DCP114 – Ric Flair – The Nature Boy – Greenville Memorial Auditorium

"Nature Boy" Ric Flair

Greenville Memorial Auditorium — Original Ditch-Cat Photo Print

The Bio

Ric Flair — born Richard Morgan Fliehr on February 25, 1949, in Memphis, Tennessee — is widely regarded as the greatest professional wrestler of all time. Trained by Verne Gagne in Minnesota alongside Greg Gagne, Jim Brunzell, and the Iron Sheik, Flair made his professional debut in December 1972. After a brief AWA run, he moved south in 1974 to Jim Crockett Promotions, where he would spend the formative years of his career and ultimately reinvent the territory. A 1975 plane crash that broke his back nearly ended his career before it began — but Flair returned to the ring within months, transformed from a power brawler into the platinum-blond, robe-wearing, jet-flying, limousine-riding "Nature Boy" who would come to define professional wrestling for the next four decades.

In the Mid-Atlantic, Flair captured every major championship the territory had to offer — the NWA Mid-Atlantic Television Championship, the NWA Mid-Atlantic Heavyweight Championship, the NWA Mid-Atlantic Tag Team Championship (alongside Greg Valentine, Blackjack Mulligan, and others), and on July 29, 1977, the NWA United States Heavyweight Championship. On September 17, 1981, in Kansas City, Flair defeated Dusty Rhodes to capture his first NWA World Heavyweight Championship — the first of a record-setting reigns that, when combined with his later WCW and WWF World titles, would total a widely recognized sixteen world championships. In 1986 he co-founded The Four Horsemen alongside Arn Anderson, Ole Anderson, and Tully Blanchard, the most influential stable in professional wrestling history.

Flair's iconic Starrcade '83 victory over Harley Race in Greensboro is regarded as the torch-passing moment from one generation of NWA champion to the next. He went on to headline WrestleMania VIII as WWF Champion, captured the inaugural WCW Championship, and remained a main-event draw into his fifties. Flair is a two-time WWE Hall of Fame inductee — once individually in 2008, and again as a member of The Four Horsemen in 2012 — and has been honored by the NWA, WCW, and Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame. With sixteen recognized world title reigns, signature catchphrases that became part of American pop culture ("Wooo!", "To be the man, you gotta beat the man!"), and a career spanning over fifty years, Flair stands alone as the defining figure of professional wrestling.

This photograph — captured by Ditch-Cat Photo in the stairwell of the Greenville Memorial Auditorium, before Furman University later repainted the interior — preserves a young Naitch in the prime of his early Mid-Atlantic run, inside one of the most beloved venues on the Jim Crockett Promotions circuit and a cathedral of Upstate South Carolina wrestling history.

Greenville Memorial Auditorium

Greenville, South Carolina · Opened 1958 · Demolished 1997

A 5,500-seat auditorium that opened in the late 1950s at 401 East North Street, the Greenville Memorial Auditorium was for nearly four decades the cultural and sporting heart of the Upstate. Elvis Presley played here. James Brown played here. Johnny Cash played here. Furman University's men's basketball team played here, painting the building's interior stairwells in the school's signature purple. And every few weeks, Jim Crockett Promotions rolled into town and the building turned into a Mid-Atlantic wrestling cathedral — the Memorial Auditorium becoming a regular stop on the JCP circuit between Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, Columbia, and Spartanburg.

For Upstate South Carolina wrestling fans, the building was the room. It was where you saw Flair work. Where you saw Steamboat fly. Where you saw Wahoo McDaniel chop a man into next week. The Greenville Memorial Auditorium was demolished in 1997 to make way for what would become the Bon Secours Wellness Arena (originally the BI-LO Center). The building is gone. The memories — preserved here, in part, by the Ditch-Cat archive — are not.