MITCHELL'S TAKE VIP - MITCHELL FEATURE: Diamonds Are Forever (PWTorch #1003) Jan 3, 2008 - 12:01:43 PM

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By Bruce Mitchell, PWTorch columnist

"A spectacular card tonight at the Greensboro Coliseum... and in the cage match, the United States Title versus the hair of Ricky Steamboat, the 'Nature Boy' Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat... no time limit, no disqualification! Ric Flair, pacing behind a steel fence, with a sense of urgency: 'Tonight, the whole wrestling world knows it's tonight! ... Steamboat, you are the man I created and you are the boy I'm going to destroy! Bald, ugly, marked up face... you see, Steamboat, I just got out of one of these. Me! They put the Great One in with Jack Mulligan, the King of the Cagers, and who walked out with the gold? Me! I walked out, you understand that, I walked out! (more desperate) Steamboat, it's your hair, it's your face, it's your body, it's your life on the line against me! My, gold, my gold belt. Tonight Steamboat, you hear that (scrapes the U.S. Title belt against the cage), that's your face, boy! You're going to be mine, tonight, as God is my witness!'"

- Ric Flair on Worldwide Wrestling, promoting a card scheduled 29 years almost to the night before he made his final wrestling appearance in the Greensboro Coliseum.

"Greensboro Is Flair Country."

- Ric Flair, Monday night on Raw

When Ricky Flair started wrestling in the Greensboro Coliseum, a single electric cord holding a simple light grid was all that lit up the wrestling action in the Greensboro Coliseum. Thirty-three years, five months and 16 days later, the sixteen time World Champion Ric Flair stepped into that same building, only this time what happened in the ring was supported by a traveling million dollar production set, using the finest in sound and pyrotechnical technology and featuring a three story high television screen that dwarfed the end zone of the Coliseum.

Not that the Nature Boy ever really needed it.

What Ric Flair accomplished in the sport and in that building in the all those days between, some of which the community remembered, some of which WWE acknowledged, is all a part of wrestling and Carolina history.

Ric Flair is the greatest professional wrestler in the history of the sport. His resume is simply too wide and too deep for any other wrestler seeking that distinction to match. The Nature Boy had more great matches, night after night after night, year after year after year, in a wider variety of places and against a longer list of great, near great, sometime great, and almost no-time great opponents over many more years than any other performer in the genre. Add to that what was, consistently, the best promo in the game and one of the most clearly defined, charismatic, and influential characters in wrestling history and you have a package that no other performer in all the genre's history can match

I mean, JBL wasn't the first guy to say, "Anything I couldn't go out and buy, I took" and The Rock wasn't the first "Great One" in this business.

And while Ric Flair traveled the world in pursuit of his business and his craft, there was one venue where he made his name and where he returned time and again for some of the biggest matches of his career. No wrestler, with perhaps the exception of Bruno Sammartino in New York's Madison Square Garden and Jerry Lawler in Memphis's Mid-South Coliseum, has had as long, storied, and profitable connection with a venue as Ric Flair has had with the Greensboro Coliseum.

Stars had to align Saturday night for final night to happen at all. First, the holiday Raw taping had to, by accident, be scheduled for the Greensboro Coliseum at same time of the year as the traditional Holiday Spectaculars twenty years ago and back, where Ric Flair had many of the matches the old Mid-Atlantic territory still remembers. Then, the most politically powerful wrestler in the WWE had to realize that facing the greatest wrestler in the business's history in his last match in his home arena in front of a hot crowd not only matched his own fantasy booking, but might help him to stay over. That alignment is what saved an angle, at least temporarily, that WWE head Vince McMahon and his creative team are clearly ambivalent about.

So what if the television show itself turned into more of "If the sixteen-time World Champion and future WWE Hall Of Famer guy who has wrestled forever thinks Triple H is great and his best friend - and he's faced them all - then Triple H must really be great" and "Chapter 3.127 of Everyone's Scared of Mr. McMahon" and if both live and on TV there was no getting around that awful banana-peel finish and if WWE didn't even bother to air the tremendous Flair career retrospective? The kids in the crowd whose parents and grandparents told them of the greatness they missed when Mid-Atlantic Wrestling was the home team, just like the Greensboro Generals and the Carolina Cougars, those of us who knew what this was, Flair's family at ringside - his wife Tiffany, his daughter Ashleigh, and his son Reid - and the emotion in Flair's unguarded face tipped that night over to make it a fitting coda to a lifetime of Coliseum memories.

Those memories started on a Thursday night, back on May 16, 1974. Just a couple of months before the Coliseum had hosted what many still consider the single greatest college basketball game in history, the legendary Lose-And-Go-Home 1974 ACC Tournament Final between Coach Charles "Lefty" Driesell (who would have made one hell of a pro wrestling manager) and his Maryland Terrapins starring Lenny Elmore and John Lucas and Norman Sloan's NC. State Wolfpack. (Actually, "Stormin" Norman wouldn't have been too bad outside the ring himself.)

From author John Feinstein - "They dragged themselves onto the bus, drained emotionally, so exhausted they wondered how they could play again in five days. Coach Norm Sloan cried on his wife's shoulder. Center Tommy Burleson, who had been the hero of the game, was so tired he remembers "feeling like a dishrag that's been all wrung out. I had nothing left." They sat there, joyous over their victory, yet too tired even to speak to one another. Suddenly, a figure appeared at the front door of the bus, climbing the steps slowly because he, too, had little energy left. "Men, I just wanted to tell you I thought you played one of the greatest games I've ever seen. I was proud of my team and I'm proud of you. You're a great team. I hope you win the national championship. You deserve it."

That speaker was Maryland Coach Lefty Driesell. His team had just lost the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament final in overtime, 103-100, to Sloan's North Carolina State Wolfpack team, which eventually did win the National Championship. "I don't usually go for that going into the other locker room stuff because I think it's phony," Driesell said recently. "But that night, I did it because I really felt that way. I was disappointed we lost, but I wasn't upset. My team played its heart out."

The Wolfpack, with star player David Thompson, started a new era in college basketball by beating Coach John Wooden's UCLA Bruins and ending their six year monopoly on the NCAA championship in a double overtime thriller in the Final Four, then went on to win the national championship. That Final Four, also played in the Coliseum, started the NCAA tournament on the road to where it is today - the biggest, most far reaching playoff in sports.

And if you've never heard of David Thompson, consider this: The Skywalker both inspired and was a better college basketball player than Michael Jordan - who won his own ACC title in the Greensboro Coliseum a decade later, the infamous 1984 Four Corners Stall Ball game between the UNC Tarheels and the Virginia Cavaliers - the game that featured a slew of future NBA stars yet still ended 47-45 and did more than any one game to bring the shot clock to college basketball. A game in the Greensboro Coliseum once again led to a boost in its most popular sport.

And if college basketball was the Coliseum's and the area's most beloved sport, and N.C. State's 1974 championship was a once-in-a-lifetime on-site thrill, well, a chubby Dusty Rhodes imitator in goggle sunglasses working a tag match third from the top on a pro wrestling show wasn't going to do much to change that. But here's a dirty little secret: more fans and more money came to the Coliseum to see Ric Flair in his heyday than to see college basketball.

Anyway, the debuting Ricky Flair teamed with Chuck O'Connor (who later became Big John Studd) to wrestle veterans Abe Jacobs and Danny Miller. Flair and O'Connor won.

Ricky Flair arrived, though, at a sea change for the Mid-Atlantic territory. Promoter Jim Crockett Sr., who had built his Virginia and Carolinas around home-steading tag teams like George Becker & Johnny Weaver, Rip Hawk & Swede Hanson, and Gene & Ole Anderson had recently died. It had been ten years since the heel Bolos masked team had drawn big houses with the formula of putting their masks up (always successfully) for any team that could beat them two out of three falls; the territory needed to be shaken up.

Booker George Scott had been hired by Crockett's son Jim Jr. to do just that. Scott did just that, bringing in new top talent to work the now singles main events. He brought in Don Jardine, The Super Destroyer, who later taught Mark Calloway (the Undertaker) how to do his signature spot, walking the ropes. He also brought in Indian and former NFL star Wahoo McDaniel, insisted Scott book his best opponent Johnny Valentine, telling him if he gave the realistic, slow-working Valentine time to get over his mastery of ring psychology, it would set the territory on fire. He was right.

This was the place and time a young Ric (the "y" was soon gone) Flair really learned his trade. He watched the veteran Valentine, with his exquisite timing, and learned what it took to be a Sixty Minute Man. He soon worked with McDaniel, and learned how tough those chop could be, and how that stinging slap could excite a crowd.

He got in trouble on his own just fine. His first championship partner, Rip Hawk, later complained about how hard it was to "baby-sit" Flair in the Virginia nightclubs. Hawk said he and Hanson had to use their connections with a certain element to keep Flair safe when he chased the wrong tail one night.

Flair won his first title with Hawk, the Mid-Atlantic tag team title, in the Greensboro Coliseum, beating Bob Bruggers and Paul Jones on June 27th of the same year. Hawk soon left the promotion, as Scott made a sweep of most of the area veterans in favor of his new main eventers.

Scott, though, was already eyeing Flair for bigger things. He gave him the Nature Boy gimmick, complete with the signature figure-four finisher, hoping he would follow in the golden footsteps of the great "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers, wrestling's top star of the '50s. To help groom him further, Scott made Flair a "cousin" of the top area tag team, Gene Anderson & Ole Anderson (Alan Rogowski), which would lead later to a big money split among the family. He also started working single semi-main events in the Coliseum against McDaniel. Rufus R. Jones, Ken Patera, and the man he patterned his early promos on, and who would become one of his greatest rivals, "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes. His won his first singles belt, the Mid-Atlantic TV Title, using brass knucks to beat Paul Jones in the Charlotte Coliseum.

A year after he arrived in the Mid-Atlantic territory, Ric Flair was on his way to the main event in a territory that was beginning to take off.....

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