Nature Boy Ric Flair vs. Terry Funk (May 1989 – Nov 1989)

Background

Ric Flair spent the spring of 1989 in the best in-ring run of his career, a three-match trilogy against Ricky Steamboat that Dave Meltzer rated five stars three separate times.[23] By the time it reached WrestleWar on May 7, Flair had regained the NWA World Heavyweight Championship from Steamboat and was working through his obligations as champion, a role he had held for most of the decade.[9]

Terry Funk was 45 years old that spring and mostly out of the wrestling business. He had won the NWA World Heavyweight Championship from Jack Brisco on December 10, 1975, in a 28-minute match in Miami, and toured on it for roughly fourteen months as the top act in the sport before dropping it back to Harley Race.[22] After that run he wrestled sporadically through the 1980s and spent much of the late decade in Hollywood, taking stunt work on Rambo III and landing a role opposite Patrick Swayze in Road House.[2][13] Between 1986 and 1989 his in-ring appearances were mostly limited to a couple of All Japan Pro Wrestling tours, with none of it airing on American television.[2]

WCW brought Funk back as a special guest judge for the Steamboat rematch, alongside Lou Thesz and Pat O'Connor, there in case the one-hour time limit expired without a fall.[1] It didn't come to that. Flair beat Steamboat clean in the ring, and Funk, in a tuxedo, climbed into the ring anyway.[7]

Funk's motive, on camera, was framed as inheritance as much as ambition. He invoked his late father, Dory Funk Sr., a wrestler and promoter who had died in 1973, in promo after promo that summer, dressing personal ambition in the language of honoring the old man's name.[11] Flair wasn't interested. He told Funk flatly that he'd been off in Hollywood with Sylvester Stallone and wasn't a ranked top-ten contender, and that ended the conversation, or seemed to.[7]

Build-up

Funk asked Jim Ross, on camera, to be the first man to challenge Flair for the championship he'd just won.[3] Flair dismissed him, on the same logic he'd use for months: an inactive actor with a Hollywood tan didn't get a shot at a working champion.[3] Funk backed off, extended his hand as if the matter were settled, and Flair, still playing the gracious champion, shook it.[7]

That was the mistake. "Terry extended his hand in friendship, and, as the unsuspecting good guy, I shook it," Flair later wrote. "That's when he pulled me forward and slugged me with his left hand... he dragged me onto the table, lifted me upside down, and delivered a piledriver. He almost killed me."[7] Jim Ross's call caught the moment live: "Flair's neck just jammed out of his spine! Funk has gone crazy! He piledrived him right on the table!"[7] Flair said afterward that he "couldn't turn my head for weeks," and the storyline built directly on the real stiffness of the landing.[7]

Funk spent the weeks that followed doing what a returning veteran with no ranking has to do: beating enhancement talent on WCW's syndicated shows to climb into the top ten, all while cutting increasingly personal interviews about Flair.[12] Paul Heyman, then a young writer in the company, has described Funk's method on the mic: "He structured his interviews to be over the top, deeply personal. He would mention your wife and your kids' names."[12] Funk himself leaned into a nickname Jim Ross had given him on commentary, "middle-aged and crazy," and wore it as a threat rather than an insult.[11]

Flair, by Heyman's account, took the mockery more personally than his on-screen composure let on, not helped by real pressure from WCW executive vice president Jim Herd, who by that point already viewed Flair as an aging champion on the way out.[12] On the July 1 edition of WCW's weekly television, Flair asked Herd to sanction a title defense against Funk at the upcoming Great American Bash, and Herd, with Funk's ranking now in order, approved it.[1]

The Great American Bash match, on July 23 in Baltimore, was violent rather than technical, a deliberate contrast to the Steamboat series that had just wrapped. Gary Hart worked Funk's corner for the first time that night, and used it: while Flair had Funk trapped in the figure-four, Hart slipped him a branding iron to break the hold.[10] Funk went for a piledriver on the exposed floor outside the ring; Flair reversed it.[10] The finish came off the same inside cradle Steamboat had used to beat Flair for the title back in February, only this time Flair found the counter, rolling through for the pin.[10] The Great Muta ran in immediately after, blinding Flair with a mist spray, and Sting made the save, clearing the ring in a brawl a contemporaneous reviewer called "almost as good as anything in the match."[10]

Funk's escalation didn't stop at the Bash. On September 12 at Clash of the Champions VIII in Columbia, South Carolina, after a tag match pitting Flair and Sting against Dick Slater and Muta, Funk cornered Flair and pulled a plastic shopping bag over his head, tying it off at the neck on live national television.[4][5] The backlash was immediate and real: viewers called TBS to complain that they'd watched an attempted murder, and the network was reportedly furious enough that the footage was pulled from rebroadcast and kept off Flair's own home video releases for years afterward.[7] Gary Hart, who managed the angle from ringside, later described making sure it read as staged rather than fatal: "If you see a tape of the angle, you'll notice that before I leave, I walk around the pole and look right at Ric to make sure he hadn't really suffocated before I leave."[7]

By late October the feud needed a spectacle rather than another one-on-one match, and Halloween Havoc supplied it: a "Thunderdome" cage match on October 28 in Philadelphia, Flair and Sting against Funk and Muta, with Bruno Sammartino brought in as special guest referee for the novelty of it.[6] The match ran 23 minutes and 46 seconds and ended not with a fall but with Gary Hart throwing in the towel for his own team.[6]

The Matches

Clash of the Champions IX: New York Knockout landed on November 15 in Troy, New York, and closed the feud in the format Funk himself had been asking for since the piledriver: an I Quit match, with no pinfall or submission hold enough on its own, only the words themselves.[14] Jim Ross told the crowd that if Flair made Funk say it, Funk would shake his hand afterward and call him the better man; Funk, before the bell, grabbed a microphone of his own to offer Flair the chance to quit first.[14]

Flair opened with a chop that sent Funk to the floor, and the match spent its first stretch as a straightforward beating before Funk clawed his way back in, working Flair's neck with a swinging neckbreaker and taunting him with open-hand slaps.[14] Gary Hart's branding iron made another appearance, buying Funk an opening for a second neckbreaker aimed squarely at the same neck Funk had piledriven at WrestleWar.[14]

Funk hit a piledriver inside the ring; Flair refused to quit. He hit a second one, dragging Flair out to the entranceway and dropping him there, and by one account the previously raucous crowd went dead silent watching it, an "unsettling eeriness" that had fans doubting Flair could still win when the referee checked on him and got no answer at all.[8][14] Funk kept talking through the whole sequence, grabbing a house microphone at ringside to demand over and over that Flair say the words, at one point turning to confront Gary Hart directly when Flair briefly rallied with a flurry of chops.[8]

Flair found his real opening late, throwing Funk into a ringside table Funk himself had rearranged minutes earlier, sending him into a steel chair on the way down.[14] From there Flair worked the leg, an inverted atomic drop into a stalling suplex, and locked in the figure-four leglock in the middle of the ring.[8] Funk screamed "Never!" and thrashed against it, but gave in seconds later, shouting the two words the match had been built around: "I quit."[8][14] The crowd, quiet moments earlier, came up in what one reviewer called a moment of pure relief. True to the pre-match promise, Funk got up and shook Flair's hand.[14]

Dave Meltzer rated the match five stars in the Wrestling Observer.[23]

Aftermath

Flair's promised handshake held, at least on camera, and the I Quit match served as the clean stopping point the feud had been building toward all fall. Funk, who by his own storyline terms had just quit a match rather than lost one, largely stepped back from full-time in-ring competition afterward. WCW moved him into the broadcast booth and gave him his own interview segment, Funk's Grill, which ran on the weekly WCW Power Hour into early 1990 with guests including Missy Hyatt, Cactus Jack and, in one January 1990 episode, Flair himself sitting across from the man who had piledrived him through a table eight months earlier.[21]

Funk's in-ring career didn't stay dormant for long. He worked a reduced 1990 schedule built around All Japan Pro Wrestling tours, including a tag league alongside his brother Dory Funk Jr., and returned to a full American singles spotlight that November, challenging Jerry Lawler for the AWA Southern Heavyweight title in Memphis on November 5, 1990, more than fourteen years after the two men had first wrestled for the NWA World Championship.[13]

Flair's title reign, the one Funk had spent six months trying to take off him, kept rolling. He carried the belt into 1990 before dropping it to Sting that July at the Great American Bash, closing out one of the busiest stretches of his career: a five-star trilogy with Steamboat followed almost immediately by a second feud that produced its own five-star match and its own Feud of the Year award.[9][23]

Gary Hart's J-Tex Corporation, the stable he'd built around Funk with Muta, Dick Slater, Bruiser Brody, Buzz Sawyer and the Dragon Master, lost its central attraction once Funk stepped back, and the group dissolved without ever mounting a comparable follow-up program.[7] Muta, still in his first extended run in an American promotion, transitioned into other pairings through the following year.

