Nature Boy Ric Flair vs. Ricky The Dragon Steamboat (Jan 1989 – May 1989)

Background

Ric Flair entered 1989 as a six-time NWA World Heavyweight Champion and the promotion's defining attraction, a role he'd held for most of the decade.[9] The "Nature Boy" gimmick, limousines, $10,000 robes, and a running claim to more women and more money than anyone else in wrestling, wasn't really a costume Flair put on and took off. A contemporaneous 1989 newspaper profile caught him saying it in plain language: "I make money. I spend money. I enjoy wearing the finest clothes, entertaining the most beautiful women in the world," and, more bluntly, "I make money with my personality. And I don't hug grandmothers and kiss kids."[9] He estimated his own annual earnings at over a million dollars and said only Hulk Hogan might be making more in wrestling.[9]

Ricky Steamboat's path to 1989 ran the opposite direction. He'd left the WWF in 1987 in the strangest title change of that era: weeks after winning the Intercontinental Championship at WrestleMania III, he asked Vince McMahon for time off because his wife Bonnie was expecting their first son, and the office responded by taking the belt off him within two months.[1] Steamboat wrestled out the rest of his WWF obligations without a real program, and by early 1988 he was gone from the company entirely.[1]

Steamboat resurfaced in the NWA on January 21, 1989, walking back into World Championship Wrestling's Atlanta studio after a year away.[10] The promotion needed exactly what he offered: a credible, sympathetic technician who could freshen up a Flair title reign that had run, in one stretch alone, over two years.[1] Where Flair sold arrogance and excess, Steamboat sold the opposite, a blue-collar family man who'd walked away from a title rather than miss his son's birth, and the contrast gave the NWA the cleanest babyface-vs-heel framework it had in years.

The two men went back further than the story WCW was telling in 1989. Steamboat first crossed paths with Flair in 1977, working for promoter Jim Crockett in the Mid-Atlantic territory; Flair had trained under the same coach, Verne Gagne, and by his own account was "still learning" himself at that point.[8] Twelve years of history between them, on top of years of shared road time, gave the eventual series a foundation neither man had to manufacture.

Build-up

Steamboat's return came without warning. On the January 21 Saturday Night taping, he teamed with "Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert against Flair and Barry Windham, and pinned the World Champion clean with a top-rope crossbody.[10] Flair's reaction sold the moment as much as the pin did; one retrospective review called it "one of the greatest freak outs and/or mental collapses ever committed to film in pro wrestling," with Flair storming to the interview platform afterward to yell that "millionaires don't get treated like this" before spiraling into paranoid insistence that Steamboat would never get a title shot.[10] He got one anyway.

Chi-Town Rumble, on February 20 at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago, delivered it. Flair and Steamboat wrestled a 23-minute, best-of-three-falls match that ended when Steamboat reversed a Flair move into a small package for the pin, winning his first NWA World Heavyweight Championship.[1] Dave Meltzer rated it five stars in the Wrestling Observer, a number that would turn out to be merely the opening bid.[5] Behind the announce table, Jim Ross had the finish spoiled in advance by booker George Scott, which frustrated him going in, though he's said the crowd's noise made him forget he'd even been told.[6]

George Scott's overall approach to booking that year drew criticism even from people who worked under him. Jim Cornette has said Scott was "10 years behind the times" as a booker, leaning on wrestlers and formulas he'd used decades earlier rather than adjusting to what the NWA's business actually needed by 1989.[18] The Flair-Steamboat series, built on two proven veterans wrestling a classic style, is close to the best possible advertisement for that instinct working exactly as intended, even as the same instinct would undercut Scott elsewhere on the calendar.

The series' best match, by Meltzer's own account, never aired live at all. On March 18 at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, Flair and Steamboat wrestled an untelevised house-show title defense that ran more than thirty minutes and included fourteen consecutive elbow drops to Flair's leg, multiple figure-four attempts, and a finish where Steamboat small-packaged Flair out of an attempted back body drop.[7] Meltzer, in the building, rated it six stars, the first time he had ever gone above his own five-star ceiling; because it wasn't broadcast, he logged it as unofficial, and the first officially recognized six-star match wouldn't happen until a 1994 bout in Japan.[7]

WCW brought the two men back together on pay-per-view at Clash of the Champions VI: Ragin' Cajun, April 2 at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, in a two-out-of-three-falls match that ran 55 minutes. Flair took the first fall with a reversed inside cradle at 19:33; Steamboat evened it with a double chickenwing submission at 34:54; and at 55:49, Flair fell on top of Steamboat for what read live as a Steamboat kickout and a Steamboat win.[2] Instant replay complicated it: the broadcast showed Flair's foot resting under the bottom rope during the count, a technicality that should have voided the finish.[2] George Scott, the booker, had deliberately kept the match off hard promotion to protect house-show business, and the Clash drew such a poor TBS rating that it cost him his job; a booking committee took over creative heading into the trilogy's decider.[13][14] The replay controversy gave WCW its excuse for one more match, and Steamboat kept the title into May with the asterisk still hanging over it.

The Matches

WrestleWar '89: Music City Showdown closed the trilogy on May 7 at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, in front of 5,200 fans and on a buyrate of 120,000.[3] The stakes were raised in a way the previous two matches hadn't been: NWA presented the match with three outside judges seated at ringside, Lou Thesz, Pat O'Connor, and Terry Funk, empowered to render a decision if the one-hour time limit expired without a fall.[3] It never came to that.

The match ran 31 minutes and 37 seconds, longer and more physical than either of the first two, described by those who saw it as "a war" of stiff chops, punches, and slaps rather than a clean technical exhibition.[8] The turning point came when Steamboat went up top and missed, crashing to the arena floor and hurting his leg on the way down.[3] Flair, sensing the opening, went to work on the knee with the figure-four leglock and repeated targeted strikes. When Steamboat tried to power Flair up for a slam late in the match, the leg gave out under him, and Flair rolled the failed lift straight into an inside cradle for the pin, winning the NWA World Heavyweight Championship for a seventh time.[3]

Flair offered his hand afterward, and Steamboat shook it; on WWE's own retrospective interview with both men, Flair called the Nashville match "a war" and said flatly of Steamboat, "I wish I could've wrestled Steamboat forever. He was awesome," ranking him "No. 1 for sure" among everyone he'd faced.[8] Steamboat, for his part, singled out the New Orleans match as his personal favorite of the three and said he regretted there was never a fourth.[8]

The handshake barely had time to register. Terry Funk climbed into the ring in a tuxedo, and by kayfabe logic that a wrestling judge deserved the same shot any top contender would get, asked Flair for a title match. Flair turned him down, telling Funk he hadn't been active enough and needed to work his way up the contenders list like anyone else.[12] Funk backed off, appeared to accept it, extended a hand to shake, then threw a left hand into Flair's face, threw him from the ring, and piledrove him through a table at ringside.[12][11] The image, Flair laid out on broken wood while Funk stood over him in his tuxedo, ran on NWA television for weeks afterward and needed no further explanation for what was coming next.

House Shows

The March 18 Landover, Maryland show is the one piece of the trilogy most fans never actually watched live. Untelevised and unrecorded for broadcast, it exists today mainly through Dave Meltzer's contemporaneous account and the memories of the roughly 30-minute match itself: fourteen straight elbow drops targeting Flair's leg, repeated figure-four attempts, and a small package finish off a blown Flair back body drop attempt.[7] Meltzer's six-star rating for the bout, the first time he'd ever exceeded his own five-star scale, is what elevated an ordinary house-show date into a piece of the series' permanent lore, even though almost nobody outside that building saw it happen.[7]

Aftermath

Flair's regained title barely slowed down. He defended it against Terry Funk that July at the Great American Bash in Baltimore, pinning Funk by reversing an inside cradle, the same move that had beaten Steamboat two months earlier, and carried the belt for another year before finally losing it to Sting at the 1990 Great American Bash.[4]

Steamboat's NWA run ended almost as fast as it had restarted. His last match for the company came at that same Great American Bash card, a United States Championship match against Lex Luger that Steamboat lost by disqualification after hitting Luger with a chair.[4] Behind the scenes, WCW and Steamboat couldn't agree on a new contract that summer; Jim Ross has said plainly that the company simply "didn't want to pay him what he believed he was worth," and called letting him go "a bad move by us" that he "would not have let happen" had he been the one negotiating.[15] Steamboat left the promotion and didn't return to a major American promotion until a 1991 run back in the WWF.

