Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Woooooo! Becoming Ric Flair’ on Peacock, a Look at the Life and Times of Wrestling’s Greatest Bad Boy

For decades, Ric Flair served as one of the most entertaining figures in professional wrestling, becoming a 16-time world champion across a long career in World Championship Wrestling and the WWF/WWE. His impact went beyond the ring, with his iconic preening, woo-ing and dancing inspiring athletes and entertainers all over the world. For all we’ve seen of Ric Flair, though, we’ve hardly gotten a chance to know Richard Fliehr, the man behind the legend. Wooooo! Becoming Ric Flair, a tight, entertaining new documentary on Peacock, offers us that long-awaited look behind the persona.

WOOOOOO! BECOMING RIC FLAIR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Much of Wooooo! Becoming Ric Flair is driven by Flair himself, who serves as a de facto narrator with help from primary interviewer Tom Rinaldi. This on-screen retelling of his life story is interwoven with archival footage of Flair’s career, along with interviews from other larger-than-life contemporaries such as Hulk Hogan, Diamond Dallas Page, Lex Luger, and Mike Tyson. Make no mistake, though–just like in the ring, Flair is in control here.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s a sports documentary, and there’s lots of sports documentaries it might remind you of. But the presence of sports reporter Tom Rinaldi as interviewer/interlocutor here will trigger immediate memories of Rinaldi’s frequent tear-jerking, heartstring-tugging athlete profile segments on programs like ESPN’s Outside the Lines and College GameDay over the years.

Performance Worth Watching: Rinaldi’s managing of the story is deft, and the cameos from other wrestlers and historians of Flair’s career are essential, but there’s no star other than Flair here; this is Ric Flair as told by Ric Flair, not by anyone else.

Memorable Dialogue: It’s Ric Flair. Everything he says is memorable. “At first they hate you, but after a while you’re so good at what you do that they can’t hate you, or you’re so entertaining that they can’t hate you. A or B. I was both.”

Sex and Skin: It’s a part of Flair’s career, but not of this movie. You just have to trust that it happened.

Our Take: There are enough unbelievable details, enough incredible moments in Ric Flair’s life story to fill the biographies of ten people. Put it this way: in the first five minutes of Wooooo! Becoming Ric Flair, we find out that Richard Fliehr–the man who would become one of the most iconic entertainers in the word–was stolen from a hospital as a baby and sold to an orphanage on the black market. That could be a whole biography for a mere mortal, but here, it’s just a quick establishing detail before we move on. At 24, while riding to a match in Wilmington, North Carolina with four other wrestlers, Flair was in a serious plane crash that killed the pilot and paralyzed one of the other passengers. He was told he would never wrestle again, but six months later he was back in the ring.

While he’d been wrestling as Ric Flair already, it was after the crash that Fliehr adopted the persona of “Ric Flair, the Nature Boy”. While Ric Flair had been a brown-haired bruised, Ric Flair the Nature Boy was a bleached-blonde, tanned-and-toned, preening, strutting mountain of attitude, always immaculately dressed and always talking trash. While the gimmick was borrowed in part from the original Nature Boy, veteran wrestler Buddy Rogers–something Flair freely admits–it was also inspired by elements from football’s Joe Namath and rock-and-roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis (where Flair got his ‘woooooo!’).

“I never wanted to wear the same thing on TV twice,” Flair recalls, “and if you look back at the tapes, there are very few times you’ll see me wear something twice. I probably bought four suits a week for 36 years. I lived the gimmick and I didn’t understand moderation.”

“How did you afford this?” Rinaldi asks.

“I didn’t pay my taxes,” Flair laughs.

As his success grew, the persona of Ric Flair took over, and the person Richard Fliehr ceased to exist. He neglected his family, spending nights at bars and in hotel rooms with fans. He’d invite female fans to his hotel room on live TV–”that was real,” biography Keith Elliott Greenberg clarifies–offering them the chance to “ride on Space Mountain”. As his personal life fell apart, he pursued a dramatic move from his home at WCW to the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE), taking on the biggest stage in professional wrestling–a move that didn’t deliver the instant success he hoped for.

There’s far too much to list in Flair’s long career, but the documentary manages to do a very capable job of compressing it into a cohesive narrative, even for viewers who might not have been familiar with Flair’s story beyond the broad strokes coming in. From his highest highs to his lowest lows–including a hospitalization that nearly killed him–Woooooo! Becoming Ric Flair keeps the story moving as quickly and entertainingly as the man himself.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There are few original American characters as compelling and outright entertaining as Ric Flair, and Woooooo! Becoming Ric Flair is a worthy telling of his wild life story.

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky who publishes the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter.