Ric Flair Danced, Wooed and the Crowd Went Wild During the Grizzlies Wrestling Night Promotion

Over the weekend the Memphis Grizzlies held a Wrestling Night promotion. Before you start rolling your collective eyes, the team didn’t simply bring out a bunch of faded legends and parade them around — well, they did that too — but Memphis handed out pretty awesome Grizzlyweight World Championship belts and staged a match between the recently released from the hospital Jerry “The King” Lawler and a guy named Maverick. The Memphis icon even took a few decent bumps as you can see in the video below.

The highlight of the event came during a sit-down interview with Ric Flair on SportSouth, a portion of which is above. (The full clip is available on NBA.com and if wrestling is your thing, give it a whirl.) During the interview Flair, a Memphis native, noted, “I am Elvis Presley’s brother, a lot of people don’t know that.” He cited The American Dream, Dusty Rhodes as his toughest opponent and that he still owns about 11 of his lavish robes — the rest are split among his ex-wives. Most important, Flair revealed the origin of his signature “Wooooooooooooo” came in 1974 and was inspired by Jerry Lee Lewis.

And yes, at the end of the interview Flair started strutting/dancing to the delight of the crowd (and anchors).

Here’s the Lawler fight from the weekend, should that interest you.

I dug up Flair’s first Memphis match with with Lawler in 1982. The entire thing is on YouTube, if for some reason you’ve got an hour to kill and nothing better to do. I’d stick around, myself, for the commercials including an excellent one for KTEL’s Hit Express featuring the smooth sounds of Journey and Foreigner.

[H/T Uproxx]