Ric Flair was a recent guest on Talk Is Jericho, and the 16-time champion discussed his relationship with the late Harley Race. Flair talked a bit about attending Race’s funeral and how some people came up to him to ask if some of the stories were true, to which Flair said “every one of them was!” Flair said he met Race back in 1972, but remembered when he first heard about him, recalling a story about Race getting retaliation for a bar fight.
“So I’m a kid growing up in Minneapolis, and Harley is there with the AWA, and I had been sent away to private school, and I came home for Christmas break. There was a front page article about this wrestler named Harley Race, who got stabbed at a bar/restaurant called The Chestnut Tree in a fight. He went to the hospital with the knife still in him and they took it out! Then, maybe three months later, he shot out all the windows of a barbecue place and got arrested for shooting out the windows. That was his retaliation, he went after the guys that stabbed him.”
Flair said Harley had to be the best at everything, and everything he did—the fastest cars, drinking the beer the fastest, arm-wrestling—he had to be better at. He went on to talk about Race’s relationship with Bruiser Brody and Hulk Hogan, and also recalled the first time Triple H ever met Race when they were all in WCW together.
“Hunter [Triple H] had just started and came to WCW. He was a huge wrestling fan – we all know that about Hunter, like you and me, he grew up loving the business. So we walk in there and Harley is sitting there in his suit, on the edge of his chair, kind of rocking back and forth. I go ‘Hey Harley, this is a new guy, Paul Levesque’. This is before he became Hunter Hearst Helmsley. He goes ‘How you doing, kid?’ and Hunter says ‘Hello Mr. Race!’. He [Harley] was taking a drag of a cigarette and he said ‘Who trained ya?’ and he says ‘Killer Kowalski!’. Another drag of the cigarette: ‘He’s the s****!’.”
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