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Perhaps nobody on planet Earth has lived as crazy of a life as WWE legend Ric Flair.
As it turns out, Flair added another, almost fatal, chapter to his remarkable life story when he claims to have suffered a heart attack during his final pro wrestling match in 2022.
Flair recently joined Bear DiGidio and former UFC star Quinton “Rampage” Jackson on the Jaxxon podcast to discuss his legendary career.
“I trained (for my last match), I got in the best shape, ever since I was 20 years old, and then I had a heart attack during the match. I had a heart attack during the match,” Flair says at the 29:20 mark of the video above. “A lot of people didn’t (know). I didn’t know myself until about six months ago because I went and got a… — I go to the heart doctor like every six months because I’ve got the pacemaker, right? And they put that on me when I was real sick, not because I had a problem with my heart, but because they couldn’t get over the fact that my heart rate was so low, but it was from all of those hour-long matches and all that cardio.
“I used to do 500 free squats every day. 500 free squats, 500 push-ups every day. — Or I would do the deck of cards or I would do step-ups on a chair. So my heart rate was always like 48. It drove people nuts that it was so slow.
“So they put that on me and then I went to get what’s called a calcium scan which I’d never had before, because a couple of guys died in our business of heart issues so it kind of scared me, so I went and I blew a number on that and —they give you the nuclear stress test, shoot you with the dye, put you on the treadmill, everything, right? So it’s two days of three hours of testing and this is six months ago. The guy takes me in and if you look at your heart like a round pie, there’s a piece of my heart right here, this big, it’s black, it’s gone.”
“The guy said, ‘You’ve had a heart attack in the last two years.’ I said, ‘I never hurt.’ He said, ‘Have you passed out in the last two years?’ And during my last match, I passed out three times, and I thought it was because I was dehydrated.”
Flair has escaped death several times, including a plane crash in 1975 that broke his back and put six people (Flair included) in the hospital.
So this latest story should come as no surprise. It’s just another incident in the seemingly impossibly crazy life of Ric Flair.