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The Charlotte Observer ran an extensive piece on the death of Reid Fleihr this past week.
The police report at the time of the death stated he was incapacitated due to drugs, although no specific drugs were listed. His cause of death is pending, awaiting toxicology reports, which could take weeks or even months.
The story, quoting his mother, Beth Fliehr, was along the same lines of everything we had heard, that everyone’s worst fear was him returning to Charlotte from Japan. He was only scheduled home for a brief stay, and was talking about moving to Charleston, SC, with his girlfriend, Whitney Burton, while he would continue his wrestling career in Japan. He was scheduled to return to Japan in late April.
Burton had spent the last two weeks of Reid’s last tour with him in Japan.
The story talked about him being under pressure as an amateur wrestler, because of who his father was. At many meets, when people knew, he was always the marked man because every kid wanted the bragging rights of saying he beat Ric Flair’s son.
Reid was born Richard Reid Flair II on February 26, 1988, just one day after his father’s 39th birthday. Ric was wrestling Sting in Cincinnati that night. Reid was named after Ric’s father, a prominent Minneapolis ob/gyn, Richard Reid Fliehr. Ric, born in Memphis and adopted as an infant, his parents’ only child, was Richard Morgan Fliehr.
Reid was a sophomore at Providence High. Ric, watched both Reid and Ashley’s games when he was around, as by the time they were in high school, he wasn’t doing a full-time schedule in the WWE. He would also come to the school and lead pep rallies.
The story noted a lot of Reid’s troubles. There was a 2004 arrest where Reid was charged with assaulting his mother. The police report said Reid had pushed her and she fell down and broke her right arm. Beth was of the impression years later that the arrest would be expunged from his record and was furious years later when it came back up in media stories. In the story, she characterized the incident as a total accident, claiming one of her high heels got caught, and she tripped, and Reid was just trying to keep her from falling. She said she never pressed charges. The case was dismissed.
In 2005, at the North Carlina Western regionals, when he lost, and his opponent after the match did a Ric Flair strut, and shouted “Whoo,” at him, Reid went after him, and they had a pull-apart. Both schools were fined $1,000 and Reid was charges with misdemeanor assault. The charges were dismissed.
There was a 2006 arrest for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia that was dismissed.
Reid’s lawyer, when asked about so many charges going away, denied being Ric Flair’s son had anything to do with it. Still, at the funeral, Ric specifically mentioned a Charlotte police officer and thanked him “for getting (Reid) out of trouble every time you did.”
The story noted that both Reid and Ashley had food delivered to school for their lunches, and when Reid was wrestling at Providence High, he had a personal trainer, who only worked with him. He was also personally coached in wrestling by T.J. Jaworsky, one of the best wrestlers in the U.S. during the 90s. Jaworsky was a three-time NCAA champion at the University of North Carolina, and in 1995, was the first ever winner of the Hodge Trophy. But he himself ran into trouble in 2005 when he was arrested for cocaine possession and fired as head coach at Davidson College.
Reid was very popular in school, although he had his wild side and had issues with temper and drugs. Reid had a childhood friend, Landon Beck, who developed Tourette’s Syndrome. Reid always made sure Landon was included in social activities and made it clear around school that nobody is to mess with him or tease him.
Beth claimed she wanted him away from Charlotte, because of all the publicity regarding his parents divorce. It was Ric who chose to send him to Blair Academy, a private school known for having arguably the best, if not certainly one of the two or three best, high school wrestling programs in the country, producing numerous national champions.
Reid made the starting lineup, but had troubles at school that Ric had to help him out of. He didn’t win a state title, nor did he get Division I offers. He went to the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga as a walk-on, but left school after one semester, and then began training for pro wrestling.
While Ric always publicly talked about how Reid, with his personality and athletic ability, would be a superstar in pro wrestling, others noted that there was frustration. It was noted that Ricky Steamboat’s son, Richie, had progressed faster and those close to the situation said it was because he trained harder.
But the real problem was that Reid’s drug issues got worse. Eric Adamz, a wrestling training partner in Charlotte and one of his best friends, in a video, characterized problems as something he had between the ages of 21 and 23.
