This Semester at the University of Utah, I took a course called Sports in American Society. This is my final paper a comprehensive look at ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary Nature Boy. Please enjoy!
Ric Flair, Nature Boy: The Story of How Deviance Bought the Wrestler Fame and Pain Beyond His Wildest Dreams.
Ric Flair “The Nature Boy” is arguably the greatest wrestler to ever live. He dominated wrestling from the late 1970’s to the day he retired in 1999. His career also provides a fascinating look at how Sociology and sport miss. In many ways because of lots of different social constructs, Ric Flair became the greatest wrestler of all time. The ESPN 30 for 30 film “Nature Boy” details the rise and fall of Ric Flair the wrestler and how the character impacted the stars personal life. He did this through portrayal and several forms of deviance. Ric Flair used his gender, his status, and his deviance to become the most successful wrestler of all time.
Being a bad guy and going against social norms made flair a success. This is particularly exemplified in the way Flair dressed. The Nature Boy donned eccentric robes in the ring. Maintained a long flowing hairstyle and wore the finest of clothes. In the beginning the documentary sights most wrestlers werent flashy. Flair’s style violated an Informal norm. Formal norms are official expectations that take the form of written rules or laws, whereas informal norms are customs or unwritten, shared understandings of how a person is expected to think, appear, and act in a social world. Wrestling at the time was very much a social world and it wasn’t widely accepted at the time that wrestlers were supposed to have style or flare. Nature boy violated those norms by dressing the way he wanted to and putting a ton of stock in his appearance as a wrestler. This was one of the things that eventually drove him toward fame. Flair had not been a successful wrestler earlier in his career when he had tried to play a more plain role of himself.
Being a wrestler gave Flair a chance to not have to follow any rules or norms and in many ways that is what made him special. In the documentary when asked why he wanted to become a wrestler Flair cites the fact that because of the profession he didn’t really have to follow any rules. Flair’s entire persona of the nature boy was built off ignoring all the norms society could put on specifically a man at that time. Flair didn’t have to go home to a wife and kids at the end of the day, he didn’t have to mow his lawn, he could do, and did do whatever he wanted. Flair estimates in his life he has been with over 10,000 women. He also estimates that in his prime he was drinking between 10-15 drinks a day. Flair very much broke every single social norm in the book. It is what made him popular though, what guy didn’t want to be Ric Flair in his prime? They wanted to “Be the man” as Flair so elegantly puts it because the super hero flair set up has no rules, no nagging wife, and certainly no boss grinding his gears at work. He had no norms on him and that allowed him to be one of the greatest wrestling characters of all time.
Ric Flair was also able to be a successful pro wrestler because his character leaned into the fact he came from status and wanted to be seen as the elite “man” that every guy wanted to be. Flair was adopted by a family with great wealth, his adopted father was a doctor. He leaned into this perception of wealth and the great sports myth to propel his character. The fact he portrayed that the sport had given him everything and made his life much better helps to contribute to the great sports myth that sports are good and that the people who participate and watch them are then also good. Ric Flair was the portrayal of masculinity in the 1980’s, good looking, wealthy, well dressed, with women swooning over them, and riding in limousines. He used that masculinity to portray his character and push himself to even greater heights as a star in wrestling. Of course, Flair is also a good example of why the great sports myth is untrue. He wasn’t a great person, he was a bad father, and a worse husband.
Flair’s character eventually consumed him. He was divorced twice, was a functioning alcoholic throughout most of his career, and probably in some way influenced the death of his son, who he drank and partied with from the time he was 16 until he overdosed on heroin at 25. In the documentary Flair says his biggest regret was that because of his character he could only be his sons’ best friend but never his dad. In many ways Flair is a cautionary tale of why we as a society need norms, formal and informal. If we don’t have those norms, we can go kind of overboard and end up really hurting ourselves. I learned a lot from the documentary. Especially about wrestling. I’m not a huge wrestling fan but watching this honestly makes me want to get into the sport a lot more. Some of the technical stuff they talked about was really interesting to me, like how to take a punch, or how they train, and the fact they can make the hardest slap they have nearly painless. Sociology wise I thought it was super interesting how flairs character developed. Overall, I really enjoyed the film and took a lot away from it and the class.