Behind the Scenes

The physical toll on both men was real, not just storyline dressing. Funk cracked his sacrum before the Great American Bash and wrestled the match anyway; Paul Heyman recalled that Funk "was more upset about the fact that he'd potentially let fans down... than he was over the fact that he had literally broken his ass."[15] Funk reportedly spent much of that fall's travel kneeling on airplane seats because sitting normally was too painful.[7]

Flair, for his part, has been consistent for decades that the piledriver at WrestleWar genuinely hurt him and that the injury shaped how the whole angle was built, not just how it was sold. His account of the moment, the handshake, the sucker punch, the piledriver through the table, reads the same in his autobiography as it does in interviews decades later: "He almost killed me."[7]

The chops were mutual punishment in the other direction. By Heyman's account, "Ric Flair chopped Terry Funk half to death... the tissue in Terry Funk's chest was all inflamed because of these chops," and Funk reportedly traveled with industrial-sized tubes of Preparation H just to manage the swelling between dates.[12]

Funk and Flair have both said, separately, that the on-screen hatred never carried over. Funk, describing his own approach, called himself "meaner than a rattlesnake but crazy like a fox," and Flair called him "maybe the only S.O.B. crazy enough to turn me good."[7] Years later Funk was warmer still about the actual in-ring experience: "Regardless of how he felt personally about my promos, Flair was a pleasure to work with... I truly enjoyed every one of our matches."[7]

That line about Flair's personal feelings toward the promos wasn't incidental. By Funk's own telling, Flair genuinely resented some of the interview content and asked for it to be dialed back, material Funk has said he never fully understood the objection to: "I don't know if Flair was upset because he was insecure or because he wasn't there... all he saw was me blasting him every week."[7]

The plastic bag angle produced the clearest business-side friction of the whole run. Gary Hart, who set up the spot, said Turner executives were "incensed" by the viewer reaction, and that footage of the angle had to be stripped out before Flair's own matches could be sold on home video in some markets.[7] Eddie Kingston, decades later, has said he pitched recreating the spot in AEW and been turned down flat, citing exactly this history: "I know how Turner is scared about that because I've asked about the plastic bag several times."[5]

By multiple accounts, WCW's internal politics were already working against Funk even as the feud drew business. Jim Herd, the former Pizza Hut executive running the company by 1989, was said to view Flair as a fading act regardless of the numbers the Funk program was doing, and Gary Hart has suggested the same office resented Funk's greater loyalty to the old NWA structure than to Herd's WCW.[7] Flair's own retrospective judgment of Herd was blunt: "A station manager is about as qualified to run a wrestling company as I am to work at the Pentagon. Jim Herd was an idiot."[7]

Legacy

The Wrestling Observer named Flair versus Funk its Feud of the Year for 1989, an unusual honor in a year that also produced the Steamboat trilogy on the same champion's schedule.[16] The I Quit match at Clash of the Champions IX drew a 4.9 rating on TBS, a mark contemporaneous reporting described as one of the highest a wrestling broadcast had drawn on cable up to that point.[8]

Retrospectives have consistently ranked the feud among the best-remembered runs of Flair's championship reigns specifically because of how different its tone was from the Steamboat series it followed: scientific classicism giving way, within months, to a piledriver through a table and a plastic bag over a champion's head.[12] Paul Heyman later credited the entire program, not just the matches, with keeping WCW's creative standard high through the back half of 1989, arguing that "when this storyline ended, the quality of WCW's output immediately declined and never consistently returned until the Monday Night War era."[15]