Because of who his father was, some of the incidents made local media. Just before he turned 21, he was found passed out at the wheel of a Porsche at a stop sign and rushed to the hospital. I believe he was with one of his best friends at the time. The friend passed away.
The police report said he had overdosed. He also pleaded guilty twice that year to driving while impaired. He was ordered to attend rehab both times, the second of which was the more publicized issue where he was found in possession of heroin, a terribly addicting drug, which showed how bad his problems were.
The drug issues kept both WWE and ROH from hiring him. He was ready to start in WWE developmental when the promotion, for obvious reasons, got cold feet. With ROH, one of the main reasons Ric had his brief run with the company, was because of the idea they would hire Reid and give him a chance at being a top star. After the heroin charge came out, ROH decided they couldn’t hire him, which resulted in Ric losing interest, and eventually walking out on the promotion even though he had dates left that he had been paid for, a dispute that ended up in court.
He had two more overdoses reported to police in 2011. In January of that year, paramedics came to where he and his father were living and he was hospitalized, with police finding a needle and a spoon.
In September of that year, he overdosed on alcohol and prescription medication, was treated at the hospital, and then released.
It was after either the first or second scare that Ric sent him to one of the most expensive rehab centers in the country, at a cost estimated at between $80,000 to more than $100,000.
He had been dating Whitney Burton since 2009. She claimed she tried to keep him away from bad people and bad situations. She would have to drive him around since he didn’t have a license. He was working as a personal trainer at a local gym, while training to be a pro wrestler, and working weekend dates for local promotions.
She had gotten a job in Charleston and he was looking at gyms in the city, wanting to open up his personal training business.
“I saw the best and worst of Reid,” Burton told the newspaper. “Obviously he had some struggles. I just felt like he needed a lot of support, and so I tried to stick it out with him, even when things were tough for him.”
I spoke to Reid a few days after he arrived in Japan. Probably 70 percent of my conversations in the last 20 years with Ric Flair saw Reid brought up by one of us. As you can imagine, they ran the gamut from being proud of his sports accomplishments and how much he loved to be around him, to the frustrations with his issues undermining his life. Ric is well known as a drinker, but the path Reid went down with the hard drugs was one Ric couldn’t relate to or understand, and it left him frustrated for years. I didn’t personally know Reid, but he was very polite, totally recognized the unique opportunity he was given and seemed motivated.
We mostly talked wrestling and I tried to warn him about Japan fever, which I’d usually get about ten days into a trip, where, no matter how much fun the trip is, you just want to go home. I told him it may happen to him, but this was his career golden opportunity. He was going to be trained by smooth veteran workers, going to get to wrestle several nights a week with a lot better people than he was going to work with on the indie scene. Plus, there is something to be said for starting in Japan as a young guy, because if he worked hard and they liked him, it doesn’t matter what level he is now, those fans are very understanding of guys starting out and working to get better.
His last match was on 3/17 at Sumo Hall in Tokyo. He worked in the second match, teaming with Kenso (former WWE wrestler Kenzo Suzuki) against veterans Masa Fuchi & Osamu Nishimura. Technically, he had improved. At this point, when it comes to look, he didn’t stand out, but in Japan, they really wouldn’t want a prelim foreigner to do so. He tried to copy his father’s animated selling as his calling card. There was some resemblance to a 1973 Ric Flair in the AWA, although he was much lighter and in much better condition. It was an okay short match, with Reid going for the figure four leglock, and Fuchi turning it into an inside cradle for the pin.
Beth Fliehr said that Reid didn’t want to leave Japan, saying he was worried about old temptations and he had grown to love it there. He was scheduled to return to Japan in late April.
She had studied addiction when speaking to drug rehab people, who told her the worst thing you could do was come home, because there are all the issues that lead to the bad habits coming back. Privately, Ric was also worried, knowing that Reid had friends in town who were a bad influence that he never extricated himself from.
Adamz said that Reid had three great loves in his life, his girlfriend, his family and pro wrestling.
