As of today (when this was written) Tony Khan and All Elite Wrestling have announced the signing of wrestling legend Ric Flair, to a lucrative multi-year deal with the company. The deal inked for Ric Flair’s new energy drink “Wooooo! Energy” The drink is to become the exclusive energy drink for All Elite Wrestling.
Now, to the uninformed this seems perfectly normal. Ric Flair has been a consistent presence in the pro wrestling scene since debuting in 1972, he’s still the record holder for most world championships held across various promotions in the US, and he’s a living legend in the squared circle.
To those that know, though, this is emblematic of a massive shift in AEW’s identity. A company that championed inclusion, diversity, and the safety of its workers, has now signed a man with a litany of outlandish allegations. Sexual assault and racism highlight the laundry list of issues Flair has seemingly carried with him over his six decade long career. On May 5, 2002, it is alleged that during a flight home from the UK after a WWE pay-per-view event, Flair cornered two flight attendants. He then is alleged to have exposed his genitalia and forced both women to touch him.
Via Grantland: (http://grantland.com/features/the-wrestler-real-life/)
“Two flight attendants, Taralyn Cappellano and Heidi Doyle, would compile their allegations into a 2004 lawsuit. Chief among the chronicled misdeeds was Fliehr’s sexual aggression. He wore nothing but a jeweled cape, the flight attendants said, and “flashed his nakedness, spinning his penis around.” He separately grabbed each woman’s hand and placed it on his crotch, and then “forcibly detained and restrained” Doyle “from leaving the back of the galley of the airplane while he sexually assaulted her.“
After being subject to a lawsuit from the airline over the aforementioned incident (and many more) the WWE settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Flair was never formally charged with sexual assault, and therefore never convicted of any wrongdoing. There’s also record of an incident occurring between Flair and wrestling personality Teddy Long, where Flair allegedly referred to Long as a racial slur.
In an interview with HANNIBAL TV on YouTube, Long states:
“One time in Knoxville, Tennessee I think, and I remember there were some girls trying to come into the back door, getting in the back of the arena, and then I think he was maybe at that door, and they said some girls threw me under the bus. I don’t even know who they were. I’m refereeing, I don’t know these people, and they said that they used my name and said that I told them that they could come in or they [could] come to the back door or something like that, and so he runs into me and the next thing I hear, he says to me, ‘[Racial slur], do you like working here?’
Long goes on to say that Flair never apologized for the incident, and that he & the Nature Boy still haven’t patched thing up to this day. If you wish to hear the full part from that interview it will be below.
Now onto the outstanding issue with AEW signing Flair. Just a couple of months after firing their top star over endangering people backstage, they’ve allowed a poisonous presence with a very seedy history into their fold.
There were rumors as early as 2021 of Ric Flair’s potential AEW arrival, only for those supposed plans to be derailed by these accusations coming to light on an episode of VICE’s ‘Dark Side Of The Ring’ TV Series.
Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter was recently quoted as saying:
“I know that he was gonna go there (to AEW), what was it about…it was right when that Dark Side of The Ring thing came out that he was gonna go there. I think, I don’t know this, but I was assuming he was gonna go as the manager of Andrade, but he and Tony Khan had a verbal deal, and after Dark Side came out, you know they…it was not the right time. So they saved it for now.”
So it seems that AEW’s leadership waited for the heat about these very serious allegations to cool off before courting Flair, and bringing him aboard. Interestingly, just weeks prior to Flair’s debut, AEW’s CEO & Founder Tony Khan made multiple references to WWE Chairman Vince McMahon’s’ own sexual assault allegations on Twitter. Responding to one fan saying that McMahon had earned the right to take “shots” at competitors over the years, Khan was quoted as saying –
In response to another fan stating that if McMahon tweeted the same thing, AEW fans would be crying and accusing him of being unprofessional, Khan tweeted:
As if making reference to very serious allegations in an effort to promote a wrestling show was not enough, Khan went on to contradict his own sentiments by not only bringing Flair himself on AEW programming two weeks after these poorly aged tweets but signing Flair to a longterm deal as well. Apparently AEW is not fronting the bill here, and it will be the parent company Carma HoldCo and whatever money is made from the energy drink that will be paying Flair. That does not change the fact that this seems to be just another case of a wrestling promoter not being different from their competitors, even after talking a big game.
All of the above taken into consideration, Tony Khan has seemingly lost a lot of good will with wrestling fans in the last few months, who thought this promotion would be a change of pace from the norm. There was hope when AEW was founded that we’d move beyond the mistakes of wrestling’s past, and stop sheltering/enabling abusers, but that hope has seemingly been abandoned.
We don’t know as of now how much Ric Flair will be featured on AEW programming , but this is a big blow for the companies image that touts itself as the alternative. But with all things in pro wrestling in the past this will be brushed aside and forgotten about in two weeks as fans continue to meme “WE ARE SO BACK” after the locker room works their asses off at Full Gear in spite of all the negative press and negative fan sentiment. Tony Khan and All Elite Wrestling should be held accountable for their actions, and if we just brush this aside in a week or two who knows what else Tony Khan might open his checkbook towards to in 2024 and beyond.
Until Khan wises up and looks back upon the original mission statement of the company, to create an alternative to the norm, it seems like we’ll be headed towards a very different AEW in 2024. There could be many factors at play here with a new TV deal on the horizon for the company in the next calendar year, marking a key period of change that the company is currently going through.
It just seems All Elite Wrestling is going through an identity crisis, and it’s heading in a direction that is not all too favorable to those who were seeking for an alternative back in 2019. Rather than reinvent the wheel given they have just seemed to double down on the wheel that has been set in motion for the last 30+ years.
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