The Flair-Funk angle that started in Nashville's ring never let up either. It grew into its own Pro Wrestling Illustrated Feud of the Year for 1989 and produced an I Quit match at that August's Clash of the Champions IX that Meltzer also rated five stars, meaning the two biggest angles the NWA ran across the middle of 1989 were, in a real sense, the same angle handing off to the next one in a single night.[11][12]

Behind the Scenes

Flair and Steamboat's chemistry read as effortless on screen because, by both men's accounts, it mostly was. Steamboat described their process as almost entirely improvised: "We'd look at each other...and he'd say, 'Ok, see you in the ring,'" he said of nights when they barely discussed a match before having it, relying instead on chemistry built over years.[6] He also credited their pace of work, wrestling something close to every night across a long tour, with forcing constant reinvention: "We had to keep changing up the matches... It would always test me and Ric to do something different."[6]

The respect ran both directions and outlasted the storyline by decades. In his autobiography, Flair wrote plainly that "one of my greatest blessings was the day Ricky Steamboat walked into the office of Jimmy Crockett in Charlotte, North Carolina," and that Steamboat "had everything, charisma, work rate, intensity, and one of the best bodies in our business. I don't think I ever had a bad match with Steamboat. He was the best I ever wrestled against."[6] Steamboat returned the compliment in kind, saying Flair "had great ears for listening to the crowd and knowing what would work and what wouldn't," while Flair called Steamboat's conditioning superhuman: "he just never stopped, he was the Energizer Bunny."[8] By all accounts there was no real-life friction between them at any point in the series, a rarity for a program built on this much on-screen hostility.

The business side was messier than the in-ring chemistry. George Scott's decision to keep the Clash of the Champions VI card light on hard promotion, protecting the house-show gate rather than the TV rating, backfired badly: the show drew a poor number on TBS, and Scott lost his job as booker in the fallout, with a committee taking over the promotion's creative direction heading into WrestleWar.[13][14] Whatever the show's business failure, the in-ring product it produced, a 55-minute two-out-of-three-falls classic, was good enough to survive the very booking decision that got its architect fired.

Steamboat's exit that summer was, by Jim Ross's account, an entirely avoidable mistake rather than any creative or personal falling-out. "That was a big mistake," Ross has said of WCW's failure to re-sign him after the trilogy ended, arguing the company simply balked at Steamboat's asking price during a summer when he'd just delivered three of the best-reviewed matches in the promotion's history.[15] Ross's regret has stuck around for decades specifically because nothing about Steamboat's WCW run in 1989 gave the company any reason other than money to let him go.

Legacy

Dave Meltzer rated all three official pay-per-view matches in the series five stars apiece, Chi-Town Rumble, Clash of the Champions VI, and WrestleWar, and rated the untelevised March 18 house show six, a mark he had never given any match before and wouldn't officially recognize again until a New Japan bout five years later.[5][7] No other rivalry in the Wrestling Observer's rating history has produced that combination of quantity and quality in a single calendar year, and the series is still routinely cited, by wrestlers and historians alike, as the best in-ring trilogy the business has produced.[6]

Flair himself has waved off some of that reverence. Asked about the trilogy's reputation years later, he said, "I would just say to everyone who likes those matches, I think they were really good, but I can tell you we had a thousand that were better," a characteristically self-deprecating answer from a champion who wrestled an enormous volume of matches across four decades and rarely ranked any single one above the job of drawing money night after night.[8] Steamboat, asked directly whether the series influenced the kind of long, epic matches that followed it in the decades since, including Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels' Iron Man Match at WrestleMania 12, was similarly modest: "To be honest with you, I don't know," though he allowed that "you've got to have a couple guys who know how to do it" for that style of match to work at all.[8]

The WrestleWar match's ending did double duty structurally: it closed one of the most acclaimed series in wrestling history and, in the same ninety seconds, launched the next one. Terry Funk's piledriver through the table turned a title change into a feud starter, and that Flair-Funk program went on to produce its own Feud of the Year and its own five-star match at that August's Clash of the Champions IX.[11][12] Few moments in wrestling history have made that hard a pivot, from a scientific, mutually respectful classic to hardcore chaos, in a single broadcast.