He got occasional appearances with higher end indies because of being Ric Flair’s son, but last year, most of his wrestling was local, usually before less than 100 fans for a group called Xtreme World Wrestling.
At the same time, All Japan Pro Wrestling was trying for months to get Ric to do a match for them on a big show. Ric wanted more for the match, believed to be in the $25,000 range, than they felt they could afford so the first attempt fell through.
When Nobuo Shiraishi secretly took ownership of All Japan, but before it was recently announced publicly, they now had the money and as part of the deal to get Ric, Ric had negotiated a deal for his son, where he’d be brought in as a trainee. When Ric was unable to wrestle due to a blood clot in his leg for the 1/26 show in Tokyo, Reid stepped in and Ric seconded he and Keiji Muto in a match against Tatsumi Fujinami & Seiya Sanada.
He and Burton arrived back on the evening of 3/24. He spent the next two days training in the ring. Burton said that he had told her he wanted to focus on getting through this month before he was scheduled to return to Japan. He was staying with his mother until 3/27, and then was scheduled to leave with his father, who had gotten out of the hospital. He told Adamz he wanted to take Thursday off training to spend time with his father, before they left for weekend house shows for Big Time Wrestling, and would then go to New Jersey for WrestleMania. But he told him he wanted to train daily until he went back to Japan, and was showing the local wrestlers different things he had learned in Japan.
Reid was staying at the Residence Inn, where Ric has been living of late. They went out to dinner at Del Frisco’s and they talked until 1:35 a.m. or so, when Ric went to bed, with them scheduled to leave the next morning for a show in Hagerstown, MD. He presumed Reid was then going to bed, but evidently he went out or trouble came in the adjacent room Ric had set up for him at the Residence Inn.
Ric spoke for 10 minutes at Reid’s funeral. He questioned himself whether he pushed Reid and Ashley too hard in sports. He told a story about how, as a gift, he bought his son a Dodge Magnum for successfully completing rehab the first time, only to get a phone call late that night from Ashley, that Reid had just been arrested for having 19 beers in the car.
“I can honestly say I blamed myself the first couple days, but after talking with people, I think he’s in a better place and he’s at peace. Because this had gone on a long time, and something happened that we didn’t have control over. But he’s a wonderful guy. I was so proud of him.”
Ric went to New Jersey for WrestleMania, more for therapy than anything else. He didn’t make any of his scheduled appearances, nor should he have. The feeling was that he would rather be around his friends in wrestling at that point in time, but didn’t do anything in front of fans, such as attend the Hall of Fame ceremony. He went home on 4/9. From all accounts, he was taking it very hard. There’s no way he couldn’t have, as his devotion to all of his kids was something well known by his friends.
It was only few weeks ago when Flair filmed an interview for RF Video. During the interview, the death of Bruiser Brody, who was one of Flair’s all-time favorite opponents, was brought up. Flair never worked for WWC, where he drew some huge crowds over the years, after Brody was stabbed to death by Jose Gonzalez (Invader I) in 1988. When bringing it up, Flair talked about how Gonzalez’s baby died in a swimming pool two days before he stabbed Brody. That’s not actually true, as it was several months earlier but it did happen. But Flair, in telling the story, said, “I’d go crazy, too, if my kid died.”
Mick Foley wrote a blog entry after Reid’s death, and a story that he’s hinted at but never fully said is the reason they ended up having that feud in WWE years ago as well as in TNA. Foley and Flair had a lot of personal issues, including Flair punching Foley once. Flair made fun of Foley’s working ability and later, when Vince McMahon wanted to turn their real life dislike into an angle, Foley refused.
As it turned out, the two were on a plan from The Philippines to Los Angeles sitting together. Foley noted he sat there and saw Flair call all four of his children, one by one, to tell them how much he loved them. Foley then said he was very touched by hearing the calls, and Flair told him that he does this every day, “just because you never know.”
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_________________ Drop In wrote: I'm picturing a 12 year old Bob Loblaw bitching out a Randy Savage Wrestling Buddy for botching his finisher. Also envisioning Bob Loblaw getting bitched at for lighting the living room table on fire for said finisher.
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