Both men kept wrestling into the next decade and beyond, Flair as the enduring face of the Four Horsemen he re-formed not long after this feud closed, Funk as wrestling's most durable hardcore veteran, still working two decades later in ECW and beyond.[13] Funk died in August 2023 at 79. Flair's public tribute called back to exactly what this feud had put on display: "In my entire life, I've never met a guy who worked harder. Terry Funk was a great wrestler, entertainer, unbelievably fearless, and a great friend."[17]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. WrestleWar '89: Music City Showdown — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleWar_%2789:_Music_City_Showdown
2. "The Summer of Funk" — The Ringer. https://www.theringer.com/2024/07/23/wwe/ric-flair-terry-funk-great-american-bash-1989-match-35th-anniversary
3. "Terry Funk's 1989 Heel Turn on Ric Flair" — The Signature Spot. https://www.thesignaturespot.com/articles/terryfunkricflair1989
4. Clash of the Champions VIII: Fall Brawl '89 — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_the_Champions_VIII:_Fall_Brawl_%2789
5. "Eddie Kingston Has Pitched Doing Plastic Bag Spot From Ric Flair-Terry Funk Feud, Tony Khan Has Said No" — Fightful. https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/eddie-kingston-has-pitched-doing-plastic-bag-spot-ric-flair-terry-funk-feud-tony-khan-has-said-no
6. Halloween Havoc (1989) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Havoc_(1989)
7. "Ric Flair and Terry Funk: A Feud to Remember" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/ric-flair-terry-funk/
8. "Terry Funk vs. Ric Flair I Quit Match Review" — Piledriver Prose. https://piledriverprose.substack.com/p/terry-funk-vs-ric-flair-i-quit-match
9. List of Wrestling Observer Newsletter awards — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wrestling_Observer_Newsletter_awards
10. "Ric Flair vs. Terry Funk, NWA Great American Bash (7/23/1989)" — Handwerk Reviews. https://handwerkreviews.wordpress.com/2025/09/19/ric-flair-vs-terry-funk-nwa-great-american-bash-7-23-1989/
11. "10 Things Fans Should Know About The Ric Flair Vs. Terry Funk WCW Rivalry" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wcw-ric-flair-vs-terry-funk-rivalry-facts-trivia-things-to-know/
12. "The Summer of Funk" (Paul Heyman interview material) — The Ringer. https://www.theringer.com/2024/07/23/wwe/ric-flair-terry-funk-great-american-bash-1989-match-35th-anniversary
13. Terry Funk — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Funk
14. Clash of the Champions IX: New York Knockout — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_the_Champions_IX:_New_York_Knockout
15. "One Year Later: Looking At The Life, Career And Legacy Of Terry Funk" — PWInsider. https://www.pwinsider.com/article/185283/one-year-later-looking-at-the-life-career-and-legacy-of-terry-funk.html
16. List of Wrestling Observer Newsletter awards (1989 Feud of the Year) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wrestling_Observer_Newsletter_awards
17. "Triple H, Ric Flair, And More Remember Wrestling Legend Terry Funk Following His Death At 79" — Cinemablend. https://www.cinemablend.com/wrestling/triple-h-ric-flair-and-more-remember-wrestling-legend-terry-funk-following-death-at-79
18. "Ric Flair on taking a piledriver from Terry Funk" — YouTube (Ric Flair). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N33s6nsWbXQ
19. "Halloween Havoc 1989: Ric Flair & Sting vs. The Great Muta & Terry Funk" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAMY_swXQHM
20. "FULL MATCH: Ric Flair vs. Terry Funk | NWA Title \"I Quit\" Match: Clash of the Champions IX" — YouTube (WCW). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0C_Xkbt1ck
21. "WCW Power Hour – January 5, 1990" (Funk's Grill segment schedule) — KB's Wrestling Reviews. https://kbwrestlingreviews.com/2012/02/20/wcw-power-hour-january-5-1990-pillman-vs-jack/
22. "Mid-Atlantic Gateway Archive: Terry Funk Wins the NWA World Championship – 40th Anniversary" — Mid-Atlantic Gateway. https://www.midatlanticgateway.com/2015/12/terry-funk-wins-nwa-world-championship.html
23. List of professional wrestling matches rated 5 or more stars by Dave Meltzer — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_wrestling_matches_rated_5_or_more_stars_by_Dave_Meltzer

Further Listening

• Ric Flair: To Be the Man (Ric Flair's autobiography) — Flair's own account of the piledriver, the plastic bag fallout, and his read on Jim Herd
• The Ross Report with Jim Ross — Ross's ringside recollections of the WrestleWar turn and calling the piledriver live
• Kayfabe Commentaries' Timeline series on 1989 WCW, featuring Jim Cornette — booking-committee context for the Flair-Funk program
• Terry Funk shoot interviews — Funk's own telling of the plastic bag angle, the broken sacrum, and working through it