Ric Flair Talks About the Time He Got Struck by Lightning and Somehow Didn’t Die

Ric Flair tells Dan Le Batard about the time he was struck by lightning after getting off a plane and somehow lived to talk about it.

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Complex Original

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Ric Flair made an appearance on Dan Le Batard's ESPN Radio show on Thursday, and in between telling a bunch of other wild stories, the 67-year-old self-proclaimed "wheelin' 'n' 'dealin' son of a gun" relayed a story about the time he cheated death by inadvertently deflecting a lightning bolt with an umbrella. The story is kind of hard to believe, but let's enjoy Flair telling it anyway:

"I was getting off a plane in Richmond, Virginia. They didn’t have the jetways back then, back in the late '70s, and I was late for a match. I was World Champion then, I was wrestling [Ricky] Steamboat at the Richmond Coliseum. Finally…they let us all get off the plane. I got off, I was walking, and I didn’t go 10, maybe 15 feet, and all of a sudden, I felt this pressure boom, and man, my umbrella shot 50 feet in the air. I thought, 'What the hell?' Lightning hit the top of my umbrella, bounced off, and hit the guy in the eye five feet behind me and killed him. Right there. I just stood there looking at the guy and froze, it scared me to death. People were running out the door to get the guy."

Flair also said he had no idea how he was still alive. "I've always wondered what kind of a lawsuit that was, because it was really a big deal," he said, "hence probably the steel tips coming off umbrellas at that point."

Like that story about him having sex with Halle Berry, it's hard to tell if this is actually true or not. However, to his credit,it's not the first time he's brought it up, though before he said it happened in 1981 (skip to the 3:15 mark in the video below):

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