In a new interview, Teddy Long spoke at length about his impressive career as a professional wrestling personality as part of the WWE and ECW and dropped a bombshell about Ric Flair.
In 1985, Long literally started at the bottom as an errand boy for wrestlers and climbed to the top as manager and authority figure in the wrestling entertainment business. His many years with the company earned him a spot in the WWE Hall of Fame in 2017.
The former referee and manager recently sat down with host Devon Nicholson’s Hannibal TV, where he repeated the claims that Flair used the ethnic slur “ni*ger” against him.
Wrestling News confirmed that Long confessed many years ago that wrestling icon Ric Flair dropped the N-word after an incident involving a few female groupies who used his name to get to an arena.
Long was asked if Flair ever apologized to him for using the term that is considered extremely offensive to African Americans.
Long stated: “No, I don’t think he has. I mean, if he had, I would know, no he hasn’t. Here’s the thing about that. Sometimes people don’t apologize like come up to you and say they apologize. Sometimes they can speak to you and maybe try and hold a conversation with you to let you know in so many words…”
Long went on to say that he is not surprised that Flair, whose real name is Richard Morgan Fliehr, never addressed the matter and added: “I didn’t really expect that, and I don’t care because I put that all behind me. I was able to make it, and I was able to show people that had that negative about me that said I would never make it and I had no talent, and I was able to prove them wrong, so that was good enough for me, so I don’t need any apologies. As I said, I’m just telling the truth. It is what it is. That’s what happened.”
He went on to reveal what prompted “The Nature Boy” to use the racist insult decades ago: “One time in Knoxville, Tennesse I think, and I know there were some girls that were trying to come into 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 was refereeing. They used my name and said that I told them that they could come in or come to the back door or something like that. So he runs into me, and the next thing I hear him say to me is, “N, do you like working here?”
He concluded the interview by: “You say what you want to say; just don’t put your hands on me. That’s when you got a problem. Like I said, I got so used to hearing that…”
According to the Charlotte Observer, in 2018, Flair and members of his entourage were slapped with a $5.5 million lawsuit for making “disparaging and racist comments” towards police officers and “the Afro-American community” of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