For Flair, the series cemented the template he'd work for the rest of his career: a champion who could work a five-star classic with almost anyone, then sell the fallout as either dignified respect or, when Funk showed up, sudden violence. For Steamboat, it was both the peak of his in-ring reputation and the beginning of his second and final exit from a major American promotion, closing on a contract dispute that even the company's own broadcast voice has called a needless, avoidable mistake.[15]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Ricky Steamboat — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_Steamboat
2. Clash of the Champions VI — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_the_Champions_VI
3. WrestleWar '89: Music City Showdown — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleWar_%2789:_Music_City_Showdown
4. The Great American Bash (1989) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_American_Bash_(1989)
5. 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
6. "Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat - The Story Behind The Magic" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/ric-flair-ricky-steamboat/
7. "One Ric Flair Match Was So Good, It Broke Dave Meltzer's 5-Star Rating" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1093756/one-ric-flair-match-was-so-good-it-broke-dave-meltzers-5-star-rating/
8. "The three best matches ... ever: Flair and Steamboat on their famous trilogy" — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/classics/wcw/ric-flair-ricky-steamboat-trilogy-interview
9. "Mid-Atlantic Gateway Archive: Ric Flair Newspaper Profile from 1989" — Mid-Atlantic Gateway. https://www.midatlanticgateway.com/2015/12/ric-flair-profile-from-1989.html
10. "Ric Flair/Barry Windham vs. Ricky Steamboat/Eddie Gilbert, NWA World Championship Wrestling (1/21/1989)" — Handwerk Reviews. https://handwerkreviews.wordpress.com/2025/11/07/ric-flair-barry-windham-vs-ricky-steamboat-eddie-gilbert-nwa-world-championship-wrestling-1-21-1989/
11. "Terry Funk piledrives Ric Flair onto a table: WrestleWar 1989" — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/videos/terry-funk-piledrives-ric-flair-onto-a-table-wrestlewar-1989
12. "Terry Funk's 1989 Heel Turn on Ric Flair" — The Signature Spot. https://www.thesignaturespot.com/articles/terryfunkricflair1989
13. "The SmarK Rant for Clash of Champions VI - 04.02.89" — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2020/02/10/the-smark-rant-for-clash-of-champions-vi-04-02-89/
14. "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
15. "Jim Ross Talks WCW Letting Ricky Steamboat Go in 1989, Why It Was a Mistake" — 411Mania. https://411mania.com/wrestling/jim-ross-talks-wcw-letting-ricky-steamboat-go-in-1989-why-it-was-a-mistake/
16. "FULL MATCH: Ric Flair vs. Ricky Steamboat – NWA World Title Match: Chi-Town Rumble 1989" — YouTube (WCW). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px9WIvLiPzQ
17. "FULL MATCH: Ricky Steamboat vs. Ric Flair – NWA Title Match: Clash of the Champions, April 2, 1989" — YouTube (WCW). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXWdgG79r3A
18. "Kayfabe Commentaries Timeline Series: 1989 WCW as told by Jim Cornette" — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2015/05/21/kayfabe-commentaries-timeline-series/

Further Listening

• Ric Flair: To Be the Man (Ric Flair's autobiography) — Flair's own account of the Steamboat series and their friendship
• The Ross Report with Jim Ross — Ross's own recollections of the 1989 NWA, the spoiled Chi-Town Rumble finish, and Steamboat's departure
• Jim Cornette's shoot interviews on 1989 NWA — Cornette's insider account of George Scott's booking and the Clash VI fallout
• The Terry Funk Story (shoot interviews) — Funk's own account of the WrestleWar attack and the feud it started