it’s my blog and I write what I need to write. Last night was “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair’s last match and tonight was his official retirement sendoff and I just have to try to explain this to people who might not follow wrestling.

Ric Flair had a 36 year career and he was a top of the card star for 30 of those. When I say that I have watched Flair wrestle my entire life it is not a joke. That’s how long he has been in the business. Throughout that time he was consistently the best wrestler around and for maybe a ten year period from 84 to 94 he was probably the greatest performer who ever wrestled. Looking at his career in total there is no one who would even come close to comparing to the guy. He could talk, he could wrestle, he could tell a story in the ring and he could make you forget that everything that you were watching was predetermined. The guy was simply the best.

One of the horrible things about the wrestling business (and there are more than a few) is that once you hit the end of your career you are pretty much forgotten. You go from being on television to wrestling in high school gyms. There is no sendoff, no retiring of a jersey, just the fact that one day you are no longer on television. Given the political nature of the business if you’ve pissed off the wrong people over the years you might even be written out of the history. There are more than a few wrestlers that the WWE will not acknowledge even existed. I always feared that Ric Flair, someone who maybe meant more to wrestling than anyone else, would end up that way.

Luckily that has not been the case. Sure, Ric should have retired a while ago as he really was too old to perform as Ric Flair but he deserved one last run in the spotlight. What’s more important is that he got to have one last match in front of 70,000 people and tonight he was honored by the fans and the wrestlers. I’ve never really seen anything like it. Ric said his goodbyes and thank yous to the crowd and then they started to bring on all of the legends from the past. By the end the entire locker room, every single person who works for WWE, was out there applauding and thanking Ric for what he has done. This is the equivalent to saying goodbye to Jordan or to Ruth. The best ever has laced up the boots for the last time. Enjoy retirement Ric.